AFIRE*

Man, I just did not get AFIRE. Is it an environmental satire about how we are all obsessed with our own mundanity while the world - literally - burns down on the edge of our peripheral vision?  Is it a satire on the narcissism of so-called creatives who underestimate the intellectual capacity of those around them?  Is it meant to be a deep and meaningful character and relationship study? Or is it meant to be a dark comedy? After an hour and forty minutes I neither know nor care. I found this film to be slow, dull, containing no characters that I found empathetic nor any plot "twists" that were compelling.  My mind drifted. I wanted to eat a blue smurf-flavoured ice cream.

The film centres on Leon (Thomas Schubert), a schlubby self-important author struggling with his second book. His friend Felix (Langston Uibel) invites him to his mum's seaside vacation house but the car breaks down en route and when they get there they find another couple also in residence. For the first thirty minutes of the film we see them from a distance but hear them loudly fucking in the next door bedroom, much to the voyeuristic Leon's frustration.  After that, Nadja (Paula Beer) comes more clearly into focus, firstly as an ice-cream seller and then as someone who is more than an intellectual and emotional match for Leon. But the character is really short-changed in this pisspoor film - a mere plot device to show up Leon's vacuity.

AFIRE has a running time of 102 minutes and is rated 12A. It played Berlin where it won the Silver Bear. It was released in the USA last month and in the UK last Friday.

BARDO - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 4

What a pile of narcissistic pretentious wank this film is! And what a waste of talent! What a waste of Inarritu and Khondji's kinetic, fluid camerawork and mastery of cinema! What a waste of a chance to truly explore the relationship of celebrity to art, and of Mexico to America!

It must be said that I have never been a fan of these sorts of masturbatory solipstic films about film-making. Everything that needed to be said about this was said by Fellini in 8 1/2 and even that film strains at my sympathy. But with BARDO, Inarritu has truly gone through the looking glass.

The film opens with a visually ravishing and playful scene of an unseen man - presumably the director's avatar Silverio Gama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) taking massive leaps over the Mmexican desert. It had a fantastical feel similar to BIRDMAN and I thought, okay, this is going to be fun!

We then transition into a scene where the director is now waiting for his wife to give birth, but apparently the baby decides the world is too fucked up and instructs the doctor to pop him back in. This we see. It's surreal, darkly comic, and I was still thinking, okay, this is going to be fun!

But we then move into the main body of the film which sees the director move through contemporary Mexico in preparation for a high profile American award. He seems disengaged and childishly refuses to co-operate with the people preparing him for the ceremony. He has a fractious relationship with his son who has been raised largely in America. And he has a fractious relationship with his homeland, which he sees as being conquered again, but this time economically rather than militarily.

It all meanders along with surreal scenes interspersed with banal family drama. At one point his wife is running around the flat, tits out, for no apparent reason, and Inarritu delights in showing us the aforementioned baby hanging out of her for no reason other than to provoke? It all felt rather childish and indulgent and pointless, but of course lensed beautifully.

I feel that within this three hour pointless dream-world there's a really taut 90 minute political satire about the commercialisation and erosion of journalistic values and the economic dependency of Mexico on America. But that's not the film Inarritu wanted to make.  What we end up with is the feeling of a director who is in a zipless fuck with his Mexican heritage. He doesn't actually want to engage with its colonial past or present. He wants to safely skate upon the surface of things. The result is an utterly superficial, uninvolving, unengaging meditation on ego.

BARDO has a running time of 174 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice, Telluride, Busan and the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released on Netflix on December 16th.

A PARIS EDUCATION aka MES PROVINCIALES - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Preview

Sweet tap-dancing Christ, this film really is the most boring pile of pretentious wank. Sit around for over 2 hours and watch whiny French film students have apparently deep and meaningful conversations about Art while fucking indiscriminately and being arrogant and bitchy.  The central character in this film - Matias - is meant to be our hero - an uncompromising wannabe auteur of integrity who worships the greats. But in reality he's just a jumped-up arrogant prick.  And he is worshipped by the film's protagonist Etienne - the provincial rube of the title who goes to Paris to study cinema, even before Etienne has even met Matias. In fact, as many women as Etienne cheats on his girlfriend with, this is the real love story of the film. The problem is that while Matias is unlikeable, Etienne is a banal void - dull, reactive, artistically blocked so we never actually see him create anything.  What makes this talky, endless, actionless nonsense even worse is that it's shot in black and white and laced with a Beethoven-heavy soundtrack for no real reason other than its director Jean-Paul Civeyrac is as pretentious as Matias. And let's be clear, this is not that kind of crisp elegant black and white photography of films like MANHATTAN. Nope. DP Pierre-Hubert Martin's whites are never white, his blacks lack depth - the whole thing just feels muddy.  Quite like the mind of its characters.  Avoid at all costs. 

A PARIS EDUCATION has a running time of 136 minutes. It played Berlin 2018 and was released in France and USA this summer. There are still tickets available for all three screenings at this year's BFI London Film Festival.

SILENCE

SILENCE is a high concept arthouse movie that for 90 minutes sees a sound recordist called Eoghan stand contemplatively in the gorgeous Irish countryside trying to record the sound of pure nature, without man's intervention.  This is interspersed with random old duffers reading poetry or hinting at Irish folklore.  I really wanted to like the flick - you've got to admire such an unashamedly challenging and purist project, as well as be fascinated by some of the (simulated?) old footage of Irishmen on the move.  But my god, was I bored.  The fact that Collins doesn't bother to create characters or plot is, of course, his point, but without any conventional narrative to cling to, I soon became bored of bored looking Eoghan staring into space.  Of course, there are ways to do a successful nostalgic homage to the land of our fathers. I am reminded of Guy Maddin's MY WINNIPEG.  But this really just isn't one of them unless you are the most masochistic of arthouse cinephiles.

SILENCE has a running time of 87 minutes and has been rated PG in the UK.  It was released in Ireland in November 2012 and is currently on release in the UK, as well as being available to download on demand.

This movie review is available as a podcast below, or by subscribing to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

FRANCES HA

For the written review, well, keep reading! But for the podcast review, either listen directly below or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

Sweet tap-dancing Christ, but FRANCES HA annoyed me. It's exactly that kind of precious, self-aware smug hipster movie that riles me, in exactly the same way as HBO's Girls riles me.  We are meant to be charmed and empathetic toward these flakey, twentysomethings with their great books college degrees who studied semiotics and thinks that life owes them a living. And why oh why is "investment banker" always a lazy shorthand for the soul-less putz who puts up with this shit and pays the bills?  I don't find this behaviour - lazy, narcissistic, delusional - charming. And even if I did, I wouldn't want to watch it for the 86 minute runtime of this movie.  And I'm not buying the idea that just because you filmed it in black and white it's deep and meaningful.

But let's take a breath and look at what we have here.  FRANCES HA is a movie written and directed by Noah Baumbach, who made the stunningly good THE SQUID & THE WHALE and the more sporadically successful MARGOT AT THE WEDDING and GREENBERG.   The latter film starred Greta Gerwig, the charming actress who plays, well charming characters who win our hearts even as they're being doormats (GREENBERG), obnoxious (DAMSELS IN DISTRESS) or flakey (FRANCES HA).  In GREENBERG and DAMSELS, the movies worked largely because Gerwig is just one of those people that you're happy to spend time with.  And the fact that I didn't walk out of FRANCES HA is largely thanks to the fact that she is pretty charming even when she's being utterly irritating.

So what's it all about Alfie?  It's about the friendship between college best buddies, Frances (Gerwig) and Sophia (Mickey Sumner).  That friendship is tested when Sophia does what late twenties girls do - gets a series job, gets an aspirational apartment and gets a fiancée.   Meanwhile, Frances is stuck as an apprentice modern dancer with no real steady income and no real hope of won.  The fact that she's impressed with the fact that she even asks for more work sums up the low bar she has set herself - and even then she ends up a loser.  So that's it.  For the first hour of this flick we watch Frances fail, and infuriatingly never really deal with that, just telling herself and her friends lies about how she's doing okay.  And then there's a crisis and a resolution neither of which I think are particularly credible.

Here's the basic level at which this movie doesn't work.  You know how Sofia Coppola so brilliantly and effortlessly captures how young girls are in each other's company?  There are a number of scenes where Baumbach tries to establish the same intimacy and freedom between Frances and Sophia, but it always comes off as stage-y rather than authentic.  And if you don't believe in their friendship, then the whole dramatic love story played as platonic friendship just doesn't work either. Of course, one let out could be that Baumbach is trying to show us how Frances sees her own life - mythologised, romanticised, a series of beautifully staged montages.  But I suspect that the movie isn't as clever as all that.

I think the simplest conclusion is that if you are someone who likes HBO's Girls, and thinks Lena Dunham is the voice of your generation, then this movie is for you.  I would rather just watch MANHATTAN or ANNIE HALL and be done with it. 

FRANCES HA has a running time of 86 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language and sex references.

FRANCES HA played Telluride, Toronto, New York, Berlin and host of other festivals in 2012.  It was released earlier this year in the USA, the Netherlands, Russia and Canada.  It is currently on release in Belgium, France, Poland and Israel. It opens in Poland on July 19th, in the UK and Ireland on July 26th, in Germany on August 1st, in Sweden on August 16th, and in Iceland on September 6th. 

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - Day 4 - UPSTREAM COLOR

Sweet tap dancing Christ, that movie was the biggest pile of pretentious wank I've seen at a festival in years. And reading the critics reviews has only made me more irate. I don't mind films where you have to do some intellectual jigsaw puzzling, and I don't mind surrendering myself to a stunning aural and visual landscape, but there must be some purpose to it, some meaning to it, beyond wilful obscurity. This film isn't so much arthouse sci-fi as an ill defined, loosely assembled jumble of images so absurd as to be laughable.

The story, such as it is, sees a young woman subjected to some kind of mind control and body horror by a gardener with some creepy maggots. He's so mean he makes her knit and drink iced water while nicking her cash. And then, we have another creepy guy who gets the maggot out of her but also does some kind of weird human centipede thang with pig transfusions in between being a sound recordist. Then the woman meets a creepy guy who's probably some kind of dodgy insider trader who inexplicably puts up with her shit. Which leads them back to discovering what happened and alerting the other victims, who then apparently set about pig farming.

I'm not denying that there are some arresting images in the movie, and the weird creepiness of the first act gave me hope. The soundscape is also beautifully done. But the alienating effect of the constant sharp editing, the ludicrous rambling voice overs and the sub Malick shots of nature had me falling asleep in my chair. I can't believe this is what we were waiting for for nine years after Shane Carruth's superb suburban sci fi PRIMER.

UPSTREAM COLOR has a running time of 96 minutes. The movie played Sundance 2013 where it won the Special Jury Prize for Sound Design, Berlin 2013 and SXSW 2013. It will be released in the USA on April 5th.

TAKE THIS WALTZ

This movie made me angry from the opening credits' sepia-tinted focus on Michelle Williams' blue-laquered toenails.  Poor Margot, it seems to say, so quirky, so right-thinking, making muffins with her face scrubbed clean.  It's like a Williamsburg dream. Except it's not.  It's a part of hipster-heaven-imagined Toronto where a young boho-wannabe couple who never seem to do much work can afford to live in a ramshackle-beautiful house interior designed just-so.  The couple are desperately irritating, right up until you realise that they are really really creepy.  They seem to have a kind of asexual buddy relationship where flirtation consists of speaking in infantile voices and drinking milk and poking fingers in your husband's mouth.  Plus the wife is clearly depressed and the husband so engrossed in making chicken cacciatore that he doesn't notice. So she starts flirting with the neighbour who is, of course!, a rickshaw driver who hangs out at the beach each morning to think.  I couldn't make this stuff up. Except he's clearly not as groovy and right-on and at peace with nature as all that because he's soon stalking her at the Y and then she's stalking him, and it all ends in the unsexiest sex-talk over martinis and a confession about nothing.  Still, as unappealing as I found the cocktease wife Margot and her stalkerish fancyman Daniel (Luke Kirby), at least there's a kind of raw honesty and commitment in their performances.  You realise that the first time you see Seth Rogen (the chicken-chef) react to his wife's confession.  Director Sarah Polley decides to do something that should showcase real acting talent - smashcut close-ups of his different reactions. Except, we learn, Rogen can't act - or at least not that kind of raw drama - he seems to be acting "at" it - and does that annoying Brad Pitt thing where you keep groping your face because that looks natural, right?  I mean, let's be clear, we have to blame Sarah Polley for this self-indulgent, risible mess, just as we lauded her for the Alzheimers drama AWAY FROM HER.  She wrote these absurdly incredible characters and their unsexy sexy language.  She exposed Rogen's inadequacies.  And in a montage designed to show Margot tiring of her new man, she reduces her film to an Ikea advert with a teenage-naive-embarrassing cut to what racy sex might actually look like.  Of course, this movie isn't as radical or subversive or raw or authentic as it thinks it is.   Chicken-man's sister turns out to be that movie cliché - the wise alcoholic.  Basically, the meaning is that we always take the weather with us.  And that very few movies live up to the Leonard Cohen song they're using.  Go home.  Go home. There's nothing to see here.    

TAKE THIS WALTZ played Toronto 2011 and Tribeca 2012. It was released earlier this year in Taiwan, the USA (Video on demand), Australia, Canada, Turkey and Sweden. It was released earlier this month in New Zealand, Japan, Denmark, Ireland, the UK, Greece, the Netherlands and Spain. It will be released in Belgium on September 19th; in France on October 31st; and in Brazil on November 9th.

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.  

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - THE ROMANTICS

THE ROMANTICS is a movie about a bunch of late-twenties college friends reunited at the Long Island wedding of two of the group. The marriage forces the group to re-assess their friendships, loyalties and sexual attraction - and all this should create tension around whether the wedding between Tom and Lila (Josh Duhamel and Anna Paquin) will actually go ahead given that Laura (Katie Holmes) is still carrying a torch for the groom. The audience is meant to be drawn into the emotional lives of characters who feel mixed-up and sympathetic - just like us! And debut feature director, Galt Niederhoffer (adapting her own novel, employs lots of obvious tricks to try and manufacture that empathy and a sense that we are watching an hip counter-culture indie flick rather than an inauthentic Hollywood rom-com: gloomy lighting; painfully indie sound-track; deliberately obscure ending. Sadly though, the film fails on every level. Casting 40 year olds like Josh Duhamel breaks the credibility of the film, especially when we're meant to believe he was a peer of THE OC's Adam Brody. The acting is universally bad and yet for diametrically opposite reasons: chip-board performances from Duhamel and Katie Holmes but hammy, over-the-top acting from Elijah Woods, Malin Akerman and Anna Paquin. The whole thing struck me as self-indulgent; pretentious; inauthentic and dull, dull, dull. Distributors were right to scorn it: there is a reason why it appeared in the UK as a straight to video/TV release. 

THE ROMANTICS played Sundance 2010 and was released in 2010 in the US and Slovenia. It was released in Iceland in March 2011.

SUBMARINE - as unsatisfying as onanism

This review is brought to you by The Ginger Dwarf, a man cursed not only with being short and ginger, but also with going to school in Wales.... 

I have never read “A Catcher in the Rye”. Perhaps this is why I felt deeply unsatisfied by “Submarine”, which, like onanism and caffeine, felt momentarily fantastic, but was ultimately disappointing. Its quirky humour, often delivered with deadpan voiceover, was at times inspired and very funny, but wasn’t sufficient to carry a movie which was too long and whose plot fell into facile traps towards the end. 

Richard Ayoade’s debut film (he wrote the screenplay and directed it, and most impressively, managed to live in Barry throughout the filming process, as anyone who has ever lived in South Wales will immediately understand), follows the travails of precocious pseudo-intellectual teen Oliver Tate. 

Oliver, best described as Wales’ answer to Adrian Mole, wears a duffle-coat and carries a briefcase around school. He obsesses about the nonchalant, twisted and red-coated Jordana Bevan, whose eczema and apparent bow-legs appear to be offset in his eyes by high-cheekbones and a flirtatious smile. That he is bound at some point to lose his virginity to her is a sine qua non, since this is a coming-of-age movie. And when the moment comes, pun intended, it is well executed and almost Andy Stitzer-like. Our solipsistic hero, encouraged by this victory and undamaged by life experience decides to try to save his parents’ marriage. Unfortunately for the viewers we simply don’t care enough about this awkward couple to care; they are just not likeable enough. They’re the sort of people who encourage their children to call them by their first names. We hardly envy their bourgeois hell. The juxtaposition of the parents’ decaying marriage and Tate’s burgeoning relationship with Jordana feels laboured. 

The only saving grace of this development is that it allows Paddy Considine’s character to run wild for a while. Much more of the dynamic between the mulleted Graham Purvis and Oliver could have been made, not least since, in their own ways, they believe equally in their own grandiose self-images. Prosaic characterisation is the film’s biggest let-down. Although he is bullied, it is refreshing that Oliver is not a total wimp, eschewing wholesale playground capitulation, but still he’s still whimsy and annoyingly affected. Jordana could have been more than the tough lass with a (barely) hidden soft side. Indeed, if this was a grown-up movie she’d have been a hooker-with-a-heart. Personally, I’d have preferred her to remain a hard-nosed and Juno-esque, or even better, like Sheeni Saunders’ “Portia Doubleday” in that other, excellent but neglected Michael Cera vehicle “Youth in Revolt”. Also noticeably implausible is the mother’s character. Albeit brilliantly played by Sally Hawkins, she comes across as far too sensible to fall for Purvis’ phoney wizard cum wedding DJ. Ayoade’s film has been frequently compared to Rushmore, indeed Wes Andersen regular Ben Stiller appears fleetingly as a TV soap star in Submarine. And yet the characters are self-involved and unpleasant, without the redeeming qualities which make Andersen’s films so textured. Despite the buzz, Submarine is underwhelming. Ayoade’s irreverent humour (he lists his influences for this film as Taxi Driver & Badlands – is he, even here, taking the piss?) is hit-and-miss and fails to convince in a movie which should have ended differently, and earlier. 

SUBMARINE played Toronto and London 2010 and Sundance 2011. It opens in the UK this weekend; in Norway on April 15th; in the US on June 3rd; in Poland in August and in Sweden on September 23rd.

Late and incomplete review - London Film Fest 2010 Day 10 - FILM SOCIALISME

We are on a cruise ship. We are in contemporary Europe. We are at the End of Days. We are in Palestine. We are in politics. We are listening to Alain Badiou. We are listening to Patti Smith.  We are in hi-def DV. We are in lo-def pixelated DV. We are in hi-camp Hollywood. We are in present-day desolation. We are mashing up images from everything and everywhere.

So what is the point? That we live in a post-political society? That we decadent capitalist Europeans care nothing for the class-struggle? That we are beyond political redemption? That we are living in a culture mediated by iconic media images, unable to disentangle reality from fiction? That we are merely repeating /parroting media image rather than critically engaging with life? Does there have to be a point? Is the point that there is no point?

FILM SOCIALISME is the worst kind of pretentious, patronising, pseudo-intellectual bilge that claims to have something profound to say about politics and the nature of cinema, but in fact is nothing more than self-indulgent, adolescent nonsense. The fact that it was produced by Jean-Luc Godard, French auteur, means that reviewers have been generous, ascribing to it meaning and coherence and earnest intentions that it simply does not possess. His film is insulting to us as viewers - it holds us in contempt. It tells us that we are not worth narrative structure or coherent exposition because we are party to the contemporary culture it is condemning. At least, that is the most generous explanation I can give for a film that plays like a collage, a scrapbook, where Godard has pasted in scenes from past films, news-reels and other sources into a layered, incoherent mess. Godard basically holds up two fingers to his audience in the film. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the most hateful film I have seen in recent years. The correct response is to walk out. And that is exactly what I did.

Now, a lot of the film's fans are going to say that basically I am just admitting my own ignorance. That I'm not well versed enough in Godard's back catalogue, that I don't speak French, that I don't understand the philosophical and political movements he is engaging with. That, basically, I am a poor creature who can only feel safe in the warm embrace of mindless Hollywood genre-cinema. To them, I say, in the words Godard might've have used as a title to this film, baise-toi! I speak French, I've watched his films, I read philosophy at university, and I like tough cinema. But this film is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. It reflects back the pretentions of the viewers and cinema-goers who love cinema, LOVE cinema, should fight back.

FILM SOCIALISME played Cannes, London and Toronto 2010. It was released in France in May 2010 and was released on DVD last month.

PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES/COEURS - pretentious wank

PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES is directed by the giant of French cinema, Alain Resnais and based on the play by acclaimed English author Alan Aychbourn. It is photographed by Eric Gautier, the respected DP who brought us GABRIELLE and THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES. It is acted by a superb cast comprising Sabine Azéma, Lambert Wilson, André Dussollier, Pierre Arditi, Laura Morante and Isabelle Carré.

All this means that I approach the film with much respect for all concerned. It does not, however, preclude me from damning it as pretentious, tedious, over-worked, heavy-handed, deliberately oblique, wank. Seriously. There is nothing new here. No insights into contemporary human loneliness and relationships. Nothing.

The film/play is based on six people and uses the over-familiar structure wherein everyone is linked to everyone else. Andre Dussolier plays an ageing estate agent who is showing Laura Morante's character around apartments. She is frustrated with the choices, though we later find that this reflects her frustration with her lazy fiance, played by Lambert Wilson. He spends his time drinking in a bar managed by Pierre Arditi instead of looking for a job. Arditi tells him to ditch his fiancee and find a new woman. So he hooks up with a pretty young blonde played by Sabine Azema. She has low self-esteem due to being constantly let down by dates. She lives with her (incredibly) much older brother, played by Andre Dussolier. And Dussolier's colleague, played by Isabelle Carre, completes the circle. She plays a fiercely religious woman who gives Dussolier's character videos of "Songs of Praise" type shows, that are actually taped over tantalising home-made porn videos! Oh yes, and she works part time as a carer for Pierre Arditi's character's father.

The only reason I stayed in the cinema was to see how they resolved by the religious woman/porn star segment. They basically didn't. What we did get was some heavy-handed imagery. Oh, the characters are so isolated and emotionally cold that when they speak it snows INSIDE the house. Ah, so poetic! Unbelievable.

PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES/COEURS played Venice 2006 where it (unbelievably) won Best Director and Best Actress for Laura Morante. It has already opened in France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, the US, Greece, Israel, Brazil and the UK. It opens in Argentina on August 2nd.

THE FOUNTAIN - intriguing/frustrating

In short, Darren Aronofsky disappearing down a dead end is still more interesting than most Hollywood hacks getting it right.

Aronofsky is a challenging director – both in terms of content and visual style. And if I found his debut feature, PI, more intriguing than perfect, REQUIEM FOR A DREAM is certainly one of my pantheon movies. Its bleak depiction of drug abuse and crass commerce was told in an innovative style and with uncompromising honesty. Not to mention the fact that Aronofsky managed to coax career-redefining performances from Ellen Burstyn and Jennifer Connelly. Where these movies succeeded was in scraping underneath the surface of a relatively closed under-ground world. Investigating the workings of mania and paranoia and addiction on a small group of individuals living in contemporary society – albeit a strand of society that most of us never interact with.

With THE FOUNTAIN, Aronofsky moves well beyond his (dis)comfort zone into the territory of 2001. He eschews contemporary settings to produce a more abstract, symbolic and richly stylised movie. At its heart is a man called Tom (Hugh Jackman) who is desperately in love with his fatally ill wife, an authoress called Izzy (Rachel Weisz). The crux of the story is Tom’s initial refusal to accept Izzy’s impending death. In the contemporary story-line, Tom chooses to spend time researching a cure rather than spending what time remains with Izzy. This choice will rack him with guilt in the futuristic story-line, which sees Tom living alone with his regrets in a sci-fi world of loneliness (another Requiem for a Dream of Eternal Love?) The film is also inter-cut with a further storyline which sees Izzy’s novel re-enacted. Tom is now cast as a Spanish conquistador on a mission from Izzy’s Queen of Spain to find a plant that can give eternal life.

The thematic content of the movie is thus profound, but also surprisingly simple, especially given the complexity of Aronofsky’s narrative structure and visual and audio stylings. The movie boasts an evocative sound-track from the Kronos Quartet and Mogwai and the production design features fairy-tale symbols and beautifully rendered old-fashioned visual effects. The problem is that at least half of it feels redundant. I am also unconvinced by the heavy-handed symbolism of the presumably deliberately under-lit opening scenes of the Conquistador? Of many examples, Christopher Nolan proved in BATMAN BEGINS that it is possible to create a dark, brooding atmosphere while actually allowing the audience to see what is going on.

The overall effect is that while powerful, the simple central question posed by the film drowns under the weight of the deliberately obscure production design, cinematography and editing. The over-complicated structure and design and abstract script also prohibit Jackman and Weisz from giving memorable performances - though they do their best with portentious dialogue. All this combines to make THE FOUNTAIN simultaneously one of the most intriguing and frustrating films I have seen in a long time.

THE FOUNTAIN played Venice and Toronto 2006. It opened in the US, Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan and France in winter 2006. It opened in Poland, South Africa, Germany and Estonia earlier this month and opens in Australia, Italy and the UK this weekend. THE FOUNTAIN opens in South Korea on Feb 8th and in Israel and Singapore on Feb 22nd. It opens in New Zealand on March 1st and in Hong Kong, the Netherland and Belgium on March 8th. It opens in Norway on March 16th, Spain on March 30th, Sweden and and Finland on April 13th and in Japan on July 7th.

BABEL: Let's challenge prejudice together

This review is brought to you by guest reviewer, Nik, who can usually be found here.

This is the last in the trilogy of films by Alejandro González Iñárritu starting with the Bafta winning AMORES PERROS, followed by 21 GRAMS, and completed by BABEL - a film of interwoven characters and relationships spanning the globe, from the Mexican desert, to the sunshine of San Diego, the wastelands of Morocco, and the buzzing nightlife of Tokyo. The locations are exotic, the scenery and visuals are quietly stunning, and despite the sarcasm of the title of this review, this film doesn't think too much of itself, or withdraw up its own arse.

In fact, the beauty of the film is that it so carefully treads the thin line between being in your face, paint by numbers morality - and being so understated that it becomes arthouse wank. It makes a simple point simply - and beautifully - that it's not so easy to be prejudiced when you have to look a human being - crying, broken - in the face and in the eye. That it's not so easy to condemn when you see acts of self-less human kindness from those who are unlike you - of whom you are initially suspicious and judgemental. This film doesn't pretend to say anything greater - or anything more fundamental or groundbreaking. And it does what it does so well. The acting is powerful, the script is excellent and spans 4 different languages and 4 different cultures with ease. It's well edited - and put together in a seemingly natural non-chronological order - not to make the plot twist at the end, or to be clever, but because it needed to be that way.

That's not to say the film didn't have its downsides - it wasn't quite a work of genius. This may seem trivial, but the musical score - an incessant Spanish guitar - started to grate after a while. It was too heavy handed. And the film probably stretched the point out for too long - although I can understand why all the scenes are in there, and why they're so long - the plot in each story just wasn't substantial enough to justify the running length, and nor were the almost incidental crossovers of the stories. And Brad Pitt looked like he thought he was doing some great community and social good by starring in a film that was mostly in foreign, and wouldn't be screened outside of Canada. Although his performance was good, if slightly 2-dimensional.

Furthermore, I didn't actually identify with any of the prejudices. I like Mexicans, and think they probably do most of the work in California. I don't think all Arabs are terrorists. And I so would have fucked the deaf-mute girl. In fact, thinking on it, what a sweet deal. How's she gonna complain if it's bad? Write me an email? Send me a fucking text message? Imagine it, boning a chick from behind, and suddenly a little scrawled out paper note appears on her back: "harder. and down a little" - class. And anyway, what'll she have to complain about? It's not like she's gonna hear me shouting out someone elses name*.

Having said all that - it was a very good film, and very worthy - it passed the time and it ought to have been made. And while I almost certainly won't be buying it on DVD and have no particular urge to see it again, because it wasn't substantial enough for a second watch, I do happily recommend it to anyone who likes a thinking and sensitive film. My fear is, of course, that this, as with most good art, is only going to be seen by people who already agree with its central points. Sadly the most prejudiced are often the most ignorant - and have little or no access or inclination towards good art, which this film represents. In other words, the people that this film was meant to challenge will be too busy seeing the latest shock flick, or masturbating at home to old episodes of Baywatch.

But all that said, it was a fitting end to the trilogy, and indeed a worthy close of the London Film Festival. And I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though the free popcorn they gave us was so ludicrously undersized. Thanks to Bina007 for the ticket, and thanks in advance to the Royal Association for Deaf People for settling out of court.

*Could all complaints from disability associations or disable people please be directed to nikolai.segura@gmail.com and not to Bina007, who does not endorse any of my jokes, however funny.

BABEL played Cannes, Toronto and London 2006. It opened in Denmark, Italy, Mexico, Sweden and the US last week. It opens in Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, wide in the US on November 10th. It opens in Belgium, France, Finland and Argentina later in November. BABEL opens in Spain, Germany and Australia in December and in the UK, Estonia, Latvia and Brazil in January 2007. It opens in Japan in March.

BREAKING AND ENTERING - Minghella bites off more than he can chew

Anthony Minghella's new film, BREAKING AND ENTERING is not quite up to the grand subjects and aspirations it sets itself, but is a compelling relationship drama nonetheless. That drama is set resolutely in London - the London of immigrant crime, prostitutes and that dirty of dirty words, "regeneration". And Minghella must be praised for rendering the back alleys of London's King Cross with as much menace as the back alleys of Venice in THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY. The score is also brilliantly judged.

In this world, Jude Law plays an architect called Will whose long-time partner is a beautiful Swedish woman (Robin Wright Penn). The relationship is crumbling because she cannot quite trust Will to look after her autistic daughter and resents his feelings of neglect. Will works at an architecture firm in Kings Cross whose computers keep being nicked. He follows one of the thieves - a young Bosnian kid - and ends up seducing his mother, played by Juliette Binoche. He does not tell her he knows her son is a thief.

Where this movie works is in its depiction of complex modern relationships - long-term partners with step-children. Jude Law is fine but he is acted off the screen by Robin Wright Penn and Juliette Binoche. The movie also has a deep vein of deadpan humour, supplied by Martin Freeman in a cameo re-run of his character in THE OFFICE. Better still, Vera Farmiga - who I hated in THE DEPARTED - is astoundingly good and wickedly funny in her role as a prostitute. She really elevates the movie and it is a shame when her character drops out of focus.

But the movie fails almost everywhere else. Accents aside, the immigrant story does not feel anchored in fact and minutely observed cultural details. The love story between the white architect and the african cleaner is picked up and tossed aside - as if Minghella's knows this is an interesting contemporary story but has neither the time nor the familiarity with the subject matter to flesh it out. The entire final 40 minutes is a mess - and badly needs a script doctor. The characters do things that seem contrary to their personalities - and the denouement seems - SPOILER ALERT - cobbled together in order to give closure to the protagonist with not a care for the treatment of Binoche's character. This makes the final scene of happy families in the architecture firm stick in the throat.

Finally, what we have is a relationship drama that sort of works surrounded and obscured by bigger social issues that are never convincingly portrayed. If you want a document of social life in London - check out DIRTY PRETTY THINGS - a far better movie all round.

BREAKING AND ENTERING played Toronto and London 2006. It opens in the UK on November 10th and in the US on December 8th. It opens in Australia, Denmark, Belgium, France, Spain, Argentina, the Netherlands, Germany and Brazil in January 2007. It opens in Italy in March 2007.

LITTLE CHILDREN - four reasons why this film is a fiasco

Let me be clear that when I go into a movie I really do want to enjoy it, especially when it comes with cast credentials as high as this. I hear all the Oscar buzz for LITTLE CHILDREN but I have to say that I just don't get it. I sat through this film waiting for that light to turn on - for the insight, the originality, the flair of vision or the emotional epiphany to happen. It didn't. I feel like I am missing out on this amazing movie experience that everyone is having.

So for what it's worth, here's why I didn't like LITTLE CHILDREN. First off, the film is based on a novel and the screen-writer/director, Todd Field, has opted to keep an intrusive, fairy-tale type narration of the kind I saw deconstructed in STRANGER THAN FICTION. The narrator has a voice like something out of Doctor Seuss. It seemed grossly out of place for a purportedly adult movie about marital infidelity and the re-introduction of a convicted sex offender into a conservative suburban community.

Second, the primary plot strand is dull. The film is basically the story of a bored suburban house-wife (Kate Winslet) and a disillusioned house-husband (Patrick Wilson) who have an affair. She, like Madame Bovary (a painfully over-worked metaphor in this film) hopes he will leave with her. The adultery story is handled in a workmanlike manner. It features a fairly explicit and yet completely unerotic and rather, well, ungainly, sex scene. It also features Winslet's character defending Madame Bovary as a heroic proto-feminist with a hunger for "options". There is nothing heroic about Winslet's character's struggles.

Third, the other inter-secting plot strand is handled in a clumsy and exploitative manner. The strand has the unhappy couple living in a community in an uproar because a convicted child abuser has moved in. The theme of sexual predators in suburbia has been handled with credible emotional authenticity and sensitivity by Kevin Bacon in the astounding movie, THE WOODSMAN. Watching THE WOODSMAN you got the feeling that everyone involved in the movie took a genuine interest in the emotional life of the molester. In this movie, he just seems like a conveniently shocking and "interesting" plot strand. The film-makers are as brutalising as the people in the community they are depicting.

The fourth reason why I didn't like LITTLE CHILDREN is that the whole thing was drained of energy and interest by bland cinematography, pedestrian editing and an over-long run-time for the subject matter. The plot meandered, skirting around larger issues that it never quite got a handle on. The director lingered on scenes that propelled the action and the character development (such as it was) not one iota. Sometimes the director's choice of focus is just plain odd. For instance, the cuckolded wife (Jennifer Connolly) is a two-dimensional character. We never learn much about her and it is hard to empathise with her. But all of a sudden she does get a scene editing footage for a documentary she is making. The footage shows a small child - far too young to string together the pretentious sentences he is uttering about his father's death in the Iraqi war. Does the director think that just by placing a small child in front of a picture of a dead soldier and a flag he will strike a chord? A movie is not something wherein you pack in random references and hope a meaning will fall out.

As a result, the film runs for over two hours and you feel every minute. This could be the most badly directed film playing the London Film Festival.

LITTLE CHILDREN showed at Toronto and London 2006. It is already on limited release in the US and opens wide in the US and in the UK on November 3rd. It opens in Australia in December, Turkey, Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands in January 2007 and in Spain in February.

KEANE - brilliant method acting but ultimately alienating

KEANE is sadly not a movie about the brilliant central mid-fielder. It is, in fact, an ultra-low budget movie about a mentally ill man called William Keane, living in contemporary New York. Keane is played by Damian Lewis (the ginger from Band of Brothers) in a tour-de-force of minutely observed acting. And writer-director Lodge Kerrigan puts the audience smack in Keane's face. The movie is shot in an uncomfortable, claustrophobic hand-held close-up. We are right with Keane as he harangues commuters as to whether they have seen his daughter who was allegedly abducted six months previously. We follow Keane as he gets drunk, takes class A drugs, has casual sex and befriends a mother and her daughter who are living in his decrepit motel. His motives for befriending the young girl, played the precociously talented Abigail Breslin, are concerning.

Keane is not the sort of movie that you are supposed to enjoy. It is, I think, designed to make you empathise with people marginalised in society - and in particular a man who has become mentally ill through grieving....or whose grief is part of his mental illness. And the acting really is tremendous on the part of Lewis - a sort of actor's guide to utter conviction. My problem with the film is rather the writing of the part of the mother. She takes decisions that I find implausible and rather "Hollywood". For instance, she cautiously accepts a hundred dollars from Keane to help pay the rent. All well and good. She is suitably suspicious of his motives. Then she invites him to share take-out. Okay. Then he asks her to dance, as if we are at some 1950s tea-dance! And she says yes! Now, please, do we really think this sort of exchange is plausible? So, as hard as Lewis works to keep us with Lewis, the writing kept taking me out of it. Added to which the verite style is bloody hard work.

To my taste, I am far more likely to empathise and have my attention wrapt by a movie like TIDELAND or SPIDER, that takes me not just bang-smack in the face of a mentally ill person but actually inside his or her mind. To that end, I found Kerrigan's movie rather limited.

KEANE showed at Toronto 2004, Cannes and London 2005. KEANE has been on release on Region 1 DVD since March 2006. It received a limited cinematic release in France, the US and Greece in 2005 and opened in the UK yesterday.

DESTRICTED - Smut! (Part Two)

DESTRICTED is the kind of film that makes you proud to be British. But it's not the kind of film that I want to watch again.

The basic idea is that since the invention of the VCR and latterly the internet, porn has been taken out of public spaces and into the home. Kids grow up watching porn and to a large extent their expectations of sex are based on porn rather than garnering real life experience. The VCR and internet also made porn big business - sitting alongside mainstream Hollywood in So-Cal. The weird part is that while lots of us have sex and use porn and feel happy in our liberal environment, it is still bizarrely difficult to have an adult discussion about the relationship between sexuality and porn. The classic example is when a publicly funded museum in the US put on a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective in the late '80s. Senator Jesse Helms hounded out the curator, called off the exhibition and essentially shut down the National Endowment of the Arts. All because he couldn't tell the difference between art and smut. So, you could say that we are long over-due an unfettered intelligent discourse about the All Porn All the Time culture that we live in and the impact that has on how we understand our own sexuality.

To that end, three English movie producers got together and said, let's ask seven modern artists to submit short films about this subject, and we'll stitch them together and make a film and call it DESTRICTED coz that's a witty title. It will be shown in museums but also reclaim public spaces. We will provoke a much needed discourse! Bravo!

Sadly, the results don't live up to the neat idea or the grand good intentions. The first movie is a bizarre short called HOIST by Matthew Barney. It graphically depicts a guy covered in mud and moss with a beet stuck into his arse getting himself off by rubbing against the moving parts of an agricultural machine. Presumably this has an Important Meaning. It was just odd. Not sexy. Not uncomfortable. Just a bit naff and boring. Then we get a very funny film from Marina Abramovic called BALKAN EROTIC EPIC that sends up Balkan sexual myths with live action footage and explicit cartoons. There are lots of unattractive old Balkan women and men running around exposing themselves or masturbating into the ground. As an added bonus, Marina's dead-pan narration does sound very Borat.

After all this pointless exposure it is rather a relief (ha ha!) to get to Richard Prince's short. Prince specialises in plagiarising other people's work. This is NOT Ripping People Off. It is Questioning Authorship apparently. So, in HOUSE CALL, Prince just takes a camera and photographs a TV screen showing a 1970s soft-core porn flick. Horny naked blonde chick calls in the doctor, nudge nudge. Like I said, it was finally rather nice to see reasonably straight-forward porn. And for this segment, I rather question the BBFC granting this movie an 18 certificate. Anyways, on to by the far the most witty and short segment called SYNC. Here Marco Brambilla basically rapidly cuts together scenes from a lot of different porn films from meeting to various positions to money shots. It's quick, funny and does more than any of these films to highlight the automation and alienation of modern sex.

Next up is IMPALED. This is the longest segment and is the funniest and most interesting on an intellectual level. The infamous Larry Clark interviews a bunch of hapless teens for a job in a porn film. He selects one, the guy then interviews a bunch of actresses and then he gets to it with the Lucky Gal. The interviews are fascinating. A lot of the guys feel inadequate both in terms of size and experience because their only benchmark is porn. Moreover, when they say they like certain things, it is not clear whether that is a genuine or "manufactured" desire. Great stuff.

The penultimate film is literally a pile of pretentious wank called DEATH VALLEY by Sam Taylor-Wood. Man goes into empty scrub land. Man wanks. End. Once again it's all about MEANING, but to me it just seemed rather dull and obvious.

And finally, we have French provocateur, Gaspar Noe, with his rather obvious movie called WE FUCK ALONE. Here, he shows us the alienation of modern sex by having various people masturbate with various sexual aids in separate rooms while nursery music and a baby crying fill the sound-track. It reminded me of that art-school movie that Daniel Clowes satirises in GHOST WORLD. I expected better from Noe.

So there we have it. A film with a noble aim, and I am very happy that it can be shown in the UK without death threats being sent through the mail or the TATE having its funding removed. But, as laudable as the project is, with the exception of the Larry Clark segment, there is nothing new or revelatory here.

DESTRICTED showed at Sundance and Cannes 2006. It is currently on apparently sporadic and super-limited release in the UK but appears on DVD in a couple of weeks. You'll be able to buy it in the Tate Modern gift-shop apparently.

LONESOME JIM – Why oh why oh why oh why?

What is it with successful Hollywood actors and directors that they feel the need to go back to small towns and make deathly dull earnest movies of charming small town folk who look terrible, say nothing witty, do nothing of consequence and then die? We know life sucks. That is why we go to the movies. We want guns, fast cars, and hot chicks in Santa outfits. Enough with the white man’s version of keeping it real. Let’s keep it fake. That’s why God invested plastic.
You think I’m kidding? Lonesome Jim (Casey Affleck – and yes, he is related to Ben) is a 27 year old guy from Indiana who moved to New York and ended up walking dogs for a living. He comes home to have a nervous breakdown, is mean to his mum, ignores his dad (Seymour Cassel), depresses his elder brother so much he attempts suicide, improbably shags Liv Tyler (the chick who marries Aragorn in Lord of the Rings) and nearly messes that up too. Don’t get me wrong. All these people give great acting performances, but they have little to work with.
The movie is shot with a digital camera (the Panasonic AG-DVX100 for all you camera geeks) and the resulting print looks grainy and washed out. This is not (I think, I hope) a deliberately cultivated aesthetic. Some other random facts and assertions…..Apparently it cost $500,000 to make. I assume this is Taiwanese dollars not US dollars. LONESOME JIM was also nominated for the Grand Jury prize at Sundance back in January, but didn’t win. 40% of people who rated this on IMDB gave it ten out of ten. I am willing to bet that 100% of these people attended film school.

LONESOME JIM premiered at Sundance back in January 2005 but only goes on limited US release from 10th March 2006. There is currently no European release date, thank God. For once, I think the distributors have this down. Apart from some film geek gawpers who would turn up to see Buscemi sneeze, who is really going to shell out ten squid to see this?

BUBBLE - An artistic sneeze

QUICK REVIEW: DO NOT SEE THIS FILM. LONG REVIEW: My review of this film is pretty redundant seeing as very few people will ever read it and even if they do, actually finding a theatre playing this movie is pretty hard. As far as I can tell, it only has a US release date - 26th January 2006 - and it is being released simultaneously in theatres, on cable and on DVD. Apparently this is because it is SO cool, cutting edge, "Sundance" etc., that it can shun the usual Hollywood premiere, critical attention hoopla. Translation: this is so pointless and unmarketable it is going straight to video. Feel free to dig BUBBLE out of your local Blockbuster bargain bin next Spring, but be warned - you'll never get those 70 minutes back.

To be sure, this movie is not Pure Cinematic Evil. It is NOT Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. In fact, it has a lot going for it. The movie is directed by Steven Soderbergh, the man who brought you Erin Brokovich and the all new Ocean's Eleven. He shoots the movie on Hi-Def video but it looks as good as if it were shot on celluloid. This is no mean feat. Moreover, there is something admirable in the fact that Soderbergh has felt the need and the actually been able to go low-budget after the $110 million extravaganza that was Ocean's Twelve.

He takes us to Bumblef*ck USA. Meet Martha, an obese middle-aged woman who lives with her invalided father and spraypaints plastic dolls in a small factory. The only joy in her life is eating junk food and befriending the much younger Kyle. Kyle is a young kid who didn't graduate high school and works in the factory making the plastic dolls. He lives with his mum in a trailor. Into this mix comes Rose, a young single mother who romances Kyle provoking Martha's jealousy.

Soderbergh wants us to think he is "keeping it real". There are lots of loving still shots of various bits of factory equipment, and he has cast unknown "real" people who speak in "authentic voices" (translation: boring, whiny, repetitive, assine....)

Stuff happens to Martha, Kyle and Rose for 70 minutes and then the movie sort of stops, leaving the audience thinking "huh?!"* But what is the freakin' point?! Deuce Bigalow had a point. The Wedding Crashers had a point. They wanted to make us laugh. They failed, but the aim was admirable. Shit, even Pearl Harbour had a point. BUBBLE does not have a point. Indeed, the only tentatively provocative shot is at the end-credits when we see the rejected defective plastic dolls - arrays of mutilated plastic - a comment on society's obsession with superficial perfection?

What do I know? Not much. And certainly not a jot more at the end of Bubble than at the beginning.

*Beware any critics who tell you this is similar in intent and quality as movies like Elephant and Gerry. They didn't have to pay £12.50 to see it and are going to be less pissed than you will be by a truly experimental film.