IRINA PALM - weak tragicomedy redeemed by a single scene

Just got round to seeing this odd little drama from German director Sam Garbarski. It stars Marianne Faithful as a frumpy widow called Maggie who reluctantly becomes a sex worker to pay for her grandson's medical treatment. The dialogue and acting are rather clumsy and the production values are poor. I was also unimpressed by the hammy treatment of Maggie's incipient romance with sex-club owner Miki (Miki Manojlović) and Kevin Bishop's unconvincing histrionics when he discovers what his mum does for a living. But, to my great surprise, the movie was redeemed by a brilliant bit of black comedy when Maggie is goaded into telling her bridge four the big secret. The humour is quietly played - devastating - and Faithful really is convincing as a meek woman who has found her strength and self-respect by giving the best hand-jobs in London!

IRINA PALM played Berlin 2007 and opened in 2007 in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, Finland, Norway, Poland, Australia, Portugal, Japan, Sweden and Turkey. It opened in 2008 in Romania, Estonia, the US, Denmark, Hungary, Mexico, the UK, Slovenia, Colombia and Argentina. It is available on DVD.

If Bina007 Ruled the Academy....

...then this is how the Oscars would go down. 

BEST FILM: THE WRESTLER; HUNGER; THE FALL; UNRELATED; Guy Maddin, MY WINNIPEG.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: IL DIVO; THE POPE'S TOILET; MYRIN; MONGOL; WATER LILIES/NAISSANCE DES PIEUVRES.

BEST DOCUMENTARY: JOY DIVISION; MAN ON WIRE; NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD; TYSON; STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE.

BEST ANIMATED FILM: WALL-E; HORTON HEARS A WHO;

BEST DIRECTOR: Darren Aronofsky, THE WRESTLER; Paolo Sorrentino, IL DIVO; Steve McQueen, HUNGER; Tarsem, THE FALL; Celine Sciamma, WATER LILIES.

BEST ACTOR: Mickey Rourke, THE WRESTLER; Michael Fassbender, HUNGER; Sam Neill, DEAN SPANLEY; Ben Kingsley, ELEGY; Toni Servillo, IL DIVO.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Bobb'e J Thompson, ROLE MODELS; Heath Ledger, THE DARK KNIGHT; Josh Brolin, MILK; James Franco, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS; Tom Cruise, TROPIC THUNDER.

BEST ACTRESS: Kathryn Worth, UNRELATED; Tilda Swinton JULIA; Catinca Untaru, THE FALL; Kristin Scott-Thomas, IL Y'A LONGTEMPS QUE JE T'AIME; Penelope Cruz, ELEGY; Meryl Streep, MAMMA MIA!.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Rosemarie deWitt, RACHEL GETTING MARRIED; Lisa Gay Hamilton, HONEYDRIPPER; Penelope Cruz, VICKY, CRISTINA, BARCELONA; Jane Lynch, ROLE MODELS; Ashley Tisdale, HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3.

BEST SCREENPLAY, ORIGINAL OR OTHERWISE: Paul Rudd, David Wain, Ken Marino and Timothy Dowling, ROLE MODELS; Alex Holdridge, IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS; Mark Herman, THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS; Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, TROPIC THUNDER; Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Maryse Alberti, THE WRESTLER; Colin Watkinson, THE FALL; Anthony Dod Mantle, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE; Crystel Fournier, WATER LILIES; Luca Bigazzi, IL DIVO.

FAR NORTH - like all the best fairy-tales, bestial and grimm

FAR NORTH is best viewed as grim(m) fairy tale and like all the best fairy tales it's full of sexual tension and menace and speaks to how narcissistic and selfish lovers can be.

In a un-named tundra in an ambiguous time, Saiva and Anja eke out a living. Saiva is mother and father to Anja, and loves her with an intensity that borders on the psychosexual. A near-dead man wanders into their path and Saiva, against her better instincts, takes him in. Immediately, he alters the balance of power: it is Loki that combs Anja's hair and hunts the reindeer; Loki who makes Anja laugh. Saiva suppresses her discomfort at first, tactfully leaving the two lovers alone, until they voice their desire to leave.

Michelle Yeoh is desperately moving as Saiva, putting so much emotion into a tortured glance that it's almost unbearable. Sean Bean is also convincing and nuanced as Loki - humble and grateful at the start; increasingly dominant and literally cocksure; finally brutally selfish. Michelle Krusiec is less convincing as Anja, but this isn't too damaging to a film that uses her merely as a possession to be fought over by Saiva and Loki. The movie has an austere, strange feel - deliberately cultivated with the ambiguity of the setting, the stunning spare ice-scapes, the minimal dialogue and the solemn iconography. I found it compelling....for the most part.

Spoilers.

The only problem I have with this film is the ending. Of course, Saiva was going to kill Anja and/or Loki. The foreshadowing was as subtle as a sledgehammer - she spent the entire movie sharpening her knife and skinning animals. The surprise was that she made Loki fuck her and said that she loved him. On my reading of the previous eighty minutes, she didn't love Loki but Anja. Killing Anja to keep her from leaving made sense. All that followed was pure nonsense.

FAR NORTH played Venice and London 2007 and was released in London and Russia last year.

THE SPIRIT - disastrous noir spoof from Frank Miller

"The only thought in my mind was, 'It's too big — I can't possibly do it.' And I refused. And about three minutes later as I was at the doorway, I turned around and said, 'Nobody else can touch this,' and I agreed to the job on the spot".

Frank Miller should have trusted his instincts and passed up the opportunity to go solo and direct the feature length adaptation of Will Eisner's seminal 1940s weekly serial. 

The strip was a noir thriller about a rookie cop brought back from the dead, living under his grave stone, investigating crime in Central City. Miller gives the book the same treatment as SIN CITY - using digital backgrounds penned largely in gray scale with occasional flashes of iridescent red - and the film is extremely stylish as a result. Miller also does the decent thing in consigning The Spirit's politically incorrect sidekick "Ebony White.

Every other directorial choice Frank Miller makes is wrong. First, let's talk casting. Gabriel Macht lacks charisma as The Spirit. All the other actors turn in hammy, self-referential performances that are painful to watch. It's not entirely their fault. Miller has directed this movie as a pastiche. The movie literally takes the piss out of itself like some dumb SCARY MOVIE flick. The result is a complete waste of time: alienating, unfunny, plain embarrassing.  I just feel that Samuel L Jackson in particular needs to be really careful about taking these sorts of role - after SNAKES ON A PLANE and his increasingly mannered performances he's in danger of turning into a self-parody.  Jackson plays The Octopus.  Uh-huh.  Not only do we see The Octopus' face but we get to see him dress up as a Samurai, and as a Nazi, for no reason than because Miller wanted a bit of sport.  I mean, seriously, how crass can you get?

Avoid at all costs. 

THE SPIRIT is on release in Indonesia, Italy, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, the USA, Australia, Taiwan, France, Iceland, the UK, Denmark and Israel. It opens next week in Israel, New Zealand and Poland. It opens on January 15th in Russia, Brazil and on January 22nd in Argentina, Finland, Iceland and Norway. It opens on January 29th in Germany, on February 19th in the Czech Republic, on February 25th in Belgium and the Netherlands. 

THE READER - slippery, but not in the way it should've been

THE READER is a movie that wants you to take it seriously as a profound discussion about complicity and moral obligation. It has a cast that drips with quality, a director with form and a screen-writer famed for his intelligence and eloquence. The source novel by Bernhard Schlick was a critical and commercial success. In short, this movie so drips with earnest good intentions that the nobility of the exercise almost, but not quite, masks stink of desperation in its bid for Oscar glory.

The movie plays, like the novel, in three parts. The first takes place in West Germany in the 1950s. A sixteen-year old school boy (an impressive David Kross) has an affair with a woman twenty years his senior (a mannered performance from Kate Winslet). They enjoy each other physically but both are evasive. He tells her what she wants to hear - that he's not a star pupil. She tells him precisely nothing. She asks him to read aloud to her. He clearly enjoys the performance. And then, one day, she vanishes and he is devastated. 

The second act takes place in the 1960s. The boy is a law student, and is taught to carefully separate moral responsibility from a narrow definition of legal guilt. He is nauseated to discover that his old lover is on trial for murdering Jews during the Holocaust and that he has evidence that will mitigate her sentence. He has to reconcile the woman he knew with the unfeeling, narrowly obedient and unrepentant woman he sees in court. 

The third act takes place in the 1980s. The teenage boy has developed into a fastidious, emotionally repressed old man (Ralph Fiennes), with a failed marriage and an estranged daughter. For a complex set of reasons he begins to record audio books and send them to his old lover. Maybe he does this out of misplaced vanity, maybe guilt, maybe nostalgia, maybe boredom, maybe a desire to connect with anyone - Ralph Fiennes' opaque performance gives us no help in making his motives out.

In a coda, the man meets with a survivor of the specific horror that his lover perpetrated - a horror for which she has still not explicitly repented. The survivor - superbly played by Lena Olin - asks the questions I had longed to ask throughout the previous hour - the questions I thought this movie would have asked and explored.  Is the mitigation - note, not the elimination - of the woman's legal responsibility for murder "an explanation, or an excuse"? With a single line the Holocaust survivor condemns the entire point of this film, which has surreptitiously asked us to empathise with, even symapthise with this concentration camp guard as a victim. It is a slippery moral equivalence to hint at, and if that's what the film-makers were about I feel they should've tackled the question more honestly rather than tucking it into a coda, let alone double-ending the film in an insultingly sentimental manner.

THE READER is on release in the US and UK. It goes on release next week in Greece and will play Berlin 2009. It opens on February 6th in the Czech Republic, Singapore and Brazil. It opens on February 19th in Australia and Iceland, and on February 25th in Belgium and Germany. It opens on March 6th in Norway; on March 23rd in Poland; on April 2nd in the Netherlands and on April 25th in Japan.

A BUNCH OF AMATEURS - Imelda Staunton steals the show

A BUNCH OF AMATEURS is a British comedy directed by Andy Cadiff (CHASING LIBERTY) and co-written by the scabrously funny editor of PRIVATE EYE, Ian Hislop. It's a classic fish-out-of-water comedy in which an aging, insecure but insufferably arrogant Hollywood star is duped into starring in an amateur production of King Lear in the middle of the British countryside. He wants a suite in the Four Seasons and a personal trainer: he gets a room in a B&B, rehearsals in a barn and accusations of an affair with the sponsor's wife. He also gets to finally empathise with Lear as a man who has a ruinous relationship with his children.

As plots go, A BUNCH OF AMATEURS is pretty creaky, and the production values are pretty flaky too. Given that Hislop was involved in the script I was surprised that the movie wasn't more sharply satirical. Indeed, I was hoping for something along the line of David Mamet's incendiary STATE AND MAIN. Still, while the comedy may be more lukewarm, A BUNCH OF AMATEURS has its moments. Burt Reynolds is stealth funny as the insecure actor who builds himself up to a moment of existential angst on a rain-swept hill, but its Imelda Staunton who steals scenes as his adoring landlady. Her facility with physical comedy is captivating and makes up for the inadequacies in the script. Other than that, Samantha Bond and Derek Jacobi are rather wasted.

A BUNCH OF AMATEURS is on release in the UK.