15 MINUTES OF SHAME****

15 MINUTES OF SHAME is a tightly edited, well-organised new documentary from Exec Producer Monica Lewinsky and Catfish TV show co-host/director Max Joseph.  The documentary has two strands. The first tells us the history of public shaming, from the ancient Greeks via tarring and feathering, to present day cancel culture. It does so with a curated collection of talking heads from eminent academic and activist backgrounds.  The other strand features people who have had their lives ruined by public shaming, and crucially, not for having done anything wrong.  People who correctly called out racism or Trump's lunacy or just happened to make a hand gesture that got misinterpreted as racist. And there are real consequences for their mental health and livelihood. All of this stuff is punching down, just as it was for Monica Lewinsky. Far easier to call a young woman a slut than an old powerful man a predatory sexual abuser.  I learned a lot from this doc - especially about social media companies lack of legal liability under Federal law, and also about the evolution of troll farms. The personal testimonies were also deeply moving. This really is required viewing.

15 MINUTES OF SHAME has a running time of 85 minutes and is available to stream on HBO Max.

SPENCER*** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 2

No film by Pablo Larrain can be a complete disaster. He's just too bloody talented. And his tale of Princess Diana's final Christmas inside the Royal Family is beautifully shot by DP Claire Mathon (PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE) in a manner reminiscent of Barry Lyndon - ethereal misty cool landscapes and warmly luscious interiors hiding a gothic horror. The framing is deliberate and intense - close-ups of Diana's quivering face - tracking shots that move with her in and out of rooms in which she is alienated and trapped -  tableaux held for longer than is comfortable.  Moreover, Larrain's film is scored by Jonny Greenwood (THERE WILL BE BLOOD) in glorious eclectic discordant cool jazz, classical piano and 80s pop kitsch, contributing to one of the most impressively intricate sound designs I've heard in years. 

In front of the lens, the supporting cast is strong throughout. I particularly loved Timothy Spall as a kind of austere Danvers-ish equerry who allows Larrain to show the full froideur of the institution, without actually having a go at Her Maj or Pricne Charles (Stella Gonet and Jack Farthing - used very sparingly indeed). And in the title role, this film hosts a career-best performance from Kristen Stewart, whose fragility and vulnerability is used to devastating effect. As a portrait of a woman suffering from a nervous breakdown, bulimia, suicidal ideation and paranoid delusion, it's a heartbreaking and powerful film.

But for me, as a film about Diana Spencer, this film is a failure.  And that is predominantly because of choices made by Larrain and screenwriter Steven Knight (the pisspoor SERENITY).  I found their screenplay heavy-handed to the point of absurdity.  In an opening sequence, Diana is lost. Lost! "Where am I?" she asks bewildered peasants. Where is she indeed. "Do you think they will kill me?"  Whatever can you mean?! Throughout the film she has visions of Anne Boleyn. A cheap trick made even cheaper by a sequence where we see Diana in full tudor kit running through the house. And curiously miscast since Anne Boleyn was most famously the "other woman" rather than the "wronged woman" - in other words, more Camilla than Diana. And then the mawkish near final scene, where Diana's beloved dresser (Sally Hawkins - so talented she almost sells it) leaves her a note saying "it's not just me that loves you".  This film hangs heavy with portents of Diana's death and the mass hysteria that followed.

It's also odd to have Diana hanker after her childhood home as a safe place full of memories of dancing and laughter and sun-dappled gardens.  Diana had a notoriously miserable childhood, with a mother who abandoned her and a father who then remarried someone Diana painted as a wicked stepmother.  And far from being a boarded up gothic manor, the house was very much alive, being renovated by her stepmother in the bourgeois comfort that Diana claims to crave in this film, but decried in real life.

Finally, when contemplating this film compared to Larrain's magisterial JACKIE I wondered if the problem was simply that Diana isn't as interesting as Jackie Kennedy. She was basically a fragile, pretty, but rather thick woman who was almost perfectly incompatible with the institution she married into. It's a sad bad marriage but nothing more. By contrast, in JACKIE we have REAL narrative tension and REAL history being made. Jackie is a smart manipulative woman who wants to create the first draft of history as the myth of Camelot in opposition to the new LBJ White House and then Billy Crudup's journalist. There is no real narrative tension in DIANA.  Just a woman trapped for a 2 hour running time, looking beautiful and skewered. 

SPENCER is rated R and has a running time of 111 minutes. SPENCER played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in the USA and UK on November 5th.

COP SECRET***** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 2

Hannes Þór Halldórsson is the Iceland national football team's goalkeeper who once saved a penalty by the greatest footballer who has ever played, Lionel Messi.  That's reason enough to be famous.  But Hannes has obviously also spent A LOT of time watching cheesy American buddy cop action movies like BAD BOYS as well as, I suspect, ZOOLANDER and has created an absolutely hilarious low-budget buddy cop spoof called COP SECRET.

The movie stars Auðunn Blöndal as Bussi, a cliched drunken loner cop who drives around Reykavik in a suped-up shitty car at great speed with no respect for the rules. As we would expect, Bussi comes into conflict with his hard-as-nails boss Þorgerður (Steinunn Ólína Þorsteinsdóttir),  His rival is super-buff ex-model suburban cop Hörður, played by Egill Einarsson.  One of the most brilliant decisions in this film is to make explicit the implicit homosocial tones of many of these movies, and have beer swilling, fast-food eating hyper-macho Bussi admit that he's totally into his rival and vice versa.  The two cops are united when a dastardly criminal gang led by disfigured ex-cop Rikki (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson), starts robbing banks but apparently taking nothing.  What are they really up to?  And how is this going to impact the upcoming England-Iceland football match?!

 

The resulting film is fast-paced, genuinely funny and a great time, but only if you're familiar with the tropes its spoofing. Highly recommended!

COP SECRET has a running time of 98 minutes and has played Locarno and the BFI London Film Festival 2021. It will be released in Iceland on October 20th.

THE HARDER THEY FALL*** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Opening Night Gala

Jeymes Samuel's assured debut feature is a pastiche of Tarantino pastiching Leone, except with a largely black cast centring real black outlaws.  There's a joyous energy from seeing that kind of representation, and I respect Samuel for using his big stars - Idris Elba and Regina King - sparingly, so that we can see that next generation of talent shining through.  Special praise has to go to Danielle Deadwyler's queer outlaw Cuffee, who I would argue is the true hero of the piece, and RJ Cyler who steals every scene he's in as the arrogant, quick-draw outlaw Jim Beckworth.  Samuel also has an absolutely masterly touch when it comes to pairing action set pieces with iconic black music from around the world.  It comes as no surprise to learn that he's a multi-hyphenate talent aka The Bullits, who as well as recording under his own name, acts as a music advisor on others' films.

So what's it all about? In a prologue we see our antagonist, Idris Elba's Rufus Buck, brutally murder young Nat Love's mother and father. And so for the body of the film we are basically deep in Inigo Montoya territory ("you killed my father, prepare to die!") with Love's gang facing down Buck's gang in a series of Mexican standoffs and shootouts. There's a loosely alluded-to sub-plot whereby Buck has actually stolen all the money to finance a black-owned town called Redwood City as a safe space for black people, but he needs more money because white people are about to incorporate the state and will not honour their claims.  But this isn't really prosecuted as a plot. Rather, Samuel is more interested in cheap visual gags whereby a town full of whites is literally painted white and there's a subtitle that says "it's a really white town".

So that's the level we're on here - knowing, well-informed site gags and verbal humour.  As a result, because the film isn't trying to do something more profound, and one shoot out follows another, I did get a bit bored in between the flashes of humour. The set pieces are great - particularly one that happens on a train - but so many.  Are we gonna listen to yet another character ponderously explain their backstory before torturing another? And this brings me to a more profound question. I find it fascinating that Samuel wants to refocus our attention on real black outlaws but then doesn't really want to respect their actual stories and historical truths.  He just bunches them altogether rather arbitrarily into rival gangs and gives them a paper thin motive for their black-on-black violence. I get that it must be a liberating choice not to have to define the characters by their attitudes to mainstream white society, but it did make me uncomfortable to see a film where black people shoot other black people and leave the oppressive whites largely unmenaced.

THE HARDER THEY FALL has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated R.  The film had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival and will be released on Netflix on November 3rd.

DUNE (2021) ****

Frank Herbert's iconic ecological sci-fi/fantasy series, Dune, begins its first book with our hero, a young aristocrat called Paul Atreides, being yanked off his luscious home planet to travel with his family to an arid desert planet called Arrakis. The evil Emperor has lured them there with the promise of Arrakis' riches - the ability to mine "spice" - a drug that makes interplanetary travel possible. Really, the Emperor is jealous of Paul's father's charismatic power and is backing House Atreides rivals, the Harkonnens.  But Paul's father feels he can mount a challenge if he can form an alliance with Arrakis' indigenous population of Fremen....

Dune is notoriously unfilmable and yet it feels like every film-maker who read it as a teenager or somehow got their hands on Jodo's epic designs (see Frank Pavich's superb documentary JODOROWSKY'S DUNE) has somehow filmed it without acknowledging it openly.  To read Dune is to realise how much everything from Star Wars to Game of Thrones has borrowed heavily from its tale of political infighting, inter-galactic warfare, and mystic religiosity. This means that anyone who ACTUALLY films Dune risks looking like they're ripping off later works who themselves ripped off Dune.  (Tatooine, Saarlaks and the Force anyone?!)  And then there's the terrifying experience of David Lynch in the mid-80s, creating a Dune that was a commercial failure, where he didn't have final edit, and where despite flashes of design brilliance the whole thing feels like a pantomime ghoulish mess. (See my DVD commentary here). 

So it takes a real fanboy to have the balls to actually film Dune, and that fanboy is Denis Villeneuve, most famous for his superb sci-fi film ARRIVAL and the recent  moody but unnecessary BLADE RUNNER sequel. It tells you a lot that despite his commercial track record, the studio was not willing to finance both films that would've covered book one of the series, wanting to wait and see if part one actually found an audience.  Hollywood scars run long and deep.

Villeneuve's DUNE is, I am relieved and happy to say, a visual and aural triumph.  From his creation of Caladan in the Norwegian fjords, to his stunning depiction of shifting sands in Arrakis, this is a film-maker with a keen sensibility who leaves us with instantly iconic scenes.  I also really loved his design aesthetic - with beautifully rendered space-ships and palace interiors and ornithopters that actually look like flying insects.  Where Lynch leaned into the grotesquery of Baron Harkonnen, Villeneuve realises that what lives in our minds when we read a book can look absurd when visualised on screen, and so he uses that character sparingly and in a very pared down design. Indeed, all the costumes and make-up feel sleek and and as modern as possible. Finally, behind the lens, Hans Zimmer's score is another triumph, and I am unsurprised to learn that he's another fanboy. 

The acting is by and large fine - with Charlotte Rampling's Bene Genesserit Reverend Mother the standout cameo. Timothee Chalamet - well he looks young enough as Paul - almost pre-pubescent - but it's just another Chalamet role where he plays a brooding kid.  He has zero range - or at least no range that I've seen. Let's see if he can actually look like a leader as and when the next film is made.  Javier Bardem is fun as Stilgar, but we see very little of him.  Where I started to have problems was the use of humour in the film. Herbert's book is really dour and unfunny and the insertion of a couple of deliberately funny scenes around Josh Brolin's Gurney Halleck sat awkwardly with the film's overall tone. And then there was the problem of the audience i watched this with laughing at Zendaya's Chani as she mocked Paul.  And again, given that she needs to take a much larger role in any sequel, that may prove a big problem.

Overall, my feeling is that I enjoyed being in Villeneuve's world and fanboys will be happy that setpieces such as the fight with Jamis make the cut. BUT - BUT - I did find myself looking at my watch a lot.  It's a really weird decision not to film the whole book and because of that not much actually happens, there's no real narrative drive, and it's all just set-up. That's fine for me - I'll happily wait for another film, but is a mainstream audience going to wait? And if not, is this film going to make enough money to warrant a sequel?

DUNE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 155 minutes.  DUNE played Venice and Toronto 2021 and opens in the UK on October 21st and in the USA on October 22nd.

NAIL BOMBER: MANHUNT

In 1999, a pathetic hate-filled white 22 year old Nazi terrorist decided to start a race war boy planting home-made nail bombs in two parts of London with large ethnic minority populations, and then in one of the city's most iconic gay bars. He claimed, once caught, that one of his motivations was fame, so I shan't be naming him here. 

Daniel Vernon's new documentary is the well-constructed concise story of the people who lived in those communities and were caught up in his hate-crimes, as well as the police and earnest members of the public who brought the man to justice.  

We begin with the Brixton bombing, and a  moment of unexpected hilarity, as two market traders selling pirated cassettes and videos describe the events of the evening. Perhaps the most London part is their story of a passer by who had the stones and basic thievery to literally steal the bag the nail bomb was sitting in. I mean, come on! Knowing a bomb is in a bag, and literally taking it out and running off with the bag is just hilarious.

But this is a rare moment of levity as we move into the meat of the film. Amazingly, no-one died in Brixton but the injuries were horrific - not least a baby with a four inch nail embedded in its skull.  It was a similar tale in Brick Lane, another busy ethnic shopping street on a weekend evening. The police swing into action, combing through CCTV footage on antiquated video tapes to identify a white man in a mask. Posters are printed and a man called "Arthur" realises it's a man he knows. This is when Arthur emerges as a real hero - an undercover informant who had infiltrated the far right British National Party and led the police to the terrorist.  Not soon enough - quite - to prevent the horrific bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub - vividly described by one of its victims. 

We then see the second moment of unexpected levity in the film, when a "big hairy man from Essex" decides to write to the incarcerated terrorist, pretending to be a naive young Nazi sympathising girl called Patsy. The aim of the deception is to con the terrorist into boasting that he's not actually insane (as he's claiming in his defense) but just a nasty Nazi. This he does, and so he is imprisoned for the rest of his life. Kudos to Essex man!

NAIL BOMBER: MANHUNT has a running time of 72 minutes. It is streaming on Netflix.