Books every movie lover should own.
Everything I ever needed to know, I learned at the movies. A nice idea, but sadly not true. Learning about movies doesn’t just mean watching them, it sometimes also means reading, and there are many, many great books about the cinema out there, ranging from the scholarly to the scandalous. I could write a much longer list of recommended reads, butt I’ve decided to boil it down to five that I’ve found both entertaining and (sometimes) instructive. I’ve tried to keep to slightly lesser known titles (hence, for example, no William Goldman), and the list is alphabetical by authors name.
Final Cut
By Steven Bach
Heaven’s Gate effectively marked the end of the New Hollywood, that auteur driven period (chronicled in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) in which studios seemed to hand control over to edgy young talents like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, and allow them to make groundbreaking, intelligent movies that were then marketed to mass audiences. Bach’s insiders account (he was an executive at United Artists, and heavily involved in Heaven’s Gate) of the disastrous hands off approach of the studios, and how the combination of that with Michael Cimino’s rampaging ego meant that the budget for his magnum opus went from a predicted $7million when the script was delivered to nearly $50million by the time the marketing was paid for effectively killed both a production model and, in its contemporary incarnation, United Artists, is both scary and laugh out loud funny.
What really impresses is the absolute wealth of detail that Bach is able to go into one every subject from the budget, to attempts to control Cimino, to the long debates over the casting of Isabelle Huppert, to the disastrous screening of Cimino’s first assembly, which ran five and a half hours and, he suggested, was ‘about fifteen minutes too long’. The personalities of all involved jump off the page, and provide perhaps the most lucid insight I’ve ever read into the internal politics of a Hollywood studio. Most of all, it makes Heaven’s Gate a fascinating proposition (though I still haven’t been able to sit through the film). Like the excellent documentary Overnight, Final Cut is a sobering insight into how NOT to behave as a filmmaker.
Projections 10
Edited by Mike Figgis
The Projections series, while often interesting in fits and starts, can be a bit dry for my tastes, but this entry, largely a series of interviews conducted by the filmmaker Mike Figgis, presents a fascinating and wide ranging picture of Hollywood in the late 1990s. Figgis talks to actors and directors, of course, but also to critic Kenneth Turan, to agents, studio execs and actors managers. The interviews aren’t very formal, instead having the feel of a free flowing conversation (undoubtedly helped by the fact that Figgis knows several of his interviewees well, having worked with them).
There’s great insight into the way the business can be rather cruel, especially from the frank contributions of actresses on the lower rung of the stardom ladder, like Ming Na-wen and Elisabeth Shue. With Boogie Nights only just completed, a young Paul Thomas Anderson is full of energy and passion for movies (and rants about the fact that his movies are often released with colour wrongly calibrated). Sylvester Stallone comes across as genuinely cerebral, Jodie Foster as the most intimidatingly intelligent person you could ever meet, and Robert Downey Jr, between brushes with the law, as troubled but fascinating. Also intriguing are the answers to Figgis’ repeated questions, asking for books, pieces of music, movies, actors and actresses that have made an impression on his interviewees. As a snapshot of varied Hollywood experiences, they really don’t get better than this.
With Nails
By Richard E Grant
Richard E. Grant’s film diaries are frequently much more entertaining than the films they’re about. He chronicles, in excitable, often CAPITALISED prose the fulfilment of his long held dream of being a Hollywood actor (if not really a star) and getting to work with the likes of Altman, Coppola and Scorsese in quick succession.
With Nails is a fast and very funny read, sharp as its title and packed to the gills with hilarious anecdotes from both on and off set. Meetings with Sharon Stone, Madonna and Demi Moore (“You sound like a rusty carburettor”, says Grant) are hilarious, as are the tales of the nightmarish making of Hudson Hawk, rehearsals for Warlock (on whip practice “Feel as though my arm has been hooked up to an artificial wanking machine”), and Coppola’s Dracula.
This is a look at Hollywood from a wide-eyed, admiring outsider turned wide-eyed, admiring insider (on his way to a premiere, gazing out the window, Grant’s companion asks what he’s doing and he replies “Gawping”). It’s a great book to dip in and out of, because almost every page features some hugely funny incident co-starring someone exceedingly famous.
See No Evil
By David Kerekes and David Slater
Kerekes and Slater’s exhaustive study of the ‘video nasties’ is outstanding on the films themselves (even if its comments on availability are now mostly outdated), but where it really excels is as a social history of the relationship between audiences, the press and controversial films. Each of the 70 odd films on the official nasties list is given a full appraisal, with comments about each one’s quality, history with the censors, and various releases and there is excellent coverage, in the first couple of chapters, of how cheap horror films came to dominate the early days of video in the UK.
Even better is a history of the way that the media engaged with (or, rather, refused to engage with) these films and the moral panics surrounding films like Child’s Play 3 and The Evil Dead and cases like that of ‘The Fox’, Michael Ryan, and the Columbine killers. It’s a riveting and persuasively argued read, exposing the tabloids for the smear printing liars they are. See No Evil built on my interest in censorship, and was thee thing that really turned me on to horror films in a big way. I still refer to it regularly when writing about censorship and as well as being a first class work of research on censorship it is a thoroughly entertaining read. An essential if you’ve even a passing interest in horror films or censorship.
A Year at the Movies
By Kevin Murphy
Kevin Murphy was part of the writing staff and cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and wrote this book, in which he travels the world, seeing at least one film at a cinema of some kind every single day for a year (2001) at a time when the show had finished and he thought, having seen such a lot of crap, that he might be falling out of love with movies. A Year at the Movies is a great book because it unashamedly celebrates and loves cinema, from the thrill of taking a kid to his first film (Monsters Inc, a fine start) to the odd experience of seeing a short film in a cinema in a hotel made of ice.
Given the timing of Murphy’s trip, 9/11 also intrudes, and, happily, coincides with one of Murphy’s favourite films of the year, one that really reaffirms his faith in cinema. He’s a genial host too, funny and enthusiastic, making points about what he thinks cinema is and should be, but without seeming to lecture (much, anyway). It’s a warm, involving book that reminds me why I love (and sometimes hate) movies, and makes me want to embark on a similar trip.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
24FPS at LLGFF '10
The 24th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
ELOISE
DIR: Jesús Garay
CAST: Diana Gomez, Ariadna Cabrol,
Laura Conejero, Bernat Saumell
Eloïse is a very standard issue lesbian love story. The form is very familiar; straight girl Asia (Gomez) finds an advert from an art student who needs a life model. That student is gay girl Eloïse (Cabrol). The two girls become close and Asia finds herself, much to the disapproval of her controlling mother (Conejero), falling for Eloïse. This story is cross cut with the aftermath of a serious accident, which has landed a comatose Asia in hospital.
I’m not sure how the lesbian audience will respond to this film, but to me it felt like a film by a straight male for a straight male audience. Far be it from me to complain about Garay and his actresses frank approach to sex and nudity - I like naked girls as much as the next straight guy (or, I guess, lesbian woman) - but there is definitely an exploitative feel to much of this movie. That said, the nudity is, like the whole film, beautifully shot, and the love scene, while explicit, is also rather sweet and tender.
Eloïse is a hard film to sum up, because parts of it work really well, and others fall totally flat. Sadly the main problem is with the screenplay. It’s just so familiar. It feels as though writer Cristina Moncunill has watched a lot of semi-mainstream lesbian films (Water Lilies certainly comes to mind, as does Fucking Amal) and tried to follow the formula. What Eloïse misses, though, is the plausibility. The script simply doesn’t give the characters who are supposed to be falling in love enough of a connection. Despite the efforts of the actresses it feels like, when they finally kiss, and subsequently have sex, they are doing so because it’s in the script. It’s not that Diana Gomez can’t put across Asia’s feelings, it’s just that there doesn’t seem to be a scene, or series of scenes, for them to grow. In this simplistic screenplay Asia’s boyfriend (Saumell) is ill one weekend and so she calls Eloïse (for no real reason I can work out, except that it’s in the script) and their day hanging out ends up turning into a first date. It’s all clunky, grinding gear changes, going from first straight to third and from third right to fifth. Adding a few more scenes would help immeasurably, but as it is this relationship just doesn’t feel organic.
On the plus side, Jesús Garay clearly knows his way around a camera, as he should, having made his first feature in 1981. Eloïse isn’t a groundbreaking looking film, but it is certainly attractive, particularly in a pivotal scene in a swimming pool, which, underwater, has a lovely dreamlike feel about it. The acting is mixed, with Bernat Saumell rather dull as Asia’s blandly handsome boyfriend and Laura Conejero turning the melodrama up to eleven as her mother. However, the leads are both much better, and between them rescue Eloïse from total irrelevance.
Diana Gomez has a tough job as Asia. Her character is deliberately very average; almost the definition of a ‘normal’ young woman, and sadly that means that the film grants her very little personality. As this sweet, normal, girl thrown for a loop by unexpected feelings Gomez does some nice work; she’s especially good in the scene the morning after Asia and Eloïse first sleep together, waking up naked, and then suddenly embarrassed by that fact when she sees Eloïse, also naked, sleeping next to her. If she can learn English to a good standard Gomez’ talent and her astounding beauty (picture all the best bits of Maria Valverde and Scarlett Johannson, in a single, jaw-dropping body) should carry her a long way. Ariadna Cabrol has perhaps an easier time ; Eloïse is a rather more interesting character, and though she’s not very developed her artistic bent and her more fearless approach allow Cabrol to have fun with the role. Gomez, thanks to her astonishing beauty, is perhaps the most compelling thing in the film, but Cabrol has the better character and gives the better performance, making Eloïse magnetic and sexy.
At the end of the day I was surprised that this film was shown in a lesbian and gay film festival, first because its treatment of lesbianism felt like softcore wish fulfilment for men and secondly, more troublingly, because the ending could easily be read as punishing Asia for embarking on this lesbian relationship, literally hitting her with tragedy as soon as she decides to commit to Eloïse. It also wants to have its tragic cake and eat it, giving us a final shot of Asia and Eloïse literally riding off into the sunset. It’s a perfect encapsulation of a film that’s confused about what it wants to be. Is it titillation or tenderness that Garay is shooting for? Is he pitching to a lesbian audience or to straight men? He doesn’t seem sure, and while there are good things in it, his film is the worse for this confusion.
KARLEKENS KRIGARE
[WARRIORS OF LOVE]
DIR: Simon Staho
CAST: Josefin Ljungman, Shima Niavarani
Here’s the headline of what the LLGFF brochure says about Warriors of Love: “Intense and dark drama about a troubled young lesbian couple who are prepared to do anything to be together”. That sounds interesting, I thought, I also liked the title and a quick scan of the extended information made this sound like an interesting, if offbeat, film. God, how I wish that Warriors of Love had been the film that was advertised.
Warriors of Love consists of 93 of the most pretentious, ponderous, minutes of cinema I’ve ever sat through. If I told you the basic story - When Ida (Ljungman) tells her girlfriend Karin (Niavarani) that her Father used to abuse her the girls determine to kill him, and then go on the run, thinking the authorities will be hot on their trail - you’d probably picture an engaging drama with some intense sequences; a little action, a few really intense, confrontational, dialogue scenes and a dramatic ending. You’d be wrong. Instead, Simon Staho’s films is built almost entirely out of endless pauses. Scenes that should last a minute run for five, solely due to the cavernous gaps between lines, time in which Staho’s camera does nothing but statically gaze at the scenery. One scene, perhaps the most dramatic argument between Ida and Karin, has the characters as tiny figures, barely visible in a long shot while, for the whole three-minute scene, the camera looks at a bridge. I’m sure it’s a nice bridge, it’s probably very well engineered, but, and I hate to have to clarify this, THIS MOVIE ISN’T ABOUT THAT FUCKING BRIDGE.
To say that Ida and Karin have no personality is, perhaps, to understate the problem that Warriors of Love has with characterisation. They are the only people we ever see and they are both complete nothings. I’ve often complained about the fact that filmmakers seem to think that one trait equals a personality, well; Ida and Karin don’t even have a single personality trait between them. All their dialogue is delivered in a sleepy monotone, which is only appropriate and effective in a single scene. Because neither of them has anything approaching a personality there is absolutely no sense of connection either to or between the characters, the actresses seem comfortable enough with each other, and with their two screen kisses, but there’s no spark there, no feeling and come the ending, when they each say that they can’t live without the other, you just don’t believe it. Not only do they not talk like a couple, they don’t talk like people, there’s barely a single conversation in this mind-bendingly boring film that wasn’t sniggered at in the cinema, largely because of the length of the pauses in dialogue. By the end I could picture Staho behind his camera, cueing each line as he decided that, this time, a 30 second pause was, perhaps, enough.
Terrible though Warriors of Love is, and difficult as it was to restrain myself from standing up in the cinema and bellowing “get on with it”, there is something in it that nags at me. It has two really good scenes. Really good scenes. The first has Ida and Karin lying in a field, Ida begins to talk, at first the silly talk of a little troll seems innocent and silly but it soon becomes clear that she’s relating the language her Father used when abused her. It is an astounding scene in a film so bad, genuinely creepy and disturbing, acted with real conviction by Josefin Ljungman, and here Staho’s unflinching camera technique is completely appropriate. Another strong moment, which also centres on a monologue by Ljungman, who I’d really like to see in a better film than this, because I suspect she’s really good, has Ida describing the first time (or perhaps the most recent time, it’s not terribly clear) she had sex with Karin. It’s the one moment that you feel any history, or any affection, between the characters.
Warriors of Love is, make no mistake, a boring, pretentious, piece of crap but there are flashes in it of the film that might have been; those two strong scenes, several beautiful shots that demonstrate that Staho does have an eye, and a few moments that indicate that at least one of these actresses is a good deal better than she’s allowed to be in this film, all in all, it feels like a missed opportunity.
ELOISE
DIR: Jesús Garay
CAST: Diana Gomez, Ariadna Cabrol,
Laura Conejero, Bernat Saumell
Eloïse is a very standard issue lesbian love story. The form is very familiar; straight girl Asia (Gomez) finds an advert from an art student who needs a life model. That student is gay girl Eloïse (Cabrol). The two girls become close and Asia finds herself, much to the disapproval of her controlling mother (Conejero), falling for Eloïse. This story is cross cut with the aftermath of a serious accident, which has landed a comatose Asia in hospital.
I’m not sure how the lesbian audience will respond to this film, but to me it felt like a film by a straight male for a straight male audience. Far be it from me to complain about Garay and his actresses frank approach to sex and nudity - I like naked girls as much as the next straight guy (or, I guess, lesbian woman) - but there is definitely an exploitative feel to much of this movie. That said, the nudity is, like the whole film, beautifully shot, and the love scene, while explicit, is also rather sweet and tender.
Eloïse is a hard film to sum up, because parts of it work really well, and others fall totally flat. Sadly the main problem is with the screenplay. It’s just so familiar. It feels as though writer Cristina Moncunill has watched a lot of semi-mainstream lesbian films (Water Lilies certainly comes to mind, as does Fucking Amal) and tried to follow the formula. What Eloïse misses, though, is the plausibility. The script simply doesn’t give the characters who are supposed to be falling in love enough of a connection. Despite the efforts of the actresses it feels like, when they finally kiss, and subsequently have sex, they are doing so because it’s in the script. It’s not that Diana Gomez can’t put across Asia’s feelings, it’s just that there doesn’t seem to be a scene, or series of scenes, for them to grow. In this simplistic screenplay Asia’s boyfriend (Saumell) is ill one weekend and so she calls Eloïse (for no real reason I can work out, except that it’s in the script) and their day hanging out ends up turning into a first date. It’s all clunky, grinding gear changes, going from first straight to third and from third right to fifth. Adding a few more scenes would help immeasurably, but as it is this relationship just doesn’t feel organic.
On the plus side, Jesús Garay clearly knows his way around a camera, as he should, having made his first feature in 1981. Eloïse isn’t a groundbreaking looking film, but it is certainly attractive, particularly in a pivotal scene in a swimming pool, which, underwater, has a lovely dreamlike feel about it. The acting is mixed, with Bernat Saumell rather dull as Asia’s blandly handsome boyfriend and Laura Conejero turning the melodrama up to eleven as her mother. However, the leads are both much better, and between them rescue Eloïse from total irrelevance.
Diana Gomez has a tough job as Asia. Her character is deliberately very average; almost the definition of a ‘normal’ young woman, and sadly that means that the film grants her very little personality. As this sweet, normal, girl thrown for a loop by unexpected feelings Gomez does some nice work; she’s especially good in the scene the morning after Asia and Eloïse first sleep together, waking up naked, and then suddenly embarrassed by that fact when she sees Eloïse, also naked, sleeping next to her. If she can learn English to a good standard Gomez’ talent and her astounding beauty (picture all the best bits of Maria Valverde and Scarlett Johannson, in a single, jaw-dropping body) should carry her a long way. Ariadna Cabrol has perhaps an easier time ; Eloïse is a rather more interesting character, and though she’s not very developed her artistic bent and her more fearless approach allow Cabrol to have fun with the role. Gomez, thanks to her astonishing beauty, is perhaps the most compelling thing in the film, but Cabrol has the better character and gives the better performance, making Eloïse magnetic and sexy.
At the end of the day I was surprised that this film was shown in a lesbian and gay film festival, first because its treatment of lesbianism felt like softcore wish fulfilment for men and secondly, more troublingly, because the ending could easily be read as punishing Asia for embarking on this lesbian relationship, literally hitting her with tragedy as soon as she decides to commit to Eloïse. It also wants to have its tragic cake and eat it, giving us a final shot of Asia and Eloïse literally riding off into the sunset. It’s a perfect encapsulation of a film that’s confused about what it wants to be. Is it titillation or tenderness that Garay is shooting for? Is he pitching to a lesbian audience or to straight men? He doesn’t seem sure, and while there are good things in it, his film is the worse for this confusion.
KARLEKENS KRIGARE
[WARRIORS OF LOVE]
DIR: Simon Staho
CAST: Josefin Ljungman, Shima Niavarani
Here’s the headline of what the LLGFF brochure says about Warriors of Love: “Intense and dark drama about a troubled young lesbian couple who are prepared to do anything to be together”. That sounds interesting, I thought, I also liked the title and a quick scan of the extended information made this sound like an interesting, if offbeat, film. God, how I wish that Warriors of Love had been the film that was advertised.
Warriors of Love consists of 93 of the most pretentious, ponderous, minutes of cinema I’ve ever sat through. If I told you the basic story - When Ida (Ljungman) tells her girlfriend Karin (Niavarani) that her Father used to abuse her the girls determine to kill him, and then go on the run, thinking the authorities will be hot on their trail - you’d probably picture an engaging drama with some intense sequences; a little action, a few really intense, confrontational, dialogue scenes and a dramatic ending. You’d be wrong. Instead, Simon Staho’s films is built almost entirely out of endless pauses. Scenes that should last a minute run for five, solely due to the cavernous gaps between lines, time in which Staho’s camera does nothing but statically gaze at the scenery. One scene, perhaps the most dramatic argument between Ida and Karin, has the characters as tiny figures, barely visible in a long shot while, for the whole three-minute scene, the camera looks at a bridge. I’m sure it’s a nice bridge, it’s probably very well engineered, but, and I hate to have to clarify this, THIS MOVIE ISN’T ABOUT THAT FUCKING BRIDGE.
To say that Ida and Karin have no personality is, perhaps, to understate the problem that Warriors of Love has with characterisation. They are the only people we ever see and they are both complete nothings. I’ve often complained about the fact that filmmakers seem to think that one trait equals a personality, well; Ida and Karin don’t even have a single personality trait between them. All their dialogue is delivered in a sleepy monotone, which is only appropriate and effective in a single scene. Because neither of them has anything approaching a personality there is absolutely no sense of connection either to or between the characters, the actresses seem comfortable enough with each other, and with their two screen kisses, but there’s no spark there, no feeling and come the ending, when they each say that they can’t live without the other, you just don’t believe it. Not only do they not talk like a couple, they don’t talk like people, there’s barely a single conversation in this mind-bendingly boring film that wasn’t sniggered at in the cinema, largely because of the length of the pauses in dialogue. By the end I could picture Staho behind his camera, cueing each line as he decided that, this time, a 30 second pause was, perhaps, enough.
Terrible though Warriors of Love is, and difficult as it was to restrain myself from standing up in the cinema and bellowing “get on with it”, there is something in it that nags at me. It has two really good scenes. Really good scenes. The first has Ida and Karin lying in a field, Ida begins to talk, at first the silly talk of a little troll seems innocent and silly but it soon becomes clear that she’s relating the language her Father used when abused her. It is an astounding scene in a film so bad, genuinely creepy and disturbing, acted with real conviction by Josefin Ljungman, and here Staho’s unflinching camera technique is completely appropriate. Another strong moment, which also centres on a monologue by Ljungman, who I’d really like to see in a better film than this, because I suspect she’s really good, has Ida describing the first time (or perhaps the most recent time, it’s not terribly clear) she had sex with Karin. It’s the one moment that you feel any history, or any affection, between the characters.
Warriors of Love is, make no mistake, a boring, pretentious, piece of crap but there are flashes in it of the film that might have been; those two strong scenes, several beautiful shots that demonstrate that Staho does have an eye, and a few moments that indicate that at least one of these actresses is a good deal better than she’s allowed to be in this film, all in all, it feels like a missed opportunity.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Review Post 70: The Bounty Hunter
THE BOUNTY HUNTER
DIR: Andy Tennant
CAST: Jennifer Aniston, Gerard Butler
I’ve been thinking very seriously, lately, about simply giving up on mainstream Hollywood cinema. This is why; movies like The Bounty Hunter, movies made with such unmitigated contempt for their audience, such total lack of effort, such disinterest in doing anything remotely interesting or surprising. Films like this are the death of cinema, more so than piracy, more so than television. Traditional crowdpleasing genre cinema is being slowly strangled, having the breath choked out of it by directors like Andy Tennant, because they just don’t fucking care.
The story is Midnight Run with a divorced couple, only rather than being adult, smart and funny this story of ex-husband Milo (Butler) excitedly executing a warrant on his ex-wife Nicole (Aniston) is juvenile, idiotic and soul destroying. I used to refer to extremely generic movies as being written by the Plot-O-Matic 3000. The Bounty Hunter represents a significant upgrade in technology. Yes, with the new, improved Plot-O-Matic 5000 you can simply feed old scripts into the machine, and it will write you something ‘new’. Here, the machine is working overtime. Every mismatched buddy movie and every rom-com of the last quarter of a century has been fed into the Plot-O-Matic, and reduced down to a collection of the oldest, mouldiest, clichés you can imagine. Not a single frame of this movie is unexpected. Every machination of the plot, every joke, every line, every cut, everything feels so like you’ve seen it before that even the stupidest person in the cinema (like the prize winning idiots sat cackling in front of me) could write this movie faster than it plays.
Andy Tennant’s direction is directionless. He can’t bring any new ideas to the table, or find a new way to shoot any of the overworked scenarios that are stitched together into the abomination that is this film’s screenplay. There’s no through line to what he does, with the exception of the fact that the whole film is shot like an unimaginative, overlit, sitcom. Everything looks flat, and Aniston, under Tennant’s harsh light, often looks a little drawn. It’s not that this is an ugly film as much as it is a completely uninspired one. I would actually wager that, given time, you could assemble this film, almost shot for shot, from other films. That’s how little Andy Tennant contributes here, there’s not a single shot of this movie that feels unique to it.
With each passing frame of The Bounty Hunter I lurched further into total despair for the future of cinema. There’s a sign for the hotel where Milo and Nicole spent their honeymoon. On seeing that sign I made a bet with myself that within twenty minutes, through some no doubt wacky coincidence, they’d be staying at ‘Cupid’s Cabin’. It took about 12 minutes. Throughout the film the couple in front of me seemed (in the most obnoxious way possible) to be LOVING this excrement smeared piece of celluloid, and I can’t for the life of me work out why. Throughout the film I silently ticked off the plot developments and jokes as I predicted every last one of them. They did the same out loud. At one point Aniston gets in a golf cart, and they muttered “she’s going to crash into the pond.” I’d figured the same thing, and when seconds later we were all proved right, we all reacted. I felt a little piece of my soul die, they laughed uproariously. I just want to take a moment to analyse that moment, because I don’t understand that reaction on so many levels. First: That joke isn’t funny, at all. Second: That joke is older than dirt, it’s the same joke that happens every time someone drives a golf cart in a movie. Third: They predicted the exact joke, a full thirty seconds before the movie made it, so why the holy hell is it funny?
It seems almost unfair to talk about what we’ll be charitable and call the acting in this movie. Expecting anyone to be good in something this badly written and directed is really like giving a chef a tin of baked beans and expecting him to make a steak dinner with it but, in this slightly stretched analogy, Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler aren’t chefs, and I’m not sure they can even open the tin of beans. Milo and Nicole are the names they (incessantly) call each other, but beyond that neither of them has any identity whatsoever. There is never even the slightest sense that either Butler or Aniston is playing a character at all, let alone a rounded, three dimensional, vaguely human one. They stand around on screen, spewing clichés back and forth in an endless droning monotone, looking like they’d rather be doing anything else. They are, at least, not alone in that.
The Bounty Hunter is an appalling movie. It is so bad, in fact, that there ought to be laws against it. It is certainly a crime against cinema. More than anything, this joyless, soulless movie feels like watching Hollywood collectively throw up its hands and say “We’ve got nothin’”. This is the death of cinema. Please, for the love of movies, and for my sanity, don’t go and see it, because if you don’t they might be forced to start trying.
DIR: Andy Tennant
CAST: Jennifer Aniston, Gerard Butler
I’ve been thinking very seriously, lately, about simply giving up on mainstream Hollywood cinema. This is why; movies like The Bounty Hunter, movies made with such unmitigated contempt for their audience, such total lack of effort, such disinterest in doing anything remotely interesting or surprising. Films like this are the death of cinema, more so than piracy, more so than television. Traditional crowdpleasing genre cinema is being slowly strangled, having the breath choked out of it by directors like Andy Tennant, because they just don’t fucking care.
The story is Midnight Run with a divorced couple, only rather than being adult, smart and funny this story of ex-husband Milo (Butler) excitedly executing a warrant on his ex-wife Nicole (Aniston) is juvenile, idiotic and soul destroying. I used to refer to extremely generic movies as being written by the Plot-O-Matic 3000. The Bounty Hunter represents a significant upgrade in technology. Yes, with the new, improved Plot-O-Matic 5000 you can simply feed old scripts into the machine, and it will write you something ‘new’. Here, the machine is working overtime. Every mismatched buddy movie and every rom-com of the last quarter of a century has been fed into the Plot-O-Matic, and reduced down to a collection of the oldest, mouldiest, clichés you can imagine. Not a single frame of this movie is unexpected. Every machination of the plot, every joke, every line, every cut, everything feels so like you’ve seen it before that even the stupidest person in the cinema (like the prize winning idiots sat cackling in front of me) could write this movie faster than it plays.
Andy Tennant’s direction is directionless. He can’t bring any new ideas to the table, or find a new way to shoot any of the overworked scenarios that are stitched together into the abomination that is this film’s screenplay. There’s no through line to what he does, with the exception of the fact that the whole film is shot like an unimaginative, overlit, sitcom. Everything looks flat, and Aniston, under Tennant’s harsh light, often looks a little drawn. It’s not that this is an ugly film as much as it is a completely uninspired one. I would actually wager that, given time, you could assemble this film, almost shot for shot, from other films. That’s how little Andy Tennant contributes here, there’s not a single shot of this movie that feels unique to it.
With each passing frame of The Bounty Hunter I lurched further into total despair for the future of cinema. There’s a sign for the hotel where Milo and Nicole spent their honeymoon. On seeing that sign I made a bet with myself that within twenty minutes, through some no doubt wacky coincidence, they’d be staying at ‘Cupid’s Cabin’. It took about 12 minutes. Throughout the film the couple in front of me seemed (in the most obnoxious way possible) to be LOVING this excrement smeared piece of celluloid, and I can’t for the life of me work out why. Throughout the film I silently ticked off the plot developments and jokes as I predicted every last one of them. They did the same out loud. At one point Aniston gets in a golf cart, and they muttered “she’s going to crash into the pond.” I’d figured the same thing, and when seconds later we were all proved right, we all reacted. I felt a little piece of my soul die, they laughed uproariously. I just want to take a moment to analyse that moment, because I don’t understand that reaction on so many levels. First: That joke isn’t funny, at all. Second: That joke is older than dirt, it’s the same joke that happens every time someone drives a golf cart in a movie. Third: They predicted the exact joke, a full thirty seconds before the movie made it, so why the holy hell is it funny?
It seems almost unfair to talk about what we’ll be charitable and call the acting in this movie. Expecting anyone to be good in something this badly written and directed is really like giving a chef a tin of baked beans and expecting him to make a steak dinner with it but, in this slightly stretched analogy, Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler aren’t chefs, and I’m not sure they can even open the tin of beans. Milo and Nicole are the names they (incessantly) call each other, but beyond that neither of them has any identity whatsoever. There is never even the slightest sense that either Butler or Aniston is playing a character at all, let alone a rounded, three dimensional, vaguely human one. They stand around on screen, spewing clichés back and forth in an endless droning monotone, looking like they’d rather be doing anything else. They are, at least, not alone in that.
The Bounty Hunter is an appalling movie. It is so bad, in fact, that there ought to be laws against it. It is certainly a crime against cinema. More than anything, this joyless, soulless movie feels like watching Hollywood collectively throw up its hands and say “We’ve got nothin’”. This is the death of cinema. Please, for the love of movies, and for my sanity, don’t go and see it, because if you don’t they might be forced to start trying.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
From the Archives
I've been writing film criticism for over a decade now, and I've built up an extensive archive of reviews, so I thought that I'd start sharing some of those reviews that I wrote in the past, but can still stand by. These are as written at the time, except where edits are needed to correct typing errors, or to remove a joke or reference that won't make sense in this context.
EVERYBODY DIES BUT ME
DIR: Valeria Gai-Germanika
CAST: Polina Filonenko, Agniya Kuznetsova, Olga Shuvalova
9th graders Katya (Filonenko), Zhanna (Kuznetsova) and Vika (Shuvalova) are excited to find out that their school will soon be holding a disco, their first. But the events of the week leading up to the dance will test their recent pact to remain friends “until we grow up”?
I’ve noticed a real difference between American and European teen movies. The US high school movie generally insists that the ugly duckling is actually a model in specs, that the girl with the shit boyfriend will chuck him and go off with the man of her dreams and that the school rebel really just needs to have their talent for painting/pottery/singing recognised in order to become a different, better, person. That wasn’t what my teenage years were like, nor were those of my friends. The darker breed of foreign teen movie, of which Everybody Dies But Me is a notably difficult example, gets closer to what seemed a fraught, often painful time.
The opening ten minutes of this very short film (whose credits roll at barely the seventy minute mark) instill a false sense of security, as the three friends hold an impromptu funeral for Zhanna’s cat, back each other up when teachers single them out at school, and make their pact to remain friends. It’s when they go home that it becomes clear that Everybody Dies But Me is not going to be an easy experience. From there it doesn’t get any easier.
It would be criminal to reveal what happens in the film from there, suffice to say that this is not a film for you if you’re easily upset. Everybody Dies But Me is, despite its unrelenting darkness, utterly compelling. Much of the credit for that must go to its director; Valeria Gai-Germanika is just 24 years old, and this is her first film, something that is never evident from her sure handed touch behind the camera, or the maturity with which she deals with the difficult subject matter. Where Gai-Germanika’s youth really pays dividends is in her handling of the young cast. You get the feeling that, because she’s not so far from her characters age herself, she’s got a real connection to the material that must have helped in the process.
The cast are, uniformly, extraordinary. Each of the leads has her moment in the sun, and each shines in every scene, but if anyone sneaks acting honours it is Agniya Kuznetsova who, as Katya, spends most of the film being abused in some way or another, but gives her character real dignity, which, along with the knowledge of what she’s going through, allows you to like Katya even at her worst. This is not to take anything away from Filonenko or Shuvalova though.
If there’s any real problem with the film it’s the dialogue’s occasional tendency to melodrama, but then, that’s teenagers for you. Emotions are heightened, the end of a week long relationship might feel like the end of the world and though it won’t be to all tastes the odd bit of melodrama actually makes the characters feel more real.
It takes quite a bit for a movie to really affect me anymore, but this one left me, after its desperately sad closing image, shaken and on the verge of tears. It’s not easy, but it is a must see.
LA CONFUSION DES GENRES
DIR: Ilan Duran Cohen
CAST: Pascal Greggory, Nathalie Richard, Julie Gayet,
Olivier Martinez, Cyrille Thouvenin
This extremely French drama of criss-crossing relationships gets most of its effectiveness from an accomplished and fearless cast. Pascal Greggory, who is fast becoming one of my favourite French actors, heads the cast as a bi-sexual lawyer who is married to the woman who is carrying his child (Richard), living with the brother (Thouvenin) of an ex-girlfriend, and attracted to both the client (Martinez) whose life sentence he is trying to have reduced and to the ex (Gayet) has him contact in order to beg her to visit him in jail.
Pascal Greggory gives each of these relationships a different feel, and makes Alain, who is a rather weak character, engaging and sympathetic. It’s an exposing film for Greggory, but he commits to each of the many love scenes with gusto, be they with men or women.
Julie Gayet, like Greggory, is someone I’ve seen relatively little of, but always been impressed by and her quiet work here doesn’t disappoint, in her you feel Babette’s desperation, her wish to escape both her ex Marc and her mundane life as a hairdresser. She’s especially outstanding in the film’s best scene, in which Babette visits Marc a second time, she’s entirely silent, but the devastation that is evident in her face is genuinely upsetting.
The rest of the cast are similarly excellent, but it is Babette, Alain and Marc’s story that is the most dramatic and when we spend time away from it the film feels like it is treading water, particularly in the not terribly interesting relationship between Alain and his much younger lover Christophe. The other B Stories are more interesting, and despite how many variations on the wedding scene we’ve seen in movies over the years Cohen does manage to come up with a fresh and funny one for Greggory and Richard.
Visually the film promises much with a beautifully shot and edited opening sequence which sees Greggory in bed, holding a conversation with a series of naked lovers, male and female, but thereafter it becomes rather more conventional, which is a shame because that sequence suggests that Cohen is an imaginative director. However even if the film is slightly unimaginative at a visual level Cohen certainly shows himself to be a capable director of actors, even drawing nice work from people in one or two scene parts (Greggory and Richard’s parents are particularly good value).
Sadly it all wraps up just a little too neatly, and that doesn’t quite ring true given the tangled web these characters weave, but still, La Confusion des Genres has much to recommend it and is well worth 90 minutes of your day.
EVERYBODY DIES BUT ME
DIR: Valeria Gai-Germanika
CAST: Polina Filonenko, Agniya Kuznetsova, Olga Shuvalova
9th graders Katya (Filonenko), Zhanna (Kuznetsova) and Vika (Shuvalova) are excited to find out that their school will soon be holding a disco, their first. But the events of the week leading up to the dance will test their recent pact to remain friends “until we grow up”?
I’ve noticed a real difference between American and European teen movies. The US high school movie generally insists that the ugly duckling is actually a model in specs, that the girl with the shit boyfriend will chuck him and go off with the man of her dreams and that the school rebel really just needs to have their talent for painting/pottery/singing recognised in order to become a different, better, person. That wasn’t what my teenage years were like, nor were those of my friends. The darker breed of foreign teen movie, of which Everybody Dies But Me is a notably difficult example, gets closer to what seemed a fraught, often painful time.
The opening ten minutes of this very short film (whose credits roll at barely the seventy minute mark) instill a false sense of security, as the three friends hold an impromptu funeral for Zhanna’s cat, back each other up when teachers single them out at school, and make their pact to remain friends. It’s when they go home that it becomes clear that Everybody Dies But Me is not going to be an easy experience. From there it doesn’t get any easier.
It would be criminal to reveal what happens in the film from there, suffice to say that this is not a film for you if you’re easily upset. Everybody Dies But Me is, despite its unrelenting darkness, utterly compelling. Much of the credit for that must go to its director; Valeria Gai-Germanika is just 24 years old, and this is her first film, something that is never evident from her sure handed touch behind the camera, or the maturity with which she deals with the difficult subject matter. Where Gai-Germanika’s youth really pays dividends is in her handling of the young cast. You get the feeling that, because she’s not so far from her characters age herself, she’s got a real connection to the material that must have helped in the process.
The cast are, uniformly, extraordinary. Each of the leads has her moment in the sun, and each shines in every scene, but if anyone sneaks acting honours it is Agniya Kuznetsova who, as Katya, spends most of the film being abused in some way or another, but gives her character real dignity, which, along with the knowledge of what she’s going through, allows you to like Katya even at her worst. This is not to take anything away from Filonenko or Shuvalova though.
If there’s any real problem with the film it’s the dialogue’s occasional tendency to melodrama, but then, that’s teenagers for you. Emotions are heightened, the end of a week long relationship might feel like the end of the world and though it won’t be to all tastes the odd bit of melodrama actually makes the characters feel more real.
It takes quite a bit for a movie to really affect me anymore, but this one left me, after its desperately sad closing image, shaken and on the verge of tears. It’s not easy, but it is a must see.
LA CONFUSION DES GENRES
DIR: Ilan Duran Cohen
CAST: Pascal Greggory, Nathalie Richard, Julie Gayet,
Olivier Martinez, Cyrille Thouvenin
This extremely French drama of criss-crossing relationships gets most of its effectiveness from an accomplished and fearless cast. Pascal Greggory, who is fast becoming one of my favourite French actors, heads the cast as a bi-sexual lawyer who is married to the woman who is carrying his child (Richard), living with the brother (Thouvenin) of an ex-girlfriend, and attracted to both the client (Martinez) whose life sentence he is trying to have reduced and to the ex (Gayet) has him contact in order to beg her to visit him in jail.
Pascal Greggory gives each of these relationships a different feel, and makes Alain, who is a rather weak character, engaging and sympathetic. It’s an exposing film for Greggory, but he commits to each of the many love scenes with gusto, be they with men or women.
Julie Gayet, like Greggory, is someone I’ve seen relatively little of, but always been impressed by and her quiet work here doesn’t disappoint, in her you feel Babette’s desperation, her wish to escape both her ex Marc and her mundane life as a hairdresser. She’s especially outstanding in the film’s best scene, in which Babette visits Marc a second time, she’s entirely silent, but the devastation that is evident in her face is genuinely upsetting.
The rest of the cast are similarly excellent, but it is Babette, Alain and Marc’s story that is the most dramatic and when we spend time away from it the film feels like it is treading water, particularly in the not terribly interesting relationship between Alain and his much younger lover Christophe. The other B Stories are more interesting, and despite how many variations on the wedding scene we’ve seen in movies over the years Cohen does manage to come up with a fresh and funny one for Greggory and Richard.
Visually the film promises much with a beautifully shot and edited opening sequence which sees Greggory in bed, holding a conversation with a series of naked lovers, male and female, but thereafter it becomes rather more conventional, which is a shame because that sequence suggests that Cohen is an imaginative director. However even if the film is slightly unimaginative at a visual level Cohen certainly shows himself to be a capable director of actors, even drawing nice work from people in one or two scene parts (Greggory and Richard’s parents are particularly good value).
Sadly it all wraps up just a little too neatly, and that doesn’t quite ring true given the tangled web these characters weave, but still, La Confusion des Genres has much to recommend it and is well worth 90 minutes of your day.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Review Post 69: Father of my Children
LE PERE DE MES ENFANTS
[FATHER OF MY CHILDREN]
DIR: Mia Hansen-Løve
CAST: Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Chiara Caselli,
Alice de Lencquesaing, Alice Gautier, Manelle Driss
She’s just 29 years old, and this is only her second film but, though Father of my Children is far from perfect, it is easy to tell that we will, in the future, be hearing from director Mia Hansen-Løve. She’s clearly a major talent. That talent still needs shaping, but once she’s got a few more films under her belt we could be talking about something very special.
The film was apparently inspired by a real life acquaintance of Hansen-Løve and her partner, filmmaker Olivier Assayas. It tells the story of Gregoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) an independent film producer who, facing insurmountable debts, kills himself and of the effect of this decision on his wife (Caselli) and three young daughters Clemence (Alice de Lencquesaing), Valentine (Gautier) and Billie (Driss).
The most pressing problem, indeed the only major problem, with Father of my Children is really that there’s just a bit much of it. At 110 minutes it feels baggy, and there are several scenes here (Clemence’s ‘date’ with a young filmmaker, and several meetings about dealing with the film company’s debt come to mind) that add little to the film but running time. What Hansen-Løve appears to need is a strict editor, because with just ten or so minutes snipped the film would likely move a lot better. To be entirely fair though, this is a film that gets a great deal more right than it gets wrong.
Hansen-Løve’s screenplay and direction both achieve a beautifully unforced naturalism. The early scenes of Gregoire’s family life are a lot of fun, and they really allow us to warm to the characters. Moments like the two young children putting on a little play for their parents and older sibling are sweet without being cutesy, and more than that they are recognisably real slices of family life. The film also avoids painting these early scenes as idyllic; there are little signs of Gregoire’s problems, teenage Clemence has the occasional sulk, there are mild tensions between husband and wife, the kids aren’t always well behaved. It’s a very real depiction of family life, and it pays off because when you believe the incidentals everything else also feels real.
It also helps, of course, that the performances are extraordinary. Louis-Do de Lencquesaing and Chiara Caselli are both excellent, but this movie really belongs to the children. Young Alice Gautier, who can’t be more than nine years old, is perhaps best. Without overegging the emotion she’s quietly devastating, especially when, explaining that she doesn’t want to move to her mother’s native Italy, she says “we have to stay close to Daddy”. In an American film I suspect that Valentine would have been some super-smart kid; a mini adult really, but Hansen-Løve allows her, and the other young characters, just to be a child and the film is all the better for it. Alice de Lencquesaing, as Clemence, has a role that grows throughout the film, and that seems to be true of the confidence of her performance as well, with each passing scene she becomes more affecting. There’s much to enjoy, especially, in her smaller moments, like the way she silently relates to the children, which speaks volumes about the characters relationship to each other without a single word.
Slightly less interesting than how the family deals with the loss of Gregoire is the story dealing with the wrapping up of his company. It provides some poignant moments (such as when the children take things from their father’s office, and say goodbye to the people in the office “Goodbye, Mr liquidator”). But it’s here that the film plods a bit.
Whatever its weaknesses, Father of my Children is still an impressive piece of work, and Mia Hansen-Løve is clearly a talented filmmaker. Like Andrea Arnold, she has an eye for an attractive image, but manages to find them without surrendering her film’s naturalism, and she’s drawn extraordinary performances from her cast, particularly the inexperienced youngsters and there is much here to enjoy and to be moved by.
[FATHER OF MY CHILDREN]
DIR: Mia Hansen-Løve
CAST: Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Chiara Caselli,
Alice de Lencquesaing, Alice Gautier, Manelle Driss
She’s just 29 years old, and this is only her second film but, though Father of my Children is far from perfect, it is easy to tell that we will, in the future, be hearing from director Mia Hansen-Løve. She’s clearly a major talent. That talent still needs shaping, but once she’s got a few more films under her belt we could be talking about something very special.
The film was apparently inspired by a real life acquaintance of Hansen-Løve and her partner, filmmaker Olivier Assayas. It tells the story of Gregoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) an independent film producer who, facing insurmountable debts, kills himself and of the effect of this decision on his wife (Caselli) and three young daughters Clemence (Alice de Lencquesaing), Valentine (Gautier) and Billie (Driss).
The most pressing problem, indeed the only major problem, with Father of my Children is really that there’s just a bit much of it. At 110 minutes it feels baggy, and there are several scenes here (Clemence’s ‘date’ with a young filmmaker, and several meetings about dealing with the film company’s debt come to mind) that add little to the film but running time. What Hansen-Løve appears to need is a strict editor, because with just ten or so minutes snipped the film would likely move a lot better. To be entirely fair though, this is a film that gets a great deal more right than it gets wrong.
Hansen-Løve’s screenplay and direction both achieve a beautifully unforced naturalism. The early scenes of Gregoire’s family life are a lot of fun, and they really allow us to warm to the characters. Moments like the two young children putting on a little play for their parents and older sibling are sweet without being cutesy, and more than that they are recognisably real slices of family life. The film also avoids painting these early scenes as idyllic; there are little signs of Gregoire’s problems, teenage Clemence has the occasional sulk, there are mild tensions between husband and wife, the kids aren’t always well behaved. It’s a very real depiction of family life, and it pays off because when you believe the incidentals everything else also feels real.
It also helps, of course, that the performances are extraordinary. Louis-Do de Lencquesaing and Chiara Caselli are both excellent, but this movie really belongs to the children. Young Alice Gautier, who can’t be more than nine years old, is perhaps best. Without overegging the emotion she’s quietly devastating, especially when, explaining that she doesn’t want to move to her mother’s native Italy, she says “we have to stay close to Daddy”. In an American film I suspect that Valentine would have been some super-smart kid; a mini adult really, but Hansen-Løve allows her, and the other young characters, just to be a child and the film is all the better for it. Alice de Lencquesaing, as Clemence, has a role that grows throughout the film, and that seems to be true of the confidence of her performance as well, with each passing scene she becomes more affecting. There’s much to enjoy, especially, in her smaller moments, like the way she silently relates to the children, which speaks volumes about the characters relationship to each other without a single word.
Slightly less interesting than how the family deals with the loss of Gregoire is the story dealing with the wrapping up of his company. It provides some poignant moments (such as when the children take things from their father’s office, and say goodbye to the people in the office “Goodbye, Mr liquidator”). But it’s here that the film plods a bit.
Whatever its weaknesses, Father of my Children is still an impressive piece of work, and Mia Hansen-Løve is clearly a talented filmmaker. Like Andrea Arnold, she has an eye for an attractive image, but manages to find them without surrendering her film’s naturalism, and she’s drawn extraordinary performances from her cast, particularly the inexperienced youngsters and there is much here to enjoy and to be moved by.
They Made Tom Watch... 10
What’s it about?
A new high-tech weapon has been developed by the evil Scottish (by the way of Hackney) Ecclestone. It falls into the wrong hands and it’s down to GI JOE to set the world to rights. Cue explosions.
Is it any good?
Funsplosive! This film had about 10 hours of fun jam packed into 2 hours. It’s like a jam doughnut that has too much jam in it. You appreciate that the makers were just thinking of you, because you love jam, but it hasn’t come out quite right. You kinda like dough too, and oops! There you go, jam on your trousers.
The jam, in this overdrawn metaphor, is the crazed high-paced action, that really doesn’t let up from after the small bit of exposition at the start. You get frenetic bursts of action (with the obligatory ear-destroying explosions) followed by a tiny amount of downtime that develops the ‘plot’ and the ‘characters’. These two elements are so thin, that our doughnut may as well be a jam jar made of paper.
But when you buy jam, you don’t care about the jar. So enjoy the sticky comfiture while it lasts, you don’t get many movies this self-aware.
Who is it for?
Doughnut fans? I’m not sure what I’m talking about anymore.
What is it like?
It’s like The Rock or Die Hard 4, but without the plot or characterisation.
Good Stuff: Brendan Fraser cameo. Explosions. Frenchspolsion (sacre-bleu!).
Bad Stuff: Lack of doughnuts. Lack of credible plot, script, characters, actors.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Review Post 68: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo / Shutter Island / Green Zone
MAN SOM HATAR KVINNOR
[THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO]
DIR: Niels Arden Oplev
CAST: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist
Tragically, the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson died just after delivering the manuscripts for the three thrillers that have since become known as the Millennium trilogy to his publisher, not living to see the books take off, or the film versions that premiered in Sweden last year and, throughout 2010, will be coming to the UK (The Girl Who Played With Fire opens in September, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest in November).
In a generally very faithful adaptation, Noomi Rapace plays Larsson’s titular heroine Lisbeth Salander; a troubled but brilliant young computer hacker whose backstory is teased a little here, but will be explored in full in the next two films. Here she plays a supporting role, helping campaigning journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Nyquvist) when he is tasked by an aging industrialist to solve the 40 year old suspected murder of his neice. Together Blomkvist and Salander unearth some horrendous crimes, but are they related to the vanishing of Harriet Vanger?
Despite a two and a half hour running time The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (the film retains the book’s English title, rather than using literal translation ‘Men Who Hate Women’) doesn’t have the time to include the mass of background detail in Larsson’s book, but, for the most part, the deletions make sense and don’t compromise the narrative. There are only a couple of exceptions. The first is rushing of the last ten minutes of the film, which tie up an important storyline about a corrupt businessman that Blomkvist is attempting to expose, and which impacts on the last two books and the other is the almost total deletion of the important relationship between Blomkvist and his boss and on/off lover Erika Berger (Lena Endre).
These are perhaps nitpicks, but I wonder how they will impact on the next two films. Aside from these minor issues though, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is an excellent adaptation. Importantly it preserves both the essential story and the feel of the book. The casting is especially on point. Michael Nyqvist has a care worn look that suits Blomkvist, but he, and the film, really comes to life most when Noomi Rapace is on screen. Rapace clearly took the role of Lisbeth Salander very seriously; she lost weight, cut her hair, started dressing like Salander and even got ear, eyebrow, nostril and septum piercings. This immersion has really paid off, as it really does feel as though, both in look and demeanour, Rapace’ Salander has stepped out of Larsson’s book. Salander is a character who holds her cards close to her chest, and is very emotionally closed off, and Rapace manages the tricky feat of putting this across without being dull, or seeming closed off to the audience.
If you’ve seen a few detective movies then, with the number of suspects reduced from the novel, you may well work out at least part of the answer to the whodunit, but that doesn’t stop The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo being an engaging mystery. The clues (for the most part) come together in a way that is both logical and surprising, and the mystery is nearly as compellingly macabre as that in Se7en. Director Niels Arden Oplev keeps a strong grip on the look and the performances, and he manages to keep the extreme content (including a couple of lengthy scenes of sexual assault) just this side of palatable though the film remains, at times, shocking and challenging to watch. It’s not an especially individual looking film, drawing much inspiration from Se7en and its ilk, but it’s well executed enough to stand on it’s own. Until the last ten minutes Oplev also excels in controlling the film’s pace, keeping it moving fast enough that we never feel the 152 minutes that the film runs but never rushing us through the story too fast, or cutting so deep into the novel that the story is compromised.
There is talk of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo being remade for the US market. It simply doesn’t need to be, this is a thrilling movie, a fine adaptation, and, like the book it is adapted from, a film that should prove highly accessible to audiences all over the world, assuming they’ve the stomach for some of it’s nastier moments. Whether you’ve never even heard of the books or you’ve read nothing else since they were published, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo comes highly recommended, if for no other reason than you should take note of Noomi Rapace, who ought to be able to spin this great performance into an interesting international career
SHUTTER ISLAND
DIR: Martin Scorsese
CAST: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley,
Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer
I always want to love Martin Scorsese’s movies, because for nearly 40 years Scorsese has been at the forefront of American cinema, making more brilliant movies in the seventies alone than most directors could dream of in an entire career. I didn’t love Shutter Island. That’s not to say that there aren’t moments of genuine, jaw-slackening, brilliance in it, but the film as a whole ends up, sadly, being really rather ordinary.
Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane (whose work also provided the starting points for Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone), Shutter Island stars Scorsese’s current leading man of choice Leonardo DiCaprio as US Marshal Teddy Daniels, who has been sent to the Ashecliffe asylum on Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a prisoner (Mortimer), but when a storm traps Teddy and his partner (Ruffalo) on the island Teddy begins to suspect a conspiracy involving experiments being carried out on the patients by the chief doctor (Kingsley).
Of course that’s not the full story, there’s a big twist late in the day, and that’s the problem with the film. That twist is, minutes in, so stark staring obvious that however good the rest of the film is (and it is often very good indeed) it just feels rather inconsequential. I knew exactly where the film was going at all times, and the journey simply wasn’t interesting enough, at least from a dramatic standpoint, to mitigate against that. The performances are all of a particular style. The film is Scorsese’s homage to the noirs films of the 40’s and 50’s, and he’s directed his actors towards the slightly bigger than life style that was prevalent then, everyone does well in it (and Ben Kingsley comes off as slightly less of a ham than usual), but it does take a little getting used to. Leonardo DiCaprio has been growing in stature as an actor film by film over the last few years. Here he’s less effective than in The Departed or Revolutionary Road, and his performance makes the twist feel very obvious indeed, but given the complexities of the role and the style of acting that he’s forced into he does rather well.
Among the supporting performances, Mark Ruffalo does perhaps the most nuanced work, his best since Zodiac and Michelle Williams and Patricia Clarkson do well in what are rather thin roles. It’s no surprise that the performer who comes closest to stealing the film is Emily Mortimer, she’s a gifted character actress, and is cast beautifully against type here as insane murderer Rachel Salondo. Mortimer’s natural warmth works well to put us at our ease with the character, though we know what she’s done, and makes the inevitable explosion both credible and scary.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the story and acting, they aren’t really, in a lot of ways, the film’s focus. Shutter Island is very much a showcase for three technical talents; director Scorsese, cinematographer Robert Richardson and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, all three have been working together for some time now, and their talents combine here to create a technically stunning work. Most striking are the dream sequences, shot by Richardson in slightly oversaturated colours, giving a hyper-real feeling to Teddy’s hallucinations, as if they are more genuine to him than the equally nightmarish Ashcliffe.
Despite the fact that all the dreams involve violence of some kind they are all quite beautiful to behold. In the scenes at Dachau concentration camp bodies form nightmarishly beautiful ice sculptures, in one scene with Michelle Williams she burns, and becomes ash in DiCaprio’s arms, in the single most beautiful use of CGI in any of Scorsese’s films. For her part Schoomaker, as ever, finds a perfect rhythm for Scorsese and Richardson’s imagery. The look is also very heavily influenced by 40’s and 50’s noir, resulting in such odd seeming touches as some really obvious rear screen projection in the opening scene and a lot of visual nods in the direction of films and filmmakers Scorsese admires, most notably (and appropriately) the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.
Taken in purely technical terms Shutter Island is a masterpiece, but because it is so predictable it is never truly satisfying as drama, and so it left me, unfortunately, rather cold.
GREEN ZONE
DIR: Paul Greengrass
CAST: Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs, Brendan Gleeson,
Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan
I was rather enjoying Green Zone, it was no great masterpiece, but it was a reasonably entertaining action movie, set in the immediate aftermath of the ‘victory’ in the 2003 Iraq war. Then came the ending(s). Two scenes in which the moral was declaimed with such sledgehammer subtlety that I begun to wonder if Aesop had written the screenplay. And that was all it took. From there, as I looked back the movie just began to unravel in front of me. I began to notice all the many flaws. The plot holes, the script problems, the action seemed to work less well. Retrospect, essentially, killed Green Zone.
Green Zone is the latest teaming for Bourne director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon, and it’s easy to tell because they’ve essentially made the same film for a third time running. Okay, this time Damon is Roy Miller of the Marines, and he’s looking for WMD rather than his identity, but that doesn’t change the fact that in form and feel this is basically Bourne goes to the desert. This is something that also carries through in Damon’s performance. It’s a shame because he’s a really capable actor, but with Greengrass all he really does is spit dialogue in a functional manner; there’s no emotion there, no nuance,
A lack of nuance is a problem that pervades the film. Politically it knows exactly what it wants to say, and proceeds to bellow it at us through a megaphone for the film’s entire running time. There’s no room for shades of grey here; all things are blak or white. Miller is the goodie and everyone associated with Bush administration is a baddie. I know that Greengrass has said that he wanted to make a mainstream film about the Iraq war, but that doesn’t have to mean treating the audience as political idiots, or making a film with the depth of a small puddle on a hot day, and this all precedes those two endings.
I have, I think it’s fair to say, a bit of a problem with shaky-cam. Used with consideration (as in the opening chase in Narc, for example) it can thrust you right into the thick of a situation, but Greengrass doesn’t use it like that. Paul Greengrass uses shaky-cam as though the camera will only work if it is moving, and it is incredibly irritating. Rather than draw me in this device called continual attention to itself, practically yelling “you’re watching a movie”. This especially true of the long final chase, in which there’s barely a frame that isn’t in erratic motion, add this to the fact that it takes places at night, in barely lit streets and the effect is incredibly annoying. You can’t see a fucking thing. Geography and sense go out the window, and drama follows with them. It baffles me that Greengrass is considered a good action director, because this shooting technique seems to go out of its way to ensure that you see as little of the action as possible.
There are things in Green Zone that work. Until the out of nowhere final scenes Khalid Abdalla is effective as Iraqui translator ‘Freddie’ and the scenes in the middle of the film before Greengrass has to surrender the film to boring, badly shot, action there are some genuinely tense scenes as Miller tries to discover what has happened to a prisoner snatched from him earlier in the day. There are also effective appearances from Jason Isaacs and his rather magnificent ‘tache as the designated villains of the piece) though, given the shallowness of the script, it is debateable whether Isaacs or the ‘tache gives the better performance.
The further I get from Green Zone the less I like it, but I can’t help thinking that, had it not shot itself in the head with those two awful pieces of moralising at the end of the film this review might have read rather differently.
[THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO]
DIR: Niels Arden Oplev
CAST: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist
Tragically, the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson died just after delivering the manuscripts for the three thrillers that have since become known as the Millennium trilogy to his publisher, not living to see the books take off, or the film versions that premiered in Sweden last year and, throughout 2010, will be coming to the UK (The Girl Who Played With Fire opens in September, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest in November).
In a generally very faithful adaptation, Noomi Rapace plays Larsson’s titular heroine Lisbeth Salander; a troubled but brilliant young computer hacker whose backstory is teased a little here, but will be explored in full in the next two films. Here she plays a supporting role, helping campaigning journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Nyquvist) when he is tasked by an aging industrialist to solve the 40 year old suspected murder of his neice. Together Blomkvist and Salander unearth some horrendous crimes, but are they related to the vanishing of Harriet Vanger?
Despite a two and a half hour running time The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (the film retains the book’s English title, rather than using literal translation ‘Men Who Hate Women’) doesn’t have the time to include the mass of background detail in Larsson’s book, but, for the most part, the deletions make sense and don’t compromise the narrative. There are only a couple of exceptions. The first is rushing of the last ten minutes of the film, which tie up an important storyline about a corrupt businessman that Blomkvist is attempting to expose, and which impacts on the last two books and the other is the almost total deletion of the important relationship between Blomkvist and his boss and on/off lover Erika Berger (Lena Endre).
These are perhaps nitpicks, but I wonder how they will impact on the next two films. Aside from these minor issues though, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is an excellent adaptation. Importantly it preserves both the essential story and the feel of the book. The casting is especially on point. Michael Nyqvist has a care worn look that suits Blomkvist, but he, and the film, really comes to life most when Noomi Rapace is on screen. Rapace clearly took the role of Lisbeth Salander very seriously; she lost weight, cut her hair, started dressing like Salander and even got ear, eyebrow, nostril and septum piercings. This immersion has really paid off, as it really does feel as though, both in look and demeanour, Rapace’ Salander has stepped out of Larsson’s book. Salander is a character who holds her cards close to her chest, and is very emotionally closed off, and Rapace manages the tricky feat of putting this across without being dull, or seeming closed off to the audience.
If you’ve seen a few detective movies then, with the number of suspects reduced from the novel, you may well work out at least part of the answer to the whodunit, but that doesn’t stop The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo being an engaging mystery. The clues (for the most part) come together in a way that is both logical and surprising, and the mystery is nearly as compellingly macabre as that in Se7en. Director Niels Arden Oplev keeps a strong grip on the look and the performances, and he manages to keep the extreme content (including a couple of lengthy scenes of sexual assault) just this side of palatable though the film remains, at times, shocking and challenging to watch. It’s not an especially individual looking film, drawing much inspiration from Se7en and its ilk, but it’s well executed enough to stand on it’s own. Until the last ten minutes Oplev also excels in controlling the film’s pace, keeping it moving fast enough that we never feel the 152 minutes that the film runs but never rushing us through the story too fast, or cutting so deep into the novel that the story is compromised.
There is talk of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo being remade for the US market. It simply doesn’t need to be, this is a thrilling movie, a fine adaptation, and, like the book it is adapted from, a film that should prove highly accessible to audiences all over the world, assuming they’ve the stomach for some of it’s nastier moments. Whether you’ve never even heard of the books or you’ve read nothing else since they were published, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo comes highly recommended, if for no other reason than you should take note of Noomi Rapace, who ought to be able to spin this great performance into an interesting international career
SHUTTER ISLAND
DIR: Martin Scorsese
CAST: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley,
Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer
I always want to love Martin Scorsese’s movies, because for nearly 40 years Scorsese has been at the forefront of American cinema, making more brilliant movies in the seventies alone than most directors could dream of in an entire career. I didn’t love Shutter Island. That’s not to say that there aren’t moments of genuine, jaw-slackening, brilliance in it, but the film as a whole ends up, sadly, being really rather ordinary.
Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane (whose work also provided the starting points for Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone), Shutter Island stars Scorsese’s current leading man of choice Leonardo DiCaprio as US Marshal Teddy Daniels, who has been sent to the Ashecliffe asylum on Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a prisoner (Mortimer), but when a storm traps Teddy and his partner (Ruffalo) on the island Teddy begins to suspect a conspiracy involving experiments being carried out on the patients by the chief doctor (Kingsley).
Of course that’s not the full story, there’s a big twist late in the day, and that’s the problem with the film. That twist is, minutes in, so stark staring obvious that however good the rest of the film is (and it is often very good indeed) it just feels rather inconsequential. I knew exactly where the film was going at all times, and the journey simply wasn’t interesting enough, at least from a dramatic standpoint, to mitigate against that. The performances are all of a particular style. The film is Scorsese’s homage to the noirs films of the 40’s and 50’s, and he’s directed his actors towards the slightly bigger than life style that was prevalent then, everyone does well in it (and Ben Kingsley comes off as slightly less of a ham than usual), but it does take a little getting used to. Leonardo DiCaprio has been growing in stature as an actor film by film over the last few years. Here he’s less effective than in The Departed or Revolutionary Road, and his performance makes the twist feel very obvious indeed, but given the complexities of the role and the style of acting that he’s forced into he does rather well.
Among the supporting performances, Mark Ruffalo does perhaps the most nuanced work, his best since Zodiac and Michelle Williams and Patricia Clarkson do well in what are rather thin roles. It’s no surprise that the performer who comes closest to stealing the film is Emily Mortimer, she’s a gifted character actress, and is cast beautifully against type here as insane murderer Rachel Salondo. Mortimer’s natural warmth works well to put us at our ease with the character, though we know what she’s done, and makes the inevitable explosion both credible and scary.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the story and acting, they aren’t really, in a lot of ways, the film’s focus. Shutter Island is very much a showcase for three technical talents; director Scorsese, cinematographer Robert Richardson and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, all three have been working together for some time now, and their talents combine here to create a technically stunning work. Most striking are the dream sequences, shot by Richardson in slightly oversaturated colours, giving a hyper-real feeling to Teddy’s hallucinations, as if they are more genuine to him than the equally nightmarish Ashcliffe.
Despite the fact that all the dreams involve violence of some kind they are all quite beautiful to behold. In the scenes at Dachau concentration camp bodies form nightmarishly beautiful ice sculptures, in one scene with Michelle Williams she burns, and becomes ash in DiCaprio’s arms, in the single most beautiful use of CGI in any of Scorsese’s films. For her part Schoomaker, as ever, finds a perfect rhythm for Scorsese and Richardson’s imagery. The look is also very heavily influenced by 40’s and 50’s noir, resulting in such odd seeming touches as some really obvious rear screen projection in the opening scene and a lot of visual nods in the direction of films and filmmakers Scorsese admires, most notably (and appropriately) the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.
Taken in purely technical terms Shutter Island is a masterpiece, but because it is so predictable it is never truly satisfying as drama, and so it left me, unfortunately, rather cold.
GREEN ZONE
DIR: Paul Greengrass
CAST: Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs, Brendan Gleeson,
Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan
I was rather enjoying Green Zone, it was no great masterpiece, but it was a reasonably entertaining action movie, set in the immediate aftermath of the ‘victory’ in the 2003 Iraq war. Then came the ending(s). Two scenes in which the moral was declaimed with such sledgehammer subtlety that I begun to wonder if Aesop had written the screenplay. And that was all it took. From there, as I looked back the movie just began to unravel in front of me. I began to notice all the many flaws. The plot holes, the script problems, the action seemed to work less well. Retrospect, essentially, killed Green Zone.
Green Zone is the latest teaming for Bourne director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon, and it’s easy to tell because they’ve essentially made the same film for a third time running. Okay, this time Damon is Roy Miller of the Marines, and he’s looking for WMD rather than his identity, but that doesn’t change the fact that in form and feel this is basically Bourne goes to the desert. This is something that also carries through in Damon’s performance. It’s a shame because he’s a really capable actor, but with Greengrass all he really does is spit dialogue in a functional manner; there’s no emotion there, no nuance,
A lack of nuance is a problem that pervades the film. Politically it knows exactly what it wants to say, and proceeds to bellow it at us through a megaphone for the film’s entire running time. There’s no room for shades of grey here; all things are blak or white. Miller is the goodie and everyone associated with Bush administration is a baddie. I know that Greengrass has said that he wanted to make a mainstream film about the Iraq war, but that doesn’t have to mean treating the audience as political idiots, or making a film with the depth of a small puddle on a hot day, and this all precedes those two endings.
I have, I think it’s fair to say, a bit of a problem with shaky-cam. Used with consideration (as in the opening chase in Narc, for example) it can thrust you right into the thick of a situation, but Greengrass doesn’t use it like that. Paul Greengrass uses shaky-cam as though the camera will only work if it is moving, and it is incredibly irritating. Rather than draw me in this device called continual attention to itself, practically yelling “you’re watching a movie”. This especially true of the long final chase, in which there’s barely a frame that isn’t in erratic motion, add this to the fact that it takes places at night, in barely lit streets and the effect is incredibly annoying. You can’t see a fucking thing. Geography and sense go out the window, and drama follows with them. It baffles me that Greengrass is considered a good action director, because this shooting technique seems to go out of its way to ensure that you see as little of the action as possible.
There are things in Green Zone that work. Until the out of nowhere final scenes Khalid Abdalla is effective as Iraqui translator ‘Freddie’ and the scenes in the middle of the film before Greengrass has to surrender the film to boring, badly shot, action there are some genuinely tense scenes as Miller tries to discover what has happened to a prisoner snatched from him earlier in the day. There are also effective appearances from Jason Isaacs and his rather magnificent ‘tache as the designated villains of the piece) though, given the shallowness of the script, it is debateable whether Isaacs or the ‘tache gives the better performance.
The further I get from Green Zone the less I like it, but I can’t help thinking that, had it not shot itself in the head with those two awful pieces of moralising at the end of the film this review might have read rather differently.
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