Preview - BOOGIE WOOGIE

BOOGIE WOOGIE is a highly enjoyable, acerbic satire on the contemporary art world, directed by debutant Duncan Ward and based on the novel by Danny Moynihan. Both are art-world insiders and the film has the feel of authentic anecdotes on speed.

The film has a large cast and many sub-plots, but these all coalesce around the gallery of Art Linson - a Jay Jopling like art-dealer who stands at the centre of the London art scene. Art is played in trademark oleaginous, sinister mode by Danny Huston, who needs to seriously worry about typecasting. Three main stories whir around Art. First, his main clients - art collectors Jean and Maclestone (Gillian Anderson and Stellan Skarsgard) are fucking a young artist and a gallery assistant (Amanda Seyfried) respectively, and are engaged in a bitter battle over who gets the art. Second, naive Dewey (Alan Cumming) is trying to promote his best friend, video artist Elaine (Jaime Winston) who ditches him for Art's assistant Beth (Heather Graham). Finally, ageing collector Alfred Rhinegold (Christopher Lee) is being manipulated by his wife (Joanna Lumley) and her butler (the ever brilliant Simon McBurney) to sell a valuable painting, at a price manipulated by art dealer Art Linson.

In short, the majority of characters are self-involved, sexually promiscuous, and care more about jockeying for money and fame than about art itself. Only a few - Alfred Rhinegold and Dewey - have a genuine passion for the work - and they basically get screwed over for their pains. It's not that the art world is indifferent to their pain, but that characters like Beth and Elaine will actually exploit it. After all, in the era of reality TV and constant self-exposure, pain is just another means to create a sensation.

The movie moves quickly; finely balances humour and disgust; assuredly handles its large cast; and is sharply photographed by John Mathieson (HANNIBAL, GLADIATOR). Art aficionados will appreciate the fact that the art was curated by Damien Hurst. I presume that when this finally gets released, it will be very limited. But this flick is definitely worth seeking out.

Additional tags: Joanna Lumley, Christopher Lee, Alan Cumming, Duncan Ward, Danny Moynihan.

BOOGIE WOOGIE played Edinburgh 2009 and will be released in the UK and US in April 2010. It is, rather improbably, currently being shown on British Airways long-haul flights.

EDGE OF DARKNESS - Curiously flat

EDGE OF DARKNESS is a curiously anemic political thriller starring Mel Gibson as a straightlaced cop whose daughter is assassinated by her employer - a shadowy military defense contractor. While the police are distracted with the idea that the killer was really after the cop, the father begins his own investigation that takes him into the upper reaches of government and business. The marketing campaign for this film led me to believe that the film would be akin to the recent Liam Neeson vehicle TAKEN - in which a vengeful father murdered and tortured his way through Paris. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that EDGE OF DARKNESS is a far quieter, more talkative film. Indeed, barring one or two scenes, it is hardly an action movie at all. Rather, the movie takes the form of a series of conversations. Mel Gibson is actually rather sympathetic and credible as the grieving father and his scenes opposite Ray Winstone, who plays a government fixer, are marvelous to watch. Winstone is more modulated than is typical, and keeps us guessing as to his true motives. But I was rather disappointed to see Danny Huston roll out the same oleaginous sinister performance as the corporate boss. I was also disappointed by the technical quality of the film, despite being shot by the team behind CASINO ROYALE, and by the complete lack of tension. Indeed, the film was so baggy that after an hour I was tempted to leave. The mechanics of the plot - the secret everyone is trying to hide - is very mono-dimensional and obvious. There is no real attempt to work out the ramifications of the secret either politically or in the media. Indeed, despite a rather impressive corporate HQ, the movie has a rather parochial air (all the more because only Gibson attempts a Boston accent.) This extends to one of the most flat and brushed aside endings to a thriller I've seen in a while. So, all in all, despite a rather sympathetic performance from Gibson, this is ultimately a rather frustrating film.

EDGE OF DARKNESS is on release in the UK, the US, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Singapore, Brazil and Canada. It opens next weekend in Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, Finland and Sweden. It opens later in February in Belgium, Slovenia, France, the Czech Republic, Greece, Norway, Romania and South Korea. It opens on March 4th in Argentina and Germany; on March 12th in Taiwan and on April 2nd in Estonia.

A PROPHET/UN PROPHET - Powerful, tense, exhilarating.

French writer-director Jacques Audiard's new film, UN PROPHET, is a devastatingly good film - even more searing than the already impressive 2005 flick THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED. It's the kind of film that has you on the edge of your seat, wincing with unease throughout, and yet leaves you exhilarated and re-energised in your belief of what cinema, at its best, can be capable of.

The movie opens with a teenage kid being admitted to prison. Malik El Djebena is a zero. He has no politics, no religion, no friends, no ambition and no clue. Within ten minutes of the two and a half hour run-time his fate is sealed. The Corsican chief Cesar has demanded that Malik kill the Arab chief Ryad, or be killed himself. The means by which the murder has to be committed, and Malik's practising it, is one of the most insanely horrific scenes in recent cinema history. Half an hour into the run-time and Malik has established his modus vivendi, protected by the Corsicans, educating himself, working up his own network. He's still an outsider: too Corsican for the Arabs and too Arab for the Corsicans, but he is on the ascendancy. Once again, while he shows some initiative, this is basically success by default. When Sarkozy's new policy sends Cesar's goons back home, Cesar has no choice but to depend on Malik, and to exploit his day-release passes. During this middle-section, the movie seems to drift a little. There are excursions and petty deal-making - it all seems rather banal. But this is, in fact, the genius of the film's structure. Because it comes almost as a surprise that, inch by inch, Malik is now the man in control - and Cesar just a pathetic, lonely old man.

I shan't say more because I feel that UN PROPHET is a movie that works best when you know as little about it as possible. Suffice to say that I think this is a movie that is a worthy contender for Haneke's DAS WEISSE BAND as the foreign-language film of the year. Moreover, Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestup, as Malik and Cesar respectively, deliver powerful and nuanced performances worthy of praise in their own right.

Not to be missed.

UN PROPHET played Cannes, Telluride and London 2009 and Sundance 2010. It opened last year in Belgium, France, Russia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Greece and Portugal. It is currently on release in the UK. It opens in February in the Netherlands, the USA, Argenina and Spain. It opens in March in Germany, Israel, Taiwan, and Finland. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.

DVD Review - BY THE PEOPLE: THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA

BY THE PEOPLE: THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA is a rather uninspired HBO-produced documentary following Barack Obama on the campaign trail through the Presidential primaries and the general election to the point of victory. The real coup for the film-makers was to have pitched the doc to the Obama camp and to the financiers as a documentary about a charismatic first-term senator who might have a shot at 2012, but to have found themselves actually on a presidential victory run. The weakness of the film is that, despite the fact that the film-makers – Amy Rice and Alicia Sams – appear to have been “embedded reporters”, there is little in the way of off-the-cuff revelation and insight. And we shouldn’t expect any, because, after all, Obama won partly because he ran such a locked-down tight media operation. So, sure, you get some footage of Obama calling home to his kids that he’ll be late in, and you get some footage of Obama trying to call Hillary on a cellphone and congratulate her on a particular primary win, but typically we are seeing campaign footage that the campaign would want us to see. Moreover, we are being shown that footage by a directing and producing team (Ed Norton) that is openly in the Obama camp. The success of the film is in documenting a particular mood at a period when the seemingly impossible became possible – the euphoria around the election campaign. It seems curiously nostalgic just a year on. But overall, there is little new here, and the events are really rather too recent to merit a trip down memory lane.

BY THE PEOPLE: THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA was shown on HBO in November 2009 and is released on DVD today.

OSS-117: LOST IN RIO - sporadically funny French spy spoof

The OSS-117 movies are French parodies of the early Bond movies, where Bond was a slick-haired, cock-sure spy in a flash car and a shiny suit, bedding women to cheesy 1960s background music. The latest release, RIO NE REPOND PLUS or LOST IN RIO, sees the hapless French spy Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath dispatched to Rio to purchase a microfilm containing the names of French collaborators from a Nazi colonel. On the way he teams up with a beautiful Mossad agent called Dolores, the Nazi’s hippie son Heinrich, and a CIA agent called Trumendous. As with the previous OSS-117 flick, when the movie works, it works because of star Jean Dujardin’s tremendously funny facial expressions coupled with the fact that he really does have the cheesy grin and good looks of Sean Connery. There’s also a lot of verbal humour around Hubert’s verbal clumsiness in dealing with women, Mossad and Germans. The resulting film contains more than its fair share of laugh-out loud moments, even if the source of the humour is sub-Austin Powers. The problem is that this film is too long and contains too many scenes that just don’t work, especially early on in the film. For instance, the character of CIA agent Trumendous, who seems to just laugh and swear for no reason, simply doesn’t work as a spoof of Felix Leiter. I would’ve preferred a shorter, more tightly written movie, with a runtime of maybe 80 minutes rather than 100 minutes. This would’ve put the sequel up there with the first movie, CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES, which felt like it had a lot more energy and more consistent laughs. So, maybe one for DVD.

OSS 117 - LOST IN RIO / RIO NE REPOND PLUS was released in Belgium, France, Latvia, Greece, Russia and Kazakhstan in 2009. It is currently on limited release in the UK.

3 IDIOTS - The funniest Hindi comedy since Munnabhai

3 IDIOTS is one of the funniest Hindi movies I’ve seen since MUNNABHAI MBBS. So it comes as no surprise to find that it was written and directed by Rajkumar Hirani, the guy behind that smash-hit. 3 IDIOTS also has certain plot similarities to the first MUNNABHAI movie. Once again we find ourselves in an Indian university, with students under pressure from their adoring parents to do well and get a great job. Once again we have an iconoclastic rebel who goes against the faculty head and argues for less learning by rote and more actual education. And once again, there’s a romance between the rebel and the Dean’s daughter. But there the resulting is far more raucous, far more consistently witty, and genuinely laugh-out loud funny.

Aamir Khan plays Rancho, an iconoclastic student who transforms the lives of his two best friends Raja (Sharman Joshi) and Farhan (Madhavan). Together, they are the 3 idiots of the title, who fight financial and social pressure to have pursue their passions. They come up against the tyrannical and uncaring university dean, nicknamed Virus, and played by the typically hilarious, but here more modulated, Boman Irani. Lisp and comical haircut aside, Irani’s Virus is less funny than terrible, because until tragedy strikes his own family, he does not change. The 3 idiots also come up against the university swot, a Ugandan NRI nicknamed Silencer, played with a pitch-perfect East African gujurati accent by Omi Vaidya. Silencer is also a tragic figure, but equally one of the funniest, with a hilarious comic set-piece revolving around a formal speech in front of the education minister which the fluent Hindi 3 idiots have doctored replacing the word “serve” with “screwed”. Silencer is also the best exponent of the movie’s full and up-front exploration of fart jokes! Naturally, this being a Hindi film, there has to be a love interest, and so we have Kareena Kapoor, also superb at the comdy, playing Pia, the dean’s daughter.

The bulk of the movie takes place a decade ago, and sees Rancho befriending the other idiots, confronting the dean and falling in love. The movie’s framing device takes place in the present day, with Raju, Farhan and Silencer trying to track down Rancho after ten years of radio silence.

The perfectionist Aamir Khan, aged 44, undergoes an impressive physical transformation to play Rancho, a university student. He has lost weight, and the combination of baggy clothes, make-up (unfairly – botox?!), posture and physicality make him more convincing in the role than you might imagine. It was even more suprising to see how far this actor, famed for his serious political films, could do pure physical comedy. His acting in the song “Aal eez well” is superb, and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.

So, 3 IDIOTS is utterly hilarious. But the great thing is that it is also politically provocative. The key argument in the film is that Indian parents are too strict with their kids, picking out their careers for them, and putting too much pressure on them succeed. Worse still, success is measured purely by salary, with which you can buy flashy branded clothes and attract a pretty wife. The price of this pressure is extreme – suicide. Rancho argues that real learning isn’t learning by rote to come first in an exam. And that, rather than trying to come top in an exam, if you “pursue excellence, and success will follow, pants down.” Most of all, if you love engineering, be an engineer. Don’t become a banker in a foreign land. It’s a wonderful ethos and the argument sorely needs to be made. It’s great to see a populist movie taking such a stance.

Of course, with Hindi cinema you have to expect a big dollop of melodrama and implausibility. For instance, the framing device see the “two idiots” go in search of Rancho by driving from Delhi to Shimla via Ladakh – a massive road trip that seemingly happens in a day! And the single most ludicrous set-piece is the scene where Rancho and the students help the dean’s daughter to give birth despite heavy rains, a lack of electricity, and any medical equipment. Just when you think the scene can’t get more schmaltzy and melodramatic, Hirani pushes it one step further, with the movie’s motto, “Aal eez well” playing a key part. It’s ludicrous. But then again, you have to assume that a writer-director who has pastiched Hindi cinema tropes in the song “Zoobi Doobi” knows perfectly well what he’s doing. He’s both pandering to our expectations of what a Bollywood movie should do, and simultaneously sending them up. It takes a very assured director to create a scene that’s both moving and hilarious.

3 IDIOTS was released on Christmas Day 2009.