June 2013

They Crawl

2020-09-192013-06-29 by Steve

Yes, They Nest was a stupid film, but it did at least have a couple of very good squirmy moments – stuff we felt if not privileged to have seen, then at least slightly sickened by. They Crawl, I’m sad to report, doesn’t. Close reading of the credits reveals no connection in terms of cast and crew (not even SFX or stunts) between the two films, meaning there’s just a personal pronoun in common, just the They. And insects, of course. However, They Crawl does hit us with two recognisable names – Tone Loc and Mickey Rourke. But fans of the Funky Cold Medina star and the one-time contender who went off to be a boxer and lost most of his looks and savvy shouldn’t get too excited – this is “blink and miss it” cameo work.

Leaving… what? A government engineered cockroach monster that’s munching its way through as many C-list actors as the producers can afford, while some lone intrepid guy (Daniel Cosgrove) investigates what happened to his brother. Was the brother involved in some shady cult? What has the government to do with it all? Are big insects really involved? And why does an attractive cop (Tamara Davies) who actually believes this guy’s bug-eyed story have so much free police time to help him? Leaving aside the suspicion that the answers to all these questions are to be found round the back of the production offices where X Files script meetings were held, They Crawl would be a much better film with its creepy-crawly moments spread between fewer victims, with less reliance on Foundation Imaging’s step-and-repeat insect effects but most of all from even 20 minutes more work done on the screenplay.

They Crawl – at Amazon

Lovelace

2020-09-192013-06-28 by Steve

Amanda Seyfried has a spectacular rack and, gents, you get plenty of it in this biopic about Linda Lovelace the 1970s deep throat queen who unwittingly did more than most to make porn legit. Amanda Seyfried… rack… unwittingly. Those are the key words from that sentence and of this film, a well made, deeply period piece that would have us believe that it’s on the side of the unwitting, naïve Bronx Catholic girl born Linda Boreman – who went on to become the star of Deep Throat, the first porn film to screen in mainstream theatres – while all the time devoting 90 per cent of screen time, and 99 per cent of dramatic weight to her as Lovelace.

I point this out not to wag the finger, but because the film is doing what Lovelace herself did – after leaving porn she became a loud voice against the industry, a campaigner whose “yes I did” would swing to “no I didn’t” so frequently that you wonder whether she might not have cared either way, just so long as she was turning a buck.

The plot? Well, it’s Boogie Nights in all but name – the money, the guys in charge, the ostentatious consumption, the cocaine. That and the Gretchen Moll Betty Page film – nice young girl from nowhere is inveigled into doing all manner of bad things by all manner of bad people. Chief baddie in the Lovelace story is Chuck Traynor, the sleaze who bewitched Lovelace into appearing in her first porn film, where it was discovered that she had a huge gift for fellatio, a poor gag reflex. Peter Sarsgaard plays Traynor, and he’s done so many similar roles now that he knows how to pitch bad that it’s just about sympathetic – this guy is just a bit adrift morally, rather than out and out wicked.

In fact one of the many nice things to be said about this movie is how good Seyfried’s support actors are – Chris Noth finally does something to write home about as a shitty movie producer; Hank Azaria does a Hank Azaria turn as a flaky director; James Franco is just about believable as a young Hugh Hefner. Special mention must also be made of Sharon Stone as Lovelace’s strict, god-fearing mother. Stone is so believable as a woman in the grip of a rigid faith, yet struggling with motherlove that it was only when the credits finally came up that an entire film of “who is that?” was finally laid to rest.

As with many films right now, Lovelace sets about settling scores with the 1970s, with the boomers, with the let-it-all-hang-out philosophy and how that meant a rough deal for women, more often than not. A generation ago there would have been no truck with the character of Lovelace’s mother. Here, though she’s not exactly carried shoulder high for a lap of honour, her brand of morality does get a sympathetic hearing.

As for the rest of it, it’s a symphony of exquisite period production design, some very funny jokes at the expense of 1970s porn, Seyfried’s frequently unclothed body and those big, big eyes of hers, brimming with liquid naiveté. Seyfried is really quite remarkable as Lovelace. But in spite of Seyfried’s stamp on this, and the film’s title, it isn’t actually about Linda at all. On this it really is, foolishly, following the line she took in her mea non culpa post-porn autobiography, Ordeal. According to Ordeal, Linda wasn’t the agent of her own fortune or misfortune. In fact she wasn’t any sort of agent at all. So who’s the film about then?

The Act of Killing

2020-09-192013-06-27 by Steve

“For killing people trousers should be thick,” says Anwar, the “star” and chief exhibit in this bizarre documentary. He’s the retired head executioner of an Indonesian death squad reliving his glory days garrotting hundreds if not thousands of “communists” (ie anyone in the way) with a piece of thick wire in the mid 1960s. And though now knocking on a bit he shows us how he did it, in the place he did it, a cement yard out the back of what looks like a restaurant.

Bizarre though this is, there is more to come, because what the makers of this film have done – not sure if it was their idea or that of the participants – is to get the executioners together to make dramatisations of what they got up to. Not literal dramatisations either, though the odd one is. They stage, for example, a musical number, in which one of them gets into female drag. They dramatise one of Anwar’s dreams, in which a hideous laughable creature comes at him like something out of a 1970s horror movie. Most of all they stage gangster dramas, each imagining they’re Pacino or De Niro, how they love those guys. And – and I bet neither star will be any the easier for this knowledge – how they use Pacino and De Niro as some sort of reference point for what they did. Through it all two things become clear – how above the law they still feel (in Indonesia almost any action against “communists” is still condoned); and how powerful the camera is. Drama has accessed these guys in way that mere reminiscence – though there’s more than plenty of that too – barely could. “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”, says Hamlet. Using drama as a way of accessing truth has rarely been done so effectively.

The Act of Killing – at Amazon

1 July 2013-07-01

2020-09-192013-06-24 by Steve

Out in the UK This Week

Maniac (Metrodome, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD)

Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, the writers of Switchblade Romance, one of the most heart-pounding horror films of recent years, swing bloodily back to form with a remake of a 1980 slasher which takes lovely gentle Frodo (Elijah Wood), casts him as a Norman Bates-style homicidal mother’s boy and then sets director Franck Khalfoun to work filming his exploits as if from the killer’s point of view. Result: another brilliant horror film, touches of Silence of the Lambs, House of Wax, with an electropop sound that just makes it all the grimmer.

Maniac – at Amazon

Cloud Atlas (Warner, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)

Like an established rock act that realises the fans only want to hear the old stuff, the Wachowskis’ adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel is an attempt to deliver new material between reminders of what made them famous – The Matrix. And what a gigantic epic blancmange it is – six era- and genre-straddling stories that, in eco-friendly fashion, re-uses its doughty cast of Halle Berry, Tom Hanks, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess (all often disguised to the point of unrecognisability). “Pay it forward” is the idea – how a decisive act at exactly the right moment can have effects that ripple forward in time. In terms of ambition it makes The Matrix look small, though it’s less straightforwardly successful. Must be watched twice.

Cloud Atlas – at Amazon

The Guilt Trip (Paramount, cert PG, Blu-ray/DVD)

A dorky inventor (Seth Rogen) takes a road trip with his Very Jewish Mother (Barbra Streisand). She, as well as being generally post-menopausally hyperactive, has all the mother’s traits – an eye for a money-saving coupon, a desire to lick her hand and smooth his hair, a compulsion to avail herself of the complimentary continental breakfast if it’s offered as part of a motel deal. He, meanwhile, finds his “grown-up” act, on the road, in meetings, is falling apart under her beady eye. The Guilt Trip is a Babs film masquerading as a Rogen film. Those with long memories will even spot an oblique reference to the “but you’re beautiful” line that was obligatory in Babs films of yore – Yentl, Prince of Tides and so on. I think it’s there as a subliminal joke, because this is otherwise a very unegotistical, warm and charming film in which Babs gives herself wholly to the part of the mad matriarch, with Rogen increasingly standing back, the better to watch an old pro work.

The Guilt Trip – at Amazon

Oz the Great and Powerful (Disney, cert PG, Blu-ray/DVD)

So we all wanted to know the Wizard of Oz’s backstory, yes? No? Well here it is anyway, with James Franco as a circus huckster whisked off to Oz in a balloon, a twister helping him get there, Dorothy style. There he finds a yellow brick road, has lots of adventures, meets witches good and bad, Munchkins, flying monkeys. And every single time the film does something original, departs from what we already know about Oz from the Judy Garland Oz film, it loses buoyancy. I detect a lack of imagination, of boldness. Or possibly the film was made with nothing more than a determination to squeeze a few shillings’ worth of milky goodness from the cash cow. Things to like include Franco’s brassy performance, Rachel Weisz as a very bad witch and Michelle Williams as Glinda the Good, complete with see-through bubble. Mila Kunis – officially the hottest woman in the world – is unfortunately unable to warm up this cool, slow movie, though someone in the post-production department should be given a gong for their efforts to make Oz into some sort of approxmation of the Technicolor delight it was in 1939. I’m not saying they got there, but the task has at least been attacked with a bit of determination and attitude.

Oz The Great and Powerful – at Amazon

Broken City (StudioCanal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)

Someone somewhere in the critic-sphere is probably giving Broken City three stars just for existing, because it’s hard-boiled and has Russell Crowe and Mark Wahlberg in it. But it’s a terrible film, a complete no-ball of a movie in which every single scene is familiar, every line of dialogue sounds like it was generated by a program set to deliver Elmore Leonard or James Ellroy by way of Raymond Chandler. So, yes, it’s a crime drama, set in a big bad city run by a big bad mayor (Crowe) who hires a busted cop (Mark Wahlberg), now working as a gumshoe, to help find the man who is tupping his wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones). Unbeknown to the PI, he’s really being set up for a yadda yadda showdown which, when it comes, won’t raise even the beginnings of an “oh really?”. The film is directed by Allen Hughes, working for the first time without his brother (as the Hughes brothers they did The Book of Eli, so they do know how to do it) and is hamstrung by the bizarre decision to give Wahlberg a backstory which reaches back to the Jurassic era. When all we need to know is that he’s the man wearing Chandler’s “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean” hat. Zeta-Jones again delivers one of those hoity-toity performances of spectacular unlikeability, confirming her as another reasonably reliable marker of a film that isn’t as good as it thinks it is.

Broken City – at Amazon

Fuck for Forest (Dogwoof, cert E, DVD)

Fuck for Forest, marketed coyly as F*ck for Forest, as if a “u” could bring down civilisation, is a documentary that’s half fascinating, half infuriating. It follows the antics of a German non-governmental organisation (NGO) made up of young attractive hippies whose MO is to make pornographic films, post them online, then use the money that punters pay to see them to fund their ecological projects. “Saving the planet”, as they put it. “Scratch a hippie, find a nazi” is one of those old sayings that’s always warms my cockles, so I enjoyed having my prejudices reinforced in the first half of this film, during which earnest young men with long hair would get their cocks out in the street in an attempt to get the foolish straights around them to adopt their “liberating moral values”. On the other hand, the collective does seem to mean what it says and practise what it preaches. They live by scavenging through bins for food, so that none of the money raised goes to waste. We’re not in Jimmy Swaggart territory. Cut to part two of the film, when the group head to the Amazon, where some of the €400,000 they have in the bank (there’s gold in them thar loins) is to be dispensed in Lady Bountiful fashion to the local natives. Except the natives don’t give them quite the reception they were hoping for. Compulsory viewing. For eco-evangelists and whatever you’d call the opposite.

F*ck for Forest – at Amazon

Grave of the Fireflies (StudioCanal, cert 12, Blu-ray)

A remaster of one of Studio Ghibli’s most acclaimed works of animation, the story of the firebombing of the city of Kobe in 1945 from the point of view of the spirit of a couple of kids who died in its aftermath. It has to be one of the grimmest uses of animation ever – the sort of darkness Tim Burton goes in for is candyfloss in comparison – a drama in which characters often aren’t motivated by the best intentions, where survival trumps all other impulses, where death seems to be round every corner. Happy viewing.

Grave of the Fireflies – at Amazon

Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train

2020-09-192013-06-20 by Steve

A bunch of reasonably familiar French faces (Charles Berling, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi among them) all get together in a talky French Big Chill sort of affair, concerned with the interaction of lots of individuals, as was director Patrice Chéreau’s recent Queen Margot. Though here we’re in the present day and Chéreau’s characters are heading off to the funeral of one of their number, a bisexual painter (Trintignant, who also plays his own brother) who’s had them all, one way or another. And they’re on the train, as his will commanded – he’s controlling them in death as he did in life. En route they expose themselves and each other, to their discomfort and for our fun. One does drugs, the other’s pregnant, a third’s a philanderer and so on – this is high-tone soap, with characters composed not so much of traits as defects. But surely this Gallic raggle-taggle group learn something and become better people as train barrels towards Limoges and they consume coffee and smoke emphatically? Mais non, this is a French film, you silly sausages, nothing ’appens at all. The slight twitting of national stereotypes aside, Train is full of great performances, it has a hipster soundtrack of PJ Harvey, Jeff Buckley, Massive Attack, Portishead, its largely handheld camera has rapier attack, it’s tasteful, it’s bourgeois, it’s adult. It’s, you know, a bit of a pain.

Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train – at Amazon

24 June 2013-06-24

2020-09-192013-06-18 by Steve

Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowsk in Stoker

Out in the UK This Week

Stoker (Fox, cert 18, Blu-ray/DVD)

Park Chan-Wook – of Oldboy fame – makes his English language debut with a visually, sonically, thematically accomplished film that seems to be trying to get as many varieties of gothic horror assembled in one place as possible. Mia Wasikowska delivers another of inscrutably cool Alice-like performance as a young girl whose lovely daddy has just died mysteriously. And before Daddy’s body is even cold he’s been replaced in the affections of her blowsy mother (Nicole Kidman, looking just a touch Wildensteinian these days) by her uncle (enter, eyes rolling, tongue lolling, Matthew Goode). Park references Night of the Hunter, Shadow of a Doubt, Hamlet, Alice in Wonderland and lots of other fervid dramas in this sexually fraught chiller, which takes scoops of tastiness and then piles on the sprinkles – Tennessee Williams, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, wonky camera, tipsy piano – until the gothic mutates into the cinematic variety of Type 2 diabetes.

Stoker – at Amazon

Song for Marion (Entertainment One, cert PG, Blu-ray/DVD)

Get ready to be manipulated. There is absolutely no doubt what this film (written and directed, surprisingly, by London to Brighton’s Paul Andrew Williams) is about from the very second it starts. But it has a secret weapon in its locker – Terence Stamp. Playing a horrid old curmudgeon whose wife Marion (Vanessa Redgrave being lovely) does all the friendly, social stuff, Stamp mutters, cusses and grumps his way through a Calendar Girls-y Britfilm while his on-screen wife gives her all to the seniors choir where the progressive and tragically single choir mistress (Gemma Arterton being lovely) introduces the oldies to “Let’s Talk About Sex” and other supposedly daring offerings (films still not having caught on that oldies these days are from the 1960s – sex is all they ever talk about). Until, that is, the Grim Reaper drags Marion off to the Choir Invisible. This is not a spoiler – as I say, the plot of this film is so obvious you could follow it through cataracts. At this point Williams’s screenplay surely contains an instruction for Williams the director: “vamp for 20 minutes”. So we get some coming and going, unnecessary character development, re-arranging of the chairs, a bit of throat clearing, some tapping of fingers on the table – until it’s time for Stamp to step forward and sing in the big finale. And at that point it’s game over for the tear ducts.

Song for Marion – at Amazon

This Is 40 (Universal, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)

To call Judd Apatow’s latest directorial effort (he’s more often writer/producer) a comedy is possibly something of a misnomer. Sure, there are good jokes in here – often in montage sequences packaged up guiltily – but his exploration of a marriage as its two participants officially hit middle age is more wistful than the trailers and advertising material let on. Leslie Mann (Apatow’s own wife) and Paul Rudd (a passable Apatow stand-in) are the couple with cute kids, difficult parents, a well developed seven-year itch and a growing realisation that for them it’s time to leave the valley, to face up to adulthood. They’re in financial trouble, they’re stressed, overwhelmed by technology, their kids. They look like a boomer couple, living boomer lives. But these aren’t boomer times. Circulating in the wings are the real boomers, putting in performances which really make the film zing. Albert Brooks as Rudd’s needy ageing dad, and John Lithgow as Mann’s. The times they are a changin’ was their refrain. For their kids, the times have not changed for the better. Reduced expectations, the end of ever-increasing wealth, midlife crisis. This Is 40 isn’t a comedy. It’s a drama with funny bits. Once I’d worked that out – about ten minutes from the end – I started enjoying it.

This Is 40 – at Amazon

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (Paramount, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)

The title is the plot, so what else can I say about this shortish action movie that feels like it came off the same production line as The Brothers Grimm? Well, Gemma Arterton looks good in leather leggings, she really does. And Famke Janssen makes a very good chief witch, she really does. But whereas Arterton is given many opportunities to swagger and strut, Janssen is for the most part swathed in make-up, which robs the audience of her expressive face – and she does do evil cackling pantomime witch very very well. The misuse of Janssen is symptomatic of a film full of missed opportunities. Director Tommy Wirkola can’t direct action and there’s not one set piece, and there are quite a few, that jolts the body’s unimpressed adrenal glands into life. The soundtrack is the sort that never lets up – bang bang bang, violin-violin, celestial choir, hoo haa, hunting horns, bang bang bang. It’s only towards the end, as the ironic eyebrow’s services are dispensed with and Arterton and co-star Jeremy Renner (the film isn’t interested in him at all, oddly) get busy with the serious witch-slaying that the film gets going. And then it’s over. Oh well, there’s another in the works, apparently. Can they please get Timur Bekmambetov to direct it?

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters – at Amazon

Movie 43 (Entertainment One, cert 15, Blu-ray/DVD)

A portmanteau comedy film of 12 different stories. I’ll give you some “for instances” – Hugh Jackman with balls and scrotum growing from his neck. Anna Faris asking her boyfriend to “poop” on her. Chloe Grace Moretz as a girl who has her first period at her middleschool date’s house – and the entire male household first freaking out, then laughing at her. Halle Berry injecting superhot chilli up her vagina. Movie 43 is one of the movie business’s periodic attempts to show the TV business that it still knows how to do risqué comedy. On this showing TV wins hands down, though there are a few good laughs in here. I did not say subtle.

Movie 43 – at Amazon

Au Hasard Balthazar (Artificial Eye, cert PG, Blu-ray/DVD)

Now restored beautifully, the gorgeous monochrome of Robert Bresson’s 1966 drama about a girl, a donkey and life in a small French town is a great example of the work of one of the world’s most influential film-makers. It is deliberately hard to access – the actors are not acting, the characters are opaque and the dialogue is frequently little more than non sequiturs – and some people just aren’t going to like that at all. What they might find easier to admire is Bresson’s command of movie-making, his use of the frame, mastery of sound and the way he stages his film to resemble something elemental. At a squint, it’s a medieval mummers play.

Au hasard Balthazar – at Amazon

The Serpent’s Kiss

2020-09-192013-06-17 by Steve

A treatise on order and chaos, propriety and lust, hidden inside the convoluted, if a bit TV-ish, story of Meneer Chrome (Ewan McGregor), an 18th-century Dutch (or is he?) landscape gardener. Chrome has been employed to refashion and tame the herbaceous borders of bumptious self-made Thomas Smithers (Pete Postlethwaite) and in the process bankrupt him and seize his bride (Greta Scacchi), if the plans of dastardly fop James Fitzmaurice (Richard E. Grant) bear fruit. This lace-cuffed fol-de-rol of a Sunday afternoon movie is the directorial debut of Oscar-winning cameraman Philippe Rousselot and it doesn’t suffer from bad looks. It also has its odd sly, dry moment – though there are only so many times that the word “woad” can be pressed into comedic service. In looks, high concept and ambition it’s clearly in hock to The Draughtsman’s Contract and would dearly love to be a devious restoration comedy. It’s certainly got the setting and the characters, with buxom beauties, caddish gents and innocents abroad all fitting that particular bill. But in spite of a top-notch cast the script just lies there refusing to sparkle. All is not lost though, there is a nice game of “who’s going to take their clothes off first” to be played. Most of the cast have form.

The Serpent’s Kiss – at Amazon

Love and Basketball

2021-02-272013-06-16 by Steve

The sports movie meets the romance in a boy-meets-girl drama featuring two affluent black kids. Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan play the basketball-playing next-door neighbours as grown-ups, the film having followed them from before puberty, through it and out into the world of professional sport and beyond.

On the romance side it’s a “will-they-won’t-they” plot, in the sports arena it’s unusually focused on the daily decision-making and strategising of operating as a sports professional, where a career could be measured in months. On both sides it packs in most of the positive role models a body could need, carefully avoiding stereotyping (except that he’s hung), because that’s a bad thing. This film works hard to seduce its audience – music, shouting, foreplay, lovely interior design and countless baskets, not to mention the performances, by the stars and support (special mention to Alfre Woodard as Lathan’s mother). But though it’s refreshing to see the girl as the pursuer, and a totally ripped Epps as the eye candy, the film struggles to generate drama, particularly as its focus moves from her to him in the second half.

Love and Basketball – at Amazon

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U-571

2020-09-192013-06-15 by Steve

The standard submarine drama – depth charges, beep-beep sonar, bursting bulkheads, “secure that hatch” dialogue – gets an efficient workthrough by director Jonathan Mostow, who did a lot with very little in 1997’s “who stole my wife” thriller Breakdown. He’s got a good cast here too – Matthew McConaughey putting in one of his brattish turns as the “I’m ready for command” lieutenant, Bill Paxton as his “No, you’re not” commander, an underused Harvey Keitel and Jon Bon Jovi, continuing his hopeful advance into movies – but it’s the presence of the Enigma coding machine that is the film’s USP. By which I mean it’s the presence of the Enigma machine that is the film’s USP if you’ve watched the trailer or read any pre-release guff. In fact you could easily lose the German code stuff and the film would still be decent enough. Drama’s a given on a sub, and Mostow knows how to muster action, deliver technically impressive set pieces. But it’s not Das Boot – there’s little time for the psychological sweatboxing that Wolfgang Petersen’s superior U-Boat drama delivers – and the sub-John Williams soundtrack also signals the direction this film is heading, towards flashy spectacle not nail-biting involvement. Prepare to dive.

U-571 – at Amazon

The New Eve

2020-09-192013-06-14 by Steve

You might be tempted re-translate a title like that (in its original French: La Nouvelle Eve) as “Women Today, Huh”, and watch the film as a portrait of, well, you follow my drift. Played by Karin Viard, our heroine Camille is a neurotic ball of angst, a woman on a quest for happiness, and hang the cost to others. The film opens with Camille at a party of almost comical anything-goesness, but even she pushes it too far – finally throwing up on her host’s bed after having done all the drugs and all the genders in a night of excess. After that, for Camille it’s a series of pffts to the niceties of normal life and a string of no-strings sexual conquests. Until she hits resistance after trying to separate the local socialist pin-up (Pierre-Loup Rajot) from his wife. He’s a man of principle, she’s a woman of pure self-interest – stand back and watch the dramatic fireworks. In spite of the obvious attractions of this movie – sex is fun, after all – it’s probably the performance by Viard that keeps this from being a one-note me-me-me display of awful narcissism. Camille may be the sort of screaming baggage who’s great for one drunken night only but Viard presents her as a woman broken by the waves of her own wild mood swings. This is not a drama about women today at all, but instead a portrait of the sort of freewheeling bohemianism that looks so attractive from the outside but which leads to loneliness – because relationships require commitment, and that means a surrender of some part of the self, which is the bit that Camille struggles with. The New Eve is dirty but it’s also sophisticated, intelligent and politically and psychologically savvy. I forgot to mention that it’s also funny. Meanwhile, on the Anglophone end of the great cultural divide, we have silly Bridget Jones. Alors.
© Steve Morrissey 1999

The New Eve – at Amazon