CYRANO**

 

French poet-playwright Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac has been adapted for screen since the dawn of the silent era - most notably with Steve Martin and Gerard Depardieu taking on the role of the tragic romantic hero.  In this adaptation by Erica Schmidt, from her own successful stage musical., the lead actor is Schmidt's husband and GAME OF THRONES' Peter Dinklage, playing Cyrano as a witty, articulate soldier who is crippled by self-doubt not because of the play's large nose but because of his dwarfism. Cyrano is in love with his childhood friend Roxanne (HALEY BENNETT), but fears she will reject him because of his appearance. So, when she falls for his handsome but inarticulate fellow soldier Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr - THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7), Cyrano offers to write Roxanne love letters on his behalf.

Matters take a grim turn when Roxanne is courted by the rich and predatory De Guiche (Ben Mendelsohn - ROGUE ONE - in full pantomime villain mode), and Cyrano helps Roxanne and Christian marry in secret before the two soldiers are sent to war. 

The resulting film is spare and elegantly constructed but filmed in a maddeningly, almost GODFATHER II chiaroscuro which the pretentious director Joe Wright clearly feels is emblematic of hidden truths and deception.  Poor Ben Mendelsohn is not asked to give a performance of any depth and neither is Kelvin Harrison Jr. There is far more to Haley Bennett's passionate, smart and rebellious Roxanne, although she is made to be so perceptive and witty it's hard to believe she wouldn't a) rumble the ruse and b) love Cyrano for his intellect from the start. There's also something deeply uncomfortable for a modern audience seeing a young woman duped in this way, into a marriage with a man she cannot help but soon find out is not who she thought he was. 

And did I mention this was a musical? With bad music that has a kind of weird country rock feel that works against its setting, costumes and dour, po-faced mood?

The only two reasons to watch this film - and the two stars I have awarded it - are as follows: first, Peter Dinklage is charismatic and compelling and heart-breaking as Cyrano.  Second, there is a particularly good and deeply sad song by soldiers on the eve of battle.

CYRANO has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated PG-13. It is available to rent and own.

A partial review of LIFE

I walked into LIFE thinking it would be a GRAVITY like intelligent sci-film with an A-list cast and great visuals.  Actually what I got was a movie far closer to ALIEN - sleek, well-acted, but basically a derivative horror film. And as I don't do well with horror films, I left after the first hour.

Still for what it's worth, the movie rolls like this:  we're in the International Space Station and the action starts in media res.  Ryan Reynolds plays the character he always plays - a wise-ass cocky man who is highly skilled at something and ultimately has a heart of gold. In this case, Ryan/Rory is rescuing a set of soil samples from Mars that a previous astronaut suspected might contains microscopic living cells.  Back on board, Rory hands the soil over to scientist Hugh (Ariyon Bakare - JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL) who is delighted to discover a micro-organism that he lovingly tends until it grows to the size of a playful little starfish like creature that could sit in the palm of your hand.  Naturally, LIFE is not going to be about how this new alien species and humanity learn to love each other. Very quickly the alien beastie, nicknamed Calvin, goes into hostile survival mode, and all the carefully set-up CDC security measures designed by Miranda (Rebecca Ferguson - THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN).  It escapes out of the lab and into the ship, and the rest is an ALIEN style hunter-prey thriller.  

Of the cast, the Russian and Japanese crewmembers (Olga Dihovichnaya and Hiroyuki Sanada) are actually among the most compelling - with a deeply ethical arc to play out and the emotional resonance of a family back home respectively.  Bakare is also impressive as the biologist who has the most sympathy for Calvin's survival instinct. But Reynolds barely moves beyond self-parody, Ferguson is under-used and Jake Gyllenhaal is under-drawn as the kind of nice, banal, everyman figure.  Nonetheless, this film has the makings of something great given its superb cinematography from DP Seamus McGarvey (NOCTURNAL ANIMALS) and elegantly choreographed space sequences from Director Daniel Espinosa (CHILD 44).  It's just a shame that the basic story is such a predictably derivative version of a justifiably classic space-horror.  For that, we have DEADPOOL writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese to blame. 

LIFE has a running time of 103 minutes and is rated R. The movie is on global release everywhere but South Korea, where it opens on April 6th; France, Brazil and Greece where it opens on April 20th and Japan where it opens on July 8th. 

NOCTURNAL ANIMALS - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 11

It appears that Tom Ford's sophomore film is controversial - with people either in love with it or damning it as dull and potentially misogynistic.  My view is that it's neither excellent nor terrible, but something far more unforgivable - boring.

Amy Adams stars as Susan - a bored rich Los Angeles art gallery owner who is growing cynical about her perfect life and the pretentious art she surrounds herself with.  Abandoned by her philandering fraudulent husband (Armie Hammer - barely used), she starts reading a manuscript of a novel her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) has written.  She basically left him because he was a romantic loser, and the novel he writes is essentially about an emasculated man who fails to protect his wife (Isla Fisher) and child from some violent slack-jawed yokels (Aaron Taylor-Johnson included).  I suspect that the point of this B-grade revenge plot is to prove that in life as in fiction, the husband was basically weak, but kind of over-came it, depending on what you make of the ending.

PAN

PAN is a really badly conceived and constructed film that has flashes of wit but by far not enough to compensate for the hour and a half of boredom it inflicts upon the viewer.  The director is Joe Wright, whose movies tend to be very high concept, over-worked and under-emotional for my taste.  And the writer, Jason Fuchs, seems to have way too much concept and far too little original thought. (Rather ominously he is also scripting the forthcoming WONDER WOMAN movie.)

So what's it all about? The movie is an entirely redundant Peter Pan sequel. Or rather it feels like the first half of one.  Peter is a young orphan left with some rather sadistic nuns in a gloomily lit world war two London of food rationing and German bombs. One night he is captured by a flying pirate ship captained by Hugh Jackman's camp but angsty Blackbeard and taken to the spice mines of kessel, sorry, the pixie-dust mines of Neverland. Enslaved, Peter makes friends with a character that's half Indiana Jones- half Han Solo called, wait for it, James Hook (Garrett Hedlund)!  We know Peter is going to lead a slave revolution because, hey, he can fly and his mum's called Mary! So together Hook and his sidekick Smee he nicks a ship and flies to fairyland with his new friend Tigerlily (Rooney Mara). She's a kickass girl and clearly the writers are trying for some kind of Han-Leia relationship with the rogueish Hook, complete with a last minute rescue reminiscent of A NEW HOPE. Anyways, there's then some Moria-ish stuff about fairy writing and a key and some Harry Potterish stuff about a childhood crush gone wrong and you end up just wondering why Blackbeard didn't just kill Peter when he had the chance.

PAN has a running time of 111 minutes and is rated PG. The movie is on global release.

GODZILLA - 3D IMAX

An excruciating confession for a cinephile: I've never seen the iconic original Godzilla movie nor any of its sequels. I may have watched Roland Emmerich's Matthew Broderick-starring remake but I've blanked it out of my memory. So I come to this new GODZILLA with few expectations and little knowledge.  What did I get? A movie that impressed me with its moody visuals and overwhelming soundtrack & sound design - a movie dripping with first-rate character actors and earnest good intentions.  But, sad to report, it's also a movie that just left me cold  - that landed like the proverbial dead fish on the screen.  And when you start to really pick it apart, you realise that underneath all that gorgeous production design what you have is a pretty hackneyed and muddled script with cardboard cut-out characters and less courage than it might have done.

So here's the story.  An earthquake hits a Japanese nuclear plant (too soon?) and a young kid loses his scientist mother (Juliette Binoche - earnest cameo).  Fast forward twenty odd years and that kid's now an army bomb disposal expert (Aaron Johnson) sceptical of his father's belief that it wasn't an earthquake at all.  He follows his dad (Bryan Cranston with hair!) to the original site, witnesses the monster first hand, and returns to the USA via Hawaii in the wake of its attacks. Caught up in the military response he colludes in a plan to lure the monster with a nuke, off which it apparently feeds. But of course, it's not so simple. Because that monster is itself being hunted by another larger foe- Godzilla himself. 

I love the idea that Godzilla is not the key threat and the twist in the tail that only the Japanese scientist (Ken Watanabe) at first perceives.  I also like the way in which the screenwriters, Max Borenstein and David Callaham (THE EXPENDABLES) try to respect the original timeline of the Godzilla movies and create a kind of continuity.  But I hate pretty much everything else that has to do with story.  The way that each generation of men has to have a picture perfect family with a cute kid. How we know the good guys are good guys because they are good fathers. How the hero's wife (Elizabeth Olsen) has nothing to do but look concerned and cry.  How actors as good as Sally Hawkins get lost in the chaos.  If the movie had had any balls whatsoever, someone in that family nut wouldn't have made it.  There's just a complete lack of relief from good people looking earnest and trying their damnedest to help out. Even the bloody monster isn't exempt.

All of which is a crying shame because the young British director Gareth Edwards (MONSTERS)  has made a quite stunning leap from micro-budget creature-features into the big time with a confident and visually wondrous palette in GODZILLA. I guess it's just a shame that his movie didn't have some of the wit of PACIFIC RIM because it sure as hell has the 2-D characters.

GODZILLA has a running time of 124 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA and 12A in the UK.

GODZILLA is on release in the USA, Belgium, Switzerland, Egypt, Finland, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden,  the UAE, Albania, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, the Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, the UK, Georgia, Greece, Hong Kong, Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Kuwait, Lebanon, Montenegro, Macedonia, Mexico, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Serbia, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, Slovakia, Thailand, Ukraine, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Cyprus, Estonia, Spain, India, Indonesia, Iceland, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Latvia, Panama, Poland, Romania, Turkey, Taiwan, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, South Africa, Afghanistan, Fiji, Liechtenstein, Bangladesh, Iran and Trinidad and Tobago. It opens on May 22nd in Cambodia and Pakistan;  and on June 13th in China and on July 25th in Japan.

ANNA KARENINA (2012)

I have a major problem with director Joe Wright. I think he is a technically accomplished director who creates wonderfully fluid, extravagantly choreographed shots that are entirely at odds with the content of his films. I first noticed this in ATONEMENT, where his long tracking shot on the beach at Dunkirk didn't advance either plot or character - it was a showy distraction in what should have been (viz. the novel) a tightly structured, chamber drama. Sadly, in ANNA KARENINA, this desire to be as contrived and artificial and intricately choreographed as possible has over-taken the film to the point where all passion, tragedy and joy is lost in a never-ending series of delicate backdrops that showcase the Chanel Haute Joaillerie collection.  This film is not so much a tragic romance as a musical without songs, and a perfume advertisement that lasts two hours.

I am not entirely sure who is to blame.  Who was it that came up with the conceit to imprison what many have called the greatest novel ever written in the simplistic straitjacket of a theatre metaphor?  Was it Joe Wright, or playwright/screenwriter Tom Stoppard? In their version of 1870s Imperial Russia, high society becomes a theatre in which every aristocrat has a part to play, and rules to which they must confirm, or else be brutally cast aside.  This is the lesson which Anna Karenina learns when she sacrifices her son and her marriage to have an affair with the dashing Count Vronsky.  He also loses - his Commission, his freedom, the respect of society - but not as much as Anna -  because he can still contract a good marriage and so redeem all.  Both Anna and Vronsky learn that happiness is tarnished by the exigencies of real life, and ultimately, they are made wretched by each other and their situation. 

The intensity with which Wright and Stoppard used the theatrical metaphor is dazzling in the open twenty minutes of the film - so ingenious it quite crowds out our attention.  I barely noticed Anna and Vronsky fall in love, or Kitty's heartbreak when Vronsky leaves her for Anna.  Anna's brother Stiva becomes a caricature of a decadent aristo, like a larger than life minor comic character in Dickens.  I kept waiting to see marionette strings.  And as for the production design - it was so rich and beautiful as to be claustrophobic, and then became a parody of itself, with Princess Betsy turning into Effie Trinkett from THE HUNGER GAMES with her outlandish dresses and coiffeur.   Underneath all the anachronistic dance moves that distracted with their inelegance and artifice, I detected what looks to be a more mature and nuanced performance from Keira Knightley, and especially Jude Law as her dogmatic husband Karenin.  Too bad those performances didn't have room to breathe. But as for poor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, his Vronsky was never more than a vain poseur.  When never feel and see his love for Anna, and his motivations are not rich enough - either in respect to Anna or the  eligible young Princess Sorokina. Maybe it's the fault of the script, but Jude Law did better with less.

The result is a film that looks fabulous and moves with the intricacy of a Swiss watch, but which feels insubstantial and skates over us too lightly.  Perhaps it's because Vronsky is so poorly written.  Perhaps it's because the larger, metaphysical discussion is entirely absent.  In the novel, Anna's attempt to escape society's constrictions is contrasted with the gloriously good but conflicted and occasionally delusionally idealistic Levin, who flees to the country but never quite loses sight of the dark backing to the mirror.  We see nothing of Levin's confusion, nothing of Kitty's process of maturing, nothing of his happiness and final equivocations.  Short-changing this story might have seemed like a narrative necessity in a two hour film - editing the "secondary" story to give Anna and Vronsky more screen time. But it's a fatal cut.  Anna's story works in relation to Levin's.  And, indeed, it's possible to see ANNA KARENINA as Levin's story after all.  Without it, the film has none of the intellectual heft of the book - and it loses perhaps the best description of happiness in literature.  Still, given these constraints, I have to say that Domnhall Gleeson was absolutely superb as Levin.  I just wish I'd seen more of him.

Of course, I am well aware that after my tirade against TINKER TAILOR, I might be giving the impression that I have a pantheon of novels that have become so much a part of my life that I cannot conceive of a film-maker's interpretation that would do my vision justice. Not so in the case of ANNA KARENINA.  I admired the 1997 Bernard Rose adaptation, starring Sophie Marceau, Sean Bean and Alfred Molina, very, very much indeed. 

ANNA KARENINA played Toronto 2012 and is released this weekend in the UK and Ireland.  It opens on November 16th in the USA and on December 6th in the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal. It opens on January 3rd in Russia and Turkey; on January 10th 2013 in Denmark; on January 17th in Australia; on January 24th in Australia; on January 31st in New Zealand and Brazil; on  February 14th in Argentina, Norway and Sweden; on February 21st in Italy; and on March 13th in Belgium and France.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 7 - WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

Lionel Schriver's hugely successful novel "We Need To Talk About Kevin" is a powerful, intelligent and provocative novel about the mother of a boy who commits a high school massacre.  The framing tool of the novel is that the mother, Eva, is writing letters to her husband, Franklyn, trying to explain what her life has become, and how she rationalises their part in raising a son who would commit such acts. From the earliest years we see the conflict between good-natured but naive Franklyn who wants two kids and a house in the suburbs, and Eva, the bohemian travel writer and City girl who has a deep antipathy to giving that up to raise children.  And so we assume Franklyn and Eva are divorced.  Eva describes the lack of bond she felt for Kevin as a child, his tantrums, her frustration, and Franklyn's disbelief that Kevin was actually playing psychological games with them. And then, when they have another child, sweet little Celia - so crucial because it shows that Eva can be a loving mother - they have their most powerful disagreement on Kevin's role in an "accident" with some bleach.  The tension builds - we know the letters will take us through Kevin's adolescence to his gruesome act of murder, and we like Eva, want an explanation.  But Schriver is far too subtle and realistic to give us easy answers.  It's a stunningly well-written novel, and I can also highly recommend the unabridged audiobook read by Lorelei King - whose voice I thought was the definitive Eva.

In approaching the material, writer-director Lynne Ramsay (MORVEN CALLAR) and writer (and actor) Rory Kinnear have taken a free approach - after all, one cannot easily translate an epistolary novel to screen, and the audience is likely familiar with the "big reveals" at the end of the novel by now. They keep the idea of the framing device - Eva in post-massacre life, bearing the insults and shame - and the chronological telling of Kevin's childhood.  However, they begin with an almost impressionistic set of scenes giving us the atmosphere of the present and the past, hints at the suburban life that has been destroyed, and before that, of Eva's life of travel - all with a nightmare vividness. The screenplay is really a masterclass in how to translate a popular novel to screen, keeping all the thematic material in tact, but without being slavish.

The performances are likewise superlative.  Tilda Swinton really is as good as everyone says as Eva - depicting both the ambitious businesswoman and the broken, guilt-ridden mother.  John C Reilly, who I couldn't really see as Franklyn before I watched the film, perfectly captures his naivete and frustrating blindness.  But it's the two Kevin's who really stand out - Rock Duer as the young boy, and Ezra Miller as the teenager. The ability to go from pure evil, mocking stare to charming smile as the audience switches from Eva to Franklyn - truly superb and sadistic. 

On the technical side, DP Seamus McGarvey (ATONEMENT) does outstanding work, and  Jonny Greenwood's score is wonderful. (THERE WILL BE BLOOD).  But I had one massive problem with the direction, and that's the ham-fisted crude use of "blood" imagery - from Eva covered in crushed tomatoes; to over-filled jam sandwiches; to red paint thrown on a house; to Eva washing her hand's of aforementioned paint......Yes, we get it, there will be blood, and the blood, as for Lady Macbeth, will be hard to wash off, metaphorically speaking.  But please, enough already. Where is the subtlety of Schriver in this blood-fetishism?

<< Ezra Miller (Kevin); Lynne Ramsay (Director) and Lionel Schriver (Author) at the UK premiere of WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN at the BFI London Film Festival 2011.


WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN played Cannes, Toronto and London 2011. It opened in France earlier this month and opens in Ireland and the UK on October 21st. It opens in Greece and Hungary on November 3rd; in Australia on November 17th; in NYC and LA on December 9th and then on wide release in the USA on January 27th. It opens in Sweden on February 17th.

NOWHERE BOY - suprisingly conventional Lennon biopic

NOWHERE BOY is a beautifully written, beautifully acted, sensitively directed biopic of the young John Lennon, directed by the reknowned British artist, Sam Taylor-Wood. Set in a perfectly rendered 1950s Liverpool, the film shows a 17 year old Lennon groping toward the truth of why he lives with his Aunt Mimi rather than with his mum and dad, not to mention taking his first steps toward becoming a Beatle.

Aaron Johnson (THE THIEF LORD; ANGUS, THONGS AND PERFECT SNOGGING) is assured as the young Lennon, complete with rock-n-roll quiff and iconic Scouse accent. He pulls off both the cockey laddishness and the vulnerability. His John is witty and playful; promiscuous and arrogant; occasionally violently angry; but also desperately adrift. Kristin Scott-Thomas also gives a nuanced performance as John's Aunt Mimi - both stiff and severe in her middle-class home, but also undoubtedly very loving toward John and possessing a wicked sense of humour. (And to those reviewers criticising Scott Thomas for being too posh, Mimi really didn't have a broad Scouse accent. Indeed, Lennon later commented that he had to broaden his Scouse accent for PR purposes.)

The character that jumps off the screen is John's mum, and Mimi's younger sister, Julia. Anne-Marie Duff's Julia is so full of energy and fun that she simply sweeps you up in her love of life and rock'n'roll music. But like John you can't help but feel something is forced in such buoyancy and we're right to distrust it. Despite being remarried with two small children, Julia obviously suffers from depression and can only truly relate to men through flirtation. This extends to John and his band members, and the delicate way in which Sam Taylor-Wood and her script-writer deal with this is both honest and elegant.

The resulting film is a moving emotional drama that is interesting on its own terms, let alone because it formed an iconic musician.

NOWHERE BOY is a very good film. It reminded me a lot of Tom Ford's feature debut A SINGLE MAN, in that it was both apparently conventional in its structure and visual style but also wonderfully brave in tackling uncomfortable subjects head on, without judgement and without cliché. The conventional style is even more surprising from Taylor-Wood given the nature of her graphic art, and her bizarre short film.

NOWHERE BOY closed London 2009 and is currently on release in the UK and Australia. It will play Sundance 2010. It opens in New Zealand on March 4th; in the Netherlands on April 1st; in Russia on April 15th and in Norway on September 10th.

THE SOLOIST - schadenfreude

THE SOLOIST is a bad movie. Bad, in ways that fawning Hollywood studios in search of Oscar-pay-dirt can't mask. Witness the fact that is was completed in October 2008, and could've been released in Oscar contender season but was instead pushed back to a 2009 release. The film is not bad because of the central performances. Robert Downey Junior is just fine as real-life LA Times columnist Steve Lopez and Jamie Foxx is impressive as Nathaniel Ayers, the schizophrenic, homeless Cellist that Lopez befriends. The film is bad because of the poor choices made by its director, Joe Wright, the very same director lauded for his adaptations of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and ATONEMENT. I was astonished at the critical acclaim the latter achieved. To my mind, Wright took a delicate, clever book and ruined it with his heavy-handed, showy, directorial "style". His self-conscious over-choreographed cinematography got in the way of his material.

THE SOLOIST is the ultimate exemplar of the fatal flaw in Wright's direction and, in my worst moments, I am rather glad he has been exposed as a mere stylist. We have impressive shots everywhere. A liquid camera curves through a newsroom taking up the editor (Catherine Keener), then a reporter, and finally our icon of liberal angst, Steve Lopez. After a chance encounter with the homeless savant is written up in a LA Times column, a reader sends in a cello. Rather than cut to the scene where Lopez delivers it to Ayers, we have a Cello-POV tracking shot through the same newsroom. When Lopez hears Ayers play the cello for the first time, the camera swoops up to the skies and follows birds in flight. All of this shows some technical ability, but again and again I asked myself WHY? Why do we need the cello-POV-shot? What does it add to my understanding of Ayers' plight or my response to it?

If self-conscious camera-work is a continuous problem with Wright's work, THE SOLOIST has its own particular problems. The biggest is how Wright chooses to depict schizophrenia. Rather than depict illness from the inside-out, as in A BEAUTIFUL MIND or THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, he goes for a rather lazy sound-scape. He doesn't really seem all that interested in mental illness as an internal experience, but rather in bludgeoning the film-goers over the head with some propaganda for a more caring society. (Note the continuous use of the US flag as an icon as a contrast to the most marginalised citizens). The second problem is that Wright clearly isn't that interested in music. Yes, it's there as a backdrop, and we are meant to tear-up, as Lopez does, hearing Ayers play. But there is no transcendental moment for the audience, as there is for Lopez. We are moved neither by Beethoven nor by Ayers' plight.

Note to director: next time, concentrate more on how to evoke an emotional response from the audience and less on how to create cool effects with the camera.

THE SOLOIST was completed in October 2008. The studio chose not to release it until April 2009 in the USA and Canada. It goes on release in the Netherlands, Australia, Greece, New Zealand, Israel, Mexico and the UK in September and in Germany, Portugal, Brazil, Denmark, Romania, the Czech Republic and Argentina in October. However, it is already available on Region 1 DVD replete with some rather self-congratulatory and pompous extras.