Complicated thoughts on ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER*****

Paul Thomas Anderson - PUNCH DRUNK LOVE, THERE WILL BE BLOOD, THE MASTER, INHERENT VICE..... a master film-maker whose film I admire and adore. But ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER was a painful watch, impacted by who I am and the times we live in. As a woman of colour and second generation immigrant living in a place where lampposts are papered with St George's flags, I could not reconcile enjoying a comedy caper juxtaposed with a hyper-real depiction of undocumented migrants fearing for their lives in a sanctuary city.  In the end, I spent much of the film wondering why all of the uniformly gushing reviews had not commented on this, or found it problematic. I felt sad about racism as depicted in this film and found in my daily life. And sad that every single mainstream film reviewer in the UK is white. Maybe in a decade, if liberal democracy wins, I will be able to watch this film on its own terms. But right now, it just feels like a white guy making a funny film using immigrant pain as a backdrop. Even worse, a hispanic saviour bailing out a white fuckwit.  No. Just no.

The film is about an ex radical left terrorist (Leonardo Di Caprio) who, fifteen years later, is a stoner dad living under an alias with his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti). His old white supremacist antagonist (Sean Penn) is trying to gain access to an elite group of racist vigilantes. In order to join he has to clean up his past, not least his sexual infatuation with the teenager's mother, a black terrorist called Perfidia Beverly Hills.  So the racist kidnaps the daughter. There are a bunch of car chases and shoot outs. The end.

On a technical level, this is, of course, a superb film, and maybe even the film of the year. PTA and his DP Michael Bauman shoot the film in Vistavision, so it looks fantastic and deserves to be seen on the best screen you can find. PTA crafts not one but two truly unique and tense car chases - the first in a prologue that has a getaway car scythe through traffic centrally rather than going around the side onto pavements - the second using a rolling hilly landscape to obscure and reveal the cars chasing each other.   And no-one unfurls his camera through an ever deeper set like PTA. There's a bravura set piece where we move from a storefront in a sanctuary city through a house and into an underground hideout where migrants are having to escape through a tunnel to a church. Impeccable film-making.

And then there's Jonny Greenwood's stunning score that moves from genre to genre, Greenwood often playing his own wide set of obscure musical instruments. At times I felt like the score was the only thing holding the film together. Kudos also to the production and costume designers who manage to deliberately confuse the viewer as to when the film is set.  Are we in the 70s, when US domestic terrorism from anti-capitalist militants was at its height? Or is this film contemporary? The answer is both, and that's handled very elegantly.

The performances are more complex to review. Sean Penn is mesmerising as a white supremacist police officer but it's a performance that is deliberately cartoonish. I actually found his sidekick, played straight, far more terrifying. Leonardo Di Caprio is funny, but derivative, playing his character as Lebowski. Or maybe it's just lazy writing. Benicio Del Toro plays himself - affable, cool, lowkey hilarious.  Regina Hall is stunning as an ex terrorist now trying to help out Di Caprio's teenage daughter. But it's like she's in a totally different film.

And this brings us into the inherent incoherence of the film. Half of it is played deadly straight and completely terrifies us.  That's the film containing Regina Hall and the migrants and the military sidekick interrogating high school kids. That's a great film. That's the film I wanted. And then there's a comedy caper full of cartoonish characters that I ultimately did not give a shit about. Leonardo Di Caprio's character is caught in the middle of this incoherence. Funny yes. But do I care about him as a father?  Do I invest in his relationship with daughter? No.  Because genre is working to undermine him.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER has a running time of 166 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

PLANE***

PLANE ain't nothing but a good, stupid time.  It's just an honest silly action film, and feels no shame in that.  Gerard Butler stars as Brodie Torrance which should tell you everything you need to know about the film. He's ex-RAF, a widower, proudly Scottish, and now flies commercial jets. He just needs to get the final bunch of passengers to Tokyo and get home to his teenage daughter, COMMANDO style.  But bad weather forces an emergency landing on an island that happens to be run by TROPIC THUNDER style armed-to-the-nuts ransoming rebels.  The good news is that Brodie, while ageing and out of breath, still has moves, and he's also transporting a French Foreign legion soldier wanted for murder - Mike Colter aka Luke Cage aka the predictable action hero with a heart.  So the two of them set about keeping the passengers safe until Tony Goldwyn's airline exec's private rescue mercenaries show up.

The action set pieces are great fun as is Butler's brand of low-key smarmy humour. I like that they acknowledge he's human.  He gets puffed out after fighting off a rebel in a telephone exchange.  When he's succeeded in landing the plane at the end he takes a moment just to let the adrenaline run down and to have a bit of a manly cry.  I also love  how they film the plane. There's a really great shot at the end where they frame it from the perspective of the top of the fin, perfectly symmetrical. And I'm not going to lie. Under direction from Jean Froicois Richet (MESRINE), I was seriously stressed out in the final set-piece, totally involved in whether the plane would make it.  So mock it all you like, this film may be hokey, but it works!

PLANE has a running time of 107 minutes and is rated R. It is on global release.

KING RICHARD***** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 10

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green's KING RICHARD is an uproarious, crowd-pleasing, but not completely hagiographical biopic of Richard Williams: coach and father of Venus and Serena. The film succeeds because of a tightly structured and powerful script from first-time screenwriter Zach Baylin. It also benefits from powerhouse performances from Will Smith in the title role (taken as read) and scene-stealing Aunjanue Ellis as Richard's wife Brandi. What emerges is a complicated picture of a complicated and imperfect family that somehow, against all odds, raised a Wimbledon winner AND a GOAT. 

As the film opens, Richard is trying to persuade various rich tennis coaches to invest in his daughters, who he has been raising according to his programme to create prodigies. He works them hard, both in tennis and school, because he wants them to avoid being mired in poverty and drugs like the rest of Compton. The threat of violence is ever-present.  Richard tells us how he was beaten up by white men as a kid. His eldest daughter is threatened by local gangs (foreshadowing her real life tragic murder).  We see Rodney King being beaten up on TV. So Richard's desire to create champions is commercial and callous. He clearly states it could've been any sport and that he literally bred the girls for greatness. But at a very basic level, it's not about money but sheer survival. 

Which is not to say that Richard is perfect. He's clearly egotistical, stubborn, a self-publicist and a tyrant. He drives not one but two coaches mad. He drives his wife Brandi mad. And in one of the most powerful moments of the film's second half, she absolutely lets him have it with details of his life that made the audience both gasp and applaud her.  But at the end of the day, whatever he did worked.

That said, it wasn't actually just what HE did. And this film cleverly both sets up the self-made myth of King Richard before deconstructing it. Brandi powerfully argues that SHE was AS influential in raising and indeed coaching the girls as HE was, and provides a powerful role model of a hard-working black woman. As a result, this film partly cuts off one of the criticisms that was brewing in my mind as I watched it: that for a film about two female tennis stars, their three sisters, and their mum, it was kinda weird to centre the only man in the story.  The entire point is that this is what Richard does, and what the women have to fight against. 

I can't say enough about how joyous this film was to watch in a packed auditorium.  Every argument, every tennis success, every tense game had us all on the edge of our seats. The film left me with an even deeper understanding of, and admiration for, these iconic sportswomen and everything that they have achieved.

KING RICHARD has a running time of 138 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film played Telluride and the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released on Netflix on November 19th. 

MARK FELT: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE

Director Peter Landesman (the superb JFK assassination film - PARKLAND) returns to iconic American history with this character study cum procedural of how Mark Felt - a 30 year veteran of the FBI - helped the Washington Post journalists Woodward and Bernstein expose the White House's involvement in the Watergate robbery and so triggered the resignation of Richard Nixon.

The resulting film is a handsomely shot and acted, compelling drama about a loyal man pushed to protect the integrity of his institution at great personal risk.  That said, he is also shown overstepping the mark in illegally wiretapping in pursuit of a terrorist group.  But overall, we are rightly meant to see Mark Felt as a hero. I loved the shooting style - Washington as a grey town full of grey men in grey suits.  I loved the subtle power plays - men overlooked for promotion - the flexing of political muscle. And I loved that Landesman allowed Felt to look compromised. Yes, he is doing something noble, but is there also a tinge of revenge against the man who got the job he wanted? This is truly nuanced and intelligent film-making and a must-see for all Watergate obsessives. 

MARK FELT: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE has a running time of 103 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film played Toronto 2017 and opened that year. 

Random DVD Round-Up - DIVERGENT

DIVERGENT. Hmmm. What to say about this film, based on a wildly successful set of Young Adult books by Veronica Roth which I have not read, and which from the look of this film are unfortunate enough to sit in the shadow of THE HUNGER GAMES. To wit, we are in an American dystopian future with people oppressed by some kind of self-elected elite.  Our plucky heroine, Tris (Shailene Woodley - THE DESCENDANTS) is much like Katniss, someone of unusual talent and resourcefulness competing in a a kind of martial game to break through into some kind of better future.  In this case, the citizens of the world are categorised by their dominant personality trait. Tris, in true Harry Potter style, sits uneasily across the thresholds and opts to leave her parents 'house' Abnegation for Dauntless, while her brother opts for the Erudites. What follows are training challenges that play out much like Games, and a good dose of romance with the enigmatic but hot "Four" (Theo James).  Naturally, Tris hooks up with a bunch of the least promising trainees, and guess what, they eventually come out on top after banding together and being nice. Ultimately there is some kind of showdown in the first strike in a civil war between the factions.  There's meant to be a hugely emotional moment but at this point I was so numb to it, it floated right by me. I just didn't care about the people, the fight, and the whole movie felt like a pale shadow of HUNGER GAMES.  Maybe that's unfair - maybe if I'd seen or read Divergent first I wouldn't have felt so turned off. But it is what it is.  Shailene Woodley is a great actress but somehow a soupy romance with Four plays far more simplistically than the complex triangle comprised by political exigency in THE HUNGER GAMES.  Or maybe it's because THE HUNGER GAMES pushes the dystopian fantasy farther and crazier - Effie Trinket, I'm looking at you - or that it's satire on modern pop culture is more biting.  Whatever the reason, DIVERGENT feels very, very thin by comparison.  

DIVERGENT has a running time of 139 minutes and is rated PG-13. It is available to rent and own in most countries. It opens in China on September 8th.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 3 - CONVICTION

Another film fest and another disappointing, soupy Oscar-bait flick starring Hilary Swank. She plays Betty Anne Waters, a middle-aged mother who put herself through her GED, college and then law school in order to represent her brother and over-turn his murder conviction. It's a two hour film that reads like a police/court procedural, where plucky little Betty Ann digs out evidence and outs corruption with her can-do, no-nonsense attitude. She has a best-friend with a heart of gold (Minnie Driver) and understanding teenage kids with hearts of gold, and a New York injustice-fighter (Peter Gallacher) with a heart of gold. It's all so bloody banal and twee and Hallmark TV afternoon movie I wondered what the frack it was doing in a Film Festival. Neither Tony Goldwyn's direction nor Pamela Gray's script ever move beyond hammy cliche. The only, only things elevating this movie beyond utter mediocrity are a small cameo from Juliette Lewis, as usual, typecast as a skank, and a scene-stealing role for Sam Rockwell as the charismatic incarcerated brother. Avoid at all costs.

CONVICTION played Toronto 2010 and is on release in the US. It opens in Belgium on December 1st, in Germany on February 24th 2011 and in the Netherlands on March 24th.