INCOMING: Curing the summertime blues. Pt. 2

Here’s the second part of my round up of the alternatives being offered at cinemas during blockbuster season this year (along with the odd interesting looking major release)

AUGUST
13th
Le Refuge


If you know me at all you know that I hold Francois Ozon in very high regard. He’s a master filmmaker, and perhaps the only working director with a lengthy filmography who has never made a bad film. Le Refuge, which I saw at Rendez Vous with French Cinema earlier this month, is among his best work, certainly his best film since his masterpiece; 5 X 2. It features an(other) exceptional performance from Isabelle Carre as Mousse, a young woman trying to kick drugs and bring the child of her boyfriend, who has recently died of an overdose, to term. Ozon doesn’t indulge in the clichés of either a drug or a pregnancy movie, instead crafting a genuinely brilliant character study.

The Secret in their Eyes


The surprise winner (beating, among others, Haneke’s The White Ribbon) of this year’s foreign film Oscar. This Argentinean film has attracted very appreciative reviews from the critics who have seen it. It appears to be a thriller, with a murder mystery at its heart, and I’ve seen it compared to The Usual Suspects. For me, another point of interest is Ricardo Darin, who I was very impressed by in XXY. This one is something of an unknown quantity for me, but I’m expecting a nice surprise.

25th
Scott Pilgrim Vs The World


The latest from British director Edgar Wright seems well suited to his idiosyncratic sensibilities. It’s a romantic action comedy about Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), who begins dating the girl of his dreams (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), but before he can win her heart he must fight, and defeat, her seven evil exes. The dialogue should be sharp and funny, the cast is brilliant (and also includes recent Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick) and the fights have been choreographed by Jackie Chan’s stunt team. I’m sold.

27th
The Girl Who Played With Fire


As a novel this follow up to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was a little bloated, and felt like a bit of a stopgap; the first part of a huge story for completion in the third book (the film of which opens, smartly, in November). Hopefully, in the inevitable tightening of the story, the film will inject a little more pace, and get to the thrilling heart of the story faster. Whatever happens we get another two hours with Noomi Rapace’ Lisbeth Salander, which can only be a good thing really.

The Runaways


I’m interested in this biopic, which apparently focuses more on Joan Jett and Cherie Currie than their band as a whole, for several reasons. First is trying to discover whether Kristen ‘cant act, blinking’ Stewart can actually act. Second is to see how Dakota Fanning (who can act) fares in her first real adult role. Third is to see whether the amazing music video director Floria Sigismondi can bring her very particular style to the movies.


SEPTEMBER
3rd
Cherry Tree Lane


It will be very interesting to see how this fares with BBFC, because it is apparently cut from the same cloth as the home invasion horrors like Fight For Your Life and The House on the Edge of the Park which featured so heavily in the 'video nasties' list. I’m getting a little bored of this British hoodie horror cycle (see, or don’t, the awful Eden Lake), but I’ll give this the benefit of the doubt because Paul Andrew Williams is at the helm, and I’m hoping this will mark a return to the form of his excellent, if disturbing, debut; London to Brighton.

10th
Metropolis [Restored Version]


A couple of years ago, in Argentina, a print of the long thought lost original version was discovered. Since then there has been a battle to restore it, so that we can, for the first time in 83 years, see this groundbreaking vision of the far future in a form that is at least very close to that intended by its director (a few scenes were too badly damaged to repair). The real joy though will be in seeing those famous images, particularly the cityscapes, and the robot Maria, in a fully restored digital print on a cinema screen. It should be a mindblowing experience.

Tamara Drewe


I know next to nothing about this latest from Stephen Frears, who seems to be continuing his genere hopping ways here, with an adaptation of a British comic strip. It was well received at Cannes though, and is toplined by rising British star Gemma Arterton (who pretty much owns 2010 at this point, with The Disappearance of Alice Creed and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time having opened already). The only thing I really know is that I’ve read that comic strip is something of a spoof of The Archers (long running, and appalling, radio soap about farmers).

17th
The Horde


French horror has, over the last few years, been churning out some of the edgiest, most compelling, most punishing horror films in the world (including the peerless Martyrs). What they’ve been missing from this fantastic cycle of films is a zombie movie, well, The Horde is going to cure that. I really know little more then ‘French, insanely violent, zombie movie’. I’ve been avoiding information and trailers so I can go into it as cold as I did Martyrs and Inside, hoping for a similar experience.

24th
Cyrus


Mumblecore auteurs Mark and Jay Duplass make their mainstream debut with this festival hit, which has also been well received at the box office, scoring a very respectable screen average. It sees John C Rielly’s character beginning to date single parent Marisa Tomei, and discovering that she has an unhealthily close relationship with her son (Jonah Hill). Tomei has, over the last few years, become one of Hollywood’s more interesting character actors, and it should be interesting if Hill has the chops to match his co-stars.

The Hole [3D]


I know I hate 3D, but I’m interested in this for one reason… Joe Dante’s BACK. This is the first feature in six years from the man who gave us the Gremlins films, Piranha, the underrated Looney Tunes: Back in Action and Matinee, that’s all I need to know. It’s also interesting because Dante is a great visual storyteller, his films may not be the most beautiful in the world, but he’s got an individual and witty eye, I’m intrigued by what he might do with 3D.

The Town


I didn’t like Ben Affleck’s directorial debut; Gone Baby Gone quite so much as some people did, largely because the ending just didn’t work for me, but it did demonstrate that he had a firm grip behind the camera, real style as a filmmaker and a sure hand with actors. This second effort is a cop movie with an exceptional cast list including Affleck himself, Jeremy Renner, Chris Cooper, Rebecca Hall and Blake Lively. Should be a sure bet for some strong performances.

Film Review: Whatever Works

WHATEVER WORKS
DIR: Woody Allen
CAST: Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson,
Ed Begley, Jr, Henry Cavill



It’s perhaps no surprise, given both his deeply uninspired recent form and the fact that this film is largely based on a screenplay that Allen wrote, and stuck in a drawer, more than 30 years ago that Whatever Works is largely bland, banal, unfunny and generally crushingly mediocre. What is more of a surprise is that in amongst the endless mediocrity is one performance, from Evan Rachel Wood, that lifts the whole film, making it, if far from great, Allen’s best for a while.

Whatever Works is so typical of Woody Allen that it is very nearly self parodying. The lead character, Boris Yelnikoff (David) is, as ever, Woody Allen (and, surprise surprise, that’s exactly how David plays him). Yelnikoff is a misanthropic physicist who regards life as largely being a desolate wasteland of pain and misery and regards himself as a genius and everyone else as “Microbes”. One night 21 year old runaway Melody (Wood) turns up on his doorstep and he lets her in ‘for two minutes’ so she can have some food. Despite the fact that they are complete opposites (she’s so dim that when Boris says he got his limp playing for the Yankees she takes him at his word) two minutes becomes several months, and they get to be quite close. Eventually Melody tells Boris that she’s falling for him, and they get married. Thereafter the film becomes something of a farce, as Melody’s eccentric parents (Clarkson and Begley) turn up looking for her.

Allen’s ongoing interest in stories about pretty young women falling for late middle aged intellectuals is becoming both rather icky and rather boring, to say nothing of, in this case, risibly unconvincing. Boris is so totally misanthropic, so unbelievably rude, so dismissive of everyone and everything that it’s impossible to believe in anyone giving him the time of day, let alone this pretty, sweet young woman. It’s not that David plays him badly, more that the role is so unpalatable that nobody could have made it work.

In support there is decent work from the reliably amusing Ed Begley, Jr as Melody’s father and from Patricia Clarkson, well cast as her Mother, who arrives in New York and in a week goes from uptight southern religious type to bohemian, sexually insatiable, artist. Faring less well is the ill defined cast of Boris’ friends (including Spinal Tap’s Michael McKean) and British actor Henry Cavill, playing British actor Randy. Honestly, Randy. I’m British, I’ve lived in Britain my whole life, I’ve met quite a lot of British people, want to know how many are called Randy? None, it’s just not a name you hear here, and it really sits uneasily with the character, to the point that it’s hard to take him seriously.

The whole film is stolen, and energised, by Evan Rachel Wood. She’s clearly very talented, okay the accent is kind of hokey, but like the rest of her performance it’s charming, and a lot of fun. Melody is the one truly likable character in the film, the only one who doesn’t seem overwhelmingly selfish. Wood plays dumb beautifully, making Melody a little slow off the mark, but not completely unbelievably idiotic, lacking more perhaps in education than IQ. What’s really engaging though is just her energy level here, she’s always just got that extra little spark about her. Allen sometimes uses her as set decoration (she spends much of her screentime in tight tops and short shorts), but she always transcends both that choice and the not especially amusing screenplay.

The problem with Allen’s recent films is that he seems to have run short of things to say, that’s true here too. There’s a clanging criticism of religion, but everything is done in such broad strokes, and all the characters besides Boris change so much, so fast, with so little reason, that it feels very unconvincing. The more pressing problem is that it’s just not funny. Boris is too readily hateable to be very amusing, and Allen’s one liners have largely lost their spark. That Whatever Works isn’t awful makes it a partial return to form for Woody Allen, but don’t go in expecting Manhattan, or Zelig.

Film Review: Villa Amalia

VILLA AMALIA
DIR: Benoit Jacquot
CAST: Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Maya Sansa



There’s something about French cinema, it just seems to be more adult, if not always in content (certainly Villa Amalia contains no swearing, no sex, no violence and no nudity) then in intent. American movies, for the most part, seem to be made for very stupid children. Everything gets spoon fed to us; emotion (if there is any), is usually writ large, characters have one, perhaps two, traits in place of a personality and every plot point is explained as if the audience had the collective mental capacity of a retarded chimp. That’s why it’s so refreshing to see films like Villa Amalia.

As the film opens two things happen, just about simultaneously, to Ann (Huppert); first she sees her partner of fifteen years kissing another woman, then, seconds later, she bumps into childhood friend Georges (Anglade). Spurred, perhaps, by these two events, Ann dramatically changes her life. She secretly sells her apartment, abandons her career as a concert pianist, and determines to, as thoroughly as possible, vanish.

The film divides pretty neatly in two. The first half, set in France, is generally a bit darker, and puts its focus more on people, with lots of medium and close shots. As Ann leaves her former life behind the film acquires more light, and becomes more expansive, and in the second half, as she winds her way through Europe, seemingly without much of a plan, the camera pulls back to give her lots of space, to show her newly acquired freedom. It doesn’t smack you over the head with this visual metaphor, but it’s there.

In fact, very little is signposted here. We never really know why Ann’s reaction is so definite, so fast, and so final. She tells her partner Thomas (Xavier Beauvois) that she’s not angry, but it’s hard to buy that (and I suspect that Ann finds it equally hard to believe). It’s also unclear, for a while, what Georges is, or wants to be, to Ann. Anglade plays him as a man carrying a torch, but a moment late in the film calls this into question. Perhaps the heart of it is that Georges (who lives alone in a huge house, and has just lost both his mother and his ‘best friend’) is very lonely. There’s certainly a melancholy running through Georges and Ann’s story, and Anglades’s sensitive, underplayed, turn really brings that out affectingly.

Isabelle Huppert, as ever, is in a class of her own. At one point Maya Sansa’s character asks “Where did you get that face?” It’s an interesting line because Huppert isn’t the most obvious beauty, but she’s got a fascinating face. When she’s on screen, whether or not she’s talking there always seems to be something going on with Huppert. Many actors seem to be waiting to talk, the great ones (and I’d put Huppert in the top few percent of that list) react, not just to other people’s dialogue, but to everything. She doesn’t do anything huge, but the fact that you can see her thinking means that Huppert allows you to identify with this difficult, distant, woman, and to go along with her on her journey.

The whole film looks lovely, but it’s in the second half that Benoit Jacquot really gets to cut loose, allowing his camera to drink in the beautiful scenery that Ann has retreated to. For perhaps fifteen minutes the film is largely dialogue free as it follows Ann’s journey, and there are some breathtaking shots along the way.

I could understand if people don’t like Villa Amalia, it’s not an easy film. The characters motivations are sometimes difficult to fathom, and though it is beautiful to look at the film moves very slowly, and not much actually happens (even when Ann forms a relationship with Maya Sansa’s character it is communicated almost entirely by shots of them sleeping next to each other). However, thanks largely to Huppert and Anglade’s expert performances, I was completely taken with the film. I wasn’t annoyed that it wasn’t spelling out Ann’s character and motivations, in fact I was intrigued by that and by her and I was enchanted by the beauty of the scenery and of Isabelle Huppert. It’s essential for Huppert fans, and recommended if you don’t always need things to explode.

INCOMING: Curing the summertime blues

I have long hated summer at the movies. It’s the season when the already dangerously low IQ of both films and audiences appears to drop another twenty points, when the studios wheel out their most aggressively marketed and (not coincidentally) most aggressively dull films. It’s also when the schools are out, so even at matinees you get mewling brats shouting, throwing popcorn and playing with their phones.

So, as a way to stave off my depression, here’s a selection of counter programming, the films being released up until the end of September which should help stave off those summertime blues. I’ve included some of the less idiotic looking studio fare, along with a lot of things that are much more off the beaten path. Some I’ve seen already, others I’m just as much in the dark on as you are. All films are listed under their UK release date.

In this first part I'll look at a couple of films out now, as well as the whole of July. I'll cover August and September in the next post.

OUT NOW
Good Hair


Chris Rock explores the $9bn industry around black hair in this irreverent looking documentary. It’s attracting good reviews, and the trailer alone contains some very funny stuff, as well as some genuinely interesting, and sometimes shocking, information.

Villa Amalia


The first of a pair of Isabelle Huppert films opening in the UK in the next two weeks. Here she sees her husband kissing another woman, which acts as the trigger for her to leave and pursue a whole new life, including, apparently, a new relationship with a younger woman played by Maya Sansa. It’s got mixed notices, but Huppert is always worth watching.


JULY
2nd
White Material


The latest from acclaimed French director Claire Denis has attracted laudatory word at the festivals since Cannes last year, and finally opens here having played at London in 2009. It’s set in an unnamed African country and sees Huppert as a coffee grower who is threatened with violence when there is a growing rebellion among the native population. There’s an interesting cast, including Christophe Lambert as Huppert’s husband and frequent Denis collaborator Issach De Bankole as a rebel leader. It will be the first I’ve seen of Denis’ work, I hope she lives up to her reputation.

9th
Leaving


I saw this latest from Catherine Corsini at both LFF 2009 and Rendez Vous with French Cinema 2010. It does boast brilliant performances from Sergi Lopez and Kristin Scott Thomas, but the film, which is a little melodramatic at times, struggles to come up to the level of excellence achieved by the leads.

Went the Day Well?
Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1942 masterpiece is getting a re-release thanks to a BFI season. The story of a covert Nazi invasion of Britain, via a tiny rural community, must have been terrifying in its day. Now it serves as a rousing war movie, while remaining tense and provocative thanks to strong direction from Cavalcanti and fine performances all round. Highly recommended among this summer’s reissues.

16th
Inception


Christopher Nolan’s stopgap between The Dark Knight and his likely next project; Batman 3 is his first entirely self-penned script since his debut, Following. In a summer seaon that looks overwhelmingly braindead it seems that the worry with Inception is the reverse, apparently some of the actors didn’t understand the film while shooting it, so the question is; are audiences too dumb for this movie? I’m interested anyway, I don’t love Nolan’s work, but this has a great cast (Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Michael Caine) and at the very least it looks like it’s going to pack visual inventivness to match the story.

Rapt


Lucas Belvaux made an audacious debut with One, Two and Three, a trilogy of linked films, each in a different genre. His latest is a kidnap thriller following negotiations for the release of Yvan Attal’s character, even as he deteriorates in captivity. The wonderful Anne Consigny plays Attal’s wife.

19th
Toy Story 3


If I were going to see just one film this summer it would be this one. And by the way, if ANYONE tells me ANYTHING about what happens in it I will rip out their lungs. I know it’s got great notices (and that professionally contrary critic Armond White hated it) and I know that it is supposed to continue Pixar’s grand tradition of making films that are funny and emotional, both for children and for adults. I want to be as surprised by this film as I was 15 years ago at a preview of the first.

23rd
Splice


I didn’t love Splice on seeing it at Sci-Fi London this year, but before it falls apart in its last twenty minutes (and it does, spectacularly) this is a smart and engaging sci-fi movie. Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody work well together, and bring some gravitas to what is essentially a generic story about two scientists whose gene splicing experiment gets out of control, producing a creature they name Dren. The effects are excellent, and Delphine Chaneac is affecting as the ‘teenage’ Dren. It surrenders to cliché in the end, but the first 70 minutes or so are well worth your time.

24 FPS Top 100 Films: No. 79

Click the title below for a trailer.

79: SPOORLOOS [1988]
[The Vanishing]
DIR: George Sluizer


This original version of The Vanishing is one of the more unnerving films I’ve ever seen. It’s not explicitly violent, there are no chases, no explosions, in fact there’s little real confrontation of any kind. Instead the film sets out to disturb, and it achieves that aim, thanks most of all to a justly famous ending that stays with you far beyond the end credits.

The film is about a young couple, Rex (Gene Bervoets) and Saskia (Johanna ter Steege) holidaying together, but when they stop at a service station Saskia goes missing, seemingly vanishing into thin air. Three years later Rex remains obsessed with the case, and with trying to find Saskia. On seeing a television report about Rex’ pursuit of answers the abductor (Bernard Pierre Donnadieu) begins writing to him, and offers to let him know what happened to Saskia. The catch? To find out the answer Rex will have to have the same experience as Saskia.

What’s really interesting about The Vanishing, from a visual perspective, is the fact that despite the darkness of its subject and its oppressive tone, the film takes place largely in the sunshine. This throws the audience off, because you don’t expect anything terrible to happen on the day of Saskia’s disappearance; a sunshiney summer’s day, nor do you expect it to happen the way it does; quietly, without anyone noticing, and from a very public place. It also works to heighten thee contrast when the film is plunged into darkness, most memorably in a very tense scene in which Rex and Saskia’s car breaks down in the middle of a tunnel and, of course, in that ending.

It’s hard to talk about this film without disclosing the ending, but I won’t because so much of its power is derived from its last few minutes. Suffice it to say that it is a genuinely terrifying rendering of one of the most nightmarish scenarios imaginable (and that it was royally fucked up in Sluizer’s own Hollywood remake).

The standout performance comes from Bernard Pierre Donnadieu (otherwise best known as the man that Gerard Depardieu may be impersonating in The Return of Martin Guerre), whose work as Raymond Lemorne is simply one of the most chillingly believable portrayals of a psychopath ever seen on screen. Outwardly he’s a genial family man, but Donadieu lets us see the layers hidden beneath that gentle façade.

I shouldn’t say much more about this film, because I’d risk spoiling it for you. See it, and then let me know how long it was before you managed to get the last image out of your head.

Standout Scenes
Tunnel
There’s no visible threat in this scene, but because of the title of the film, and the expectation of what’s due to happen, it is a real nerve shredder.

Coffee
Rex has to decide whether or not he’s going to drink the drugged coffee Lemorne is offering, whether or not he really needs to know what happened to Saskia.

The end
Perhaps the most purely disturbing ending to any film I’ve seen.

To buy this movie, and help out 24FPS at the same time, please use the links below. Thanks!
UK: DVD
USA: Criterion DVD

Film Review: Get Him to the Greek

GET HIM TO THE GREEK
DIR: Nicholas Stoller
CAST: Russell Brand, Jonah Hill, Sean Combs,
Elisabeth Moss, Rose Byrne


Another week, another juvenile comedy that makes me question whether (at the ripe old age of not quite 29) I’m a grumpy old man, or whether it’s just that most comedies these days really just aren’t very funny. To be fair there are a few jokes in Get Him to the Greek (a spin off from the overrated, but at least somewhat amusing, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) that get laughs, notably a recurring cameo from Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, but frankly I found most of it juvenile and rather tedious.

Russell Brand basically plays himself as cocky, drug addled rock star Aldous Snow, and he doesn’t even do that especially well. The film desperately tries to give him some depth, through relationships with Rose Byrne’s Lady Gaga-ish pop star Jackie Q (a joke that wears thin roughly three seconds in, though that may be because I fucking loathe Lady Gaga) and with their young son Naples (gosh, what an hilarious and timely riff on Brooklyn Beckham’s name, well done movie). It’s defeated in this pursuit of actual character by two things, the first is Brand’s utter lack of ability to act; all he really does is stand around being Russell Brand and saying random weird things. The second problem is with the editing; if you’ve seen the trailer you’ll notice huge swathes of material that has evidently been deleted from the final film, and you can feel every cut here. The story with Naples has a twist that ought to have provided an emotional moment, but it’s never mentioned again, and the story with Jackie Q also feels hugely truncated. Poor editing doesn’t just impact the story, it persists throughout the film, perhaps most glaring is Tom Felton’s (Draco from Harry Potter) cameo, where an extremely rude word has very clearly been cut, bringing the scene to a very abrupt end.

Jonah Hill does his usual thing, not badly, but like Brand there’s really not much acting going on here. There’s a real problem with putting these two together in what is essentially a buddy comedy, because neither is really acting at all there’s nothing to invest you in the relationship between them. We’re told over and over that Hill’s character is a huge fan of Snow and his band Infant Sorrow, but that fails to ring true because their music is spectacularly awful. I’ve no problem with the idea that terrible cock rock might be popular (though it’s certainly not the way the charts are trending right now), but I don’t buy Hill’s character being into it. The other bands he plays and discusses here are names like The Mars Volta and Pixies, and given that taste I just don't buy him listening to Snow's music. In leaning too heavily on the parody elements in Snow’s songs (ridiculous lyrics and titles abound) the film sacrifices credibility, because when Snow plays his triumphant show (and if that’s considered a spoiler then clearly you’ve never seen a movie before) I just didn’t buy the idea that anyone thought this guy’s career was worth reviving after ten years.

One performance is worth mentioning though. Elisabeth Moss, who I fell for when I saw her in The West Wing, has a rather thankless role as Hill’s girlfriend, but she really makes the most of it. In the early scenes there’s a lovely warmth between them which, despite the fact that physically they make a very odd couple, makes that relationship one you can buy into and later on she’s pretty funny.

It isn’t that the rest of Get Him to the Greek is terrible; it’s just not very good. It isn’t funny enough, largely because most of the jokes are essentially the same joke. It’s not very engaging, because for the most part there are no characters and no acting. It’s not very convincing, because the music is awful and it’s not very satisfying, because several of the storylines appear to have been pureed during editing. If you like modern mainstream comedy more than I do then you’ll probably like this, but frankly I’m just weary of the same jokes, and of not laughing very much.

Mini-Reviews: Revanche / Helen / Buried Alive / Wild Target / Please Give

REVANCHE
DIR: Götz Spielmann



Thanks to its very slow burning nature, and lack of a visceral payoff, calling this Austrian film a thriller might be stretching the point a little, but it is strangely riveting. It centres on Alex (Johannes Krisch), an ex-con working in a brothel and, on the sly, romancing one of the prostitutes, Tamara (Irina Potapenko). Wanting to escape from the brothel and from having to hide their relationship Alex plans a bank robbery, so that he and Tamara will be able to run away. Unfortunately it goes wrong. Tamara is shot accidentally shot dead by rookie cop Robert (Andreas Lust). Taking refuge with his grandfather (Johannes Thanheiser), Alex discovers that Robert and his wife (Ursula Strauss) live next door, and begins to plot vengeance.

I loved the opening forty minutes of this film; the slow grind of Alex and Tamara’s day to day life is brilliantly drawn by Spielmann, and the characters are intricate and, despite their obvious flaws, sympathetic. Kirsch and Potapenko give fantastic performances, and create a genuinely interesting relationship. It’s also worth noting an interesting choice with the subtitles here; as the Ukrainian Tamara speaks rather broken German the English subtitles reflect that; “I go car” for example, which really, along with Potapenko’s affecting work, helps paint a full picture of the character for an English speaking audience. I was genuinely saddened by the loss of her character, which does cast a melancholy over the whole of the rest of the film.

It’s not that the second half of the film is bad (though the character of Robert is frustratingly sketchily drawn). Kirsch continues to be excellent, while Ursula Strauss is equally good as Robert’s wife. However, for a long time very little happens besides Alex sawing very large piles of wood for his grandfather and while you’ve got a very real sense that film is building to something you do begin to wish it would get there. And then there’s what I call the Last House on the Left problem. The Last House on the Left problem arises when the entire plot of a film turns on you buying into a coincidence so outlandish that it is self defeating. Believing that Alex would find himself next door to the very man who shot his girlfriend is just that coincidence.

I appreciated the glacial visual style, redolent of Spielmann’s countryman Michael Haneke. I thought most of the performances were excellent and I was very pleased that the film didn’t go uncharacteristically over the top with its ending, but the pacing issue and that huge coincidence were just a bit much for me.


HELEN
DIR: Joe Lawlor / Christine Molloy



Helen (played, in a remarkable debut, by Annie Townsend) is an 18-year-old girl, she’s about to leave care and about to finish college. When another girl, Joy, who attended college with her goes missing in a local park Helen is called on to be her stand in in a police reconstruction for a TV witness appeal. Helen becomes fascinated by Joy; she begins wearing the yellow leather jacket that Joy wore when she vanished, befriends her parents and gets close to her boyfriend.

That’s pretty much all that happens in Helen, and despite a running time of just 72 minutes it often happens very slowly and very quietly. Shots are often held for an inordinately long time, silences often seem to go on forever and yet every frame of the film speaks volumes. This is a remarkable piece of work from first time feature directors Lawlor and Molloy. If they aren’t always best served by some of their supporting cast (all their actors are amateurs) that still doesn’t detract from the simple stark power of their story and images. Helen is obviously a quite carefully designed film, from the composition of individual shots (especially one that has Helen lying in the forest from which Joy disappeared) right down to the selection of a canary yellow jacket for Helen to wear, making her stand out in a way that we see clearly when we first meet her, is unusual for her.

Lawlor and Molloy are also brilliantly served by Annie Townsend, who gives an extraordinary, completely real, completely raw, performance as Helen. She’s so available to the camera, so easy to read, and yet she’s convincingly closed off emotionally to the other characters. I can find n evidence that she’d acted before, and at least on film she hasn’t acted since, in a world where someone as bland as Kristin Stewart is a movie star it would really be terrible if someone so clearly talented as Townsend didn’t act again.

Helen is one of the best character studies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a genuinely fascinating look at a troubled young woman, and at a troubling event and how it effects the community and the individuals surrounding its happening. I suspect that a lot of people will hate it, many of them for many of the reasons I loved it, but I implore you to give this film 72 minutes of your time, because it will resonate much longer than that.


BURIED ALIVE [1990]
DIR: Frank Darabont

I like Frank Darabont as a filmmaker, but he’s not the reason I’ve spent the best part of 15 years chasing down this TV movie, which appears never to have had any home video release in the UK. I finally got it by getting a friend to record a Sky TV broadcast to DVD for me. Why? Why spend so long chasing a probably not especially brilliant, barely released, TV movie? Jennifer Jason Leigh’s in it.

She plays Tim Matheson’s wife, but she’s having an affair with William Atherton (Walter ‘this man has no dick’ Peck from Ghostbusters), who talks her into poisoning her husband so that she can sell his business and they can run away together. So far so low rent Double Indemnity, but Matheson doesn’t die and, after clawing his way out of his grave he discovers his wife’s affair and sets about crafting a suitable punishment for her and her lover.

There are a few really clever ideas here, the pretty horrifying dénouement being one of them, but it’s wrapped up in uninspired direction from Darabont, lacklustre performances, a lack of chemistry between the leads and a whole pile of quite laughable contrivances. It’s schlock, and to be fair Jennifer Jason Leigh has the ability to lift schlock above its station (just look at Single White Female), but here even she seems a little lost. She’s especially hamstrung by William Atherton, who gives a wooden performance, providing her little to play off and the pair have all the chemistry of a cat and a dog. She does pull out a strong performance in the film’s disturbing last few minutes, but it’s rather little and rather late. Overall it’s a surprisingly uninspired performance.

Among the rest of the cast Hoyt Axton (who I know only from Gremlins) does his avuncular thing as the town Sherriff and Tim Matheson does what he can with a role that essentially degenerates into bogeyman territory. Even by the relatively low standards I had expected of it, Buried Alive disappointed.


WILD TARGET
DIR: Jonathan Lynn



From the sound of the imdb reviews, this film is an incredibly close remake of the 1993 French film Cible Émouvante in all but one respect. The plot has translated exactly, the character names are almost the same, but the British appear to have forgotten to bring the funny. I understand that on any journey, say a cross channel one, you’re liable to lose a couple of things but mislaying the comedy in a remake of a farce seems somewhat beyond careless.

Bill Nighy plays professional killer Victor Maynard, whose latest contract requires him to kill Emily Blunt (according to imdb her character’s name is Rose, but I don’t recall getting that information from the film). Predictably he gets an attack of conscience and so he, Rose and a young man named Tony (Rupert Grint), who accidentally gets caught up in the incident have to hide out from Victor’s employer (Rupert Everett) and the new hitman he’s hired (Martin Freeman).

Wild Target is shockingly unfunny. It’s not as if the people involved in it aren’t funny. Director Jonathan Lynn was one of the creators of Yes Minister, Bill Nighy has been funny even in some pretty dire films and Rupert Grint is reliable comic relief in the Harry Potter series. So what happened? Why when so many jokes are being thrown at the wall do absolutely none stick? One of the major reasons is that Emily Blunt just isn’t a comedienne, she’s certainly very alluring as Rose, but she's more irritating than she is funny (half the time I just wanted Nighy to shoot her in the head so we could all go home).

That said, as noted before, everyone’s comic metronome is here hopelessly off the beat. Nighy just doesn’t seem interested, Grint flails around, desperately searching for either a character or a reason he’s in this movie (it’s lost on me). Martin Freeman underplays to almost the point of invisibility and Rupert Everett has so little screen time and so little to do that he may as well not exist. This film would have been equally amusing had it actually, rather than just figuratively, consisted of 98 minutes of tumbleweed blowing across the screen.


PLEASE GIVE
DIR: Nicole Holofcener



I want to like Nicole Holofcener’s films, and I feel like I should like them. Please Give, for example, has some nicely drawn characters; Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt as a middle aged couple who buy old furniture from the relatives of people who have just died, Sarah Steele as their teenage daughter. There’s also another family; Ann Guilbert as Andra, a 91 year old woman whose home Platt and Keener are planning to buy when she dies and Amanda Peet and British actress Rebecca Hall as Andra’s granddaughters. It’s got some clever dialogue. It’s often pretty funny and the acting is excellent all round. But I didn’t like Please Give because, largely, I just didn’t care.

I didn’t care, for example, about Catherine Keener’s Kate (though Keener, as ever, is flawless) and her mounting guilt about what she does for a living. I certainly didn’t care about her problems with her daughter Abby, who seemed to me in desperate need of a slap (particularly in a sequence where, when Kate gives $20 to a beggar Abby snatches it out of his hand, keeps it, and demands that Kate give him $5 instead). I didn’t much care about Kate and her husband Alex’s marital problems, largely because I didn’t buy the threat to it nor his affair.

I didn’t care about Amanda Peet as Mary, because Holofcener writes her as such a bitch that I had trouble buying her as a character, and certainly I didn’t care about Abby, whose feeling of entitlement to a $200 pair of jeans results in a final scene which sent me out of the cinema fuming. The one character I did care about, probably because she was the only one I warmed to at all, the only one I’d want to spend any time with, was Rebecca Hall’s character, also called Rebecca. Hall is a fast rising talent, and with good reason; she strikingly beautiful and, more importantly, I’ve never seen her be less than excellent in anything. Here she’s the film’s much needed ray of sunshine. Rebecca, who spends most of her time looking after her Grandmother, could just have been played as a saint, but Hall makes her simpler than that; not perfect, just a decent, caring, but very real, person.

There’s nothing notably wrong with Please Give. The story isn’t eventful, but it’s well told and at all levels the writing and acting is strong. It just struck the wrong chord with me, at the end of the day I just struggled to find any interest in well off people who were either struggling with the guilt of being well off in a vague sort of way (Keener), or just bitching about their lives (most of the rest of the cast. I, quite simply, don’t give a fuck.

24 FPS Top 100 Films: No. 80

80: PAPRIKA [2006]
DIR: Satoshi Kon


Why is it on the list?
Satoshi Kon draws a lot of inspiration from other filmmakers whose work appears on this list. There are very definite shades of Lynch and Hitchcock in all his work, and here there’s more than a hint of David Cronenberg too. What makes Kon stand out is that, as well as working in a field none of those directors have explored in detail; anime, he takes his many influences and combines them with great artistry into a style that is all his own.

Paprika, like many of Kon’s films, explores multiple levels of reality. It centres on a device called the DC Mini, which allows therapists, including heroine Atsuko Chiba, to enter the dreams of their patients and treat them from within (something Chiba does in the form of an alter-ego; Paprika. However, the DC Mini goes missing, and its misuse results in the walls of reality beginning to break down, the dream world bleeding into the real. It’s up to Chiba, Paprika, and a cop named Konakawa to stop the dream world from swallowing reality whole.

Right from the word go, Paprika is a mind-melting experience. It begins with a surreal dream and from there on it only proceeds to get stranger. Given that our dreams (I’m told, I never remember mine) draw from the world around us it is appropriate that Kon uses a lot of movie references in the dream sequences, both archetypal (see the repeated sequence in which Konakawa shoots someone in the back) and specific (direct visual quotes of, among others, The Greatest Show on Earth and Roman Holiday). That said he also comes up with a lot of imagery that seems to be the result of the director emptying the contents of his brain onto cels. The recurring image of a dream parade is especially striking. However, the dream sequence that sticks longest and firmest in the mind is one decidedly more nightmarish than the strange, but rather fun, parade.

Confronting, in a dream world, the man who has stolen the DC Mini, Paprika finds herself pinned to a table, at which point the man sinks his hand into her and, from the crotch up, as if unzipping it, peels off Paprika’s skin to reveal Dr Chiba beneath. It’s a deliberately disturbing and frankly transgressive image, but like David Cronenberg Kon uses it not purely to shock (and indeed there’s no blood, this being a dream state) but to really ram home the way and the degree to which the layers of reality in the film are beginning to bleed together.

Kon’s design and animation is wonderful. There’s a lovely flow to the movement of his characters, and the design gives each character (including, importantly, Chiba and Paparika) their own very individual personalities. He’s also got an equal knack for a single striking image (a man exploding into a mass of blue butterflies, for example) and for massed action (the parade, which though busy and complex never degenerates into the mess it could easily have become). His sense of timing is also strong, something especially keenly felt in the film’s brilliantly dynamic opening credits sequence.

The acting is sometimes a minor consideration where cartoons are concerned, especially, it seems, in anime, but here too Kon excels, drawing particularly good voiceover work from Megumi Hayashibara as Paprika and Dr. Chiba, for whom she manages to find two very different registers and personalities. This, along with the beautiful animation and often breathtaking filmmaking, conspires to make Paprika not just a visual feast but a genuinely intriguing, exciting and engaging film. Watching any of Satoshi Kon’s films is like diving head first into a whole new world, and it’s and incredibly rich and rewarding experiences exploring the two worlds of Paprika.


Standout Scenes
Credits
A wonderful, fast moving, credit sequence that does a great job of establishing both character and look at the film’s outset.

Skin Peel
The stuff of nightmares, beautifully realised.

Face Off
Paprika’s final showdown with the force causing the blending of realities, boasting some truly strange and arresting imagery.

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24FPS Top 100 Films: No. 81

Click the title below for a trailer

81: THE FLY [1986]
DIR: David Cronenberg


Why is it on the list?
Horror films in general, and David Cronenberg’s films in particular, are never actually about what they appear to be about. You CAN see The Fly as a (relatively) simple tale of a scientist (Jeff Goldblum) who, in his eagerness to test his teleportation machine, accidentally splices his DNA with that of a housefly, and finds himself metamorphosing. You could see Geena Davis’ role as just that of the girlfriend, and the gore of the middle and end parts of the films Cronenberg simply delivering the generic goods. You could see The Fly like that and have fun, but you’d be missing out on so much.

That’s the surface, where The Fly is most interesting is underneath all that. As ever with Cronenberg the subtext is the beating heart of the film. In taking on this remake job Cronenberg could easily have dumped all the intelligence and nuance of his previous films and, with the assistance of effects artist Chris Walas and his team, delivered an empty headed gorefest. Instead he goes the other way, producing one of his richest works. Some critics have suggested reading The Fly as a parable about womb fear; with Goldblum’s telepods as the surrogate incubators and the nightmarish sequence in which Geena Davis imagines herself giving birth to Goldbulm’s maggot offspring (delivered, significantly, by a cameoing Cronenberg) as the realisation of this nightmare. For me that’s valid, but this is clearly a film about disease. Cronenberg is clearly fascinated by disease, and he depicts Goldblum’s metamorphosis as a form of cancer, especially as it becomes more extreme, with all the new tissue on his body looking like a series of external tumours.

As well as being a deeply interesting and intelligent film, The Fly is an extremely well made one. The screenplay is unusually intelligent. Most remakes these days strip away themes, character and intellect from their originals, Cronenberg and co-writer Charles Edward Pogue add these elements. There’s also an almost perversely touching love story between Goldblum and Davis ( areal life couple at the time), in fact the film opened for valentines day 1987 in the UK.

Cronenberg’s direction is great, he balances humour and horror, sometimes in a single moment, with great assurance, he draws fine performances from his very small cast (there are only three major roles) and there are few directors who ever handled special effects so well. On a visual level the film is striking, particularly as the disease progresses and Goldblum’s Seth Brundle becomes more and more the fly. What’s interesting is how unlike a horror film most of the movie looks. Even as Brundle changes much of the film is a relatively brightly lit domestic comedy (aided by Jeff Goldblum’s great comic timing).

Funny and horrifying as the film can be (and Chris Walas’ effects certainly give the visceral horror of the last act a real impact) it’s also a rather sad film. In many ways the relationship between Goldblum’s Seth Brundle and Davis as journalist Veroica Quaife is the heart of the film. You find yourself rooting for these two slightly odd people who find each other, and then are divided by this terrible illness. It’s especially keenly felt at the end of the film. In any other film the moment the fly is destroyed would be one of triumph, here it’s one of devastation, thanks to strong work from Davis, and from Walas’ expressive animatronics.

The Fly is a strange cocktail of ingredients, but they are all high quality, and expertly mixed. It’s a film that grows ever more interesting the more you see it.


Standout Scenes
Life with Brundlefly
Seth introduces us to the ways in which he’s changed, showing us how he eats using something called ‘vomitdrop’, and introducing us to the Brundle museum of natural history.

Birth
The horrific sequence in which Veronica dreams she’s given birth to a maggot. Perhaps the film’s purest Cronenbergian moment.

Fusion
The final, deeply sad, moments of the film.

Memorable Lines
Seth Brundle: What's there to take? The disease has just revealed its purpose. We don't have to worry about contagion anymore... I know what the disease wants.
Ronnie: What does the disease want?
Seth Brundle: It wants to... turn me into something else. That's not too terrible is it? Most people would give anything to be turned into something else.
Ronnie: Turned into what?
Seth Brundle: Whaddaya think? A fly. Am I becoming a hundred-and-eighty-five-pound fly? No, I'm becoming something that never existed before. I'm becoming... Brundlefly. Don't you think that's worth a Nobel Prize or two?

Seth Brundle: I'm saying... I'm saying I - I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over... and the insect is awake

Ronnie: If you *SAW* him, Stathis, if you saw how scared and angry and desperate he is...
Stathis Borans: I'm sure Typhoid Mary was a very nice person too when you saw her socially.

Seth Brundle: How does Brundlefly eat? Well, he found out the hard and painful way that he eats very much the way a fly eats. His teeth are now useless, because although he can chew up solid food, he can't digest them. Solid food hurts. So like a fly, Brundlefly breaks down solids with a corrosive enzyme, playfully called "vomit drop". He regurgitates on his food, it liquifies, and then he sucks it back up. Ready for a demonstration, kids? Here goes...

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Film Review: Brooklyn's Finest

BROOKLYN’S FINEST
DIR: Antoine Fuqua
CAST: Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, Richard Gere,
Wesley Snipes, Will Patton, Ellen Barkin



I saw Antoine Fuqua’s previous police drama, Training Day, at the Venice Film Festival back in 2001, an odd way to see a very mainstream film. I remember liking it a great deal right up until it ended, and then hating it for the 30 minutes it continued after that ending. Brooklyn’s Finest is a considerably better film, it’s more complex, better acted and looks great. Sadly it is still dogged by a poor ending which, after almost two hours of intense, generally relatively down to earth, drama piles contrivance on contrivance in the film’s last twenty minutes, to little real purpose or effect.

There are three stories, which we follow concurrently, though they are only really connected by the fact that the protagonists in all three are New York policemen. There’s Sal (Hawke); a devout catholic and family man with a pregnant wife (the excellent and underused Lili Taylor) who is driven to corruption in pursuit of a down payment on a new house. There’s Eddie (Gere); a 22 year veteran who has lost any sense of purpose as cop and is serving out his last week and there’s ‘Tango’ (Cheadle); an undercover operative who wants out, but has to deliver an old friend (Snipes) to his superiors to get the desk job he wants.

Of these three stories two work really well, and one just never quite fits. Eddie’s story isn’t uninteresting, nor is it badly produced. In fact this performance ranks with Richard Gere’s best work (he’s become a much more interesting actor now that he’s less able to get by on charm and good looks). The problem is that it lacks the drive and the urgency of Sal and Tango’s stories, and when it does acquire those qualities the change in Eddie’s outlook never feels organic, it’s driven by the plot, rather than driving it.

As Sal Ethan Hawke gives another performance that demonstrates that when he’s allowed to stretch, an especially when he’s allowed to go somewhere dark, he’s a lot more than the Gen-X pinup that many had him pegged as. Sal’s desperation is etched on his increasingly gaunt face and in a haunted look in his eyes that seems to grow more intense with each scene. You should hate the guy, in the first scene he murders someone (a cameoing Vincent D’Onofrio, demonstrating just how deep the selection of quality acting talent runs in this film) for the money he needs for that house, but thee film doesn’t make Sal a simple bad cop, and Hawke always manages to articulate how conflicted he is and, especially importantly, how much he loves his wife and kids. It’s not the most complex character writing you’ll ever see, but when one trait is considered enough to constitute a character, I’ll take what I can get in terms of layers.


Don Cheadle, recently seen apparently bored out of his mind in Iron Man 2, is equally good and also manages to bring a lot of layers to his character. We’ve seen Tango’s story before (there’s more than a shade of Donnie Brasco about it), but it does boast some energetic and exciting performances. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the bunch is Wesley Snipes who, after a few years in the DTV doldrums and having snored his way through Blade: Trinity, seems reinvigorated here. He’s charismatic and entirely unforced as recently released drug dealer Casanova, and in his many scenes with Cheadle and Michael K Williams he more than holds his own. On the other side of the law there’s Ellen Barkin, as the FBI agent giving Cheadle his orders. It’s been a while since we’ve seen her, and she’s great as Tango’s ball busting superior (there’s also a nice little nod to her past elsewhere in the film, as Gere sings Sea of Love to his girlfriend).

What’s really impressive about Brooklyn’s Finest is how well balanced it is. Fuqua and editor Barbara Tulliver keep all the stories moving at a good pace, never backing away from any of them for too long, never letting you start wondring where any of the characters has disappeared to. The editing is consistently impressive here, maintaining the pace of the film while never degenerating into the MTV style mess tthat many films with even the smallest amount of action can quite often become these days. If anything, Fuqua’s shooting and editing style here feels more the product of the 70’s. The film has a gritty look to it, and, happily, Fuqua isn’t afraid to hold shots, often for quite some time. There are pacier sections, but crucially, even during the film’s final sequence, which consists of three different confrontations in three different parts of the same building, Fuqua always keeps the geography of each shot and sequence clear and intelligible - a small thing, but one so many directors now seem incapable of.

I just wish that screenwriter Michael C. Martin hadn’t felt the need to draw all his strands together at the end of the film. The way it happens is contrived and messy, and for the first time I began really seeing the structure of the film, rather than just getting into the storytelling and the performances. Most of all though, it just isn’t required. There is no reason for the three stories we’ve so far followed almost entirely separately (there are a couple of crossovers, but they are kept very low key) to have to end at the same place. It doesn’t add any real meaning, nobody interacts, so why do it? It’s a shame, because that one amateurish choice undermines what is actually a rather interesting film, if hardly a groundbreaking one.

24FPS Top 100 Films: No. 82

Click the title below for a trailer

82: CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST [1980]
DIR: Ruggero Deodato


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
Of all the films that made up the video nasties list in the early 1980’s, Deodato’s horrifying exploitation classic is the one that holds up best. It’s not brilliantly acted (something not aided by the largely abominable dubbing), but its construction is masterful and the cumulative effect of the film is so shocking that it stays with you longer than almost any mainstream film you’re likely to see this year.

Cannibal Holocaust is one of the first ‘found footage’ films. It divides rather neatly into two parts. The first follows a more traditional narrative and camera style, with anthropologist Robert Kerman (otherwise known as pornstar R. Bolla) despatched to the South American jungle to attempt to find four young documentarians (Carl Gabriel Yorke, Francesca Ciardi, Perry Pirkanen, Luca Barbareschi) who have vanished while making a film. In a village of cannibals he finds skeletons and the filmmakers footage. The second half of the film is that footage, viewed by the editors putting together the documentary.

This second half of the film is where Deodato’s technique, raw as it is, really comes into its own. Found footage films (all the subsequent examples of which, including The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, bear the influence of this film) rely on the maintainance of the illusion that the footage you are watch was captured by the characters, rather than an external crew. Deodato maintains that illusion brilliantly, but more than that he remembers exactly what condition this footage has been found in, so we get harsh edits, dropped shots and instances where there is no sound to go with the picture, all of which contribute to create an horribly convincing illusion.

Once in a while, infamously, it’s not an illusion. Cannibal Holocaust features much real death; animal and, in the brutal Last Road to Hell segment, human. That footage was genuine documentary footage of Pol Pot’s troops executing men in Cambodia. It still rather baffles me that when people get on their moral high horse about this film it’s generally the fact that a turtle gets killed (in perhaps the film’s most graphically disgusting moment) that really gets them riled up. This blend of real and incredibly convincing fake led to Deodato having to appear in court in Italy and PROVE that his actors were still alive.

For a film made in 1980, on a budget that likely wouldn’t cover the catering on a Michael Bay film, the effects are extremely convincing, from the famous image of a woman impaled on a stake down to the climactic slicing apart of the filmmakers, it’s all convincing enough to maintain that terrible illusion that it might, just might, be real.

Another thing that really works in the film’s favour is Riz Ortolani’s unusual score. Rather than use ominous cues that emphasise the horror Ortolani’s music is almost soothing, running counter to Deodato’s taboo shattering imagery. The effect is that the film yanks you in two radically different emotional directions at the same time. It’s an incredible balancing act by Deodato and Ortolani, but it works brilliantly. You can hear the main theme from the score here.

There has been much talk among critics that Cannibal Holocaust is a sophisticated piece of social commentary, and through the act of having us watch the documentary footage (in which the filmmakers provoke situations by various savage acts, culminating in rape and murder), that it asks us to consider who the real savages are; the cannibals, the filmmakers or us, the voyeurs. It’s an interesting reading, and all that is present, but I tend to think of its intentions being more to challenge the audience on a more basic, more visceral level. One thing is, for me, certain; Cannibal Holocaust is not merely a gore movie, and that’s why it is an important and enduring piece of work.


STANDOUT SCENES
The Last Road to Hell
The morals of this sequence are very dicey, but its effect is incredibly striking, and it sets the tone for just how extreme the film is going to be.

Impaled
The most famous image in the film, and still one of the great triumphs of practical special effects.

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Film Review: Greenberg

This review contains some VERY strong language.

GREENBERG
DIR: Noah Baumbach
CAST: Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig,
Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Jason Leigh



Roger Greenberg (Stiller) is a cunt. There’s really no arguing the point, he’s a raging asshole who I would cross the street or leave a party to avoid, and that completely undermined Noah Baumbach’s latest directorial effort for me, despite its several inarguable qualities.

The story (which Baumbach co-wrote with his wife Jennifer Jason Leigh) sees Greenberg, who has just been released from hospital after a nervous breakdown, staying at his brother’s house, looking after the dog while his brother and his family holiday in Vietnam. During the weeks that he’s staying in LA, Greenberg renews a friendship with Ivan (with whom he was in a band, until Greenberg’s dissatisfaction with the record contract they were offered broke them up) and forms a tentative relationship with his brother’s young assistant Florence (Gerwig). The problem is that I just don’t believe any of it. Especially the parts concerning Florence.

Gerwig, a pretty young woman who doesn’t quite fit the Hollywood ingénue cookie cutter, is terrific as Florence. She gives a wonderfully unaffected performance and by the end of her first scene you’re with her, you like her, and that’s why its frustrating that the screenplay seems to run so counter to the performance. Here’s this vibrant, intelligent, sweet young woman, there’s just no reason for her to put up with Greenberg, who consistently treats her with little disguised contempt, and I simply don’t believe that she’d have anything to do with him. There’s no incentive there. He’s 15 years older, doesn’t have a job, treats her like shit, outright tells her that he doesn’t like her and doesn’t want a relationship with her, oh, and he’s beginning to look like a fully made up Roddy McDowell in Planet of the Apes. Gerwig tries hard here, but there’s just no way to buy into the relationship. When she says to Greenberg “You like me so much more than you think you do” I thought, well, maybe, but why the blue fuck do you care? He’s a wanker.

Ben Stiller isn’t the problem. Point of fact he’s excellent as Greenberg, it’s unquestionably his finest performance to date. If anything he’s too successful, he makes Greenberg so misanthropic, such an irredeemable piece of shit, that when the film does want to move the character on a little bit, perhaps give you a little sympathy for him and make it seem like he’s changing, it doesn’t work. Stiller and the screenplay have created such a complete impression of this awful, awful man that you don’t believe that he’s really changing, and nor do you care. I just wanted the film to end so I could be rid of him.

For a critically lauded filmmaker, Baumbach is disappointingly one note. This is the third film on the trot in which he’s had essentially the same misanthropic main character; Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale, Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding and now Ben Stller’s Greenberg. It’s becoming clear that Baumbach is something of a one trick pony, and his one trick is wearing dangerously thin at this point.

Greenberg is so much the focus of the film that aside from Florence only one supporting character is really developed. Rhys Ifans steals the film as Ivan, his melancholic character is genuinely affecting and the layers that Ifans plays, the way he lets you see just how every callous, careless, thing Greenberg says and does wounds him, make him the film’s one truly rounded character. I was so much more interested in Florence and Ivan than I was Greenberg, the film might have been a great deal more interesting (certainly it would be more bearable) if it were about those two characters, with Greenberg a more peripheral figure. If I weren’t a huge fan it would barely be worth mentioning Jennifer Jason Leigh’s role, despite her high billing. She has two scenes, perhaps four minutes of screentime, and her character (an ex of Greenberg’s) is underdeveloped, but she is customarily brilliant, the actress as invisible as ever.

That’s the frustration of this film, aside from a couple of stray boom mikes there’s nothing technically wrong with it, and the performances are excellent all round. It’s just that the Greenberg character is so vile that I don’t care about him, nor do I believe anyone in the movie does.

24 FPS Top 100 Films: No. 83

Click the title below for a video

83: VALERIE A TYDEN DIVU [1970]
[Valerie and her Week of Wonders]
DIR: Jaromil Jires


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
It’s the blood, almost certainly, that has influenced many writers of both books and movies to associate a girl’s coming of age with the horror genre. Valerie may not have been the first to do it, and certainly it wasn’t the last (films bearing its influence include Carrie and Ginger Snaps), but it remains probably the strangest, and certainly one of the most striking.

For most of its running time (just 72 minutes) Valerie and her Week of Wonders feels quite unlike other movies, quite unlike a movie at all. The story is told in a series of scenes that feel only slightly connected (though the presence of Valerie), but what starts to become clear is that, whether in reality or just in her own mind, Valerie’s (Jaroslava Schallerova) first period has triggered a lot of strange happenings in her town, notably the return of her father, who seems to be a weasel like vampire. Valerie lives with her grandmother (Helena Any´zová), who may also be a vampire, and disappears part way through the film, only to return, young and beautiful, as Valerie’s ‘cousin’. The whole town also seems gripped by sex, with the 14-year-old Valerie at the centre of that too; at one point a priest attacks her, at another she shares a bed (and, by implication, more than that) with a recently married young woman.

I’m not sure I can tell you the story of this film, I’m certainly not sure I can tell you what it means, but neither of those things really matter here, this is a filmic fever dream, and it captures that feel brilliantly. Some sequences are clearly nightmares (most notably the scenes with Valerie’s father), while others seem like beautiful fantasies. Jires often lets these qualities bleed into one another, creating a feeling that you are drifting through a dream world as you watch the film. Watching it is genuinely strange, but it does capture you in a way few other films can.

The performances are excellent, with Schallerova wonderful as the naïve guide to the dream, as puzzled as we are by what it all means. Helena Any´zová, who has three roles, is also a real standout, making clear delineations between her various parts, but also keeping continuity between them that hints at the complexities of what Valerie’s Grandmother may actually be.

It’s also a quite astonishing film to look at, with set designs (Valerie’s completely white bedroom), make up (the ‘weasal’, Valerie’s Grandmother’s very odd old age make up) and images (Valerie about to be burnt at the stake, Valerie kissing a young woman, the whole closing sequence) sticking in your mind long after the film ends. This film is still something of a mystery to me, and perhaps that’s some of its appeal. I highly recommend tracking it down if you want to see something REALLY different.


STANDOUT SCENES
I’m cheating here, but the whole film is really a patchwork of strangely related single scenes, each them a standout in its own right.

MEMORABLE LINES
Grandmother: Hedvika is marrying
Valerie: Poor Hedvika

Orlik: [of The Polecat] He's one hundred years overdue for death

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24FPS Top 100 Films: No. 84

84: RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK [1981]
DIR: Steven Spileberg


WHY IS IT ON THE LIST?
Why do you think? The first film in the Indiana Jones series is a near perfectly formed entertainment. It has it all. There’s Harrison Ford’s unassailably cool, unflappable, but never invulnerable, hero Indiana Jones. There’s a group of hissable villains (“Nazis, I hate these guys”) led by an over the top but still pretty scary Ronald Lacey. There’s a gorgeous girl - Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood - but she’s no damsel in distress, holding her own in fights and giving as good as she gets verbally. Oh, and there’s several of the best action sequences ever filmed too, which is nice.

In creating Indiana Jones, George Lucas wanted to recapture the thrill of the serials that used to play in front of movies before television became prevalent. With the aid of writer Lawrence Kasdan and director Steven Spielberg he comfortably exceeds his inspiration, draining most of the cheese from the serials and reducing them down into two lean, mean hours, while also finding time to develop characters and a proper, engaging story.

Harrison Ford isn’t the world’s most gifted or versatile actor, but as Indy he’s so perfectly cast that, despite the presence of screen tests showing other actors including original first choice Tom Selleck in the feature length documentary that accompanied the DVD release of the trilogy, it is impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. He doesn’t even really seem to be acting; indeed Indy barely feels like a character, you could believe that this guy is a real adventurer.

Among the rest of the cast Karen Allen and John Rhys Davies really stand out. Davies is a riot as Indy’s friend Sallah (a role written for Danny DeVito) and Allen is just enchanting as Marion. I’m still a bit in love with Marion Ravenwood, nearly a quarter of a century since first seeing the movie. Of course the fact that she’s so cool, funny, and capable helps, but if I’m honest it’s all about that smile, which, could we harness its power, could solve the world’s energy crisis in one fell swoop.

As much as the cast are great in their own right, it’s the chemistry between them that really makes the film play. Indy and Marion are a brilliant couple; their squabbles are funny, but their attraction is believable too, especially in the lovely scene in which Marion kisses all of Indy’s many injuries better.

At the end of the day Raiders of the Lost Ark is a constant reminder that, yes, blockbuster entertainment can be tremendously good fun and relentlessly exciting while also being smart engaging. In fact, this film makes it look so easy that you wonder why so many filmmakers (including Spielberg himself) have in the last decade so comprehensively failed to capture this same magic.


STANDOUT SCENES
So very, very many, but here’s just a few.

The opening
A perfectly self-contained thrill ride, often imitated, almost never bettered.

The swordsman
A case of the squits leads to one of the best visual jokes in cinema.

The truck
Directed by second unit helmer Michael Moore (not that one), this pretty much sets the standard for action set pieces. Genuinely dangerous looking and completely thrilling.

The device
Toht (Ronald Lacey) produces what looks like a torture device, scaring Marion.


MEMORABLE LINES
Marion: You're not the man I knew ten years ago.
Indiana: It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage.

Indiana: Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?
Sallah: Asps... very dangerous. You go first.

Sallah: Oh, my friends! I'm so pleased you're not dead!

[Marion is being kidnapped]
Marion: You can't do this to me, I'm an AMERICAN.

Toht: You Americans, you're all the same. Always overdressing for the wrong occasions.

To buy all 4 Indiana Jones films, and help out 24FPS at the same time, please use the links below. Thanks!
UK: DVD [4 Disc Boxset]
USA: DVD [4 Disc Boxset]