They Made Tom Watch...

What’s it about?
YOU GET THE BEEEST OF BOTH WORLD… LA LA LA LA… Sorry… Umm… The film. It’s about a girl called Miley Stewart who is secretly pop star Hannah Montana. She gets a bit out of control so her dad takes her home to the deep south so she can find herself. Finding ensues, as do a few really annoying sub-plots.

Is it any good?
I have a reputation for having the cinematic and musical taste of a 9 year old girl, and thus, I quite liked it. There are a few annoying niggles, like the various extraneous sub-plots, but nothing that a good ol’ song and dance doesn’t cure. All is righted in the end after all…
It’s a charming film that does what it was designed to do and does it well. It drags a little in the first half, where the song set pieces seem to be designed for people with ADHD, but settles nicely in the final act, and delivers nicely at the end.
On a side note, someone should hunt and kill Billy Ray Cyrus.

Who is it for?
Pre teen girls. And me.

What is it like?
Hannah Montana: The Concert (though sadly I’ve not seen this… yet.)

Good Stuff
The set piece songs, the simple and effective plot.

Bad Stuff
English people, sub-plotting, Billy Ray Cyrus.

24FPS on Superpodcast

Well, I've been trailing it for long enough and here it finally is. I've been talking with the lovely Supermarcey for a little while about appearing on and lowering the usualy extremely professional standard of her always entertaining and instructive Superpodcast.

The topic for this podcast (Episode 27) is "Why haven't you seen these films?" Each of us picked five great movies that you probably haven't seen, but should, to talk about. I think it's an interesting and entertaining hour. Thanks to Marcey for having me, I hope we'll do it again some time.

The player embedded below will, hopefully, work for everyone but if it doesn't you can find the podcast streaming at Marcey's site (which you should visit anyway, because it's ace).

As ever, comments will be much appreciated.



Listen Here

Mini-Reviews: Tin Cup / My Summer of Love

TIN CUP
DIR: Ron Shelton


Director Ron Shelton has made something of a trademark of sports movies, with White Men Can't Jump, Play it to the Bone and Bull Durham (also with Tin Cup star Kevin Costner) among his credits. He's left the world of sports behind recently, and, tellingly, his more recent work hasn't been as well recieved comercially or critically.

Tin Cup combines a sports movie with a romantic comedy, and both are actually pleasingly different. In featuring two relatively mature (in years if not attitude) characters the romantic storyline between Costner and Rene Russo - who have pretty strong romantic and comedic chemistry - feels less rote than usual. The golf storyline, while it ends, as expected, on a high note for Costner's washed up golf pro Roy 'Tin Cup' McAvoy doesn't quite go in for the last second victory that is the preserve of almost every sports movie ever made. Tin Cup doesn't radically depart from the cliches of either genre, but it shakes them up just enough to feel fresh.

This is also helped by the energetic and engaging performances. Kevin Costner; an underrated actor who always seems to be at his best as some sort of sportsman, gives one of his best performances as the neurotic McAvoy. He's especially good when he's nervously trying to ask Russo out, in the manner of a 14 year old boy asking the prettiest girl in school to prom. Russo is also good, she doesn't have quite as much to play as Costner, but she does funny and maturely sexy well. Tin Cup isn't a great classic, but it's an amusing couple of hours; it never feels baggy and it always remains fun, great escapism.


MY SUMMER OF LOVE
DIR: Pawel Pawlikowski



I always seem to forget, between viewings, just how dark this film about Yorkshire girl Mona (Natalie Press), and the summer over which she falls for upper class Tamzin (Emily Blunt), really is. Theere are certainly shades of other films in this one; echoes of Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures abound (a relationship between two girls, one of them upper class and a fantacist (Blunt here, Kate Winslet in Jackson's film) and, if anything, it bears that influence more heavily than that of the (TERRIBLE) novel the film is ostensibly based on.

If anything the story is a little banal and familliar, the only signifcantly new element coming in Paddy Considine's role as Mona's newly born-again brother Phil, but the performances, the music (by Goldfrapp) and the gorgeous images crafted by Pawlikowski, whose previous documentary work here gives way to something more impressionistic, all exceed the screenplay. For me it is Natalie Press, as the rather naive Mona, who really owns the film. She's able to turn on a dime from being broad and comic (as in a scene where she demonstrates to Tamzin how her older boyfriend would have sex with her) to something much smaller and heavier (The way she tells Tamzin "If you leave me, I'll kill you, and then I'll kill myself").

Considne also gives a remarkable performance; all repression, emotion held barely in check by his newfound faith, he's particularly outstanding when Tamzin tries to seduce Phil. I'm a little surprised that it was Emily Blunt who went from this film to a Hollywood career; she's beautiful, ceertainly, but while she's good here she's perhaps not as strong as Press and Considine. My Summer of Love is a beautifully made film, if perhaps a deceptively titled one, but it's one whose excellent performances allow you to get really wrapped up in the film's small, personal story.

Self Promotion

The trailer for the next episode of Supermarcey's Super Podcast, on which I'm the guest, has just come out. Check it out here, and be sure to tune in for the whole show from Friday. Comments, of course, will be welcomed here, on youtube and, I'm sure, at Marcey's site.

I Love Paul Verhoeven

A lot of actors and directors have, shall we say, interesting hobbies, but few more so than Paul Verhoeven. I've seldom been more surprised than I was when I discovered that Verhoeven, the provocateur behind the likes of Robocop, Basic Instinct and The Fourth Man, is an internationally recognised scholar on the subject of the historical Jesus. Yes, really. He's the only lay member of the Jesus Seminar. He's also just published (in English, it came out in his native Holland a while back) a biography of Jesus, simply called Jesus of Nazareth. And he wants to make it into a film.

If no other film is made in the next year, that one HAS to go before cameras, it will probably be greeted with controversy that makes The Last Temptation of Christ seem like Toy Story 3, I can't wait to hear the sound of the heads of groups like Mediawatch and Christian Voice exploding with rage.

Another reason I love Paul Verhoeven, aside from the sheer entertainment value of his movies? Try this quote, about Mel Gibson's torture porn take on the New Testament; The Passion of the Christ

“If that’s God, then we are really fucked.”

.
Yeah, I love Paul Verhoeven.

Mini-Reviews: How to Train Your Dragon / The Scouting Book for Boys / The Fish Child / I Am Love

2010 films I Neglected to Review

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON [3D]
DIR: Dean DeBlois / Chris Sanders



Dreamworks’ latest animated film lacks the emotion of last year's Pixar effort Up, and the lunatic invention of Columbia's wonderful Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, but it isn’t without charm. The performances by the vocal cast (even, surprisingly, Gerard Butler as a Viking chief) are fun and relatively engaging and, while it’s very generic, the buddy movie story between misfit Viking Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and the wounded dragon he adopts is funny and has moments of real charm.

The look is enjoyably cartoony, and the character design largely appealing (though, sadly, the dragon; Toothless, is rather a bland design) and the 3D, while as pointless as ever, is well implemented enough that, while it adds nothing to the film, it manages not to detract from it. No classic, but an agreeable timewaster.


THE SCOUTING BOOK FOR BOYS
DIR: Tom Harper


Despite giving the film its (awful) title the book Scouting for Boys appears in this film for approximately five seconds, and is of little to no importance. Instead the film revolves around David (Thomas Turgoose of This is England) and Emily (Holliday Grainger), two roughly 14 year old friends living in a caravan park, currently on its off season. One day Emily disappears, and the community suspects foul play, centring round an older boy (Rafe Spall) who may have been Emily’s boyfriend, however, Emily is in hiding, and David is helping conceal her in a local cave.

This dark tale stands or falls on the performances of Turgoose and Grainger, and both are excellent. Turgoose, finally, shows that he’s real talent, rather than just receptive to Shane Meadows’ direction, giving a complex and realistic portrayal of a young man nursing a painful, unreturned, crush on a friend. Grainger is equally fine, moving as a desperately naïve young girl running away from a pretty awful situation, and the two play off each other well, with that easy intimacy of friends giving way to a slight, but real, awkwardness when the difference in their feelings is stated.

The ending is shocking, and not entirely convincing. I understood David’s jealousy, but never quite bought the film’s last ten minutes, solid as Turgoose is in them, but that’s a small issue next to the preceding tense and involving 80 odd minutes.


EL NIÑO PEZ
[THE FISH CHILD]
DIR: Lucia Puenzo


This was a real disappointment. The last collaboration between writer/director Lucia Puenzo and actress Ines Efron was the excellent XXY. Unfortunately, The Fish Child; a rather muddled and uninvolving tale taking in a lesbian relationship between the daughter (Efron) of a murdered judge and their young house maid (Maria Vitale) and vacillating between being a romance, a road movie, a dark drama and a crime thriller with little purpose or direction, lacks any of the emotional punch of that first collaboration.

Much of the problem is down to Puenzo’s storytelling; she chops the timeline up so much in the first hour of the film that it’s unclear what is happening when, and it’s really hard to get a handle on what you’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment. When the flashback disappear in the films last act the story takes a radical, and risible, gear shift. Efron is a great actress, and she does sterling work here with a thin role, but she’s just laughable in the last few scenes as she simply isn’t physically threatening enough. What does work relatively well, though it’s given surprisingly little prominence, is the relationship, there’s a real intimacy between Efron and Vitale and Efron’s longing for her lover comes through viscerally. A great actress then, in a rather underwhelming project.


IO SONO L’AMORE
[I AM LOVE]
DIR: Luca Guadagnino



I Am Love has taken a long time, over a decade in fact, to reach the screen. It was born out of the friendship between director Luca Guadagnino and leading lady Tilda Swinton. Set in Milan, and played entirely in Italian, it sees Swinton as a Russian woman who has married into a rich and powerful industrial family and raised three children, when her younger son befriends a chef (Edoardo Gabbriellini) Emma begins to fall for the handsome young man.

As its title might suggest, I Am Love is cinema on a rather grand scale. Guadagnino’s images are striking, often almost operatic in their scale and intention, metaphor isn’t dealt with subtly here, it’s thrust at you in glorious colour and intricate, imposing, composition. The score is similar in tone; John Adams’ music is very beautiful, and it is also, at times, almost assaultively deployed, asking, nay, demanding that you experience the desired emotional response to each scene. For about an hour I Am Love is exceptional, the images and the music cast a spell on you, and the rather intimate screenplay and Swinton’s brilliant performance (in what sounds to me like perfect Italian) draw you in despite the artifice of much of what Guadagnino is doing. Unfortunately, after a pivotal mid film sex scene (which is gorgeously shot, as if Terence Malick had put an urgent and explicit sex scene into Badlands), the film begins to fall apart.

The focus drifts from Emma’s new experience of love and instead there are several dull scenes revolving round the family business and a last minute twist that turns the film from something operatic in scale to something overwrought and more concerned with that operatic tone than with the more down to earth emotion of the first part of the film. Swinton remains astonishing throughout, but as the film goes on it begins to crumble around her faster and faster.

Film Review: Storm

STORM
DIR: Hans-Christian Schmid
CAST: Kerry Fox, Anamaria Marinca, Stephen Dillane



Storm has an interesting idea. Set at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, it follows a prosecutor (Fox) who finds that a three year old case against a former Bosnian general is about to collapse because a witness lied to her. She’s got a week to get the case back on track and convince a new witness (Marinca) to testify. The problem with this film is that the execution just doesn’t match the promise of the idea.

As you might expect with a distinguished cast and Hans-Christian Schmid, who drew such remarkable work from Sandra Huller in his previous film Requiem, behind the lens the performances are excellent. Fox, allowed for once to use her natural New Zealand accent, is an excellent and underrated actress, and she’s entirely believable as this lawyer with a desperate desire both to put a disturbing case to bed and to see justice done. She’s also a good physical fit for the role, at 44 she’s certainly an attractive woman, but she’s no glamour girl, she’s the right age and has the right look for us to buy her in this role in a way that, say, Penelope Cruz really doesn’t. It’s more than that though; the lines that she’s given as Hannah Maynard are largely very functional and actually rather lacking in character, but Fox manages to bring more depth to the role than was likely there on the page, only coming unstuck when the screenplay essentially throws up its hands and abandons plausibility entirely.

There’s also a fine performance from Anamaria Marica, the Romanian actress lauded for her work in Channel 4’s Sex Traffic and, more recently, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Here she manages to bring emotion to her part in three languages; Czech, German and English and bring a measure of credibility to her character’s emotional journey, despite the fact that, again, the screenplay, by virtue of its very truncated timeline, offering little in the way of help or plausibility.

The workings of the ICC and the way it takes care of witnesses are convincingly observed, and there seems to have been scrupulous research into the manner in which it conducts its business. The first twenty minutes of the film are especially convincing, and thus especially interesting, from this point of view. Sadly the screenplay begins to fall down in its second and third acts, with character motivation feeling hazy (Marinca’s character especially, who goes from ‘can’t hep, won’t help’ to ‘lets get the bastard’ in a very few scenes). The ending is what killed the film for me though, a ridiculous, laughably implausible, piece of grandstanding, followed up by a coda all of which feels like a sermon directed at the ICC, really, if that’s all that Schmid and co-writer Bernd Lange had to say I wish they’d just written a strongly worded letter to someone.

Fox and Marinca’s excellent work aside, Storm doesn’t really work, perhaps Schmid and Lange aren’t yet assured enough in English, or perhaps this clanging, declamatory tone is exactly what they were after, either way it really undermines what could have been a genuinely smart and provocative film, and it’s a terrible disappointment from a filmmaker who had previously made something as subtle, as intelligent and as absolutely real as Requiem.