London Film Fest Day 15 - ANGEL is a fiasco

ANGEL takes the prize for biggest fiasco of London 2007. It's also the only movie I walked out of - after 90 minutes of its 135 minute run-time. I simply couldn't take any more.

Francois Ozon has adapted Elizebeth Taylor's novel about a head-strong, self-centred young girl who turns herself into a famous novelist almost by sheer will alone. Her novels are pure trash - romantic melodramas reminiscent of Barbara Cartland. She becomes rich, buys a husband, has a Sapphic personal assistant (his sister), and the country house of her dreams. But during World War One she turns pacifist, loses readers and her husband's love.

Ozon's movie is a vulgar pastiche of the genre of novel that Angel writes. This is no loving, gentle parody or sensitive reinterpretation in the manner of Todd Haynes' FAR FROM HEAVEN. Rather, it is a simple-minded send-up that sneers at the genre and raises cheap laughs from an audience complicit in its sneering. Sets are over-done; costumes are ridicuolous; the orchestral score is all soaring strings; the actors ham it up for all its worth; the dialogue is (presumably deliberately) absurd.

One does, of course, laugh at the deliberately ropy back-projection shot of Angel and her publisher riding in an open-top carriage past the Houses of Parliamnent. But after around 45 minutes the one-note humour and banality of the central conceit of this film become boring beyong belief.

This film is a sad waste of an admirable cast and the proven ability of Ozon. In 8 WOMEN he modernised and subverted genre cinema to great effect. By contrast, ANGEL is just a worthless piss-take.

ANGEL played Berlin, Toronto and London 2007. It opened in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Germany, Austria, Poland, Lithuania and Italy earlier this year. It opens in Turkey and Australia in November and in Japan in December. It opens in Singapore on January 31st 2008.

London Film Fest Day 15 - JUNO rocks my world

JUNO is another of those films that you feel wouldn’t have happened before Wes Anderson and Sundance took off and Napoleon Dynamite became a sleeper hit. You know what I mean. The faux-naif acoustic soundtrack featuring Kinks songs and Lou Reed. The quirky characters that say ever-so-slightly unrealistic things about life and love. The over-designed sets, crammed with bad-taste props and trashy clothes. The use of carefully designed credits with a hand-made feel – this time half-animated. The insistent campy visual motifs – in this case Michael Cera’s track-suit and the joggers who run across screen every now and then. I mean, Sweet Tap-Dancing Little Miss Sunshine, it even features a beat-up camper van.

For all that, JUNO remains a very smart, very witty and thoroughly engaging film. That’s largely down to a whip-smart script by new-comer, Diablo Cody, the good comic timing of director Jason Reitman (THANK YOU FOR SMOKING) and flawless dead-pan performances from Ellen Page (HARD CANDY), J K Simmons and Allison Janney. In addition, Michael Cera gives a stealth performance that is so quiet it’s easy to overlook how good he is.

Page plays an intelligent but, yes, fundamentally dumb, 16 year old girl called Juno, who gets knocked up by her best friend Paulie Bleeker (Cera). At first, she thinks she’ll just get a quick abortion but almost on impulse decides to give the baby up for adoption. Her parents (Simmons and Janney) are flummoxed but supportive, and while Juno gets odd looks at school she has enough moxy to front it out. The putative adoptive parents are played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. Bateman is suitably slippery as the cool older guy. There’s a lot of sexual tension between him and the much younger Page – and I suppose it doesn’t hurt that viewers will partially read Page’s precocious, flirtatious character from HARD CANDY onto her portrayal of Juno. Garner is also fantastic as a slightly snobbish but fundamentally decent yuppie who’s desperate for a kid. She makes what could have been a rather cliché’d annoying character sympathetic. There’s also a hysterical opening cameo from Rainn Wilson as a clerk.

Performances and big belly-laughs aside, the great thing about JUNO is that it’s a proper story with characters that develop and change and events that take us by surprise but also seem plausible and credible. Moreover, instead of letting this become some day-time TV serial cliffhanger about whether the adoption will go ahead, Reitman/Cody rejig the focus to the love story between Cera and Juno. All this adds up to a movie that’s funnier than the already decent THANK YOU FOR SMOKING but which has more narrative drive and a more satisfying emotional pay-off. Instead of drifting in the third act, JUNO actually gets better. And while JUNO doesn’t quite pip SON OF RAMBOW at the post for best comedy at London 2007, it gives it a damn good run for its money.

JUNO played Toronto and London 2007 and goes on release in the US on December 5th. It opens in Australia and Sweden in January 2008, in Finland, Italy, Spain, the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands in February and in Germany in March.

London Film Fest Day 10 (late review) - THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY/LE SCHAPANDRE ET LE PAPILLON

Notes on THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY from our Gmunden Correspondent, Georg:

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY has the capacity to be a major success because it combines both artistic quality and accessibility. It has artistic quality because it was made by Julian Schnabel, a director who is also an artist and photographer. He has a great sense of visual style. Schnabel and the Director of Photography, Janusz Kaminski, manage to capture what it must be like to have “locked-in” syndrome. The opening part of this biopic takes place from the point of view of Jean-Dominique Bauby. He wakes from a coma and we hear his thoughts. We look through his one functioning eye and interpret distorted sights.

The movie is accessible because Bauby has a terrific sense of humour. Even though he has been struck by illness, his voice-overs are actually very funny. In fact, THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY is one of the funnier movies I have seen in recent time. Bauby shows us what his life used to be in flash-backs. Before the accident, Bauby was editor of French Elle magazine. He had a long-term lover and children. He also had a hot current girlfriend. He was a bit of a playboy. There is a dramatic tension because the current lover finds it too painful to visit Bauby in hospital.

This is really a great film and should be a big success.

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY played Cannes 2007 where it won the prize for Best Director and Technical Achievement. It also played Toronto and London 2007 and was released in Belgium, France and the Netherlands earlier this year. It is released in Greece and the US in November and in Denmark and Australia in December. It is released in Spain, Sweden and Finland in January and in the UK in February.

London Film Fest Day 12 - BEE MOVIE

BEE MOVIE is a new CGI animated flick from Dreamworks. It features a bee called Barry who decides to break out of the monotony of working in the hive and makes friends with a florist called Vanessa. Barry also discovers that big food companies farm hives for honey and get fat off the profits. So he sues them in the Supreme Court and duly wins back all rights to honey for the bees. Now drowning in the globe's honey stocks, the bees no longer need to make any more. So they kick up their heels. As a result, the flora and the fauna of the world dies out through lack of pollination. Barry and Vanessa must therefore make a last ditch attempt to pollinate the last batch of flowers on earth.

The movie is very smart and very witty as one would expect from a project created by, written by and starring Jerry Seinfeld. As a naive bee entering the world for the first time, Seinfeld can comment on all the craziness he sees. And yes, he is basically just Seinfeld as a bee. There is no other characterisation to the part. Luckily, just being Seinfeld is probably enough to give the audience its ticket-price worth of belly-laughs.

Problem is that other than the disposable one-liners, there's not much to this film. The animation is pretty basic - not a patch on recent Pixar efforts or indeed old-school stop-mo flicks like MAX AND CO. Perhaps more seriously, the movie doesn't have much heart. Law suits and work-life balance are not the stuff of memorable films and BEE MOVIE lacks the emotional centre of a TOY STORY or RATATOUILLE. And this seems to me to be a constant complaint with Dreamworks animation films. They are all funny, more or less, but are technically weak and have no heart. The only real hit they've had was SHREK and that franchise has delivered diminishing returns. By contrast, films like TOY STORY, FINDING NEMO and RATATOUILLE have real stories, character development and emotional pull as well as the quick-fire wit.

So BEE MOVIE gets a qualified thumbs-up. You will, no doubt, have a good time. But I doubt you'll take it to your heart.

BEE MOVIE premiered at London 2007. It opens in Russia, the US, Singapore, Mexico Spain and Taiwan in November and in Argentina, Australia, Hungary, Brazil, Iceland, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Slovakia, Turkey, the UK, Slovenia, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Sweden amd Norway in December 2007. It opens in Japan and Egypt in January 2008.

London Film Fest Day 12 - SAVAGE GRACE

It's a story so delicious, you couldn't make it up. The suave heir to an industrial fortune marries a beautiful social climber. They lead a life of privelege and ease in the summer resorts of Europe. She is embarassingly over-ambitious for her delicate young son. All three have casual sex with alarming alacrity. No-one is off limits. Nothing is unexpected. And then, after an hour or two of bed-hopping, the young son and mother indulge in the only coupling as yet untried. The fuck each other. He kills her. He orders chinese take-out and waits for the cops.

All this is true. But so much is left out. We never learn of Barbara Baekeland's disgust at her son's homosexuality. We never see that she seduces him in an attempt to turn him heterosexual, rather than out of careless boredom. We never see Tony exhibit signs of mental illness - the murder is not foreshadowed in anything he says or does. As a result, the movie lacks momentum or narrative drive. It just drifts across the screen - one scene of boredom and casual sex after another. You never understand why any of the characters do anything, much less care. Even during acts of incest or murder, the dull tedium of their lives has infected the movie-goer to the point where we couldn't care less. Things aren't helped by the lack of context in the production design. Apart from one scene in the Stork Club we never see the Baekelands as social animals, living fast in glamourous parties or nightclubs. Maybe this was due to a budgetary constraint? The result is that visually, this is rather a dull film. There's also a sort of prudishness when it comes to the sex scenes. They are hinted at but never shown - certainly this movie has none of the balls-out bravery of Christophe Honoré's MA MERE.

All of this is a tremendous shame. I have great respect for all three lead actors - Moore, Dillane, Redmayne - and the subject matter could have been fascinating. But the movie had a listless, bizarrely prim feel to it. I was utterly unimpressed.

SAVAGE GRACE played Cannes, Toronto and London 2007. It opens in the US, Spain and Turkey in 2008.

London Film Fest Day 11 - GRACE IS GONE

GRACE IS GONE is one of those quiet films that just steals up on you. It's a very simple story. Stanley is a decent guy. He has a wife, Grace and two young daughters, Heidi and Dawn, whom he loves dearly. He loves his country in a quiet way - not in the dumb, jingoistic manner often depicted in war films. Stanley cheated on his eye test so he could get into the army but was eventually discovered and kicked out. Which is partly why he feels so ashamed when his wife - an active soldier - is killed in Iraq. He can't bring himself to tell his daughters. In a desperate act of evasion he drives them to his mother's house, where they meet Stanley's brother, and then on to a theme park in Florida. The elder daughter, Heidi, is sensible and thoughtful and almost stumbles onto the truth. The younger daughter, Dawn, is wonderfully full of energy and fun, but she misses her mother and her home. Eventually Stanley breaks down and tells his daughters the truth.

The movie is affecting because the characters, situations and dialogue all ring true. In happier moments, the playful joshing between the two sisters is charming. In darker moments, Stanley's inability to deal with the situation also, tragically rings true. Credit goes to writer-director James C Strouse. I hated his earlier script for LONESOME JIM. I didn't empathise with any of the characters or situations in that film. I was never sold on why I should spend time with them. But GRACE IS GONE is completely different - warm, moving, never manipulative, tragically believable. I also think the three lead characters do a sterling job. It's wonderful to see John Cusack getting a chance to move beyond his slick charmer role with a very modulated, still performance. But the real stand out is Shelan O'Keefe as the elder daughter. Admittedly the tech package is nothing special but that's not the point with this film. Instead, in a period where we are daily bludgeoned with portentious movies about the war in Iraq, it's refreshing to see someone take the time to look at the real, fundamental impact on ordinary people.

GRACE IS GONE played Sundance 2007 where it won the Audience Award and the Screenplay Award. It also played Toronto and London 2007. It opens in the US on December 7th, in Spain on February 1st 2008 and in France in April 2008.