Flickers...

It's not been my finest year for cinemagoing... *flicks through diary* ...four times to be precise.  Two new films, two old.  I am nothing if not disciplined!

My first film of the year was Pedro Almodóvar's LOS AMANTES PASAJEROS (I'M SO EXCITED) and I was!  It has not been well-received with carping about it being too camp and too much like his early 'movida' films.  Which was probably why I enjoyed it as much as I did.  Pedro can't win, when his films went through a transition during the mid-nineties the general consensus was "Why isn't he doing more funny films like he used to make?"  The fact that he can move across styles and genres marks out his excellence.

Yes it was lightweight and ephemeral but it also had a wicked sense of humour - his characters here aren't given depth and deep emotions, they are brash, glossy and non-stop talking for longer than a full Madrid minute.

Taking his cue from the "Airport" film series, a plane on a routine flight is discovered to have damaged landing gear and only a limited amount of fuel and we watch as the passengers and crew react to the situation.  Only here the crew have access to copious amounts of drink and drugs - which they eventually share with the passengers!

As with any disaster film we have a motley bunch in first-class, a high-class bondage madame, a Mexican hit-man, a recently married couple, a psychic, a businessman etc. and of course we also get to find out what has brought them to be on that plane.  Mostly though we concentrate on the three gay cabin crew: the wonderful Javier Camara as Joserra who is having an affair with the pilot, Raul Arevalo as thin-as-a-whip Ulloa and chubby Fajas (Carlos Areces) who never flies without his portable shrine!

For us Pedro fans another treat was seeing Cecilia Roth (star of his first film PEPI, LUCI BOM as well as the magnificent TODO SOBRE MI MADRE) as the high-class dominatrix and Lola Dueñas (VOLVER, LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS) as the lovelorn psychic Bruna.  There are also two delightful cameos from long-time Pedro stars Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz as the airport workers who accidentally damage the plane.

 

It was fun, filthy and flew by, the only time the film seemed to pall was when we left the interior of the plane and returned to earth.  The highlight of the film being the trolly-dollys choreographed dance routine around the plane to The Pointer Sisters' I'M SO EXCITED (which is where the English language title comes from) - and on the subject of music, Alberto Iglesias' score is a major component in it's success.  If you want to view the film as a satire on Spain's current malaise you can, if you want to view it as a hymn to camp gay men - hey that's there as well!

 

As usual, I came out wondering where this remarkable film maker will take us next.

My second new film was Baz Luhrmann's much-vaunted version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY.  This one was always going to be tricky for me, firstly because GATSBY is my favourite novel (I re-read it again last August) and secondly, because I have a problem with Luhrmann.  I loved WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO + JULIET but his other films have always annoyed the hell out of me.

Luhrmann has stated that he made the film because he loves the book but I can't believe it's the same one that I do.

I have sat staring at this screen trying to find a way in to blogging about the film but I simply can't.  Let me try it this way:

What did I like?  Leonardo DiCaprio gave a performance of pure star quality, suggesting the loneliness and quiet desperation behind Gatsby's studied pose.  He also conveyed the unquenchable hope that lay behind all his efforts to win Daisy back.  DiCaprio also had real chemistry with co-star Carey Mulligan.  The trouble with Mulligan though is she is such an intelligent actress that I felt she was simply too grounded to play Daisy.  Mia Farrow was the perfect Daisy in the 1974 version, highly-strung, maddening, gossamer.

 

 

Occasionally a screen image would appear which made me gasp with amazement and his vision of the desolate valley of ashes, that stretch of misery between the rich worlds of West Egg and New York was exactly how I had pictured it in my mind when reading the book.

 

While I disliked Luhrmann having Nick Carraway narrating the story to a doctor in an alcoholic sanatorium, I did like his occasional use of the actual text disappearing on and off the screen.  It felt to me like Luhrmann was showing up all his outlandish visuals - in the end, there are Fitzgerald's words.

 

 

What didn't I like?  Have you got a while?  The sheer dizzying absurdity of his vision was so relentless that when the visuals stopped, it was difficult to concentrate on the quieter scenes.  The worst excess was splurged on the impromptu party that Tom and Myrtle have at their apartment in New York.  Fitzgerald gives us a scene with Nick trapped in a small flat with bores and boozers, Luhrmann instead gives us a wild orgy with a hallucinating Nick.  It's all so crass.

 

My real problem lies in the fact that Luhrmann strips his characters of any saving graces apart from Gatsby, Daisy, Nick, possibly Jordan.  Tom Buchanan is a teeth-grinding, moustache-twirling villain straight out of a bad silent movie, Wilson is a snivelling loser and Myrtle is a low-rent slut.  Compare this with the way the characters are represented in Jack Clayton's superior 1974 film.  They all have key moments which at least give them a humanity: Tom and Wilson both have scenes mourning Myrtle and crucially, Myrtle is given the speech at the party where she explains how she first met Tom on a train.  Of course it also helps having actors of the calibre of Bruce Dern, Scott Wilson and the late Karen Black.  In this film Joel Edgerton gives a truly lousy performance as Tom while Isla Blair and Jason Clarke bring nothing to the table.  Luhrmann even changes the plot to have Nick tell Wilson that Gatsby is the man responsible for Myrtle's death.

 

 

Damning as well - especially from someone who says he loves the book - is that he changes the conclusion of the story.  In the book, an old man shows up at Gatsby's mansion in time for the funeral who turns out to be his father who explains to Tom his son's determination to 'better' himself and to marvel at what his son achieved.  Here Gatsby himself tells Nick in a few lines of his background which robs the story of any real context.

 

But right at the end, Luhrmann surprised me by including Fitzgerald's haunting last lines which Clayton left out of his film:

 

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

 

I know I will be borne back to the book again, I'm not sure about this film version.  Even if we did get a free Stella Artois pint glass after the screening!

 





After having seen Leo diCaprio's latest fillum at the weekend I had a look on IMDB out of idle curiosity to see what his next film is going to be. My jaw hit the deck.

He is due to star in an upcoming biopic of FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, scripted by Lance Black who won an Oscar for MILK and the film is to be directed by one Clint Eastwood. One can assume that scripted by Black the film will address the rumours of Hoover being a closet gayer and transvestite. I am sure Leo will be up to the challenge... no, what shocked me was that Eastwood should be handling this material.

The reason I am worried by this is due to whether or not Jean Seberg will be included.

In 1968 Eastwood and Seberg started filming the screen musical PAINT YOUR WAGON and during the extended location shoot they started a love affair. Eastwood gave Jean enough encouragement for her to tell then-husband Romain Gary that she wanted a divorce only for Eastwood to fly back to Hollywood and end the relationship - one of his several extra-marital affairs, one of which had already produced an illegitimate daughter.

At the same time Jean became passionate about the plight of inner-city black children and started giving financial support to various groups including the Black Panthers. This came to the attention of the right-wing J. Edgar Hoover who immediately started a wire-tap surveillance on her as well as planting stories to discredit her in the public eye. Jean realised she was being followed and repeatedly tried to alert people she was being spied on.

When it was announced that Jean was pregnant in 1970, one such fake story was printed in the Joyce Haber gossip column in May of that year in the LA Times. A "Guess Who Don't Sue" type piece gave enough clues to the fact that Miss A was Seberg and finished with the scoop that the father was a prominent Black Panther leader.

Jean and her now-reunited husband did their best to quash the press sniffing about but in early August Jean was hospitalised with a suspected overdose of sleeping pills. In late August the final blow came when Newsweek printed the story as a news piece in which she was actually named. Jean Two days after it was printed Jean went into labour and the baby girl died two days later.

Jean returned to America to bury her child in her hometown of Marshalltown, Iowa, making sure that the open coffin was viewed in the funeral home so the world could see she had given birth to a white baby. What was known only to Romain Gary however was that the child had been fathered by a Mexican dissident who Jean had briefly seen during their estrangement.

Although she continued to work in European films, Jean's mental health declined under the weight of the guilt over the sleeping pill overdose while pregnant and the ongoing paranoia of being spied upon with the allied addictions of alcohol and drugs. Every year she attempted suicide on the date of her daughter's birth.

In August 1979, nine years almost to the day after her daughter died, Jean was found dead from a massive overdose of barbiturates and alcohol in the back seat of her car near her apartment in Paris. She had been missing for eleven days. The coroner returned a verdict of probable suicide although there has always been conjecture as to possible foul play.I have never understood the high regard afforded Eastwood by the critics - the sexual politics in his films invariably stink - and now he is taking on this film biography of a man who had direct influence of the fate of a woman he purportedly had feelings for but who he in his own way used.

One hopes that the 80 year old Eastwood will still have time to show some sympathy to the memory of Jean Seberg.

For the first time in months and months and months O and I went to a picture show - they have sound and everything nowadays. The film that was honoured by our presence was Christopher Nolan's sci-fi epic INCEPTION.I must say although I was initially thrown and floundered for about 20 minutes I soon found my dreamscape feet and was hooked throughout the film's lengthy running time.

The screen it was showing in was one of the Odeon's smallest and there were only a handful of us there until just as the lights went down for the obligatory ads when a constant stream of punters appeared and by the the time the film proper started it was full! Luckily they were very quiet.
The convoluted plot involves Leonardo di Caprio (filling out with every new film) as Cobb, the best man you can employ to enter someone's dreams and generally move things about in there for corporate gain. But Cobb and his sidekick Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) have their most challenging job yet when the shadowy - aren't they always? - businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) wants them to infiltrate the dreamworlds of a rival Fischer (the oddly featured Cillian Murphy).

As Saito wants an untried action, a thought to be implanted in deep sub-consciousness, Cobb gathers together a team to help him - the cocky impersonator Eames (Tom Hardy), the King of sedatives Yusuf (Dileep Rao) and Ariadne (Ellen Page) a young architecture student to design the landscape the dream will take place in.However Ariadne discovers a secret Cobb has kept from the others - his dreams are haunted by his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) who appears to be bent on revenge for him living on without her. But once inside the rival's head they find that they are all in danger as Fischer has previously been treated for such intrusions and has a personal army to thwart any attempt to interfere with his dreams.

A race against time ensues - can the team manage to implant doubt in his mind? Can they escape the businessman's dream army? Can Cobb escape from his tortured memories of Mal - or will she get her revenge? Ahh go and see the film and find out!As I said while I was there I has hooked on the journey our intrepid band take but since then I have had a few doubts about it. I read an interesting review where a female critic took several swipes at Christopher Nolan's vision. I have to agree that the dreamscapes are remarkably prosaic - rainy NY streets, hotel, an empty city of lakes and high-rises and, most boring of all, an arctic bunker a la James Bond.

I am hoping Nolan would respond by saying that the visions are the boring businessman not his. But where was the surrealism that makes dreams such a challenge usually in film? Where was the wondrous colour and strange juxtaposition? Dreams should be something unlike life - not like so many dull action films. I fear also the lengthy dream level set in the arctic had the film loosening it's grip on me.Also, while it was good that the Cobb - Ariadne relationship doesn't devolve into a standard love story, I have the sneaking suspicion that this could be because Nolan really has no idea how to write a credible female character. The potentially fascinating character of Mal is written rather large as a man's nightmare woman - it is thanks to the hypnotic Cotillard that she emerges as a haunting creation. It's very much a Boy Film - it's very father-based, mothers are never referred to. I also found it rather irksome that the whole film was ultimately resolved by a daddy and kids Happy Ending.The performances are all luckily from the same dictionary of dreams page. Leo has a role which is surprisingly an echo of his last one in SHUTTER ISLAND - husband haunted by the death of his wife having flashbacks to his boy and girl playing in the garden! Like, Leo... let it go lover! Actually he gives another fine performance. He is nicely partnered by fellow former child-actor Gordon-Levitt who gets the best of the hotel sequence.Tom Hardy steals every scene he's in as Eames the laconic forger who can change into any likeness in any dream, his sardonic lines give the film a much needed dash of humour. Ellen Page is fine as the architecture student who realises Cobb's obsession will jeopardise the job and Ken Watanabe is fine although sometimes incoherent as Saito while Michael Caine and Pete Postlethwaite give telling cameos as the fathers of Cobb and Fischer.

Constant Reader, you will know I have rated Marion Cotillard's performances in LA VIE EN ROSE and NINE and here again she gives a film a vibrant shot of genuine pain and febrile intensity as Mal, so you yearn for her next appearance. I just wish Nolan had given her more screen time.I am sure the film will intrigue and have filmsites a-buzz for a while, how long it lives in the memory though will have to be seen. I would however recommend you see it on the big screen while you can as the film will diminish if seen on a smaller screen.

Constant Reader... I am in a peculiar position. To the best of my knowledge it has never happened before in all my blogging years. THAT momentous.

Constant Reader... I have to tell you about FOUR recent visits to the cinema.

Four.

In the past few years I have sometimes managed that in a year. Ok... better dive in... but don't panic... I won't do the full nine yards about them!

First one off the rank was NANNY McPHEE & THE BIG BANG. I had liked Emma's first incarnation as the magical Nanny who - Poppins stylee - appears seemingly out of nowhere JUST as a mother or father is at the end of their tether.

In the first film it was a widowed 19th Century Colin Firth unable to cope with a fractious brood, here the action moves forward to WWII and Maggie Gyllenhaal is attempting to run her husband's family farm while he is overseas while she also attempts to work in the local shop, hindered more than helped by the addled Mrs. Docherty (Maggie Smith).

Her three children are horrified when their posh nephews arrive, packed off from London by uncaring parents using air raids as an excuse. All Hell breaks loose as Gyllenhaal dangles from the end of her rope... thunder rolls, lightening flashes... and there's Nanny McPhee at the door.

The film starts a little overly-frantic, with screaming kids and an uneven pace that doesn't bode well for the film but with the arrival of Emma the film calms down as she teaches her five lessons for a happy household.

Director Susannah White then keeps the kid-friendly comedy going but also manages to allow in moments of touching humanity as when a pastoral picnic is interrupted with a dreaded telegram and when the posh boy (Eros Vlahos) confronts his emotionally cold military father (Ralph Fiennes).Emma of course gives an assured and witty performance and her script quietly builds to a moving climax when Maggie Smith's character reveals a charming link to the first film and a figure is seen walking towards the family as Nanny McPhee leaves them.

The film boasts quirky roles for Rhys Ifans, Sinead Matthews and Katy Brand as the agents of mean, charming comic turns by Sam Kelly and Bill Bailey, and White elicits strong performances from her child stars notably Vlahos, Rosie Taylor-Ritson and Asa Butterfield (building on his arresting performance in THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS).I have a feeling that one day NANNY McPHEE AND THE BIG BANG will be up there with THE RAILWAY CHILDREN as a classic British family film.

And now for something completely different...

Martin Scorsese's SHUTTER ISLAND is his fourth film with Leonardo DiCaprio, much to the critics' chagrin. Leo gives a committed - no pun intended - multi-layered performance here and his casting as a Big Film Star is as important in this as to any qualities he has an actor.

Set in the repressive atmosphere of post-war 1950s America, the plot starts off as an intriguing film-noir thriller - Detective Teddy Daniels (DiCaprio) and a new partner (Mark Ruffalo) arrive at an asylum for the criminally insane on a bleak island off the Boston coast. They have been asked to investigate the disappearance of one of the inmates overnight who has literally vanished from her locked cell. The only clue he finds is a hidden scribbled note in her cell wondering who the 67th prisoner on the island is... Danels knows the island only holds 66.

The air of lowering oppression is exacerbated by the freak storm that breaks out that night forcing them to remain on the island and slowly DiCaprio's character begins to suspect that this most secretive of places holds a frightening secret. He views the silky head psychiatrist (Ben Kingsley) with suspicion and the psychiatrist's German associate (Max von Sydow) with ill-disguised contempt.Daniels - as with any film-noir hero - is a man with an unquiet soul: he witnessed the horrors of Dachau when his platoon liberated it and the personal horror of his wife being killed in an arson attack on their apartment building by a psychotic janitor.

The Detective confides in his sidekick that he has an ulterior motive for agreeing to take the case as he found out previously that his wife's killer is one of the prisoners held on the island. The film slowly changes into a full-blown horror film as Daniels realises that all the secrets are possibly held in the forbidding Civil War fort in the centre of the prison that holds the most dangerous inmates.Suspecting himself being drugged, he fights off visions of Dachau and of his dead wife alerting him that her killer is there somewhere and determines to get to the heart of this nightmarish situation.

There has been much critical debate as to the manner in which Scorsese has filmed Dennis Lehane's bestseller as he really does throw in everything but the kitchen sink into the nightmare world of SHUTTER ISLAND but I feel as if now that the Best Director Oscar of Damocles that has hung over his head has finally been won Scorsese is just having a ball, using all the tricks in the cinematic cupboard under the stairs to scare the bejeebus out of the audience.I suspect that the big plot twist - that is no real surprise when it comes - is another reason why it has not had the rave reviews one would suspect - people by and large like to believe in narrative in film and once the carpet is pulled out from under them they are largely distrustful of the fact that they were 'conned' by the slight-of-hand. I suspect the film warrants another viewing - just to see it with the knowledge of hindsight.

I enjoyed the sheer Ghost Train thrill of seeing the film on a big screen with sound effects echoing around me - the film also has one of the most genuinely chilling soundtracks, compiled by Robbie Robertson from various recorded works of modern classical and avant-garde composers. It's worth staying for the end credits just to be spooked by the mash-up of Dinah Washington's haunting vocal for "This Bitter Earth" woven into Max Richter's "On The Nature Of Daylight".With excellent performances across the board, DiCaprio holds the audiences attention throughout - the only jarring note being the slight suspicion that he is channeling Jack Nicholson's performance from CHINATOWN.

Next up to the ocky is the curio AGORA from Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar.
I have heard your cry Constant Reader "When oh when is someone going to make a film of Hypatia, the Greek Egyptian teacher and philosopher who caused a schism between the Roman Prefect Orestes and the Christian leader Cyril?"

Well Amenábar heard your cry too. Whether you should have kept your gob shut or he should have had his iPod earphones in I have yet to resolve.

I hadn't the slightest clue of the story of how the Greek atheists, Jewish believers and Roman powers were swept away by the onslaught of Christian fundamentalism in the 4th Century AD. For some reason we weren't taught that in school. But luckily Amenábar picked up on it somewhere along the line and obviously thought "Aha... religious fundamentalism, middle east, women being banned from study, statues being toppled to overthrow regimes... this is all so topical!"Well bigotry is always au currant somewhere but the obvious parallels with today are - well a bit obvious.

It's an ambitious film and it's to be applauded for trying to make the sort of 'intimate epic' that David Lean and Anthony Mann would have attempted. But by Isis, it's so leaden. We get revolt after revolt, stonings, burnings, blood, fire, corpses by the binload... but i was aware from quite soon after it started that I was staring at it, not watching it.

Rachel Weisz certainly gives a thoughtful and nuanced performance - I had never noticed her odd resemblance to Charlotte Rampling before - and she has a rare intelligence on screen but Hypatia sadly remains a pillar of virtue and intellect all the way through - she seems so unconcerned by her obvious fate that it is hard to feel anything for her character. Some sign of doubt or even a sense of humour might have made her more human.

The supporting actors are given more running around and shouting to do but to little obvious effect of making one even remotely concerned in their character's destiny.

Max Minghella - son of the late director Anthony - has a dog of a role as Davus, Hypatia's servant who loves her but who defects to the Christian cause thereby endangering her life. He glowers at anything and everything but his character's sudden defection back to helping her seems forced and the ending flies in the face of what is known of her demise, contrived to give her a dignity that was ill-afforded her.Oscar Isaac is able to bring more subtlety to his role of Hypatia's former student - and ardent admirer - Orestes, who after the upheaval becomes the Roman Prefect and finds himself caught between the hardline Christians and the atheist Hypatia. He gives an interesting performance but again, with no attempt by Amenábar to humanise the character his character is oddly becalmed.The nasty Cyril - dear Horus that name! - is played with an unrelenting mad-eyed stariness by Sami Samir that certainly makes him a hissable villain but again, I found myself aching for some varying of the one-note characterisation.The film certainly looks impressive - it won 7 production Goya Awards in Spain this year - with it's evocative sets suggesting the city of Alexandria (the film was shot in Malta) and Amenábar certainly pulls off some stylish touches such as when the Christian mob ransacks the library they are shot from above as the film speeds up faster and faster, the pillagers resembling a ravaging hoard of insects.

But also he has hit on the notion that to suggest chapters in the story he will zoom out of the city and contemplate the world in the cosmos before zeroing back into the city again like some ancient world DHL advert. Once or twice ok - it fits in with Hypatia's quest for the facts of astronomy - but after a while it is just another distancing effect in a film that really doesn't need any more barriers to engaging with it, a pity as Weisz certainly shines amid the film's torpid atmosphere.So finally to the last film of the bunch and to a director who rather than inducing disinterest by too little connection with the characters, manages it by overuse of his style.

I speak of......although Alice In Burtonland would be more appropriate.

We saw this at the iMax in Waterloo which is a very odd experience... all screen, no atmosphere.

So here we surely have the last shake out of Burton's over-used visual tricks. One would have thought that Alice and Burton would go together perfectly but I felt there to be little connection between him and the material - it all looked exactly as I expected it to.

Only once was I genuinely intrigued by the imagery which was when Alice used the severed heads of the Red Queen's victims as stepping stones as they floated in the castle moat.

The visualisation of the characters was certainly interesting, just this side of disturbing but again I felt like Burton was soft-pedalling - I don't know whether this was due to the length of the artistic spoon he used to sup with the Disney organisation or whether it was down to the bog-standard storyline he had to work with.
The intriguing jump-off of an older Alice returning to Wonderland - or Underland as the natives call it - is soon dissipated as the whole premise turns out to be one long meander to a climactic duel between her and the Jabberwocky. It didn't help that we had previously seen a trailer for the new CGI-fest CLASH OF THE TITANS which ends with a duel with a big feck-off monster so rather than a thrilling climax we are given a by-the-numbers Big Battle that seems de-rigour for these sort of films. Sadly by this time I had kinda switched off having been dulled into submission by the torturous route that had led us to this. it seemed to involve a lot of traipsing around for no discernible purpose than to drag out the film's running time.

I also think the idea of presenting the film in 3-D led to the film to look even more tired - it wasn't even filmed using the process but was added on afterwards and it shows. Occasionally something would grab my attention - the Cheshire cat was always looked forward to - but it all just seemed to dress up the fact that Burton seems to have run out of ideas.Much has been made of Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen and she certainly perked the film up but I was alarmed how much of the character seems ripped off from Miranda Richardson's Queenie from BLACKADDER 2. The success of her performance though robbed the film of any other strong female presence - Alice was cookie-cutter Burton heroine: pale-faced and with hardly any life in her, and I found Anne Hathaway's White Queen character forgettable as I watched her.And then there's Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. Of course the plot had to find much for him to do but as soon as he would appear on screen I was praying for him to get off again. He brought nothing to the film but the worst excesses of his previous Burton characters - excluding SWEENEY TODD - and as usual, this awful passivity.I think it's about time they took a break from each other - they seem to bring out the worst in each other when they are let loose in Fantasyland. I think SWEENEY TODD is an interesting exception as the form dictated that they couldn't play it cute.

I also think it's odd that critics are happier to find fault with DiCaprio and Scorsese than with Depp and Burton. Give me SHUTTER ISLAND over this misfire anyday.

My advice to Burton? Start making films with a genuinely anarchic performer from ALICE...