NO OTHER CHOICE***** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 9

Pantheon director Park Chan Wook returns to our screens with the darkest of black comedies and social satires. It’s hilarious and occasionally deeply moving and sends a dire warning to all of us wage-slaves. And all with his trademark audacious and assured visual and aural style. The film is the third that I have seen in as many days where a family patriarch is so ashamed at being unable to financially provide for his wife and kids that he turns to a life of crime. After the feckless and self-involved JB Mooney (Josh O’Connor) in THE MASTERMIND and the charming but rogueish Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) in ROOFMAN we now get Man Soo (Lee Byung-Hun) in NO OTHER CHOICE. After decades working in a paper factory, itself an obsolete industry, he is laid off by the new American owners who use the platitude that they had “no other choice”. A year later and his house is about to be foreclosed, his wife is supporting the family, and his daughter can’t have cello lessons. They’ve even had to give up the dogs! Every job opening has a bevy of over-qualified men applying. So Man-Soo grabs his father’s old service revolver and takes a KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS approach to his problems. 

There is nothing that I didn’t love about this film. Its 2hr20 min running time went by in a flash. I loved its clear-eyed, heartbreaking depiction of middle-aged men discarded by society and its dire warning of what a fully automated AI-powered factory would look like. I loved its clear depiction of the social pressures on men in a misogynistic patriarchal society, whether young or old. I loved all of the acting performances. Both Lee Byung-Hun (JOINT SECURITY AREA) and Son Ye-Jin as his wife are superb. But most of all this film works because of how Director Park handles comedy - especially absurdist physical comedy - and uses music. The first truly violent scene goes on forever and is set to overloud schmaltzy Korean pop music. It’s funny but it also tells us so much about the emotional psychodrama in the marriage it is depicting. This is cinema at its finest, its most complex, and its most entertaining.  

NO OTHER CHOICE has a running time of 139 minutes. It played Venice, Busan, Toronto and London. It does not yet have a commercial release date in the USA or UK but was released in South Korea in September.

MICKEY 17*****

MICKEY 17 is Korean writer-director Bong Joon Ho's much anticipated follow-up to his Oscar-winning political satire, PARASITE. Once again, his concerns are with economic inequality and political hypocrisy, and as with PARASITE, MICKEY 17 contains moments of trenchant laughter.  But the mood here is lighter, zanier, looser, and altogether more.... gonzo than PARASITE.  The political satire is broad and crude, the violence is ultra, but at heart this is a gorgeous love story and a plea for humanity.

Robert Pattinson continues to make astonishingly good career choices and stars as the eponymous Mickey.  He's basically a harmless but feckless and aimless man in a near-future dystopia.  On the run from mafia loansharks, abetted by his supposed best mate Timo (Steven Yeun), Mickey stupidly signs up to be an Expendable.  He is basically an indentured slave to an exploitative space colonisation mission, put in harms way, killed again and again, and then just reprinted out.  As the film opens, we are on the seventeenth iteration.

Joy of joys! Feckless Mickey somehow falls in love and lust with Naomie Ackie's kickass space-cop Nasha and she loves him back! In fact, I would read this film as a love story most of all.  Improbable, hilarious, sexy, weird, but a love story nonetheless. But things get weird when Mickey 17 is somehow alive at the same time as his sassier, more mischievous reprint Mickey 18.  And both set out to rise up against the kleptocratic rule of a character clearly based on Trump, with a Macchiavellian wife modelled on Imelda Marcos.  Mark Ruffalo seems to be reprising his role in POOR THINGS here, but it's a no less fun turn for that.   But the star of the show is clearly Pattinson.  And the the Creepers. I won't say more for fear of spoiling the plot but I would pay a LOT of money for a plushy that looks like a baby creeper.

MICKEY 17 has a running time of 137 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

RUMOURS***

Co-directors Guy Madden (MY WINNIPEG) and Evan and Galen Johnson have created arguably the most absurd, whimsical and batshit crazy film of 2024 in their political satire RUMOURS.  

The movie starts with the G7 leaders meeting at German country estate to draft some kind of vapid communique about an unnamed crisis. Night falls, their phones stop working, fog rolls in, a giant brain appears (!), and the leaders start stumbling through the forest without a clue.  Evidently this is an extended metaphor for the now G-Zero world that we live in, with global leaders incapable of speaking honestly about, let alone solving, the existential crises facing our planet.  How far you find it overstays its welcome and wears on your nerves depends on your tolerance for its bonkers style.  

There are some brilliant set pieces. Cate Blanchett in an appalling German accent asks the Canadian PM if he wants a neck massage like a cheapo seduction scene.  The Canadian and Japanese PMs attempting to sail to help to a faux-moving Enya song. Charles Dance singularly failing to even attempt an American accent for his role as US President. Alicia Vikander in an hilarious cameo as the European Commission President in deep communion with the Brain. And for my money, the funniest of all is the cynical and pragmatic British PM, played by Nikki Amuka-Bird - the audience's way into this nuts story.  

I felt like the story outstayed its welcome but I liked its audacity and tone.  The more extreme the concept, the shorter the running time should be.

RUMOURS is rated R and has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Cannes 2024 and opened in October in the USA and earlier this month in the UK.

THE SUBSTANCE*****

French writer-director Coralie Fargeat's THE SUBSTANCE is a body horror film that also works as social satire.  It is visually and aurally stunning and features a career-defining and award-worthy performance from Demi Moore that veers between MOMMIE DEAREST and heartbreak. It works all the better for Gen X viewers like myself because we have watched Demi's body-choices litigated over decades. Her buzz cut and ripped muscles for GI Jane.  Her Vanity Fair cover proudly showing her nude with a baby bump.  Her recent extreme plastic surgery. And there's an irony that she looks so good at 60 that she can play 50, but even good at 50 isn't good enough for Hollywood, or real life.

Moore's Elisabeth Sparkle is a preternaturally well-preserved middle-aged actress who now hosts a Jane Fonda-style aerobics show.  She is summarily sacked by her shark-like boss on her fiftieth birthday and turns to a black-market drug to remain attractive. The problem is that the brat-green injection doesn't restore your own body to youth but creates a younger, perkier avatar.  The avatar - "Sue", played by Margot Qualley - gets all the fame and adoration.  You, Elisabeth, become like the portrait of Dorian Grey, something abandoned, lonely, old, old, old.  And that's before you misuse the drug, stay longer as Sue, and reap the cost as Elisabeth.

There's a lot of stylish fun to be had in this film. It reminded me of Cronenberg and Vachon with its disciplined graphic design and willingness to push body horror to absurdity. Whoever did the sound design deserves an award. We hear and feel the grotesquery of every crunch of a prawn and every needle puncture. Dennis Quaid is game as the disgusting venal TV producer.  Moore and Qualley are courageous with their nudity and objectification. I laughed out loud a lot all the way through the film as well as having to look away and particularly gruesome scenes.

But there's so much more going on here.  Demi Moore is heartbreaking as Sparkle - a woman who by all standards is stunningly beautiful and youthful but is tormented by the giant billboard of Sue facing her apartment. There's a pivotal scene around half way through the film when Elisabeth tries to go out on a date and looks stunning to our eyes, but she is crippled by her internalised misogyny and ageism. It's tragic and credible and stunningly performed. She deserves an Oscar nomination for this career-best performance.

THE SUBSTANCE is rated R and has a running time of 140 minutes. It won Best Screenplay at Cannes 2024. It will be released in the USA and UK on September 20th.

AMERICAN FICTION****

Based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, AMERICAN FICTION is being sold as a scabrous take-down of modern politically correct sensibilities. It is that, but also so much more.  

Jeffrey Wright (Westworld) stars as Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, a tenured academic railing against the sensitivities of his Gen Z students, and the moronity of a publishing industry that wants to cage all black authors in the prison of poverty porn, rather than accepting that they can write a variety of stories.  

Monk returns home to Boston and realises his outwardly wealthy and successful family is in crisis. His sister (Tracee Ellis Ross, Blackish) is divorced and weary of caring for their mother, his brother (Sterling K Brown, This Is Us) is manically embracing his new gay identity, and his mother is declining into dementia.  Desperate for money and outraged at the commercial success of a nakedly exploitative book by his rival (Issa Rae, Insecure), Monk pens an equally trashy novel that predictably becomes a wild success. For the first time in his life, his alter-ego is selling well, optioned for a movie, and appeasing the consciences of rich white people.  Monk hates it, hates himself, and hates all those being duped by his ruse, including his new girlfriend. The question is how this will resolve.

There is much to admire in Cord Jefferson's first directorial feature. It is genuinely, brilliantly, hilariously funny it taking down the sensitivities of the progressive Left, but also Monk's own delusions. This is a movie whose pre-credits sequence contains more belly-laughs than most soi-disant comedies have in their whole running time.  But what I love about this film is that it moves beyond that to deliver what Monk seeks: whole stories about contemporary black lives that are more than simply ghetto or slave stories. The Ellisons are a successful middle class family - highly educated and refined. Their emotional problems are fully described and beautifully acted by a fine cast, among whom Sterling K Brown steals every scene he is in.

My only criticism is that the movie doesn't quite stick the landing. This is partly by design. Neither Monk, nor the director, nor maybe the novelist who wrote the source material, are interested in easy answers and pat endings. Indeed, with their movie director character played by Adam Brody (The OC) they satirise the very concept.  But I did want some consequences, if not a resolution. We all know of real life novelists exposed as lying about their real lives. I wanted to see the literary as well as the personal consequences. But this isn't that film, and as such, I was left wanting more.

AMERICAN FICTION is rated R and has a running time of 117 minutes. It played Toronto 2023 where it won the People's Choice Award for Best Film. It will be released in the USA on December 15th (cinemas) and December 22nd (streaming).

SALTBURN** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Opening Night Gala

Emerald Fennell's second directorial feature is a desperately disappointing mash-up of superior works.  We begin with forty minutes of Brideshead, before morphing into The Talented Mr Ripley by way of The Blandings and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Worse still, Fennell uses transgressive sexual acts to paper over the unoriginal and meandering plot. The film is not as darkly funny as she thinks it is. And its only saving graces are Rosamund Pike as the AbFab clueless matriarch, and Carey Mulligan in a touching cameo as the mother's addict friend Pamela. One star for each of them, and half a star for Richard E Grant shouting "Just eat the bloody pie!"

Barry Keoghan stars as the Ripley-esque Oliver Quick, a Fresher at a fantasy Oxford where  you drive up to the Rad Cam, smoke in your room, and students not tourists drink at the KA. Oliver is drawn into the in-crowd when he helps out Felix Catton (Euphoria's Jacob Elordi), and lands an invitation to his Brideshead-style country house, Saltburn. In addition to Felix, Oliver charms the Wodehousian ditsy father, caustically selfish mother and vulnerable sister (newcomer Alison Oliver). The only person who seems on to his manipulations from the start is the family's poor relation Farrell (Archie Madekwe - GRAN TURISMO).  Game senses game. 

The film proceeds at a leisurely pace, with every plot twist telegraphed years in advance. The way the film develops will not surprise anyone with a shred of (cine-) literacy. There are occasional lines or scenes that are mordantly funny and brilliantly constructed, mostly involving Pike and Mulligan.  But between them, ennui and an infantile desire to shock.

Fennell's first feature, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, was just that. SALTBURN is a step back. Will her inevitable third feature show this to be a mis-step? Will her directorial choices add to her narrative or to continue to be puzzling (why the 4:3 aspect ratio?) or showy without effect (look! mirrors!)?

SALTBURN has a running time of 127 minutes. It will open in the USA on November 24th.

EL CONDE*****

Pablo Larrain returns to our screens after the histrionic and only partly successful Princess Diana biopic SPENCER with his mordantly black political satire about the Chilean director Augusto Pinochet, EL CONDE. Larrain has often covered the long shadow of Pinochet's brutal military dictatorship, not least in his brilliantly political comedy NO. But this film is darker, nastier and more challenging, if something of a one-trick pony. The big concept of this film is that Pinochet is reimagined as a vampire who first stirred up shit in the French revolution, before seizing power in a military coup in Chile, fifty years ago.  In Larrain's hilarious fantasy, Pinochet faked his own death in the mid 2010s, but now wants to actually die, leaving his avaricious wife and children with a logistical and financial issue.  So they bring in an accountant slash nun to both exorcise Pinochet so that he can be killed, but also to track down his hidden fortune. 

The question this film raises is where evil resides. Can it be isolated to Satan? To a single power- (and blood-) hungry general? To the soldiers that carried out his terror? To the businessmen and family members that grew rich in his regime? To the Catholic Church rich on ill-gotten donations? To the foreign political powers who supported his coups?  To the country, England, that had benefited from his military intelligence in the Falklands war?

As an ardent Thatcherite I might object at Stella Gonet's portrayal of Thatcher as a fellow blood-sucking political player, but that would to ludicrously miss the point. Thatcher DID admire Pinochet's fight against Communism and acknowledge Chile's help in the war. That realpolitik may not sit well with the British public but it's a truth we have to reckon with, just as Chile has to reckon with Pinochet's legacy in their own country.  The film uses provocative dark humour to rightly leave us all uncomfortable at our own complicity.

So kudos to Larrain and writer Guillermo Calderon for creating a deeply unsafe but also hilarious vampire movie, as provocative in its depiction of vampires and religion as Park Chan Wook's THIRST. But also a film that at root is a fucked-up five-person love story - the sexual and financial jealousy runs deep between Marie-Antoinette, Margaret Thatcher, Pinochet, his wife and his valet. Yep.  That's the kind of film this is.

Elsewhere, praise for cinematographer Ed Lachman (CAROL) for his stunning black and white photography, and to the actors Jaime Vadell (Pinochet), Paula Luchsinger (the nun), Gloria Muenchmeyer (Pinochet's wife) and a scene-stealing turn by Alfredo Castro as the valet.

EL CONDE has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and Telluride 2023, went on limited cinematic release last week, and is on Netflix this week.

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.

THE HAND OF GOD**** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 4

 

Paolo Sorrentino’s THE HAND OF GOD begins as a kind of group portrait of working class Neapolitans in the 1980s.  It has the feel of a menagerie of grotesques, and Sorrentino feels no politically correct restriction on mocking the fat, the disabled, the absurdly made-up or the mentally ill. This might sound distasteful and yet, and yet, over that hour we come to feel a kind of familial familiarity with these everyday oddballs, delighting in their joy when Maradona signs for Napoli and enjoying their practical jokes. We even come to admire and love the genuinely loving mother and father of the family, delighting in the depiction of an ordinary happy marriage. 

Observing all of this loveable craziness is the younger son of the family, Fabie, whose quiet gaze is pre-directorial. For this is the third film in two days that I've watched where a director tells a fictionalised version of their childhood.  And to be sure, Sorrentino is not going to spend the second hour of this film in rather trivial but engrossing depictions of life in 1980s Napoli. Instead, major life events occur that force Fabie into being the protagonist rather than voyeur of his own life, and of this film.

I absolutely adored this movie. It is by turns hilarious and tragic and strange and whimsical. I merely dock it a star for having had an obvious ending point (for me) in a cathartic playground scene, but lingers for thirty minutes longer. 

THE HAND OF GOD has a running time of 130 minutes and played Venice 2021. It wil be released on Netflix on December 15th.

PARASITE

PARASITE is a rightly critically acclaimed black comedy/political satire from Korean director Bong Joon Ho. It's a film that speaks to the profound income inequality that we see around the world, and the social anxieties that the super-rich invent to give them something to do.  The rich family in question here lives in a beautifully modernist house - mother, father, spoiled son, elder daughter.  They are placed in contrast with a poor family living in one of Seoul's "sub-basements" - dank, fetid, insect-infested, sub-standard housing for the city's poorest residents - prone to flood during the rainy season. Improbably, the son in the poor family gets an in to the rich family, pretending to be a university student to tutor the daughter. He then contrives to have their driver and housekeeper sacked and to get his own mother and father to replace them. He also gets his sister into the house as a tutor for the small kid.  Of course they have to pretend not to know each other. The movie reaches its climax when the rich family go away on holiday, and the old housekeeper comes back, vowing revenge, and with her own dark secret to protect.  The result is skewering, violent, social revenge. Because as feckless and laughably superficial the rich family is, they still have their prejudices - expressed here as the fear of the fetid stink of the sub-basement dwellers.  They can lock the poor out of their gated house, but that smell comes over the walls.....

This film is beautifully constructed, acted and built.  The modernist house and sub-basement are meticulously created.  The script is at turns hilarious, tragic and absurd.  The performances both move one to tears and laughter. The film isn't without its longeurs in the middle section, and I would've ended it ten minutes before it ends, but this is nothing in a film of such originality and audacity.  There's a particular scene, where the poor family sneak out of the rich house on the hill, through pouring rain and flooded streets, down and down through the city's streets and staircases, to the hellish world of the flooded sub-basement. It's poetic and tragic.

As with THE KINGMAKER this is a film that speaks to us in the West. The income inequality and class prejudice resonate.  You could easily remake this film set in the OC, or in Notting Hill.  And I'm sure somebody will.

PARASITE has a running time of 132 minutes and is rated R.  The film played Cannes 2019 where it won the Palme D'Or by unanimous verdict. It also played Telluride and Toronto. It opened in the USA in October and opens in the UK on February 20th 2020.

THE DEAD DON'T DIE

THE DEAD DON'T DIE is an unashamedly indulgent movie who's success relies on the audience wanting to be in on the joke.  I went along for the ride and found it to be uproariously funny, silly, shaggy and joyful - and hands down one of my favourite films of 2019.  This isn't a film for those over-obsessed with tight-plotting, consistent pace or an aversion to jump the shark moments. But as I said, if you go with the silliness, there's a lot of fun to be had.

The film opens in small town USA, reminiscent of original Twin Peaks. There are some slow-witted nice cops, played by Bull Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny. And there's policing a dispute between Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) and MAGA-supporter Farmer Frank (Steve Buscemi).  There's pace is lackadaisical and their hearts decent.  It soon becomes apparent that polar fracking has caused the earth to move off its axis resulting in whacky daylight hours and a zombie apocalypse. The rest of the film sees how our heroes cope with the impending doom ("kill the head") - not to mention the newly arrived Scottish mortician with hardcore Samurai skills (Tilda Swinton). 

We get lots of references to George Romero, including an update on his consumerist satire, as zombies wonder round in desperate search of wifi.  We also get a hopeful message about how "the children are our future". But mostly this is a film of supreme visual comedy - a shot of Adam Driver pulling into a diner parkway in a tiny red convertible Smart car - a shot of Tilda Swinton applying 1980s New Romantic makeup to a corpse - or a re-animated Iggy Pop hunting for coffee.  

Any film is worth watching that gives us even one of those things. So yes, I get all the critics and I see the film's weaknesses but I just dont' care, because when it delivers it's absolutely hilarious!

THE DEAD DON'T DIE is rated R and has a running time of 104 minutes. The film played Cannes 2019 and was released in the USA in June. It opens in the UK on Friday.

DONBASS

Sergey Loznitsa's DONBASS is a strange surreal examination of the Russian agitprop and invasion of east Ukraine in 2014. This might seem like a niche arthouse topic but given all our concern with potential fake news, bots, twitter accounts and whatnot influencing our elections in the West, the film has a horror show urgency to it. 

It opens with people running through town fleeing troops, but it turns out that they're extras being directed in a video shoot to create a fake news blast. This is the kind of maddening fakery that occurs throughout the film to create a feeling of sickening unmooring from the truth. Later on a rich businessman is shaken down by local troops.  He owns his car? Fine. Prove it by handing it over to the local militia to use for their war effort.  All of these short stories add up to a sense of Kafka-esque craziness.  But then, every once in a while, one of these crazy stories in interspersed with one of simple suffering and its jarring and all the more moving.  There's one particularly awful one where we're taken inside a small, dark, damp shelter housing many families. Our guide is a smart sparky kid proudly showing us his "room" - the upper bunk bed in a room full of many such beds, with damp trickling down the wall, and everyone dressed in multiple layers of clothes to keep warm.   The overall impact is brutal, provocative and compelling. This is must-watch cinema. 

DONBASS has a running time of 121 minutes. It played Cannes 2018 where Loznitsa won the Un Certain Regard directing prize.  It opened last weekend in the UK in cinemas and on streaming services. 

LORO

Paolo Sorrentino's latest film LORO (THEM) is a film about the obsequious corrupt parasites that tried to make money during the reign of the abominable Italian President Silvio Berlusconi.  Infamous for amassing a media empire, then using the presidency to protect himself from prosecution and taxes, Berlusconi was a glutton for money and sex.  Moreover, in many senses he was the precursor and pioneer for a new breed of businessman turned populist demagogue - with a line leading from him via Orban to Trump.  Accordingly, one might have expected an urgent and excoriating film treatment from Italy's premier arthouse film-maker, Paolo Sorrentino.  After all, Sorrentino has form!  His nonpareil take-down of Italian Prime Minister Andreotti, IL DIVO, is one of my all-time favourite films.  And his bizarre surreal TV series THE YOUNG POPE is a similar, if fantastical, take-down of the corruption in the Vatican and its links to contemporary Italian politics. 

Imagine, then, my disappointment in finding LORO to be a rather toothless affair. Worse still, baggy, directionless, dare I say it? Dull!  Maybe this is a result of the format that I watched - a still over-long 150 minute compression of what were originally two separate feature films released in Italy last year.  But that still doesn't excuse this highly disjointed, weird final product.

The film opens with its focus on a sleazy low-level businessman who wants to move into the orbit of "him".  He pimps out pretty much every woman he knows, including his partner, for advancement.  He courts one of Berlusconi's mistresses. And makes a final expensive gamble - filling a villa with prostitutes and drugs and dance music - hoping to tempt Berlusconi to this apparently all-summer long bunga bunga party.  This section is really dull. It feels like a succession of beautifully shot living tableaux, set to moronic dance music. Endless shots of scantily clad women.  At some point you ask yourself when the depiction of sexual exploitation is itself exploitative - when the depiction of vacuous people is itself vacuous. 

It's only about an hour into the film that we meet Silvo, as played by the always charismatic Toni Servillo. The disappointment is that Silvio is shown in an almost sympathetic light. He's out of office and out of the good graces of his wife - showing a vulnerability that's disarming.  As the audience, we delight in him flexing his con artist muscles, persuading a random Italian housewife to buy a non-existent flat that she can't afford. THIS is the movie I wanted. A movie that explained Berlusconi's brilliance and charm and ruthlessness. But it's just that one scene.  Finally his wife breaks away and in this desperation he finally falls for the bait in the villa next door. But after so much moral corruption on show, he hardly seems worse than the rest of them. And maybe that's Sorrentino's point?  We get the President we deserve, resemble, need to enable us?

LORO has a running time of 150 minutes. It is currently available to watch in cinemas and on streaming services in the UK and Ireland.

ASSASSINATION NATION - Crimbo Binge-watch #5

Sam "Son of Barry" Levinson returns to our screens with the stylish but morally bankrupt political satire slash horror film, ASSASSINATION NATION. It's a film written and directed by a guy who believes he is being truly progressive in calling out slut-shaming and female sexual exploitation but who tragically and apparently without self-awareness is similarly exploitative in how he depicts teenage girls.

The film posits a contemporary American town riddled with social media and MAGA sentiment.  An anonymous hacker starts released people's private emails, photos and texts.  Predictably, the townsfolk respond by becoming a feral mob, and with law enforcement too busy to deal with it, violence ensues. Our heroine, Lily (Odessa Young) is a truly dumb girl who sends explicit pictures of herself to an older man (Joel McHale).  This could've actually been an interesting story if the writer had explored the grooming aspect of this but no, it's just passed over quickly.  She gets exposed and is painted as a whore, and targeted by the mob when they think she's also doing the doxing. I mean, how dumb do you have to be - why would you dox yourself? Anyway, this leads to her and her three best friends being hunted, before they in turn become revenge killers. 

There are occasional moments of brilliance in this film.  Hari Nef is truly amazing playing Bex - a teenage girl who hooks up with the guy she really likes at a party only to have him reject her after sex.  The sheer depth and nuance of emotion on her face after he pulls away is so moving - and what I love is the ambiguity of whether he's just being a classic teenage boy douchebag or whether there's also a layer of him freaking out because she's trans.  Nef is an actress to look out for.

But other than a handful of very truthful moments, what I mostly got from this film is that Levinson wants to tell us the movies he likes - from THE SHINING to KILL BILL - and would probably be better off directing commercials than features. He has an eye for an arresting visual, but doesn't have the balls to sustain his narrative. After all, in the world he posits, the logical outcome is that the two girls pulled out of the house would be gang-raped and left for dead - the trans girl would be strung up - and the protagonist would be shot.  But what's most offensive is that the director seemingly wants to criticise society for sexually objectifying girls while simultaneously really enjoy showing his heroine scantily clad covered in blood. Grow up. 

ASSASSINATION NATION is rated R and has a running time of 108 minutes.  It played the BFI London Film Festival 2018. It also played Sundance and Toronto and was released in the USA and UK earlier this year. 

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU - BFI London Film Festival 2018 - Day Five

Cash Green (Lakeith Stanfield - GET OUT) is your typical millenial struggling to make rent in Oakland.  He gets a job as a salesman at Regalview but can't connect with customers until Danny Glover's older wiser colleague advises him to use his "white voice".  Once Cash does that, he starts making bank, and while his friends and girlfriend (Tessa Thompson - Westworld) are trying to unionise, Cash gets promoted. Problem is, what he's actually doing in his new job is selling labour - and not just any kind of labour - voluntary slave labour!  Cash does so well suppressing his conscience for money that Armie Hammer's rival megalomaniac tries to poach him to sell an even more bizarre form of labour, wherein he'll both control the labour and its malcontents.

The result of all this is a film that doesn't have the attention span to mine any of its ideas properly - but just keeps throwing more and more outlandish scenarios at the wall.  When it works it's great, but by the final half hour I had utterly lost interest in its absurdist premise.  The tragedy is that writer-director Boots Riley goes so far beyond his original concern about code-switching that we kind of forget what point he was making. (As a side note, I thought it would have been FAR more effective to show actual code switching rather than the allegedly funny ruse of dubbing the black actors with actual white voices). I feel that Boots Riley has a lot that is vital and urgent to say, but that he needs a strong producer to really edit down his thoughts so that each film is powerful and memorable for a single strong idea. There's just waaaay to much happening here for it to be coherent. 

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU has a running time of 111 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Sundance and SXSW 2018 and opened this summer in the USA. It is currently playing the BFI London Film Festival and will open in the UK on December 7th.

WOMAN OF THE YEAR (1942)

WOMAN OF THE YEAR is a romantic comedy from director George Stevens (SHANE, GIANT), starring a very young Katherine Hepburn and less young Spencer Tracey.  They both play journalists on the same paper, but that's about all they have in common. Tracey's Sam is a salt of the earth sports journalist with few pretensions.  Hepburn's Tess is the daughter of a diplomat, raised in many countries, fluent in many languages, addicted to work, wielding political influence, and feted by all.  The meet-cute is a public argument about the role of merits of baseball that results in a mutual attraction and a tentative attempt at dating.  She goes to a ball game in a hat and gloves, he gets bored and abandoned at a party with diplomats. And yet despite all this, they get married.  

LOST IN AMERICA (1985)

LOST IN AMERICA is a classic American comedy from the mid-80s, satirising our addiction to commercial success. It's directed by, written by and stars Albert Brooks (BROADCAST NEWS) as a successful and smug but neurotic advertising exec and a big LA firm. He's just sold his house to trade up to an even larger one and is about to order a stupidly expensive car.  But when the promotion he's been expecting is denied him he loses his temper and storms out of his job, persuading his wife Linda (Julie Hagerty - AIRPLANE!) to join him by selling everything they own, buying a motorhome, and travelling through America to "find themselves".  The problem is that they're pretty feckless, obviously have to lose their money to force them to face reality, and see their yuppie entitlement testing in the "real world".

The movie holds up really well, thanks to the fact that we still live in a time where people talk about finding themselves and living authentic lives, but are addicted to Stuff and Status.  The lack of self-awareness drives the comedy  - every time the husband meets someone and says he's trying to live like EASY RIDER it's so palpably absurd it cracks you up. But what's amazing is how far the people he says this too believe him or at least admire him for trying.  There's also the daily insults and grappling to deal with the difference between commercial promise and reality that get to us all, even today - like when you lay out $44k for a car, all in, but the leather seats are really vinyl, or when you bribe the hotel reservations clerk for the bridal suite, and it turns out to be the "junior" version and really rather ordinary.  Brooks just gets the indignities of modern life.  The result is a film that is genuinely smart, laugh-out-loud funny, and yet darkly honest about the compromises we are all forced to make.  It's basically saying we all aim high but fundamentally want a nice easy life.  I'm comfortable with that. 

LOST IN AMERICA has a running time of 91 minutes and is rated R. 

THE PARTY - Day 9 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

THE PARTY is a brilliantly observed, nastily witty laugh-out loud dark comedy from writer director Sally Potter.  Filmed almost as a chamber comedy in one apartment, the entire 70 minute movie takes places over an aborted dinner party. It has been convened to celebrate the fact that Janet (Kristin Scott Thomas) has just become Shadow Health Minister, much to the delight of her scabrously rational realist best friend April (Patricia Clarkson).  But, rather bizarrely, her husband (Timothy Spall) is apparently depressed if not borderline potty.  This is somewhat overshadowed in the early scenes by the totally bizarre behaviour of the strung out city banker Tom (Cillian Murphy).  The remainder of the guests are April's new age hippie boyfriend Gottfired (Bruno Ganz), brilliantly mocked by April - as well as a lesbian couple expecting triplets, Martha (Cherry Jones) and Jinny (Emily Mortimer).

It would be unfair to reveal the plot twists and dramatic turns that propel this short film toward its dramatic conclusion. I was utterly surprised by all of them - particularly the last.  But it felt to me that this film had it all - properly funny, but also with moments of real relationship trauma and deeply felt distress. In particular, the reaction of Martha to learning she's co-parenting triplets felt very raw and credible.  The acting is also universally good, with Patricia Clarkson stealing the show with her nasty put-downs.  I also loved Aleksei Rodionov's cinematography - effectively using lighting to create stark black and white contrast, and with a mobility and fluidity that kept this one-room drama feeling exciting and pacy. The music choices are also used to great effect - in one scene of near-death, the use of Dido's Lament had me corpsing too.

In the words of Meester Phil, this is a frankly delightful film. It's an unhinged expose of the middle class English suburban family and purported intellectuals. 

THE PARTY has a running time of 71 minutes. The movie played Berlin, Seoul, Sydney, New Zealand, Melbourne and London 2017.  It was released earlier this year in Germany and France. 

GET OUT

GET OUT is a confident, subversive and visually assured horror movie from debut feature director (and longtime stand-up comedian) Jordan Peele.  It tells the story of a young African American man called Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) whose girlfriend (Allison Williams - GIRLS) takes him home to meet her parents (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) for the first time.  As with all the best horror, there's a deep and subversive commentary on social conditions here.  And in the case of GET OUT, Jordan Peele is trying to tell us that the most insidious form of racism is that is secretly practiced by liberal educated rich white people - the people who vote for Obama and donate to the ACLU but don't actually want their daughters to date black men.  The director also seems to be sending a message to his fellow African Americans - a message warning against complacency about race relations. And this message is embodied in Chris' hilarious best friend Rod, who warns him against going to his girlfriend's parents house in the woods early on, and is instrumental in helping Chris as her parents turn out to be quite literally using the silver spoon of privilege to subjugate him.

This tale of modern day racial slavery is, then, deeply profound and provocative, but this film is also hilarious and frightening by turns.  It's quite astounding to see a debut director handle the tonal shifts with such aplomb, not to mention the impressive production design of the oppressive house and his eye for framing a visually iconic shot. The cast all deserve praise, although it was particularly interesting to see Allison Williams subvert her GIRLS character's preppy self-absorption in this film. But the subversive nature of this film is many faceted. I particularly enjoyed the fact that the most hated of bureaucrats and petty power brokers - the TSA - turn out to be good guys here. 

Ultimately, GET OUT feels like exactly the right movie for our times - in which the happy surprise of Obama's election is over-turned by the surprise victory of Trump - and in the wake of the #blacklivesmatter movement.  It entertains us but also reflects the deep fractures in American society.  And this may well be why the film continues to do so well at the box office.  

GET OUT has a running time of 104 minutes and is rated R.  The movie played Sundance 2017 and opened earlier this year in the USA, Canada, Philippines, Greece, Singapore, Estonia, UK, Ireland, Denmark, Kuwait and France. It opens on April 7th in Indonesia, Lithuania and Norway; on April 20th in Sweden, Hungary, Malaysia and Turkey; on April 28th in Poland; on May 4th in France, Australia, Switzerland, Chile, Germany, Portugal and Finland; on May 11th in Russia; on May 18th in Hong Kong, Italy and Spain; and on June 15th in Brazil.

BFI LFF 2016 Preview - TICKLING GIANTS

TICKLING GIANTS is a funny/serious documentary about the business of satirising corrupt politicians.  In this case, it's the story of the charismatic Egyptian heart surgeon, Basseem Youssef, who started making youtube videos satirising the old dictatorial regime of Hosni Mubarak.  Before he new it, viewer numbers were through the charts and he had a prime time show called The Show, in the manner of Jon Stewart's Daily Show.  The two hosts are clearly sympathetic and inspirational to each other, and they have appeared on each other's programmes.  But things took a darker turn after the Arab Spring.   The people may have put Morsi in power but soon it was his military commander Sisi who had staged a coup and ushered in an even more repressive government than that of Mubarak.  Suddenly Basseem Youssef is being summoned for arrest, his show is threatened with being taken off air, and becomes the top news story.  He jumps to another channel, but Sisi's regime jam the signal when he refuses to tone down his criticism. Youssef worries about his family and employees and questions if keeping the show on air is worth the candle.