PAN

PAN is a really badly conceived and constructed film that has flashes of wit but by far not enough to compensate for the hour and a half of boredom it inflicts upon the viewer.  The director is Joe Wright, whose movies tend to be very high concept, over-worked and under-emotional for my taste.  And the writer, Jason Fuchs, seems to have way too much concept and far too little original thought. (Rather ominously he is also scripting the forthcoming WONDER WOMAN movie.)

So what's it all about? The movie is an entirely redundant Peter Pan sequel. Or rather it feels like the first half of one.  Peter is a young orphan left with some rather sadistic nuns in a gloomily lit world war two London of food rationing and German bombs. One night he is captured by a flying pirate ship captained by Hugh Jackman's camp but angsty Blackbeard and taken to the spice mines of kessel, sorry, the pixie-dust mines of Neverland. Enslaved, Peter makes friends with a character that's half Indiana Jones- half Han Solo called, wait for it, James Hook (Garrett Hedlund)!  We know Peter is going to lead a slave revolution because, hey, he can fly and his mum's called Mary! So together Hook and his sidekick Smee he nicks a ship and flies to fairyland with his new friend Tigerlily (Rooney Mara). She's a kickass girl and clearly the writers are trying for some kind of Han-Leia relationship with the rogueish Hook, complete with a last minute rescue reminiscent of A NEW HOPE. Anyways, there's then some Moria-ish stuff about fairy writing and a key and some Harry Potterish stuff about a childhood crush gone wrong and you end up just wondering why Blackbeard didn't just kill Peter when he had the chance.

PAN has a running time of 111 minutes and is rated PG. The movie is on global release.

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA is the delightful sequel to the charming 2012 kids animated movie.  It brings together most of the creative and voice team of the original for a story that feels organic in its progression.  In the first film, Dracula (Adam Sandler) struggled to accept that his beloved daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) had fallen in love with a human interloper (Andy Samberg) in his monster hotel.  In the sequel, the kids have gotten married and Drac is a grandpa to cute little Dennis. Problem is, Dennis doesn't appear to be a monster at all.  And so, a concerned Mavis wants to take him to live in the human world, much to Drac and his son-in-law's horror.

For much of the movie we see Drac take the kid on a road-trip to discover his inner monster, with laughably negligible impact. Turns out the monsters aren't really that monstrous anymore, partly through old age, and just plain old assimilation.  Pretty soon, Drac comes to believe that Mavis is right.  But at a last hurrah birthday party for Dennis, Drac's father Vlad (a brilliant cameo by Mel Brooks) comes to town. This infamously hard-ball monster is aghast that his son-in-law is human, just as the human grandparents are happy the kid is "normal".  

There's lots of social commentary in here about the difficulty of being accepted as a mixed-race or non-straight kid.  The difference between tolerating something and truly accepting it.  The difficulty of being understood by both sides and the pressure to please parents and grandparents.  And that's to be applauded. But aside from all that, the movie really works at the level of great animation, and superb imaginative comedy. The scenes of vampire bat flight are beautifully animated, and there are some lovely throw-away visual jokes (such as Drac giving the Invisible Man a purple nurple). Finally, what I love in this movie, as in the original, is its heart.  This is just a straightforwardly joyously warm-hearted movie that makes you want to hug your family and embrace glorious diversity.  Kudos to all involved.

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 has a running time of 89 minutes and is rated PG.  The movie is on global release.

STEVE JOBS - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Closing Night Gala

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Danny Boyle (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) is a great director with a kinetic visual style and a great use of dance music. He creates fast-paced films and all his best traits are evident in this new biopic of the iconic Apple founder, Steve Jobs.  But this is not so much a Danny Boyle film as an Aaron Sorkin creation. The screenwriter famous for The West Wing and THE SOCIAL NETWORK has an instantly recognisable style - heavy dialogue - often combative - delivered at fast pace while the characters are on the move.  On top of that style, Sorkin has also chosen a highly theatrical conceit for structuring this movie. Rather than a conventional biopic, he splits the film into three acts, each forty minutes long, and each taking place behind the scenes of one of Apple's iconic shareholder meeting. And in each segment, Steve Jobs, as played by Michael Fassbender (12 YEARS A SLAVE) confronts the same people.  

First up are the techies. We've got Seth Rogen (THE INTERVIEW) in an utterly straight role as Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder and genuine computer engineer.  He confronts Jobs about his desire to have everything frustratingly closed system and his unwillingness to credit the unsexy but cash-generative Apple II and its team.  We've also got the marvellous Michael Stuhlbarg as Andy Herzfeld, the engineer who we see as being serially bullied by Jobs.  

HE NAMED ME MALALA

Malala Yousafzai is familiar to us all as the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot by the Taliban on a schoolbus in 2012 for defying a ban on girl's education.  Today she is in exile with her immediate family, living in England as a schoolgirl, but also a globetrotting Nobel Prize winning campaigner for a woman's right to education.   

This is the story retold in David Guggenheim's documentary. It begins with some candid footage of the Yousafzai family trying to create a new life in England.  Malala and her two brothers are wonderfully frank and full of energy and on the surface it all seems remarkably buoyant. But we get a few glimpses of the reality of life in exile in a vastly different culture. Malala misses her home and friends and finds it odd to be schoolfriends with girls who are dating and wear school skirts. Her mother, who speaks very little English, is lonely and has to almost rebegin an education she never had. Malala also struggles to combine the normal stresses of schoolwork with the campaigning work that she is evidently utterly committed to - not to mention exceptionally good at.

The story of her present day life is interwoven with the real meat of the film.  Through archive footage, old photos and beautiful pastel coloured animation from Jason Carpenter and Irene Kotlarz we see village life in the Swat valley recreated.  We see that Malala's father and grandfather were campaigners and that she was raised in her father's school.  When the Taliban come to town, at first they are received warmly. But then comes the burning of televisions and CDs and the ban on women's education.  Her father campaigns and she defies the ban and in so doing becomes a target for retribution.  When she's shot (and two of her schoolfriends caught in the fire) her father even asks himself is she'll resent him for putting her in the path of fire. It's something David Guggenheim asks her about at the end of the film.  Malala takes ownership of her choice to defy the ban, and of course one senses her profound personal courage. Nonetheless, as the title of this documentary and the focus of its attention show, her father is an equally inspiring figure and undoubtedly deeply influential on his daughter.

The resulting film is interesting and well put together and benefits greatly from the exuberance of the Yousafzai family. But I do rather regret David Guggenheim not probing deeper into the story of difficult exile. It's starts to be really insightful as certain conversations are picked up, but they're never pursued satisfactorily. 

HE NAMED ME MALALA has a running time of 86 minutes and is rated PG-13.  The movie played Telluride, Toronto and London 2015. It was released earlier this month in the USA and Canada. It will go on release later this month in Germany, Chile and Denmark.  It will be released in November in Italy, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK and Ireland, Chile, Brazil, Sweden and Finland. It goes on release in December in Argentina, Japan and Norway and on January 27th in France.

TRUTH - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Eleven

In 2004 legendary news anchor Dan Rather aired a report on his 60 Minutes news programme that accused President Bush of pulling strings to get a cushy domestic air force job during the Vietnam War and then not even bothering to fulfil that duty properly. This was at the time when his electoral opponent John Kerry was being accused of falsifying his Vietnam war record. The report, airing just before a Presidential election, was incendiary, and all the more so when the two documents upon which it was based were accused of being forgeries. In the end, the misreporting of the story cost Rather his job, and also that of Mary Mapes, the producer who put the story together.

Now I’d never heard of Mapes, or of this story, and only of Rather in some vague way, and certainly not the particulars of his resignation. Accordingly, all I know of this case is what writer-director James Vanderbilt has chosen to present me with. I think he wants to tell a tale in the manner of George Clooney’s GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, or of Aaron Sorkin’s THE NEWSROOM, about crusading journalists out to expose the truth no matter what the discomfort to the powers that be. So, in that vein, he has many characters tells us again and again - at award dinners and in touching scenes of personal inspiration - how Dan Rather embodies all that that is right and good in integrity and the public trust. He does this is speeches that are very Sorkin-esque. Vanderbilt also paints Mary Mapes as a heroine - a woman beaten by her abusive father for daring to ask questions - and so per Vanderbilt, her psychology reduced to a father-daughter relationship with Rather. As the final music swells over the end credits, Vanderbilt tells us that Mapes’ work on exposing Abu Ghraib won a Peabody Award and that she hasn’t worked in TV since 2004. The space then hangs for us to fill in - what a tragedy - what an injustice!

Now I have no doubt that Rather and Mapes are motivated by the best of intentions and that their report was in good faith as presented here. But even here, presented as the heroes, as it was being constructed it all looked a bit slapdash to the untrained eye. I mean, when your document expert is being cut off and cut down for daring to ask about the sourcing of the document or raising queries about type face by your supposed heroine that does look bad. And although Mapes and Rather keep saying over and over that it isn’t about the document but about the abuse of power, well yes, but the document goes to prove that. You can’t just assert stuff, you have to prove it. That’s what journalism is, isn’t it?

I feel bad for all involved, but is Vanderbilt really doing Mapes any favours here? In a the big rousing speech she gives to her mean, nasty interrogators - the independent panel set up to investigate the claims but clearly loaded with right wing corporate interests - she is hoist by her own petard. She says the story is that so many of Texas’ spoiled rich kids got off going to Vietnam by going into the air guard. The guy asks her if any of them might just have gotten in on their merit. And she says no. People in the cinema ware clapping, but if you don’t even admit of a chance that just one of these guys got in of their own merit - not knowing them or their cases - isn’t that just prejudice?

Like I said, I don’t know anything about this case. I do think Bush probably got an easy ride because of who he was, and that is a story that should’ve been exposed, no matter what Viacom’s business with Congress. But per the evidence in this film, the investigative work done by Mapes didn’t prove that, and shouldn’t have been aired. Yes the questions should’ve been asked, but the answers had not bean adequately demonstrated.  Even worse, the fake documents became the story. Incompetence prevented the exposure of truth.

So what we have here is a very very weird film indeed that seeks to portray a woman as a heroine for creating a news report that was substantively right and sticking by it, except that the movie does not, to my mind, show that it was substantively proven. And that just undermines the whole exercise. Worst of all, it undermines the very concept that it is trying to defend - rigorous, unprejudiced, investigative journalism no matter how powerful the target. So with that major flaw of choice of subject matter, or just how it was shaped and presented, writer James Vanderbilt makes Cate Blanchett’s typically fine performance redundant.

TRUTH has a running time of 121 minutes and is rated R.  It played Toronto 2015 and is currently on release in the USA. It opens in Sweden on November 16th, in France on February 10th 2016, in the UK on March 4th and in Germany on March 17th.

MY SCIENTOLOGY MOVIE - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Eleven

The past decade has seen the lid blown of the cult that is the so-called Church of Scientology thanks to the testimony of ex-members and many of the Church's ultra top secret documents, that you'd usually pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn, being posted online. In addition, in the past couple of years we have seen some important cinematic treatments of the Church, including Paul Thomas Anderson's powerful lightly fictionalised drama, THE MASTER, and Alex Gibney's HBO-funded doc, GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE PRISON OF BELIEF.  Both films exposed basic beliefs and psychological training drills as well as exploring the way in which ordinary people can get sucked into a prison of the mind, if not worse. No-one can now say that they weren't warned. 

Writer-presenter Louis Theroux is the latest high profile journalist to investigate Scientology and in some ways his approach is the best calculated to expose its simultaneously sinister and absurd response to what it perceives are threats. Theroux has made countless documentaries in which his trademark deadpan humour, thick skin and ability to keep going until he provokes a response have combined to elicit insight or humour, and oftentimes both.  So when faced with a cult that has its members stalk him, prevent him from filming, bar him from public roads, Theroux's phlegmatic, superficially friendly and yet persistent response is absolutely the right approach.  As a result, some of the funniest and most powerful moments of this film are when the production team are filming the Scientologists who are filming them in return - both sides claiming they are unconcerned with being monitored by the other.

Where the documentary is darker, and arguably more insightful, is in showing Louis get close to ex scientologist Marty Rathbun, well known for his criticism of the Church's boss, David Miscavige.  Louis uses casting sessions and cinematic re-enactments of key moments of alleged abuse in the Church to show us, the audience, what he thinks it's all about, but also to start to investigate Rathbun's own complicity in its practices. Notably, Rathbun is reluctant to allow the discussion to go in that direction and it's a shame he wasn't pressed more, at least on screen.

Which brings me to my real criticism of the documentary, which is its soft-pedalling.  At one point, an ex-scientologists says of Marty Rathbun that he's not been totally open, and has been tip-toing around some of the stuff that went on in the 1990s.  "He knows where the bodies are buried."  And when Marty himself gets riled up when some harassers refer to his child, he makes statements to the effect that he's being playing fair so far, but now he's really going to bring Scientology down.  

Well I'd argue that, at least on screen, Louis Theroux does exactly the same - he tiptoes around certain subjects that anyone who's followed this subject online will know about and want answers to. One wonders if that's because of legal issues, because Alex Gibney didn't go there either. But I would simply ask why Shelley Miscavige wasn't mentioned in either documentary?

The resulting film is, then, very funny, often insightful, but doesn't tell anyone who's watched the Alex Gibney film anything they don't already know. 

MY SCIENTOLOGY MOVIE has a running time of 99 minutes.