THE GOOB - LFF14 - Day Eight

Writer-director Guy Myhill's debut feature, THE GOOB, is a beautifully shot, authentic coming-of-age movie set in the British countryside. It features a typically superb and sinister performance from Sean Harris as the jealous bully Womack - a man so insecure that he even goes after the feckless Goob when Goob manages to pull one of the many girls that Womack likes.  The Goob is in fact a 16 year goofy kid called Taylor played by Liam Springs.  Scenes with him and his brother and best mate are full of exuberant mischief and perfectly capture that mildly anarchic spirit of our childhood summers.  As they caper about the English countryside we can't help but back the underdogs against Womack's control.  Indeed, one of the best parts of the movie is an extended pre-credits set-piece where the two brothers nick Womack's precious car keys and go on a joyride. Of course it goes epically wrong when Womack finds out, and this sets us up for the spiralling confrontation that caps the film.  In between we have one of the best uses of music in a film, and the wonderful energy of the teenage actors, not least Oliver Kennedy who steals the show with his cameo role as Elliott.  One of the joys of the film is seeing how, in a way, vulnerable Womack is.  The kids are just so cheeky that even he can't dent their fun.

Overall, THE GOOB has pace, energy, authenticity, real laughs and a lot of insight into how domineering personalities operate.  It's a tremendously assured 

THE GOOB has a running time of 86 minutes.  The movie played London 2014. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

IN THE BASEMENT / IM KELLER - LFF14 - Day Seven

Ulrich Seidl's IN THE BASEMENT is a slippery darkly comic movie satirising the popular image of Austrians post-Fritzl - as ex-nazis who do weird things in the basement.  It's presented as a documentary but is clearly a mockumentary that sends up the outside world's most absurd fears but each time with breathtaking technical poise that dares us to take it seriously. It's a superb and short cinematic joke but ultimately tells us something provocative about the prejudices we may hold about Austrians, and the prejudices Austrians may hold about themselves.

IN THE BASEMENT aka IM KELLER has a running time of 85 minutes.

HUNGRY HEARTS - LFF14 - Day Seven

HUNGRY HEARTS makes a superb companion piece to Susanne Bier’s A SECOND CHANCE. Both films are concerned with presenting mothers that challenge our prejudices of good parenting and both contain a slow build of frustration and pent up emotion that prompt ordinary people to take extreme steps. Moreover, both films are exceptionally well made and acted - provocative and insightful.

In HUNGRY HEARTS the focus is on a young couple played by Alba Rohrwacher and Adam Driver (GIRLS). They meet cute - I mean - it’s the ultimately nauseating cute way to meet - and proceed quickly through a picture-perfect marriage to pregnancy. And here the cracks appear. The wife becomes intensely phobic of doctors, refuses to eat enough to nourish the baby, and almost sabotages the birth. And then, once the baby is born, she becomes so overprotective against the apparent menaces of processed food and germs that the baby barely gains weight. An increasingly frustrated husband is caught between concern for his son and his enduring love for his wife, and ultimately the film resolves itself in how which way he eventually jumps on that question and the social context of judgment around both sides.

What is impressive about this film is just how sinister the apparently waif-like wife becomes and how claustrophobic the apartment is - aided by sparing but powerful use of a fish-eye lens. Both actors do a great job but I have particular respect for Adam Driver who manages to credibly appear concerned for both parties when many people in the audience, myself included, would have gladly slapped the mother, stolen the child and headed for the hills. Of course, as the movie goes on we realise that she is genuinely mentally ill and so some sympathy returns. But it’s fascinating how an arthourse audience - usually very willing to say the grey shades of morality - found it hard to sympathise with her even at the end. Mistreating a baby is apparently the moral top trumps.

This may or may not be a problem for the film. Is it possible to enjoy a film when you spend most of its runtime wanting to commit a violent act against its central character and increasingly disliking its other lead character for enabling her? I noticed a handful of people walk out and I suspect that may have been the problem. In a sense, the director Saverio Constanzo (IN MEMORY OF ME) is a victim of his own success - creating an atmosphere so toxic it’s almost unbearable. For those reasons I suspect this film will be a tough sell, which is a shame. Moreover, it’s fantastic to see Adam Driver given the range to be very impressive indeed.

HUNGRY HEARTS has a running time of 109 minutes.  The movie played Venice, where the lead actors well-deservedly won the Volpi Cup for Best Acting, London and Toronto 2014. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

THE KEEPING ROOM - LFF14 - Day Seven

In the final months of the American civil war General Sherman undertook his March to the Sea enacting a policy of ruthless property destruction designed to bring a swift capitulation of the South.  Looting was officially forbidden but clearly occurred, and the men being away at war, it was the women who bore the brunt of the destruction.  In the new film from British director Daniel Barber (HARRY BROWN) we see what happens when three women have to deal with this threat - a minutely observed and incredibly tense study of what happens to normal people in extra-ordinary circumstances - much in the tradition of Susanne Bier. 

Two of the women are sisters - the elder Augusta (Brit Marling) is realistic about their situation - starving, forced to manual labour, and living in the keeping/store room rather than the old great house.  The younger, Louisa (Hailee Steinfeld) starts the film as naive and wilful and cruel, particularly toward the Mad (Muna Otaru) - their slave.  But what we quickly see is that the need to survive has made these women equals of a sort. Mad has a wisdom born of painful experience that the other women come to admire and in a particularly potent scene early on we see that Mad knows her value.

The first half hour of the film is an exercise is almost tortuously slow ratcheting up of tension.  We see through Augusta's eyes the hollowing out of village life - death, fear and the advance scouts of the Union army. In the final hour, those scouts come to the keeping room and the movie becomes a tense cat and mouse shoot out. Intertwined with this is a kind of tentative attraction between Augusta and one of the men, who may well have the capacity to be decent, and is as much a victim of the brutalisation of war.

I can't tell you how much I fell for this movie after some misgivings about the pacing at the start. Like THE DROP, it's a slow burn but worth sticking with.  The austerity of it is breathtaking.  It's also one of the few movies where, when the final scene rolls, I really wanted a sequel to show what happened next to those characters, so much had I taken them to my heart. We rarely see strong women on screen, let alone women who have a relationship with each other - the female dramatic version of the bromance.  Accordingly, this movie is an absolutely treat. Kudos to all involved.

THE KEEPING ROOM has a running time of 95 minutes.  The movie played Toronto and London 2014 and does not yet have a commercial release date.

ROSEWATER - LFF14 - Day Seven

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews on iTunes.

ROSEWATER is a compelling and important film that is funny, insightful and imaginatively directed.  That it also the debut feature of Daily Show star Jon Stewart is all the laudable because while be brings his intellect and wit to bear he doesn't let his on-camera overwhelm the story.  

The film is the true story of Iranian-British journalist Maziar Bahari who travelled to Iran to report on the elections in June 2009.  When the popular choice didn't win, Iranian people took the streets in the "colour revolution". What is fascinating is that Bahari had been reporting from Iran for many years and new just what he could get away with reporting without invoking the ire of the Iranian authorities. Yet in this particular case, he was moved to allow footage of soldiers shooting a protestor be published on TV - taking a moral stand.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was than arrested and kept in confinement as the Iranian state accused of him being a spy and a stooge of a Western media conspiracy to attack Iran.

Gael Garcia Bernal is superb as Maziar - somewhat against my expectations.  He adopts just enough of an Iranian accent on his English to be credible and nicely portrays the absurdity and incredulity of the man caught up in accusations of spying because of a spoof video he'd shot for The Daily Show.  But the actor who really steals the film for is the one who plays Maziar's "Specialist" interrogator. He paints the picture of a man who is capable of torture, yes, but also world-weary, fearing his own boss, somewhat naive and occasionally very funny.  It's an essential part of the film that we believe he is vulnerable because the point Maziar and Jon Stewart are trying to make is that the regime is ultimately scared and afraid. 

Behind the lens, the film is worth seeing for giving us a rare glimpse of life in contemporary Iran.  Jon Stewart elegantly and powerfully shows us Maziar's relationship with his father and sister, both of whom were persecuted by the state.  There's a quick introductory scene where the history of Maziar's relationship with his sister is shown on the city streets through which Maziar walks that is very special indeed.  Indeed, the only technical flourish I thought distracting and unnecessary was the superimposition of twitter feeds on an Iranian cityscape.

Overall, a worthy, funny, frightening and insightful film and an impressive debut.

ROSEWATER has a running time of 105 minutes. ROSEWATER played Telluride, Toronto and London 2014 and opens in the USA on November 7th. The movie opens in the UK and Ireland on May 8th 2015.

WILD - LFF14 - Day Six

You can listen to a short podcast review of this film here:



This movie is based upon the autobiography of Cheryl Strayed, a college student utterly undone by the death of her mother, who became a sex and drug addict, ruined her marriage and decided to hike the 1,100 mile Pacific Crest Trail over three months to clear her head and come to some kind of self-awareness and self-acceptance. 

This could have made for a fascinating and moving story in the manner of last year’s LFF entry, TRACKS, or maybe INTO THE WILD. However, the key defining point of those two movies is that they are not afraid to show their protagonists getting kicked around by life and nature. When Mia Wasikowska tracks through the Australian desert her lips are cracked, her face raw with hot wind, her limbs burned and blistered. We’re not sure what she has come to understand about life but her struggle with it feels credible and her character realistically equivocal. By contrast, in WILD, Reese Witherspoon never allows her character to get roughed up. She hikes for months and complains about stinking but always has squeaky clean hair and a fresh face. Save for the bruises of martyrdom from her backpack and one opening shot of a bloody toenail it’s not credible that she’s undertaking this journey. Her kit always looks freshly laundered. Moreover, she doesn’t seem to encounter any real adversity. Her backpack is comically to heavy to lift up in the first scene, but after thirty seconds she’s walking with it happily. Every man who might be a threat turns out to be charming and even the forest services give her coffee and a donut. Where’s the self-realisation through suffering there? The underwhelming nature of the trip is summed up by the final shot at the Bridge of God - we have been led to believe by its name that this will provide some great epiphany but hey it’s just a steel suspension bridge and she looks at it rather wanly and doesn’t even cross it.

If all this weren’t bad enough, Cheryl’s hiking trip is intercut with flashbacks to her past. Her mother (Laura Dern) is portrayed as a kind of saint - every perfect, smiling, singing and wise. No wonder Cheryl took to heroine failing to live up to this unblemished mother figure. And let’s be honest, there is apparently a limit to how bad Reese Witherspoon will let herself look, even when playing a junkie shooting up in a squat. Contrast this with the actress playing junkie Sanne in Susanne Bier’s stunningly good drama about grief, A SECOND CHANCE. Now that’s how you do emotional trauma and redemption. The final insult is a technical one. You’d think that a movie that spends this long in nature reserves would contain some amazing landscape photography of the kind we found in Mike Leigh’s MR TURNER or Fatih Akin’s THE CUT. But no - director Jean-Marc Vallee (DALLAS BUYERS CLUB) and cinematographer Yves Belanger - give us nothing that is out of the ordinary - nothing that makes us feel Cheryl’s head clear and her heart soar. 

Overall, one can’t help but feel that this is a cynical attempt for Reese Witherspoon to break out of the rom-com’s she’s now too old for and to earn an Oscar. I know it’s a thin year in the Best Actress race but it would be shocking indeed to see this do well either in awards season or at the box office. Avoid.

WILD has a running time of 115 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Telluride, Toronto and London 2014. It opens in the USA on December 5th, in the UK on January 16th, in Estonia on January 30th, in Germany, New Zealand, Austria and Romania on February 5th, in Denmark, Italy and Portugal on February 19th, in the Netherlands on February 26th, in Belgium, France and Norway on March 5th.