THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE aka ANN LEE* - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Official Competition

Elvis Costello once wrote a song called “All This Useless Beauty”: an apt description of THE BRUTALIST co-writer and producer, Mona Fastvold’s new film, THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE.  It’s not that it’s badly put together. Indeed, the cinematography, costume and production design are rather handsome.  (Not that you can appreciate the cinematography on the Curzon Mayfair’s cream-crackered projector.). Fastvold is clearly a deeply skilled film-maker and has a sure and unique visual style and the courage to do something really audacious in putting music and movement at the heart of the film. Daniel Blumberg’s score takes inspiration from actual Shaker folk music and the choreography of the cult sect shaking and beating their chests to the music is genuinely mesmerising. In the words of my husband, if this film had been a thirty-minute piece of experimenta mashing up the dance numbers it would have been a banger.

But no. What we have here is the Wikipedia entry for Ann Lee rendered as a film. Born in 18th century Manchester in a Quaker community she joins a sect known for its “shaking”.  She loses four children in infancy, is persecuted for her faith, and develops the belief that she is literally the second coming of Christ.  She takes her followers to New York and eventually founds a religious community in the middle of Bumblefuck.  She continues to be prosecuted for refusing to take sides in the American War of Independence, then dies.

Fastvold and Brady Corbet’s script has no interest in interrogating any of Ann Lee’s religious claims and shows no interest in the interiority of any of the characters.  The utter sincerity of the film shocked me. It read like a propaganda piece for a cult.  Every now and then there would be flickers of potential interest: ooh, is the husband a sado-masochist?! Is the brother gay?! Is Ann a eunuch?! But no.  Nothing so prurient or interesting.  Ann is just taken as what she is: a pioneering female religious leader with a decent following of her fellow nutters.  Indeed she really is a saint according to this film.  Observe the one liner where she shames slave traders, or the other one liner where her people have the condescension to learn woodworking from the First Nations. She must be a good person, right?

I just feel really sad that some really talented film-makers got together and harnessed all of their earnest intentions to create such an utterly uncurious and irrelevant film. What a waste.

ANN LEE has a running time of 137 minutes.  It played Venice, Toronto and London. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

FANTASTIC FOUR (2015)

One gets the feeling that FOX have never really known who to handle the Fantastic Four IP, and with any luck the poor performance of this film will prevent a sequel and allow the rights to revert back to Marvel. We've had the broadly inoffensive but unmemorable 2005 and 2007 outings starring Ioan Gruffud, a pre-Cap Chris Evans and Jessica Alba.  And now we get a reboot of actively poor quality starring a much younger cast.   This causes as many problems as it solves - sure, the movie might appeal to a younger demographic but as a result the Four meet in a kind of super-nerd school that gives the movie a feeling of ripping of the X-MEN reboot.  Worst of all, the writer-director Josh Trank massively fell out with the studio and disowned the final 90 minute cut, and the resulting film feels incoherent in its editing.

Anyways, back to basics. The movie kicks of with twenty minutes of tedious pre-amble in which a geeky young Reed Richards befriends Ben Grimm and the two work on building a teleportation machine only to be mocked by teachers and students alike. Fast forward to their late teens and Reed (Miles Teller0 and Grimm (Jamie Bell) are recruited by Franklyn Storm (Reg E Caffey) to join his well-funded research org.  They hook up with Johnny and Sue Storm (Michael B Jordan and Kate Mara) as well as the rebellious Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell) and create the transportation device.  Pissed off that pro scientists will get to pilot it, they decide to take the ship out to Planet Zero, shit hits the fan, they get their superpowers and Doom becomes a destructive comic book villain.  Thereafter we get a kind of Hulk goes to Latin America to find his soul interlude and the inevitable showdown.  

The actors are all decent, so why does this movie suck? A hammy derivative script, hamstrung by bad editing and shitty special FX. Move along, there's nothing to see here. 

FANTASTIC FOUR is on general release. It has a running time of 100 minutes and is available to rent and own.

AS I LAY DYING - LFF 2013 - Preview

As the anticipation builds for the London Film Festival, you may find that a lot of the obvious hot tickets are already sold out. So I thought I'd give a shout out to some of the more under the radar movies that you can still buy tickets for, here, at the time of writing.

James Franco's directorial début AS I LAY DYING is just such a film.  The actor, artist and writer has made his own adaptation of William Faulkner's novel, and brought it to screen with a starry cast and an earnest fidelity to the source material.  It's the tale of a family of poor farmers in the American South of the early twentieth century.  This may be a country of motor cars, but their existence remains one of poverty, ignorance and superstition.  The dying mother's last wish is to be buried in the town of Jefferson, and much of the movie chronicles the physical and emotional toll that the journey to Jefferson, decaying body in tow, has on her husband and children.  

Anse, her husband, is staunch and strict, burdened with rotting teeth and selfish needs. His portrayal by Tim Blake Nelson begins comic - a spoof of Cletus the Slack Jawed Yokel, complete with rotting teeth - but becomes more sinister as the movie progresses.  The three grown sons - Darl, Jewel and Cash - are plagued by doubts, conflicted desires and take the physical and mental toll worst.  I'm not sure if James Franco ever really convinces as the mentally fragile Darl, but Logan Marshall-Green is devastatingly moving as Jewel  - the son who doesn't agree with the journey but can't quit it either.  And Jim Parrick, as Cash, is as close as we get to a sympathetic everyman in this story.  Meanwhile, kid brother Vardaman, seems the most slippery, and sister Dewey Dell (Alma O'Reilly) is hiding a secret that contributes to Darl's ultimate fall. 

When the movie works, it works because it faithfully transcribes Faulkner's haunting, slippery style.  There's a heavy use of voiceover and different, sometimes misleading, points of view.  This is not a movie you should watch if you don't like hearing peasants speak in vaguely pretentious terms of life and death.  I suppose one could argue that there are things that work on the page that seem absurd on the screen, I'm not sure how one could try to translate Faulkner, and his style, without this device.  Where I think the movie is in more troubling territory is when Franco makes a stylistic choice that has nothing to do with Faulkner. Most notably, he uses a split screen, showing two characters from different angles, sometimes engaged in conversation with each other, at other times with a separate conversation overlaid on the audio track. Maybe Franco's trying to make a point about how disconnected the family is? Either way, it's an alienating device for the audience, that undermines the intimacy that the voiceover is trying to create. 

Overall, AS I LAY DYING is still perhaps the most faithful adaptation of Faulkner's novel as you're likely to see, and has moments of visual beauty - and in Logan Marshall-Green's performance - great strength.  It's not always successful, but at least Franco's taking chances. 

AS I LAY DYING has a running time of 110 minutes and is rated R in the USA.   The movie played Cannes 2013 and will play London 2013.  It will be released in Portugal on October 10th 2013. It will be available as VOD in the USA on October 22nd and on DVD on November 5th. It will open in the Netherlands on November 21st. 

Miguel Arteta retrospective - THE GOOD GIRL

The only good thing to have come out of my watching YOUTH IN REVOLT is that it prompted me to look back at the career of director Miguel Arteta. It turns out the last feature he directed was way back in 2002 - the bleak tragicomedy THE GOOD GIRL. I really enjoyed THE GOOD GIRL, not least because I was pleasantly surprised that Jennifer Aniston would have the balls to play such an equivocal and drab character. I was even more surprised at how convincing she was in the role. The film garnered a lot of critical praise, and I guess its surprising that Arteta took so long to get back into features. It's slightly less surprising that Jennifer Aniston has drifted back toward the light and cheery comedy fare that made her name.

Anyways, back to the matter under consideration. THE GOOD GIRL is the story of a supermarket check-out girl called Justine (Aniston) who is married to a good-hearted but dull pot-head (John C Reilly). For no better reason than boredom, she starts an affair with a slightly creepily obsessive college drop-out with Catcher in the Rye delusions (Jake Gyllenhaal). Things get even more complicated when her husband's even more creepy best mate (Tim Blake Nelson) attempts to blackmail her with this knowledge.

What I really love about this film is that while the situation may be contrived, and some of the characters exaggerated (particularly Zooey Deschanel's brilliantly subversive store assistant), the emotional conflicts ring true. Because, at its core, this is a film about a typical housewife who finds herself settling for less than she had hoped for, and needs to decide where the balance lies between selfishly pursuing her happiness and disappointing those that she does, on some residual level, love. And it's about a woman wondering whether settling is really as bad as she thought itm might have been. The great thing is that Justine isn't just a plain vanilla good girl. She is fundamentally decent but does not some really questionable shit and makes some terrible decisions. It's rare to see such a realistic and nuanced character study outside of European art cinema.

If you haven't seen THE GOOD GIRL, don't be put off by YOUTH IN REVOLT. This is a great little black comedy that's well-acted, intelligent and interesting to watch.

THE GOOD GIRL was released in 2002 and is available on DVD.

Ali D comments on THE INCREDIBLE HULK...

THE INCREDIBLE HULK - yet another disappointing summer blockbuster

I've been known to read a comic or two in my time but I never cared much for HULK. The story was just too thin: repressed scientist's arrogance backfires when his own gamma bomb explodes, irradiates him, turning him into his suppressed alter-ego - a seething, angry giant. I mean, that's pretty much it. Yes, there's a weak romance with fellow scientist Betty Ross, and yes, the Hulk is hunted down by her father General Ross, and yes there's an even more fucked up mutant enemy, The Abomination........But Hulk never had the psychological complexity of Batman or the sheer exuberant fun of Tony Stark.

Zak Penn and Ed Norton's script for the new HULK feature shoots itself in the foot by collapsing the whole origin story into the opening credits. What this means is that all we have left for the two hour run-time is the following.....

Bruce Banner hides out in Brazil.

Bruce Banner gets chased by US military: turns into Hulk.

Bruce Banner hides out in Culver City.

Bruce Banner gets chased by US military: turns into Hulk.

Bruce Banner hides out in New York City.

Bruce Banner gets chased by US military: turns into Hulk.

Bruce Banner hides out in Canada.........

This is not very interesting. It's especially not interesting because the ludicrously over-worked CGI Hulk looks nothing like Ed Norton. So, even though Norton gives a sympathetic turn as Banner, I didn't care what happened to him as Hulk. Contrast this with Peter Jackson's KING KONG. Thanks to deft motion capture and some lovely scenes between Kong and Ann Darrow I really cared when Kong was being attacked by the military.

But let's end on a positive note. This movie is not a complete failure. Tim Roth chews up the scenery and actually has some fun as Hulk's enemy, Emile Blonsky. Louis Leterrier puts in some stunning aerial photography of the Brazilian favelas and he certainly knows better than Jon Favreau how to direct an action scene. And the movie nicely sets us up for an AVENGERS movie, wherein the dull mediocrity of THE INCREDIBLE HULK will hopefully be leavened by the far from perfect but still much more entertaining spirit of IRON MAN.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK opens this weekend in the UK, the US, Australia, Greece, Hungary, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Brazil, Estonia, Finland, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Turkey. It opens next weekend in Egypt, Italy, Argentina, the Netehrlands, Iceland and Spain. It opens on June 26th in Belgium and Denmark; on July 3rd in Israel; on July 10th in Germany; on July 23rd in France and on August 1st in Japan.

THE MOGULS/THE AMATEURS - promises kookiness, delivers the commonplace

THE MOGULS is a feel-good comedy about a bunch of small-town losers who band together to make a feature-length porno and thus achieve something with their lives. The comedy relies on having a bunch of ordinary schmucks sitting around mama's house eating jell-o talking about lesbian sex. This appealed to my juvenile sense of humour for around half an hour and then I got mildly annoyed that the movie was turning out to be just another schmaltzy feel-good losers-do-well movie. It's like THE FULL MONTY but with tanned Hollywood stars - not least Jeff Bridges, William Fichtner, Tim Blake-Nelson and Ted Danson - less profundity and less jokes. In fact there is only one cast iron joke. The Fichtner character asks the Bridges character for a job on the movie - not too much work - just so he can stand around and watch stuff happen. Bridges makes him the Executive Producer. Apart from that, it's all pretty run-of-the-mill and I feel vaguely disappointed that in this day and age a closeted homosexual is still deemed comic fodder. So this is probably a movie to miss, or at most rent on DVD.

THE MOGULS went on limited release in the UK yesterday. It is known as THE AMATEURS in the US.

THE BIG WHITE - so bad, it went passed cult-status and back to bad

What did I do when I wasn't laughing at alleged black-comedy THE BIG WHITE? 1. I wondered how it could be that British director Mark Mylod could come up with such hysterical stuff for TV (Shameless, The Royle Family) but on the big screen had saddled us with cinematic stinkers such as ALI G IN DA HOUSE. 2. I applauded Robin Williams for trying to do something a bit left-field. 3. I wondered whether the Coen Brothers were going to sue script-writer Collin Friessen for biting their style so badly. Seriously, not only does he set this "comedy" in Fargo-like snow-drenched nowheres-ville, but he tries to replicate all those eccentric quirky characters. The casting director even managed to con Tim Blake Nelson and Holly Hunter into participating. 4. I wondered if Collin Friessen's directorial effort FARM SLUTS was available on DVD, and if so, whether or not it would be more entertaining that this shambolic enterprise. I actually looked up FARM SLUTS on the internet while I was waiting for England to win the Third Test match. The guidance warned that it contained "partial nudity, language and untimely random acts of perversion." I sadly have to report that FARM SLUTS was probably even less funny than THE BIG WHITE and certainly had no other entertainment-related merits. So, overall, the whole BIG WHITE experience was fairly disappointing.

THE BIG WHITE got an indicatively small release in the US at the fag-end of 2005 and is now on release in the UK. The Germans get the pox on April 20th 2006, and the Austrians on June 2nd 2006.