BRIMSTONE - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 10

BRIMSTONE is a beautifully photographed and designed western thriller that features Dakota Fanning and Guy Pearce in fiercely committed performances.  However, it falls into the trap of seeking to portray and condemn sexual violence against women by basically showing us a lot of sexual violence against women, in such a manner and style that it almost seems to be enjoying it.  The result is a film that looks beautiful and is certainly fiercely focussed on what it wants to achieve, but which jumps the shark at several key moments, and left me wondering whether it was good with occasional misjudgments, or just plain objectionable.

The film is set in the American midwest in the mid 1800s and focusses on a young mute woman (Dakota Fanning) who is a wife and mother to two small children.  In the first of four chapters we see her incite the vengeance of a mean-spiritied judgmental preacher (Guy Pearce) out of all proportion to her apparent crime of having chosen to save a mother over her baby in a troubled delivery.  But still, in this chapter I was convinced this film was going to be a well-acted, tense, taut thriller. That is until a final act of violence so absurd it pulled me out of the film.  But that was ok, because we then moved into the second chapter, and an apparent re-set of the film, as we met a young runaway girl being picked up by Chinese travellers and sold to a brothel keeper.  This was by far the most interesting and successful segment of the film but once again utterly jumped the shark with violence by the end.  And it was notable that at both of these points in the film, a number of people walked out.  Bu the film got really problematic in its third and fourth segment, where the true nature of the relationship between the preacher and the girl is revealed in all its melodramatic, exploitative detail.

What can I say? If this movie had just exercised a little restraint and thought deeply about how to depict violence against women it might have been a really fascinating, genre-bending movie.  But the director, Martin Koolhoven, seems to have zero instinct about what's provocative and what's just offensive.  It's an enormous shame because Guy Pearce and Dakota Fanning are clearly going for something high quality here, but there's let down by a director with a tin ear. 

BRIMSTONE is rated R and has a running time of 148 minutes.  BRIMSTONE played Venice, London and Toronto 2016. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

London Film Festival Day 9 - THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES is a movie set in South Carolina in 1964 and features a cast full of famous African-American actresses. Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okenodo play August, June and May Boatwright - three sisters that live in a beautiful house and make honey. They are affluent, cultured, strong and independent. This is so rare for the period, where Jennifer Hudson's abused house-made Rosaleeen is the norm, that the Boatwright family seem like something out of a fairy tale. Certainly this is how runaway Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning) sees them.

I had thought that a movie about a little white girl taking shelter with an African-American family would be a film about race. And superficially, it is. We get an early scene where Noraleen is beaten up for daring to register to vote. And later on, Lily's friend Zach will be abducted and beaten up for daring to go to a movie with a white girl. In the background, we can spy an Atticus-Finch-like lawyer, and Alicia Keys character - a feminist, activist member of the NAACP - screams for more screen-time as a representative of the social movements coming to the boil in the mid-60s. Now, that would have been an important and interesting movie.

But the dirty secret of THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES is that it's just not interested in investigating the reality of the ethnic minority experience in the 1960s. In fact, it falls victim to the same prejudice we have seen through the history of mainstream cinema, where ethnic minority issues are fit only as a framing device or context for the real meat of the story - which is all about the white characters. What THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES is *really* about is a dysfunctional father-daughter relationship. Lily Owens and her father T.Ray (Paul Bettany) have a violent, guilt-ridden relationship. T. Ray hates Lily and abuses her because he resents the fact that her mother loved her but didn't love him. Lily has to come to terms with the reality of her parents marriage and to learn how to empathise with her father. That's the real emotional journey of this film. And it has nothing to do with race.

Still, if you're looking for a soupy, schmaltzy, weepy sort of melodrama setting in a fairy-tale world of hot-pink houses and forever-sunshine, then THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES is at least nicely-shot, well-intentioned and well-acted, particularly by Dakota Fanning in the lead role.

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES played Toronto and London 2008. It was released in the US last week and opens in Portugal on November 27th and in Germanhy on April 23rd.

The Vladislav Moudrykh* Memorial Review - MONGOL

As an armchair military historian an avid player of Medieval Total War II (does my geekdom know no bounds?) I can't think of a movie more designed to appeal to me than MONGOL - the first in a three part biopic of Gengis Khan. In the twelfth century, this man united the fractious Mongol tribes under his leadership by a mixture of savage physical force and strict adherence to the rule of law. By the time he died he'd conquered most of Central Asia. His descendents' Empire ran from China to Eastern Europe. The tragedy for historians is that Gengis Khan lived in a community rich in oral tradition but without a written record of great deeds. Accordingly, the history of Gengis Khan is largely made up of myth and patriotic legend. To some he is a hero - to others, a butcher.

Sergei Bodrov's film leans heavily toward the former interpretation although, as the film ends before Gengis starts invading his neighbours, it could be that Bodrov will paint a more balanced picture in future films. Still, it's interesting that Bodrov chooses not to show Temudjin killing his brother on a hunting trip....

Other than that exclusion the film is actually rather less bombastic than one might have imagined. In fact, Temudjin spends most of the film getting his arse kicked by a variety of angry tribesman, foreign powers, and even his blood brother! Temudjin is also portrayed as being firmly under the thumb of his deceptively quiet-spoken wife, Borte. All this adds up to a far more engaging, human picture than I had expected. I especially loved the charismatic, insouciant blood brother Jamukha, played by Honglei Sun - a total scene stealer.

Hillarious inter-marital escapades aside, MONGOL also boasts some of the most stunning cinematography and costumes I've ever scene. You leave the film having a real feel for the lifestyle of medieval Mongols and half falling in love with the landscape. Kudos to Sergei Trofimov (of the WATCH movies) and Rogier Stoffers (DISTURBIA.)

Overall, MONGOL is deeply entertaining, has some suitably gory battle scenes, but also lots of quietly funny family drama. I think it's a bit of a shame that the Oscar nom has led the PR guys to pimp it out as an art-house movie. It could've had the appeal of a GLADIATOR. I'm certainly looking forward to the sequel.

MONGOL played Toronto 2007 and opened in Russia in 2007 and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It was released earlier this year in Turkey, Japan, France, Belgium and Italy. It opened this weekend in the UK and US and opens next week in Australia. It opens in Israel on July 10th, in Germany and the Netherlands in August and in Norway on September 5th.

*This review honours Vladislav Moudrykh, Fellow Scoundrel and Peasant Outreach Officer, 1998-2002, Missing, Presumed Fed.

DISTURBIA - Hitchock meets The OC

Oh, the marketing genius that combines the conceptual hook of a Hitchcock film with the pop-cultural references and hormonal teen angst of The OC! As distasteful as this REAR WINDOW remake may seem to us old cinephiles, Grinch-like critics are missing the point. Even as diluted and dumbed-down as this teen-thriller is, isn't it better that teens are getting their rocks off to Hitchcock-lite than to woeful spoofs like EPIC MOVIE?!

Clearly not one for adults or people who have any familiarity with the original, DISTURBIA is a reasonably well put together movie for the target demographic. Shia LaBeouf plays another troubled teen - he witnessed his father's accidental death and punched out a school teacher. As a result, he's under house arrest and resorts to spying on his suburban neighbours when mum (Carrie-Anne Moss) cancels cable. Lucky for him, the neighbours include hottie, Sarah Roehmer and for the first hour DISTURBIA plays like a goofy teen dating movie, complete with a charmingly inept side-kick played by the scene-stealing Aaron Yoo. In the final furlong, the screen-writers wake up to the fact that DISTURBIA is meant to be a thriller and put in some mildly tense scenes involving David Morse's serial killer next door.

Director D.J.Caruso handles the project with competence but no memorable visual signature. Christopher Landon's script may be derivative, but he is convincingly "down with the kids". Overall, a slick, undemanding movie that is not as completely dumb as most teen fare.

DISTURBIA is on release in the US, Australia, Argentina, Mexico and Russia. It opens in Icelasnd on May 18th; Malaysia, Singapore and Bulgaria on July 26th; Norway and Turkey on August 3rd; Denmark on August 10th; Germany, Italy on August 16th; Belgium, France, the Netherlands on August 23rd; Spain and Hungary on August 31st; the UK on September 7th; Brazil, Estonia and Finland on September 14th and in Sweden on September 21st.