Review Post 56: The Twilight Saga: New Moon

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON
DIR: Chris Weitz
CAST: Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Robert Pattinson,
Michael Sheen, Dakota Fanning



You may have noticed that I’m a big horror fan, and thus I’ve been very much in favour of the resurgence of the genre, and of vampire stories in particular, in mainstream culture. It’s just a shame that this resurgence is largely on the back of something as monumentally dreadful as the Twilight series.

In the interests of full disclosure I should say that I haven’t read Stephenie Meyer’s books. This is despite rather enthusiastic endorsements from both my brother (amazingly, despite being 24 and liking both Twilight and High School Musical, he doesn’t appear to be gay) and my mother. Because of these recommendations I cracked open the first book. I got half way down the first full page before tossing it aside. The concept of the Twilight series isn’t so bad; in fact it’s actually sort of intriguing. A human girl who falls in love with a vampire and then becomes involved in a love triangle with that vampire and a werewolf is filled with potential for drama. Sadly the execution of the idea is botched at every possible turn.

New Moon is spectacularly terrible. You may recall from my review that I hated Twilight (calling it “an unholy mess”). Well, almost impressively, New Moon is considerably worse. It’s tempting to blame Chris Weitz for this, after all, he’s the only significantly different element but when you’re handed a sows ear it’s always going to be difficult to turn it into a silk purse. Even if Weitz were a great auteur - which he is emphatically not - I can’t imagine this film being much better.

The big problem is perhaps inherent to the story. NOTHING happens. Literally. For at least 100 of this film’s 130 painful minutes there is nothing to see except an 18-year-old girl (Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan) moping. This is because her 109-year-old vampire boyfriend Edward (Pattinson) has dumped her unceremoniously, and told she’ll never see him again. New Moon covers about six months during which this boring, self-obsessed, girl does nothing but pine, and treat everyone else about her like crap. We’re meant to buy into a burgeoning relationship with Jacob (Lautner), but can’t because the script and the character of Bella are so completely obsessed with Edward that the potential for a love triangle never heats up.

As well as being dull, Bella’s a pretty awful character, which is a major problem for the movie, because the entire story revolves around the idea that this girl is so amazing that everyone is obsessed with her. Nothing in the world even exists except in relationship to Bella. You don’t always have to love a movie’s protagonist, but it helps if you don’t actively hate them. And I hate Bella. She’s unspeakably selfish; for six months the entire world is expected to revolve around her (totally unconvincing) pain and she seems to expect people to bend entirely to her will (when Jacob reveals that he’s a werewolf she says, in a completely ham-fisted metaphor for lycanthropy as homosexuality, “it’s wrong. Can’t you just stop?”). More to the point she never considers anyone else in her desire to be with Edward - not even Edward and his family, despite the fact the she is forcing a family of drug addicts to sit idly by while one of their number is basically dating crack. Point of fact you could make a compelling case for Bella being a psychotic erotomaniac. This is what the tedium of New Moon does to you; it forces you to think up your own, considerably more interesting, films.


This series is crying out for camp. Warring vampires and werewolves, all consuming star crossed love (as if the parallels weren’t already hammered home, Romeo and Juliet features in this instalment), the vampires council, the melodramatic emotion. If it were funny - on purpose - New Moon might be bearable, but screenwriter Melissa Matheson, Weitz, and the cast have all clearly been told that Meyer’s work is sacrosanct, and must be treated with a gravitas that it utterly fails to earn. This is a film that wants to be seen in the same earnest light as the Shakespeare that it references but, to put it mildly, Meyer and Matheson aren’t Shakespeare. I think they’d be found out even if they tried to pass themselves off as William’s talentless twin brother Ted Shakespeare. Lines like “The absence of him is everywhere I look. It is like a big hole has been punched through my chest.” read and play as if ripped from a depressed 14 year old’s journal, where it tries desperately to be emotional New Moon only ever manages sickly and slightly worrying.

If only the script were the only problem. Despite Hitchcock’s famous maxim that the three most important things to a movie are “the script, the script and the script” a strong look and a clutch of great performances can, to some degree, rescue a film from a poor screenplay. Oh well. The performances in New Moon are almost uniformly terrible. I’ve previously noted that Kristen Stewart strikes me as one of Hollywood’s most expressionless ‘talents’, well she outdoes herself here. Bella has two expressions ‘huh?’ and ‘can’t act, blinking’, both of which are rendered almost entirely in close up. The only emotion that Stewart registers is ‘scared’, never when it’s appropriate though, actually I think she’s just afraid of the camera. In a part that is supposed to overflow with emotion, Stewart’s total blandness, her utter vacancy, undermines every frame of New Moon. She reads every line with the same dead-souled lack of expression, the emotional content of her work redolent of an alien who has just landed and been handed a script. She either doesn’t understand the concept of what Bella is supposed to be feeling or, despite having been acting professionally for nearly a decade, she completely lacks the tools or the ability to portray any human emotion at all. I’ve seen a lot of movies, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a leading actress as consistently poor as Kristen Stewart.

Cinemas are apparently largely divided between two sets of fans ‘Team Edward’ and ‘Team Jacob’, two sets of teenage girls, each squealing for a different plank. Both Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner are, I suppose, handsome but equally both appear utterly devoid of talent. Pattinson isn’t helped by his role, which is essentially to brood, largely as an apparition, but he doesn’t help himself by doing every scene with what appears to be a poor attempt at Derek Zoolander’s blue steel look on his face. One especially laughable moment comes as Edward tells Bella “This is the last time you’ll ever see me”. Clearly this line should be devastating for both of them, but Pattinson delivers it with all the weight you might employ to tell your wife that you are just popping down the shops, and Stewart receives it with an exquisite blankness, suggesting that she can’t choose between ‘huh?’ and ‘blinking’ for this important moment. If Pattinson acts with his… nothing, Taylor Lautner does at least go one better, he lets his (mightily impressive) abs do the acting. His abs, sadly, utterly fail to deliver any sense of the longing his character is supposed to feel for Bella, or the conflict between that and his true wolf (read gay) nature. For such a major character, with such extensive screentime, Lautner’s abs contribute very little.


There are some small compensations in the form of the supporting cast, but they are all criminally underused. The beautiful and extremely talented Anna Kendrick gets about six lines as Bella’s friend Jessica (I’d much rather see a film about her than Bella). British actor Michael Sheen does his best as vampire king Aro, he does get the fact that the film needs to be campy and does his best to inject a little fun, though you can almost hear the internal monologue saying ‘I’m doing this for my daughter’. Sadly he, along with Dakota Fanning, who also works hard and puts a great deal into about three lines, has less than five minutes screentime.

From a visual standpoint Chris Weitz doesn’t stamp much identity on the film. It looks a little different to Twilight - more golden browns in place of the steel blues of Catherine Hardwicke’s film - but the film looks no better, or less silly, than the first. The vampire make up is appalling; with the exception of Ashley Greene, who is spared for the sake of making her look especially beautiful, all the vamps have skin so white it is almost marbled. Oddly a bluish green appears to have been mixed into Edward’s make up, which makes him look constantly like he’s about to be sick on Bella. This too undermines the attraction between Bella and Edward, because Edward looks dead. The effects are notably terrible; the glowing is as silly and unconvincing as in the first film - expensive CGI doing a job that would have been as well done with body glitter - but that is the least of it. The film’s big effect is the family of werewolves, and they look appalling. Their physical presence is totally absent, they lack weight, and are horribly integrated into the picture, as if the effects are two passes away from being ready. Yet another problem is the film’s action, even leaving aside the fact that what little there is amounts to perhaps three minutes of film, it is poorly designed and shot, especially in a fight with the Volturi, which has all sorts of bizarre frame rate effects applied, which add nothing to the experience.

Look, I know what these films are, and I know they aren’t really for me but honestly, that’s not the problem. It just feels as though so little effort has gone into this film at every conceivable level. Every aspect of it is embarrassingly poor from script to acting to visuals. I just object to anything so slapdash, so lackadaisical, so explicitly an exercise in commercial cynicism, being vomited into cinemas. I object to the fact that Summit Entertainment is able to expend so little effort and still make a hit movie. We deserve better than this. Perhaps David Slade will deliver, come July’s Eclipse, but I doubt it somehow.

Lux Radio Theater

I was born in 1981, roughly the same time that video was becoming popular. I missed the revolution though, the sudden availability to movie fans (albeit often in rather compromised form, thanks to 'pan and scan') of their enduring favourite movies (and, yes, an endless cavalcade of crap too).

Generations prior to mine will remember a time when the only way to see movies again was on TV, and before that only a select few titles would be re-accessible, through re-releases. Recently, on BBC Radio 4, there was an episode of Archive Hour about a really rather extraordinary programme called Lux Radio Theater, on which, from 1935 to 1954 recent and popular movies were adapted for radio, often with the original stars, but sometimes with different casts (albeit still with actors drawn from the top rank of Hollywood talent), creating alternate versions of the movie, a strange sort of paralell reality in which Casblanca starred Alan Ladd and Hedy Lamarr, Carole Lombard (pictured) played opposite Bob Hope, rather than Robert Montgomery, in Mr and Mrs Smith, and Ray Milland and Frank Lovejoy were the Strangers on A Train.

At the time, Lux Radio Theater must have been a wonderful way to revisit movies, and today it is a stunning archive of the golden age of Hollywood, with some highly enjoyable bookends featuring the week's stars and show 'producer' and presenter Cecil B. DeMille. The banter is probably closely scripted, but it's fun, and what I've heard of it has a nice loose feel.

You can find some episodes on youtube, but you can find a hugely extensive library of episdoes at the internet archive. I highly recommend, if you are at all interested in classic film, that you give this show a listen.

Talk to Me

As you may have noticed, I've added some contact details to the sidebar. There are a few reasons for this.

First, of course, any and all opinions on the 'blog are welcomed and (assuming that you're not rude, insulting or threatening me with death) I'll make sure I reply to everyone who takes the time to email in an opinion. It matters to me that people enjoy the site.

The other reason I've added these details is that, now 24 FPS is approaching its first birthday, I'd like to encourage a little more interaction. I want you the reader(s?) to get involved. If you want me to review a specific movie then you can email a request. If there's a topic you'd like to see a Cinematters post on then write in and suggest it. If you are a filmmaker and you'd like me to watch and review your film then drop me a line and I'll give you a postal address to send a DVD to.

Finally, if you've got an idea for a feature that you want to write, and you think would suit the site, contact me with the idea (NOT, initially, a full article please) because I'd like to run a few more articles from outside contributors.

I'll look forward to hearing from you. All three of you.

Review Post 55: The White Ribbon / The Girlfriend Experience

DAS WEIßE BAND
[THE WHITE RIBBON]
DIR: Michael Haneke
CAST: Christian Friedel, Burghart Klaußner, Leonard Proxauf,
Rainer Bock, Susanne Lothar, Leoni Benesch



Michael Haneke’s cinema is deliberately, often explicitly, challenging. The White Ribbon lacks the extremes of films like Funny Games and The Piano Teacher but, like its director’s previous work, it is an uneasy experience.

The White Ribbon often seems like a set of contradictions. It is a film about violence, physical and psychic; but that violence is almost never shown. It is a mystery, a whodunit; but we never find out any answers, and the answers never seem to matter. It begins by saying it wants to clarify things, but then spends two and a half hours obfuscating. This is a film that could easily have dealt in explicit shock (imagine the same material in the hands of, say, Gaspar Noe), but what Haneke does instead is create an undertone; an atmosphere of impending doom and of utter dread that begins as an almost imperceptible background note, but grows with every passing frame to a crescendo. This makes The White Ribbon a deeply haunting, troubling film; the unease all the more deeply felt because you can’t find any reason or any culprit for the events that precipitate it.

The film deals with strange violent events in a highly religious German village in 1913 and 14. What it seems to suggest is that these events, which range from the tripping of a horse, leading the local doctor (Bock) to break his arm to the vicious attack on a local disabled child, are a manifestation of the abuse that everyone in the village seems to mete out. Though there is nothing explicit shown it is clear that abuse runs deep. The pastor (Klaußner) humiliates his ‘sinful’ elder children by making them wear ribbons to remind them they must be pure, deprives his family of food when the children misbehave and even ties his son’s hands to the bed frame so that he can’t masturbate, and in the most appalling scene the Doctor dispassionately details to his Midwife and lover (Lothar) how she now disgusts him. Some have read the violent events and the cycle of abuse as a suggestion of the incipient fascism that would come to fruition 20 years later. Personally, I think I’ll have to see the film at least once more to decide what I think Haneke is saying with it, but it is a rich enough film that I’m looking forward to doing just that.

Technically The White Ribbon is flawless. Haneke and DP Christian Berger shoot in stunningly crisp black and white. It’s Haneke’s first non-colour film, but he demonstrates a total mastery of both black and white and of his frames. The light in the film is beautiful, with stark whites and deep blacks dominant, in a story comprised almost entirely of shades of grey. The photography calls to mind directors like Bergman, Murnau and perhaps especially Carl Dreyer. Each shot is a beautifully composed tableau, a perfectly stark image, often painterly in its beauty. Even some of the more disturbing images, like that of a gruesomely (and symbolically) killed bird, are as startling in their beauty as their shock value. Another thing that really makes the film appear somewhat out of its time is the casting. Haneke’s casting department deserves some sort of award, not only for finding such a capable group of actors, especially among the many children who play pivotal roles, but for finding actors whose faces seem to fit the period. Haneke has said that this was a painstaking process, and that he saw 7000 candidates for the children’s roles, weeding out the modern faces. It’s stood him in good stead, as The White Ribbon is very convincingly set in its early 20th century period.

The children are uniformly excellent. In one especially strong scene the Doctor’s daughter (Maria-Victoria Dragus) tells her adorable young brother about death, both of them giving supremely natural performances. Also impressive is Leonard Proxauf, in perhaps the most important juvenile role, as the pastor’s eldest son. There’s a powerful, barely repressed, simmering rage behind his eyes in a few scenes (which lends a little credence to the idea of at least this character being an incipient fascist). It’s an effective and rather chilling piece of work. The adult cast is also excellent. The only lighter moments come from a little romance between the school teacher (Friedel) and his young fiancé (Benesch, a beautiful young actress who seems lit from within), but even these scenes sometimes have an undertone of darkness, as in a deeply uncomfortable carriage ride late in the film. Friedel does well as a man who seems something of an outsider looking in at this slowly imploding community, and as the only possible point of identification for us. Burghart Klaußner is chilling as the film’s biggest hypocrite - a man who preaches against and punishes sin, yet sins himself and ignores news of bigger sins when it is brought to him - but he’s best in the one moment when his severe mask seems to slip, letting us see for one brief moment that he does have emotions. Best of all are a pair of barnstorming performances from Ranier Bock and Haneke regular Susanne Lothar as the doctor and the midwife. That devastating scene in which he tells her how he is disgusted by her is astounding cinema, the kind of thing that burns itself into your brain and remains there long after the credits roll.

The White Ribbon is certainly an austere film, and there are audiences who will find it distancing because of that. Many will also find it frustrating, because of Haneke’s total refusal to answer the many questions his film throws up. It’s not a film for the casual cinemagoer, it demands your attention, it demands reflection and, frankly, it also demands repeat viewings. The White Ribbon is not an easy film, but it is a great film, the work of a man who has not only made a storming return to form (after the curious, pointless, Funny Games US) but who is working at the height of his powers, it’s a sight that should be seen. Twice.


THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE
DIR: Steven Soderbergh
CAST: Sasha Grey, Chris Santos,
Glenn Kenny



If Che; a two part, four hour plus epic, years in the planning, was a five course dinner then The Girlfriend Experience represents a palette cleanser for Steven Soderbergh; a quick shoot, with largely improvised dialogue, and a lot of non-actors, and an eventual runtime of just 74 minutes.

The film centres on ‘Chelsea’ (Grey), a high class, very high priced, call girl who specialises in ‘girlfriend experiences’. Rather than turning a simple trick she is paid to spend time with clients; go to movies and dinner, talk, listen to their problems and, yes, to have sex with them. For many of the men it seems that being with Chelsea is as much about companionship as it is sex. Soderbergh began shooting the very week that the US economy crashed, and these concerns also weave their way through the film, impacting on ‘Chelsea’s’ clients as well as on her real life as Christine Brown and her relationship with boyfriend Chris (Santos).

My problem with the film was that, in dealing so closely and personally with ‘Chelsea’s’ life it should have felt rather intimate and observed, but for me Soderbergh’s own photography and editing undermined that. There’s a veneer to the film, a rather self-conscious artsy feel that strives to be off the cuff, but feels extremely designed and artificial. You could read this as clever, as reflective of the dual realities of Christine’s life. I don’t buy that. Most galling for me was Soderbergh’s very consciously metaphorical use of focus, I felt especially battered over the head by it in a bar scene, which has Grey and Santos out of focus as they talk, but snaps Grey into sharp focus when Santos leaves the frame. I get it Steve, but it’s not as clever a device as you think. The non-linear editing was also a problem for me, because it was another thing that seemed just to shout “you’re watching a movie”. Another issue is that, even at just 74 minutes, the film feels baggy. There’s a lot of very dull, time marking, stuff about Chris trying to maximise his earning potential as a personal trainer, stuff about which I really don’t care. What saves The Girlfriend Experience, somewhat surprisingly, is its star Sasha Grey. I’m not a big porn watcher. Of course I’ve seen some, but the only porn films I’ve seen all the way through are so-called classics Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas. I hadn’t seen any of Grey’s work prior to The Girlfriend Experience.

Let’s say this for starters; this girl is wasted on porn. Now obviously I’m making a judgement call here, but I’m guessing that Face Invaders 4 (charming) doesn’t call for much in the way of characterisation, which is a shame because in The Girlfriend Experience Grey demonstrates an ability to create a very convincing, multi-dimensional character. Christine and ‘Chelsea’ are very different personalities, and Grey draws that distinction impressively. What is particularly striking is the fact that she creates each persona so convincingly that we are never sure whether Chelsea is a mask that Christine puts on, or vice versa. It’s a complex piece of acting and Grey disappears into it completely.

While the film as a whole doesn’t quite work, some individual scenes are excellent. All of the scenes in which ‘Chelsea’ is interacting with her clients are nicely done, with the actors playing the johns (many of whom, apparently, are based on real people) all doing good work and Grey impressing with her ability to show how ‘Chelsea’ adapts her persona to each individual client. The film’s most striking moment is a scene featuring film critic Glenn Kenny as a blogger called ‘The Erotic Conniseur’ who, in return for a freebie, says he can give ‘Chelsea’ a review that will increase both her client base and her price. Kenny and Grey are both brilliant, in a scene that is skin-crawlingly unpleasant, sad, scary and also hilariously funny. In the film’s most memorable line the blogger tells Christine he’s planning to take a group of escorts to Dubai, which is “great, because it sounds like white slavery, but it isn’t”.

The Girlfriend Experience is ultimately an interesting failure. It’s hard to care about the characters, and the narrative is so choppy that it is difficult to get wrapped up in it, but it is worth seeing because, in Sasha Grey, it heralds the arrival of an impressive actress who I really hope we’ll get to see in more mainstream films.


Q and A


After the screening of The Girlfriend Experience Sasha Grey did a 30-minute Q and A session. Without her heels she would have been tiny (in them she was still perhaps a touch under my 5’ 7”) and she looked so petite that she seemed almost fragile (a notion that seemed ridiculous after she spoke). Still just 21, she looks even younger and is delicately beautiful, more so than on screen, in person.

I’ve been to a lot of Q and A sessions, but I’ve seldom seen a person who seemed smarter, more confident or more engaged than Sasha Grey. There were some stupid questions, even some that bordered on insulting, but she fielded all of them with good grace and gave full, thoughtful answers, always trying to engage the questioner personally. Most of the questions centered not on The Girlfriend Experience, but on her porn career and how she was going to combine it with a burgeoning mainstream career (she said that she's not putting up any boundaries). An interesting question asked whether she was interested in higher production value, more cinematic, adult films. To this she answered that she's setting up her own production company (Greyscale, a good name) and that she wants to move into making adult films with more plot and better production values, if not huge budgets. My favourite question was perhaps the last. Are you a feminist? She said that she is, but that she could see both the positive and negative sides of that description, before ending on the note of "isn't every woman basically a feminist?"

After she left the stage I managed to grab a brief personal moment, just to shake her hand (I didn’t have anything to get signed) and say how much I had enjoyed her performance.

This week

This week at 24 FPS, It's Tilda Swinton week. I'll be looking at seven films featuring the idiosyncratic British actress, including The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe; Sally Potter's Orlando and her Oscar winning role in Michael Clayton.

Also coming this week... Reviews of Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon and Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience (with a Q and A with star Sasha Grey)

Bond Week: Day 7

You Only Live Twice (1967)
Dir: Lewis Gilbert

At the time of its release You Only Live Twice must have played really well. It boasts a story that was loaded with relevance at the height of the cold war, taking in both the space race and the threat of mutually assured destruction between the US and Russia. In Donald Pleasence’s Blofeld it has an iconic villain. Sean Connery, in his fifth Bond, contributes a vigorous and entertaining performance; one that distils everything that defines Bond, and the action sequences are exciting, varied and well excuted.

The one thing the film really suffers from is the lack of a greatBond girl. Bond meets and hooks up with several Japanese lovelies, but none really contributes anything memorable. Another problem is a long sequence in which Bond is made up as Japanese man. The effect, to quote Blackadder, is as convincing as a giraffe in dark glasses attempting to get into a polar bears only nightclub. And, if not out and out racist, it’s certainly an uncomfortably anachronistic sequence.

The more pressing problem with seeing You Only Live Twice now, for the first time, is that it plays less like a Bond film and more like Austin Powers. It’s so nakedly the template for Mike Myers’ first spoof outing that I found it difficult to take the film seriously. That’s not a fault of the film, but it does mean that You Only Live Twice plays very differently now than it would have in 1967. Still, this is a very solid Bond film, and a highly entertaining piece of hokum.

Review Post 54: The Men Who Stare at Goats / Cold Souls / An Education

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS
DIR: Grant Heslov
CAST: George Clooney, Ewan McGregor,
Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey



I stared at Grant Heslov’s directorial debut for nearly two hours. It didn’t - quite - keel over and die, but the memory of it began to fade fast as soon as I stopped staring.

It’s really two films, and to what extent either is based on the book of the same name by British journalist Jon Ronson, I’m not certain. The more engaging of the films tells the story of the New Earth Army, allegedly an American military project that, in the early 1980’s, attempted to train ‘psychic spies’. This laid back, often very funny, satirical comedy boasts fine performances from the likes of Stephen Lang, George Clooney and Kevin Spacey, who, with this and Moon under his belt of late, seems to be reinvigorated as a film actor. However this part of the film, and indeed the film as a whole, is stolen by a perfectly cast Jeff Bridges as the new ager commanding the New Earth Army. Bridges’ Bill Django may be little more than a military garbed variation on The Dude, but it is endless comedy gold. There are a lot of strong, out of left field, jokes in this part of the film, none funnier than a totally unexpected namecheck for, of all people, Angela Lansbury.

The second film is a bit of a grab bag of genres. Part comedy, part drama, part war movie, part road movie, part buddy movie. It connects with the other story via George Clooney, whose ex New Earth Army operative take journalist ‘Bob Wilton’ (Ronson re-imagined as, of course, an American and played by a dodgily accented McGregor) on a mission in Iraq, while telling him all about the New Earth Army, whose story is related in flashback. The problem with this section of the film is that it doesn’t seem sure what it wants to be - one moment it’s a zany comedy, the next it wants to make a serious political point, and then we shoot back to the buddy movie, already in progress - the flashbacks come as a relief, but they also add to the whiplash inducing shifts in tone. The big problem with this framing story is that we’re given little reason to care about either Wilton, who comes off as impulsive to the point of idiocy, or Clooney’s Lyn Casaday, and as a result the buddy movie idea never really takes off. The plot of this part of the film also seems very much imposed on the film, wrapping up in a manner so implausible and yet so neat that you suspect it must be an invention for the film.

The performances, largely, aren’t bad. Ewan McGregor, who had the potential to be one of his generation’s finest actors, has been disappointing of late and this is no exception. His performance feels phoned in, and he generates no chemistry with Clooney. Clooney, the Cary Grant of our age, reins in the smugness that can afflict his performances and is very funny as Lyn, always walking a line between deciding to play him as nuts or as having genuine powers. Over and over though, I keep returning to Jeff Bridges, who is so good that he’s not just the best thing about the film, he’s something the film really misses when it isn’t there.

There are about 45 minutes of a very funny film here, I just wish it hadn’t been mixed in with an hour of a very confused and unengaging one during editing.


COLD SOULS
DIR: Sophie Barthes
CAST: Paul Giamatti, Dina Korzun,
David Strathairn




Cold Souls sees actor Paul Giamatti (playing ’himself’) struggling to play Uncle Vanya and, as an aid to his performance having his soul removed and stored. It’s an oddly apt metaphor for what Cold Souls itself is like.

There is a great deal to like about writer/director Sophie Barthes’ feature debut, but it never quite comes together, never quite connects, never quite scales the heights you feel it ought to be reaching. It is, at the end of the day, rather inconsequential - a curiously soulless experience. Despite this, I enjoyed the experience of watching Cold Souls for the most part. Sophie Barthes’ screenplay certainly has some very distinct echoes of films like Being Jonh Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (and, largely through the casting of Emily Watson, Synecdoche, New York), but it is smart enough and funny enough to stand on its own. There are some very funny sequences in the film. Giamatti’s first scene after having his soul removed is a real treat, especially hen he discovers what his soul looks like and once his soul is lost, sold on the black market in Russia, there is a wonderful extended gag about how the person who now has his soul actually wanted Al Pacino’s. What the screenplay lacks really three-dimensional characters. ‘Paul Giamatti’ is quite well rounded, but everyone else has a tougher time, with Dina Korzun suffering from a thin role (though she brings a lot to it) and Emily Watson (as Giamatti’s wife) so inconsequential and characterless that she almost melts away. However, the film is kept alive by both its laughs and two wonderful leading performances.

Paul Giamatti, even since Sideways and his extraordinary performance in American Splendor, has been working at the margins. He’s constantly employed, but he’s still ‘that guy from that thing’ in the conciousnesss of most filmgoers. Cold Souls won’t do much to change that, but it should, because it really lets Giamatti show the extraordinary depths of his talent. There are several different versions of his take on Uncle Vanya, but my favourite was the one during a rehearsal in which he is soulless, it’s a hilarious little vignette in which Giamatti plays Vanya with all the subtlety of a sitcom character. Just a few scenes later, now with the rented soul of a Russian poet, Giamatti performs the same extract with such depth and richness of emotion that it’s hard to believe it is the same actor. While he manages to bring a different quality to each of the states of his character (‘normal’, soulless, using a rented soul) never lets them become different characters, nor does he overplay, it’s an award worthy performance in a movie that struggles to deserve it.

Apparently Dina Korzun is known as the Russian Julia Roberts, a comparison that does her a huge disservice by tying her to one of the world’s most overrated actresses. I imagine that most people who have, like me, only seen her in her three English language films will have trouble crediting that comparison, because you couldn’t see Julia Roberts in any of the roles that Korzun has taken. I’ve been a fan since I saw Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (for which she won an acting award at almost every festival the film played) and Cold Souls only reinforces my opinion that she’s one of world cinema’s best and most malleable talents. Korzun’s character Nina is a soul mule, carrying smuggled souls between Russia and the US, a process that has left her with fragments of other people’s souls where hers used to be. This is only addressed a couple of times in the dialogue, and then never by Nina, but you can feel it in Korzun’s performance, which, paradoxically, is genuinely soulful. The supporting cast, as I said, is largely wasted, but David Strathairn, who does little comedy, shows a real flair for it in a fun performance as the doctor who removes Giamatti’s soul.

Cold Souls visuals are often as chilly as its title, but Barthes delivers a nicely designed and impressive looking film. The Soul Storage company is especially good looking - all white and metallic; sleek lines and curves - and the extraction machine is both aesthetically pleasing and somewhat realistic looking (it reminded me of an especially claustrophobic CT scanner. Cold Souls is slightly frustrating, something summed up perfectly by its abrupt and entirely resolution free ending, but there’s much to recommend it and plenty to suggest that Sophie Barthes will go on to do better work in the future. It’s an intriguing debut that’s well worth seeing for Giamatti and Korzun.


AN EDUCATION
DIR: Lone Scherfig
CAST: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina,
Rosamund Pike, Olivia Williams



Expectation is dogging An Education. It’s a hot tip for both Best Picture and Best Actress (for 24 year old British newcomer Carey Mulligan) at next year’s Oscars. It probably wouldn’t get my vote in either category, but that’s not to say that this isn’t high quality filmmaking.

Set in 1961, in a Britain yet to be taken by storm by the 60’s of popular memory, An Education is based on a memoir by Lynn Barber. Here Barber’s character is called Jenny (Mulligan), she’s a 16 year old girl set (with her parents often strict encouragement) on going to Oxford University, until she meets David (Sarsgaard), a man twice her age who sweeps the young girl off her feet with concerts, expensive meals and, most importantly, lots of attention. Lone Scherfig, a Danish filmmaker on only her second English language film, seems to have a surprising eye for the period, which is captured with assurance, reality and a strong eye for detail. Beyond that concern, the film looks wonderful, Scherfig captures bold, colourful images when Jenny is away from her parents and her school, off having the time of her life with David, giving Mulligan a gamine sophisticate look not a million miles from Audrey Hepburn. In Jenny’s home and school the film is a little more drab, like a little of the colour goes out of her life when she’s there. It’s subtly done, but reflects nicely the divisions between Jenny’s two worlds.

Scherfig and screenwriter Nick Hornby are also blessed with a distinguished and largely outstanding cast. Going curiously unmentioned in many reviews is Rosamund Pike, who is wonderful as a sophisticated, but very stupid, friend of David’s. It’s a part that could easily have been overplayed, but Pike makes Helen dimwitted in a way that, though extreme and very funny, is also believable. This means that when there are dramatic demands made of her it doesn’t seem entirely out of step with the character. Twice lately Pike has worked wonders with a thin part, and she deserves to be getting more notice for it. Much of the rest of the supporting cast is made up of the cream of Britain’s female character actors. Emma Thompson does good, authoritative, work as Jenny’s headmistress and Sally Hawkins impresses in a small, but pivotal, one scene role, while Cara Seymour lends solid, near silent, presence as Jenny’s mother. In another small supporting part Olivia Williams comes close to stealing the film as Jenny’s teacher Miss Stubbs, the hurt in her face when she says, in reply to Jenny, “I’m sorry you think I’m dead” is almost palpable.

An exceptional cast then, and that’s before we get to talk about the leads. Peter Sarsgaard first made an impression on me with his terrifying performance as John Lotter in Boys Don’t Cry. Since then he’s racked up performance after performance that demonstrates his chameleonic brilliance as a character actor. Here his upper crust English accent sounds a little forced, but it could easily be argued that that’s a valid character choice, and besides, otherwise he’s flawless. David is a loathsome, slimy, character. He’s clearly at least 30, and yet he spends most of the film attempting to seduce a 16-year-old girl. Skilfully, Sarsgaard walks the fine line of making David unsympathetic to the audience, while also allowing us to see how and why Jenny and her parents are charmed by him. Carey Mulligan has been plugging away as an actress for a few years, having debuted in Joe Wright’s 2005 Pride and Prejudice. She’s hit on a starmaking role here, and gives a performance that simply demands your attention. Though 22 at the time of filming, Mulligan certainly looks young enough to convince as 16 year old Jenny, indeed at times she looks younger, almost troublingly so in certain scenes. Jenny is written as an extremely intelligent girl, and Mulligan exudes that quality on screen, both in her character and in her acting, which is precise and detailed without ever being mannered. She gives a supremely natural and laid back performance that both charms and impresses.

One more performance must be mentioned because, for all the deserved plaudits that Carey Mulligan is attracting, and all the awards she may reap from this performance, the film is stolen from under her nose by an exceptional performance from Alfred Molina. Molina is brilliant as a Father struggling to do the very best for his daughter, trying hard to show her how much he loves her (the scene in which he gives her a Latin dictionary for her birthday is wonderful). In the single best scene of the film he brings Jenny a cup of tea and some biscuits and, standing outside her bedroom door, pours his heart out. It is hugely moving, and brilliantly underplayed by Molina.

My only real problems with the film are little ones; Dominic Cooper’s over broad performance as David’s friend; a rather predictable script (I promise you, you already know what happens with David and Jenny); a terrible, trite, pointless ending, in which, all of a sudden, the film feels a need to tell us something stunningly obvious and banal in voiceover. I think the reason I didn’t entirely love it is simply that behind the wonderful performances lies a story that’s rather unexceptional, but I can still highly recommend that you get yourself An Education.

Bond Week: Day 6

I've made a few edits, but this is largely the review I wrote on seeing Casino Royale on its cinema release.

Casino Royale (2006)
Dir: Martin Campbell

Newly promoted double 0 agent James Bond (Daniel Craig) is sent by MI6 to play in a high stakes poker game against terrorist banker Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen). He's to make sure Le Chiffre loses all his money so he'll have no chice but to seek asylum from Britain.
Along for the ride is treasury agent Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) whose job is to protect the money Bond is playing with and for whose charms Bond falls fast.

I wasn't optimistic about this one at all. I'm not a big Bond fan and I'm even less of a Daniel Craig fan. The criticsm when he was hired was about Craig's hair... James BLOND yelled the tabloids when, having seen the man 'act' before, I thought James BLAND was much more of a worry.
However reasons for optimism did begin to mount up. The recruitment of such strong talent as Mikkelsen, Giancarlo Giannini and, in a small role, Jeffrey Wright. The breathtakingly beautiful Green as a Bond girl. Most importantly, though, this was not merely to be the next Bond film, it was a complete reboot of the franchise.

Let's get a few things straight. This isn't really a Bond movie. It's got the girls and the action but so many of the trademarks are missing. Gone are the horrible puns about girls names ("I thought Christmas only came once a year"). Bond's drink order is also different ("Shaken or stirred?" "Do I look like I give a damn?"). There's no Q, no megalomaniacal supervillain in a hollowed out volcano. All in all this feels more like Jason Bourne than James Bond.

The script is pared down. For the first half of the film Bond says next to nothing as we the audiences get to gorge ourselves on action sequences. This is where one of the more major changes in the franchise shows itself. While still grandiose and show-offy the action feels more real here than in previous franchise entries. There's no powerboats down the thames, just feet and fists. The free running sequences (executed with panache by Sebastien Foucan) are stunning, injecting pace and danger into the opening of the film where there could merely have been dry setup. There's a lot of setup needed to get us to the titular Casino Royale and this is where the screenplay, by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis, comes good. The plot machinations could be slow but they find ways around and get some great scenes out of it, most notably a moment when Bond breaks into M's (Judi Dench) house. What's really well handled though is the immediate build up to the poker game, beginning with the introduction of Eva Green as Vesper Lynd. Most Bond girls have been characterless sex objects, not this one. The script gives her real intelligence and wit and Green sparkles. Witness the lovely scene where she and Bond first meet. The sparks fly around some quick witted flirting, though the two don't really like each other just yet.

So what of the main players? I've never liked Craig, as an actor he's always seemed to me to be robotic and act merely by saying one bit quietly and another bit LOUD, more or less randomly. This is as good as he's been and perhaps it's that he's found a role that fits him. Bond is an all but emotionless killing machine, it's surely not co-incidental that the passages where Craig is found wanting are when we are supposed to be feeling and investing in a genuine emotional connection between him and Green. Better is Mikkelsen, a great actor, who has fun as Le Chiffre but never lets his performance become pantomime, as so many Bond villains have. However this is Director Martin Campbell's show all the way. From the stark black and white opening, to the unrelentingly grim torture sequence and the massive final set piece in Venice he's got a firm grip on the reins and knows that he's going for realism and weight more than ever before in Bond.

All this mountain of praise isn't to say that there aren't problems with the film. The poker game itself is too drawn out, the match ups must take 15 minutes of screentime and though it's spread out the pace can't help but flag. There's also a 15 minute segment of Bond and Vesper's relationship, which not only slows the film to a crawl but, criminally, rings false. Another problem is the lack of an ending. As the credits roll you'll have been entertained but little has been achieved and no sense of closure is felt. It also bears mentioning that the product placement in the film has reached all but unbearable levels. As if visual plugs for Sony phones, Ford cars and Sony laptops weren't enough there's what may as well be an ad for Bond's watch inserted into the dialogue. These are all small things, but all distracting. However, on the whole, as absolutely empty nonsense goes, this is about as entertaining as it gets

Bond Week: Day 5

For Your Eyes Only (1981)
Dir: John Glen

As far as I can tell, For Your Eyes Only seems to be something of a favourite among the diehard Bond fans. I can’t for the life of me figure out why. It’s not that this is an especially bad film; it’s just not a very good one either. It just sits there on the screen, often seeming as tired and old as its Bond (Roger Moore, looking like a wrinkled leather sack at 54). It is perhaps summed up best by its title song, which isn’t the worst Bond song ever (that, surely for all time, is Madonna’s staggeringly terrible Die Another Day) but Sheena Easton’s somnambulant ditty sets you up brilliantly for what is a rather tedious film.

Though, at two hours, For Your Eyes Only is hardly a marathon, or even one of the longer Bonds, but it moves like a snail on valium. It doesn’t help that Julian Glover’s villain makes little impression, and is not even close to being evil enough to be interesting. It’s also a shame that the very talented Carole Bouquet appears, for much of her performance as dull as dishwater Bond Girl Melina, to be very poorly dubbed. The action isn’t bad, but only one scene - Bond hanging perilously off a cliff as some random thug cuts his rope - really gets the blood pumping. Moore does his usual thing as Bond, and is perfectly alright, but he seems a little bored, perhaps tiring of the role, or even realising that he’s getting rather long in the tooth for it.

For Your Eyes Only is a two hour yawn.

Next Up: Casino Royale (2006)

Bond Week: Day 4

The World Is Not Enough (1999)
Dir: Michael Apted

I was going to watch Die Another Day, the only Pierce Brosnan outing I haven’t yet seen, today but my VCR (yes, VCR) ate the tape and so I went to this film, and I’m glad I did. Every time I look at The World Is Not Enough I enjoy it more. Brosnan’s third crack at the Bond whip isn’t without its faults; Robert Carlyle’s bad guy is poorly defined, and totally unthreatening, Denise Richards is laughably cast as nuclear physicist Dr. Christmas Jones and the one liners are often painful (“I thought Christmas only comes once a year”) but, conspicuous as these faults are, they don’t take much away from what is a hugely engaging and entertaining film.

Michael Apted was brought into the Bond fold in order to punch up the film’s performances, and he’s succeeded admirably. Leaving aside the awful Denise Richards there’s not a bad turn on display here. Brosnan appears much more comfortable in the role than in his first two films, like he has now found a way to make it fit better, it’s evident in his interaction with other actors, notably Judi Dench’s M and in the fact that he’s able, in Bond’s relationship with Sophie Marceau’s Elektra King, to give the character a little more depth. The star attraction though is Sophie Marceau. Quite apart from being mind-blowingly attractive, Marceau is a proper actress; someone with major talent to back up the kind of looks that make her, with the possible exception of Jane Seymour, the single most beautiful Bond girl. Elektra is a strong role; while Richards is stuck with a very basic damsel in distress role, Marceau has layers, complex motivations and an interesting psychology to play. She does it brilliantly, giving a performance that is even richer the second time you see it.

This is not to say that the film skimps on the action. Apted and second unit director Vic Armstrong have crafted some tremendously exciting action sequences, from the opening boat chase down the Thames to the Millennium Dome to the attack on Zukovsky’s (Robbie Coltrane) Caviar factory by two helicopters each wielding several massive circular saws, there’s enough action to sate any fan, a great deal of it very obviously practically realised. Brosnan makes for a solid action hero; outwardly tougher than Moore and Dalton, he’s the most convincing Bond in action scenes since Connery. Like The Spy Who Loved Me, The World Is Not Enough starts to run out of steam in its last fifteen minutes or so, mainly because Robert Carlyle’s Renard isn’t developed or scary enough to make for a credible threat at the end of the film, otherwise, this is an underrated movie, it has plenty of problems, but is never undone by them and so far it’s one of my favourite Bonds.

Next Up: For Your Eyes Only

Bond Week: Day 3

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
Dir: Lewis Gilbert

Roger Moore, the longest serving Bond, probably the most divisive, and the one I’ve seen least of - just one film prior to this week. Moore’s films have a reputation for being campy, and though there are certainly flashes of this in The Spy Who Loved Me (“keeping the British end up, sir”) those problems are outweighed by the film’s many virtues.

The film gets off to a roaringly exciting start, with a strong action sequence which culminates in a jaw dropping stunt with Bond skiing off a mountain, freefalling and then opening a parachute. Today you’d probably do that stunt with a CGI Bond; here a stuntman skis off a mountain. It is absolutely astonishing. This leads into a title sequence featuring one of the series’ finest title songs and then a pacy subsequent 75 minutes of high class action and thrills. Moore, at 50, is looking a touch weather-beaten, but he’s still pretty spry and he executes the action scenes, especially those where he faces off against Richard Kiel as the menacing metal-mouthed mute Jaws, with energy. The choreography is also pretty good, and Jaws is made to feel like a real threat, with his blows looking like they connect and hurt.

Barbara Bach, as Russian agent Anya Amasova, isn’t much of an actress, which is a bit of a shame because while she’s very pretty an actress with a little more depth could well have made Anya one of the great Bond girls. As a secret agent herself, and working with Bond only for her own ends, Amasova is an intriguing character, but Bach lacks the resources to play the layers of the relationship between herself and Moore’s Bond and ends up playing more of a decorative role. Curt Jurgens’ Stromberg isn’t the most memorable of villains, but his plot is rather original and intriguing, particularly now, when climate change seems to be beginning to bite.

Overall though The Spy Who Loved Me is a very solid Bond film. Moore is pretty good here, he even scores with several of the one-liners that are usually my least favourite aspect of Bond movies in general, and which marred the otherwise rather entertaining Live and Let Die. He’s by no means the almost psychotic Bond of Dalton and Craig, but there’s a slightly harder edge to Moore than he’s usually credited with, and he does seem more secret agent than playboy here. The action is excellent, and well directed by Lewis Gilbert. Aside from that opening there’s a strong fight with Jaws around an Egyptian ruin and the storming of Stromberg’s control room, from which he’s attempting to destroy the world, results in a lengthy but exciting and, in a touch that has now become rather rare, intelligible, gunfight.

My only major issue with the film is that it runs a little long, and begins to run out of steam in the last twenty minutes or so, at which point the evil plot has already been foiled. That said, a hundred minutes of solid entertainment is pretty good, and I enjoyed this film more than I expected to.

Next Up: The World is Not Enough

Bond Week: Day 2

I’m sorry that this post is late. Our local telephone exchange has been down, and for almost 24 hours we’ve had no internet service.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
Dir: Peter Hunt

I have often said that, given a decent budget and a proficient crew, just about anyone can make a technically competent movie. Clearly I had not reckoned with Peter Hunt. Had it been competently made parts of OHMSS might have been fun, but as it is Hunt’s stylistic choices and the hideous botching of several technical issues make the film a real chore to sit through. The first problem is the action. All of the hand to hand fights (and there are many) are abysmally choreographed, with blows that never seem to connect, they are all dubbed with sound effects - both impact noises and Bond and whoever he is fighting breathing heavily, to show how much they are exerting themselves - that would seem outrageously over the top in a Jackie Chan movie, but these are the least of the problem with fights. Every fight scene is sped up. I named this website for the speed at which film runs through a camera to create the illusion of movement, but during the silent era films were often shot at 16 FPS. Some DVD releases fail to take account of this discrepancy, leading to movements seeming sped up and jerky. This is what appears to have been done with most of the action in OHMSS, and it is an unmitigated disaster, not just lessening the impact of the action but rendering it comical.

Other technical elements are also botched. The editing, by Bond director in waiting John Glen, is a complete mess. The first ski chase sequence is particularly terrible, with shots of new Bond George Lazenby and his stunt double not only utterly failing to match, but so disconnected that the sequence makes barely any sense. Then there’s the soundtrack. The music, though John Barry’s score is fine, is obnoxiously used; played so loud it dominates many scenes and used less as score than as instruction. Worst is the looping, oh dear god, the looping. It’s standard practice to re-record dialogue and match it to the pictures after the fact, but never - except perhaps in Lucio Fulci’s House by the Cemetery - have I heard it done worse. At one point during a car chase Diana Rigg ‘speaks’ while on screen she is facing the camera, open mouthed with fear and shock and clearly not speaking. There are several of those moments, but that one is just so blatant that it made my jaw drop to see that it had been left in a professionally made film. I saw better looping at a screening of short films made by the 17 year old students I had film studies with last year.

I wish that On Her Majesty’s Secret Service had merely been a technical failure, but sadly it disappoints on just about every level. The thrills are almost totally mitigated by the appalling editing and action choreography, and in between those sequences the film is both boring and seemingly interminable. The sequences at Blofeld’s (Telly Savalas; less megalomaniac than slightly creepy uncle) are just endless, and provide nothing in the way of thrills and even less in the way of comedy. Add in a totally unconvincing romance with gorgeous Bond girl Diana Rigg (who, to be fair, is the best actor and the best character in the picture; a tough, spunky Bond girl long before that was expected) and the stunning woodenness of Lazenby himself, and you’ve got a horrible, tedious, mess of a movie.


Next Up: The Spy Who Loved Me

Bond Week: Day 1

This will be the first in a series of themed weeks, during which I’ll be watching seven films that are in some way linked, be it that they are part of a series, the work of the same director, actor or actress, or even that they share a theme or genre. I thought I’d start off with a series I have embarrassingly little experience of…

Bond, James Bond

Licence To Kill (1989)
Dir: John Glen

It’s a shame that Timothy Dalton’s stint as James Bond was short and unloved, because his two films in the role are two of the best I’ve seen in the series. Licence To Kill is the only Bond ever to get a 15 certificate. These days it’s pretty mild for that category (indeed the 12 certificate Casino Royale is considerably more brutal) but twenty years ago this must have been a shock to Bond fans. The Roger Moore era of arched eyebrows and awful puns was, clearly, well and truly over. Dalton’s Bond was a tougher, meaner, more mercenary proposition. The quips are largely absent, as are many signature lines and moments and in their place is an unrepentantly violent Bond, gone rogue, seeking revenge on a drug lord (Robert Davi) who, at the beginning of the film, maims Felix Leiter and murders his wife.

Many of the qualities so lauded in Daniel Craig’s Bond are visible here, and Dalton really should get credit (as should director John Glen) for trying to take the series in a new direction with this film. Licence To Kill, despite the fact that it finds Bond working outside MI6, and with his licence to kill revoked (original title Licence Revoked was changed because, apparently, it was feared that Americans wouldn’t know what ‘revoked’ meant) still feels very much like a Bond film. We get the expected exotic locations, we get the girls - notably the stunningly lovely Carey Lowell, whose Pam Bouvier is a Bond Girl more capable than most - and we get Q (Desmond Llewellyn), very well used in an extended role. The difference is that it is all delivered with a harder edge. Robert Davi’s Sanchez is no cat-stroking megalomaniac, he’s a drug dealer, and a perfectly loathsome one at that, and it is his brutality that lands Licence To Kill with its certificate.

This is a lean, mean, focused film; one that matches its James Bond perfectly. It more than delivers the action goods, with a climactic truck chase and several excellent aerial stunts being especially thrilling and the performances (bar that of the robotic, if lovely, Talisa Soto) are generally very strong. Dalton is particularly good, and certainly more convincing as a rogue Bond than Daniel Craig was in Quantum of Solace. I really enjoyed Licence To Kill, and it baffles me that it was so poorly received that Dalton never got to develop this take on the character and the series very nearly died in its wake.

New Look

This, I promise, as much for my own sanity as yours, is the last time for a long time that I will be changing the look of the 'blog. I've been using this template at my new music 'blog, and have come to like it a geat deal. Having them share the same template gives the sites a shared identity, and there are little features of this template that will make 24 FPS look neater and be easier to read in future. I'll spend much of tomorrow restoring the sidebar and then things will, I promise, get back to normal service around here.

Cinematters: The 'best' of the decade

It’s perhaps silly to complain about lists, but it has come round, shockingly quickly, to both that time of year and that time of the decade when critics are looking back at what the 21st century has given us so far, a summation of 10 years of cinema. I’ll be doing it myself at the beginning of 2010. The first of these lists that I’ve seen was published today in The Times, you can see the full list here. I was immediately depressed on turning to the article; yet another entirely predictable list, a calculated mix of the mainstream (lots of Pixar, the two Bourne sequels, Gladiator) and populist, unthreatening, unchallenging, semi-mainstream arthouse fare Let the Right One In, City of God, The Orphanage).

It’s not that the list is full of bad movies (though it’s got some fucking shocking choices such as Paul Haggis’ Crash and Miranda July’s staggeringly irritating Me, You and Everyone We Know), and even if it were entirely populated with terrible a movie, that’s not the point. The point is that, especially in a retrospective like this, any critic worth their salt will be looking beyond the obvious, looking to share great movies that people are unlikely to have seen. I’ve seen 85 of the 101 films on the list, and of the other 16 not a single one is new to me. This is a list that looks like it was made by people sitting around and thinking about which films people will recollect rather than which were actually the best.

Of course all lists are subjective, and this one is, like all the rest that will come out, wrong by definition because I didn’t write it. But really, does ANYONE think that Wedding Crashers deserves to be considered one of the hundred best films of the last ten years, especially on a list that can’t find space for Oldboy? What really galls is the middle-class bent of the list; it’s a list designed to cater to Times readers rather than illuminate great movies (hence the almost total absence of horror films, bar LTROI, The Orphanage and, arguably, Pan’s Labyrinth). I’d love to hear someone defend this list, tell me, for example, why Al Gore’s powerpoint presentation is a better movie (remember, this isn’t about importance, or influence or relevance) than the devastating Her Name is Sabine, or how they arrived at the conclusion that in the last decade South-Korea’s new wave produced just one film worthy of inclusion here, or who Stephen Gaghan blew to get the painfully boring Syriana in at number 40, or… I could go on and on.

Here’s the thing, if you honestly believe that Wedding Crashers and Knocked Up and an overgrown TV movie like The Queen are even in the conversation when it comes to the best movies of the last ten years, you shouldn’t be writing as a film critic because, really, you aren’t seeing enough films.

Mini Reviews

Just a few mini-reviews this time, because there’s really not a massive amount to say about these movies.

FANTASTIC MR FOX [PG]
DIR: Wes Anderson


Catastrophic Mr Fox. Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl adaptation feels nothing like its source. The very peculiarly English wit of Dahl’s prose is stripped out, as is the way that Dahl spoke to both children and adults. What we get instead is a Wes Anderson film with stop motion animated animals. The characters all talk like they are in The Royal Tenenbaums, and while that style is fine for The Royal Tenenbaums it just doesn’t work with Fantastic Mr Fox.

Adding to the pain is the animation. It’s supposed to be charmingly lo-fi, but it just looks slapdash and inexpert. George Clooney’s Mr Fox is one of the most exquisitely punchable characters in film this year. Clooney is just unbearably smug in the role, and his trademark ‘whistle, click click’ made me want to write to my MP and get the ban on fox hunting repealed. Anderson never caters to Dahl’s core audience of children. The animation, the tone of the jokes and the soundtrack (Beach Boys, Rolling Stones and a painfully self-conscious Jarvis Cocker cameo that stops the film dead) are all clearly aimed at an audience of adult Wes Anderson fans.

Fantastic Mr Fox is an insult to a great book and a great writer, and I very nearly walked out.


MICHAEL JACKSON'S THIS IS IT [PG]
DIR: Kenny Ortega


This Is It is fascinating for about 20 minutes, that is for the time in which it is a documentary exploring the behind the scenes goings on at rehearsals for Michael Jackson’s ill starred intended 50 night residency at London’s O2 arena. Sadly another 90 minutes are given over to a facsimile of what the gigs might have been like, only because this is rehearsal footage MJ (as everyone calls him) is not working at his full potential.

The band are absolutely awesome, each member is a virtuoso in their own right, and they gel into an incredible unit whose interpretations of the songs give Jackson an exceptional backing with which to work. This makes it all the more sad that the Michael Jackson we see here seems so diminished. There are a couple of brief moments when he seems to be on, and his dancing is still genuinely awe inspiring, but there are some painfully bad vocal performances. The Jackson 5 medley in particular was like listening to fingernails being dragged down a blackboard in my soul.

The only time this film approaches the magic you’d hope the concert would have delivered in Thriller. The sad thing is that I don’t for one second believe that the Thriller vocal isn’t dubbed in straight from the album. This is a sad epitaph for a strange but undeniably talented man.


JENNIFER'S BODY [15]
DIR: Karyn Kusama


For someone as famous as she has become we’ve actually seen very little of Megan Fox. Transformers, a brief role in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and Transformers 2. Jennifer’s Body is her first chance to prove she’s more than a ‘pretty’ face (I still am REALLY not on board with the whole idea of her being attractive). Look, I know I’ve been rude about her in the past, but really, nothing would make me happier than to have to eat those words. It didn’t happen. Fox comes up ludicrously short. She speaks her lines well enough that we can understand them, but that really is about it, expression is nowhere to be found.

The faults, though, begin with Diablo Cody’s script, which reveals her as a real one trick pony, and the quirky teen dialogue has lost what charm it had in Juno, perhaps part of the problem is that Fox and Amanda Seyfried seem much older than Juno’s Ellen Page and Michael Cera and so Cody’s self-consciously hip words don’t really fit in their mouths. That’s just the surface though, and the problem is deeper. The characters are cardboard cut outs, all of whom share the same voice and - criminally - the film just isn’t scary.

The one thing that will make the (male) audience sit up and pay attention is the kiss between Fox and Seyfried (who, to her credit, is pretty good here, despite having little to work with). They do it with gusto, and while it arises out of nothing it is pretty sexy. Sad, really, that that’s the most memorable thing in the film.


9 [12A]
Dir: Shane Acker


You can tell that Shane Acker’s debut was expanded from an (Oscar nominated) short, because that’s clearly where the story belongs. Even at just 75 minutes this tale of ragdolls who have become the last inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic world is ludicrously overstretched. There’s a decent vocal cast, but sadly they are mostly wasted. The bulk of the dialogue goes to the ever bland Elijah Wood as idealistic youngster 9, leaving such interesting performers as Jennifer Connelly, Martin Landau and Crispin Glover (whose entire role amounts to FOUR lines) with little to do. This also means that there is little investment in the story, the characters are just ragdolls, and they never really became more than that for me. I don’t think of Woody and Buzz Lightyear as toys while I’m watching Toy Story, they are Woody and Buzz; living breathing three dimensional entities whose hopes and dreams I care about. 9’s characters are forever numbered ragdolls created by a computer.

Even the action scenes are a snore (almost literally, it really was a struggle to stay awake), and the fact that the film looks so very drab - all blacks, browns and greys - is little help. I didn’t hate 9, it’s not really interesting enough to evoke that kind of emotion in me. I nothinged it, which may be worse.

An Explanation

Hi. Sorry I haven't been writing as much lately. There are a couple of reasons for that. First is simply that I saw and reveiwed so many films in October (27 films at the cinema alone) that I was getting a bit burned out, and worried my reviews weren't up to snuff.

The second reason is more exciting. I finally decided to do something I've been thinking about for a while, and last Saturday started a music blog called AN ALBUM A DAY. I'll have new reviews here very soon (mini-reviews of Fantastic Mr Fox and more), but in the meantime pop over to the new site and have a look and a listen. Cheers all.