THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY - PART 2

As I right this, MOCKINGJAY 2 has had the weakest opening weekend of any of the movies in this franchise and this financial blunder is not undeserved. The fourth movie in the series has none of the emotional power, imagination or wit of the previous instalments. Instead, we are treated to a two hour dirge in which our post-apocalytpic heroine Katniss Everdeen is shell-shocked, guilt-ridden and almost impassive despite a plot that sees her raid the Capitol city in an assassination attempt on the tyrannical President Snow.

Perhaps the problem was splitting the final book in Suzanne Collins' trilogy into two parts. Like Peter Jackson's HOBBIT, the story seems stretched thin over two movies of almost interminable action.  Regardless, this movie misses the effervescence of Elizabeth Banks' eccentric fashionista Effie Trinket, and even Woody Harrelson's cynical alcoholic seems to have sobered up. Even Shakespearean tragedy contains light relief.

THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY - PART 1

The late Philip Seymour Hoffman as show producer Plutarch Heavensbee
and Julianne Moore as rebel President Coin.

MOCKINGJAY is a dirge of a film. Two hours of hackneyed dialogue, J-Law stumbling around debris with PTSD interspersed with the occasional attempt at a rousing speech for rebellion.  The movie has no pace, no flow, no excitement, largely because it's basically pre-amble to the final showdown between the oppressed masses and the ruthless President of this dystopian future dictatorship.  I'm not sure how the young fans of Suzanne Collins' wildly successful books will react to the style and content of this film but I found the shift in tone from the gladiatorial action of the first two films to the attempt at earnest commentary on war jarring.  Which isn't to say it isn't an honourable attempt at engaging with contemporary politics, but my god it isn't entertaining either.  

As the movie opens, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) has been rescued from the Hunger Games and wakes up traumatised in District 13 - an austere military bunker run by the sinister President Coin  (a typically steely Julianne Moore).  Coin decides to pimp Katniss out in much the same way as her nemesis President Snow (a 2-D villain played with mustache-twirling glee by Donald Sutherland) did.  Instead of schmaltzy TV interviews for the state, Katniss now does supposedly impromptu Churchillian speeches urging the rebels to rise up - all of which have been expertly stage managed by Coin and her on-the-ground director Cressida (Natalie Dormer).  The movie cruises toward the inevitable showdown contrasting the "propos" with the terrorist/freedom fighter acts in various districts. And all the time, in the background, there's Katniss' demand that Peeta be rescued, culminating in an extraction that is clearly inspired by the Navy SEALS raid on Abbotabad.  All of this is fine, except that it gets undercut by the hokey dialogue and plot turns.  Of COURSE, when Katniss rescues her sister's cat we just now there's going to be some perilous plot moment when rescuing the cat places Katniss in jeopardy.  And the scenes near the end when President Coin commands her troops against a state bombing campaign reeks on the final scenes in STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE.

Overall, I'm not sure whether they really needed to cut the final book into two films. This first part could easily have been much shorter - just one propo - just one montage of the people rising up - because what we want to get to is the final fifteen minutes of Part 1 and then all of Part 2.  I applaud the good intentions to get gritty and real but once again, I'm just not sure how this constitutes any kind of credible storytelling in a world of such outlandish fantasy costumes and hokey dialogue and cartoon villains. 

MOCKINGJAY has a running time of 123 minutes, is rated PG and is on global release.

THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE

THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE begins in media res, assuming wisely that we've all watched the first movie if not read the wildly popular books.  We're in a harsh dystopian future where fascists keep the masses in penury, fobbing them off with glitzy super-violent reality TV. Our heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is back from the Hunger Games of the first movie, struggling to explain her faked on-screen romance with fellow survivor Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) to her home-town love-interest Gale (Liam Hemsworth.)  But this nascent and hackneyed love triangle is rightly cut short by larger political dangers.  The evil President Snow (Donald Sutherland) fears that Katniss has become a symbol of defiance and, when she can't convince him or the crowds that she's an obliging mouthpiece of his regime, he orchestrates a Hunger Games in which she will once again have to compete for her life. The catch is that she will compete against those she cares for - Peeta and their mentor, Hamitch (Woody Harrelson).

What I love about The Hunger Games franchise is that while it does have a fair dollop of the typical teenage romance, it's given limited time and is handled with far more nuance than, say the Twilight franchise. Katniss is a strong woman - she isn't defined by her love interests - indeed, to Gale and Peeta's disappointment, she refuses to even acknowledge them.  We understand that she loves both men in different ways - Gale as a symbol of the home he loves but Peeta as the man who can empathise with what she has been through since she left.  And in an unusual twist on the typical romance, Katniss is the physically stronger of the two, whereas Peeta has the higher emotional intelligence. She may save him in the arena, but with his ruses to win the heart of the public, he saves her from the Capitol.

Given this film's emphasis on the political fallout from Katniss victory in the first film, and lesser time spent on the actual gladiatorial contest, I far prefer it to the original. I love seeing the dystopian world-building - the rich art direction - the beautiful costumes - the stark depiction of poverty.  More importantly, I love the satire on contemporary reality culture, and the sinister edge that Stanley Tucci's gamehost, Caesar Flickerman, lends to what most would leave as just a comic performance. There's something truly unnerving about his forced laugh and day-glo teeth.  But for me the real scene-stealer is Elizabeth Banks as Katniss and Peeta's stylist, Effie. As in the first movie, Banks has to sport the most outlandish costumes and toe the party line on being fabulous-dahling but in this movie, she gets to show the real heart beneath the wigs, while all the time pretending to still believe in the system. It's a marvellous portrayal.

As usual, I had less time from the games in the arena, which always seem like a series of levelling up quests followed by a tricksy ending. There's nothing to match the death of Rue in the original.  There are some new characters, all rather banal, and poor Jena Malone's over-acts fiercely as the angry Johanna Mason.  Most fascinating is the casting of my acting hero, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Plutarch Heavensbee, the new gamesmaker.  For most of the film, Hoffman is so anonymous as to almost look like he's in a different movie, or phoning it in.  I leave you to decide whether, given the final act, this is a clever choice or just lazy.

Overall, the best way to describe the movie is professional and faithful.  Taking over from writer-director Gary Ross, we have Francis Lawrence in the director's chair and Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt writing the script.  I could discern little difference - we still get a movie with rich production design, solid to excellent performances and a fascinating political plot.  Indeed my only real criticism of its direction and script is the rather underwhelming final shot - that said, this is probably faithful to the book.

THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE is on global release. The film has a running time of 146 minutes and is rated PG-13.

THE MASTER

Paul Thomas Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD was something like cinematic perfection. It had a brutal force, a bravura confidence, an unforgettable visual and aural palette. It was a movie dominated by a charismatic evil man - an Oil Man - a man bending the world to his very will.  At times it felt like Paul Thomas Anderson was in step with his on screen persona, throwing the conventions of genre cinema aside, reinventing the grammar of cinema with his disdain for mere dialogue and petty narrative conventions. The bar was set high for THE MASTER.  And our prurient interest fuelled by early reports that about the founding of a cult similar to Scientology.  It was almost too much for the art-house addict to handle: a take-down of Scientology from our most pioneering and uncompromising director. And one who had directed Tom Cruise in his closest-to-the-bone role in MAGNOLIA.

The result, is sadly, so much less than the sum of its parts. A salutary lesson in what happens when an uncompromising artistic vision ultimately fails in its execution and resolution. A mis-step to be sure.  A tragedy, when one considers the nuggets of performance that hint at what this movie could have been.

As the film opens we meet Freddie Quell, a traumatised WWII vet, washed up on the West Coast: alcoholic, sex-obsessed, with an ungovernable temper, a drifter.  As played by Joaquin Phoenix, he is quite literally bowed and beaten by life, his shoulders turned inward, his clothes ill-fitting, his face riven by lines, his voice so broken one can barely understand him.  It is a brave choice, but an unsuccessful one.  Phoenix seems to play "at" his character, rather than inhabiting him. Worse, he seems to be acting in a register - in a movie - entirely different to the other characters in the film.

He meets them after half an hour of drifting, when he jumps on board the luxurious cruise ship of The Master, the cult-leader Lancaster Dodd. Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays him as a charismatic bon vivant.  We feel that he does love the people he is helping, even if, as the movie progresses, we hear hints that he has been fraudulent - even if, as his son suggests, he is just making it up as he goes along.  He certainly cares about Freddie. Indeed he needs Freddie, much to his family's disquiet. 

The problem is that the relationship between Freddie and Lancaster isn't as interesting or as sinister a it needs to be to form the centre of the film - perhaps because of Phoenix's bizarre performance - perhaps become of Anderson's weak script.  I was far more drawn to the relationship between Lancaster and his wife, Peggy, superbly portrayed by Amy Adams as the most quietly poisonous wife since Winona Ryder's May Archer in Scorsese's THE AGE OF INNOCENCE.  There are moments when one believes that it is Peggy who is truly THE MASTER, but those moments are never allowed to open up. Even in a movie of a 145 minute running time, Freddie Quell keeps crowding her out. The way in which Peggy exerts her power is from a chair in the corner, with the subtlest of touches. And it reminds us  of how unnerving and profound this movie can be, when it will only be quiet.  A similarly memorable scene occurs between Lancaster and his acolyte Helen (Laura Dern). She questions the change of a single word in The Cause's doctrine and is summarily dismissed by Lancaster.  To see her face crumple, and his irritation sparked, it is to see the genesis of oppression and a heart breaking.

What else can we say about his strange, long, sometimes beautiful, oftentimes bewildering film? I'm not sure the 65mm photography is really put to good use.  There are some gloriously coloured shots of the sea, and of dark rooms from DP Mihai Malaimare Jr (TETRO) but nothing to rival Robert Elswit's fire-drenched skies of THERE WILL BE BLOOD.  (How sad that THAT couldn't have been filmed in 65 mil.)  I also rather disliked the use of female nudity in this film. I'm far from prudish but was any of this necessary?  I also understand that many critics have had problems with the movie's ending, and while I agree, I think this is just symptomatic of far deeper problems.  

The sad truth is that Paul Thomas Anderson just didn't know where he was going to take this story, or what his point was. Neither did he have the taste or the courage to recognise that Phoenix's performance was skewering his film.

THE MASTER played Venice, where Paul Thomas Anderson won the Silver Lion, and Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman shared the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. It also played Hollywood and Toronto 2012. It opened earlier this year in the USA, Canada and Israel. It is on limited release in the UK this week but opens wider in two weeks time. It opens on Nov 9th in Australia and Turkey; on Nov 16th in Chile andd Poland; on Jan 6th in Portugal; Jan 10th in France, Greece, the Netherlands and Norway; on Jan 18th in Iceland; on Jan 31st in Denmark; on Feb 7th in Argentina and Italy; on Feb 15th in Brazil and Russia and on Feb 21st in Germany and Hong Kong.

MONEYBALL - Unloved

Brad Pitt as Oakland A's manager Billy Beane and
Jonah Hill as his statistician sidekick Peter Brand. 

Michael Lewis is the chronicler of our age - the man who takes us inside big money, whether on the trading floors of Wall Street (LIAR'S POKER, THE BIG SHORT) or in the soccer and baseball stadiums of America (THE BLIND SIDE, MONEYBALL).  Lewis is the documentarian who shows us who big money distorts ethics and produces outcomes that are inefficient, even from a financial point of view.  In previous novels he took us insides world we didn't know and showed us their glamour and danger.  Heck, LIAR'S POKER was as big a recruiter for Wall Street, as well, WALL STREET.  

The fundamental problem with MONEYBALL is that his big angle is really not that insightful.  Lewis wants to tell us that when baseball managers buy players, they are distorted and prejudiced by all sorts of extraneous and irrelevant information - how good looking a player's girlfriend is an index of self-confidence is - how good he is at doing one thing when really what you're buying him for is something really different.  As a result, Lewis argues that the managers systematically misprice players - overpaying for "stars" and underpaying or plain ignoring the hidden gems. Yes, that's it.  That's the big idea.  And for those of us who are the 1 percent, that's really not revolutionary.  It's just Ben Graham's concept of value investing applied to sport. 

Still, even without a revolutionary idea, MONEYBALL could still have been a good underdog sports movie, of the type that DODGEBALL satirised so well. There is something genuinely romantic about failed player and down on his luck coach Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) taking his two-bit club, the Oakland Athletics, to baseball's greatest winning streak in history, and a genuine contender for the World Series. And, because he didn't have the money to outbid the Yankees for the best players, he had to do it with smarts - with a geeky kid called Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) who believed that stats could pick a holistic team of write-offs and turn them into a great and consistent squad. All this in the face of stiff competition from the conservative old guard, particularly coach Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the rest of the baseball fraternity.  I was expecting a buddy movie - as the handsome jock and nervous geek unite against the world - an underdog movie - a David versus Goliath feelgood epic.  And who cares if I don't know about baseball? I love cricket so much I can appreciate a game suffused with stats, and that chronicles the triumph of the statos over the jocks. 

But no, MONEYBALL turns out to be an utter damp squib of a movie - unloved, uncared for, without a single voice, a single vision, or any conviction about what it's trying to do.  I guess the problem is literally one of rejected parentage. Originally this was a movie that was going to be directed by Steven Soderbergh (CONTAGION) with a screenplay by Steven Zaillian (the forthcoming GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO).  But then, at the last minute, Soderbergh was axed in favour of Bennett Miller, a relative unknown who hasn't done anything since 2005's CAPOTE, and the script was rewritten by Aaron Sorkin of THE SOCIAL NETWORK fame.  The result is a script and a film that just never finds its groove.  

For the most part the dialogue is flat, and characters ill-fleshed out. There is no charismatic connection between Pitt and Hill.  Pitt does that thing where he thinks he's acting if he constantly eats on screen and squints.  Hill turns out to be utterly uninteresting in a straight, non-comedic role.  Poor Philip Seymour Hoffman barely gets anything to do as the antagonist. We don't feel the stakes. We don't buy Pitt's apparently tragic back story.  His connection with his daughter seems utterly trite. There's  not enough actual gameplay. But then again, I didn't really feel like I knew what the coaches were doing or why certain moneyball tactics were working.  The only flashes of wit and excitement are a couple of scenes where Beane is playing off team's against each other, and another brilliant scene in Boston - scenes that scream Sorkin and jar against the tone of the rest of the film.  One can only imagine what this film might have been with Fincher and Sorkin behind the camera, and maybe Clooney and Gordon-Levitt in front of the camera.  And believe me, you'll be so bored, you'll have plenty of time for such conjecture.

MONEYBALL played Toronto and Tokyo 2011. It was released earlier this year in the US, India, Mexico, Russia, Panama, Iceland, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Japan, Taiwan, France, Israel, the Netherlands and Brazil. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland. It opens on December 2nd in Finland and Lithuania; on December 8th in Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Sweden and Turkey/ It opens on December 16th in Norway; on December 23rd in Estonia; on January 12th in Portugal; on January 27th in Italy; on February 2nd in Germany and Spain and on February 16th in Singapore. 

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.

Late Review by A.H. - SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK (2008)

Everyone is disappointing the more you know them.

By turns comic and poignant, the maze of love, and of the memory of love, and the idiosyncratic forms that maze takes, has been a motif of the writer Charlie Kaufman’s recent work. And yet the maze of SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK – in contrast to his previous doubling rabbit-holes – is neither internal, nor scrambled through; rather it is a large-scale theatre, a simulacrum of the city of New York, where director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) meticulously puts on, observes, and so re-experiences the daily troubles and past disappointments in his relationships with his wives and lovers. That the protagonist is an artist considering his time with the women around him may be a nod to the familiar – but it is in the effect of this life-long, theatrical, melancholic project that the film becomes a remarkable and ambitious variation in Kaufman’s characteristically unique design.

From the opening of the film, Cotard is, as his name suggests, preoccupied with the approach of death and the disintegration of his body, which only seems to widen the tense distance between himself and his wife. He directs a successful production of Death of a Salesman, and is subsequently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship that gives him the funds to create his immense life-theatre in a disused airplane hangar. This time of achievement in his professional life is weighted by his increasingly failing health (an unending anxiety seems to surface in pustules, disturbing shakes, problems in bed), and his complex personal life, marked by absence and regret and obsession, which in turn, Escher-like, becomes material for his grand play.

Kaufman has always drawn skewed perspective brilliantly, particularly in highlighting the difference in perception within relationships, and he continues this trick in SYNECDOCHE. When Cotard’s first wife Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter, declines an invitation to attend a performance of one of her husband’s plays because she must spend time packing up her canvases for an exhibition abroad, there is a hilarious cut to a shot of her canvases in their boxes – she paints on the most miniscule of scales and the crates she uses resemble matchboxes she could pack in a few minutes. Similarly, when Cotard discovers, to his horror, that his daughter from his first marriage has become a tattooed celebrity at the age of ten, his second wife Claire (Michelle Williams) exclaims that everyone has tattoos and turns her back to lift up her shirt revealing an enormous, monstrous tattoo of her own – which Cotard then denies having ever seen.

Keener and Williams are faultless in these roles, as the rest of the cast generally tend to be whenever they are on screen. That cast includes Samantha Morton; Jennifer Jason Leigh; Hope Davis; Emily Watson; Dianne Weist; and it feels important to name the soaring ensemble here as they are each gone too swiftly. But that, achingly, is the nature of the piece. As the play comes to its end, so Kaufman’s questions become plain: where does love go? Where does life go? Their ethereal conclusion is one of the many ways this film rewards watching and, of course, re-watching.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK played Cannes (where it was beaten to the Palme D'Or by GOMORRAH), Toronto, Chicago and London 2008. It won the award for Best First Feature and the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards in 2009. It went on limited release in 2008 and 2009, and is now available to rent and own.

Overlooked DVD of the month - MARY AND MAX

MARY AND MAX is an amazing film, and all the more wonderful for being un-expectedly so. It's a darkly comic, emotionally raw clay-animated drama about the unlikely friendship between two very lonely people - a little girl called Mary, who lives in Australia, and an old man called Max, who lives in New York. Mary Daisy Dinkle is lonely because her mum is a mean drunk and her father is a withdrawn taxidermist. She hates how she looks, she's socially awkward and other kids tease her. Max is lonely because he finds the world strange and irrational and frustrating and retreats into a closed existence of comfort-eating and writing angry letters. They are each other's only and best friends. 

The movie takes us from the early heady days of their friendship - the first not to involve an imaginary friend for both of them - through Mary's adolescence and marriage. The friendship blossoms, then flounders on betrayal, and is finally redeemed. The journey is genuinely moving - I cried like a baby at the end of the film - and I was happy to have spent time with these intriguing people despite the harsh material I was forced to endure - drug abuse, sexual infidelity, self-loathing, suicide and chronic disease. 

If all this makes MARY AND MAX sound about as much fun as shock-therapy, then please believe me that despite the unbearable sadness as its heart, it's also a very funny, and ultimately uplifting film. The detail of the art design is wonderfully witty, with lots of clever details to repay a repeat viewing, and the verbal humour is at once pathetic and laugh-out-loud funny. I have always had nothing but praise for Philip Seymour Hoffman, but he really surpasses himself as Max, imbuing every sentence with common-sense, hurt, longing, fear and unintentional wit. Toni Colette is wonderfully misguided and sympathetic as Mary, and even Eric Bana gives a sweet cameo. So, if you love the kind of gentle, warm, heart-breaking humour found in the following quotations, please check MAX AND MARY out. As for me, I just can't wait to see what Australian writer-director Adam Eliot does next.

Max Jerry Horovitz: When I was young, I invented an invisible friend called Mr Ravioli. My psychiatrist says I don't need him anymore, so he just sits in the corner and reads. 

Max Jerry Horovitz: Butts are bad because they wash out to sea, and fish smoke them and become nicotine-dependent. 

MARY AND MAX played Sundance and Berlin 2009 and opened in Australia, the Czech Republic, New Zealand and Russia that year. It opened last year in Denmark, Belgium, Greece, Norway, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the UK. It is currently on release in Singapore and opens in Japan on April 23rd. It is available to rent and own.

THE BOAT THAT ROCKED - a lot of fuss about nothing

In general, I hate movies by Richard Curtis. He has created a mythical London in which smug middle-class bastards live in pretend-bohemia and have the emotional maturity of pre-teens. In Richard Curtis movies, the sun is always shining, unless someone has just broken up with you, in which case it rains. Everything happens for the best in the best of all worlds. It's a world I neither recognise nor find entertaining. Now, all this being said, the one thing you couldn't accuse Richard Curtis movies of was being poorly structured and lacking in narrative drive. Indeed, what irritates me so much about them is that they work so much like a Rubik's Cube of dappy fops. Everyone knows everyone else - everything is connected. Imagine then, my complete surprise in finding that THE BOAT THAT ROCKED has no point and no story. (I was less surprised to find that it had no jokes.)

What Curtis is trying to do is to make a movie about an epic clash between freedom-loving pot-tastic DJs and the reactionary, heartless British establishment. He wants the stakes to be high - freedom of expression and the very future of popular music. But he also wants to make jokes about poo and have a character called "Twatt". In reality, there wasn't an epic clash over pop music. Pirate radio stations weren't doing anything illegal. When the government realised this, instead of being all skull and dagger and Bond-villain about finding clever loopholes to shut them down, they just outlawed them. Pop didn't die. The establishment didn't win. Rather, a very typically British revolution happened. Pop was co-opted by the BBC, with many of the best DJs turning up on legitimate airwaves.

Curtis mistakenly tries to turn a rather banal set of events into A Matter of Life and Death. Kenneth Branagh and Jack Davenport play the establishment stiffs trying to shut down Radio Rock. The performances are excruciating to watch - hammy, unfunny, poorly directed and under-written. Meanwhile, a motley band of British comedians plus the brilliant Rhys Darby and Philip Seymour Hoffman play the DJs aboard Radio Rock. They make misogynistic jokes, shag a lot, play some decent records and that's about it. For nearly two hours we just get montages set to 60s hits; a piss-poor attempt at emotional drama via a paternity story; and no real laughs.

All this would be bad enough but in the final twenty minutes, Curtis decides to go in a direction that is just ludicrous. I can only hope he is satirising a very famous and very rubbish movie but I suspect that he was deliberately going for an ending that is as schmaltzy as the original.

The only possible reason to see this film is for Rhys Darby. And that's not enough. Even Bill Nighy's mannered delivery is starting to get on my nerves. As for Philip Seymour Hoffman, in general, he is a genius at picking great roles in superb dramas, but this is his worst choice since the abysmal ALONG CAME POLLY.

THE BOAT THAT ROCKED is on release in the UK and opens next week in Australia and New Zealand. It opens on April 16th in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It opens on April 30th in Russia; on May 1st in Estonia; in May 6th in Belgium, France and Iceland. It opens in Spain on May 29th; on June 5th in Bulgaria; on June 11th in Italy and Hungary; on June 19th in Turkey; on July 30th in the Czech Republic; in Argentina, Brazil and the USA on August 28th.

DOUBT - over-acted, over-written, over-directed

John Patrick Shanley has directed a movie based on his own award-winning play called DOUBT. It's about a Catholic priest in 1960s New York who may or may not have abused a young African American boy attending an overwhelmingly white Catholic school. The priest is chased out of the parish by a nun who is certain of her belief that he is a paedophile despite the lack of actual evidence. Or maybe she just doesn't like him because he is a liberal reformer who stands against her conservative interpretation of Church practice.

Now I like the fact that Shanley doesn't give us a clear-cut answer as to whether Father Flynn is guilty. And I especially like the reaction of the purportedly abused child's mother, Mrs Miller, to Sister Aloysius' suspicions. It's complicated, deftly explained, emotionally brutal. Because in essence, this good woman decides that maybe being abused is a price worth paying for a chance at college. It's a shocking, complicated reaction and Viola Davis totally sells it. She well deserves his Oscar nod.

Everything else, I hate.

I hate the direction. John Patrick Shanley directs like he's shouting. His film is full of pointless off-kilter camera angles and heavy-handed symbolism - lights gong out, winds of change. Most of all I hate the clumsy forced symmetry of the final scene. I hate Roger Deakins' anonymous sub-par cinematography. I hate the fact that the script never does say anything intelligent about the battle between pre and post Vatican II catholicism. And most of all, I hate the performances from Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman acts at the role, and expresses emotions by shouting louder. Streep plays Sister Aloysius like a pantomime villain. She has all the subtlety of the ruler-snapping nuns in THE BLUES BROTHERS. I laughed out loud at several of her line-readings.  She's so self-evidently prejudiced and bigoted I had not one iota of sympathy for her position - and that's fatal in a movie that's supposed to give you a balanced argument. 

I don't understand the hype. I don't get why this is meant to be so intelligent and so well-acted. It seems clumsy, superficial, and hammily acted.

DOUBT played Toronto 2008 and is currently on release in the US, Israel, Argentina, Australia, Norway, Croatia, Greece, Singapore, Bulgaria, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil and the UK. It goes on release next week in Belgium, France and South Korea and opens later in February in Poland, Slovakia, Estonia and Turkey. It opens in the Czech Republic on March 5th.

I just don't get why everyone's raving about THE SAVAGES

Wendy and John Savage are self-involved middle-aged siblings, estranged from their father. When he's diagnosed with dementia, they put him in a nursing home. Wendy suffers from guilt and sentimentalises everything. John is more rational, on the surface at least.

This film was sold to me as bleakly comic, bravely unsentimental, insightful....as a showcase for two outstanding performances from Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Well, I found the script superficial, irritatingly earnest, dismally slow-paced and basically boring. Writer-director Tamara Jenkins' treatment of the impact of mental illness on close family is a very poor relation to Sarah Polley's infinitely superior AWAY FROM HER. Comedy? What comedy? Philip Seymour Hoffman in a neck brace? Please. Which brings me to Laura Linney's apparently Oscar-worthy performance. All I can say is that there was nothing exciting here. Nothing that moved me. Nothing that will stay with me. Even Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor to whom I ascribe generally god-like status, is lacklustre here. The production values are also terrible. Just look at the lighting and picture quality when they're filming scenes in ill-lit bedrooms or on motel balconies at dusk.

I just don't get what all the fuss is about.

THE SAVAGES played Sundance, Toronto and London 2007. It opened in the US in 2007 and is currently on release in Singapore and the UK. It opens in Sweden, Belgium, France and Spain in February. It opens in Norway in March and in Italy and Germany in April.

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD - superb performances wasted on a thin script

Director Sidney Lumet of SERPICO and DOG DAY AFTERNOON fame returns to the screen with an emotional melodrama centred around a caper gone wrong. Two brothers - both in debt, resentful of each other and suffering failed marriages - decide to rob their parents store. The heist goes wrong, the mother dies and they are threatened with blackmail. Andy, the elder, dominant brother, decides to rob his drug-dealer in a last-ditch attempt to set the accounts straight but, this being your typical caper gone wrong plot, he only escalates matters. Pretty soon, we're sinking in murder, betrayal and seven shades of shit-creek.

The plot structure of this film is predictable and thin. Writer Kelly Masterson tries to make it seem more interesting by using a non-linear over-lapping Rashomon type structure. It's all gimmick, no balls. The production quality is pretty lousy too. DP Ron Fortunato doesn't light the interior scenes properly and the DV print is of poor quality. Pretty much the only thing I liked was Carter Burwell's score. But all this is just about offset by some particularly fine perfomances in front of the camera, not least from Philip Seymour Hoffman as the impotent, smack-addict, thieving cuckold. He deserves gongs for this performance, CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR or both. It's just a shame that the story couldn't have been as credible and fresh as his performance.

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD played Toronto 2007 and was released in France, the US, Taiwan and Russia in 2007. It is currently on release in the UK and opens later in January in Belgium and Sweden. The movie opens in Portugal, Argentina, Spain and Norway in February and opens in the Netherlands on April 3rd.

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.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III - There's a point at which boldness becomes stupidity

My mate Nik won't see this film because he does not want to enrich Tom Cruise and thence the Church of Scientology. I paraphrase. What he actually said was, "I’m not going to see MI3 on principle. The principle is that Tom Cruise is a cock." While I agree with Nik's sentiment, I have two words for him and all Tom-haters, and those two words are "air conditioning". Yes, summer is here my friends, and when the going gets hot, Bina hits the Odeon.

But enough of that and on with the show. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III is a half-way decent summer blockbuster. Minimal plot, lots of cool stunts, above-average looking-people, great one-liners. Clearly, it is ridiculous. We are in a world where Tom Cruise can pass himself off as Philip Seymour Hoffman just by donning a latex mask! But that kind of bizarre lunacy is why I love this franchise so much. And, yes, Tom Cruise may seem a tad bizarre when you read the press, but to my mind no-one does mindless action better. We get the added bonus of 1980s nostalgia, most obviously in a scene where Tom rides a motorbike up to a plane on a runway, wearing aviator sunglasses at sunset. I could almost hear "Take my breath away" on the ether.

The plot is beside the point, but for tradition's sake, let me lay it out for you. Tom Cruise reprises his role as Ethan Hunt, a secret agent with a US Government Agency called the IMF. He has quit field work for a training role and a chance at a real life and marriage. However, when his protege is kidnapped, he returns to the field to track down the evil arms dealer, Owen Davian, and secure the return of the dangerous new weapon, codename Rabbit's Foot. And here is where the movie really gets into gear, because we are presented with a host of BADASSES, towit Philip Seymour Hoffman as the evil Davian, Laurence Fishburne as Tom/Ethan's boss and Ving Rhames as Tom/Ethan's side-kick Luther Stickell. These guys steal the show, not least when the hillariously out-of-shape Hoffman kicks the shit out of Cruise. Man oh man, all you Tom-Haters should pay-up just for that vicarious thrill.

But as much as I enjoyed the balls-out ridiculousness of this movie, there is a big problem every time it switches from action to romance. The movie jumps the shark about 35 minutes in thanks to the most stupid, cringe-worthy wedding scene since Four Weddings & A Funeral. Thereafter, every time we get Tom Cruise together with his on-screen wife, you feel the need to laugh out loud. In fact, a supposedly emotional reunion triggered the biggest unintended laugh in the theatre apart from the nauseatingly bad trailor for the latest Bond movie. I know that MI3 is not meant to be a high-fallutin' drama, and maybe I am being harsh to mark it down for making me laugh when I should have been feeling all loved up. But this stuff was so bad it really took me out of my happy, popcorn-tastic vibe. Good action flicks don't deviate from the task at hand. Bad ones have pretensions beyond their grasp. So, like Luther Stickell says, whereas some boldness is required with the stunts and visual effects, there is a point when bold manipulation of the genre becomes stupidity. MI3 may not fall over the line, but it comes too close for comfort.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III is on global release.

CAPOTE - Great performances but not a great movie

I am rather conflicted about the much-praised movie, CAPOTE. The movie attempts to give us the essence of the character and life of American author Truman Capote by focusing on the years 1959 to 1964. We meet Capote enjoying the success of the novella, “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, holding court at the kind of jazz-and-gin-fuelled parties depicted in the movie starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. Capote himself is an absurd figure. The victim of a troubled childhood, he escaped Alabama for the New York literary scene. He is over-weight, speaks in a high-pitched nasal whine, and is extremely camp. He hangs around with his childhood friend, Nelle Harper Lee, who is on the verge of astronomical success with her novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

One day, Capote reads of a seemingly random act of violence in small-town Kansas. A well-loved, upper-middle class family have been gunned down in their own home, all for fifty bucks and a radio. Capote persuades The New Yorker magazine editor, Wallace Shawn, to finance a trip to Kansas to investigate and write-up the impact of the murder of the Clutter family on a small town. His interest is not in “whodunnit”. However, once he meets the two boys who committed the murders, the magazine article turns into a full-scale “non-fiction novel” and the anti-“whodunnit” becomes a “why-did-the-do-it”. Four years later, he has formed a friendship of sorts with Perry Smith, one of the murderers, and has the majority of what he knows will be a revolutionary and brilliant book. Capote wants to contrast the parallel worlds within America – that of the prosperous, god-fearing folk of Holcomb – with that of the misfits and under-class, who had survived abuse and abandonment and for whom petty crime was the only option. Capote wants to humanise the murderers, with whom he undoubtedly empathises, and the title of his book, 'In Cold Blood' should be seen as ironic. For Perry Smith, the book is also a chance to put his side of the story to the American public. The key point is that the murders were not pre-meditated, but part of a heist gone wrong. However, for Perry, son of a violent father and alcoholic mother, collaborating with Capote also brings what he thinks is friendship.

What the movie CAPOTE tries to do is show Capote’s conflicting emotions and motivations. At first, he finds Perry a better lawyer for the initial appeal. He needs Perry alive to pad out the novel. But more than that, he feels genuine empathy for the poor kid. But as the process drags on, he lies to Perry again and again about his progress on the book. This culminates in a scene of breath-taking cruelty where Capote essentially emotionally blackmails Perry into recounting the gory details of the night of the murders.

The movie gets a lot right: the acting performances are universally out-standing. Philip Seymour Hoffman has long been proving his ability to create characters of psychological complexity in movies such as FLAWLESS, MAGNOLIA and LOVE LIZA. He deserves the accolades he is currently receiving. Catherine Keener plays Harper Lee with a quiet strength, laughing off the misogyny of the New York literati and quietly screwing Capote’s courage to the sticking place. Contrast this with her quick-thinking hard-ball in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, or her sweet, down-to-earth character in THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN, and you begin to appreciate her range. But the performance that really stood out for me was by Clifton Collins Junior as Perry Smith. He manages to convey the subtle wavering – how far and at what point does Perry realise that Capote is deceiving him? How far does he let himself believe in Capote’s friendship because he simply needs to feel that someone is there for him?

But while this is film of great performances, I do not think that CAPOTE is a great film. There are two key problems. The first is simply slow pacing which leads to periods of boredom. The screenwriter and director are trying to convey Capote’s frustration with the judicial appeals process. After four years of working on the novel, he simply wants to write the ending and be done with it. However, too often, the pace of the film itself slackens. The second problem is more fundamental to the project. In using the “In Cold Blood” episode to explore Capote’s personality and life, I feel the screenwriter is exploiting Perry Smith and his story in exactly the same way that Capote did. Perry Smith got used by Dick Hickock, his partner in crime, and got used by Capote, and now he is being used again. There is something ironic and hypocritical in Dan Futterman criticising Capote for exploiting a man, and then doing exactly the same thing himself.

CAPOTE premiered at Telluride 2005 and went on limited release in the US and Canada in the autumn. The film played at Berlin 2006 and opens in the UK on the 24th February, Germany on the 2nd March and France on the 8th March.