HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1***

I was surprised to find myself rather enjoying the first instalment of Kevin Costner's Horizon saga.  It came to our screens freighted with controversy.  Costner had apparently bilked out of the wildly popular Yellowstone TV show to make his passion project, enduring a messy divorce in the process.  Much like Frances Ford Coppola's MEGALOPOLIS, early feedback was that HORIZON was a bloated, boring, self-indulgent, intentionally regressive film.

To speak to the latter accusation, this film is indeed wilfully old-fashioned but in a way that I appreciate. It's a good old-fashioned Western where men are men (good or evil) and women are either loving home-makers or hookers with a heart of gold. This film is not interested in character nuance.  But it's not entirely without modern concerns: note that whether men are good or evil comes down to whether they have an accommodative or antagonistic attitude toward Native Americans.  And while there's probably a PHD to be written on how these issues are dealt with in Yellowstone and Horizon, I think Costner has probably benefited from exposure to the former. 

The problem with the film isn't so much its political attitude as its format. This isn't a film with a beginning middle and end so much as a three hour prequel that establishes character. Heck, the real baddie doesn't even show up except in a final montage sequence setting up the second instalment. All of which makes me believe that this multi-film cinema project would have played far better as a TV miniseries where a patient three-episode build-up would have been better tolerated. Instead, what Costner got was a box office failure that has condemned the second film to a streaming roll-out anyway.

And what of this instalment?  I very much liked Sienna Miller as the earnest widowed housewife who begins a romance with Sam Worthington's equally earnest military man.  That's strand one of the film, and the closest set of characters to the newly established town of Horizon. In the film's second strand Kevin Costner is in Montana, hooking up with Abbey Miller implausibly bleach blonde sex worker.  It was nice to see Jena Malone back on screen in this strand. In the final strand, it was also lovely to see Luke Wilson back on screen as the leader of a wagon train, also making its way to Horizon. In all three segments, the cinematography was lovely. I will indeed watch the sequel.There is an honest joy in seeing the landscapes of the Wild West so lovingly portrayed on screen.

HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1 is rated R, has a running time of 181 minutes, and is available to rent and own.

THE POWER OF THE DOG***** - BFI London Film Festival - Day 6

Jane Campion returns to the Festival with her breathtaking and slippery adaptation of Thomas Savage's novel.  The film is set in Montana in the 1920s and cinematographer  Ari Wegner (TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG) creates landscapes so stunning that I really hope she wins awards for this work. I also implore you to try and see this film on the largest screen you can find when Netflix puts it out on limited release rather than waiting to watch it at home.

The movie stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a cattle rancher called Phil Burbank.  When we meet him he's a nasty homophobic misogynistic bully who strides around unwashed and intimidating all and sundry. But as the movie enters its second hour we learn that Phil has many layers and our understanding of him deepens and softens. 

The target of Phil's bullying behaviour are his soft-hearted and plain-talking brother George's new wife Rose (played by real life couple Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst). When we meet Rose she is a timid lonely widow, running a small rooming house alongside her teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Both Rose and Peter are mocked by Phil, but his brother George genuinely falls for her and takes her to live in a dark brooding grand house.  Rose is intimidated by Phil most of all, but also by George's fancy friends and parents. Dunst breaks our heart with her portrait of a woman brought to ruin by intimidation.

It's absolutely key that we believe in her ruin because that becomes the motivating point of the plot - both her reactions to and the motives of Phil and her son Peter and the relationship they form when he come home from school. What I love about the film is that even as we reach the final fifteen minutes it could go one of many ways depending on our interpretation of each character's feelings and character. I can honestly say that I was genuinely surprised by the outcome, but that when I saw it, I felt it was authentic and had been properly established in prior scenes. In other words, Jane Campion is playing fair with us.

Overall, THE POWER OF THE DOG is just a stunning film - beautifully written, scored, acted, filmed - the pacing perfection and the unfolding mystery gripping. 

THE POWER OF THE DOG is rated R and has a running time of 125 minutes. The film played Venice, Toronto and London 2021. It will be released on Netflix on December 1st.

THE HARDER THEY FALL*** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Opening Night Gala

Jeymes Samuel's assured debut feature is a pastiche of Tarantino pastiching Leone, except with a largely black cast centring real black outlaws.  There's a joyous energy from seeing that kind of representation, and I respect Samuel for using his big stars - Idris Elba and Regina King - sparingly, so that we can see that next generation of talent shining through.  Special praise has to go to Danielle Deadwyler's queer outlaw Cuffee, who I would argue is the true hero of the piece, and RJ Cyler who steals every scene he's in as the arrogant, quick-draw outlaw Jim Beckworth.  Samuel also has an absolutely masterly touch when it comes to pairing action set pieces with iconic black music from around the world.  It comes as no surprise to learn that he's a multi-hyphenate talent aka The Bullits, who as well as recording under his own name, acts as a music advisor on others' films.

So what's it all about? In a prologue we see our antagonist, Idris Elba's Rufus Buck, brutally murder young Nat Love's mother and father. And so for the body of the film we are basically deep in Inigo Montoya territory ("you killed my father, prepare to die!") with Love's gang facing down Buck's gang in a series of Mexican standoffs and shootouts. There's a loosely alluded-to sub-plot whereby Buck has actually stolen all the money to finance a black-owned town called Redwood City as a safe space for black people, but he needs more money because white people are about to incorporate the state and will not honour their claims.  But this isn't really prosecuted as a plot. Rather, Samuel is more interested in cheap visual gags whereby a town full of whites is literally painted white and there's a subtitle that says "it's a really white town".

So that's the level we're on here - knowing, well-informed site gags and verbal humour.  As a result, because the film isn't trying to do something more profound, and one shoot out follows another, I did get a bit bored in between the flashes of humour. The set pieces are great - particularly one that happens on a train - but so many.  Are we gonna listen to yet another character ponderously explain their backstory before torturing another? And this brings me to a more profound question. I find it fascinating that Samuel wants to refocus our attention on real black outlaws but then doesn't really want to respect their actual stories and historical truths.  He just bunches them altogether rather arbitrarily into rival gangs and gives them a paper thin motive for their black-on-black violence. I get that it must be a liberating choice not to have to define the characters by their attitudes to mainstream white society, but it did make me uncomfortable to see a film where black people shoot other black people and leave the oppressive whites largely unmenaced.

THE HARDER THEY FALL has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated R.  The film had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival and will be released on Netflix on November 3rd.

NOMADLAND

NOMADLAND is a truly beautiful, affecting and rightly award-winning film featuring a stunning performance from Frances McDormand. She plays a 60 something woman called Fern, caught like so many of her generation with insufficient savings to retire in the wake of the Global Finacial Crisis, and no job when the town's factory closes down.  No longer able to afford a home, Fern becomes a Nomad - a person living in their mobile home, driving from town to town looking for seasonal work, forming a bond of kinship with other nomads on the trail.

I had no idea that modern day Nomads existed, but their life is depicted here as a melancholy one. Aside from the financial stress and alienation from family members still living a conventional life, there seems to be the pervasive discussion of death.  Sickness has to be born without financial support or maybe even familial support. The people here are either grieving for the sick or dealing with sickness and death themselves - one describes movingly the impulse to suicide.

And yet there is much to be said for the community that the Nomads form. There's mutual support, care, teaching and companionship as they meet and part and meet again. It's interesting to see that while Fern's friend (David Strathairn) does choose a sedentary life when offered the chance, the choice is not so straightforward for Fern. There's a kind of impressive endurance and nobility to a life lived away from the constraints of the small town dominated by a single employer.

The nobility and resilience is expressed in Frances McDormand's moving and vulnerable performance as Fern as well as the real life Nomads she meets.  Writer-director Chloe Zhao's decision to foreground the real community, and to straddle the line between fact and fiction is an inspired one. It affords the marginalised visibility and dignity and McDormand is the perfect entry into that world given her empathy and curiosity as a performer. 

But I would also give special credit to cinematographer Joshua James Richard's beautiful depiction of the landscapes in which the Nomads live. The endless shifting-coloured sky - the feeling of fresh air and expanse. Maybe it's because I've effectively been at home for a year but I can see the appeal of a life of apparent freedom, if hardship, as so eloquently described by Nomad activist Bob Wells. 

NOMADLAND is rated R and has a running time of 107 minutes. It played Telluride, Toronto, Venice and London 2020.  It was relased in the USA in February and will be released in the UK on April 30th.

HOSTILES - Late late review

Writer-director Scott Cooper (CRAZY HEART, BLACK MASS) returns to our screens with a deeply affecting, beautifully shot and acted western, penned by Donald Stewart, who scripted the The Hunt For Red October.  The story is set in 1892.  A tortured civil war hero called Blocker (Christian Bale - superb) has spent the intervening period slaughtering Native Americans.  And then, he's given a galling order, to accompany a dying Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) across the country to Montana so that he can die in his native land in Montana. And so what we get is  road trip of sorts, south to north through the most magisterial but hostile landscape. This hostility is displayed in a prologue that sees a settler called Rosalie (Rosamund Pike) lose her entire family in a vicious Comanche raid.  When Blocker rescues her, they and the Cheyenne come together in mutual defense against the Comanche who are tracking them. So who is truly hostile to whom? 

As the movie opens it's clearly the white people who are hostile to the Cheyenne. But Rosalie's desperate grief (Pike really goes for it in a career best performance) prompts an act of kindness from the Cheyenne and after that a kind of uneasy truce emerges that builds towards genuine respect and a willingness to die to defend the Other. Of course this comes at the expense of making villains out of the Comanche.  There's no real attempt to understand why they have turned to such violence, except that we know what Blocker and his ilk have done in the past. And so we end up getting evil "red indians".

Despite this mis-step I really loved this film.  Christian Bale's portrays a really complex tortured man mostly through his physical presence and facial expressions. Pike's transformation from bordering-mentally ill grieving woman to fierce warrior is stunning. Masanobu Takayanagi's cinematography is breath-taking and I loved seeing the American landscape change as we move from south to north. And last but not least, Max Richter's score is heart-breakingly beautiful. I felt that I had come to love these characters and care deeply about their future. And was held on the edge of my seat to the end of the very final scene - one that affected me profoundly.  

HOSTILES is rated R and has a running time of 134 minutes. It was released at the end of 2017 and is now available to rent and own. 

SWEET COUNTRY - Day 9 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

SWEET COUNTRY is a film of power and beauty that knocked me for six and took a while to digest. It stands as one of the best films of this year's LFF, and certainly one of the most important.  It contains a unique directorial vision, a unique true story, and provocative questions for all of us at this time of heightened fear of the Other.

The film is set in post-World War One Central Australia, on a series of small cattle farms. The hero is an aboriginal cattle farmer called Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris), a decent man who works for another decent man, station owner Fred Smith (Sam Neill). Unfortunately, their oasis of mutual respect goes against the prevailing tide of racism and injustice in this wild frontier.  A newly returned solider (Ewen Leslie) manipulates Fred into lending him Sam, his wife and niece, to work for him for a few days.  This good turn sets in motion a series of events that culminate in Sam shooting the white man in self-defense and going on the run.  Act Two sees Sam and his wife being chased down by the local lawman (Bryan Brown) and Act Three sees him face whatever justice a black man can get in 1920s Australia.  To say more would be to ruin the plot.

There's so much to admire in this film that it's hard to know where to begin. To state the obvious, the director Warwick Thornton (SAMSON & DELILAH) has a unique interest in bringing Australia's alternative history to the screen - in showing the violence and exploitation that doesn't show up in textbooks. Instead of Aussie folk hero Ned Kelly he wants to give us  a true indigenous hero - Sam Kelly - and he wants to ask us if he'd fair any better in the justice system today.

But the great and wonderful thing is that Warwick Thornton's projects are so much more than just pedagogical. He has a really unique directorial vision. For a start, filming this story as a western allows him to tell us something about the wild frontier (in)justice at this time.  Second, he makes bold choices, all of which seem to pay off.   I loved his use of quick flash-backs and flash-fowards to add nuance to his characters and build suspense for the audience.  For instance, the ostensible bad guy in the movie is basically a racist bully, but he's also a very traumatised war veteran who's self-medicating with a lot of alcohol. I also loved the equally bold choice to have no musical score in this film, but to really ramp up the tension by focusing on the sound of every footstep, locked shackle and cocked rifle.  But most of all, I just love the visual vastness and harsh beauty of the landscapes as a context for this very small-scale human tale - with these people quite simply dwarfed by greater forces - whether nature or institutional injustice.  There's a deep humanity to the tale - and Hamilton Morris' performance in particular.  And I can't think of anything more chilling than Sam Neill's final line in the film.

SWEET COUNTRY has a running time of 110 minutes. It played Venice, Toronto, Adelaide and London 2017. The film is rated 15 for strong violence, injury detail, violence and racism as a theme. 

THE BEGUILED

Sofia Coppola's remake of the 1971 Don Siegel film, THE BEGUILED, is shorn of much of its historicity and hysteria, and teeters dangerously close to absurdity.  That is survives to become an enjoyable viewing experience is down to the evocative, romantic cinematography of Philippe le Sourd, a delicate score from Phoenix, and its perfect casting.

The story is based on a pulpy Southern gothic novel by Thomas Cullinan, and is set in Civil War Virginia.  A brutally injured Union soldier called McBurney (Colin Farrell) has deserted the battlefield and is rescued by a young schoolgirl at a pretentious plantation seminary run by two teachers and five girls who have no safe homes to go too.  McBurney may be crippled, but his charm is in tact, and he lays it on thick to ensure that the ladies don't turn him in to the Southern army or force him to find his own regiment. And the ladies are no less collusive in the decision to keep him on, justifying their own decisions in the echo chamber that is the claustrophobic schoolroom.  Each of them is beguiled - the younger girls claim special friendships - the teenager Miss Alicia (Elle Fanning) flirts with him outrageously - the younger teacher Miss Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) harbours dreams of marriage but secretly wants sexual fulfilment - and the headmistress, Miss Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman), seems to delight in the sheer companionship of an adult, but also comes close to a kiss. 

JANE GOT A GUN

JANE GOT A GUN is a troubled film. The original director Lynne Ramsay either quit or was fired over differences with the producer the day before shooting was meant to start, prompting celebrated DP Darius Khondji and Jude Law to quit in solidarity. Earlier, Michael Fassbender got waylaid with an X-Men movie causing a last minute switch in casting.  And so the movie found itself in the hands of no-name director Gavin O'Connor (PRIDE AND GLORY), DP Mandy Walker (RED RIDING HOOD) who bathes every scene in sepia tint sunset to the point of banality.  The resulting film is dreary and emotionally uninvolving, grinding its way to the inevitable and absurdly buoyant conclusion.

Natalie Portman plays the titular heroine.  In the framing story her husband Ham is shot by the gang he used to belong to and she decides to arm up and get help from her neighbour,  Dan Frost.  Together they await the investable battle against Ewan McGregor's gang, having prepared with some A-Team style defences.  In the flashback story we learn that Jane and Dan used to be engaged, but he went off to the Civil War and after long delays returned to find her married to Ham.  We then discover her side to the story, which is pretty predictable.  It's the kind of film where the good guys have perfect teeth and clean skin and the baddies have rotten teeth.  The acting is undercut by the three lead actors' shaky attempts at a Western accent. 

JANE GOT A GUN has a running time of 98 minutes and is rated R. The movie was released earlier this year in Germany, France, the USA, Kuwait, Philippines, Greece, Cyprus, Singapore, Russia, Indonesia, Thailand and Israel. It is currently on release in the UK and Ireland. It opens on May 6th in Spain, May 19th in Macedonia and October 22nd in Japan.

THE REVENANT

In the 1820s much of north west was harsh country, fought over by various colonial and native american factions.  There was money to be made though - trapping animals for their skins - and military outposts to guard the frontiers and protect trade.  One trapper, Hugh Glass, became incredibly famous for surviving a real life bear attack and somehow managing to get back to camp despite being abandoned by his colleagues. That story in turn become a novel by Michael Punke, and now a film written by Mark L Smith and directed by Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu (BIRDMAN).

The resulting film is epic.  It is meticulously grounded in authentic reality - from Emmanuel Lubezki's natural light photography to the incredibly violent, raw depictions of human and anima violence.  And yet the story itself is absurd, taking the real story of Glass and making it bigger, crazier, larger at every turn. Whether you enjoy this film therefore depends on how far you can allow the former to trump the latter.

To speak of the film's strengths is to start and end with Inarritu's visual direction and the central performances. In BIRDMAN Inarritu created a technique of circling his actors with a fluid and expressive camera, and for creating shots that felt never-ending.  He uses that technique here to bring us up close to a key character, pans around to show us what they are seeing, and then pans back by which team we see them already reacting, moving away or into action. It creates an amazing feeling of being inside the action and reaction of this organically unfolding story.  Another thing is that Inarritu is fearless when it comes to showing us violence - an arrow through the head - a bear ripping up a man's back - a man sealing up a gash in his throat with dynamite - to name but a few.  

When it comes to the performances, this is a lead role that asked Leonardo di Caprio to experience and portray hardship, as he keeps telling us in his Oscar campaign. It's a very good, gritty, nuanced performance. But the guys who really steal it for me are Tom Hardy as the cynical but interesting trapper that leaves Glass behind and Will Poulter as the young man he co-erces to help him.  What's amazing about Hardy's performance is that here's a guy who does things we hate. But he's also a man who survived being near-scalped. So in a sense he's a commentary on how war brutalises us all, as is the entire movie.  And as for Will Poulter, his career is quite impressive. He's done broad comedy in WE'RE THE MILLERS and pure drama in this and WILD BILL. An actor to look out for.  So from my perspective, the direction, cinematography and performance by Hardy deserve Oscars. I suspect it's Dicaprio who will get one.

Turning now to the annoying.  I get that Inarritu is probably one of the few directors to actually treat his native American characters with anything like respect and to give them fully developed motives but did Glass really need a son and lots of Terence Mallick-style quasi-spiritual shots of wheat fields and floating wives and whatnot. It's just derivative nonsense designed to make Glass the good guy because not only does he not share the colonial views of the bad guy he can visibly display this in protecting his son. It's all so unnecessary. The Glass story is great enough without making him some kind of anachronistic earnest liberal.

THE REVENANT has a running time of 156 minute running time and is rated R.  The movie went on release in the USA on December 25th 2015 ad went on global release throughout January.

THE SALVATION - LFF14 - Day Eight

THE SALVATION is a beautifully made, powerfully acted, good old-fashioned Western. There's no meta-narrative, no post-modern reworking, no reimagining.  It's "just" an immensely satisfying  short, taught, austere tale of good, evil and justice served in the Wild West.  I loved every minute of it.

The film is set over a couple of days in a dirt town in 1871.  A Danish ex-pat soldier called Jon (Mads Mikkelsen) greets his wife and young son from the train, reunited for the first time in seven years.  They travel by stagecoach to their ranch, but a couple of thugs rape and kill his wife and son, with Jon utterly powerless to protect them.  He quickly takes his revenge but this sets off a train of violence: the rapist was the brother of the local crime boss Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).  The townsfolk, led by the callow Sherriff and Minister (Douglas Henshall) and undertaker and land speculator (Jonathan Pryce) are caught in a bind.  If they don't hand over the Danish brothers Delarue will continue killing them instead.  

The movie plays out exactly as one would expect for a film in this genre.  There's cruelty and injustice, a steely damsel in distress (Eva Green), a nasty double-cross, and an epic set of climactic shoot-outs.  Mads Mikkelsen does stoic obstinate vengeance like no other and I rather liked Jeffrey Dean Morgan's charismatic bandit (side note - whatever happened to him after WATCHMEN?)  Eva Green plays the role she always plays - sultry, not to be messed with.  And even Eric Cantona doesn't offend in a minor role.  But what really sets the film apart is Kristian Levring's spare style and script and DP Jens Schlosser's stunning photography.  It just goes to show that sometimes you don't need to reinvent the wheel. You just need to do something simple really well.

THE SALVATION has a running time of 91 minutes.  THE SALVATION played Cannes and London 2014.  It opened earlier this year in Denmark, Iceland, Finland, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany and Austria.  It opens in the Netherlands on November 6th.

A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST

I'm not exactly sure why critics seem to pissing on a great height over Seth MacFarlane's new comedy, A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST.  The only legitimate criticism is that his highly concentrated humour, with visual and verbal hits coming at you at a rapid-fire pace, is hard to take for over two hours.  But other than that, what's not to like?  This film is funny, wry and has genuine heart and I honestly don't see what there is to criticise in the performances either.  

The movie works in the same way as MacFarlane's smash hit comedy, TED.  Take some outlandish premise and apply that extreme harsh MacFarlane humour. In this case, we're put in the Wild West, complete with shoot-em-outs, warehouses and corrupt oligarchs and asked to laugh at how absurd it is.  Hence the title of the film. The West isn't a place to romanticise but a filthy, disease-ridden misogynistic and racist era in which nature and man conspired to kill you.  So if you get the one person in the film, played by Seth MacFarlane, bitching about how absurd life is within the context of a spoofily all-happy Western, then that, to me, is really funny.

The plot is as follows. MacFarlane plays Albert Stark - a hapless sheep farmer who has been rejected by his sweetheart Louise (Amanda Seyfried) in favour of the rich moustache-bearing merchant Foy (Neil Patrick Harris). Albert then forms a friendship with Anna (Charlize Theron) who teaches him how to shoot properly so he can survive a duel with Foy. Little does he know that Anna is really the wife of an outlaw called Clinch (Liam Neeson.)

So what we have is the classic rom-com set-up where a guy tries to impress the one girl while really falling in love with the other.  We even have a song and dance number that is absolutely brilliant and probably the best thing Neil Patrick Harris has done since Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog.   We also get a side plot that pokes a lot of fun at an earnest guy (Giovanni Ribisi) dating a whore (Sarah Silverman) who refuses to sleep with him until they are married.

Like I said, I loved TED and I loved this film. It was half an hour too long, for sure, but I found its analysis of the absurdity of the Western myth spot on and its casting superb.  

A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST has a running time of 116 minutes and is rated R. The movie is on global release.

HEAVEN'S GATE - AN APPRECIATION

Cimino's breathtaking Heaven's Gate: cinema as stunning landscape painting

This review is available as a podcast below or by subscribing to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

True story.  In 1892, the rich cattle-ranchers of Wyoming declared war on the newest influx of poor immigrants for old Europe. A few of these famished immigrants were rustling, to be sure, but nothing to justify the wholesale butchering of men on trumped up charges of anarchy and theft.  What makes it worse is that the stockmen apparently had the tacit, and then the explicit support of the US government, even though no actual warrants were produced in advance of the action. The result is the Johnson County War - although massacre would be a closer description.

Fast forward to the 1970s, and New Hollywood director Michael Cimino, flush from the success of THE DEER HUNTER, used that leverage to get United Artists to let him make his passion project, originally titled The Johnson County War, but known to us as HEAVEN'S GATE.  

That movie comes to us today freighted with notoriety and tales of hubris, excess and abuse.  Cimino was, like most of his auteur counterparts, so bloated with success and flush with cash, that his projects became journeys into addiction and ego-maniacal tyranny. It could have been RAGING BULL or APOCALYPSE NOW that sunk a studio, and pulled the curtain down on that Golden Age - both of those pictures were helmed by drug-addled geniuses who went massively over-budget, and were tortured in editing - but it happened to HEAVEN'S GATE.  And so offensive was Cimino's arrogance and so lurid the tales of sets rebuilt on a whim, millions of feet of stock printed, actors exhausted after take after take, that the press were rabid before they even saw a frame of the finished picture.

Cimino's went into the editing suite with 220 hours of footage, that had cost the studio $44m, on an initial budget nearer $10m.  His initial cut was 325 minutes long, and deemed unreleasable.  He cut it down to 219 minutes and it played New York in November 1980 and bombed.  He eventually cut it down even more to 149 minutes, which played in 1981.  It bombed again. Ebert called it the worst movie he'd seen.  It won Razzies rather than Oscars. It became an industry joke, except with dire consequences, as United Artists effectively went bust and got sold off the back of it.  Studios started making heavily produced action flicks rather than risky visionary films.  And it was all Cimino's fault.  He never made another movie of any note or scale or vision.

Amid all the hype and the hoopla - the moral superiority and told-you-sos - the reality is that HEAVEN'S GATE is, to my mind, one of the greatest films ever made.  And now, with the painstaking restoration and recompilation of a 216 minute cut*, supervised by Michael Cimino, we can all see why, projected on the big screen, where this movie belongs.  It is, to my mind, visually stunning; beautifully acted; incredibly accomplished in its use of music; and deeply politically relevant today.  There are so many scenes that I remember vividly - so many one-liners that I can always recall - and watching it anew this week - so much that is relevant in our post-global financial crisis world. 

What follows here is less of a review than a long-form critical appreciation, full of spoilers. 

Kris Kristofferson as the world-weary Jim Averill.

The movie opens with a PROLOGUE set in Harvard in 1870 as two friends, Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and Billy Irvine (John Hurt) are graduating.  They are ebullient, triumphant, the kings of summer. The college priest (an ageing Joseph Cotton) lectures them on their obligation to civilise the uncivilised, but Billy, already a jovial drunkard and master wordsmith, warns them that change is impossible in his fateful, but little understood, valedictory address. But even as the boys dance with their sweethearts to the Blue Danube on the college lawns, violence breaks in. There's some kind of kerfuffle - town vs gown perhaps? - and Billy is bleeding.  He realises that this is the happiest they will ever be. It's all over.  They will never again be this full of hope and life and promise.  

I found this segment especially poignant, not least because the scenes, though claiming to be in Harvard, were filmed at my alma mater, and the waltz scene was so redolent of those drunken high summer balls.  But despite that personal connection, it's surely impossible not to be swept up in that opening triumphant march, the Battle Hymn of the Republic sweeping our lads into their elite ceremony, the gilded hall pullulating with pretty girls. And as we transition to the lawns for the extended waltz scene, the fluidity of Cimino and DP Vilmos Zsigmond's camera allow that energy and vitality to lift us up and into that moment. 

The FIRST ACT of the movie proper takes place twenty years later, with a quick scene setting up at once the brutal struggle to survive in Johnson County. A poor immigrant is slaughtering a cow that he has stolen, when from behind a white sheet, the shadow of a mercenary comes up and shoots him cold dead.  It's a brutal and stunning expressionist shot that defines so much of what is to come.  We then move into St Louis for the remainder of this act, as a now grizzled Averill learns of the war that the stockmen have declared on the immigrants.  

As his train rolls into town we are faced with the awful dichotomy of his empty first class carriage, and the quite literally huddled masses on top of it. The sound of the train, the people, the horses, the traffic is so loud that we can barely hear the dialogue.  This isn't a mistake.  Cimino is making a point about the chaos, industry and anarchy of a frontier boom-town, and of the savage brutality of a world where a starving child is pitied by a working class train-steward but nobody else.  His recreation of that world is immersive and worth every production decision to build and rebuild.  I've never before felt the industrial machine so tangibly - and the steam engine whipping up dust and cloud, is like something out of Whistler. 

Isabelle Huppert as Ella and Kris Kristofferson as Averill

As soon as Averill makes his way from the station to the exclusive club where the stockmen are hatching their plot, the hushed luxurious silence is stark and obvious.  Only the rich have the luxury of peace in which to think.  Averill is told the full details of the 125 man Death List by his old friend Billy Irvine - now so drunk he barely has the courage to stand against the plan - the most tragic post-college drunk since Sebastian Flyte.

As we move into the second hour of the film, ACT TWO takes us to Johnson County, and into the crazy, down and dirty world of John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) emporium of cock-fighting, drinking, gambling and, somewhat improbably, roller-skating!  Averill tries to warn everyone of the coming war, but no-one seems to take action because they have too much tied up in the town, and perhaps because it seems so fantastical a threat.  The interiors are dark, crowded, richly decorated and drip with authenticity.  Cimino shows immigrants speaking their own dialects and doesn't translate.  We feel for the first time what it must have been to be in settler country.  In the words of John Bridges: "It's getting dangerous to be poor in this country." Averill replies: "It always was."

One of the most exhilarating scenes - the roller-dance at Heaven's Gate

We also meet Ella (Isabelle Huppert), the brothel madam with whom Averill is having a relationship.  He gives her a grand horse and carriage and her exuberant ride into town is filmed with wild POV shots that communicate the danger and exhilaration of the ride. That joyful energy carries over into a scene that mirrors the formal dancing of the college lawn waltz - the roller-skating dance at the rink known as "Heaven's Gate." I've never seen a better use of music in film to communicate a sense of community, time, history and motivation.  As for the production design - just the posters on the walls of Heaven's Gate should've won this picture an Oscar. 

This takes us into the central emotional triangle of the film.  Ella loves Averill and he wants her to leave, but won't leave with her. By contrast, the mercenary Nate Chamption (Christopher Walken) will keep Ella safe if she marries him.  She needs to be kept safe because she's been accepting the pilfered cattle as payment, incurring the stock association's ire. Behaviour that might appear coquettish in another comes across as genuine love of both men. It's a subtle and modern portrayal that few other films have managed to convey.  As for Averill, it's not clear if he really loves Ella.  When he's deposited, drunk, back in his digs by Nate, we see that he still has a framed picture of his college sweetheart.  

And while we're here, let's stop a minute to appreciate that amazing set of the rooming-house, full to the brim with poor immigrants - a set that extends in depth and height, to hammocks slung across the narrow corridor, bodies everywhere, claustrophobic and stifling. The beautifully, deliberately framed visuals continue.  We see a team of old women, bundled in rags, pulling a plough-share until they fall from fatigue.  A drunken man atop a horse, backlit in deep blue against the night sky.  And finally, one of the most powerful scenes in the film, entirely without dialogue: Nate pulls out a chair for Ella at his table, inviting her to marry him silently - will she sit down?

The war begins - expressionistic framing and choice of camera angle.

ACT THREE sees the war start, and opens the third hour of the film. Fatefully, it's the poor good-hearted train-steward who's the first to be killed in a shot whose power is enhanced by the camera angles and colour contrast - red blood against lush green grass. This truly is paradise turned to hell. Averill reads out the Death List to the gathered immigrants in Heaven's Gate. It's basically the whole town. The townsfolk bemoan the fact that they have been disenfranchised - that the rules of the game are rigged for the rich - and that it has always ever been thus.  "Your hopes are exaggerated. In the end they got it all anyway."  We move to the brothel where Ella is gang-raped - a scene that is shot sensitively despite Cimino's easy use of full frontal nudity earlier. Averill comes to her rescue, but even then can't offer her a way out - because he won't marry her, and she won't leave otherwise. It all seems utterly hopeless.

There is a futility and nihilism and rage that seems to reflect our own contemporary angst in movements such as Occupy and the Tea Party, at opposite ends of the spectrum.  Somehow the system seems rigged against the poor, and even the rich are resorting to extra-judicial measures to protect their wealth.  The immigrants see themselves as the real contributors to society - wanting to improve and work the land, and make something of Wyoming. They characterise the stockmen as "Eastern speculators" just creaming off profit but holding Wyoming back as just a cow pasture.  The debate seems redolent of our current opposition between the nostalgia for an economy that made "things" rather than abstract and complex derivatives.  

The mercenaries ride into town.

As we move into the third hour of the film, we enter ACT FOUR, which is, basically, the massacre. Poor Nate Champion, who had discovered something like a conscious and nobility after Ella's rape, turns on his masters and is smoked out of his cottage in turn and shot down in a scene that has visual punch equivalent to the final scene of BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. Ebert says he thinks it's absurd that he'd write a final not to Ella in that moment, but I felt it was utterly credible and psychologically correct.  Moreover, there was something heartbreaking of seeing his precious walls - wallpapered in newspaper adverts - go up in smoke. So much for the Harvard Reverend's attempts to civilise the uncivilised. 

Meanwhile, the townsfolk have been butchered, and those that remain hole up overnight.  Averill prolongs their pain with some Roman tactics, but it's all shut down when the US army intervenes, on the side of the stockmen.  Somebody washes his hands of it, saying "it's not me that's doing it to you, it's the rules."  Once again, that modern cynicism is staggering - it's not a particular person that's evil - not even Sam Waterston's swaggering elitist Carron - but the impersonal, arrogant, immovable "rules". It's like some kind of nightmarish Leonard Cohen song: "everybody knows that the dice are loaded."  Averill turns his back on the men, he's already resigned as marshall, and for one forlorn moment we think he might leave with Ella, in bridal white, but that's obviously absurd.  As absurd as the idea that poor drunkard-savant Billy, having declared that "all flesh is dust" would survive the cross-fire.  This isn't a place for romance or romantics.

So, from the glorious lawns of Harvard, the Blue Danube now plays over the dusty, wagon strewn field where the immigrants have been butchered and a widow blows her brains out.  If Averill survives to the EPILOGUE, three hours and twenty minutes into the film, he's living a kind of death too.  Dressed like a dandy on a yacht with this college sweet-heart, now aged and dessicated. He's suffocating under chintz and roses.   

HEAVEN'S GATE closes with most of the characters we loved butchered, Averill trapped, the rules of the game unchanged, in fact, validated by the highest authorities.  Nate Champion's triumphant "fuck you" achieved nothing, neither did Averill's pleas and idealism.  Even Billy's descent into alcoholism couldn't save him. And third generation asshole Carron has probably spawned another three generations of state governors.  If the message of EASY RIDER was "we blew it", the message of HEAVEN'S GATE is that we were never in a position to blow it - the game was blown before we even got here. In it's all pervading disenfranchisement and nihilism, it speaks eloquently to our times and in visual and musical poetry that matches anything in cinema history.

HEAVEN'S GATE was released in 1980. The digitally restored 216 minute cut opens on 2nd August at BFI Southbank and selected cinemas nationwide. *It's basically the same as the original 219 minute cut except without an intermission. The original YCM negative has been 2K scanned and recombined and then restored under Cimino's direct supervision. This cut has been rated 15 in the UK for strong violence, sexual violence, sexualised nudity and language.  One scene of unsimulated animal cruelty was cut.  It is rated R in the USA. 

DJANGO UNCHAINED - Castigat ridendo mores

Quentin Tarantino returns to our screens with his gonzo Western homage slash anti-slavery revenge movie DJANGO UNCHAINED. It's arguably his best work since PULP FICTION - a movie so tightly drawn, so beautifully produced, so funny, so earnest, so delicately handled. Yes! Delicately handled.  There may be the trademark pulpy shootouts, and those archetypal Tarantino tense long-form dialogue scenes, but watch how Tarantino handles the politics of slavery here.  It's so deft, so respectful, so bracing, it achieves in the context of a pulp mash-up what no earnest AMISTAD like film could achieve.

The first shot of the three hour epic is of Jamie Foxx's whip-scarred back. The camera holds its gaze, forcing us to internalise what slavery really means.  It's not the forced silence of Hollywood, only to be occasionally broken by Mammy in GONE WITH THE WIND, or Spielberg's dignified oppressed. It's violent, and sadistic, sweat and blood-stained.  Throughout the film, Tarantino shocks us with visions of slaves in hook ringed chains, metal face guards, branding irons and most appallingly, a torture chamber called a hotbox. I don't think any movie has brought us up close to the reality of slavery, and given us, in the form of Christoph Waltz' Dr King Schultz, a liberal almost preternaturally modern pair of eyes through which to view it. Then notice how carefully Tarantino shows us the violence of slavery.  When he wants us to see something, he holds the camera on it, preventing us from looking away. But look how carefully he shows us Broomhilda's (Kerry Washington) limp body being wheelbarrowed out of the hotbox.  He's very careful to show us the horror without exploitatively showing us her nakedness. Or in another key episode, look at how he shows us the sadistic plantation owner and Mandingo fighting boss Calvin Candie (Leonardo di Caprio) ordering a runaway slave to be torn apart by dogs.  We hear the horror, and see it reflected it the faces of the onlookers, and we see fleeting glimpses, but Tarantino is careful not to exploit it. Even in a pivotal later seen, when our conscious, Dr Schultz, remembers it, the powerful imagery is held to a minimum.  

The film falls into three broad parts. In Act One, we meet Dr Schultz, a bounty hunter with a smooth tongue and a faster trigger-finger, as he  meets and frees the slave Django. Waltz is characteristically charismatic, holding our attention as the film's hero, almost to the detriment of Django, at least until the final act.  They make a deal - Django will help him as a bounty hunter, and then he'll help Django find and free his beloved Broomhilda.  In the second act, the initial bounty has been killed, and we move to a kind of training montage. Django becomes a sharp-shooter, and the two form a bond as Schultz explains the significance of the Siegried-Brunnhilda legend.  Our heroes have a run-in with the Clan, that plays like something out of a Coen Brothers movie.  For me, this second act was the weakest of the piece. It felt like the film was meandering, and I particularly disliked the stunt casting of Jonah Hill as it brought me out of the film.  In the final act, our heroes meet the real anti-hero of the piece, Calvin Candie and his sidekick, the obsequious head house slave Stephen (Samuel L Jackson).   This is where the true horror of slavery is exposed, where Di Caprio gets to chew up the scenery, and where righteous anger is unleashed.

The structure, revenge motif and complete mastery of DJANGO bears no small resemblance to INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, but this film feels more tightly written, less meandering and more focussed.  There's nothing as memorable or as tense as the initial scene where the Nazi general is sitting in the French farmhouse looking for hidden Jews, or as the bar-room scene where the English spy is given away, but as a complete movie, DJANGO feels superior. 

I think the courage to show what slavery was, and the restraint in showing it, especially in the context of what is essentially an exploitation-revenge movie, makes DJANGO UNCHAINED a peerless film - certainly one of the finest of Tarantino's career, and easily the most important.  But if all that makes it sound too earnest, rest assured that this is also a movie for cinema lovers - full of references to old classics, belly-laugh dialogue and ludicrous shoot-outs.  You will enjoy this film, and be educated by stealth - the perfect combination.

DJANGO UNCHAINED is on release in the USA, Canada, Belgium, France, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Albania, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the UK. It opens on January 25th in  Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, Portugal, Lithuania and Uruguay. It opens on January 31st in Argentina, on February 27th in Taiwan, on March 1st in Japan, on March 21st in Singapore and in March 29th in India. 

DJANGO UNCHAINED is rated R in the USA and has a running time of 165 minutes.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 8 - LET THE BULLETS FLY

LET THE BULLETS FLY is an utterly ridiculous, hilarious, cartoonish movie of the kind that made KUNG FU HUSTLE so superb, but without the latter film's heart. Written and directed by Wen Jiang (THE SUN ALSO RISES), it is set in 1920s provincial China, where the tax revenues of small towns are fought over by provincial governors and brutal mafiosi drug runners. The movie is a kind of action flick come comedy of errors.  Chow Yun-Fat looks like he's having a ball in the roll of Master Huang - the local drug lord defending his territory against the new governor, played by Wen Jiang.  That governor is an imposter, really a gangster, but the real meat of the story is whether either that gangster or indeed Master Huang is really the legendary and feared gangster Pocky Zhang. And why on earth is the governor, who came to the town to milk it of its cash, turning Robin Hood?!  

The movie unfolds in a series of beautifully choreographed tricks and fight scenes as each guy tries to get the better of the other, culminating in the final show-down and revelation. There are lots of laughs, plenty of ridiculousness and a superb supporting performance by Carina Lau as the governor's wife - willing to do anything to support her own position. The only fault is that it's probably too long at over two hours - there's only so much zaniness one can take in one sitting.

LET THE BULLETS FLY opened in China in 2010, in Hong Kong and Singapore earlier this year, and played London 2011.

RANGO - Wonderful, radical, revolutionary

RANGO is a revelation. It is one of the best films I have seen this year, one of the best animated films since TOY STORY, and must surely raise the bar in terms of what is seen as appropriate material for a children's film, and the level of ambition one can bring to the visuals in an animated film. I wonder if history will judge it as revolutionary as AVATAR in terms of bringing the craft of cinema forward and - contra AVATAR - showing us just how dazzling and immersive visuals can be without 3D, but when the CGI animators are guided by one of the best cinematographers working today, Roger Deakins (TRUE GRIT, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN).

The movie has been put together by the team behind PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN - director Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp - and it's their best film to date - capturing the sheer energy and comedy of the original POTC film, but allying it to a stronger story and imbuing it with an indulgent love of cinema. For this is, above everything, a film for cineastes - a film about the joy of transformation - of being part of a story that you craft - and about living up to the Heroic Ideal. To that end, John Logan (GLADIATOR)'s screenplay leans heavily on the plot of 70s film noir, CHINATOWN, but lives in the shadow of all of those wonderful Clint Eastwood westerns, not to mention doffing its cap to FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and APOCALYPSE NOW among others.

Johnny Depp plays a pet lizard with no real friends but a vivid imagination. The lizard is the ultimate cinephile, indulging in wild cine-literate fantasies, but ultimately lonely and confused about who he really is. When a car accident leaves him wondering into a old western town in the Mojave desert, he takes the opportunity to reinvent himself as "Rango" - a gun-slinging hero along the lines of The Man With No Name. And boy does this town need a Hero. Some Evil man (obvious to anyone who's seen CHINATOWN) has been hoarding water, leaving the town to run dry, forcing humble farmers from their land....In order to sort this mess out, Rango has to over-come his fear, make good friends, and become a Real Hero, helped out by a wise armadillo (Al Molina) and a surreal dream featuring Timothy Olyphant as the Clint-like Spirit of the West.

What I love about Rango is its evident love for the genres it's referring to (in sharp contrast to the risible YOUR HIGHNESS) and its evident love for the textures of the western. I've never seen an animated film - typically full of shiny, bright, smooth CGI - look so dusty, weather-beaten and worn. The details of the fur, the clothes, the buildings is quite stunning and the film is drawn as if it really has been shot on old fashioned 35mm by the best cinematographer in the business. Add to that a story with real stakes and real emotional heart, voiced by actors at the top of their game. (Special mentions for Isla Fisher as Beans and Ned Beatty as the Mayor.) But most of all I love that this film neither patronises its young audience nor bores its adult audience - and yet doesn't pander to quick, cheap laughs with post-modern winks at popular culture - a trait I particularly detest in the SHREK films. Which other animated movie would dare to have a joke in which the word "thespians" is confused for "lesbians" - or a sequence in which the Hero cross-dresses?

All of this makes RANGO at once marvellously old-fashioned in its cinephilia, its textures and its wonderful photography, but also marvellously modern in its subversive adult humour and willingness to use surreal dream sequences. This really is a wonderful film - and one can only hope that other animated features rise to the challenge of matching its attention to detail and depth of vision.

RANGO is on global release in all bar Japan where it opens on September 23rd.

TRUE GRIT

The Coen Brothers are, for me, film-makers who chronicle the absurd and the arbitrary. Their films feature ordinary folk living ordinary lives, taken up by Chance and led into crazy adventures.The protagonists may well be eccentric - and often, superficially, have crazy hair - but they have nothing on the people they meet and the circumstances they encounter. In the early films, Chance manifested itself in a kind of dark, absurd, comedy. The protagonists were put through the ringer but ultimately were set down back in their homes, happy and well. But of late, the Coen Brothers' films have taken on a darker tone, and become almost obsessive with the arbitrary nature of Chance. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, following directly from the novel, goes to black mid-sentence. The message seems to be that after all this cruelty, all this killing, there are no answers, no justice, no meaning. A SERIOUS MAN is similarly nihilistic. It's a film filled with search for meaning, typically religious meaning, but ultimately it holds no answers. A good, if complacent man, suffers the torments of man and nature. Why? There isn't a why.

It was, then, with some surprise that I learned that the Coen Brothers were adapting Charles Portis' True Grit for the screen - a novel whose over-arching theme is "You must pay for everything in this world, one way and another". For, at the most basic level, True Grit is a story about a young girl in late nineteenth century rural Arkansas, who hires a mercenary to help her get revenge on the thief that murdered her father. And at a more complicated level, it's a story about the sacrifices that those who seek to punish must make. The heroine, Mattie Ross, pays dearly for her single-minded obsession with revenge, but even her associates, Rooster Cogburn and LaBoeuf lead diminished lives as a result. Punishment is meted out to all, and in direct proportion to their crimes and faults. This is not, then, the world of arbitrary justice so often depicted in Coen Brothers films.

The Coen Brothers' adaptation of the book is faithful - as faithful as their adaptation of No Country For Old Men - and far more faithful than the 1969 film starring John Wayne, Glen Gampbell, Kim Darby and, in smaller roles, Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper. In this film, the voice of the narrator - Miss Mattie Ross - comes undiminished to the screen, and it's no surprise to see that it's Hailee Steinfeld, the young girl playing that character, who has the best of the dialogue and the pick of the award nominations. It's a gift of a role. In the book as in this film, Mattie is as particular as any Coen Brothers character. She's a teenage girl with a cool head for business, a strong religious sense of right and wrong, and a determination beyond her years. She weighs everything according to its cost and brooks no opposition. The funniest scenes in the film come early on, as we see wily adults try to fool her or dismiss her, only to be taken to the cleaners themselves. The lawman she hires, Rooster Cogburn (played by a wonderfully grizzled Jeff Bridges), comes to respect her after initially trying to shake her off. And even the vain Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf (a wonderfully funny Matt Damon), overcomes his initial frustration and distaste to feel affection for her. But Mattie is warned early on by a local lawyer that she will pay dearly for this stubborn determination, and as we see the movie's final scene and epilogue we can see that that has been the case. But we get no sense that she regrets her actions. She knew the cost, and accepted it. Her sense of justice is as cool whether concerning herself or her father's murderer, Tom Chaney. And that's the message of the novel and the film. True Grit is to do what you feel is right, but to look unflinchingly at the consequences. And when it comes to steadfast courage, Mattie beats the men she hires hands down.

The resulting film is a work of the highest quality and quiet strength. It's not as superficially provocative or quirky as many of the Coen Brothers' films, and because of its thematic material and lack of spectacular haircuts, many reviewers have dismissed it as being "not a Coen Brothers film". My view on this is that the Coen Brothers have become so reknowned for delivering films with rapier-like dialogue, superb acting performances, stunning cinematography (typically from Roger Deakins) and great scores (here, Carter Burwell), that viewers and reviewers have become complacent. It's as if the machine is so well-oiled that it is taken for having been effortless, or even banal. To my mind, this is utterly wrong-headed. TRUE GRIT is a kind of pantheon film - a film in which every part of the whole - lead performances, supporting performances, photography, design, editing, dialogue - blend seamlessly into a profound and affecting whole. No individual component stands out and attracts attention in the way that Javier Bardem's character did in NO COUNTRY, but the completed work is truly a thing of great art and craft.

To my mind, TRUE GRIT is simply the best film of the cinema year 2010-2011, and has been woefully underplayed during the awards season. It is being drowned out by more populist or more self-consciously dramatic fare (THE KING'S SPEECH, THE SOCIAL NETWORK and BLACK SWAN). But, foolish as it is to make such predictions, I believe that TRUE GRIT will stand the test of time far better than those, still very admirable, films. Quiet quality does not often get rewarded, but look at any aspect of this production and tell me it isn't first class.

TRUE GRIT opened last year in the US and Canada. It is currently on release in Norway, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Peru, Russia, Brazil, Iceland, Panama, Poland, Spain, the UK, Venezuela, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Kuwait, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Finland, Italy and Sweden. It opens next week in Belgium, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. It opens on March 18th in Japan.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - JONAH HEX

JONAH HEX should've been superb in the way that SOLOMON KANE was superb.  Based on pulp comics written by John Albano and illustrated by Tony DeZuniga, Jonah was a late ninteenth century bounty hunter in the Old West, sold to the Apaches by his father, his face disfigured by scars in  a tribal ritual, bound to protect the innocent, and battling alcoholism.  Jonah had no superpowers or skills other than being a damn fine shooter, and was the classic lone anti-hero.

The movie version of Jonah Hex abandons the simplicity of the original. It's as if the scriptwriters, Neveldine, Taylor (of CRANK fame) and William Farmer, just didn't trust the source material to be exciting enough, although as the former have disowned the script, perhaps the original was more coherent and faithful? Whatever the truth, the film version of Jonah Hex is given superpowers - he can speak to the dead - and his disfiguring scars aren't from an Apache battle but from being branded by his nemesis, evil Confederate general, Quentin Turnbull. The plot is also shoe-horned into contemporary political allegory, with Turnbull a kind of anti-Unionist terrorist determined to blow up the White House, and Jonah hired by President Grant to stop him.

The result is a short film (it's barely an hour and ten minutes long sans credits) that feels mashed up in the editing booth - over-stuffed with characters and allegory - and never given the time to breathe and establish itself. Josh Brolin's Jonah Hex is suitably brooding, but John Malkovich must go down as the most environmentally sustainable actor of all time, recycling his typical baddie tropes as Turnbull. Megan Fox looks sultry but is given little else to do as Hex's love interest, and actors of the calibre of Michael Sheen are wasted in small roles. It is a film destroyed in re-writes and conflicting visions - an unloved bastard of a film - and a crying shame.

JONAH HEX was released in summer/autumn 2010 and is now available to rent and buy.

London Film Fest Day 2010 Day 7 - MEEK'S CUTOFF

Meek's Cutoff is a real-life trail in Oregon, originally followed by Stephen Meek in 1845. He led a group of pioneers down that route, losing many to dehydration, but eventually helped open up Western Oregon with his trail. In director Kelly Reichardt's (WENDY AND LUCY) movie the story is stripped down and pared back. Rather than hundreds of pioneers we have three families, and rather than epic confrontations with Native Americans we have a single dramatic relationship. Lost, desperate for water, the pioneers capture a lone Native American, and force him to lead them to water. This confrontation brings out the worst prejudices of Meek, and the paranoia of some of the women who have been brought up on vicious tales. But it also brings out the essential decency and courage of Emily Tetherow (Michelle Williams) - the moral and emotional heart of the tale. The ultimate idea of the movie is subversive. The trail is named after Stephen Meek, and the pioneers are much to be admired, but as the movie progresses the captive becomes captor. He is still bound up by the pioneers, but they are completely dependent on him to find water and to survive.

I find Kelly Reichardt's films alienating. I find the stillness, the quietude, disturbing and, ultimately, dull. I admire the beautiful cinematography and the acting - but it's a kind of abstract admiration. I suspect that audiences will either love this film - for its visuals and its central idea - or hate it - for its silence, and its oblique ending. I am glad I watched it, even if I didn't really enjoy it. I admire the project, if not the product.

MEEK'S CUTOFF played Venice and Toronto 2010. It does not yet have a commercial release date.