Cannibal Holocaust (2011 Cut) [18]

DIR: Ruggero Deodato

In 1984 the Director of Public Prosecutions in the UK drew up a list of movies that would become known as the video nasties. Films so repellent, so brutal, that their release made their publishers liable to prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. Ironically, for the most part, the DPP ended up granting a now nearly 30 year long spotlight to these films, films which otherwise would mostly have drifted into well deserved obscurity.

However, it has also preserved a handful of good films, and even a couple of classics. Cannibal Holocaust, perhaps the most transgressive of the nasties, falls into that last category. Far from being a simple exploitation film, Deodato's magnum opus is a film of ideas and which plays with form in ways that provoke revulsion, fear, and most importantly thought, in its audience.

Last night I was finally able to see this groundbreaking film at the cinema (the last screening I had wanted to attend was pulled by Police). However, this was still not quite the original film, rather it is Deodato's 2011 edit, cut to get around some of the problems that the British Board of Film Classification have historically had with the film (largely its extensive unsimulateed animal cruelty). This is the version which will be released on Blu Ray later this year by the exceptional Grindhouse company Shameless.

Rather than cutting the contentious moments Deodato has generally chosen to obscure them with what are ostensibly flaws in the film. This is well thought out; an artful way to make the edits, in keeping with the form of the film (the second half of which puports to consist of documentary footage left in poor conditions in the jungle for months), and it doesn't take much away from the film, only the early killing of a muskrat is entirely deleted.

These considerations aside, Cannibal Holocaust remains a brilliant film. The performances are really only serviceable, but even that's quite high praise for Italian exploitation movies, but Deodato's direction is what really transforms this film from a simple gorefest into something genuinely interesting. The first half of the film is pretty straightforward narrative cinema, following a rescue operation to attempt to recover four missing filmmakers and their footage, and here Deodato reveals a genuinely artistic eye, developing many memorable shots and set pieces. The second half is even more striking; Deodato develops the faux documentary styling brilliantly, using them to draw us in in a much more visceral way than if we had been able to sit at one remove from the film, and manipulating technical 'flaws' to make the verisimilitude ever more, and thus ever more disturbing.

The film's moral questions are simplistically phrased (summed up in a final line of voiceover), but they remain troubling, and can be extended into far less extreme situations with equally troubling implications. Cannibal Holocaust may have begun (as Deodato said before the film) as a reaction against explicit violence in news footage, but today it could easily be seen as being about war reporting, or even the morals of any reporting.

It may not quite be complete, but this is as good a version of Cannibal Holocaust as the UK is ever likely to see, and it was a treat (an odd term i know) to feel the full force of its impact on a big screen. It's an essential film, and a genuinely great and interesting one at that.

Julia's Eyes [15]

DIR: Guillem Morales

I'm not the guy who talks to the characters in the cinema (you know the guy, the one who yells "Don't go in there" at the Nightmare on Elm Street remake), in fact I think there should be severe punishment for that guy. However, I did shout at Julia's Eyes. Let me explain myself... For the better pert of two hours I had watched Julia's Eyes lurch from being a deeply uninspired noises off horror, with unconvincing supernatural overtones, to become a dull, stupid and derivative serial killer film. Then came the final shot, which managed at once to be head slappingly obvious, mawkishly sentimental and insultingly stupid, and I could not contain myself, the words just sort of rolled out at the screen "Oh, do fuck off".

This is a terrible shame, because Belen Rueda, who took the lead in earlier Spanish horror hit The Orphanage and here returns to the genre, deserves considerably better. Her performance exceeds the film at every turn, and if you believe in a single frame of Julia's Eyes it will be entirely thanks to her nuanced performance, remarkable in a film so hackneyed.

The fault lies, unquestionably, with director Guillem Morales, who makes a series of irritating, film hobbling, choices. First of all there are the many threads which Morales sets up, but never pays off (a group of blind women who seem to have almost supernatural senses, a creepy neighbor for Rueda's Julia, why the hell nobody thinks to tell Julia that a: Her twin sister (whose suicide opens the film) had an operation to correct her blindness and b: That that operation failed), these are just some of the half complete threads. The screenplay also gives us little sense of most of the characters motivations, notably those of its ultimate villain, which are 'explained' in a garbled and hilariously nonsensical speech.

However, the big issue is Morales' consistently awkward direction, which knows only three qualities; cliche, theft and pathetically obvious metaphor. At times Julia's Eyes resembles a horror cliche museum; you've got the creaking floorboards, the lights going on or off suddenly, loud inappropriate music, the obvious dream sequence, the chase through a thunderstorm (complete with thunder as a score track cueing the scares), a score that essentially bellows 'are you scared yet? HUH?' at you for two hours, and even a 'CAT!' moment, and that's, again, an incomplete list. Theft is also prevalent, horror films like The Eye and The Orphanage loom large, one sequence is an all but direct lift from The Silence of the Lambs (but not scary) and the last shot may as well be from Contact.

The visual metaphor was what got to me most though, especially during a roughly twenty minute sequence after Julia (who has gone blind) has had a cornea transplant and has to wear a bandage over her eyes. During this sequence we never see anyone's face except Julia's. Several problems here; first it's just awkward, and forces Morales into a lot of odd compositions and unnatural lighting, second WE GET IT, she doesn't know what people look like, stop punching us in the face with the visual metaphor and thirdly, most problematically, it makes it screamingly obvious who the villain is, it's basically a Scooby Doo technique,and frankly Hanna Barbera got more surprises out of it.

This is an irritating film, as it went on I had an ever deepening desire to slap the director, and it can't be rescued either by the best efforts of Belen Rueda or by the occasional creepy image. I've got no idea what someone as talented and as original as Guillermo Del Toro is doing putting his name to this boring, derivative, amateur night tosh.

Screening Room 12

In this latest episode of The Screening Room - the podcast I present over at MultiMediaMouth - me and Mike Ewins rant about Pirates 4, discuss foreign horror films, flag up some movies that are Not Playing in our new feature and recommend selections from an exceptional set of DVDs released this past Monday. It's a packed 85 minutes of movie chat.



Next week in The Screening Room: Our huge Summer preview.

MultiMediaMouth competition.

Below you'll find details of a competition I've set up at MultiMediaMouth, in conjunction with my Why Haven't You Seen...? series.

This week, in conjunction with my regular Why Haven’t You Seen…? feature, I thought I’d give you a chance to actually see some movies. By sending the (correct) answer to the question below to competiions@multimediamouth.com you can win a prize pack of four DVDs, one of which has previously featured on WHYS? and the others all films that fit the criteria, and may well feature in the future.

The prize pack consists of DVD copies of Sidney Lumet’s last film; Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Oscar nominated Greek drama Dogtooth, and modern French horror classics Switchblade Romance [a.k.a: Haute Tension] and Martyrs.

YOU MUST BE 18 OR OLDER TO ENTER THIS COMPETITION

To enter, simply answer this question: The director of Dogtooth acts in this week’s WHYS subject, Attenberg. What is his name?

Terms and Conditions
1 - Only one entry per person
2 - Sending an e-mail is not proof that we have received your entry.
No responsibility can be accepted for entries that are lost or delayed,
or which are not received for any reason.
3 - Winners are chosen at the discretion of the judges.
4 - No part of a prize is exchangeable for cash or any other prize
5 - Winners will be contacted via the email address the entry was sent from.
6 - Incorrectly completed, abusive or coarse entries will be disqualified.
7 - MultiMediaMouth will endeavour to send prizes within a month
of the competition end date but cannot guarantee this delivery time.
8 - Your contact information will be kept safe and not passed on to any
third parties.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (3D) [12A]

DIR: Rob Marshall
CAST: Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Ian McShane,
Geoffrey Rush, Sam Clafin, Astrid Berges-Frisbey

Back in 2003 the first installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean series was refreshing; a fun blockbuster which saw Johnny Depp give an entertaining performance, and reap some long and richly deserved mainstream rewards after fifteen years as one of the most reliably interesting actors in cinema. Eight years on and here we are with the fourth film in the series. It seems to be going back to basics somewhat, with a more linear story than the last, baffling, installment; At World's End and the cutting of Orlando Bloom (yay) and Keira Knightley (boo) from the cast list. At least, that's what it wants you to think. In reality everything that has been pruned away is replaced by something worse. Thanks Hollywood.

I would usually begin the second paragraph of a review with a brief plot summary, but this time I'm not going to, because there's not a plot here, there is just STUFF. STUFF happens for all of this film's 137 minutes, but, despite Keith Richards' cameo laying out a quest that is so linear it may just as well be the plot of an 8 bit platform game, none of it seems to serve any larger story. There are about six tangents, each involving different characters or sets of characters, and not one makes sense, manages to be interesting, or feels like it has anything to do with the other stories. It's all just STUFF. Loud STUFF. In 3D.

I think my feelings on 3D are pretty well documented, so I only want to address the use of the technology briefly in this case. On Stranger Tides was shot in 3D, but you'd be hard pressed to tell. Even in the scenes that really try to exploit it (generally involving swords pointing out of the screen, because, yeah, that's what movies have been missing the past 110 years; the ability to point at us) the 3D is utterly underwhelming. In fact the only effect I really noticed from the 3D is that I couldn't see the film properly, because, as ever, it's so bloody dark that the 3D process and glasses flatten the picture and obscure detail. If you must see this film (and, honestly, you must not), do yourself the favour of seeing it in 2D, because all you'll get for the extra price of 3D is the chance to watch an already dark film with sunglasses on. Again, thanks Hollywood.

The 3D, however, isn't really the problem here. The problem is the astonishing tedium. By God this film is boring. I may have loathed Sucker Punch (which remains the worst film of 2011), but at least it generated some feeling in me, even if that feeling was revulsion, anger, and the desire to get Zack Snyder some therapy. On Stranger Tides, by contrast, is just unfathomably dull. It's like a five year old wailing 'look at meeee' for two and a half hours, but not doing anything when you do look at it. Even the action scenes are a snooze (and in those the 3D is the problem, rendering the action smeary and indistinct, though even that can't hide the laughably unconvincing doubling of a pregnant Penelope Cruz). The action is also completely derivative with the earlier films, with the initial swordfight almost a shot for shot lift of Depp's first fight with Orlando Bloom in the first film, only this time with the least convincing drag king in history as Jack's opponent (oh, hang on, that's the same too isn't it?)

Between the action we get a slew of new - I hesitate to say characters - bodies to populate the film. The characterisation is laughably thin. Blackbeard (played by Ian McShane) is supposed to be the ultimate badass in the pirate world, but he's underwritten and less than scary, even when threatening to kill Cruz. In the franchise's Orlando Bloom shaped hole, Sam Clafin plays a missionary captured by Blackbeard. It's not entirely Clafin's fault that the character doesn't work, since screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio give him all the personality of a wet fart, but the fact that Clafin is more wooden than the mast he's tied to for quite a lot of his screentime really doesn't help. As the other side of the deeply unlikely missionary/mermaid love story French actress Astrid Berges-Frisbey has an appropriately limpid beauty, but is no more engaging or well written that her paramour. It also doesn't help that, just as their story is climaxing the film up and forgets about them, but that's par for the course with the abysmal writing and editing on display here. It's also worth noting, as far as the supporting cast is concerned, the jaw droppingly awful performance given by Richard Griffiths as King George II of England, one of the most embarrassing things done by a good actor in recent memory.

Okay, so the support is terrible, but there are three really solid actors at the centre of this film, surely there must be something to enjoy there. You'd like to think so, wouldn't you? Geoffrey Rush, happily, does seem to be enjoying himself, but sadly the effect doesn't really translate, because he's never on screen long enough for his story (he's trying to beat Jack Sparrow to the fountain of youth, sailing under the colours of the British navy as a privateer) to gain any depth or traction or for his performance to provide any real respite from, well, everything else. Penelope Cruz, as I noted above, was pregnant during the shooting of this film, and it's pretty poorly hidden, it's also seriously constricting, meaning that her character (an old flame of Jack's, which really doesn't work, because I'd always assumed Jack was gay) does almost nothing. Cruz looks and sounds bored, turning in a lifeless performance that has 'I have a mortgage payment coming up' written all over its joyless face. She also has a peculiar lack of chemistry with Depp, despite the fact that they worked well together in the still underrated Blow.

And then there's Johnny Depp. It's just sad, sad and depressing to watch this great talent pissed away in a film as bad as this, and to see him so obviously cashing a cheque as he is here. This time out his Jack Sparrow is listless, he doesn't commit to the character at all, even letting the voice slip. For all the flailing he does (and he does a lot) the energy always remains low and the performance dialled in at best. I wouldn't care so much, except that Depp likely made well in excess of twenty million dollars for this performance, and frankly you should expect a bit more for that sort of money.

So, over the course of an interminable 137 minutes we are pulled this way and that, thrown from scene to scene in a senseless, flailing fashion that makes this already brutally long film feel as if it is missing huge swathes of material. At least I hope that's the case, because otherwise the endless series of moments in which I all but yelled 'who's that? what's he doing? why? where are they? how does he know this? WHY?' are the fault of the writing. Frankly I struggle to find anything remotely positive to say about this film.

So, the question is really 'is it better than the last one'? The answer, sadly, is not really. It's shorter, which is nice, but really all that that amounts to is saying that this giant pile of shit, smelly though it is, is a bit smaller than that giant pile of shit. Look, I know this is critic proof, I know there are at least two more of them coming (KILL ME) but really, don't see this, lets demand more of filmmakers than this.

Deep End

DIR: Jerzy Soklimowski
CAST: Jane Asher, John Moulder Brown

It is amazing to think that films made as late as 1970 could be lost to history, but Deep End very nearly was. For a long time it was unavailable but now, happily, it has been rescued, found, restored and re-released by the BFI. It's a huge relief too, because, even if it has dated quite considerably, this a fascinating and hypnotic film, filled with intriguing scenes, performances and shots, and it deserves better than to fall through the cracks in history.

Deep End starts out as a fairly typical coming of age, boy meets girl picture. 15 year old Mike (Moulder Brown) gets his first job (as an attendant at a public bathhouse, one of several things that feel very anachronistic 41 years later) and promptly falls in love with his slightly older co-worker Susan (she's played by a 24 year old Jane Asher, so really, who can blame him). It's after this initial falling in love, and Mike's discovery that Susan is not just engaged, but cheating on her fiancé with at least one older man, that Deep End really becomes interesting; metamorphosing into a study of a steadily growing and rather dangerous obsession.

Polish director Soklimowski has a really interesting eye, and he makes what could easily be quite a visually drab tale endlessly fascinating to look at. From the way he uses colour to bring the film full circle (red paint used in two strikingly different moments at either end of the film) to his seedy, dirty looking London and the composition of his frames, this is always a visual feast, and I'm sure that further viewings will only deepen (no pun intended) what can be seen in this film. This is a film very much of its time; London had just about stopped swinging, and the long passage of the film that sees Mike follow Susan and her boyfriend, and wait for them to leave a club in the red light district, really brings that home.

The performances are effective. John Moulder Brown is very convincing as the naive and inexperienced Mike, who has his head turned by Susan. In one of the films best scenes Susan teases and flirts with Mike, and he doesn't quite know how to handle it; an awkward reaction that really transcends the years, because there's not a guy who doesn't know that feeling. Moulder Brown also manages to move the character on credibly, becoming more and more disturbing but giving a quietly chilling rather than an overblown 'I'm mad me' performance as Mike's obsession grows. Early in the film he follows Susan and her boyfriend to a porno cinema, and touches Susan up in a very creepy scene.

Jane Asher is just as strong. She's obviously jaw droppingly beautiful, but she also gives a great performance as Susan. There is both an ethereal unknowable quality about her, and a down to earth straightforwardness that she adopts with Mike in the early part of the film. It's an intoxicating blend, and it would be easy to become as obsessed as Mike does. I like the way that both the film and Asher's performance leave certain important questions unanswered, for instance, Mike steals a cutout of a topless girl who looks exactly like Susan from outside a strip club, but she will not confirm or deny that it is her, also left ambiguous is the exact type of relationship and arrangement she has with the men in her life (her fiancé and others).

It's hard to know where to file Deep End. It has surealist tendencies (the ending uses these especially well), moments of high comedy (Diana Dors' cameo as an amorous pool guest) and there is a vein of horror running right through it. However you categorise it, this is an intensely interesting film which I am sure will grow in stature as I rewatch it, which I plan to do many times when the BFI release it on DVD (and hopefully Blu Ray) in July. I suggest you discover it as soon as possible.

Daisy Diamond

DIR: Simon Staho

My first experience with Danish filmmaker Simon Staho was not good. I said that his film Warriors of Love (made after Daisy Diamond) 'consists of 93 of the most pretentious, ponderous, minutes of cinema I’ve ever sat through.' However, that wasn't enough to put me off seeing what I heard was a barnstorming performance from Noomi Rapace (who rose to international fame last year as Lisbeth Salander in the Millennium trilogy).

Daisy Diamond is a tough, tough watch, as uncompromisingly bleak a film as I have ever seen. From its bare visual style, to its confrontational depictions of sex and nudity to its parade of utterly unsympathetic characters, the film offers absolutely no respite from the emotional brutality that defines it. It centres on Anna (Rapace), a young woman in her early 20's who is trying to be an actress, but finds all her auditions disrupted by her constantly crying four month old daughter Daisy. With no support, and seemingly no parenting skills, Anna becomes desperate as her daughter is always noisily preventing her from working. One day she takes drastic action.

Though other characters drift in and out, usually as directors who are auditioning Anna, or using her in some other more direct way, Daisy Diamond is, to all intents and purposes, basically a one woman show for Noomi Rapace. For much of the running time all we see is her talking to her four month old daughter (tellingly the few loving things she says are often revealed to be audition passages, or quotes from movies). Staho has many characters tell Anna how interesting her face is, and his visual style reflects that, with many scenes played almost exclusively on a close up shot of Rapace' face, particularly in the film's most disturbing moments.

This kind of material, and this kind of scrutiny, demands a lot from an actor, and Rapace more than delivers. She clearly threw herself, body and soul, into the part (she was actually hospitalised when shooting ended, suffering from internal bleeding, apparently brought on by the stress). She has to make 180 degree emotional turns in an instant, and you believe every single one, and even when you become used to Staho's device of using audition dialogue but suggesting that it's coming from Anna herself, you still believe every last word that she says (this does create one small issue in the film; why doesn't Anna get every role she auditions for?) Rapace is especially outstanding in her scenes with the baby, after a while you get to see when Anna is rehearsing and when she's expressing genuine feeling, and the detachment with which she regards, speaks to, even holds, Daisy is chilling. It's a naked performance in every sense of the word, Rapace is explicitly stripped down physically, but much more impactful is the gradual stripping away of any emotional register (seen best in the cold, matter of fact way she relates her life story for the pimp she ends up working for).

I like to think that after 20 years and 8000 odd movies I've become a pretty decent judge of acting. Noomi Rapace' performance here may be the best I've seen in five years or more. I wouldn't hesitate to rank it with the likes of Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher, Jennifer Jason Leigh in Georgia or Sissy Spacek in Badlands among the best performances I've seen by an actress. It absolutely demands to be seen.

The film as a whole doesn't quite meet that standard, largely because Staho's techniques start calling attention to themselves midway through the film, and by the end it does feel like he is gratuitously piling on the tragedy (though it's not so oversold there is a plot turn that reminded me of Precious) and almost rubbing our faces in the degradation on display. Some people will hate this film, and I can see why, it may lack the explicit violence, but for me it has a similar impact to Irreversible; a 93 minute gut punch that resonates long after the credits. It may be flawed as a film, but I can't imagine you not thinking about, not remembering, Daisy Diamond, and that, for me, would be enough to recommend it, even without its astounding central performance. It is nothing short of criminal that this film isn't available in the UK.

Best Worst Movie

DIR: Michael Paul Stephenson

The 1989 film Troll 2 (which is about goblins, and has nothing to do with Troll 1, obviously) was a low budget, direct to video thing, knocked off in three weeks in Utah by prolific Italian exploitation filmmaker Claudio Fragasso with a cast of apparently baffled locals, but in the years since its release it has become a cult classic, passed around among bad movie fans and gaining a reputation as this generation's Plan 9 From Outer Space; the kind of bad movie that's so terrible that it becomes brilliantly entertaining.

This documentary was directed by the film's now grown up child star, but it largely follows a Utah based dentist named George Hardy, who is apparently the nicest man in the world, and who, 18 years ago, played the Father of Troll 2's central family. Stephenson follows Hardy through a series of screenings and conventions, and the two get reacquainted with some of their co-stars. It's overwhelmingly a warm and affectionate film, pulled along by a man who, though he does get a little intoxicated by sudden cult stardom, remains perhaps the most amiable guy alive (when he's flopping at a convention he corners people - punters and fellow B-List celebs alike - and asks them whether they've seen Troll 2, before regaling them with his famous "You can't piss on hospitality" line, and even then he comes across simply as intensely friendly).

It's not all sweetness and light, director Fragasso thinks Troll 2 is both a good and an important film (spoiler alert: It's not) and harangues the amused (and bemused) cast at a Q and A and there is a downright sad scene with Margo Prey, who played Hardy's wife, and now seems to be a borderline crazy cat lady, confined to her home and looking after her elderly Mother (there's a whole other, much more depressing, film to be made there).

Stephenson and most of his subjects (even the initially skeptical actress who played his sister) seem to, eventually, treat the film and its fans with amusement and enjoy the little bit of recognition it gives them, and it's that warmth that really makes Best Worst Movie the intensely likable experience it is. This isn't so much a film about Troll 2 as much as it is about a strange shared experience, for both cast and fans. It's a real treat, find it and double bill it with Troll 2 for a great evening's entertainment.

Review / Competition: Yu-Gi-Oh! 3D: Bonds Beyond Time [PG]

DIR: Kenichi Takeshita

First, a confession; going into this film I knew nothing about Yu Gi Oh (apart from a vague awareness of its existence) because I am, in terms of the film's 6-12 year old target audience, old. It was perhaps in deference to me, and to the parents who will be dragged by their kids to see this film, that Yu Gi Oh 3D: Bonds Beyond Time began with a 15 minute series of extracts from the TV show the film is based on, filling us in on each of the main characters, who are soon to be drawn together by a time traveling villain named Paradox. It is also likely the fault of my old brain that even after this animated cheat sheet I didn't understand a single second of the next hour (the film is mercifully short).

So I think that Paradox comes from a far future, a world that has essentially been destroyed by people playing Duel Monsters (the apparently very dangerous card game at the centre of this franchise) and he now wants to travel back in time and destroy the game to save the future. It's really a bad start when you look at a villain's motives and think 'yeah, he's got a point'.

It should be said that while Yu-Gi-Oh! 3D is one of the worst films I've seen in quite some time, it is terrible in a brilliant, brilliant way. It is so irredeemably, unconscionably stupid, so mindbendingly difficult to follow that it actually is hilarious, and increasingly so the more you attempt to take it seriously. At one point a character mentions the concept of time, and another asks "What's that?" This is either the worst line in cinematic history or the most advanced concept ever discussed in a film for six year olds, I'm not sure which.

The animation is terrible, looking like low budget TV animation for the most part, and cursed with some of the worst lip synch I've seen in ages, and the 3D does little to help, yes it creates a few interesting CGI backdrops, but otherwise the effect is so layered that it's akin to watching a kid act out the story with cutout characters in a shoebox theatre (this too is hilarious at times).

About half of the film is taken up with the final 'duel' (it's 3 against one, so, not a duel) and it is ludicrous and baffling in the extreme. It may (MAY) make some sense to the target audience, but I wouldn't bet on it, as, from what I hear the 'rules' on display here bear little or no relation to how the real world game is played. For me, the sequence seemed little more than characters shouting random thing at each other about monsters along the lines of "My dragon is going to suck all the power out of your dragon, then attack your knight and take half your hit points". I half expected every turn to end with Nelson Muntz making a cameo to say "ha ha". Quite apart from being totally mystifying, it's inherently undramatic; three barely distinguishable characters and a villain whose motives you're probably behind are settling the fate of the world... by playing cards. Really?

Yu-Gi-Oh! 3D: Bonds Beyond Time is terrible, but actually, if the kids want to see it, you could do worse. In fact you'll probably enjoy it, just in a way the filmmakers didn't intend. Take the kids, roar with laughter at the ineptitude and stupidity, and then go about your day knowing that you've only lost 75 minutes, it's better than allowing them to drag you to Sucker Punch.


COMPETITION
To win the contents of my goody bag from the Yu-Gi-Oh premiere [A Yu-Gi-Oh graphic novel, scorepad, pen and exclusive Yu-Gi-Oh card] simply answer the following question...

WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE TIME TRAVELING VILLAIN IN YU-GI-OH! 3D: BONDS BEYOND TIME?

Answers by email (subject: Yu-Gi-Oh competition) to sam@24fps.org.uk Winner will be drawn at random and notified by email.

Hanna [15]

DIR: Joe Wright
CAST: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett,
Tom Hollander, Jessica Barden

Hanna (the movie, rather than the character) is a bit schizophrenic. Sometimes it's a modern take on Grimm's fairytales; with Saoirse Ronan playing both Red Riding Hood and the woodsman, other times it's more simple; a stripped back, lean, focused and well lensed action movie. I'm not sure which of those films it really wants to be, and I'm not sure the film knows either. Both work to some degree (the action movie more so, for me) but they don't really complement one another that well, I often felt like I was watching two movies that had been slightly awkwardly edited together.

The story isn't tremendously original; it sees Ronan as a 15 year old girl raised in the forest by her ex CIA operative Father (Bana) and trained in preparation to kill Marissa Weigler (Blanchett), the CIA higher up who killed Hanna's mother. When Hanna decides that she is ready she allows herself to be taken by the CIA, so that she can find and kill Marissa.

That said, there is much that is good about Hanna, notably Saoirse Ronan. Just 16 when this film was shot, Ronan has long shown that she has a deep, beyond her years, understanding of her characters and her craft, and she brings Hanna to vivid life. Much of this performance is in Ronan's clear, cold, blue eyes, in the detachment and focus with which she plays the action scenes, as if running through a series of moves she's rehearsed a hundred times. However, as the film runs on she's also allowed to show emotion, and she's effective as she shows us another side of Hanna scenes in scenes with a family of tourists with whom she makes friends (particularly Jessica Barden as the teenage daughter and Olivia Williams as the mother) and attempts to be a normal teenager for a while (it doesn't always go well, notably on a double date with Barden). The relationship with Bana adds another layer, it seems a touch cold in the opening sequence; more teacher/student than father/daughter, but again towards the end of the film you get to feel it more as Hanna is allowed to be a more emotional creature.

Ronan also throws herself into the action, clearly doing a decent amount of her own stunts and fight sequences, and handling them with aplomb, putting across a surprising amount of force (particularly in the container park scene, and when fighting Eric Bana) for such a slight girl. It is to her credit that the film works at all, because she grounds what could be an outlandish piece of work with a performance of conviction and reality.

Joe Wright (who was suggested by Ronan after she was cast) seems an odd choice to direct a film so action heavy as this, but his inexperience seems to work for the film, because it means that he's not shackled to the boring prevailing trends of fast cutting, close ups and slow motion in the action scenes. Wright brings some of his arthouse styling to the table, be it the pounding circular cutting in the CIA facility action scene, the series of tracking shots and out of focus fights in the container park or Eric Bana's Oldboy inspired single take fight, Wright is always finding ways to make each set piece look and feel different from the others, while keeping everything both intelligible and exciting.

The other great contribution to Hanna comes from The Chemical Brothers, whose score is the only thing that really manages to draw the disparate parts together. At times it is a huge, pounding, breakbeat driven monster, and at others it subtler and softer, but it always complements the film, and the two themes that run through the score are carried through brilliantly, particularly the lilting tune that becomes disturbing when whistled by Tom Hollander's villain. However, good as the score is, and vital to the film though it may be, this is not Tron: Legacy. That was a Daft Punk video first and a film second, Hanna is never a Chemical Brothers video.

Unfortunately in amongst all this good stuff, there are things that just don't work. Set against Ronan's very real performance other elements often feel too broad and cartoony. This is especially felt in the extended sequences with the insufferably liberal family Hanna hitches a ride with and, more damagingly, the villains of the piece. Cate Blanchett is a great actress, make no mistake, but I've no idea what she's doing here, she seems out of place, her terrible orange wig, stereotypical uhmayrican accent and over the top approach repeatedly threatening to unbalance the film and rob it of what credibility it does have. It's not helped by Tom Hollander either, playing an androgynous German assassin who is so ridiculous that he's never frightening. I get that they are archetypes; a witch and a big bad wolf to tie into the film's fairytale theme, but it just clashes with the rest of the film. Talking of moments that clash; what the hell is with that sequence in Wilhelm Grimm's house? It's like someone cut in a scene from another film (and not in a good way)

As the film runs on, Wright really begins to hammer home the fairytale stuff ("To Grandma's house we go") to the point that he has Hanna walk into a wolf's jaws for the final confrontation with Marissa. Again, I get what he's saying here, but not so much why he's saying it, it doesn't really inform the film or the characters, and the metaphor sits uneasily with the rest of the film.

Whatever else is wrong with Hanna, it is never at a loss for ideas, and it is never dull. There is much to love here; Ronan's performance; the score; the action; the neat circular structure; the terrific, percussive editing, and for all its flaws it is well worth seeing, because it's a film that feels different to its peers, because it's a film worth thinking about, and a film worth discussing. We don't get enough of those, flawed or otherwise.

The Screening Room

The Screening Room is the podcast I present for MultiMediaMouth, along with Michael Ewins. This week we talked about kickass movie heroines and reviewed 13 Assassins and Hanna. You can listen to The Screening Room Episode 10 below.

DVD Review: My Friend From Faro [15]

DIR: Nana Neul

The Film
Though it's hardly mainstream, the lesbian coming of age movie has, in recent years, become a familiar part of the cinematic landscape, and as such it has laid down many of its own standard forms and clichés, so you have to credit début writer/director Nana Neul for trying to do something at least a little different from the usual coming out story.

The film centres on closeted tomboy Melanie (Anjorka Strechel), who meets Jenny (Lucie Hollmann) after almost running her over. Jenny assumes that Mel is a boy, and Mel, attracted, plays along, claiming to be from Portugal and named Miguel. At the same time, challenged to bring her new boyfriend; Miguel, from Portugal, to a family dinner, Mel hires a co-worker (Manuel Cortez) to pose as Miguel. You can pretty much guess that these lies lead to a lot of confusion and heartache for all concerned.

The obvious touchstone for My Friend From Faro is Boys Don't Cry, or rather the real story of Teena Brandon before the events of that film. Like Brandon, Melanie poses as a boy in order to seduce a straight girl, but in this fictional context it is harder to sympathise with Melanie. The main reason is that we know throughout that Jenny is 14, and though she's told Melanie that she's 16, she looks and seems very much younger, which gives a creepy vibe to the relationship (compounded both by the deception it is built on and by a late revelation about Melanie's age). While it's easy to understand why Melanie lies to Jenny, it's harder to see why she lies to her family and invents a fictional boyfriend, there doesn't seem to be any pressure on her to be 'normal', at least not beyond the fact that they assume she's straight, and while the scenes with Melanie's family are well played, there is little inherent drama to them, as there seem to be no stakes.

On the plus side, the performances are uniformly good, with leads Strechel - who convinces physically as an androgynous figure who could be taken for a handsome young man - and Hollmann both committed and impressive, as hard as it is to really invest in their relationship, you do believe their investment in it. There is also a quickly built but convincing brother/sister relationship between Strechel and Florian Panzner, and an appealing performance from Manuel Cortez as Mel's Portugese co-worker/fictional boyfriend.

Beyond a creative title sequence, Nana Neul doesn't do anything flashy as a director. She keeps the focus largely on her actors, and is served well by their performances. She does, however, develop a few subtle things with her blocking and visuals, notably a close relationship between Jenny and her friend Bianca, which seems to hint at a deeper desire on Bianca's part. There are only a couple of really active scenes in the film, and Neul fumbles both. The car crash and a chase towards the end of the film both play almost completely in reactions, and feel slipshod in terms of both shooting and editing, but at the end of the day these are small problems, and the film's focus is on relationships and conversation, which are well handled by the director.

On the whole, My Friend From Faro is a mixed bag; it's well performed, but hard to connect to, and despite its undoubted qualities and several very good scenes (the family dinner with Melanie's fake boyfriend; Jenny, Bianca and Melanie's night out and Jenny and Melanie's date at the beach all stand out), it ends up feeling a bit inconsequential, especially as it ends on a very open note, but one that doesn't - unlike, say, the ending of Fucking Amal - leave you anxious to know what happened after that last cut to black. There are good things here, and I'll be keeping an eye on both Anjorka Strechel and Lucie Hollmann, but My Friend From Faro doesn't quite come together.

My Friend From Faro is released in the UK on May 16th by Peccadillo Pictures. If you want to order the DVD, and help out 24FPS at the same time, please use the link below.

Report: Isabelle Huppert in Conversation

Last night I was lucky enough to be at the National Film Theatre to see Isabelle Huppert give a career interview and receive the BFI Fellowship. As you may know, Huppert is one of my great heroes, I consider her if not the finest actress alive one of the top two, and my admiration for her is prompted to grow every time a new film of hers comes out (which, happily, tends to be frequently, as she's a workaholic).

Huppert; small, but not delicate, appeared in a stylish dark suit with red stripes, with minimal make up and, contrary to her reputation as difficult interview subject, seemed open and ready to discuss her 40 year career.

Despite being a big fan I've done little real research about Isabelle Huppert (perhaps to preserve the illusion when she's on screen), and so it was a surprise to get some insight into her process, or rather her lack of one. A recurring theme of the evening was the ease with which she approaches acting; she does no real research (even for, say, A Story of Women, in which she was playing a character inspired by a real woman) or reading around her subject, relying instead on herself to conjure the character, seemingly from within. Frequently she repeated 'acting is imagination' and that she sees film, even that closely inspired by real life, as fantasy.

This laid back nature seems to carry through into her choices and on set habits. She spoke of getting a feeling about the many first time directors she has worked with (and that the director is always the most important aspect in getting her to sign up for a film). She noted that she has no preference about how a director works 'that's his problem', and that she's only really been taken aback by someone's methods once; she described how, on La Truite, Joseph Losey would almost always do only one take, even for complex tracking shots, and recalled asking him what would happen if there were a technical problem 'are we going to come back to Japan?'

She spoke only briefly about Claude Chabrol, and the emotion of his relatively recent death still seemed quite raw. She offered the tantalising morsel (never picked up, sadly) that she had been about to work with him again, and described her relationship with him as that of a Father and Daughter, and suggested that they each understood, at a cinematic level, the other's tastes and needs. There was more detail, and a couple of stories, about Michael Haneke. She told a funny story about calling him from a phone booth in Scotland ('My kingdom', she called it, as she had been doing Mary Stuart at the National around the time of this holiday) to turn him down for Funny Games, and later detailed how, anxious to work with him after years of not working together, she only read the screenplay for The Piano Teacher closely on the plane the day before starting work, and was shocked at what she'd agreed to do.

Haneke also came up in discussion when what is 'real' in film was discussed. Huppert said that film is realistic, rather than real (a distinction I've been talking about for years, incidentally), and used an example from The Piano Teacher of Haneke (who, she noted, often does a lot of takes) making her drag Annie Girardot by the hair over and over again, because it didn't yet feel real on film, and that she only really saw what he meant on seeing, rather than playing, the scene. Another topic that came up in terms of realism was Huppert's gift for silence on screen. She was, perhaps, a little dismissive of this skill that she has, the ability to listen, and tell us something by listening, on screen. She put it down to the director, to the editor, and to cinema itself, which, she said, 'makes silence audible'. This was another recurring theme; any suggestion of technique or skill seemed to get slapped down, often with slight bafflement, with the notion that it's all a combination of her imagination and the technique of film.

As Huppert seemed to become more playful as the interview went on it is perhaps hard to say how sincere what seemed to be an exclusive revelation may have been, but here it is anyway... She said that she had, that day, thought of directing a film for the very first time, that she had read a story in the newspaper on the Eurostar and thought that there was a great role to play, and then thought 'I should direct'. I hope this turns out to be true, and to happen.

Perhaps the biggest running theme of the evening, and something that came through in every answer, whether or not it was explicitly spoken, was Huppert's love of her work; she seems still to find it exciting, and spoke of every film as doing it again for the first time, self-deprecatingly noting that she doesn't feel she has learned anything in her career, and that, to me, seems to be at the heart of her daring as an actress.

The audience Q and A was a typically mixed bag, the best question came towards the end when someone asked which directors Huppert might have liked to work with, she said Hitchcock, sharing, I'm sure, a desire with the audience, and also noted that she had never worked with a British director, which must have had budding filmmakers in the audience champing at the bit. I got the mic for the last question, but sadly she went into that story about not reading The Piano Teacher, and I never got to ask about the experience of making Heaven's Gate and what she now makes of the film, because we had run out of time. Still, though that, and the fact that I wasn't able to meet her, was a shame, it was a fascinating interview with one of the great talents in cinema, and it was an absolute pleasure just to listen to her.

Why Haven't You Seen...?

Over at MultiMediaMouth I write a weekly series called Why Haven't You Seen...? in which, each week, I profile and recommend a great film that you may not have seen before (some weeks films you may not have heard of before). It's been a long time since I have given you an easy access list of the films I've been covering in this feature, so here you are...

Mum and Dad
Police Story 3: Supercop
It Could Happen To You
A Simple Plan
Lemming
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Love Exposure
Georgia

Update

Hi. Sorry I haven't been writing lately. The details are too dull to go into frankly, but I did want to assure you that there is new writing coming. Tomorrow I've got a screening and a premiere (ooh), both of which I'll be writing and podcasting about. I've also got a Q and A session tomorrow, with the greatest actress of our time; Isabelle Huppert, so there will be a full report (hopefully a full transcript) on that coming as well.

Further in the future I'll have some more DVD reviews on the way, thanks to some recent contacts, so we are going to be busy again. Sorry about the break.