THE PAPERBOY

THE PAPERBOY is a superbly trashy tawdry movie in the best tradition of the Southern Gothic. Set in a late 60s bumblefuck town in Florida, the movie opens with a racist obese cop having his guts eviscerated in a parking lot and closes with a sunkissed teen ferrying brutalised bodies over an alligator swamp. In between, we're going to see a convicted murderer command his infatuated fiancée to simulate oral sex in front of the journalists trying to prove him innocent. We're going to see that same fiancée pee on the sunkised teen lashed by a jellyfish.  We're going to see his elder brother brutalised in a sadomasochistic act in which he might have been complicit. And we're going to see a man rip the guts out of a gator as if it ain't no thang. 

In all this craziness, it's questionable where our focus is really meant to be?  Are we really meant to care about proving the innocence of creepy Hillary van Wetter (John Cusack)? To be sure, reporters Ward (Matthew McConaughey) and Yardley (David Oyewolo) do some investigating but I never really got a hold of what they were meant to be uncovering and how it got him released, or even why Ward was so convinced of his innocence after the way he talked to his fiancée Charlotte (Nicole Kidman).  (I figured Yardley never cared one way or another, just so long as he got to publish something.)

No, the focus of the movie seemed to be far more on kid brother Jack (Zac Efron), his infatuation with Charlotte (so slippery for the narrator to keep calling it love), and his unending loyalty to his brother, despite everything that he saw in that plastic sheeted motel room.  There are moments between Ward and Jack, amid the garish grotesquery, that are so intimate and authentic they make you realise how rare it is to see true sibling love on screen. I'm thinking of a snatched conversation on the banks of a swamp - and the way in which Ward cradles a drunken Jack as they sail out to see Charlotte in the movie's final act. And let's be honest, the flash of anger in which Jack uses the N-word in front of his beloved housemaid, Anita (Macy Gray) and then makes up with her says so much more about the reality of race relations in that period than THE HELP ever could. 

So, while THE PAPERBOY might fail as a conventional investigative procedural, while it's focus might be fuzzy, it succeeds like no film I know in holding us rapt - just waiting to see what on earth could happen next to these characters that, after all, we have come to care about. Because, yes, I did want the oversexed trailer trash prison groupie to be happy. And I did care about Jack and Ward, and wince every time someone mistreated Anita. 

I love the way that Lee Daniels (PRECIOUS) and DP Roberto Schaeffer's Super 16mm photography and impeccable production design make the movie jump off the screen. I love the way we can feel the sweat, and the taste the dirt and smell the filth.  And I have to say that as much as Nicole Kidman got a lot of award season glory this really is an ensemble cast that has no shame, no pride and every willingness to look trashy in service of the story.  I guess we've come to expect this from Matthew McConaughey who's reinvented himself as the king of sleaze, but I was shocked at John Cusack's transformation.  Macy Gray is also wonderful as Anita, in one of the rare examples of a narration that really works. 

THE PAPERBOY played Cannes and Toronto 2012 and was released last year in Croatia, the USA, Belgium, France, Canada, Israel, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece and Portugal. It opened earlier this year in Poland, Lebanon, Finland and Australia. It opens this weekend in the UK and Ireland, in Chile on April 4th, in Mexico on April 5th, in Turkey on April 12th and in Argentina on May 9th. 

THE PAPERBOY has a running time of 107 minutes and is rated R in the USA. 

THE BOURNE LEGACY

THE BOURNE LEGACY is very much the B-team continuing a critically acclaimed and commercially successful action franchise. Instead of director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon, we have Tony and Dan Gilroy and director and writer, and star Jeremy Renner (THE HURT LOCKER).  The only sensible move the writers make is to avoid Renner just inhabiting the character of Bourne.  Rather he is another member of the elite programme that created Bourne, who is still at large. The US intelligence service, scared that the programme of genetic enhancement will go public, decides to shut it out, which basically involves a manhunt of all the "mutants" and the scientists who did the work.  Cue a partnership between Renner's agent and Rachel Weisz' scientist as they travel the world looking for the drug that will "lock in" Renner's enhancements.  

THE BOURNE LEGACY is a good enough "tab A into slot B" movie with solid performances from the lead actors and a good enough script and plot premise.  I remain sceptical about whether Renner is really a leading man - whether he has sufficient charisma and screen heft. I wanted more of the danger that lurked just below the surface in THE TOWN - more of the raw edginess. I also remain sceptical about Tony Gilroy as a director as opposed to a screenwriter: too many of the chase scenes felt baggy and boring. There's none of the subtlety, style and confidence that he displayed in MICHAEL CLAYTON.

Overall this film is not as bad as many had feared, but it isn't really in the same league as the original trilogy.

THE BOURNE LEGACY is currently on release in the Philippines, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, India, Paraguay, the USA, Vietnam, Ireland, the UK, Spain, Australia, Denmark and New Zealand. It opens on August 23rd in Argentina, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia and Mexico; on August 29th in Indonesia, Sweden, Bahrain, Kuwait, Peru, Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Colombia, El Salvador, Estonia, Latvia and Turkey.  It opens on September 6th in Hungary, the Netherlands, Brazil, Italy, Lithuania, Norway and Pakistan; on September 12th in Belgium, Germany and Israel; on September 19th in France, Finland and South Africa; on September 28th in Japan; on October 4th in Greece; on October 25th in Chile and China and on November 23rd in Venezuela.

THE BOURNE LEGACY is rated PG 13 in the USA and has a running time of 135 minutes. 

London Film Festival Day 10 - W.

W. is a frustrating movie. It features a strong central performance from Josh Brolin (NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) as George W. Bush, but this biopic plays like an afternoon TV drama. Writer Stanley Weiser and director Oliver Stone have given us a conventional biopic wherein a bunch of stuff happens to W. He goes to Yale, he drinks a lot, he fails at a bunch of jobs, he gets born again, and somehow, just to prove he can, he gets elected, he takes us into Iraq....Nowhere do the film-makers show the kind of intelligence in shaping the material that Paolo Sorrentino lent to his Giuilio Andreotti biopic, IL DIVO. There are no big ideas. Okay - there's one big idea. That W. was always trying to prove his worth to his "poppy" H.W. But frankly, this is treated in such a ham-fisted, cursory manner it hardly passes for an over-riding theme. And the dream-sequence in a baseball stadium is so crude and so ill-pursued that it wouldn't look out of place in a rookie feature. Oliver Stone seems to be regressing from a work of labyrinthine brilliance and daring - JFK - to this superficial, paint-by-numbers narrative. Directorial clumsiness aside, biographers of W. have a problem, and it's not a problem that Oliver Stone resolves. You have to make a choice on how you view W. If you assume that he really is as dumb as he looks - that he can barely string a sentence together and that he's been manipulated by the neo-cons - then you reduce him to a buffoon. And if you reduce him to a buffoon, but you're dealing with serious issues like Iraq, then what the audience wants is actually a film about Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and how those guys got what they wanted. In other words, you want a movie in which W. is not the lead character. On the other hand, if you argue that W. was actually more intelligent and active than that - that it takes more than a famous name to become POTUS - then you have to work hard to argue your case and to make W. a nuanced and interesting character worthy of a biopic. Oliver Stone simply doesn't do this. He doesn't try to get underneath the skin of W. in the way that he got underneath the skin of Nixon. Stone goes for the easy laughs in mocking W. As a result, he undermines his own case for making the film. Accordingly, we get a sporadically entertaining but largely dull film that strings together famous phrases, a series of vignettes and some piss-poor caricatures of cabinet members. This film is not worthy of Oliver Stone. And it's certainly not worthy of an American president that took his country into a three-front war; tore down constitutional protections; and was at the helm at the start of an economic clusterfuck. 

W. played London 2008. It was released earlier this month in the US and opens next weekend in Belgium and France. W opens in the UK on November 7th, in Turkey on November 14th, in Sweden on December 5th, in Finland on January 2nd and in the Netherlands on January 8th.