Beguiling and frustrating in equal measure. As I tweeted after seeing it, I don't know if it's good, bad or what the fuck it is.
I reserve a special category of my filmgoing experiences to ?problem films,? that rare breed of film that leaves me completely bamboozled. Usually, it?s the work of an auteur on an off-day, failing to fulfil the full bargain of a complete work of art but leaving such personality and atmosphere on the flawed finished product that I can?t help but be fascinating. Think of Welles? The Lady From Shanghai, Chaplin?s Limelight, Peckinpah?s Straw Dogs or the daddy of problem pictures, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
Usually, blockbusters are more cut and dried. Either they?re good
The Blu-ray is out on Monday, with reds that have never looked redder, symbolism that has never looked more symbolic and extras that really ought to be better.
We Need To Talk About Kevin
(Lynne Ramsay, GB, 2011)
We need to talk about Lynne Ramsay?s inability to let the emotional violence speak for itself with thuddingly obvious symbolism
The near-misses are always the most disappointing. In many ways, We Need To Talk About Kevin comes close to being a cast-iron classic but, in trying so hard for perfection, it loses something at its core. The irony seems to have bypassed Lynne Ramsay that the story revolves around a psychopath who spends too long trying to hit the bullseye ? because her perfectionism is the biggest problem about her film.
Ramsay bypasses many of the pitfalls that might have derailed this project. It?s very un-Hollywood in the treatment of its subject matter (what if a mother didn?t love her son?), eschewing the obvious temptation to make a Rosemary?s Baby / The Omen-style potboiler with freak accidents and hysteria. Ramsay is too cool for that, so pitches things as a fragmented tale of grief, the mother?s story ricocheting through her life like shards of an accident. It?s a bold gambit, which gives the climax the feel of inevitability, and a chilling grip that imbues the most mundane activity with hidden meanings ? or does it? By starting at the end, and focussing so subjectively on Eva?s regret, the film throws a massive pebble into the water. It?s impossible to see a true reflection of Kevin?s personality for the ripples.
This is the right way to play the material ? or would be, were it not for Ramsay?s insistence each ripple is art-directed to death and shot in such lingering detail it loses its context. Ramsay ? a photographer by trade ? cannot let go of her imagery, and composes the film in thuddingly obvious symbolism. The family lives in suburbia
Getting its UK debut on Blu-ray and DVD on Mon 27th February, The Conformist is one of those films that always comes with the word "masterpiece" attached - but in this case, they're right. One of the most amazing-looking of films, out now on Blu-ray and DVD. If you don't have a Blu-ray player, now's the time to upgrade, not least because it has a Bertolucci documentary not available on the standard-def disc.
The Conformist
(Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
The title refers to the character only. In its style and substance, Bertolucci?s film develops its own sensual, highly original path
It?s impossible to watch The Conformist without seeing the shadow it cast over 1970s Hollywood. From Chinatown?s art deco corruption to The Godfather?s rich Bolognese, the look and feel of Bertolucci?s film was copied throughout the decade. By its end, Coppola had nabbed The Conformist?s extraordinary cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, to work on Apocalypse Now, and Paul Schrader had likewise hired art director Ferdinando Scarfiotti as a consultant on American Gigolo.
And yet, just as the film advises us that the shadows of reality are not the same as the reality, so Bertolucci?s film is a true original, its endless style not an affectation but in the service of its story. Bertolucci tells of Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant), the conformist of the title: a man driven by his demons to seek solace in Fascism, hoping that by being a willing foot-soldier in Mussolini?s cause he will find the normality he cannot abide in society or relationships. Throughout, the painstakingly stylised camerawork and art direction are conspiring to prevent Marcello?s fucked-up fantasy.
The film is a labyrinth of lines and lights, as Venetian blinds throw haywire patterns onto Marcello?s face, or Storaro trails the anti-hero with paranoid Dutch tilts that only right themselves when Marcello discovers that a would-be pursuer is one of his own men. Mostly, Bertolucci denies Marcello the prison he wants by having Storaro forever dancing around him, the camera rezooming and tracking simultaneously to turn the screen into complex, undulating, ungraspable spaces.
Regardless of the specifics of Marcello?s psychology ? basically, it boils down to repressed homosexuality ? this is an incisive look at what it means to give up the self to totalitarianism. Marcello is prissy and exact, quick to condemn (even his petty bourgeois wife) and yet without a clear moral identity of his own. If the symbolism wasn?t obvious enough, Bertolucci makes his best friend and mentor a blind man.
When his mission to spy on a left-leaning professor is altered to become a hit, he baulks at the assignment, but goes along with it anyway. It?s easier to conform than complain. The only complication: Marcello?s confused sexuality sees him wanting to throw it all away on his target?s wife
Here's my review of the most star-laden movie of the year. Seriously, look at that cast list: Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, Scooter, Rowlf, Bunsen & Beaker, the Swedish Chef, Uncle Deadly and - last but not least, my son's favourite - Crazy Harry. Nothing else out this year has starpower like this!
The Muppets
(James Bobin, 2011)
Better than nostalgia, a film about nostalgia that sizes up the pros and cons of feeding on past glories and votes with its big Muppety heart
It could all have gone so horribly, horribly wrong ? which is why it?s such a pleasure that The Muppets gets more or less everything right. This reclaims both the uncynical sweetness and the counter-cultural, experimental wit of Jim Henson?s creations, as well as creating its own fiendish intricate genre, a mash-up of reboot for the kids and nostalgia trip for their parents.
The Muppets have been big-screen stars before, of course, but somewhere along the way they lost the anarchic edge that made The Muppet Show only tangentially for kids. That?s why it?s all the more amazing that Disney greenlit superfans Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller?s conception that it had to be done old-school, a tragi-comedy of interlaced hope and regret that reflects the threadbare stitching of Henson?s puppets.
The film?s theme and plot sit side-by-side: is there a place for the Muppets in this day and age, when telly has got much more cruel and cynical (a state of affairs the film sums up in one spoof show, 'Punch Teacher') and everything is all CGI and 3D? The answer is a glorious yes, with the film becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy that the Muppets simply need to get back together and everything will be right in the world.
In-jokes abound ? Sweetums has to find his own way to the Muppet Theater, a la The Muppet Movie ? and there is much meta-contortion of the characters? realisation they are in a movie, but this succeeds because a huge amount is played straight. The linear plot withholds introducing Kermit, Fozzie et al for the longest time. Until then, our only Muppet is fan-surrogate Walter, living an everyday life in Capra-esque Smalltown. That?s the kind of fantasy Henson never really bought into (don?t forget, Sesame Street was deliberately an urban show) and the anthem Life?s A Happy Song is staunchly at the Disney end of the Muppets? musical spectrum. Surely, the Muppets haven?t lost their bite?
Nope. After the sunny opening, things get darker, fast. The film rests on hitting the narrowest of targets, the one that Henson invariably nailed. Too kind and this would be anodyne and lifeless; too cruel, and it?s no longer the Muppets (a theme that becomes felt in shadowy tribute act-cum-bizarro nightmare The Moopets; somebody here has definitely seen Peter Jackson?s Meet The Feebles). More importantly, once you get past the Macguffin of pantomime villain Chris Cooper ? maniacal laugh ? wanting to destroy the Muppet Theater to drill for oil, there?s an undercurrent of existential crisis, too, because his plans mean that the Muppets would cease to exist.
This core of sadness is expressed most clearly in Pictures In My Head, Kermit?s bittersweet ballad in which paintings of old pals burst into life, briefly, to sing along, only to then be trapped on canvas once again. The film is hauntingly ambiguous on the subject of whether these old pop-culture favourites should be regarded as historical curios or living, breathing, relevant concerns. The plot about a fan bringing the team together is pure wish-fulfilment on Segel?s part, but he interrogates it with real insight, nowhere more so that in Brett McKenzie?s standout song Man or Muppet, which is acutely concerned with whether a grown-up should still be playing with childhood toys.
Look to the marketing ? the chat shows, the bloggers? Q&As ? and it?s obvious that a lot of this is pitched way over kids? heads. This is a film for, and about, a generation that doesn?t see anything wrong in laughing at a puppet frog into their thirties and beyond. But the film earns its right to say: so what? The film?s boldest gambit is to create 80s Robot, a symbol of all that is wrong with today?s vacuum-packed, pre-recorded nostalgia. In contrast, the character, personality and joie de vivre of the Muppets is an altogether different prospect. It?s good to have them back.
Many thanks to Showcase Cinemas for helping me to play the music, light the lights, meet the Muppets, etc.
Here's the text of a introduction to Roman Polanski's Carnage, which I gave last night at Derby QUAD. Polanski becomes the first director whose films I've introduced twice, as I 'did' Chinatown in 2010.
Introduction to Carnage
Carnage is 79 minutes long, features only four primary actors, and is set in a single New York apartment. You won?t be surprised, therefore, to learn that it is based on a stage play. As a general rule, it?s very tricky to adapt theatrical works into movies without ?opening up? the action ? which risks alienating audiences who know the material ? or keeping the claustrophobia ? which will make many feel, ?well, we may as well have gone to the theatre.?
Carnage has no such problems, because it is directed by Roman Polanski, arguably cinema?s greatest director of confined spaces. Indeed, when Carnage was shown at the New York Film Festival last year, the festival?s boss Richard Pena called Polanski "a poet of small spaces
That's chronic in the positive, Dr Dre-sampling definition. In other words, it's dope.
Chronicle
(Josh Trank, 2011)
A deeper, darker tale of superhero hubris than its jokey marketing implies ? and a fascinating dispatch from the war between Hollywood pros and YouTube amateurs
It?s quite possible that some films are produced by a kind of genre Tarot, in which the cards are turned over until an acceptable combination turns up. Chronicle is the inevitable result of matching ?superheroes? with ?found footage,? but refreshingly, it?s also a film whose makers have bothered to read the small print on each genre before beginning.
So Chronicle is, equally, a superhero movie defined by the limitations of found footage, and a first-person camcorder movie with some surprising new moves to match its newly super-powered heroes. So the first act is deliberately, almost self-consciously, a beat-for-beat retread of every movie in which a socially awkward youngster takes a camcorder to a party
Back to catching up on 2011 films I haven't reviewed yet, with the prequel to the Troy McClure musical Stop The Planet Of The Apes! I Want To Get Off.
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
(Rupert Whyatt, US, 2011)
Go ape ? with excitement. True to the original?s spirit, yet with an astute sense of possible improvement, this is a champion amongst chimps
It isn?t rocket science ? at least, it shouldn?t be. And yet Tim Burton still managed to fuck up retelling Planet Of The Apes, despite it being one of the cast-iron classics of science-fiction cinema, a story that manages to be infinitely complex by being brilliantly simple in its reordering of man and primate. By rights, Burton?s folly should have killed any hope of further Ape-work but fortunately, Rupert Whyatt fancied his chances. Better still, he?s treated it like a rocket scientist, just in case.
This is blockbuster filmmaking the way it isn?t made any more: slow, methodical and daring in its conviction that a good story can be told without recourse either to camp or to cynicism. It?d be all too easy to make a joke out of these militant monkeys, but Whyatt allows him the indulgence only of a couple of sly in-jokes (an ironic reversal of the 1968 film?s signature line, and a monkeys? exercise yard that resembles the Dawn of Man soundstage from 2001: A Space Odyssey) but both elements are perfectly integrated into Whyatt?s original design. By the time that head Ape Caesar talks, leading his troops into battle on the Golden Gate Bridge, you?ll have bought it wholesale, because Whyatt?s sales pitch is so good.
Otherwise, this is a film remarkable for its realism. Yes, the fleeting glimpse of a manned space flight to Mars (a hint of a sequel?) suggests a setting slightly in the future, or in a parallel universe, but in its look and feel it?s a recognisable world against which the Rise takes place. The conception of how the monkeys gain their intelligence is simplicity itself, the stuff of countless science-fiction stories ? or, indeed, any genre of stories: the hubris of science, the greed of capitalism, the bonds of family. At heart, it?s a cry of rage against animal testing, but it also nails the themes of apartheid and revolution of the original Apes saga without condescendation.
In fact, what?s most remarkable is the film?s even-handedness. Even with a lean running time only just over the 90 minute mark, Whyatt feels no reason to rush, the leisurely pace allowing him to build a rounded portrait of human and ape characters alike. OK, so Freida Pinto is wasted in an unnecessary role, but James Franco?s scientist is a believable protagonist ? a man who risks the collapse of mankind in the hope of improving it ? and is superbly underplayed. Against that is Caesar, a towering performance by Andy Serkis that makes Gollum and King Kong look like mo-capped dress rehearsals. The role is anthropomorphism at its purest, a monkey not only raised by humans but able to think and emote as a human. Serkis gets it, his gait simian but his watchfulness that of a super-charged child.
Whyatt conveys an ape?s eye view better than any of the franchise?s previous films, preferring not to gawp but to stalk alongside Caesar and his co-horts. What distinguishes the film is Whyatt daring to side with the apes ? but also against them, never forgetting that the prospect of this actually happening is terrifying. That combination makes the climactic action scenes doubly exciting, the ebb and flow of the conflict creating a richly ambiguous blend of triumph and pathos. The open ending might be a cop-out in other hands; here, it seems like a sensible responsible to a film that treats its scenario as a scientist would, with dispassionate interest. OK, Whyatt is saying, let?s see what happens now. Please, Hollywood, let him conduct another experiment.
The Oscar nominations are in and either the Academy voters are batshit mental, or they've helpfully removed the opposition (chiefly, by snubbing Michael Fassbender and shifting Berenice Bejo out of Meryl Streep's firing line) to clear the decks for a clean sweep by The Artist.
Fair enough. I finally saw The Artist last night. It's actually better than most folk are saying, as clever and thoughtful as it is breezily entertaining. With the possible exception of The Tree Of Life (nominated for Best Picture and Best Director; take note, BAFTA), it's easily ahead of any American film of last year.
The only potential upset - unless you count the horse's head section of The Godfather, no film about Hollywood has ever taken Best Picture. Sunset Boulevard, Singin' In The Rain, Burn Hollywood Burn
Yes, we're up to Bond movie #13. Unlucky for some.
Octopussy
(John Glen, 1983)
Think the title?s animal amalgam is ungainly? Wait ?til you see the Frankenstein stitch-work on the most randomly assembled Bond film to date
You?d think they?d be taking the competition seriously. After all, a rival Bond film ? reuniting Sean Connery with his license to kill, no less ? was set to go into production, stealing the march on the official series. In their favour, Cubby Broccoli and chums duly persuaded Roger Moore to stay, signed on Hollywood legend Louis Jourdan as the baddie, and got Tim Rice and John Barry to pen the greatest of all Bond songs (no arguing: Pulp covered it). Yet in every other way Octopussy doesn?t have a clue how to beat the competition.
The stakes had changed in the real world, 1970s detente giving way to renewed hostilities between an apparently resurgent Russia and a paranoid America. This ensured that Never Say Never Again (with its plot bound by complex legal shenanigans to be nothing more than a remake Thunderball) had an authentically retro, Cold War edge that recent Bonds had more or less given up. So what?s Octopussy?s response? To drop in a comically gung-ho Soviet General, who actually gets to say ?The West is decadent!? and is played by Steven Berkoff in such deranged, accent-mangling glee that he became Hollywood?s go-to guy for OTT villainy in Beverly Hills Cop and Rambo: First Blood.
Weirdly, though, the film takes ages to actually fulfil its promise of a Cold War thriller, disguised instead as an exotic caper movie about Faberge egg smuggling in India. The thinking, presumably, was that Bond had to pay at least a modicum of lip service to Ian Fleming and, having worked through all the obvious material, the producers got stuck with the title of one short story, Octopussy, and the Sotheby?s sequence from another, The Property Of A Lady.
And here?s where the problems start, because none of these elements really belong together ? not least, because the producers forgot to have what the nowadays call a ?tone meeting.? With a director of relatively serious intent in John Glen, and the threat of atomic extinction for the first time in a Bond movie for ages, this ought to be all gritty BAFTA, but everyone else is under the misapprehension that they?re still making Moonraker.
The list of poor choices includes, but is not limited to: A tennis player cast as Bond?s sidekick, so that he can fight baddies with a racket and be watched by a back-and-forth crowd. Bond telling a tiger to ?siiiit!? a la Barbara Woodhouse. Johnny Weismuller freestyling on the soundtrack as Bond swings from tree to tree a la Tarzan. Octopussy?s harem runs a harem of lady ninjas in red Lycra. Bond?s idea of attacking by stealth: a Union Jack hot-air balloon. And enough racial stereotyping to keep India in fury for weeks.
Roger Moore, at least, is in his element here, revelling in some of his most glorious moments of comedy and becoming the film?s de facto auteur. Told that a tattoo is ?my little Octopussy,? he delivers a mini-symphony of darting eye movements and raised eyebrows to convey his wry amusement. Even better is the moment where, faced with the ignominy of wearing a gorilla suit, Moore makes the most of it by checking his watch. OK, so purists would argue that you?d never see Connery stoop so low for a laugh, but anybody who?s seen Never Say Never Again will know that Connery could have done with a few half-decent gags at this stage.
And yet John Glen staunchly refuses to treat this as camp. He?s a director who seems blithely unaware that the endless parade of animals ? spiders! tigers! crocodiles! ? are not (as he tries to film them) objects of realistic menace but signs of rollicking Boys? Own peril. As a director, his trademark shot is a slow pan following people walking across a sumptuously decorated room. It?s as if he saw the rushes of Never Say Never Again and decided to take the pace down a notch. And he?s an editor by trade! Jeez; this is one of the least action-packed of Bond movies, which shoots its bolt with the daft but undeniably impressive opening minijet-through-a-hangar stunt, and the chilling woodland clown take-down, and effectively gives up.
Admittedly, Glen delivers the goods in the Berlin sequence, where he finally musters the urgency to create one of 007?s most compelling countdowns ? but by this point the film makes as little sense as a Jabberwocky in an Escher painting. Apparently, the U.S. Air Force never vets its visitors, hiring a circus named after a world-famous criminal, and nobody?s even bothered to ask why 009 turned up dead in a clown suit. So when Bond himself dons outsized shoes and a red nose to prevent Armageddon, there?s a twisted inevitability to it. Often painted as a franchise nadir, it?s actually the one moment in the film where the serious and the surreal work together instead of being at odds.
Want a review? Read on. Want an introduction to Win Win? Click the link. Success either way; there's a saying that conveys that sensation, but for the life of me I can't remember what it is.
Win Win
(Tom McCarthy, US, 2011)
The sporting movie downsized ? in terms of economic woe, high school wrestling might just be the most appropriate activity.
It?s not exactly a hotly contested honour, but Tom McCarthy is surely the nicest director currently working in America. His films are about ordinary, essential decent people struggling to get by, who find their salvation through nothing more magical than human contact. And, remarkably, he does it without the insincere, focus-group sentimentality that will have you reaching for the sick bucket. When McCarthy characters smile, they don?t flash those perfect shit-eating Californian grins, but bashful, even rueful half-smiles, as if they?re ashamed of having fun.
Admittedly, Win Win isn?t so much a progression from earlier hits The Station Agent and The Visitor, as a refinement. Where previously the trigger for the hero?s spiritual rebirth was caused not by chance (the inheritance of The Station Agent, the discovery of illegal immigrants squatting in a flat in The Visitor) but by a moment of weakness. Mike Flaherty is a normal, average guy, with a normal, average family, but one who happens to be living through a recession. So, when the opportunity arises to stave off bankruptcy with some hassle-free extra cash ? even at the expense of a kind, helpless pensioner ? Flaherty takes it against his better instincts.
Two things are notable in Win Win. One, that McCarthy makes this a surprising twist of behaviour for a lawyer. Flaherty isn?t the usual cinematic huckster exploiting a loophole for profit, but a down-at-heel attorney whose business is slow because
My belated round-up of 2011 continues with the film that my three-and-a-half year old son is currently watching at least once a day.
Gnomeo & Juliet
(Kelly Asbury, 2011)
Wherefore art thou, Romeo? Well, much of Shakespeare is here ? but as you?d expect, garden-based punnery takes precedence over scholarly fidelity to the Bard
Has any Shakespeare play been filmed as often as Romeo & Juliet? Doubtful, but it's probably never been seen quite like this. The Bard?s age-old tale of tragic teenage love doesn't obviously lend itself to kid-friendly CG animation ? what do you do with that ending, for starters? ? but if you're not afraid to see the details changed to make them fit-for-purpose, it's fascinating how adaptable the central premise is.
This is one of those films where a pun in the title pretty much establishes everything that follows ? in much the same way, incidentally, as horror movie Tromeo & Juliet. But at least it's a solid idea, allowing the rivalry between Montagues and Capulets to be contained into two neighbouring gardens, whose water features and pride-of-place plant life become the targets for a tit-for-tat cycle of vandalism. And, of course, the inherent tradition of the feud is given overt symbolism by the fact that gnomes are locked into pre-ordained forms, in this case the fact that one 'family' is painted blue and the other red.
What follows hits all the plot beats ? the accidental meeting, the attack on Mercutio (here conflated with Benvolio, renamed Benny and played by Matt Lucas), the mistaken belief that one of the lovers is dead ? but plays fast and loose enough to have a third act that revolves around an extreme lawn mower voiced by Hulk Hogan. The pleasure, as so often in these films, is in the incidental jokes, with nods to lines and characters from across the Bard's canon. A removal firm, naturally, is called Rosencrantz and Guildernstern. In ten years' time, the target audience is going to study Shakespeare for real and be shocked at how much they know, although in many respects they will also be utterly confused.
Otherwise it is business as usual for the genre, with Shrek 2 director Kelly Asbury's attitude being that of a gnome: fixed and unyielding. So there are movie homages, a star cast and a pop soundtrack, the only distinction provided by how British this is. Today's Britflick A-listers James McAvoy and Emily Blunt are nicely counterpointed by Michael Caine and Maggie Smith as their respective parents, while everything else fleshed out by alumni from telly comedy and the casting director's Rolodex. (Future pub quiz question: which Shakespeare film stars Jason Statham and Ozzy Osbourne?) And producer Elton John makes his mark felt with the songs ? and the leitmotifs of the score ? all recognisable from his back catalogue. It's worth pointing out, though, that Bernie Taupin isn't a producer, and his lyrics have been gnominated for some distracting changes.
Just because I'm in the process of uploading unpublished reviews of 2011 films, doesn't mean they have to be good films.
Sucker Punch
(Zack Snyder, US, 2011)
An avant-garde anti-blockbuster? When it?s so indistinguishable from any other disjointed, distasteful dreck, who can spot a satirical masterpiece?
Zack Snyder would have you believe that Sucker Punch is a feminist manifesto, an artistic statement on behalf of appallingly treated actresses everywhere, and a provocative blurring of the line between mainstream Hollywood and pornographic objectification. The weird thing is that, actually, he has a point. Conceptually, Sucker Punch is all of these things. The problem is that the director is Zack Snyder, a director whose well-worn stylistic handbook results in a film that is dangerously, irresponsibly close to the kind of filmmaking it purports to satirise.
The story is certainly bravura: a nosedive into a narrative rabbit hole structured as fantasties-within-fantasies. But Snyder is no Christopher Nolan. There?s too little here to distinguish from layer from another. In his head, Snyder believes that swapping the titillation of a brothel for the empowering spectacle of girl power action sequences is a daring intellectual conceit: the sucker punch of the title. But this is a director who is too one-note in his imagery ? the processed colours, fetishised costumes and self-conscious comic book framings travel from one reality to another. Even ?real life? looks like a music promo.
What he has failed to grasp is that cinema needs subtlety to deliver the kind of shade and ambiguity this material needs. Withour, Sucker Punch is propaganda in search of a message. The juxtaposition of the grim brothel sequences, salivating with the prospect of rape, with the video game ultra-violence against hordes of anonymous samurai/zombies/robots is incredibly distasteful because there isn?t even a hint of a joke to let on that this might be operating as satire. The film simply moves from one sphere where women are helpless victims, to one where they kick-ass in skimpy costumes without noticing the irony.
The problem is that girl power needs more than attitude, it needs character ? but Snyder gives them nothing but fantasy outfits and nicknames, and a cast of supposed up-and-comers take that at face value. With the exception of Abbie Cornish?s Sweet Pea, these girls have less personality than the Spice Girls. Cornish suggests damage, vulnerability and fire
So David Cameron wants the British film industry to chase Hollywood dollar by "incentivising UK producers to chase new markets both here and overseas.? Hot on the heels of the terrible longlist of BAFTA 2012 nominations, it's another attempt to nail shut the coffin of our revitalised film culture.
The sad thing is, we've been here before Flashback thirty years to the beginning of 1982, and Chariots Of Fire wins Best Picture and Colin Welland cries "the British are coming!" It's the perfect salve for a nation undone by unemployment and rioting, and a chance to continue the feelgood factor in the wake of a high-profile Royal Wedding. Sound familiar?
So Chariots of Fire producer David Puttnam, with his company Goldcrest, started to pump out expensive, prestigious movies with commercial appeal. Finally, Britain would be free from the tyranny of low-budget mediocrity and would bring exactly the kind of flag-waving, entrepreneurial success that David Cameron is calling for now.
Initially, Goldcrest succeeded: Gandhi was a major hit and Oscar-hog. But David Puttnam's chase for success then created a string of expensive flops: Revolution, so bad Al Pacino temporarily quit acting; Absolute Beginners, responsible for inflicting Patsy Kensit on the world; and Palme D'Or winner The Mission
I realised there's loads of films I watched and reviewed last year but never got around to posting, so here's the first in a whistle-stop tour of the ones I missed. And what better way to start than with 2011's best film, as voted by the Cannes Film Festival jury, Sight & Sound, and many others.
The Tree Of Life
(Terrence Malick, US, 2011)
Intimate/epic. Naturalistic/star-gazing. Intoxicating/infuriating. Malick breaks free of Hollywood's garden fence with a film of tangled roots, soaring branches and exquisite foliage.
?The chapter has closed, the story has been told,? Sean Penn?s architect Jack is advised by a colleague early in The Tree Of Life. When asked, ?What did you do?? the reply comes back: ?Experiment.? It?s a cute nod to the nature of Terrence Malick?s fifth film, in which a director long given to abstraction and intellectual ambition attempts to do everything in a single film, and damn near pulls it off.
Weaving Jack?s mid-life crisis in the present day, his childhood in 1950s Texas and nothing less than the beginning of life of Earth (complete with dinosaurs!) The Tree Of Life is a bizarre, intoxicating one-off. Plot-wise it?s a hybrid of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stand By Me; in tone, it veers from the childlike awe of Spielberg to unsettling dreams and dissonant sound effects that recall David Lynch. (Finally, maybe, Malick is letting on what he did throughout the 1980s. He was assimilating movies.)
Malick has never been shy of pretension and many will find this infuriating. I did, at times: the undergraduate theology, and those annoying mannered voiceovers Malick is so fond of, act as cringe-powered handbrakes on an otherwise immersive experience. And the feeble ending is as bathetic and crushing a disappointment as the similar climax to Lost ? a trite, kitsch attempt to portray the Afterlife whose solemn closure seems bent on destroying the subtle, ambiguous mood of the rest of the film.
Fortunately, none of this is enough to swing the clapometer away from the extraordinary feat of filmmaking achieved elsewhere. For me Malick has refined his style into something approaching perfection: certainly, this is the most intense emotional response I?ve had to a film in a while, a feeling of joy and sadness that is near-unbearable but so addictive I was rapt with attention and impatient to see what was coming next.
In outline, the film sounds trite, a simplistic juxtaposition of one man?s existence with the wider mystery of the universe. Yet the rhapsodic, insistent pull of Malick?s editing, the luminous beauty of the cinematography and the minute observation of his direction transcend any schematics. Presumably because of the director?s fabled, painstaking methods, this really feels lived-in: an uncanny evocation of childhood. A sequence showing Jack?s infant years is an impressionistic montage of memory and experience (being scared by a dog, being startled when his baby brother hits him) that is so naturalistic and unfakeably warm it transcends specifics of setting to be universal.
It helps that Hunter McCracken, as the boyhood Jack, is startlingly good: an adventurous, inquisitive and gauche child in the process of shaking off his innocent wonder to become a sullen, secretive man. The duality of character that emerges reflects his parentage. As the dad, Brad Pitt shakes off celebrity to become an archetypal father: stern and broad, yet whose bullying is never less than well-meaning. As the mum, Jessica Chastain might look like the typical Malick heroine, a serene, spiritual presence who in one fantasy sequence is witnessed floating in the air, but Chastain makes her capable of fire when called for. It?s a memorably quiet, but never vacant, performance.
What has any of this to do with the digression into special effects, as Douglas Trumbull plays with air and water and colour to fashion imagery to explain creation? Or the modernist high-rises in which Penn lives and works? Throughout, the film takes delight in the sheer tangibility of things ? down to the dirt in a baby?s fingernail ? from which Jack, from which all of us, draw our experience. This is a film that makes an absolute mockery of any claims made for 3D?s superiority. With the right cameraman (and Emmanuel Lubezki is surely now the world?s best) you can achieve the sensation of touch with just two dimensions.
And with it comes the film?s purpose. Jack is brought up in a God-fearing age ? but why put a label on the majesty of creation when it?s all around us, in the things we do, the things we make and the world around us? Malick is an eternal optimist, filling the speakers with gorgeous classical music, and the screen with rippling streams or sun-dappled leaves (a tree is seldom absent here, but without the cloying symbolism of the recent movie, The Tree). The film doesn?t need its silly coda when Malick makes such a strong case for this life being the one we should be living. Even when Jack is rebelling against his Eden by firing a frog into the sky on a firework ? surely the ultimate sin for nature-lover Malick ? the director gives him the perfect get-out clause. It was an experiment. Just like this film. Just like life.
Sex, sex and more sex. That's pretty much the plot of Steve McQueen's Shame, in cinemas this Friday, but it's also a brave and astute portait of a man's descent into an all-consuming sex addiction, brilliantly played by Michael Fassbender. The Americans might have saddled Shame with an idiotic (if expected) NC-17 certificate, but it's certainly not a porn flick
Because it was on telly at the weekend, and I hadn't seen it for years. Thanks to the particularly grubby print broadcast by G.O.L.D. it looks exactly how my childhood brain remembers it when, as an eight-year-old, my dad took me to see the kind of family entertainment where everybody chain-smokes and nobody blinks at talking of a man with no dick
Arrietty, Studio Ghibli's enchanting take on The Borrowers, is out on Blu-ray and DVD tomorrow. It missed out on my top 10 films of 2011 by this much *waves hand in vague approximation of the size of a Borrower* but it's lovely stuff and up to the usual Studio Ghibli standards.
For a full review of Arrietty, here's one I made earlier for Total Film.
Another year, another long-list of BAFTA film nominees which yet again shows up our national cinema sucking up to Hollywood celebrity in a pathetic attempt at reflected glory.
In case you were wondering, the B is for British, and yet AFTA continues to forget that, chasing after the Oscars' sloppy seconds. Even rebranding itself by holding the awards before the Oscars can't escape the fact that, in terms of importance, the AFTAs always come after.
Check out the BAFTA 2012 nominees, and take a gander at the barking-mad divide between Best Film and Outstanding British Film, which patronises homegrown talent with a pat on the back and an "oh, didn't you do well?" Meanwhile, while everybody's obsessed with trying to second-guess what the Americans will go for (Moneyball? The Descendants? Midnight In Paris?), the BAFTA voters are forced to ghettoise probably the greatest year for British cinema in recent memory.
For my money, many of the British films not nominated for Best Film - especially Shame and Tyrannosaur - could give the Americans a run for their money, and yet I'd wager that the final nominees will be only a Kevin or a Tinker Tailor away from Xeroxing the AMPAS' selection.
And yet British films live in an awkward no man's land where cosy, Weinstein-esque biopics like The Iron Lady or My Week With Marilyn are nominated in both categories, while the coruscating, innovative Kill List gets nothing.
No other country has this problem. The French, the Spanish, even the Aussies, all have proud national cinema awards and consign Hollywood movies - rightly - to fight over a single award. Hell, BAFTA's telly awards manages to do the same; imagine the outcry if it suddenly started awarding everything to Dexter instead of Downton?
So why does the film wing of BAFTA behave like Hollywood's bitch? There's an argument that the American studios use all of our actors and craftsmen so, indirectly, we're supporting our own. That's true - but there's a cultural side to things as well. The BAFTAs should have a remit to big up the best homegrown films that audiences might not otherwise find. Let's put it this way: no other British awards body, whatever the discipline, would ever nominate something about baseball as being amongst the best in its field.
As an aside, the BAFTAs can't even get their American choices right. The Tree Of Life has received one measly nomination (admittedly for cinematography, its strongest suit). This is the same The Tree Of Life that won the Palme D'Or and cleaned up on most critics' end-of-year lists. Oh, and if you think it's not celebrity enough for BAFTA, its star is Brad Pitt.
As journo Mark Salisbury tweeted this morning, "that's what happens when you don't send out screeners." Which says it all - it's all one unseemly cattle-market, in which only the noisiest, pushiest bulls get heard.
I say: enough bull. Isn't it time for BAFTA to become a British Bulldog instead?
In which animator Bird takes one look at M:I?s live-action jazz standard and wonders what it would be like to draw all over it
The Mission: Impossible films have developed into the spy action equivalent of the Alien franchise, in the way that each new mission has been assigned to a different director. Yet, star/producer Tom Cruise ? always a man whose career has been founded on steely control and self-assurance ? has played far safer in his recruitment policy, opting for proven A-list talent (De Palma, Woo) over the young turks (Scott, Cameron, Fincher) who made their names fighting xenomorphs.
Yet Mission: Impossible 3 found a new way of approaching things: find somebody who, while an expert in one field, was untried in live-action features. It?s the best of both possible worlds, combining trusted experience with a novice?s hunger ? it worked with J. J. Abrams (kickstarting Hollywood?s premier TV-to-movie auteur) and it works double for Brad Bird?s Mission: Impossible ? Ghost Protocol.
The obvious question: what?s in it for animation giant Bird, a veteran of both The Simpsons and Pixar and a two-time Oscar winner to boot? The answer becomes obvious half an hour into his live-action debut, as Cruise?s Ethan Hunt and Simon Pegg?s Benji Dunn rig up a nifty device that allows them to sneak around while the guard at the end sees only an empty corridor. On one level, it?s the old spy movie stand-by of the CCTV camera on a loop. But look again. Isn?t it exactly the kind of ACME gadget that Wily E. Coyote would pull out of his bag when trying to catch Road Runner?
De Palma, Woo and Abrams all treated the Mission: Impossible template as a kind of jazz standard, a set of notes on which to riff in their own idiosyncratic style. Brad Bird is used to being able to do whatever he can in a movie, so here his mission is to render reality as a live-action cartoon. Borrowing the elastic camera moves of Paul Thomas Anderson?s cinematographer Robert Elswit, and buoyed by the rhythms of Michael Giacchino?s score, Bird dares to treat sets and props and actors no differently from pen-and-ink or CGI.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the central sequence in Dubai, in which Cruise climbs and falls and rises and runs across the Burj Khalifa as if he?s jealous that Bird?s previous stars included Mr Incredible. It?s a marvel of modern filmmaking, which uses its star?s craziness to ignore stuntman conventions and get on with smashing your jaw on the floor in disbelief. Bird?s sense of narrative logic sets up a sandstorm like a spinning plate, and then crams as much intrigue and tension and set-pieces into the half-hour or so before it arrives, in breathless near-real time, until the sand whips in to change the mise en scene from sun and steel and glass to an eerie visual standstill through which Cruise runs like a line drawing.
That?s why the film?s final act has been seen, in some quarters, as a (minor) disappointment. It?s still thrilling, classic Mission: Impossible stuff, with a countdown, a bonkers fight in a robotic car park, and the team ? sexy Paula Patton, sardonic Jeremy Renner, wisecracking Simon Pegg, and Cruise doing his trademark running thang ? all on top form. Trouble is, any half-decent filmmaker can make that stuff work. What Bird had reminded us is that, like his avian namesake, a director can fly if he has the imagination to grow wings.
The Coen Brothers mosey on into the West, with Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld and Matt Damon. Out now on Blu-ray and DVD.
True Grit (Joel and Ethan Coen, US, 2010)
A classical Western that’s also unmistakably Coenesque. The Brothers have removed the topsoil of irony and burrowed down to the essence of their craft
The complaint often levelled at the Coen Brothers is that their ironic vision – a post-modern swirl of ornate dialogue, OTT characters and genre pastiche – precludes any real emotional involvement in the story. This, despite Miller’s Crossing heartfelt study of brotherhood, Fargo’s sense of banal horror erupting in an everyday community, or The Big Lebowski’s sheer joie de vivre.
But something’s changed since the Coens’ mid-Noughties exile: a soberer perspective, a sense of lives lived and loves lost, maturity. If, in No Country For Old Men, that attitude could be attributed to Cormac McCarthy’s influence, in A Serious Man it was unmistakably the Coens’ own.
The runes were recast, the message clear enough – the Coens were going straight
It's only been half a year in BlogalongaBond terms, and already it's our first reboot. Gosh, how time flies.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (Peter Hunt, GB, 1969)
Things that never happened to the other fella – romance, tragedy and a 40-plus year debate as to whether he’s any good
Not so long ago, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was dismissed as the weak link in the Bond franchise – call it the ‘Lazenby factor,’ or perhaps the relative absence of campness or gadgetry, but it was the one that the wider public tended to steer clear of in favour of a more linear Connery-to-Moore progression. Even usually reliable critics like Time Out's Geoff Andrew got particularly snarky about this one.
Recently, though, there’s been a sea change initiated by those into hardcore Bondage. Actually, they insist, this is one of the series’ greatest entries, a moving, ambitious romantic thriller that showcases a tone and class that no other 007 movie would attempt…ooh, at least until the arrival of Timothy Dalton, but not properly until Daniel Craig. Oh, and Lazenby’s not bad either.
There’s a whiff of oneupsmanship in that revisionism – of course, the fans are going to alight on the one the public hates – but they have a point. Unfortunately, so too do the detractors… and for much the same reason. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service stands alone, and not only because of the star.
The Connery movies had delivered a steady progression into hugeness, to the point where Bond was but an ant in a volcano base. Ian Fleming had been largely jettisoned as other writers – from Kevin McClory to Roald Dahl – invented material largely original to the big-screen. And Bond was increasingly ripe for piss-takes, notably the all-star disaster that is the 1966 non-canon Casino Royale. As Hollywood would rediscover decades later in its superhero franchises, sometimes too much of a good thing becomes, simply, too much. The answer, for the 007 producers, was the same as it is today: reboot.
So this is the most faithful book to Fleming, a character study about a spy for whom saving the world is no big deal next to meeting the woman of his dreams. Technically, it follows on from You Only Live Twice in Bond’s mission to ‘get Blofeld,’ but when they meet, neither apparently recognises the other. Continuity error, sly in-joke (both actors have changed since the last film), or a slippery piece of Moebius strip postmodern where this can be simultaneous Bond movie #6 and the first in an entirely new series? [Just to complicate things, even its cliffhanger ending is largely ignored in the next movie, Diamonds Are Forever, in favour of reinstating the more frivolous house style.]
It’s best to view On Her Majesty’s Secret Service less as an aberration than an experiment: the movie equivalent of a limited edition comic where official chronology gets quietly shelved because the creators fancied doing something different. You can see why mainstream audiences have recoiled against it during the years where it had to fend for itself in the Bank Holiday TV schedules against more crowd-pleasing entries. This – as Bond wryly muses – never happened to the other fella.
It’s a bizarrely structured film, its opening hour barely discernable as a Bond movie at all. No wonder Hunt breaks protocol by opening with a scene of M and Moneypenny (justly wondering where their best agent has got to) and Maurice Binder does “007’s greatest hits” in the credits. Hunt has to drop odd flourishes – like a whistling dwarf sweeping a floor – to place the film in the same story-world where villains have hooks for hands and bowler hats can be weapons. And for an editor-turned-director, who was largely responsible for the zippy, ironic pace of the series to date, Hunt takes his precious time about things.
And then there’s the tone. The film could pass for an international jet-set romance, and we even gets a banal ‘falling in love’ montage that is only bearable because it’s scored to Louis Armstrong’s We Have All The Time In The World: the single greatest song ever recorded in Bond’s name. The attempts at classy art-house drama clash wildly with the silly, speeded-up fight sequences, as if they’d hired Claude Lelouch to guest direct and then snuck Benny Hill into the editing suite. And, sacrilege though this is, I’ve always been agnostic about Diana Rigg’s supercilious grace.
And yet – there’s something so fresh and original about its take on Bond that is undeniably interesting. Officially, Bond is at work, his pursuit of Contessa Teresa and her criminal papa all part of a ploy to find information on Blofeld. But he has gone so deep undercover he’s stopped being a spy and become a man, one who finds unexpected common ground with gentleman thief Drago, and is attracted to a live-wire woman who prefers trusting instinct to her intellect. No wonder Bond lets Operation Bedlam go hang.
For the first time, we’re getting a sense of who James Bond is, especially so when the plot kicks in and he has to impersonate a heraldry expert to infiltrate Blofeld’s lair. Notwithstanding the outrageous daftness of Blofeld faffing around with coats of arms when he’s about to hold the world to ransom, this is heady (if incredibly old-fashioned) thematic stuff. The difference between hero and villain is that where one has nobility, the other has to cheat his way into it (and Telly Savalas’ coarse, brutish performance undoes years of making Blofeld into a mystical mastermind by redefining him as a thug). Somewhere in the middle is Tracy, a criminal’s daughter by birth but proof that if you have what it takes in beauty, attitude and all-round aceness, you can ascend to saintliness.
What undoes Bond, of course, is his predilection for pussy, in the film’s only sustained sequence of the smutty comedy that is the stock-in-trade of 007 movies. See, Bond is a man of fallen nobility, flawed because, perhaps, his day job continually sees him flirting with sin. He’s not so different from Blofeld after all. It’ll take an English rose to redeem him, and Tracy appears as if by magic to rescue him.
Given the increasingly pop-tastic direction of the films, this Feudal rewiring of the main character is a medieval throwback. It never, ever would have worked with Connery, whose sardonic humour and brusque physicality were armour enough against playing Bond as folk hero. Counter-intuitively, casting a novice actor like Lazenby makes a huge amount of sense, because the qualities required of a Bond caught off-guard by love (innocence, vulnerability and charm) emerge naturally from his performance. Put it this way: if you’re stepping into the biggest cinematic shoes of the decade, you’re going to be a) eager to please and b) worried you won’t be able to pull it off.
Still with us? Many won’t be: this kind of depth is bromide to those wanting their 007 to be the man of action. Fortunately, the reward for those who stick with Hunt’s long game is an unbroken, extended last act of astonishing flair. The last forty-five minutes are almost wall-to-wall – ski chase, stock car rally, another ski chase, a helicopter assault and a toboggan fight. Christopher Nolan’s love of the film is well-known, but the structural debt to Inception involves more than blowing up an Alpine lair. It runs through the entire film, chiefly that dot, dot, dot
Out on DVD on Monday 13th June from Soda Pictures, a fascinating, thoughtful documentary (albeit one that doesn't look or feel like a documentary) about a Danish platoon fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Armadillo (Janus Metz, Dan, 2010)
The restyling of war doc dispatches as dramatic combat thriller ought to feel ethically shaky, but it pays off with Dostoevskyian depth
Finally, after all the liberal movies about the War on Terror, this modern-day, 24/7 rolling news conflict, has found its ideal cinematic form in embedded reportage. First there was Restrepo, and now here’s Armadillo, a film which (to U.K. eyes) universalises the campaign by focussing on a platoon of Danes, rather than the more familiar Brits or Americans.
There’s little, initially, to distinguish the Europeans from the standard-issue grunts who populate war movies. They are into porn and video games (in one amazing match cut, a computer screen cuts to the real thing with seamless, ironic precision), mardy when patrols are boring and eager to get stuck in. The platoon is composed of the usual array of hot-heads, jokers and even the sensitive Charlie-Sheen-in-Platoon conscience in mild-mannered Mads.
Think it’s reductive to use fictional avatars for real people? This is a film that blurs the boundary, because it sure as hell doesn’t look like a documentary. The outstanding in-the-field camerawork, shadowing soldiers across enemy territory, is augmented by clever, dramatic colour grading and booming sound design. It’s edited and scored as an action thriller, and even the understandable omissions of events the crew couldn’t make it to are engineered for pathos – notably the sudden cut to a shell-shocked soldier who has just ordered a mortar strike which killed an Afghan child.
There’s a real danger here of the form/content mismatch trivialising the grim reality of war, but Metz displays nerve and thought in assembling a narrative that is punctuated with horrible irony. The titular Armadillo base is barely holding on to its territory, hemmed in by fast, guerrilla insurgency, but it the land doesn’t even feel strategically valuable. What’s important to the ‘peace-keeping’ forces is to win hearts and minds; they are staying simply because, as soon as they leave, the Taliban will take over again. But the Taliban are already there…
So the Danes are locked into a permanently Phyrric victory, as their continued presence further destabilises the region. It’s a thankless cause, as tactics force the Danes to run roughshod over the locals’ recently-ploughed fields, bursting into their homes, inadvertently killing cattle or, worse, relatives. Metz maintains a subplot about Armadillo’s civilian liaison and his interpreter, whose conferences with the locals are at best a mockery and at worst, an insult, as they hand over cash as compensation for shattered lives.
What emerges is a dispassionate, academic vision of ‘help,’ where compassion is overridden by military efficiency. Attempts to make inroads into the community last only until a drone picks up suspicious men wandering across a field – at which point it becomes easier just to blow them up, an event achieved with shocking speed and matter-of-factness. Worse, during a skirmish, several soldiers have to finish off a kill when a grenade attack only wounds the enemy. Pumped-up on adrenaline and propaganda, the soldiers are full of bravado, but when the news leaks, the cover-up becomes a matter of cold pragmatism to justify what was done. It’s in these final stretches that Metz justifies the quasi-fictional tone of the film, because the real-life drama is Dostoyeskyian in scope and depth. This is a glimpse into the soul of a team of professional killers, for whom the definition of ‘the right thing to do’ has long slipped away from normal civilian meaning.
To his fans, Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the greatest of all directors, a name to be revered in the kind of awestruck tones usually reserved for a pope or a pop star. Stanley Kubrick? Terence Malick? Michael Bay? Nobody comes close to Tarkovsky for the mystical fervour in which his name is spoken. He’s become a master of miserablism, a default ambassador for any movie made east of the old Iron Curtain, and the shorthand for Slooow Cinema.
All of which makes me look like a prize fool and cinematic charlatan, because I’ve only ever seen one Tarkovsky movie, his debut Ivan’s Childhood. Oh, and Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris, if that counts. I taped several others off Film 4 in the early Noughties but never got around to watching them… and when the tracking went on my old VHS player, that was that.
Until now. Artificial Eye is kindly bringing out a box-set of all (seven) of his feature films - released on Monday 27th June - and even kinder they’ve sent me a copy. A daunting prospect, of course – can any man plunge headfirst into Tarkovsky’s cinema in one go? No: Andrei took his time, and so must I.
So here’s the deal. I’m going to watch one film a month, in the vein of The Incredible Suit’s BlogalongaBond project. Yes, yes, I know. He’s offering 007: babes, gadgets and ironically raised eyebrows. I’ve got nothing but enigmatic glances, inscrutable narratives and 10-minute takes of the Russian steppes.
Still, if you fancy joining in, here’s the schedule:
By now, you'll probably have read the news that the BBFC has 'banned' (technically, refused to pass) Human Centipede 2 for UK distribution. Perhaps you might have read the censors' rather detailed synopsis of why you shouldn't be allowed to watch the film: an irony that's rather been glossed over.
All I'm thinking is, we've been here before. Last August, I wrote a piece called The BBFC vs A Serbian Film, which is still I think the most widely-read article on this blog. My opinion hasn't changed - the whole sorry farrago is a perpetual dance between censors and directors like Tom Six who want to watch those censors squirm.
Judging from initial reports, the entire sequel seems to have been devised as a test case in pushing buttons, given that its premise is about a man who watches the first Human Centipede film and decides he can do better. On paper, it's a savage meta-satire about the so-called degrading impact of video nasties. On-screen, by the sound of it, Six hasn't got the taste or talent to avoid rubbing our faces in that degradation.
As I wrote last year, I'm not worried about the audience getting degraded. What pisses me off is that cinema gets degraded by films like this. During the original 1980s media panic about horror movies, for example, several serious, genuinely thoughtful and provocative movies (for example, Possession) got banned because of a few immature, borderline-snuff movie shockers.
Remember who was in power back then, and have a think about who's running the country now? It's only a few days since the Government announced a clampdown on 'indecent' advertising and broadcasting for children. It'll be the adults next, and a high-profile ban like Human Centipede 2 plays into their hands. Let's put it this way: the BBFC doesn't take stuff like this lightly. They've passed some hardcore movies uncut over the past few years, because they recognise that artistic context is king.
The moral guardians in Whitehall don't share that belief - their idea of a good movie is The King's Speech. So when a shit-stirrer like Mix comes along, it legitimises their instinct to thwart difficult material, and encourages a culture of beige, anodyne conformity. Which, of course, will drive certain filmmakers (and their audience) further underground. It won't stop anyone watching the "sick filth," but it might reduce the amount of quality movies elsewhere.
In short: I remain torn on the thorny issue of censorship. I want to be challenged as much as the next movie fan, but when cinema itself becomes a human centipede, each segment more full of shit than the last, all it's going to do is catch the attention of the exterminators.
Hot on the heels of this week's arrival of Cross of Iron on Blu-ray, Optimum are releasing a very different WWII film, The Cruel Sea, next week (Monday 13th June). Extras are light, but the disc does include an interview with Donald Sinden, who's one of those old-school charmers you can't help enjoy listening to.
The Cruel Sea (Charles Frend, GB, 1953)
Ignore the melodramatic title and its flag-waving reputation: this is a film that stiffens its upper lip with deathly-dull duty in the cold Atlantic air
The Cruel Sea has become one of the defining examples of postwar, stiff upper lip British heroism – check out the stirring Union Jack packaging on the new Blu-ray release – but the interesting question is: why? This isn’t the usual gung-ho triumph of pluck over adversity; it’s so more restrained that the likes of The Dambusters start to look tacky and indecent in their patriotic cheerleading.
Instead, its study of a warship protecting Allied merchant convoys from U-boat attack is a no-frills, get-on-with-the-job affair, whose sheer stolidity becomes a virtue. In its best passages, it bypasses the clichés of the Brit wartime drama and becomes a keenly observed study of why the genre’s trademark emotional reticence is essential.
The film concentrates on Lockhart, a civvie and amateur sailor who by accident and professionalism rises to be the second-in-command of Jack Hawkins’ commander, Ericson. Surprisingly, Lockhart is ably played by Donald Sinden, an actor who would become renowned playing smug slapstick with Windsor Davies, but here is the bashful matinee idol who learns to get the job done by shutting up and listening to the boss. The longer the film goes on, the more it becomes a bromance between Ericson, a career sailor aghast at the life-or-death choices the war has forced him to make, and Lockhart, the novice who helps him to hold it together.
No room for idlers or boasters here. This is a place where, as the script gloriously puts it, you “try to die without wasting anybody’s time.” The liveliest (and most atypical) character is Stanley Baker’s fast-talking used car salesman turned naval tyrant
Released by Artificial Eye on Monday 13th June, the Abbas Kiarostami Collection gathers today six of the Iranian master's movies on DVD, starting with his 1997 Palme D'or winner The Taste of Cherry and ending, bang up to date with another Cannes success, last year's Certified Copy.
Alongside these are The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), 10 on Ten (2004) and two films apparently never before released in the UK: ABC Africa (2001) and Ten (2002). Coincidentally (or not), these are the two films I was sent for review purposes.
Abbas Kiarostami is an acquired taste. Often, especially in the two films reviewed below, he doesn't appear to be directing at all, but the rough, home-movie aesthetic hides piercing insight and a provocative rewiring of what exactly we mean by "a film".
ABC Africa / Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 2001/2002)
Why do films try so hard? Kiarostami needs only a camcorder, a car and a Visa to Uganda, to get us all wondering
If nothing else, watching these two films back-to-back is a reminder that dashboards make great places to plonk a camcorder. Long stretches of ABC Africa go by with Abbas Kiarostami being driven around Uganda and recording the view of the road in front. Ten presents the reverse angle, consisting entirely of ten in-car conversations, shot largely from two cameras fixed on, respectively, the driver and the passenger.
Kiarostami was already a master of minimalism and the blurry line between fact and fiction
Sam Peckinpah's only war movie, a cult classic, makes its Blu-ray debut next Monday (6th June) from Optimum Releasing. Decent extras include an extensive making of documentary, Passion and Poetry: Sam Peckinpah's War.
Cross of Iron (Sam Peckinpah, US/Ger, 1977)
When you’re losing the war, what else is there to believe in but nihilism? Peckinpah’s cowboy code faces its sternest test amongst the Nazis
War movies are usually directed by the winners. Rephrase that, to specify Second World War movies directed by Americans, and ‘usually’ becomes ‘virtually always.’ The virtually is there because of the rare exceptions, one of which is Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron: the story of a German regiment losing against the Russians and marooned in a muddy quagmire with nothing to fight for beyond survival.
Check the date this was made, and you’re probably thinking, “this is about Vietnam, isn’t it?” To some extent, yes, but by presenting Germans as the good guys Peckinpah explodes accepted notions of heroism far beyond the topsy-turvy morality of America’s involvement in Indochina: this is a film where we’re rooting (if that’s the word) for guys who have portraits of Hitler in their bunkers. Crucially, those, with few exceptions these are no Nazi ideologues but Wehrmacht regulars, career soldiers fighting a cause they don’t believe in – exactly the position of many Marines sent to Vietnam.
In his own perverse way, Peckinpah wryly charts the problems that any army faces: ineffective leaders, pampered and cowardly glory-hunters, and the deranged, couldn’t-give-a-fuck foot soldiers who might actually help win the odd skirmish. With little left to believe in (politics, religion, military protocol and even personal hygiene get a kicking here), the only code left is the same one which united The Wild Bunch. You look after the men you fight and die with. That’s it. The result is an astonishingly nihilistic film, in which the odd shaft of tenderness should be grasped with both hands because it’s so rare and fleeting.
Inevitably, a film this bleak borders on being a comedy, with Maximilian Schell hysterical as the bullshit artist hoping to be rewarded for valour without so much as getting his hands dirty. Cowering from explosions, backtracking from orders, he’s something out of Blackadder – but in contrast James Coburn’s Steiner is ice-cool and deadly serious, a madman rendered sane by putting a Luger in his hand. Their duel is fascinating, a very Peckinpah story of principles betrayed and honour avenged, which is expertly plotted as high-stakes farce. James Mason and David Warner provide much needed class as a two-man Greek chorus, decent men whose code of honour has been so annihilated by war that all they can do is hope Steiner wins the petty but highly symbolic war of his own.
The only misstep is an encounter with a platoon of Russian women soldiers, where Peckinpah tries to highlight Steiner as a man of principle by comparing him to the rapists in his squadron. Ass with Straw Dogs, the whole thing feels queasily exploitative and unnecessary, with Peckinpah’s leering camerawork complicit in crimes which, in theory, he’s criticising.
Otherwise, it’s a film notable for pushing Peckinpah’s exceptional eye for action into untrammelled rage. Forget the blood-splattered glory Peckinpah achieved in his Westerns. This time, there is zero glamour: the mud-stained colour palette is drained of life, the actors’ faces stinking with sweat and soil. Peckinpah’s trademark rhapsodic editing splices endless barrages into repetitive, senseless slaughter, and few films have shown the brutal power of tanks as well as this.
Theoretically, the only respite comes when an injured Steiner gets R&R in a hospital, but Peckinpah maintains the dislocatory editing even here. As Steiner witnesses a general trying to shake hands with an armless paraplegic, Peckinpah delivers a surreal, hallucinatory vision of concussion and the madness of inactivity that makes you long for the light relief of the battlefield. For a man like Steiner who has nothing left, the ruthless honesty of combat is preferable to the craziness and hypocrisy of ‘peacetime.’
Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now is back in cinemas this Friday (27th) in a stunning digital restoration. Certain cinemas are also showing the film's equally deranged 'making of' doc, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse.
Failing that, both are available in a Blu-ray set on 13th June that includes hours of extras and the (superfluous) three-and-a-half hour Redux cut, so you can love the smell of napalm whatever the time of day.
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, US, 1979) Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (Fax Bahr / George Hickenlooper, US, 1991)
A flawed masterpiece outshone by its own ‘making of’ – however powerful Coppola’s Vietnam epic is, there’s nothing to compete with what happened behind the camera
By any rational standard, Apocalypse Now is one of the greatest films ever made. But then, we’re not dealing with rationality here. Endlessly complex, thrilling and maddening in equal measure, it’s a tough nut to crack. I’ve always joked it’s my 101st favourite film – a film I admire and desperately want to love, but which remains just outside of passion. It’s the best of the rest, my favourite non-favourite.
Why is this? It’s a stunning achievement, one that takes the breath away even on umpteenth viewing. So few films fully grasp the potential of filming and editing imagery in such a way as to reinvent reality, and there are – were- only a handful of directors who would even dare to pull off something so substantial and chaotic without a safety net. Today, with CGI and cautious accountancy, nobody ever will again.
It’s the high watermark of a cinema that knows no fear and no restraint, willing itself down the river in search of elusive dreams – and, as ace ‘making of’ documentary Hearts of Darkness (its equal in madness) observes, the collateral damage would kill a half-hearted project, with typhoons destroying the sets; one actor getting fired, and his replacement suffering a breakdown and heart attack; and the star completely indifferent to what was needed and not even bothering to lose weight.
What’s remarkable is that nothing is spectacle for spectacle’s sake, despite Coppola’s assertion that he was making a film in the tradition of Irwin Allen, not David Lean. The images, painstakingly lensed by Vittorio Storaro (a contender for cinema’s greatest cinematographer) are seemingly organic expressions of jungle fever and warfare, but in hindsight everything is immaculately planned. The sheer number of match cuts and double-exposures make it obvious that Coppola always intended a multiplicity of meaning in each shot, to pack the frame with symbolism that could be carried across to the next shot. And those image systems look frankly astonishing in the new digital restoration, as swirls of napalm vapour obscure hithero pin-sharp compositions, and ripples of water spreading out whenever a helicopter lands, a symbol of war-torn chaos destroying the peace of nature.
But don’t disregard the contribution of editor Water Murch, who chopped down one million feet of footage into something usuable, and then virtually invented 5.1 soundtrack to add further layers. The famous opening helicopter/ceiling fan combo is only the most overt expression of a film that is effortlessly fluid in sound and image. Together, the effect is genuinely hallucinatory, with Martin Sheen’s Willard fighting at every step of the way to avoid cracking a smile for fear of going loco. The film is partly a satire of a military mindset that needs to be boring to survive. One of the marvels of the new restoration is seeing how immaculate Sheen’s hair remains throughout, a symbol of a man determined to hang onto the outward signs of sanity against all evidence to the contrary.
Everything else, though, equals bonkers. “Little by little we went insane,” says Francis Ford Coppola – and that does infect the film, for good and ill. Coppola was determined to avoid being pretentious, and his transpositions from the source novel (Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) are ever so cheeky. The colonial Victorian-era Africa of Conrad’s imagination certainly never had to deal with a nutty Colonel busting Vietcong chops primarily to get access to good surf, or a Playboy USO performance that descends into slapstick. These are moments of satirical pop-culture genius, but it leaves Coppola paddling upriver without a getaway plan; the minute Willard arrives at Kurtz’s compounds, Coppola instinctively reaches for Conrad and flails blindly into one of the most messily indulgent endings of any film.
In terms of impact, it’s a startling coup to go so downbeat after the earlier Wagnerian bombast: sitting in the dark with Marlon Brando is visually and dramatically powerful…until he speaks. What follows is a reductive Xerox of Conrad’s weighty themes that is ponderous, silly and – yes – pretentious. It’s a mark of Coppola’s indecision that he sets up a lofty ending based on the Fisher King (the legend, not the Gilliam film) only to scrupulously ignore its ultimate implications, turning much of Brando's talk into a thematic dead end.
The result is a film that desperately needs an authorial stamp and, for all the money and talent thrown at the screen during the shoot, the saviour arrived in post-production, via the voiceover. There’s a convincing case to be made that Apocalypse Now’s auteur isn’t Conrad, Coppola or co-writer John Milius but Michael Herr, the Vietnam journalist who supplied Willard’s poetic monologues. Its talk of being “in the shit” gave Hollywood a shorthand for Vietnam war movies that made Herr the genre’s single most evocative stylist, and it’s noticeable that it was to Herr that Stanley Kubrick turned when developing Full Metal Jacket. Go and read Dispatches, Herr’s ace collection of war reportage, and it’s clear that – for all the nods to classic literature – Apocalypse Now is an adaptation of the journalist’s sardonic observations.
Coppola’s greatest coup, then, was to set up Herr's words by replicating the conditions of combat in the way he made the film, “with too many men, too much money, too much equipment.” This is the story, after all, of a director who deliberately heads to a country – the Philippines – which is embroiled in a guerrilla war, in order to secure real army pilots quite happy to blast the shit out of the jungle in the service of action cinema. The downside? At any moment, your biggest set-piece might be called off because the pilots are ordered into bombing insurgents for real.
This is Hearts of Darkness, a film that throws Apocalypse Now’s loftier ambitions into sharp relief because real-life is quite crazy enough, thank you. It’s so scarcely plausible that, if it was a fiction film, the only way you could sell it to an audience would be as the broadest of farces, a la Tropic Thunder. Even as a book it’d be hard to swallow. But the evidence is all there, because Eleanor Coppola shot hours of on-set footage of her husband at (for want of a better word) “work.”
Never mind Kilgore putting on ‘Ride of the Valkyries;’ behind the camera, Coppola was stomping around, barking orders into a walkie-talkie, with a big hat on his head. Who's satirising who? The distinction between fiction and reality breaks down at every turn, with the shoot taking on the mannerisms of the on-screen action. The Playboy extravaganza has its equivalent in the increasingly elaborate celebrations undertaken to mark the film’s rapidly-accumulating shooting anniversaries. Timothy Bottoms took speed to help play a character who was tripping out on acid. And then there’s Martin Sheen, spending his 36th birthday in a drink-fuelled dark place as a Hollywood film crew captured every moment. The extended footage of Sheen’s breakdown is especially disconcerting in the wake of his son’s recent public mania, but remains more chilling and moving than anything in Apocalypse Now. In our own way, we’re all headed upriver into the darkness.
Thanks to Optimum for giving me access to the films.
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