Tag Archives: Critics Notebook

Helter skelter

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Coverage of this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival should be along shortly. A preview of the festival was commissioned by a commercial but non-paying site and written by me, but subsequently spiked; the kind of occurrence that makes the whole unpaid film “journalism” charade sound even more ridiculous than it does when I’m explaining it to my team of accountants and the man who polishes my bullion.

Meantime: I reviewed The Purge here for Critic’s Notebook. The staging is a mess and characters do inexplicable things just to fit in with the plot, so the most interesting aspects are the borrowings from Manson-ology, which paint the film’s One Percenter outrage in a most disconcerting light. But that’s such a knotty issue that the film opts not to get stuck in – a missed opportunity having got halfway there, and not the only hint of solid conservative values. The campaign to get Lena Headey into a Marvel super-villain role rolls on, though.

And: I have a lot of time for Neil Jordan films, and although limited resources cause Byzantium to puff somewhat on its way up the hill, there are still enough subtexts about the historical plight of women living and undead alike to raise it out of any vampiric rut it looks like it might be settling into. That review is here at the same venue.

High lives

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Pedro Almodovar's I'm So Excited: Do the time warp.I reviewed I’m So Excited, the new film by Pedro Almodóvar, here at Critic’s Notebook. Although I didn’t hate it, it’s possible that Pedro and I might be through (again). However, those keen to spare me from it by having the film cast out of polite society for romanticising rape can kindly stop doing me favours. No one ever killed an idea by leaping in front of it every time it drove around the corner, having dug out their Censor’s hat and cape for the occasion. Ideas become extinct precisely because people are allowed to see them, think about them, and decide them to be toxic. To be even having this discussion about a Spanish film maker such as Almodóvar seems somehow very Anglo-Saxon.

Also at the same venue, a review of The Look of Love, whose recreation of Soho and the Revue Bar seemed skin deep at best – presumably for a reason.

And while we’re here: Iron Man Three. Ten years after I decided that Brian Tyler was the key to any decent DC Comics movie, there’s real juice in seeing the Marvel universe operate under his characteristic muted string layers; he even gives the hero a memorable theme tune, which neither of the previous composers seemed very bothered about. But seeing these stories squashed into this tiny inviolable template is now officially a chore; myths cheapened, rather than soap-operas elevated. Marvel’s movie juggernaut, gurning Stan Lee and all, has become a vast engineering project devoted to hollowing out America’s electric mythology and turning it into crack. At some point the cost becomes too high, even while the Brian Tyler big-band plays you off at the end.

Mental architecture

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I reviewed Danny Boyle’s Trance and also Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion for Critic’s Notebook.

And briefly noted:

Proving that it’s probably better to have an eye for genre and approach fantasy material from a certain detachment, rather than just build on remembered youthful delight and some kind of weird faux-nostalgia, Bryan Singer’s Jack The Giant Slayer beats Sam Raimi’s Oz all ways up. The sound of a big fantasy film with a pretty fine John Ottman score answers the same question from a different direction. Surely Singer saw this as a training exercise, a way to try the toolbox on for size before returning to the X-verse? A relatively risk-free excuse to run the current template up the flagpole and see if he could bring himself to salute?

Carlos Reygadas has confounded me before, and he still seems too keen to deny his characters grace for my liking. Post Tenebras Lux is easier to swallow than some of his films – for one thing it’s oddness is mostly text-book surrealism rather than holy terror – but it still resonates with his colossal indifference towards things that don’t deserve his disdain.

Meanwhile Olympus Has Fallen resonates with the screams of innocent tourists mown in half by gunfire and a national gnashing of teeth. The whole thing is wall to wall self-flagellation, not least when a plane cuts the Washington Monument in half and Castrates America. Gerard Butler’s producer credit makes this look like a calculated attempt to un-rom-com himself by ripping a North Korean’s arm off and hitting someone with the wet end, but then I always liked him as emo-Dracula and won’t be heard complaining.

All the troubles in the world

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Tales of the city: Anna Paquin in MargaretFor a minute there, a discussion kicked off in 2012 about whether film culture was dead, dying, comatose, reviving or healthy. But this is a vast, indigestible, daunting topic, the kind of sprawling landscape that only shows its true nature from thirty thousand feet, the same way climate change doesn’t depend on the weather forecast. And so the conversation took the easy way out and turned into list-making instead.

Trying to assess film culture by ranking the current films and forgetting the culture is looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and lists aren’t the tool for turning it around. It’s understandable that list-making is currently the proof-of-life ritual by which movie commentators show their potency, but diminishing returns set in once the number of lists on offer passes the first five thousand or so, not least since it swamps the casual audience clear out of the conversation and leaves us talking to ourselves. A better analysis will have to account for the fact that while we were waving our shopping lists at each other, mainstream movie escapism squirmed and morphed again in its role as the biggest cultural drug-delivery system on the books, and $365-million-worth of real people went to Taken 2.

In other words, a snapshot of film culture in my neck of the woods will need to include that my favorite film of the year was twelve years old and shown at a festival to a few hundred people; and that I read reviews of Killer Joe which thought it was written by a woman. Let’s not even get started on how Project X is not a teen comedy.

My shopping list for the year:

Anna Karenina
I had my say here.

Cosmopolis
Some earlier thoughts here. I like it more now than I did then.

Damsels in Distress
In which Richard Strauss composed the waltzes and the twist was popularized by someone named Chubbard Checker. Having belatedly spotted that Last Days of Disco is a stone-cold masterpiece, Damsels strikes me as quirk of a high American blend and another examination of Whit Stillman’s favorite people, those caught on the horns of doubt vs certainty. Once again the static is eventually released as song and dance; no surprise that for someone as perfectly attuned to verbal wit as Whit, musical numbers are a superior form of discourse, communication at a pitch so pure only dogs can hear it.

Dredd
Reviewed here.

Elena
Andrei Zvyagintsev’s piece of needling unease about a homely well-meaning wife who finds herself in need of her older husband’s money and ends up pondering the poisoner’s handbook has subtexts that are not exactly opaque: weep for Mother Russia, again or still. Exquisitely acted, especially by Elena Lyadova as a spark of brunette fire in the gloomy landscape, the magic touch is the addition of existing Philip Glass music, a cerebral way to generate unease without cheapening the mix with anything as superfluous as authentic noir. Any film operating under Glass has actual respiration going on, and this one breathes deeply.

Haywire
Up the amazon, says my notebook. Haywire is very knowing about what transpires when performers who ply their trade in other physical disciplines turn up as actors. In this case what transpires is Gina Carano’s posture and the striking balance of her running action, which Steven Soderbergh features in long uncut shots as the camera-car tries to keep up. Plus the film is fascinating to watch, full of space and light and color planes that prove what skilled cameramen like “Peter Andrews” can do with the RED, and expertly paced thanks to the subtle editing finesse of “Mary Ann Bernard.” What a team they make.

Margaret
Broadly speaking, Margaret looks exactly like what it is: a film by a playwright kept awake by 9/11 who wrote a script with a million words in it, found himself unable to complete, got sued, got depressed, and watched Martin Scorsese wade into the footage until something emerged that had all the rhythms and cross-cuts and rapid jags of the Scorsese experience. But broadly-speaking is no way to tackle this thing. Margaret is a New York film to the core, wracked with the dire unease of a city undergoing a painful crisis of existence but not knowing what to do about it, which is exactly what its lead character endures too. Kenneth Lonergan’s efforts have yielded my favorite type of movie, the kind powered by the belief that actors talking to each other is the sweetest sight of all. And no praise is too high for Anna Paquin, screaming and scheming and self-deluding in a fog of personal confusion. It never occurred to me before how well Ms. Paquin’s off-kilter air would suit an elliptical editing style in the Scorsese manner, but she seems to be jerking with life’s electricity. (The biggest disappointment of the re-edited longer version is that this current is largely quenched.) The mind boggles at what might have happened if Margaret had come out on schedule just a few years after 25th Hour, in which Ms. Paquin incarnated an entirely different pole of the post-Ground Zero experience with equal fire. She could have written her own ticket to the Moon.

Room 237
The tendency of documentary makers to be coolly aloof on matters of pop culture lets Room 237 adopt a serious expression without ever actually presenting a coherent position on its own topic. But more to the point, and pace Jonathan Rosenbaum, the film perfectly explores one vein of modern film reviewing: the idea that art should not be allowed to ripple outwards and become internalized to influence and cajole, but is instead something to burrow into and unlock and nudge in the ribs about its cool in-jokes. Much cobblers to that.

Rust and Bone
The state-of-the-art in CGI limb removal is impressive, but it’s Marion Cotillard’s physicality, heaving and hauling her useless body across the floor and the look in her eyes when she does it, that stings. Plus the film syncs neatly with Jacques Audiard’s earlier The Beat That My Heart Skipped and the frustrations of Romain Duris’ disobedient fingers.

Silver Linings Playbook
Not a great film, but clearly Jennifer Lawrence’s time has come. I guess not many people saw The Burning Plain, or her time would have come in 2008. Her kohl-eyed petulance is the second-best thing seen in Silver Linings Playbook; the best thing is the brief glimpse of a cinema marquee advertising Midnight Meat Train, which makes me think I’ve misjudged someone in this film’s chain of command completely.

And my Film Of The Year, the year in question being 2000: Kaza-hana
Courtesy of the Edinburgh Film Festival’s Shinji Sômai retrospective this year, another humane tumult, but an interior kind, with more compassion and less dread. Kyôko Koizumi, bracelets jangling, dances around her depression on a gorgeously photographed cross-country jaunt before finally succumbing to the void next to an icy river. By that point you would have given a lot to stop that from happening. Luckily Tadanobu Asano takes care of it instead, thus getting his atonement for Battleship in twelve years early.

Other films deserving mentions honorable and otherwise:

John Carter: Barsoom blitz. All sympathies to Lynn Collins, stuck with invoking Dune for an in-joke.
Holy Motors: bonjour tristesse.
Killer Joe: malice, texas. Reviewed here.
Flying Blind: for featuring my neighborhood at its most cinematic.
Le Havre: for featuring Jean-Pierre Darroussin as an individual somewhere between Inspector Clouseau and one half of George and Mildred.
The Avengers: Operation Galactic Shit-Storm. Paging Bryan Singer, again.

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And fair’s fair: one place to be for discussion of film culture that included the culture was the Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival, covered this year here and here.

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Bodies, rest and motion: Gina Carano in Haywire

Pax Britannica

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James Bond and M in Scotland. I would have paid actual money to make Bond turn to his boss at this point and say “It is now that time of day that I have set apart for Debussy.”

I reviewed Skyfall for Critic’s Notebook. It is a handsome film, shot and scored by master craftsmen; there’s no limit to the fun of seeing James Bond breathing the musical air of Thomas Newman’s fabulous Gil Evans deep chords, for those scant few seconds where that happens.

On the other hand, the film does nothing – can do nothing – to solve the dilemma of what Bond is supposed to be like in an era where a thousand other armed orphans have crowded in on his act, and opts to throw up its hands in surrender. It pretends not to care, and perhaps genuinely doesn’t; but the result seems more like an extension of 007′s eternal screen identity crisis rather than a solution. It’s been a few years since I remembered that Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor was routinely derided as a Bond villain, and I rather wish it hadn’t been Skyfall that reminded me. Plus the statute of limitations on further misuse of John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom is never.

The review is here.

Also: mentioned by David Hudson at Fandor.

The curse of closure

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I reviewed the new film version of On the Road for Critic’s Notebook, another theoretically Unfilmable Book that was always perfectly filmable on the understanding that the end result would not be “On the Road”. Cloud Atlas will be along shortly to restart the argument all over again, even though David Mitchell seemed to model his major printed novel on your average major TV miniseries quite blatantly. There isn’t a moment in that book that doesn’t feel camera-ready.

On the Road is not so camera-ready. Jack Kerouac’s unspooling first-person prose creates a tide of subjectivity that barrels forward forever, no destination in sight, details piling up behind it in large heaps, incidental characters receding in the rear view mirror with their questions unanswered. Director Walter Salles and writer Jose Rivera handle all that by filleting out a decent through-line that tries to keep the tone of melancholy intact, although a feel for the period never seems to be as high on the agenda. There are other costs too.

One stems from the suspicion, whenever contemplating The Beats from this distance, that they would have run a mile from the thought of being considered as cool as their position in the culture now requires. Kerouac found Neal Cassady beatific and loved him for it, but at least in the book the reader can make up their own mind on the topic when faced with their invisible avatars. For a film you have to find an actor who actually is beatific, or take the brave decision to cast someone who isn’t. Either way things are uncomfortably clarified immediately. A worse problem for this particular film is the absence of the actual landscape that Kerouac describes. It’s big sky country all right, but not the right one.

Then there’s the conclusion. The film ends with its main character leaping to the typewriter to get cracking with the writing of On the Road. Which reminded me in turn of the film version of The Rum Diary, which ends with the creation of something recognisably like Hunter S Thompson, the scent of Richard Nixon’s blood in his nostrils. Neither bears much relation to what happened on the page.

These odd self-creating grace notes are more than just a wish to close a book’s loose ends for narrative purposes, although they might achieve that too. There’s an urge, a need, to haul redemption into the frame before the house lights come back up, and to do it about post-war decades whose messy failures nag constantly on the culture. It wants to beatify the very things it’s uneasily criticising at the same time. It feels like a very American anxiety.

The Critic’s Notebook review is here.

Less Bergman, more Crazy Frog

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Flicker. Så är det.

David Hudson declined to aggregate much coverage from the Edinburgh International Film Festival this year. He limited himself to a couple of the festival press releases, and one article each from Indiewire, Filmmaker and The Scotsman. This speaks volumes, should anyone be listening.

A first round-up for Little White Lies covering week one, give or take, is posted here.

The second, covering a conspicuously more vibrant week two, is posted here at the same venue.

And for Critic’s Notebook, five films deserving a further few hundred words:

Killer Joe is a wicked black comedy about male impotence and a reminder that Gina Gershon knows no fear.

7 Days in Havana is over-extended but catches aspects of Cuba that normally get left behind.

Dragon is Western-friendly wuxia with a Weinstein Company flavour.

Shadow Dancer sits at the point where TV and cinema theoretically overlap but where TV usually wins out, the same space that Page Eight occupied last year. But Andrea Riseborough can do no wrong.

Meanwhile, the British remake of Pusher occupies a space all on its own.

No room in any of them to mention Flicker, the black comedy whose vision of life in Swedish industry stirred many repressed memories, most of which I was glad to find were still there. I wore that hat.

Titanic

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My editor at Critic’s Notebook requested a review of Prometheus that didn’t hold back on the spoilers. Here is that very thing. As with certain other Ridley Scott films, characters are framed in visual environments that make you doubt your own eyes, while saying things that make you put your fingers in your ears. One day cinema will reclaim the further shores of sci-fi from television, strip away the small screen’s thin characterizations and habitual pacing in 20-minute units, and learn to take deep breaths again. This is not that day, although the look on Noomi Rapace’s face when she got to page 90 or so of the script must have been a peach.

To add: The most illuminating realization about Prometheus and its weaknesses.

Prometheus prayer

That this image, having been in every trailer for months, of Rapace bloodied and stripped and seemingly praying in desperation in the face of a universe wreaking disgraceful havoc on her beliefs and her uterus, surely the absolute crux point for the character’s every fibre and principle, isn’t there. It’s been left out, apparently superfluous.

For the birds

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xkcd knows the scoreI reviewed The Raven for Critic’s Notebook. I did this mostly because I remember coming out of The Sure Thing in 1985 convinced that John Cusack was a superhuman actor equipped for any film genre dreamed up by man, and wanted to see if the theory still held water. Which it does, if you charitably call the current model of 15-year-old-friendly un-horrific horror films a genre.

The film makers never actually bring up the name of Alan Moore, but they hardly need to. The man’s shadow will loom automatically over a film in which a historical literary figure adopts contemporary mannerisms and lands himself in a tale so self-reflexive that it feels like its own graphic novel. The fact that The Raven also manages to look a lot like a cross between From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, filmed in the well-known Baltimore suburbs of Belgrade and Budapest on sets lighted by the output of one small firefly, and by the man who made V for Vendetta to boot, just makes the wizard of Northampton’s presence more palpable.

Any resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe is coincidence, but Mr Cusack can still get the acting job well and truly done. The review is here over at Critic’s Notebook, and yes, once I realized that “Nevermore” rhymes with “Alan Moore,” one thing led to another.

Meanwhile…

Four thousand miles east and forty-five years later, Georges Duroy rides again in the new version of Bel Ami. This time the general air of Now is more considered, since these are actors with distinctly modern ways of going about their business, and the plot’s interests in desert wars and press corruption are kept on the boil between all the un-corseting and de-girdling.

It also shows three composed and seemingly self-possessed woman drawn helplessly into bed with a floppy-haired youth at very little urging, leaving the story open to its most misogynist reading. Robert Pattinson gamely submitting to a fine bout of joyless sex isn’t really enough to balance the books, and I can think of several folk who might hate it, for reasons both warranted and not.

Whether Bel Ami’s tweaks and mannerisms energize the historical-drama trade or leave it looking a bit rootless is a murky question, but all the right texts have been studied. A film that remembers how Uma Thurman is naturally built for period drama is setting off on the right lines, and this one goes on to hire Anthony Higgins and Christopher Fulford for cameos of several seconds each. If only it could have wheeled the three of them into the same drawing room for a shouting match. That review is here, at the same venue .

Mondo apocalypto

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The annual year-end bun grapple over at Critic’s Notebook brings the inevitable list: Ten films I liked from 2011.

At this rate next December’s apocalypse will be caused entirely by the posting online of more Top Ten Films of 2012 lists than the cosmos can allow.

Updated to add:

I didn’t realise that Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty – that’s Emily Browning above, in the process of applying for the job – never got a review at Critic’s Notebook when it was released in the UK or subsequently when it broke cover in the US. It’s also one of those films that seems to have left the New Model Collective of film reviewers in a bit of a muddle. So for the record, set the Wayback Machine for Things I Wrote Down Last October (now with fewer typos):

Julia Leigh Sleeps Furiously: Sleeping Beauty

None of the many calamitous ways in which the sight of old men queueing up to fondle a comatose Emily Browning could have gone off the rails actually happen in Sleeping Beauty, since it turns out that Julia Leigh is a) a clinician with a painter’s eye for compositions and tones, and b) not mucking about. She’s also not exactly breaking new ground, pulling on threads already tackled in one form or another by Kubrick and Bunuel, and indeed by Jane Campion, whose name on the label seems to have confused those forgetting that Campion’s waded out into frustrated sexuality and the human textures of homesteads before. But not quite like this. To say Leigh scores a bullseye on some complex ambiguities of masculine power and feminine voids is an understatement. Sleeping Beauty is taut as a stretched rubber band, set squarely in the art house wheelhouse with acres of still compositions and sound design to let the mind roam around, but with the tonal refresher of the whole Australian setting and screen acting style kicking in all the time. It’s also roughly as erotic as eye surgery, and anyone detecting actual misogyny or anti-feminism in its sights and sounds deserves a close encounter with the mighty pillow of truth, especially if they’re male. In fact your reaction may hinge entirely upon exactly which side of life’s median line you happen to find yourself.

Leigh doesn’t bother to hide the cogs, so Sleeping Beauty is transparent. Browning is orally penetrated for money in the name of science in scene one and doesn’t get much joy from it, so her half of the agenda is in plain sight from the off. The meatier side comes later via the three old men who queue up for a grope, three fearless old actors whose conflicted and conflicting horrors are only slightly weakened by noticing that one of them was in Mad Max when the world was younger. Some reviewers have detected pretension everywhere, but the film’s only actual tinge of the stuff comes via a long literary monologue delivered straight to camera by Old Man One (the interweb tells me it’s a story by Ingeborg Bachmann), shortly before he bares a bod that looks in need of a thrash with a carpet beater and is revealed to be hung like a dormouse. Not sure that bravery is quite the word for that.

All the rigid lines and staged country-house formality of it keep the focus squarely where Leigh intends it to be: on the minds rather than the bodies. Rachel Blake’s madam is carved from some kind of marble, and if her deportment wasn’t all you needed to know about her then the way her pinky finger locks at precisely thirty degrees while pouring the tea fills in the gaps. Leigh uses fades rather than cuts, the classic metaphor for decay and unconsciousness, and builds them into an Aussie setting with all its body consciousness and free-wheeling machismo intact – states of mind which are then unpicked by Leigh with a laser microscope, in a manor-house lit by southern hemisphere sunlight. Emily Browning’s naked body is on screen so often you almost ignore it, but the varying views and vistas out of the windows she parades in front of at different points in the plot are at least as significant. Look at the framing of her alabaster body among the other olive-skined brunettes and tell me this director isn’t in complete control of mood, tone and perspective.

Browning’s bravery in doing this thing is beyond question, and at least her style looks a better fit with the actual story here than it was in Sucker Punch. But the dilemma that always hangs around screen portrayals of shallow characters applies: casting someone who’s not a born firebrand might suit the story, but dents the film. Browning is obliged to downplay so far she’s practically planted in the ground, swinging between being a hollowed-out void to strangers and a conflicted bitch to people she knows. She comes across as an emptier vessel than the investigation underway can really use. Faced with a cameoing Amazonian brunette I’d not seen before named Mirrah Foulkes, whose six-foot black-clad face-decorated usually-topless frame glides around as if following lines of magnetism while she radiates the kind of air that could lead a man to his doom, Browning seems lost for words. She wasn’t the only one.