PARANORMAN

PARANORMAN is an absolutely delightful, heart-warming, funny and beautifully visualised stop-motion animation film about a young troubled boy who finds acceptance when he saves his town from zombies.  Norman Babcock (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is the classic emo kid bullied at school and a cause for embarrassment at home. The reason: he sees dead people.  The social pain reaches a pitch during the school play when he's carrie back in time to when a little girl was similarly misunderstand by Puritan townsfolk and hounded out, sparking a curse that Norman must lift.  True to the touchy-feely wholesome values of this film, that curse is lifted with empathy rather than pitchforks, with the upside that his family finally accept Norman for what he is, and more importantly he finally feels comfortable with his gift and understands that they truly do love him.  The scene where his blonde bimbo elder sister (Anna Kendrick) grabs his hand and protects him from a mob is positively heart-breaking.  The movie works on all sorts of more subtle levels too - I love that they cast geeky Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the voice of the bully - a role he'd never be able to play in a live action film.  I love the balls-out bravery of the final joke between the elder sister and the guy she's been crushing on. I love the subtle and obvious reverential references to horror films throughout the movie. And I love the gentle humour and genuine chemistry between Norman and his eager best friend: "Don't make me throw the humus - it's spicy!"  Overall, there's nothing not to like about this film.  It's less dark than the Neil Gaiman penned CORALINE which many of the team here also worked on, but what it looses in darkness it gains in sheer heart. 

PARANORMAN is on release in  Mexico, Iceland, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Peru, Canada, Colombia, Taiwan, the USA, Vietnam, Belgium, France, Germany, Russia, Chile, Singapore, Slovenia, Romania, the Philippines, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Estonia, Finland, Pakistan, Greece, Portugal, El Salvador, Ireland, Norway and the UK.  It opens on September 20th in Denmark, Poland and Sweden; on September 28th in Lithuania; on October 4th in Thailand; on October 11 th in Italy; on October 19th in Turkey; on October 25th in Argentina; on October 29th in Israel; on September 21st in December; on January 10th in Australia and Hungary; on January 17th in New Zealand and in Japan on March 29th.

PARANORMAN has a running time of 92 minutes and the movie is rated PG in the USA.

TO ROME WITH LOVE

TO ROME WITH LOVE is a rather mediocre, derivative, Woody Allen movie - a portmanteau of four stories, neither of which is especially interesting, well-acted or well-developed.  The only real link is that they all take place in Rome - there isn't a link between them - either through the characters or thematically, as far as I can tell. 

The most ill-fitting of the four stories, by virtue of the fact that it's in Italian and also because it isn't romantic but whimsical-philosophical, centres on an ordinary Joe (Roberto Benigni) who suddenly becomes famous for no reason he can see. It's kind of an inverse Josef K situation - and a wry comment on the fatuousness of modern celebrity culture - and reminded  me of early Woody Allen movies where a fantastical idea was worked out to it's ludicrous extreme. The problem is that the story makes a rather simplistic point, and doesn't really take it anywhere.

The story I found simultaneously the best and worst features Woody Allen himself back in an acting role, as a cynical retired impresario who puts his daughter's Italian father-in-law on the stage. Problem is, this simple mortician can only sing when he's in the shower. It's meant to be fantastic and funny but fell rather flat for me. The only redeeming feature was Judy Davis, cast once again as Woody Allen's wife.  She gets the only really funny one-liners of the whole film.

Next up, we have Jesse Eisenberg playing a young Woody Allen character - an unsatisfied cynic who cheats on his earnest girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) with her flighty, flirty best friend (Ellen Page). I really hated this segment, mainly because the romantic triangle is well-worn in Woody Allen; second, because I thought Ellen Page was woefully miscast as the femme fatale; and third, the conceit of having Alec Baldwin play a devil on the shoulder of Jesse Eisenberg's character also just fell flat.

Finally, we have the weakest story of the bunch.  A young Italian couple lose each other - she flirts with an elderly actor and he gets entangled with the cliché Woody Allen brassy whore (Penelope Cruz.) No laughs, no insights, no point.

All in all, after his recent good run, this is an utterly worthless and mirthless movie.  We've seen all this done before - and better. Most of all, it's disappointing to see Jesse Eisenberg wasted on such poor material.  He's an actor who seems to have been playing Woody Allen all his life.

TO ROME WITH LOVE opened earlier this year in Italy, the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Norway, Uruguay, Belgium, France, Israel, Russia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Iceland, Mexico, Denmark, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Greece and India. It opens this weekend in the UK, Ireland and Lithuania. It opens next weekend in Portugal, Singapore, Estonia and Spain. It opens on September 28th in Taiwan and Turkey; on November 9th in Bulgaria; and on December 20th in New Zealand.

SAVAGES

THE SAVAGES is a day-glo bright, tawdry, energetic mess. Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch play unlikely friends and wholesale drug manufacturers - the former an earnest hippie who has perfected killer strength drugs, the latter a war vet who cares more about money and getting the job done. The two share a ditzy blonde chick played by Blake Lively. The plot, such as it is, sees the trio under threat from a Mexican drug cartel (Salma Hayek and enforcer Benicio del Toro) and entrapped by a corrupt narc (John Travolta).

The lurid colours and kinetic force of the film are attractive but are not enough to compensate for the alienating characters.  Ultimately, it's hard to care about the fate of Lively's character in the movie's more serious second act, when her persecutor is playing a drug baroness a la Cruella deVil. Moreover, the satisfyingly tricksy plot is ultimately undone by an entirely fatuous epilogue. 

SAVAGES opened earlier this year in Canada, the USA, Colombia, Mexico, Turkey, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Portugal. It opens this week in Argentina, New Zealand, Russia and Vietnam. It opens on September 20th in Singapore, Ireland and the UK and on September 26th in France, Chile, Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Iceland, Poland and Spain. It opens on October 3rd in Belgium, Hungary, Brazil and Lithuania. It opens on October 12th in Denmark, Germany, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It opens on October 18th in Australia and on October 25th in Greece and Italy.

ANNA KARENINA (2012)

I have a major problem with director Joe Wright. I think he is a technically accomplished director who creates wonderfully fluid, extravagantly choreographed shots that are entirely at odds with the content of his films. I first noticed this in ATONEMENT, where his long tracking shot on the beach at Dunkirk didn't advance either plot or character - it was a showy distraction in what should have been (viz. the novel) a tightly structured, chamber drama. Sadly, in ANNA KARENINA, this desire to be as contrived and artificial and intricately choreographed as possible has over-taken the film to the point where all passion, tragedy and joy is lost in a never-ending series of delicate backdrops that showcase the Chanel Haute Joaillerie collection.  This film is not so much a tragic romance as a musical without songs, and a perfume advertisement that lasts two hours.

I am not entirely sure who is to blame.  Who was it that came up with the conceit to imprison what many have called the greatest novel ever written in the simplistic straitjacket of a theatre metaphor?  Was it Joe Wright, or playwright/screenwriter Tom Stoppard? In their version of 1870s Imperial Russia, high society becomes a theatre in which every aristocrat has a part to play, and rules to which they must confirm, or else be brutally cast aside.  This is the lesson which Anna Karenina learns when she sacrifices her son and her marriage to have an affair with the dashing Count Vronsky.  He also loses - his Commission, his freedom, the respect of society - but not as much as Anna -  because he can still contract a good marriage and so redeem all.  Both Anna and Vronsky learn that happiness is tarnished by the exigencies of real life, and ultimately, they are made wretched by each other and their situation. 

The intensity with which Wright and Stoppard used the theatrical metaphor is dazzling in the open twenty minutes of the film - so ingenious it quite crowds out our attention.  I barely noticed Anna and Vronsky fall in love, or Kitty's heartbreak when Vronsky leaves her for Anna.  Anna's brother Stiva becomes a caricature of a decadent aristo, like a larger than life minor comic character in Dickens.  I kept waiting to see marionette strings.  And as for the production design - it was so rich and beautiful as to be claustrophobic, and then became a parody of itself, with Princess Betsy turning into Effie Trinkett from THE HUNGER GAMES with her outlandish dresses and coiffeur.   Underneath all the anachronistic dance moves that distracted with their inelegance and artifice, I detected what looks to be a more mature and nuanced performance from Keira Knightley, and especially Jude Law as her dogmatic husband Karenin.  Too bad those performances didn't have room to breathe. But as for poor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, his Vronsky was never more than a vain poseur.  When never feel and see his love for Anna, and his motivations are not rich enough - either in respect to Anna or the  eligible young Princess Sorokina. Maybe it's the fault of the script, but Jude Law did better with less.

The result is a film that looks fabulous and moves with the intricacy of a Swiss watch, but which feels insubstantial and skates over us too lightly.  Perhaps it's because Vronsky is so poorly written.  Perhaps it's because the larger, metaphysical discussion is entirely absent.  In the novel, Anna's attempt to escape society's constrictions is contrasted with the gloriously good but conflicted and occasionally delusionally idealistic Levin, who flees to the country but never quite loses sight of the dark backing to the mirror.  We see nothing of Levin's confusion, nothing of Kitty's process of maturing, nothing of his happiness and final equivocations.  Short-changing this story might have seemed like a narrative necessity in a two hour film - editing the "secondary" story to give Anna and Vronsky more screen time. But it's a fatal cut.  Anna's story works in relation to Levin's.  And, indeed, it's possible to see ANNA KARENINA as Levin's story after all.  Without it, the film has none of the intellectual heft of the book - and it loses perhaps the best description of happiness in literature.  Still, given these constraints, I have to say that Domnhall Gleeson was absolutely superb as Levin.  I just wish I'd seen more of him.

Of course, I am well aware that after my tirade against TINKER TAILOR, I might be giving the impression that I have a pantheon of novels that have become so much a part of my life that I cannot conceive of a film-maker's interpretation that would do my vision justice. Not so in the case of ANNA KARENINA.  I admired the 1997 Bernard Rose adaptation, starring Sophie Marceau, Sean Bean and Alfred Molina, very, very much indeed. 

ANNA KARENINA played Toronto 2012 and is released this weekend in the UK and Ireland.  It opens on November 16th in the USA and on December 6th in the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal. It opens on January 3rd in Russia and Turkey; on January 10th 2013 in Denmark; on January 17th in Australia; on January 24th in Australia; on January 31st in New Zealand and Brazil; on  February 14th in Argentina, Norway and Sweden; on February 21st in Italy; and on March 13th in Belgium and France.

LAWLESS

LAWLESS is the kind of movie you could watch in an imaginary art-house theatre where the only seat is a Chesterfield sofa in the middle of the room, and you're curled up with a bottle of Bourbon and an Opus X cigar. It contains scenes of sickening violence; ethereal cinematography;an immersive, at times overwhelming sound-scape; and a disturbing, provocative moral ambiguity.

Set in Prohibition era Virginia, LAWLESS is the tale of the three Bondurant brothers - bootleggers holding out against a corrupt lawman, and dangerously believing the myth of their own invincibility.  Gruff, inarticulate older brother Forrest (Tom Hardy) is at once a faintly comic goon and a frighteningly violent dispenser of justice, as he sees it.  Middle brother Howard (Jason Clarke) is a largely silent, forgotten (and fatefully forgetful) middleman. Younger brother Jack (Shia LaBeouf) is the vain, starry-eyed, romantic fool who's wooing of the preacher's daughter ultimately sets in motion the final showdown between the brothers and the "Law", Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce).

Tom Hardy is mesmerising as Forrest - walking a fine line between fearsome and funny - and killing a final scene where he has to question his own myth.  But this movie belongs to Guy Pearce in the same way that NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN belongs to Javier Bardem.  He plays perhaps the most chilling, disturbing dandy killer since Brother Mouzone of The Wire, with brilliantly conceived make-up - a slightly too wide parting, slightly too thin eyebrows - unsettling us from the start.  

Ultimately, the rest of the movie is pretty thinly conceived. Poor brother Howard has nothing much to do.  The female roles are underwritten.  Gary Oldman - playing a Chicago mobster - is criminally underused, although he does have one tremendous scene with Noah Taylor.  The plot, when you really think about it, is pretty thin too.  The boys refuse to pay off the corrupt Rakes. He tries to terrify them into submission. They refuse.  It comes to a showdown.

But I guess I just think all that is beside the point.   The movie is both lyrical and hard-boiled. It's all about the battle  between Forrest and Rakes - and their personalities dominate the screen.  It's about the atmosphere of that time enveloping us - Benoit Delhomme's beautiful photography of landscapes shrouded in mist, and interiors cast in shadow. It's about being immersed with Jack in the overwhelming sound of the religious meeting to the point of being sick.  It's about the uneasy feeling that even in lighthearted moments, sickening violence is always a possibility.  It's about being complicit in the violence - cheering on the boys, as the poster suggests, as "heroes", but knowing that Forrest has done some truly repulsive things.

More than that, the film is - like BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID - or THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD - about myth, and the dangers of believing in your own press. Early on Forrest tells Jack that the only thing that keeps the brothers safe is the myth of their invincibility.  But this myth is subversive.  Poor Jack and his sidekick collect shell casings to make necklaces and take photos of each other posing with guns.  Forrest's belief in his own invincibility is used against him by his lover.  And Rakes is infuriated by that myth.  Far from glorifying the violent Forrest, in the end he is a figure of hapless incompetence and comedy.  So much for the hero.

LAWLESS played Cannes 2012 and is on release in Canada and the USA. It opens this weekend in Bulgaria, Finland, Ireland, Norway and the UK. It opens next weekend in France, Hungary, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. It opens on September 20th in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Greece, Brazil and Iceland. It opens on October 4th in Russia; October 11th in Australia and Denmark; October 18th in Portugal and South Korea; October 25th in Argentina and Turkey; November 15th in the Netherlands; November 30th in Poland and on February 7th 2013 in New Zealand. 

TAKE THIS WALTZ

This movie made me angry from the opening credits' sepia-tinted focus on Michelle Williams' blue-laquered toenails.  Poor Margot, it seems to say, so quirky, so right-thinking, making muffins with her face scrubbed clean.  It's like a Williamsburg dream. Except it's not.  It's a part of hipster-heaven-imagined Toronto where a young boho-wannabe couple who never seem to do much work can afford to live in a ramshackle-beautiful house interior designed just-so.  The couple are desperately irritating, right up until you realise that they are really really creepy.  They seem to have a kind of asexual buddy relationship where flirtation consists of speaking in infantile voices and drinking milk and poking fingers in your husband's mouth.  Plus the wife is clearly depressed and the husband so engrossed in making chicken cacciatore that he doesn't notice. So she starts flirting with the neighbour who is, of course!, a rickshaw driver who hangs out at the beach each morning to think.  I couldn't make this stuff up. Except he's clearly not as groovy and right-on and at peace with nature as all that because he's soon stalking her at the Y and then she's stalking him, and it all ends in the unsexiest sex-talk over martinis and a confession about nothing.  Still, as unappealing as I found the cocktease wife Margot and her stalkerish fancyman Daniel (Luke Kirby), at least there's a kind of raw honesty and commitment in their performances.  You realise that the first time you see Seth Rogen (the chicken-chef) react to his wife's confession.  Director Sarah Polley decides to do something that should showcase real acting talent - smashcut close-ups of his different reactions. Except, we learn, Rogen can't act - or at least not that kind of raw drama - he seems to be acting "at" it - and does that annoying Brad Pitt thing where you keep groping your face because that looks natural, right?  I mean, let's be clear, we have to blame Sarah Polley for this self-indulgent, risible mess, just as we lauded her for the Alzheimers drama AWAY FROM HER.  She wrote these absurdly incredible characters and their unsexy sexy language.  She exposed Rogen's inadequacies.  And in a montage designed to show Margot tiring of her new man, she reduces her film to an Ikea advert with a teenage-naive-embarrassing cut to what racy sex might actually look like.  Of course, this movie isn't as radical or subversive or raw or authentic as it thinks it is.   Chicken-man's sister turns out to be that movie cliché - the wise alcoholic.  Basically, the meaning is that we always take the weather with us.  And that very few movies live up to the Leonard Cohen song they're using.  Go home.  Go home. There's nothing to see here.    

TAKE THIS WALTZ played Toronto 2011 and Tribeca 2012. It was released earlier this year in Taiwan, the USA (Video on demand), Australia, Canada, Turkey and Sweden. It was released earlier this month in New Zealand, Japan, Denmark, Ireland, the UK, Greece, the Netherlands and Spain. It will be released in Belgium on September 19th; in France on October 31st; and in Brazil on November 9th.