BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER****

Pleasantly surprised by BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER, despite what felt like a raft of mediocre reviews.  Edward Berger's follow-up to his superb CONCLAVE has style to spare and a beautifully haunting examination of addiction, redemption and spiritual awakening. I am only docking it a star because I felt like the costume choices for Tilda Swinton's character were so outlandish as to become comic, and undercut the emotion and gravity of the story.

The Penguin's Colin Farrell stars as Reilly, a gambling addict and conman posing as an aristocrat in Macao.  He is desperate for a big win at the Baccarat tables and his only source of credit is a casino waitress/black market credit broker called Dao Ming (Fala Chen).  Meanwhile a British debt collector called Blithe (Swinton) is on his trail. He goes on an insane bender, forges a deep emotional relationship with Dao Ming, and arguably Blithe too, and suddenly his lucks comes almost miraculously good. The existential question is what he will do with that good fortune.

The film is showcase for Farrell's ridiculous acting talent and willingness to mine the very depths of human depravity and vulnerability. It's also a showcase for cinematographer James Friend and his stunning visuals of rainstorm-drenched Macao. I felt utterly immersed in this world, and utterly invested in Reilly's story.  I was rooting for him even as he self-sabotaged.  I also loved the thematics, but can't really discuss them here without spoiling the plot. Suffice to say that those familiar with certain genre of Chinese film-making will not be disappointed.

BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER is rated R and has a running time of 101 minutes. It is available to watch on Netflix. It played Telluride, Toronto, San Sebastian and London.

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 11

The anticipation of iconic writer-director Almodovar's first ever English language film starring two exceptional talented actresses in Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore was high. I am sad to report that while the film is handsomely produced and surface-glossy, it lacks any real depth. And without any crunchiness in the writing the actresses have little to do but be .... nice.  The result is a rather vanilla, unbrave film that skirts over the profound issue that it is tackling.

The film is based on a Spanish book and I wonder if the source material has more conflict within it.  In Almodovar's version all the big questions have been decided and all debate is shut down.  Tilda Swinton plays a war correspondent called Martha who has incurable cancer and decides to commit suicide.  She procures a tablet on the dark web and asks her friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to be in the room next door when she dies. That's it. That's the plot. (Although it's padded out with unnecessary flashbacks to her ex-partner's death). 

The decision has been made and Martha will not allow Ingrid to try and persuade her out of it.  And we are not going to see any of the unpleasantness and pain of actually killing yourself in this way. Don't get me wrong - I am in favour of euthanasia - but this film situates it in a beautifully designed house with a beautiful woman in a beautiful outfit lying on a deckchair in a beautiful garden with elegant pink snow failing. I find that rather disingenuous.

The real problem with this highly stylised depiction of the friendship and the decision is that there is no conflict and no depth to the conversations between the two friends, other than maybe a discussion about career vs motherhood that never really convinced me. Compare and contrast with Swinton's own discourse on this subject in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN.  People have praised the performance - heck this film won the Golden Lion at Venice - but I really struggled to see what the fuss about.

I would suggest that if you are actually interested in this topic that you watch documentarian Ondi Timoner's desperately moving film LAST FLIGHT HOME.

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR has a running time of 110 minutes. It played Venice, Toronto and London 2024. It goes on release in the UK on October 25th and in the USA on December 20th.

THE KILLER***** - BFI London Film Festival 2023 - Day 3

David Fincher returns to our screens with his mordantly funny, coolly stylish, impressively spare hitman procedural, THE KILLER.  The film is based on Alexis' Nolent's cult graphic novel, adapted for the screen by Andrew Kevin Walker who also penned SE7EN.  We spend the film inside the mind of a ruthlessly pragmatic hitman played by Michael Fassbender (SHAME).  We watch him narrate and then fuck up a hit on a French businessman, and then spend the rest of the film taking revenge on the people who tried to wipe out the chain of evidence leading to the fiasco. There isn't much on-screen dialogue, but flashes of deliciously dark humour and social satire from our deadpan narrator as he deftly takes down German tourists, New Orleans restaurants and Floridian ex-cons. As for Fincher, his social satire extends to self-absorbed beanie-wearing billionaire tech-bros, as superbly exemplified in Arliss Howard's cameo.

There is nothing not love about a film this well-made. It's just so stylish and handsome in its execution, so dark in its humour, so brilliantly scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, so pure in its focus....  All I want to know is whether Fincher is taking the piss out of Morrissey or legitimately using his songs in his score. Do please try to see this on a big screen and not at home on Netflix. This deserves a proper screen and audio setup.

THE KILLER is rated R and has a running time of 118 minutes. It played Venice and London 2023 and will be released on Netflix on November 10th.

GIULLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 11

It feels as though the theme of this year’s  BFI London Film Festival is coming to terms with the death of a loved one. Maybe with a side order of humanity versus religio-fascism. If you don’t believe me, remember this is the second film I’ve watched in the last twenty- four hours that takes a children’s story and recasts it with added violence in the midst of early twentieth century European fascism. The result is a film that is strangely full of childish enthusiasm and hope but that does not shy away from the reality of mortality, death and war. Del Toro was straightforward about its agenda when he introduced the film at today’s world premiere: it’s a film about disobedience as a virtue. And as Christoph Waltz said, there’s something worthwhile in a film about a wooden puppet who wants to be a boy, at a time when humans are being made into puppets. 

The film is depicted with the most beautifully rendered stop-motion animation that has texture and vivid colours and the most wondrous attention to detail. Our narrator is Sebastian J Cricket - never referred to with his pejorative nickname. He’s voiced by Ewan MacGregor as a rather vain but ultimately lovely little insect, and he provides much of the comedy of the film. 

We are treated to a prolonged prologue that tells us about the beloved son that Gepetto (David Bradley) lost, and after whom he fashions Pinocchio. One of the themes of the film is that one should never have to change to be loved. The narrative journey of Gepetto is that he has to learn Pinocchio for himself rather than trying to make him a good little Carlo. 

The world around our trio is one of Italy falling into fascism under Mussolini. And we have a lot of fun with innocent Pinocchio mocking "Il Dolce" and inspiring others to disobey laws that are unjust. Gregory Mann gives a sensational voice performance as the puppet - full of energy and fun and heart.  In one of the most moving scenes of the film, Pinocchio passes on the advice given to him by Sebastian - that fathers may say mean things when they fall into despair, but they don’t mean it. As in all totalitarian societies, there is no room for the personal in this Italy and poor little Candlewick (Finn Wolfhard) struggles to be the son his Fascist father wants him to be. 

As with Pixar’s SOUL there’s a fair amount of time spent in the afterlife, or underworld or whatever you’d like to call it. And this is a subtly radical world insofar as it shows that the Catholic Church is quiescent to fascism. The imperative to obey moves easily from Church to State in this film as in UNICORN WARS - also playing in this year's festival. But in Del Toro’s universe it’s the spirits of nature that have real power, and it’s a pagan elemental world that we’re living in. This is depicted in the guise of two feminine powers, both voiced by Tilda Swinto..

So the subject matter is grown-up but as with all the best childrens' films it will appeal to the adults and to the children, who have always been aware of the horrors of this world. As Del Toro said in his introduction, this is fine for children to watch, so long as their parents talk to them about it afterwards.

GIULLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO has a running time of 113 minutes. The world premiere is at the BFI London Film Festival 2022. It will be released on December 9th.

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 3

Joanna Hogg's THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER is a quietly powerful, emotionally devastating film that effectively continues the mother-daughter-film-maker triangle depicted in Hogg's previous films SOUVENIR parts one and two. Honor Byrne's young film-maker from those films has now grown up into Tilda Swinton's Julia and Tilda Swinton's Rosalind is now the more elderly mother of the film-maker. And of course, Julia is still a thinly veiled autobiographical expression of writer-director Joanna Hogg. And if you think that's all too meta, remember that Honor Byrne is Swinton's real life daughter.

Okay so back to THIS movie. It's late at night and a taxi pulls up to a country hotel wreathed in mist. My kind of horror film plays out: the surly lone receptionist can't find Julia's booking and makes a fuss about giving her a first floor room even though the hotel appears to be empty. Still she makes the best of making her mother, Rosalind, comfortable. The next day Julia struggles to work on her new script about her relationship with her mother, and seems to be hyper-sensitive to any discomfort her mother might feel. It emerges that Rosalind actually grew up in the house when she was taken in my her aunt during the Blitz.  And in successive visits over the decades, Rosalind's memories are sad as well as happy.

Rosalind seems to have that phlegmatic no-nonsense, self-effacing character of her generation, as epitomised by our late Queen. But Julia is so desperate for everything to be perfect for her mother that she breaks down at the slightest bump in the road. We realise that their relationship, while loving, does not in fact rest of mutual understanding and intimacy. 

As for the rest of the plot I am not sure we needed it. The references to ghost stories, eery bumps in the night, amd self-proclaimed mystery seemed to me to cheapen the whole affair and provided very little actual suspense.

THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 96 minutes.  It played Venice, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival 2022.

THE SOUVENIR II***** - BFI London Film Festival Day 3

Julie is grieving the death of her charismatic, controlling, deceitful boyfriend Anthony. She doesn't know if she misses who he was or just the companionship and intimacy of love. She expresses her grief in her student film, a memorial, or Souvenir, if you will.  And in making the film, she rediscovers her sense of fun and takes joy in her friendships. We leave her still aware that she is inchoate and waiting to find her voice, but optimistic. And we leave the film, conscious that writer-director Joanna Hogg, who has created this fictionalised version of her life in this film, has indeed voice her voice with this deeply felt, technically audacious, often hilarious, film.

Viewers who have not seen Hogg's previous film, THE SOUVENIR, may struggle to understand why Julie is so driven to capture her relationship with Anthony. Without Tom Burke's dominant presence, I feared that this sequel might lose its purpose, much as Julie feels unmoored at the start of the sequel. But as the film progresses we see Julie find her way, thanks partly to her unstintingly supportive if somewhat anachronistic parents (Tilda Swinton and a drily hilarious James Spencer Ashworth). She also progresses with her student film despite her supercilious film professors, but with the support of her best friend Marland (Jaygann Ayeh). Along the way there are moments of desperation - and searching for connection - and the lightest of touches with the tragedies of the 1980s when a gay editor reveals his boyfriend has been sick for a while.  Richard Ayoade also returns with a scene-stealing turn as an arrogant film student with dip-dyed hair. The problem is that he's not wrong in what he says! Julie should move on.

But what raises this film to a level beyond that achieved in the first part of THE SOUVENIR is Joanna Hogg's greater confidence in exploring the meta-textual nature of making a film about her own student film-making. I LOVE that the student film we finally see bears no resemblance to the verite-footage we have seen so far, but leaps into Fellini or Red Shoes ballet -esque surrealism. Bravo!

I also hope that Honor Swinton Byrne continues to act. She has a natural charisma and empathy that shines through the screen. I'd love to see what kind of range she has.

THE SOUVENIR II has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated R. The film played Cannes and the BFI London Film Festival 2021. It will be released in the USA on October 29th 2021 and in the UK on January 21st 2022.

FRIENDSHIPS DEATH (1987) - BFI London Film Festival 2020 - Day 9

FRIENDSHIP'S DEATH was originally released in 1987 but has since been lovingly restored by the BFI and is playing in this year's London Film Festival. 

It stars a very young Tilda Swinton as woman who seemingly just shows up in Jordan in the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian war of 1970, and is befriended by a journalist played by Big Paterson.  The rest of the movie plays as a two-hander and takes place almost entirely within the confines of a hotel room in Amman. We hear the bullets and bombs firing and very occasionally see archive news footage but essentially this feels like a filmed stage play, albeit with some rather funky camera angles and some deeply cool outfits for Swinton.

The conceit of the film is that Swinton is actually an alien from a more advanced planet where the biological beings have long since died out and been superseded by cylons. She has been sent to Earth to make contact with the academic community and give them an axiomatic ethical system that can ensure humanity's peaceful survival.  She ends up in Amman by mistake, and seeing the brutality of war gives up on her mission, rather accurately predicting that if she did make it to MIT she'd just be turned over to the FBI for endless testing and exploitation - and that - in the funniest line of the film - if she went to England the authorities there would do the same but just more slowly.

Those looking for a sci-fi film will be disappointed.  This is actually a rather more philosophical film where two smart people - well one person and one robot -  debate the Singularity and ethics. The wonder of the film is that despite its short running time, we really believe in the friendship that has built up between the pair, and indeed delight in Tilda Swinton's delight at the absurdity of shaving, or at building things with Lego! This is - then - a beautifully acted chamber piece, remarkably prescient in its ideas and understanding of technology.

FRIENDSHIP'S DEATH originally played Toronto 1987 and Berlin 1988. It is playing in the BFI London Film Festival 2020 in a new restored version from the BFI National Archive.

UNCUT GEMS

UNCUT GEMS is perhaps the most unique and certainly one of the best films of 2019 - a surreal, 80s-vibe, darkly comic thriller, in which against all probability I became insanely invested in the largely self-inflicted travails of its hero Howard.  As played by Adam Sandler in a role reminiscent of his angry-loveable PUNCH DRUNK LOVE intensity, Howard has a life of unremitting stress. He's broken up from his wife (Idina Menzel) but still enmeshed in Jewish family dinners.  He's set up his mistress in a city apartment.  His diamond business is doing well thanks to the big music and sports buyers his middle-man (Lakeith Stanfield) brings in, and he's just been smuggled a super-valuable rock containing uncut gems. The problem is that Howard also has a massive gambling problem, and spends the entirety of the film's running time trying to fence the gems to pay the debt.  Oh yeah, and did I mention he finances his ever more gargantuan bets with mob loans?  

I was initially reluctant to watch this film because I'd heard such extreme reactions at the London Film Festival. People said it was nerve-wracking and intense - like having Adam Sandler just shout at you for two hours.  But I was pleasantly surprised at how funny the film was, and how the directors really did give the audience a chance to pause and recalibrate every once in a while - usually in a quieter family scene.  But the final act really is super-tense, and just phenomenally well crafted and I was literally on the edge of my seat. I was hugely invested in whether Howard would come through, despite his stupidity, because at the end of the day, the poor idiot is an addict, and actually he's not an idiot - there's something really impressive about his ability to keep spinning stories to keep his debtors at bay.  This is Sandler's best performance since PUNCH DRUNK and I was with him every step of the way. It's hard to think of anyone else carrying off this performance.

Phenomenal performance apart, everything about the production and costume design, the cinematography and the use of music is superb. Darius Khondji gives us  images that are at times gritty and urban-realist and at times claustrophobic and surreal and at times neon-lit 80s music video.  It's like being in a film that's at once recognisably the diamond district and at once something almost fairy-tale like.  Most of all, the Safdie Brothers have a confidence with tonal shifts that take us from casinos to auction houses and back again. This film is a tour de force and deserves to be seen. It also deserves far more awards love than it has been given.  

UNCUT GEMS is rated R and has a running time of 135 minutes.  The film played Telluride, Toronto and London 2019 and is now available to stream on Netflix. 

THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD - BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Opening Night

Armando Iannucci's adaptation of Dickens' beloved autobiographical bildungsroman is a complete triumph.  Thanks to a wonderful adaptation by Simon Blackwell; effervescent and imaginative visuals; and a wonderful set of performances, this really is one of my all-time favourite versions of the tale.  I think it's because of the wonderful way in which it captures the love within the novel - the wonderful spirit of acceptance, love and compassion contained in the Peggotties assembled family - or Aunt Betsy Trotwood's care of Mr Dick - or David Copperfield's eventual reconciliation with Mr Micawber.  The film also captures Dickens' wonderful humour - whether in his sharp-eyed satiric portraits of the villains, or in the linguistic wonders of Micawber and Yarmouth. The film is also a really good portrayal of the author as a cipher for Dickens, and places the act of writing and imagining and rewriting at the front of its visual style.  Those of us familiar with the fate of Dora in the novel will find a quite elegant, more concise, and yet somehow similarly moving resolution here. But the movie never shies away from the darkness in Dickens' portrayal of violent, oppressive marriages - cruel poverty - social snobbery - and fallen women.  Most of all, it's a beautifully nuanced portrait of mental illness - whether Mr Dick's fixation on Charles I, Steerforth's suicidal depression or even Micawber's self-delusions.

In front of the camera, Dev Patel really is the most beautifully cast David Copperfield - all gangly wide-eyed love and optimism even in the worst of circumstances. But his David is never a patsy, even when falling for the dippy Dora.  He shows his anger, often physically, and fights and works for his future.   Patel handles everything from slapstick to righteous anger to compassionate frustration with the best of good humour. He's one of those actors that it's simply a pleasure spending time with.

In the supporting roles, I was struck by Rosalind Eleazer as Agnes - showing real love, strength, smarts.  An actress I would hope to see so much more of.   Daisy May Cooper is just heart-meltingly lovely as Peggotty, and Tilda Swinton - who starts off as just another Tilda Swinton eccentric - shows real depth of emotion and care as Aunt Betsy.  But perhaps the most surprising turn was from Hugh Laurie as Mr Dick. Every big cast drama has its Papageno, and with Copperfield it's usually Micawber. And Peter Capaldi is just find as Micawber. But there's something so quietly funny, moving, whip-smart about Laurie's Mr Dick that steals every scene that he's in, and must surely be a contender for Best Supporting Actor awards.

I really can't fault this film. And it's worth noting that Mr007 has never read the book and loved it as much as I did.  And that's a rare feat - to condense an epic novel but lose none of its essence, and to also please the casual viewer. Kudos to all involved. 


THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD has a running time of 119 minutes. It has played Toronto and London 2019 and opens in the UK on January 10th 2020.

SOUVENIR

THE SOUVENIR is writer-director Joanna Hogg's personal memoir of her time as film student in London in the early 80s and a love affair she had with a charming but dangerous older man.  Set largely in a meticulous recreation of Hogg's Knightsbridge flat, we are introduced to the fictionalised Julie (Honor Swinton Burne) as a naive, privileged, earnest and desperately vulnerable young woman.  At first, her relationship with Anthony (Tom Burke - finally finding a role to flex his muscles in) seems innocent enough, although the age gap is troubling, as is his domineering personality. But we, as Julie, as her parents, are lulled into a sense of complacency by his posh accent and apparent Foreign Office job. Soon we discover that all is not as it seems - earlier in fact than the alarmingly innocent Julie. It starts with him cadging a tenner, and ends with a kind of emotional domination and abuse, centred around a character twist that I won't reveal.  The tension of the film lies first in knowing whether Julie will gather the strength to leave Anthony, and second in whether her mother (played by Honor's real-life mother Tilda Swinton) will intervene.  

As in her previous, outstanding, films  - UNRELATED and ARCHIPELAGO - Joanna Hogg creates these wonderfully tense, nuanced, naturalistic chamber pieces where characters are trapped in seemingly ordinary conversations but so much is going on in their interior lives - so much is unsaid - and the stakes seem so high. Tom Burke is absolutely superb as Anthony, in the most difficult role of creating a character at once despicable, but also pitiable, who we have to believe is charming enough to be loved. Honor Swinton Burne is not called upon to show such range, but is convincing in playing a shy young woman. If THE CROWN needs to cast a shy young Diana they need look no further. And stealing the show, we have a deliciously funny cameo from Richard Ayoade with one of the most quotable lines in film. I'd repeat it here but it gives away too much plot!

Kudos to Joanna Hogg, whose idiosyncratic scripting and shooting style got the best out of a new actress and creates a slow-build tension and genuine emotional involvement in the lives of these characters.  One must also comment on how she captures particular visuals - a shot of the Grand Canal (perhaps one of the most hackneyed scenes and yet so beautiful and apparently fresh here) - or a disagreement in a hotel room that's so emotionally difficult to behold that we see it reflected in a mirror.  This film really is unique, disturbing, beautiful and melancholy.  I cannot wait to see the second part. 

THE SOUVENIR has a running time of 119 minutes and is not yet rated.  The film played Sundance 2019 where Joanna Hogg won Grand Jury Prize - World Cinema - Dramatic.  It will also play Berlin 2019. It does not yet have a US or UK release date. 

DOCTOR STRANGE

DOCTOR STRANGE is a patchwork quilt of a Marvel movie.  Pleasant enough to watch, but undeserving of a second view, in which almost every character, action sequence or funny line echoes another film, and the only originality comes not from the central character but from Tilda Swinton.  It's visually arresting but emotionally hollow mid-tier Marvel of a kind that - with a release calendar chock full of B-grade comic book characters -  I have become rather bored by. 

As with IRON MAN, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a rich materialistic egotistical genius brought low by a severe accident, who supplements his physical healing process with "super powers".   As with SHERLOCK, Strange has a perfect memory and a fondness for being right.  As with StarChild, Strange has a fondness for cheesy seventies hits.  Strange was a successful but cocky surgeon who texts while driving and ends up in an horrific car crash that renders his hands unfit for surgery.  In desperation, he journeys to Nepal where he finds a mystical Jedi Master, sorry, Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), who puts him through a training regime straight out of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.  I kid you not, there's even a "judge me by my size, do you" sequence. It turns out that, quelle surprise, Strange has a rare aptitude for astral projection and drawing energy from other dimensions of the multiverse to cast magic spells.  He even gets a cool gadget that allows his to reverse time.  (Do you think that will be significant?!) He also gets a HARRY POTTER style set of magical gadgets, including a sentient cloak that actually reminded me a bit of Terry Pratchett's luggage.  So armed, he goes off to fight the Ancient One's former pupil turned evil villain (Mads Mikkelsen) who wants to open Earth up to an eviller villain whose name sounds like Dormouse.  Oh yes, I forgot that Strange has an ex-girlfriend played by Rachel McAdams who's also a surgeon but she has nothing to do but simper.  He also has sidekicks at his zen school played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Wong who exist to show a moral centre and comic relief respectively. 

BFI LFF 2016 Preview - LETTERS FROM BAGHDAD

LETTERS FROM BAGHDAD is a truly exceptional documentary about the life of the intrepid explorer, spy and archaeologist, Gertrude Bell.  A contemporary of Lawrence of Arabia and Gordon of Khartoum, Bell arguably had as much of an influence on Middle Eastern politics a century ago, and perhaps greater insight into the troubling diplomatic and political issues.  

She grew up in a minor aristocratic family with an incredibly supportive and wise further who funded her studies at Oxford - one of the few women admitted - and then her travels in the Middle East, starting with a visit to her Uncle, the British Minister in Tehran.  As an archaeologist and British spy she explored and map territories making her work of huge importance during World War One.  (Moreover, as a sidenote for all Cambridge Spies obsessives, she was the field handler for St John Philby.) After the War, Bell worked with Lawrence at the peace conference to determine the boundaries of the new states of TransJordan and Iraq, and was then a part of the Iraqi government - mediating between the different tribes and between the Iraqi government and the British.  Accordingly she has been blamed for some of the political unrest in the region - such as the Kurds being included as a minority in Iraq - but in her correspondence and essays she clearly foresaw the problems that would be caused by the boundaries and the difficulties of forming stable government in ethnically and religiously heterogeneous region.

This documentary is a fitting exploration of the life of a remarkable woman.  It combines extracts from her letters (voiced by Rose Leslie for the young Gertrude and Tilda Swinton for the old Gertrude) with archive location footage, family photographs and documents.  The directors also have a handful of actors in appropriate costume and shot in a period style commenting on her actions.  The result is a richly textured aural and visual tapestry that forms a deeply insightful picture of her life and motives.  It focuses both on her politics and her emotional life, and is fair and balanced.  It's also interesting how the film manages to be both inspirational - Bell is a woman who defines her own destiny at a time when few could - and depressing - because Bell's insights about Middle Eastern conflict remain relevant and problematic today. 

LETTERS FROM BAGHDAD has a running time of 95 minutes.  Both screenings at the BFI LFF are sold out but there will likely be standby tickets.

HAIL, CAESAR!

HAIL, CAESAR! is, of all the Coen Brothers screwball comedies, the least funny and the most tedious. I say this with a heavy heart as a great fan of their work and a shared love of the old Hollywood big budget genre pics it aims to lovingly pastiche.  But the best bits really are in the trailer, and their sharp editing in that trailer gives the impression of a movie of high energy and cannon-fire wit. Sadly the real thing runs at an ambling pace, punctuated by the odd set piece, and stutters to its final close.

The movie's protagonist is studio producer and fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) - a man with a religious conscience - although this is not something that is explored as in their more overtly philosophical movies.  Mannix spends his days and nights getting his movie stars out of illegal problems and massaging the press all to get his movies off the ground. This is contrasted with a job offer from Lockheed - a job that is grown up and in a real industry. But even as that job offer is made we know that Mannix won't take it, because he loves the industry that he's in, for all its deception, egomania and crazy hours.

TRAINWRECK

TRAINWRECK is just like every other Judd Apatow comedy. There's a character who's essentially a loveable gorgeous person but because of various issues has an infantile attachment to booze, weed and the sofa, so much so that said character almost loses the love of their life. But after a final act come to Jesus moment, wises up, realises that it's just fine to admit you want a conventional married life with kids and a mortgage and goes ahead and gets those things.  Because make no mistake, despite the frank sexual content, Judd Apatow comedies are very socially conservative, as well as being very formulaic and occasionally very funny.  The only difference in the case of TRAINWRECK is that the immature character is a woman - as written and played by Amy Schumer. She's the one who's getting drunk and having one night stands, and feels weird when her boyfriend says he loves her for the first time. And the guys in the movie - including a brilliantly cast LeBron James - are the ones who aren't afraid to talk about their feelings and are generous in bed and want to get married.  That the movie is formulaic doesn't matter because it's still brilliantly written and acted. It's laugh-out-loud funny, it's not afraid to take its lead character to some dark places, and there's real chemistry between the romantic leads.  

A BIGGER SPLASH - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Six

Director Luca Guadagnino (I AM LOVE) makes a triumphant return to our screens with his remake of Jacques Deray and Jean-Claude Carrière’s LA PISCINE.  One of my all-time favourite films is thus transformed into another superb erotically charged, wonderfully ambiguous thriller.

In this largely faithful remake, we are placed on a small Italian island and a rented villa where rockstar Marianne (Tilda Swinton) is recovering from a throat op that renders her almost unable to speak. She's evidently passionately and mutually in love with her boyfriend, a recovering addict photographer called Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts.) Their gloriously restful idyll is shattered when Marianne's ex Harry (Ralph Fiennes) turns up with his young daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson) in tow. 

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE - LFF 2013 - Day Eleven - Super late review!

So here's a super-late review of the gloriously weirdly wonderful romantic-comedy ONLY LOVERS LEFT LIVE from art house director Jim Jarmusch (THE LIMITS OF CONTROL).  I originally saw this flick at the London Film Festival, and then watched it again on Valentine's Day at the BFI.  I resisted reviewing it because sometimes the movies you truly love are the hardest to write about. Somehow it's easier to pinpoint exactly why you hate hate hate hate hate a movie and far harder to articulate that nebulous feeling of unashamed joy when you luxuriate in a movie that's uniquely wondrous. But, as this flick is still on a few arthouse screens in the UK, here goes....

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE tells the story of two ancient vampires called, in biblical simplicity, Adam and Eve.  When we meet them, they're living apart. She's in the richly decorated decadent Tangier, hanging out with her friend Marlowe (wry jokes about ghosting Shakespeare), and generally looking effortlessly punk-rock-chic.  He's hanging out in decaying Detroit, writing awesome moody music on self-consciously old-school tech, procured by his cluelessly half-baked muggle friend Ian.  

Adam's in a funk, and Eve comes to rescue him. What's funny and sweet about their relationship is that after all those centuries it has matured into a kind of docile middle-aged marriage and yet we still feel they're passionately in love with each other, and utterly good people who make each other better, which is ultimately the aim, right?  He shows her his decrepit post industrial city by night, dodging fan-girls, and all seems wistfully melancholy until Eve's little sister Ava turns up and throws everything into chaos.  There's a lot of fun to be had at Adam's deadpan response to Ava's hell-raising antics, and the key plot point is that it forces our Lovers onto a plane to Tangier, leaving their ethically sourced blood supply behind them.

Throughout all of this, Jim Jarmusch seems to be engaging us in an elegy for high culture.  Adam is weary with superficial modern culture - the source of his depression - and longs for a greater more glorious past.  Eve might try to snap him out of this, mocking Byron as an old bore, but there's a feeling that the times of great dandy fashion and music and writing is over and they are not just the Only Lovers Left Alive as in the only truly passionate people left, but the only Lovers of Art left in a modern world denuded of taste. To that end, Eve's little sister with her insatiable immediate and unfiltered appetites might remind us of modern pop-culture - superficial, insatiable, undiscriminating.  If Eve's reading Marlowe, then Ava's reading TMZ. 

All of which makes this movie sound rather pedagogic but it's only after I watched it, and rewatched it, and pondered it, that I came to this awareness. When you're in the movie, you're enjoying the wonderfully attenuated, chiselled beauty of Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, and utterly buying into their love story.  You're enjoying the wonderfully curated ramshackle houses that they live in.  You're glorying in the very British humour delivered in particular by Hiddleston and his interplay with Anton Yelchin as Ian. Plus, did I say that the music is just insanely wonderful?

Really, there's nothing not to like here.  And if you've found Jim Jarmusch inaccessible and wilfully obscure in the past (as I have) then please don't let that put you off this beautifully shot, deeply affecting film.

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language.  

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE played Cannes, Toronto and London 2013.  It was released in 2013 in Russia, Croatia, Switzerland, Japan and Germany. It was released earlier this year in Greece, South Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, Turkey, Belgium, France, the UK, Ireland, Romania, Poland, Taiwan, Denmark and Finland. It will be released in the USA on April 11th, in Australia on April 17th, in New Zealand on May 1st, and in Spain on June 27th.

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL

Wes Anderson's THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is a wondrous set of films within films and memories within memories of a world that never quite existed and yet has such a profound resonance with our own.  It begins with an earnest young girl making a pilgrimage to the memorial of an un-named writer (Tom Wilkinson) in an unspecified Mittel-Europische town. In a technical flourish we change aspect ratio and film stock - something that the unversed viewer will only subliminally mark as a shift in perspective - to see that writer as a middle-aged man, trying to give a po-faced TV interview about how he wrote his now famous work about The Grand Budapest Hotel.  He sits in a perfectly appointed 1970s apartment - every attention paid to the production and costume design - his focus disturbed by his mischievous son shooting a BB gun.  Echoes to THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS, and once again, a shift in perspective and memory.  We unravel another layer of wrapping paper to this box of magic and go back further to a Central European Soviet setting with that peculiarly gharish and soul-destroying imposition of dun-coloured formica upon the face of our beloved majestic wedding cake ostentatious Grand Budapest Hotel.  A now younger writer, played by Jude Law, comes across a mysterious vaguely exotic hotel guest (F Murray Abraham) who invites him to dinner to reminisce about the hotel's hey-day.  And at last, we are at the heart of the box of tricks, in the mythical country of Zubrowka, in the mythical hotel that established a kind of aristocratic service that only ever existed in the fictional Browns Hotel of Agatha Christie, or in today in the grand hotels of Venice, like the Danieli or the Gritti, that aspire to give us a sepia-tinted view of the past closer to Downton Abbey than reality.

The lynchpin of the story - the man who gives it its drive, its power, its comedy and its tragedy - is the hotel concierge Monsieur Gustave, played with delicious camp glee by Ralph Fiennes, in his funniest role to date. He squires the hotel's ageing guests, genuinely delighted in their attentions and gifts - a man so far removed from reality and yet utterly self-aware. The mechanics of the plot sees his M. Gustave inherit a priceless (fictional!) piece of art from Madame D., a wonderfully aged up decrepit Tilda Swinton, invoking the ire of her mean son Dmitri Desgoffe-und-Taxis (Adrienne Brody) and his henchman Jopling (Willem Defoe.) There follows a kind of caper movie as M. Gustave secures his prize, is thrown in jail, and conceives an escape with his fellow cellmate Ludwig (Harvey Keitel) and the legendary Society of the Crossed Keys led by Bill Murray.  All this, and I haven't even mentioned Zero yet!  Zero is M. Gustave's protege, a refugee from somewhere vague and oriental, with no-one to look after him and no papers, hence the name.  And it's the relationship between the camp, extravagant M. Gustave and this earnest, lost little boy that gives the brilliantly shining mirror of a movie its dark backing.  For in this fictional world, a fictional SS is about to arrest Zero for having incorrect papers, and when M. Gustave calls them "darling" and explains that they can't POSSIBLY arrest the Bellboy at The Grand Budapest Hotel, we see the clash between the hermetically sealed world of Wes Anderson and the dark realities of European history.  We see that behind the indulgently rich detailed creation of hotel liveries and scrumptious pastries in delicate ribbon-tied boxes there is a reality that mean and in antithesis to all the values of heroic friendship that M. Gustave embodies. And suddenly this fairytale world becomes even more tragic because we truly understand how fragile it is, and our minds are drawn back to its fate as a crumbling 1970s Soviet bloc bath-house. 

The standard take on Wes Anderson is that he always made these delightfully detailed, beautifully imagined confections whose only failing was their solipsism and similarity. But now, with THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, he has finally made an important film, whose profound subject matter lives up to the wonder of the detailed design indulgence.  But when you sit back and really think about it, his movies have always contrasted hermetically sealed children's worlds of wonders,and shown the tragedy inherent in confronting reality.  They are monuments to the infantile shock at the adult world.  RUSHMORE quite literally memorializes a school;  THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS is about returning home to mother in the shadow of incest, suicide, addiction and death; and MOONRISE KINGDOM uses the metaphor of Noah's flood to show our loss of innocence.  Parents are frail, love is desperate and doomed, children are overlooked and hurt.  Wes Anderson's worlds may be as scrupulously curated as a beloved Victorian doll's house, but they are dangerous places.  The only difference in THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is one of scale - the stakes here are higher - it is not just a single child losing innocence, but a whole European civilization caught on the pyre of a fascist war. 

What IS knew in GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is the continuous, raucous comedy, that is far more sweary and frank than much we have seen before in Wes Anderson's films, as well as the patchwork of overt homages to different film genres and directors. We have the chase scene involving the lawyer Deputy Kovacs (Jeff Goldblum) that feels like something out of THE THIRD MAN, and the jail break scene that's straight out of THE GREAT ESCAPE, as well as countless other nods to the films of Powell and Pressburger (especially Colonel Blimp).  The humour seems to be something taken from an Ealing Studios caper comedy starring Sir Alec Guinness, and overall, the movie has the air of something from wartime British cinema.  This together with the deft and deliberate handling of the differing aspect ratios, and the self-conscious use of miniature work and stop-motion animation, coupled with the over-arching theme of memory, mis-memory and world-building, makes THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, par excellence, a self-conscious movie about cinema.  It's a film that addresses full-on our need for escapism - what else is it that the hotel sells to its old-maid residents?  It's a film that sympathizes with that need, and delights in providing it, but which also knows the limits of that fiction - and that when confronted with violent reality - the confection inevitably melts away.

This is then, for all those reasons, Wes Anderson's most thoughtful, entertaining, technically accomplished and tragic film to date.  It's also, for those that care, the best movie of the year to date. 

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL premiered at Berlin 2014 and is currently on release in the Netherlands, France, Belarus, Belgium, Germany, Greece, Israel, Macedonia, Austria, the UK, Ireland and the USA. It opens on March 13th in the Czech Republic and Kazakhstan; on March 14th  in Canada and Lithuania; on March 20th in Hungary, Singapore and Slovakia; on March 21st in Spain, Norway, Romania and Sweden; on March 27th in Argentina and Denmark; on March 28th in Estonia and Poland; on April 3rd in Brazil and Chile, on April 10th in Australia, Italy, New Zealand and Portugal; on April 11th in Finland; on April 18th in Turkey and in June in Japan. 

THE ZERO THEOREM - LFF 2013 - Day Five

Aaargh! I wanted to love ZERO THEOREM, I really did! And I loved the satirical visual in-jokes, the rambling shambolic wonderfully inventive Terry Gilliam trademark production design. There were individual moments of genius - Tilda Swinton's cyber-psychologist starting to rap her advice when her programme gets buggy - Matt Damon as the evil totalitarian overload "Management" wearing suits that camouflage against his furnishings - singing pizza boxes - oh the list goes on!  But I just found it so hard to grab hold of the movie.  It kept slipping through my fingers.  I just didn't empathise with the protagonist, or get an idea of what the stakes were, or know who I wanted to win, or what winning even was. And without any kind of anchor, the visual tricks became tiresome, after a while.

The movie stars the charismatic Christoph Waltz against type as Qohen Leth - a kind of mad Uncle Fester, shaved and paranoid, living in a ramshackle old church, working for some kind of tyrannical company, waiting delusionally for the phone call that will give him the meaning of life. Into this world comes the fantasy girl Brainley (Melanie Thierry) - a kind of cyber-punk take on the "hooker with a heart of gold" trope - as well as what turns out to be Management's son (Lucas Hedges) - a smart-talking IT genius - both of whom have been sent to help Qohen Leth with his mission.  And what is that mission? To solve the Zero Theorem, proving all life as meaningless. 

That's about as much plot as we get.  What this movie is really about is satire on contemporary society - the paucity of modern relationships in a world of cyber-communication - the trashiness of online sex - the wince-inducingly naff adverts - the  dependence on therapists and pills - the alienation of atomised man. All this amongst visuals that give us a feeling of childlike whimsy and a society disappearing up its own proverbial. If only Richard Ayoade's dystopia in THE DOUBLE had had one percent of the imagination of this film. And if only this film had had one percent of the true emotion that Ayoade found at the heart of his story. Alas, it was not to be. 

THE ZERO THEOREM has a running time of 107 minutes.

THE ZERO THEOREM played Venice and London 2013 and opens in Italy on December 19th and in Russia on January 2nd. 

MOONRISE KINGDOM

Wes Anderson was, for me, a film-maker like Tim Burton.  A man with a distinct and beautiful visual style but whose tendency to rework the same themes, with the same actors, playing essentially the same characters, had begun to pall.  I particularly hated his last live action film, THE DARJEELING LIMITED, for its self-absorption, narcissism, rather exploitative attitude toward its Indian context, and ultimately for just being dull. With this in mind, I went into  MOONRISE KINGDOM with barely any hope that I would find the kind of film - at once whimsical and yet also profound (echoes of Tarsem Singh's THE FALL!) - that I had fallen in love with while watching THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS.

Well, my fears were groundless. MOONRISE KINGDOM is a simply wonderful film.  It is, of course, beautifully designed, rich in background detail, empathetically scored, and well-acted.  It affects a sweet yet knowing innocence - it's full of characters struggling to deal honestly with themselves and their loved ones - it deals with the darkest of emotions but it drips with hope - in friendship, in people doing the right thing - in family.  It's as if everything that began to feel so clichéd about Wes Anderson has finally been re-united with sincere emotion - and that this emotional authenticity has cut through the stagey-ness of the costumes, locations, soundtrack - and transformed a whimsical confection into something altogether more lasting, provocative and memorable.  It's as if Wes Anderson finally gave in and just told the story he always wanted to tell - about first love.

Suzy B (Kara Hayward) falls in love with an eagle-scout called Sam (Jared Gilman) one golden summer in 1965. The carefully hatched plan to leave together triggers a sequence of scrapes, jams, shenanigans, emotional revelations and deeds good and ill.  

Anderson perfectly captures that intensity of feeling when you're a kid and you feel nobody understands you apart from this one perfect person. Suzy's trying to escape her family - her kid brothers, her distant father (Bill Murray) and the mother (Frances McDormand) she suspects of sleeping with local policeman (Bruce Willis). Sam's an orphan and a misfit with a good heart. In one of the most affecting scenes, written in exact mimicry of how we speak at that age, Sam tells Suzy he loves her but she's talking nonsense for hating her parents. Suzy and Sam run away together.  They're at the age and living in the time when you're hold world fits into a suitcase, and you take your're favourite adventure stories rather than clothes. When you can place you're entire life into the hands of another person without second-guessing yourself.  

There's a deep vein of melancholy running through the film. Most of the adults seem desperately lonely, none moreso than Ed Norton's majestically decent scout leader.  The exception is the almost mechanical Social Services, played by Tilda Swinton with steely efficiency. But the kids are in their own world, where all things are possible, and where adults barely skim the surface, except as occasional constraints and only too rarely as facilitators. There's excitement and wonder and threat and crushing disappointment. As the movie builds to a pivotal final scene (superbly scored to Britten's Noye's Fludde) I realised that I deeply cared about these kids.  I wanted desperately to know what they happened to them, and not just to download the soundtrack they were listening to. It's been a long time, but we finally have a Wes Anderson movie that makes us feel as well as admire its surfaces.  

MOONRISE KINGDOM opened Cannes 2012. It is on release in France, Germany, Ireland, Turkey, the UK and he USA. It opens next weekend in Belgium, Iceland, Hungary and the Netherlands. It opens on June 6th in Sweden, on June 8th in Norway, on June 15th in Greece and Spain, on June 21st in Russia, on June 2nd in Portugal and Lithuania, on August 16th in Slovenia and Argentina and on August 30th in New Zealand.

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.