Confessions of a Film Critic

Jeff Nichols and Mud

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 18:11:00 +0000

“At any one time I have five or six stories going around in my head”, writer and director Jeff Nichols says, while moulding some imaginary thing between his hands like a potter at a wheel. “I’ll pick one up, work on it for a while, then lay it down and pick up another. The longer I work on them, the better they get. I first had the idea for Mud when I was nineteen and have been thinking about it on and off ever since.”

Today Nichols looks like a lanky Marty McFly in jeans and trainers, a flannel shirt and red sleeveless body-warmer, his thick sandy hair swept into a peak. At 34, he appears at least a decade younger, relaxed and thoughtful, brimming with enthusiasm for his new film and the work of those writers and directors that have influenced him; “Malick, Spielberg, John Sayles, John Carpenter. Man, I’ll tell you, John Carpenter is a hero to me…”

Nichols grew up in the city of Little Rock, hometown of former President Bill Clinton, deep in the American South. He was a child of the Arkansas suburbs with a passion for comics, television and movies. “When we were kids, my father would take us to the movies a couple of times a week. I was fascinated by the theater of watching films, if you know what I mean; the ritual of it. The audience settle into their seats, the lights go down and the curtain goes back. It has always been tremendously exciting for me.”

That thrill of witnessing a story unfolding is apparent in Nichols’ first feature, Shotgun Stories. A sparse and literary story of feuding Arkansas farming stock, the film featured a star-making turn from Nichols’ best friend “and muse, I suppose” Michael Shannon. His follow-up, Take Shelter starred Shannon again as a man despairingly trying to protect his family from his terrifying visions of the end of the world. Now he has swapped the dusty plains and anonymous suburbs for the lush green banks of the Arkansas river for Mud, another family-focused drama about two teenage boys Ellis and Neckbone (played by Tye Sheridan and newcomer Jacob Lofland) who encounter a fugitive (Matthew McConaughey) hiding out on an island in the Arkansas delta. Acting in secret, they help him evade the bounty hunters on his trail while re-uniting him with his long-lost true love (Reese Witherspoon).

“You could call it a coming of age story”, Nichols says, “I’m comfortable with that definition, but that wasn’t the original intention. I sat down to write a getaway film, a chase movie. But once I had this character who was a fourteen year old boy, he connected to all these other things that were floating around in my head at that time and I found I had stumbled into something else that was far more interesting.” What kind of things? “Well, my wife and I were expecting our first child and I was thinking about fatherhood and father figures, mentors, people who will help you along in life. I was thinking about communities and how they form and function, because I was about to add one to that number. Pretty heavy stuff”.

I ask Nichols how much of the film is autobiographical and he spreads his arms wide. “The first connection, for me, is always a sense of place. I didn’t grow up on the river, I wasn’t a river-rat like Ellis and Neckbone, but I had spent time in their world and felt close to it. With each of my films, I try and find one emotional connection to my own life, something that is physical and palpable. Ellis standing in a parking lot getting his heart broken is exactly and precisely me at the age of fourteen. I remember I had a physical reaction when that girl let me down that day, nauseous and light headed. It played out almost exactly as you see it in the film. Similarly, Shotgun Stories came from a deep fear that one of my brothers would be killed or murdered somehow. And in Take Shelter I was trying to recapture a momentary anxiety that I had that if my marriage fell apart, the world would end too. Like a total deterioration. These are feelings within me, not always rational or reasonable, but once I can anchor the film to that, the rest of it can be about anything.”

Once the kernel of an idea comes to him, his approach is to flesh it out with characters that he knows intimately. “Ellis and Neckbone are basically two sides of my personality, the fantasist and the realist. To bring them into the story, I just think about who they are, what they want and how they can achieve that. I try to make that as realistic as possible and as close a match as I can to the kind of experiences I have had myself. A lot of times I think filmmakers are only concerned with plot. They’ll say, “I am making a movie about this or that”, as if defining it in two sentences or less is somehow a positive. I think that is a bad way to tell stories.”

Nichols describes his method of screenwriting as “mostly thinking, then typing”. Relating how, one summer a couple of years back, he had two films on his mind, he tells me how he sat down to write them both at the same time. One became Take Shelter, the other became Mud. “They’d been knocking around for a while. They had to come out. I made Take Shelter before Mud because I knew with this film I was going to have to shoot in boats and on sets built on water. To do that effectively takes time and costs money. Take Shelter has a lot more special effects but oddly, in comparison, it was a simpler film to make. Whatever we achieve in Mud we did it practically, with effort and sweat.”

Before it came to shooting, however, Nichols had another practical problem to address. “When you write a script with two teenage boys as the central characters, you just have to believe that the actors to play them are out there, somewhere, and that you will find them. It’s a leap of faith”. I ask him if casting the film was a drawn-out process, and he laughs. “Not at all. In a funny way, the universe delivered them right to my doorstep, quite literally in the case of Tye Sheridan”. Sheridan, who had just turned fourteen when he was cast, came to Mud through Nichol’s producer Sarah Green, who had produced Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life and had spent more than a year on set with the young actor as he played one of Brad Pitt’s sons in 1950s Texas. “When I talked to Sarah, her first reaction was to call for Tye. He was about 11 when he was working on Tree of Life and it was an extraordinary experience for him. When we met he was just the embodiment of the character I had written. He looked like him, talked like him, behaved as I thought Ellis would. He’s extraordinary”.

As good as Sheridan’s performance is, it wouldn’t be nearly as effective without the presence of Neckbone; a tough, self-sufficient kid who rides a motorbike he built himself from scrap and speaks with the voice of reason. “For Neckbone, we put an ad in the paper. I knew Malick had done that to find Tye, so I figured it was the way to go. What I didn’t know was that Malick had received about another ten thousand audition tapes”. Casting Neckbone was big news in Arkansas, Nichols says, “like someone winning the lottery. What happened was that Jacob Lufland’s mother saw the ad and thought our description sounded a lot like her son. He had never acted before, never even thought about it. I knew very early on that he was the right guy.”

Nichols’ luck continued with casting continued with finding the grown-up actors from a deep pool of fellow Southerners, but he only ever had one actor in mind for his lead. “From day one I wrote the part of Mud for Matthew McConaughey to play”. The fact that Nichols had never met McConaughey, and had no idea if the actor knew of his existence, didn’t matter. “He didn’t return my phone calls for a long time and it took some convincing to get him to read the script but we got there”. I tell Nichols that, for a long time, McConaughey was better known for taking his shirt off than his acting abilities and the director nods his head. “He takes his shirt off in my movie too, but only because it was hellish hot. We talked about all that though and he told me that he was working in a very confined space, as an actor, in the studio romantic comedies he made for the last couple of years. He couldn’t be too happy or too sad, too bright or too dark, too up or too down. Those characters exist between these two points which are actually very close to one another. What’s great about Mud, according to Matthew, is that we can go wherever we want to”.

Like all of his films so far, Mud is set in his home state and the director feels a deep responsibility to represent the place as it really is. It’s a part of America that isn’t often depicted on screen, he says, where money is tight and communities are even tighter. “There are very few movies about poor people and the working class”, Nichols explains, “and these are the people I have the most respect for. When it comes to developing a character, the first thing I do is give them a job. Our work defines so much about who we are. I’m always confused when I watch a movie where everyone is an advertising executive living in a penthouse and driving an extravagantly flashy car. Who are these people? How can they afford to live to live like this? I just can’t relate to them.”

There’s more to Nichols’ determination to hew to reality than providing a backdrop to his stories: he needs his characters to carry their own authenticity. “Take Ellis’ father, for instance (played by Ray McKinnon). He is a small-scale commercial fisherman, and that tells us things we need to know about him: his love and respect for the river that gives him his livelihood, his connection to his community and his personal history and life experiences. I don’t have to spell all that background detail out for the audience; the character can do that for me. Films are about behaviour. There are two elements to any screenplay: one is action, the other is dialogue. Both of these things are driven by behaviour. If I just got up and walked out of the room right now, that would say something to you. I don’t have to share my reasons, or say anything at all, but you’re left here to deal with the consequences of my behaviour.”

He stays seated, thankfully, and continues. “So, I want my films to be rooted in character. I’ll have the big idea, like a fugitive hiding out on an island in a river, but the rest of it comes from character. Who is the fugitive? Who are the people who help him? Why are they helping him? What’s going on around them? I’m not just asking them to advance my plot and get me to a certain place. I want to know who they are. Everything is borne out of those characters and if you get them right, the rest falls into place. Ultimately, if you’re building towards that physical emotion I was talking about earlier, that kick in the stomach, the audience will feel it more if you have been honest with them all the way through. If you’re not, it won’t feel real. You might have this cool idea and manoeuvre everything to make it happens, but really you’re just putting words in your characters mouths”.

Nichols has more stories he’s been turning over, with the two most likely to become his next films precipitating a move away from Arkansas. “I have this science-fiction story I’ve been working on called Midnight Special. It’s just a little chase movie with speculative elements. And there’s a road movie, a biker film told from a woman’s point of view set in 1960s California. But I won’t write anything down until I have the movie in my head, from start to finish”.

The Best Films of 2014

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Thu, 18 Dec 2014 12:33:00 +0000

The turn of the year brings with it the irresistible urge to make a list and check it twice. International box-office takings might be down but the quality and breadth of films available to Irish cinemagoers is as strong and vibrant as ever. I’ve catalogued my 13 favourites here but might easily have included 13 more. The blockbusters might not have a great summer but it’s been a vintage for cinema.

Before we get to the selection, first an apology: I haven't been updating this blog as regularly as before, or as regularly as I should. I can't say that will change in the year to come, as the pressures on my time aren't likely to change. If you want more posts, please say so in the comments.

Now, my film of the year is Ida, the story of a young novice nun who discovers a dark family secret in an austere, almost abandoned 1960s Poland. A haunting meditation on identity, history and survival, crafted with deceptive simplicity and photographed in luminous black and white, Pawel Pawlikowski’s film is a masterwork. The rest of the best, in no particular order:

Under TheSkin

Unsettling, erotic and dangerously hypnotic, British director Jonathan Glazer’s audacious sci-fi tells the sideways story of an alien, transported to contemporary Glasgow, who preys on the unwitting human inhabitants.

Interstellar

Christopher Nolan’s madly-ambitious sci-fi space opera divided audiences right down the middle but seeing it in a 70mm projection on the IMAX screen was 2014s best argument for watching films on the big screen, with big sound, in the big dark.

Frank

Even from under a papier-mâché head, Michael Fassbender is brilliant in Lenny Abrahamson’s funny/sad story of a talentless keyboard player (Domhnall Gleeson) joining an edgy art-school band to make an album in the Wicklow mountains.

12 Years A Slave

Raw and mad, Fassbender again astonished in Steve McQueen’s heartbreaking, Best Film Oscar-winner about American slavery, playing a demented plantation owner refusing to release Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Solomon Northup, a free man stolen into bondage.

The Lego Movie

It might have been just another kid’s toy tie-in cash-cow but Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s visually stunning, funny and subversive Lego Movie turned out to be the year’s best animation. A stirring tribute to the power of the imagination.

Leviathan

Ten years on from his debut The Return, Andrey Zvyagintsev continues his forensic dissection of contemporary Russian life with this angry story of a car mechanic fighting a corrupt local mayor to keep ownership of his family’s land.

The Wolf of Wall Street

His best film in years, Martin Scorsese takes a pop at 90s excesses and their malignant after-effects in this blisteringly paced and packed romp with Leonardo DiCaprio on electrifying form as a junk-bond trader living it up in good times New York.

Gone Girl

The book that everyone read became the film that everyone saw. One of the biggest non-franchise films at the Irish box office this year, David Fincher’s take on Gillian Flynn’s novel is a ripe and rewarding circus of pulp noir, black comedy and sly surprises.

Her

Spike Jonze returned from a lengthy absence with this tender and sad film, set in a near future in which Joaquin Phoenix’s lonely writer falls in love with his computer’s operating system (the smoky-voiced Scarlett Johansson, who has had quite a year).

We Are The Best!

An adorable teen comedy from Lukas Moodysson, based on his wife Coco’s graphic novel, that follows three 13-year-old girls who start a punk band in 1980s Stockholm.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson makes possibly his best film yet; a painstakingly beautiful, howlingly funny comedy about lives and loves at a Mitteleuropean hotel, in a fictional mountain state, between the wars. As fun to just look at as it is to watch, Ralph Fiennes’ performance alone made it a must see.

Boyhood

Ellar Coltrane goes from boy to man before our eyes in Richard Linklater’s saga of everyday life, filmed over 12 years, which hangs on the passage of time and our perception of it. Made up of those bits that usually get cut from films about families (as opposed to ‘family films’) it considers the past, present and future all at once and in a unique way.

And the worst film of 2014?

Even in a good year there’s no shortage of bad films but there was only one possible winner (or is it loser?): Olivier Dahan’s purported biopic Grace of Monaco, a deranged and misguided soap-opera.

*Image of Pawel Pawlikowski and cinematographer Lukasz Zal from this story on the American Society of Cinematographers website

Terry Gilliam Interview

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 17:59:00 +0000

He is the Monty Python animator turned director famed for his creative genius and unique vision, but making films is still a struggle for Terry Gilliam.

“You’ll be sure and tell me if I’m talking too quickly,” Terry Gilliam says, a grin poking through his lumberjack’s beard as he flops onto an enormous couch in the Merrion Hotel. “I've been told I talk very quickly. My films are the same. Sometimes, I worry that it all goes too fast on screen and that there’s a lot of stuff going on that people miss.” I tap my tablet device and reply that I am equipped to capture whatever he says, at whatever speed he prefers. “A computer”, he snorts, “I’m no Luddite but you can’t put your trust in computers.”

Gilliam does talk pretty fast, as it happens, but then he has a lot of ground to cover. At 73, the director, animator, writer and member of the recently-reunited Monty Python comedy troupe shows no sign of slowing down. He’s in town to present his new science-fiction think-piece The Zero Theorem at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival and pick up one of the festival’s Volta awards, in recognition of his long and unique career. “It’s an honour to get any kind of award, especially one bestowed by a great festival in this fantastic city,” Gilliam says in a modest gush, “but I’ll be perfectly honest, it’s even better to be here with a film to show.”

Things haven’t been easy for Gilliam recently. The Zero Theorem is his first film since The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in 2009, a production almost derailed by the tragic death of his lead actor Heath Ledger half way through filming. At the time of its successful release, Gilliam was quoted as saying he didn’t foresee himself making another feature. “I used to think I could will films into existence,” he says of that time, “I don’t think that anymore.” Since then, he has made a couple of short films “from stories that turned me on,” directed the English National Opera’s production of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust in 2011 and watched a series of projects burn to a crisp in development hell; including an adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novel Good Omens, an adaptation of Mr. Vertigo, co-written with novelist Paul Auster from his book, and The Defective Detective, a surreal crime caper written with Richard LaGravenese, who scripted Oscar-winning The Fisher King for him in 1990. As we sit over steaming tea cups, watching the furious February rain beat off the windows, Gilliam shrugs his shoulders. “Hollywood”, he says with an exaggerated sigh, “is the least imaginative place on Earth.”

Little wonder, then, that for his new film, Gilliam stayed as far away from Hollywood as possible. Made for $10 million (“the least amount of money I’ve had since Time Bandits in 1981”) and filmed over the course of a month in Budapest, once it started to happen, The Zero Theorem happened very rapidly. He admits that getting to that point was, in typical Gilliam fashion, something of a complicated process. “The script from first-time screenwriter Pat Rushin came bouncing my way about five years ago. When I read it, I liked that it was full of thoughts and ideas. It seemed to ask questions about the modern world and how we communicate with one another. But I went off and made Dr Parnassus and Zero Theorem floated away, as things sometimes do. The story was always at the back of my mind, though. I keep scraps of notes in a drawer in my desk and I found a bundle of them were about Zero Theorem. Most of all, I liked the characters. I felt they were people I would like to spend some time with, so when the chance came around again in 2012, I took it.”

Ask Gilliam to describe the finished film and he winces. “I've never been good at synopsis and sound bites. I can’t tell you what I do, I just do it.” Ask him what the film is all about and he laughs. “I don’t have the answer to that question. That’s why I make movies. I hope The Zero Theorem contains some answers but at the same time, I’m always looking to ask more questions that I answer. Otherwise, what’s the point?” The film focuses on Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz), a brilliant and reclusive computer hacker in the near future, who works as a programmer for an Orwellian corporation called Mancom. Always referring to himself as “we”, Qohen lives in a derelict church, waiting for a phone call that will deliver him from his unbearable life. When Mancom’s mysterious ‘Management’ (played by Matt Damon) charges him with cracking the Zero Theorem, a digital equation that could provide the meaning of life, Qohen sets to work. As he attempts this impossible task, Qohen is visited by the seductive muse Bainsley (Melanie Thierry) and computer prodigy Bob (Lucas Hedges), who disrupt his micro-managed existence, forcing him out into the wider world when all he wants is to be left alone.

Even with the budget restrictions and short production time, Zero Theorem takes place in a distinctly Terry Gilliam world, with inventive production design, complicated, hand-built props and outrageous costumes. The director says that making the film “look the way I want it to under financial and time challenges” was an enormous task. “But in a funny way, finding clever and inventive ways to overcome the difficulties was the most exciting part of the whole process. I got my team together and said, just jump in there and do it. Everything we were doing was reflexive, responsive and intuitive. We were putting it down on paper, then BANG! it was done.” To illustrate the point, he tells me about the challenge of creating futuristic costumes for crowd scenes with very little money. “My costume guy found these huge bales of incredibly cheap and ugly Chinese fabrics spewed out of some factory in the middle of nowhere, carpets and shower curtains basically, and turned them into clothes. Incredibly sweaty, uncomfortable clothes that looked amazing on camera and fit the world we were making.” Gilliam says he wanted to create a colourful, happy place where the people were always smiling. “Grinning like fools, for no apparent reason. It’s buzzing with life. The people are zipping around in their electric cars in their plastic clothes, listening to optimistic pop music, constantly staring into their phones, buying into whatever it is that Mancom asks them to buy into. There’s only one guy that’s miserable.”

Funny and bleak in equal measure, the film can be read as a biting critique of corporate culture and a satire on internet culture. Gilliam says his hero is “thinking not shopping, trying to make connections and ask questions. You’ll see it in the endless billboards and advertisements: ‘Don’t Ask, Multi-task!’ and ‘Occupy Mall Street.’ Qohen only does what he’s told so the system will leave him alone. This is a damaged guy but he’s got something that the corporation wants – he can form connections, he can use logic and intelligence to figure things out – he has skills that this future society has allowed to atrophy.” There is a clear line between Zero Theorem and Brazil, the sci-fi comedy that made Gilliam’s name, released in 1984. “When I made Brazil, I was telling a story about the world as I saw it then. This film is a glimpse of the world we are living in now. Brazil was about the misery of bureaucracy and the manufactured fear of terrorism and war that politicians use to control the people. This film is more about the connectivity the internet allows us to have and whether it is possible to separate yourself from it. They are both dystopias, but Zero Theorem is about a private hell. It’s about finding solitude in a connected world. How do you know who you are if you’re tweeting and twitching all the time about nothing in particular? People have a terrible fear of aloneness now. The internet fills that gap but the side-effect is that nobody wants to spend time with themselves anymore.”

Is The Zero Theorem a warning? Gilliam shakes his head, reluctant to stand on a soapbox. “It’s a statement of concern more than a warning. I don’t have the solution to any of these problems but I wanted to find a way in which to frame the question. What about the sex suit that connects Qohen and Bainsley in the story? That’s very nearly a reality. Can you imagine the profits that are coming to the guy who invents a working internet sex suit? Every lonely guy and girl in the world is going to want one and they’ll never turn them off again – at least not for long enough to go outside and find one another and have sex in the real world. Why would any of us ever leave the house again? This is what I’m saying in the film. We think we’re connected but we’re not really. As people, we are in fact entirely disconnected. We think we’re part of this endless stream of information but it’s not making us any smarter and maybe it’s doing the opposite.”

The internet can affect positive change too, Gilliam readily admits. It was an on-line campaign that finally brought the Monty Python gang together again for a series of live dates in London in July. He says he’s not really looking forward to it. “I’m too busy to think about it, but I suppose it will be fun. It’s always fun. We sold out opening night, something like 17,000 tickets, in 40 seconds.” He expresses amazement that anyone would care, saying that the Pythons can hardly believe that they are still relevant. “It’s not about reminiscing, or at least it’s not all about reminiscing. We never thought that anyone would care forty years later, never mind quote the sketches back at us. The way Terry Jones put it to me is that the establishment we were poking fun at in the 60s are still there, even though they’ve done their best to destroy themselves in the meantime. We’ll do what we can to help them achieve that.”

Then, Gilliam says, it will be time to focus on the project that has haunted him for more than a decade. “Ah yes, Don Quixote.” His version of Miguel Cervantes’ 500 year-old novel was half-way through filming in 1998 when a series of misfortunes caused it to be abandoned. There was an injury to his lead actor, a disastrous flash flood that washed away his set and NATO fighter-jet manoeuvres roaring overhead, a disaster chronicled in the entertaining not-quite-making-of documentary Lost in La Mancha. “You say entertaining, I’d use a different word entirely,” Gilliam interrupts with a rueful grin, “but I’m still tilting at those windmills. I haven’t given up. It’s an obsession, a desperate, pathetic, foolish delusion of a film.” With some long-overdue luck, Gilliam says he’ll start shooting the film, entitled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, on the island of Fuerteventura in the Canaries later this year. “Eleventh time is the charm, right? If everything goes according to plan, we’ll shoot in October. He says the film has changed considerably over the years, “becoming more and more autobiographical, and better too, each time, I think. Certainly it’ll be a smaller film, more modestly appointed. I must cut my cloth according to my measure nowadays,” puffing up his chest and adding a wry aside that my microphone barely picks up; “cheaper cloth too.”

Under The Skin

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 09:58:00 +0000

For his first film in almost a decade, British director Jonathan Glazer lands an extraterrestrial on the grimy streets of modern-day Glasgow and follows her as she completes an unexplained mission. Oblique and mystifying, beautiful and grotesque and filled with haunting images, Under the Skin is likely to repel as many as it entrances.

Sparsely adapted by Glazer and screenwriter Walter Campbell from Michel Faber’s cult novel, Under the Skin unfolds as a feverish dream. The first thing we see is a series of overlapping images; the crescent curves of a planetary system, a vast, white circular vessel slowly filling with an oily substance and the black pupil of a human eye without a spark of life. Then a dead woman’s body is thrown into the back of a truck on the side of a wet road. Another woman (Scarlett Johansson) strips the corpse naked and puts on her clothes, seemingly in the process adopting her persona. While doing this, she finds a solitary black ant and examines it closely as it wriggles on her fingertip. Without uttering a line of dialogue or providing any overt exposition, Glazer has established the scene: this ‘woman’, arrived from somewhere else, will study us in the same way she studies the insect. She is not the benign anthropomorphic alien of ET or Close Encounters, here to teach and heal. She looks like a person; she looks like Scarlett Johansson in fact, but is as separate and unknowable to us as we are to the ant.

Glazer’s camera takes us onto the streets of the Scottish capital, leads us between the people on the streets, watching as they tap out texts, smoke cigarettes and wander through the shops. The woman buys new clothes to match the city crowd, gently applying a smear of red lipstick and a smudge of eye-liner. As Johansson drives around the street-lit roads in a white van, looking for likely men to enrapture and ensnare, Glazer adopts the techniques of hidden-camera reality television to give us glimpses of how his alien slips unnoticed through the cracks. She stops the van to talk to men in a politely clipped English accent, always checking first that they are alone and unlikely to be missed. More often than not, they respond to her charming questioning and get into the van with her.

Soon after, in the film’s most visually striking sequences, Johansson leads the men into a black room with a shiny, slick floor and watches as they sink beneath the surface, to be absorbed by an oily black liquid and transformed into something unspoken. Is she collecting trophies, processing food or collating data? We cannot say for sure and the uncertainty is unnerving. Again and again Glazer shows us this process, extending the scene by moments and adding more details, until we make the connections for ourselves.

In the first act, Glazer’s methodical pace, deliberate repetition and disorienting tone is structured to reflect the alien’s utter inscrutability and the apparently simple terms of her mission. Things gradually start to change. She meets a potential victim, lures him into her van and only then notices his facial deformity. Uniquely, she allows him to escape. The next day she falls on her face in the street and is bewildered when passers-by try to help her. From that moment on, the story gathers emotions around it like an out-sized overcoat. She struggles to cope with new sensations of empathy, pity and fear. When her motorbike-riding handler, credited only as The Bad Man (and played by professional racer Jeremy McWilliams), discovers his charge has fled the city into the Scottish highlands, he gives chase. The predator becomes prey.

Told with minimal dialogue and with a vibrato mood of anxiety and tension, there are moments where the film contorts into pure horror, particularly in a sequence at a bleak, wind-torn beach where Johansson stands mutely on the shore. We watch as a woman drowns in the pounding surf, her frantic husband attempts a rescue and their toddler sits screaming on the sand. The alien walks away. It is the most stomach-clenching scene I have watched in a cinema in years; a moment of icy disregard that serves to remind the viewer that they are human, that they have feelings, that they couldn’t just stand by and watch other people suffer. Mico Levi’s throbbing electronic score ratchets up the dread, sounding at times like a whispered conversation between computers, or an almost-subsonic alien language.

As the film weaves between the gliding precision that Glazer exercised in Sexy Beast and Birth and more rough-and-ready CCTV images, Johansson remains the constant, effortlessly switching from sunny and gorgeous to an unsettling blankness, every wrinkle of posed humanity falling off her face in a heartbeat when no-one is looking. It’s a brave, engrossing performance of twisted eroticism that grounds an always intriguing, sometimes astonishing audio-visual experience. Glazer crafts a mesmerising, surreal spell: some audiences will fall for it and some will remain unmoved but Under the Skin remains lodged beneath mine.

Frank

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Tue, 13 May 2014 17:51:00 +0000

“I say tell everyone everything. I mean, why cover anything up?” The man speaking this line is wearing a papier-mâché head with wide-set painted blue eyes and bee-stung lips. His name is Frank and he’s a singer in a band. The head doesn’t come off. It’s therapeutic. Frank has a certificate.

In the first of director Lenny Abrahamson’s wilful ironies, the man in the head is played by one of the current cinema’s most handsome leading men, Michael Fassbender. He’s explaining his song-writing philosophy to Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), a keyboard-player and wannabe rock star who has just joined his unpronounceable band Soronprfbs. And Jon doesn’t get it. The band is holed up in a cabin in the Wicklow Mountains, supposedly recording an album. They’ve been there for a year, having gotten lost on the way to superstardom, a place nobody but Jon wants to go.

That’s the set-up for Abrahamson’s off-beat musical comedy Frank which shares something with the director’s previous films in that the story contains a nugget of truth. There really was a rock singer named Frank Sidebottom who wore a papier-mâché head and he was joined, for a brief period, by a keyboard player who wanted to be famous, the writer Jon Ronson, who scripted this story with Peter Straughan. From that kernel of inspiration, Abrahamson has constructed a funny, tender and endearingly daft film that captures the spirit of creativity like lightning in a bottle then tries to break the bottle over your head.

We first meet Gleeson’s Jon as he is enlisted into Soronprfbs to play a gig when their other keyboardist runs screaming into the sea. The previous incumbent had been driven to his demented soaking by the rest of the band, including Theremin-playing Clara (a brilliantly sour and suspicious Maggie Gyllenhaal), aloof bassist Baraque (François Civil), passive-aggressive drummer Nana (Carla Azar from the band Autolux) and manager Don (Scoot McNairy). The gig does not go well but Jon joins up anyway, taking the ferry to Ireland under the pretence of another live date. “You can play C, F and G, right?” asks Don, with a squint. They end up trekking into the mountains to record a long-promised album, rehearsing in a close-quartered cabin and finding inspiration in the wild world around them. Tweeting his experiences incessantly, and slowly gathering followers, Jon secures the band a slot at the prestigious SXSW festival in Texas and Soronprfbs reluctantly hit the road. And like every road trip ever undertaken by a ragtag gang of movie characters it turns out to be their undoing.

Frank wouldn’t work if the music didn’t work. From under the head, Fassbender proves a magnetic front-man, delivering a masterclass in physical performance through little more than undiluted charisma. As we watch Frank lead the band through their unconventional rehearsals, or weaving around on-stage, the music from composer Stephen Rennicks takes an identifiable shape. Songs are delivered in burps and snatches as Soronprfbs generate a sound unique to themselves but inspired by outlying musicians like Captain Beefheart, Daniel Johnson and The Residents.

Abrahamson’s uncanny control of tone and mood nudges Frank from a kind-of comedy to a kind-of tragedy, bumping up against almost every point in between. Partly an exploration of the unknowable methods of the truly creative, and partly a discussion about how fame and celebrity are cheap commodities in the internet age, Frank is a consistent and enduring delight. It’s a film about outsiders who feel no particular urge to come inside. An unexpectedly poignant conclusion makes astute observations about how analysing the creative process can destroy it, and damage the source of creativity itself.

White House Down

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 15:20:00 +0000

The same day I watched Roland Emmerich’s new film, news broke that Barack Obama was preparing to commit American forces in the Syrian civil war as a consequence of the Assad regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons against his own people. The sobering real-life headline somewhat popped the bubble on Emmerich’s typically frenzied adventure. In fairness to the director, whose film was planned, shot and edited a year ago or more, it was about the only occasion when grim reality intruded on White House Down: a double-denim 80s action romp disguised in the pin-stripe of a high-stakes political thriller.

As with all of Emmerich’s films, the plot synopsis could be described in pictograms on the leaflet that accompanies a piece of flat-pack furniture. The first few minutes are spent showing us which bits slot together and which direction the screws should turn. Happily for the hyper-efficient Emmerich, screenwriter James Vanderbilt’s brutalist approach gets all the dull-but-necessary story business out of the way so there’s more time for running about and blowing things up.

It’s an economical model but one with inherent problems. For instance, we first meet Channing Tatum’s aspiring Secret Service agent as he shares a dialogue scene with a squirrel, seemingly because there is no-one else around to talk to. Cale is about to drive Speaker of the House Raphelson (Richard Jenkins) to his office on Capitol Hill, as he explains to the chattering rodent, before making his way to the White House with his eleven-year-old daughter Emily (Joey King) to interview with Secret Service agent Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal) for a big job.

Meanwhile, braying snippets from the television news networks explain how Foxx’s President Sawyer determination to “break the cycle of war in the Middle East” (which he blames on the “military-industrial complex”, as if that were explanation enough) has broken new ground. At a peace convention in Geneva, Sawyer initiates a complete withdrawal of American troops from the region and is photographed shaking hands with the new Iranian leader.

All this peacenik talk doesn’t play well with the folks back home. His long-serving chief of security (James Woods) is on high alert against a terrorist threat. Although still mourning the loss of his son in a war that his boss now calls futile, his job is to protect the President. He’s also just days from retirement which, in the way of these things, doesn’t bode well for his hopes of seeing the end credits. But even as Sawyer confides in his stylish and smart First Lady (Garcelle Beauvais) that his peace plan might result in him becoming “a one-term president”, a motley crew of heavily-armed right-wing mercenaries led by the Aryan-sounding Stenz (Jason Clarke) have secreted themselves in the White House.

White House Down is a far better Die Hard film than John Moore’s franchise effort from earlier this year. If his character’s name is just a few consonants away from being an actionable copyright infringement, Tatum’s divorced, unstable hero John Cale is - through violently unpredictable circumstances - soon reduced to wearing a blood-stained white sleeveless vest and a bandolier of salvaged weapons. Buddied-up with the President, Cale must keep them both alive for long enough to foil the terrorist plan and save his daughter. As events proceed, the plot thins. There’s some back-room political chicanery as the chain of command is tied in knots, a gung-ho response from the military chiefs that turns into a shambles and a series of to-the-death gun battles that result in the wanton destruction of the building’s priceless antiques and furnishings.

There isn’t much that doesn’t result in wanton destruction, actually. White House Down marks the third time Emmerich has laid waste to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on screen, but this is his first time to do so from the inside out. Once behind the walls, he seems to take a certain delight in blowing every iconic room into smouldering rubble and turning detailed reproductions of familiar objects into firewood: the Lincoln bed, the ‘Resolute’ desk and Stuart’s emblematic portrait of Washington are all splintered and set ablaze for our entertainment.

It’s a model of mayhem that has served Emmerich well over the years, his films make a lot of money, but White House Down is the director’s attempt to have his cake and blow it up, too. He gleefully incinerates the apparatus of the American state yet constantly reminds us of its power to effect positive change in the world. He gives us a president modelled after Obama and castigates him for being politically enfeebled at the same time as he has him pick up a machine-gun and turn Commando in Chief.

Never mind the laws of man, given the laws of physics currently at play in the universe; White House Down could not happen. Emmerich knows that. In fact, he revels in it. Part tongue-in-cheek provocation, part thunderous action extravaganza, the director gleefully expands on the lesson from television’s The West Wing: it does no harm to see impossible events played out in the familiar corridors of real-life political power. If nothing else, it serves to distract us from thinking too much about what really goes on there.

The Conjuring

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 12:59:00 +0000

James Wan’s The Conjuring (the title is meaningless, unless you consider the box-office numbers the film has magicked up) is an old fashioned spook-house horror, built on the bedrock of a supposedly true supernatural story and unashamedly derived from the best bits of a long list of genre classics, from The Exorcist to The Shining.

1976s blockbuster Amityville Horror is a touchstone, but that’s no surprise given that this purportedly true-to-life account of the strange goings on that affected a family home in Rhode Island in the early 70s comes from the same source, husband-and-wife paranormal investigators Ed and Loraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga).

In real life, the Warrens came to prominence at a time when there was a spike in interest in paranormal matters; the most pronounced revival in spiritualism since the Victorian era, a hangover from the third-eye opening sixties. It was a golden age for woo-hoo: the films already mentioned were all released during the 70s, and have been rejigged, remade and repurposed ever since. As the Warrens were busy mounting investigations and writing up reports in a series of best-selling books, to join hundreds of others on bookshelves around the world, belief in ghosts, demons and little green men was in the ether. Horror films became blockbusters, they were fainting in the aisles at The Exorcist (similarly ‘based on a true story’) while on small screens at home, Arthur C Clarke and Uri Geller were revealing signs and wonders. Context is everything in storytelling and Wan goes to considerable effort to evoke the era, dressing his sets and actors in drab shades of brown and plastic while adding a subtle sepia tint to the cinematography.

After attending one of their lectures at a local college, a desperate young married couple, Roger and Carolyn Perron (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) beg the Warrens to visit them at their new home, deep in the New England countryside. As soon as Farminga’s medium Loraine enters the house, she knows something is wrong. An evil spirit has taken hold of the family. It manifests itself through night-time disturbances, slammed doors, bad smells and sudden cold spots. Confined to one room by the nightly disturbances, deep fissures have appeared in the family.

The kids are terrified and withdrawn. Carolyn, who appears to be the focus of the haunting, wakes every morning covered in bruises. She has strange thoughts. They are being pulled from their beds in the middle of the night and seeing spectres in the shadows (cleverly hidden from our view). The Warrens arrive in a bustle and do a pleasingly analogue survey with flash-bulb cameras and reel-to-reel tape recorders. Their professional diagnosis is that the Perron’s house is haunted by a malign spirit that must be removed.

Wan leads us through the house with a constantly tracking camera, familiarising us with the layout, before injecting sudden moments of twitchy pace by switching from steady, carefully composed shots to jolting, galloping Steadicam. Events that happen off-screen are chased down, the camera arriving a moment too late, blurred and breathless. The big scares, and there are quite a few, are delivered like rib-shaking punches from a skipping welterweight. It’s all terribly effective.

But there’s the distinct impression that the Warren’s aren’t really listening to the voices in their own heads. For one thing, they keep a museum of cursed items – including a creepy porcelain doll possessed by a demon – in their home. That’s the same home they share with their eight year old daughter. One of them underwent a psychic collapse during their last exorcism they performed, yet they’re happy to agree to do another, not too long after, and agree the deal while standing in a car park. These underestimations are carefully delineated in a lengthy prologue that forecasts details that will become important later, but feel every bit the signposts that they are.

The first half unfolds as an escalating series of creepy moments, perfectly timed for maximum effect and convincingly played by the entire cast. The Conjuring is the very model of a haunted house horror. Pre-determination is perhaps inevitable in a story about psychics, but everything seems to lose traction once the Warrens apply their bell, book and candle. Nevertheless, a sequel is already in development.

Byzantium

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 15:40:00 +0000

Anyone who follows the careers of Irish writers and directors has, over the last couple of decades, had what might be termed a Neil Jordan Moment. These are times as you watch one of his films when your jaw drops and your eyes bulge and the synapses in your brain go ‘ping’. The werewolves emerging from the diner’s mouths in The Company of Wolves, the atomic mushroom cloud exploding over a mountain lake in The Butcher Boy, the shock reveal in The Crying Game that made the whole world catch its breath.

His new film, Byzantium, has more than a few of these moments, arresting glimpses into a character’s psychology that could only have come from Jordan’s singular imagination. Here’s one: a waterfall transforming from a clear, cold torrent to a cascade of steaming blood. The red flow is the result of a new victim entering a magical place, a round stone cell perched on the side of a granite cliff on a remote Irish island. This is a place where vampires are born. One of those few undead, Clara (Gemma Arterton) was made here two hundred years ago by Ruthven (pronounced Riven and played by Jonny Lee Miller), a cruel British Army officer who condemned her to life in a brothel once he had his way with her. Having found an arcane map that led her to the cliff-side hut, Clara was reborn in blood. Later, she had a daughter, who was also initiated as a vampire. Now Clara and Eleanor (an especially ethereal Saoirse Ronan) pose as sisters, flitting around the tired seaside towns along the south coast of England in search of sanctuary, somewhere they can be safe from the secret, all-male society of vampires that have been hunting them for centuries.

When their latest lair is discovered by one of those men, Darvell (Sam Reilly), mother and daughter flee to the coastal town of Newhaven, the place they lived in as mortal beings before their transformation. There, Clara insinuates herself with the shy, awkward Noel (Daniel Mays), owner of a run-down boarding house which she plans to turn into a brothel while Eleanor, two hundred and sixteen and never been kissed, returns to school and starts a tentative relationship with local boy Frank (Caleb Landry Jones). When her teachers (played by Tom Hollander and Maria Doyle Kennedy) discover the truth behind a seemingly-fantastical writing assignment, they start to investigate these strange sisters and their sinister lives, laying a trail of clues for the women’s pursuers to follow.

Adapted from the play A Vampire Story by Moira Buffini (who co-wrote the screenplay with Jordan), Byzantium marks the director’s return to bloodsucking fiends twenty years on from his sumptuous, suffocating take on Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. In the interim, vampires have become commonplace, from Buffy to Blade, True Blood to Twilight, with Jordan deliberately seeking out a new direction for his immortal characters, a steady accretion of tone that builds into a melancholy atmosphere of Gothic dread. Every vampire story has to re-write and re-establish the rules: Jordan’s monsters don’t have fangs, but draw blood through elongated thumbnails that stiffen and sharpen at the sight of a bare neck. They don’t seem to be affected by daylight, or garlic or crosses or running water, although they do require an invitation to enter people’s homes. They are also immortal, suspended in time, with Jordan cutting between the centuries to tell the story of how they came to be alongside the story of what they have become.

It’s an ambitious structure but the problems with Byzantium are in the story itself, not in how it is told. Clara and Eleanor’s twinned sagas aren’t dark enough to be horrific, subversive enough to be truly original or nuanced enough to be convincingly political. There is little sense of the vampire’s compulsion to feed, that predatory parapsychology that marks them out as fascinating, inhuman creatures driven by something we cannot understand. As characters, they are shallow and one-dimensional: Clara seems only motivated by money, using her flawless body to provide them with the resources to ensure their survival, while Eleanor’s self-imposed moral code only allows her to drink the blood of the elderly dying, who see her as a kindly angel of death in their last moments.

Later, the balance of power Jordan had spent time carefully establishing is seemingly abandoned to allow the threads of the story to better fit together. This jarring uncertainty is part of what marks the film out as an original work but are also what causes it to gradually lose its power to unnerve and disturb. The wandering plot lacks the heart-stopping lyricism of Jordan’s best work, but it does have its moments; startling visions we have never seen before that later, we cannot forget.

The Great Gatsby

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Thu, 30 May 2013 09:49:00 +0000

Great just isn’t good enough for Australian director Baz Luhrmann. It’s too small a word for the kind of monumental confections his films have become, elaborately iced wedding cakes that deliver surges of sugary energy but provide little narrative nutrition. Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless novel The Great Gatsby might well be entitled The Stupendous Gatsby, told at a breathless gallop in gaudy 3D with a starry cast of A-list actors and a supporting cast of thousands of faceless digital effects technicians. The effect is like Al Jolsen’s Jazz Singer hitching a ride with The Fast and the Furious. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

The best known adaptation of the book, Jack Clayton’s version with Robert Redford from 1974, suffered from sticking too closely to the source novel with characters standing around reeling off paragraphs of Fitzgerald’s prose in gleaming white clothes. Luhrmann’s uniquely kitchen-sink approach might give the story a bolt of energy, but for a long time he overplays his hand, unable to match his cacophonous vision of the Jazz Age with the different beats of the story.

The film opens with a broken-veined Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) relating the last crazy decade of his life to a psychiatrist in a book-lined room. As Carraway tells it, he had moved to New York to take a job on Wall Street when he failed to make his name as a writer. He rented a cottage on Long Island “for eighty a month”, across the water from the house his cousin Daisy Buchannan (Carey Mulligan) shares with her boorish husband Tom (Joel Edgerton), a dissolute, polo-playing scion of a wealthy family. Carraway soon hears fantastical stories about his next-door neighbour, a reclusive young multi-millionaire called Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who throws enormous parties for New York society every weekend but is otherwise a complete enigma. As the friendship between Carraway and Gatsby grows, we come to learn more about the mysterious man who has built his Xanadu within sight of the woman he is obsessed with, and what part the young Wall Street novice might play in his long-formed plan to recover a lost love.

Although part of the fascination with any literary adaptation derives from seeing what new perspectives a director can find in the material, in the end, the novel is still the novel. It would be pointless to outline the places where Luhrmann and co-writer Craig Pearce’s story deviates from Fitzgerald’s: there are plenty and in the end, it doesn’t really matter. This version is designed only as a cinematic experience, where images and sounds, not words, evoke emotion. The shame is that for a long time, the images in this Great Gatsby remain just that, beautifully rendered and sumptuously ornate pictures that vibrate with theatrical passion but otherwise fail to move the soul.

It’s hard to know what Luhrmann makes of Jay Gatsby, an enigmatic icon in his own story, or if he is interested in portraying him as anything more than a victim of love. Luhrmann’s interpretations all drive his characters towards the one place that he feels most comfortable; tragic, melodramatic romance. Every bump and contour in Fitzgerald’s story is smoothed down to make this passage easier. Nuances turn into vapid clichés through endless repetition, the ornate places and lavish settings become postcards and shop windows and, through dialogue, voice-over and anachronistic music, every awkward nail in Fitzgerald’s knotty story is emphatically hammered home. Luhrmann’s characters cannot see a horizon without staring off into it with a sigh, followed immediately by his swooping camera and a visual trick or two. His techniques are so emphatic, they overwhelm the story. His presence can be felt in every overly-choreographed movement, standing off camera, beating out time. But his rhythm is off.

Every frame of the film has been worked to ribbons by an unseen army of digital effects technicians. It is difficult to invest in characters that appear to be wisps, wandering an imaginary world. Now, before you say it, I realise all films take place in imaginary worlds, but some are more imaginary than others. Nothing in The Great Gatsby feels solid. Nothing feels like it isn’t a film set. The characters are wearing costumes, not clothes. They speak only in dialogue and their behaviour is designed only to advance the plot. Even Luhrmann’s well-chosen snippets of archive footage have been artificially colourised in photo-chemically lurid oranges and blues. There are long sections that look like nothing more than an expensive commercial for a high-end after-shave named Old Sport.

The film gets better as it continues but then it couldn’t have gotten much worse. In the end, it’s the characters that save it, and the actors playing them. They transform from figures in a photograph to people that we can believe might share love. DiCaprio is too good an actor to succumb to Luhrmann’s fumbling and steadily grows into the role, finding his own interpretation on a man who is, all at once, a helpless romantic, a dangerously obsessed weirdo, a ruthless social climber and a crooked gangster. He looks the part too, an almost surreal personification of the urbane sophisticate, suave and certain. It’s strange that one of the most ephemeral characters in American literature should be the most solid presence in the film.

The Best & Worst of 2012

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:09:00 +0000

An unexpectedly busy Christmas season means a short delay in compiling my best and worst of the year just gone, with the extra couple of weeks allowing a few late changes and additions. As before, I have listed my favourites of 2012 in no particular order but the standout film was Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon A Time In Anatolia. The Turkish director's sixth feature is a visually stunning, quietly gripping masterpiece about a group of policemen out hunting for a buried corpse in the countryside. A modest epic of desperation that made magic of the mundane, it cements Ceylan's reputation as one of the new masters of world cinema. At least it does for me.

And, in no particular order:

The Master

The two finest acting performances with a story that falls just short of transcendence, Paul Thomas Anderson’s dared to distil the story of America in the Atomic Age into the relationship between a Philip Seymour Hoffman’s cult leader and Joaquin Phoenix’s wild-eyed follower.

Amour

Michael Haneke’s devastating exploration of the power of love won the Austrian writer and director his second Palme d’Or in a row. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, now both in their 80s, play a loving couple whose lives are disrupted by sudden illness and inevitable death. Unwatchable yet unmissable.

The Artist

The big winner at the Oscars brought a shaft of flickering light to an otherwise gloomy January. Funny, sweet and sumptuously presented, Michel Hazanavicius’ film made stars, however briefly dazzling, of Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo.

The Imposter

Bart Layton's ingenious, intricate documentary about identity thief Frédéric Bourdin, a thirty year old French orphan who pretended to be missing Texan teenager Nicholas Barclay. The cliché that truth is stranger than fiction has rarely been more appropriate.

What Richard Did

Lenny Abrahamson’s third film confirmed his reputation as the best Irish young director working today. A brilliantly-crafted story of public death and private remorse, inspired by a real-life crime, it had a career-making performance from 20 year old star Jack Reynor.

The Dark Knight Rises

Plenty of films tried to put the tangled politics of the Occupy protest movement in a cinematic context in 2012, the clumsiest being David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis, but it was a big-budget, blockbuster superhero film, funded by a major studio, that came closest. After seven years and billions of dollars at the box office, Christopher Nolan ended his trilogy by bringing Batman bang up to date.

Looper

Rian Johnson made telling the story of his time-travelling sci-fi look easy and complicated at the same time. Not perfect, but very nearly.

Searching For Sugar Man

Malik Bendjelloul's documentary told the story of how a couple of South African fans of 1970s singer/songwriter Rodriguez decided to look behind the urban legends that surrounded his disappearance from the scene. What they found was astonishing.

Shame

Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender reunited for this brutal examination of an Irishman in New York addicted to sex. A long night of the soul delivered in a series of horribly intimate close-ups and endless tracking shots, it burned up the screen in a wrong-feeling, sad way.

The Raid

Who would have guessed that the year’s finest action film would be made on a shoestring in Indonesia by a Welsh director? Tied with Leos Carax’s loo-lah Holy Motors for most WFT moments, Gareth Evans’ hyperkinetic extravaganza made a new martial arts star of Iko Uwais. The five-minute standing ovation that greeted its Dublin Film Festival screening stood the hairs on the back of my neck.

The Worst of 2012

To mark annual whipping-boy Matthew McConaughey's spectacularly unlikely career resurrection - as an entrepreneurial stripper in Soderberg's Magic Mike and a sleazy cop in Friedkin's nutso-noir Killer Joe - this year's worst list is limited to one title (in which McC did not appear), McG's This Means War: an ultra-violent toothpaste commercial. There were others but none as soulless.

Image of the director and his cast on location taken from Nuri Bilge Ceylan's website.

Seven Psychopaths

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 16:22:00 +0000

Irish writer and director Martin McDonagh has gone Hollywood. He’s gone to Hollywood and made a Hollywood film, about people living and working and dying and not working in Hollywood. Seven Psychopaths is a gory black comedy which works as a both a satire on, and an example of, hardboiled gangster cinema. Closely connected in spirit and execution to the surreal knottiness of Charlie Kaufmann and the vivid Grand Guignol theatrics of Quentin Tarantino, McDonagh’s follow-up to In Bruges operates on the verge of absurdity throughout, being defiantly self-aware, self-referential and completely and utterly clever-clogs.

All of this is nothing new for McDonagh, whose characters, even in his acclaimed stage plays, have always shared the quality that Tarantino calls “movieness”; the awareness that they are characters and that the world they inhabit is make-believe. For In Bruges, McDonagh placed two stock characters, a bickering pair of killers-for-hire, in a situation that not only allowed him to explore how their glamorised cinema universe bumped up against the grey, everyday world of dusty museums and shuffling tourists, but to slowly absorb into their orbit other characters from a film-within-the-film, a ferocious dwarf actor and an art department love-interest. McDonagh mocked his assassin’s appetite for violence while indulging in it, a neat trick that he executes again, albeit without the same levels of subtlety and wit. It is Hollywood, after all.

Colin Farrell, who co-starred in In Bruges, plays Martin, an ex-pat Irish screenwriter working in Hollywood. Martin seems to enjoy his new life in Los Angles; the comfortable domesticity he shares with his girlfriend Kaya (Abbie Cornish, briefly) and sipping cocktails with his live-wire best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) beside sun-kissed, rooftop swimming pools. The trouble is that Martin has forgotten how to write. Terminally blocked, and with his agent pressing him for delivery of a long-promised screenplay, all he has to show for a year’s work is a title: Seven Psychopaths. Everyone loves the title, it’s a great title, but Martin is unable to progress his story any further than EXT: LOS ANGELES STREET CORNER, DAY.

Martin is beginning to despair that he will never be able to place two words together again when his peripatetic life starts feeding him inspiration. The newspapers are filled with stories about a masked killer who only kills mobsters, leaving a playing card on their bleeding corpses. There’s a character in that, Martin thinks, but the Jack of Diamonds killer is only one psycho: he needs six more. When Billy places a recruitment ad in the paper looking for psychopaths to get in touch, they meet a rabbit-stroking tramp (played by Tom Waits) who describes, in eye-watering detail, those events that drove him to become a killer. Billy, whose career as an actor has hit the skids, tells Martin about another potential character, his colleague in a dog-kidnapping business Hans (Christopher Walken), who has recently taken illegal possession of a yappy Shih Tzu belonging to Charlie, a notoriously ruthless mob boss played by Woody Harrelson. What’s the count on psychopaths now? Four, maybe five? A side-story introduces us to a Vietnamese priest (Long Nguyen), sitting in a motel room plotting revenge on America for the Vietnam War while, somewhere in the city, Harry Dean Stanton stalks the streets in a wide-brimmed hat as a vengeful Quaker tormenting the man who killed his only daughter. There’s really not a lot to be gained in keeping up with the various shades of human psychopathology on display, the film is more about following the looping convolutions of the plot, and perhaps it’s not even about that.

Just as the fictional Martin becomes distracted by the unhinged characters that he meets, the real-life Martin allows this otherwise workaday buddy crime caper to break free from the conventions of cinematic narrative and fold in on itself, becoming a reflexive meta-textual commentary on screen violence, storytelling and Los Angeles itself. For instance, Rockwell’s excitable Bickle demonstrates what should happen next at a key juncture in Farrell’s screenplay, proposing an action set-piece which gathers everybody in a cemetery to shoot off big guns and splash around in fake blood; a crude, dumb shoot-out that we then watch being acted out, in all its high-concept glory. When the story takes a long detour into talkativeness, Bickle is again on hand to observe, “oh, we’re making French movies now?” Elsewhere Walken’s grizzled Hans tells Martin, truthfully, “your women characters are awful”, as Cornish and Precious star Gabourey Sidibe come and go in a couple of frames.

But if McDonagh can see where his screenplay needs work, why not do the work rather than leave it to the characters point out the problems and carry on with a smirk? That’s not to say that the results aren’t entertaining, the dialogue fairly fizzes and the multiple storylines are enjoyably contorted, but it is difficult to remain involved in a film when the characters are going out of their way to remind the audience that they are watching a film. There’s no time during Seven Psychopaths to think how neatly McDonagh’s story fits together, if it fits together at all, and afterwards the film doesn’t linger long enough in the memory to bother trying.

The Master

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:13:00 +0000

Paul Thomas Anderson’s wholly engrossing, slyly disorienting study of the symbiotic relationship between a feckless drifter and a charlatan cult leader in the years after WWII is an extraordinary film; brilliantly realised and audaciously eccentric.

The Master opens in the days before the end of WWII, as the Japanese surrender is being negotiated and American sailors are enjoying shore-leave on a sandy Pacific island. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is an able seaman with a talent for making high-proof moonshine from whatever chemicals he finds lying around. Newly demobbed and unable to adjust to civilian life, he spends some time in a veteran’s hospital, where uncaring psychiatrists diagnose him with a post-traumatic stress disorder and don’t seem to notice, or care, that he is drunk all the time.

Having cleaned up enough to get a job as a photographer in a department store, and keep it just long enough to fall back off the wagon, Freddie flits across the United States, eventually ending up in a field in the middle of nowhere harvesting cabbages with migrant workers. After almost killing an elderly man with a bad batch of his booze, Freddie finds himself a stowaway on a yacht belonging to the charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), or rather, the yacht that the self-proclaimed visionary, literary genius, nuclear physicist and philosopher has borrowed from a rich benefactor and is using as a training centre for his quasi-religious movement, The Cause.

Before too long, Freddie is making his moonshine for Dodd, using paint-thinner, crushed-up pills and orange soda to loosen the older man’s writer’s block. The two become friends, perhaps because Freddie’s home-made hooch mirrors Dodd’s home-spun hogwash. After submitting to Dodd’s psychological profiling in a thrillingly tense question and answer session, Freddie becomes the Master’s right-hand man and surrogate son, booze-supplier, confessor and sometime violent enforcer. “You'll be my protégé and my guinea pig”, Dodd tells him, with a flourish, but Freddie is just content to have a roof over his head and three square meals a day. Actual self-realisation will take more time, according to Dodd and his manipulative wife Peggy (superbly played by a steely Amy Adams). As Dodd works his mountebank magic on Freddie’s broken mind, the story follows his ups and downs as he struggles to write his new book (on the restorative power of laughter) and stay one step ahead of his enemies, while his sidekick tries to cope with his troubled past, and mourns his lost love (played in flashback by Madisen Beaty).

In the same way that There Will Be Blood was loosely based on the life of American oil tycoon Edward Doheny, The Master is undoubtedly inspired by L Ron Hubbard, the founder of the cult Church of Scientology. Yet it also encompasses every other entrepreneurial evangelist, self-help saviour and pavement prophet in American history, malignant and benign, from Dale Carnegie to Jim Baker, Pat Robertson to Jim Jones. Anderson’s portrait of Dodd is not damning, exactly, but he carefully positions the guru as a symptom of the enormous social upheaval such as that experienced in the aftermath of WWII when, at the dawn of the Atomic Age and faced with unspeakable horror and mass death, people went looking for answers to the big questions: why are we here? What’s the point of it all? Dodd is a vulture, a smart, confident charlatan with a natural-born ability to identify weakness and speak directly to it. He finds an exemplary subject in Freddie, traumatised by war, floundering in alcohol and brim-full of regret.

With his vulnerable, fractured face, Phoenix’s performance suggests the grimaces and squints of the Method actors who came of age in the 1950s, such as Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando, while the preening, pretentious Hoffman, playing a role Anderson wrote specifically for him, is like a plump Orson Welles, dancing nimbly across the screen, around the chasing police and lawyers, around any explanation of his ridiculous theories and skipping, laughing, ahead of his followers; the people who buy his books, pay for his seminars and, like Laura Dern’s wealthy Miss Sullivan, honour him with the title of “Master”.

Phoenix and Hoffman, both at the top of their game, slug it out all the way through Anderson’s story, as he surgically dissects post-War American life, separating the parasites from the prey, the profiteers from the paupers and the crooks from the credulous. From time to time, Anderson breaks the story with unannounced dream sequences, if indeed they are dreams, strange deliriums that tie elements of the story more tightly together or hang, loosely, like worrying threads. Johnny Greenwood’s discordant orchestral score takes a little getting used to but has a similar effect, unsettling and sometimes distracting.

Skyfall

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 14:46:00 +0000

“You know the rules of the game,” Judi Dench’s spymistress M tells Daniel Craig’s James Bond with an exasperated glare, “You’ve been playing it long enough.” The 23rd Bond film in a franchise that celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, director Sam Mendes Skyfall manages the neat trick of striding ever forward while repeatedly looking over its shoulder, into its own past.

The story opens in media res with Craig’s taciturn Bond and fellow MI6 agent Eve (Naomie Harris) racing around the crowded streets of Istanbul in pursuit of a swarthy villain, who has stolen a computer hard drive containing the names of all the double agents the British Intelligence service has placed in terrorist organisation. The chase comes to nothing, and worse, it seems Bond has been fatally wounded by Eve’s friendly fire, falling feet first over a waterfall in mournful slow-motion. No body is found.

Just in case anyone thinks I’ve given the game away, all of this happens in the first ten minutes, before the trademark credits sequence, scored by Adele’s immediately forgettable theme song. Bond has survived the cascade, of course, and escaped to somewhere remote and tropical to recover. Back in grey, damp London, Dench’s exhausted-looking M also appears to be on the way out. Newly promoted Whitehall mandarin Mallory (a delicately priggish Ralph Fiennes) is gently pushing her towards the exit door. At the same time, a mysterious enemy agent with a shadowy connection to M’s past has somehow infiltrated the MI6 fortress beside the Thames, hacked the computer system and exploded a bomb. From an idyllic shoreline, where he has been medicating himself with whiskey and women, Bond hears of the attack on his mentor and returns to the nest.

Soon, videos of the compromised agents being executed by a variety of masked terrorists start appearing on the internet, making MI6 look incompetent and Bond and M seem like throwbacks to a bygone age, whose guns and guile are no match for a new breed of techno-anarchists. Having waited in the wings for more than an hour, the villain finally takes centre stage in the form of Javier Bardem’s Silva, a bleached-blonde, majestically camp former agent with enough charisma to cover the emerging plot holes, Silva doesn’t just want to destroy MI6, he's out for vengeance.

Mendes’ decision to emphasise plot and character over non-stop action is commendable, with the director allowing his ensemble cast the time and space to flesh out characters that previously were truncated to allow for another chase or thunderous explosion. Dench’s M is effectively given a co-starring role with the veteran actor delivering a sterling performance, alternating between steely authority and tender frailty. Craig, who has settled into the role admirably, finds new character notes to add to Bond, playing him as an aging, inscrutable presence who allows the characters around him to fill in the story while he concentrates on the messy business at hand. The supporting cast is of a higher calibre than we’ve seen in the franchise previously. Bardem’s Silva is a particularly juicy creation, the most memorable villain in the franchise since the days of Richard Kiel’s Jaws, a creepy, eerily unruffled sociopath with seemingly unlimited powers.

Skyfall gathers together all the familiar Ian Fleming elements of the series; the guns, the gadgets, the exotic locations, the beautiful women and the unsubtle product placement, but places them in a changed world – one whose origins lie more in the glossy pages of a modern superhero comic than a cheap paperback. Mendes’ film has less in common with the traditional all-action 007 fantasy than with Christopher Nolan’s moody Batman trilogy, which reconfigured the template for the modern blockbuster by framing a heroic story through the lens of geopolitics and psychology. Bardem’s clownish Silva is the Joker without his make-up while Bond is revealed as a self-sufficient orphan whose lack of emotional connections to the world outside MI6 allowed M to remould him into a deadly, disposable asset. Like Batman, he is a man without a past but its in exploring this vacuum that Skyfall finds it’s most interesting and progressive material. He might race around the world to face fearsome enemies but is at his most vulnerable when he finally returns to his childhood home.

“We don’t go in for exploding pens any more,” quips the bespectacled young boffin Q (Ben Whishaw). Neither do audiences, but Mendes’ tinkering can only go so far. In the end, the traditional requirements of the Bond formula take precedence over any post-modern reinvention. Skyfall achieves its aim of returning the 007 franchise to the gritty high of Casino Royale after the addled low of Quantum of Solace, but the chance to find a new direction for the fifty year old series is tantalisingly spurned. Maybe next time.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 11:52:00 +0000

The winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance earlier this year, Benh Zeitlin’s directorial debut Beasts of the Southern Wild is a deeply eccentric, strikingly immediate story of life and loss in the flooded wastelands of post-Katrina New Orleans. Adapted by Zeitlin’s artistic collective Court 13 from a one-act play by co-writer Lucy Alibar, played by an amateur cast (who also built the sets) and shot on grainy, hand-held 16mm film, Beasts has a charmingly home-made, half-baked aesthetic that, unfortunately, also carries over into the ill-considered narrative.

Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl played with extraordinary courage and tenacity by Quvenzhané Wallis, lives with her alcoholic father, Wink (Dwight Henry) in “The Bathtub,” a flooded Delta community at the edge of civilisation. Hushpuppy is the film’s heroine, a cross between a mini-Mad Max and the biblical Eve, whose whispered voice-over fills us in on her shattered family life, their hardscrabble existence and her sustained belief in magic, despite her father’s tough-love teachings about survival. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness that turns his veins black under his skin, nature itself seems to fall out of synchronicity. A great flood arrives, sinking The Bathtub, the tumbling clouds cause the temperature to rise and, somewhere far distant, the ice-caps melt unleashing a herd of prehistoric pig-like creatures called Aurochs. As the waters rise, and her father slowly succumbs, Hushpuppy goes in search of her long-lost mother and a new home.

But there’s comes a point, about half way through, when it becomes clear that the inhabitants of The Bathtub aren’t the straggled survivors of some apocalyptic disaster, living in a post-industrial Eden of their own assembly, but rather a band of people who choose to live apart from the rest of the world. While the “beasts” commitment to their home and community is touching, and touchingly played, the subsequent story is constructed around their naïve determination to live as Rousseau’s ‘noble savages’, eschewing the medical and social assistance they so desperately need and actively asking the audience to root against the faceless people that offer help. Over time, a desperate cuteness soaks into the film as Zeitlin strains to avoid even the most obvious social comment while having his characters run around in rags in a devastated world where alcohol is the only currency.

Zeitlin does get an extraordinarily self-assured performance from young Wallis (expect her to be nominated for an Academy Award in January) but his Malick-like evocation of natural poetry and magic realism don’t sit comfortably with the realistic depiction of grinding poverty and blackout-chasing alcoholism. Characters that we have come to care for, Hushpuppy in particular, are abandoned as the story sidelines into condescending clichés about ragged people struggling against 'the man' for the right to return to their home. The photography is sensitive and immersive, the soaring score is bouncing and playful but no amount of atmospherics and lighting can fill the gaping hole where a fully-formed story should be. By the time that the Pied Piper Hushpuppy leads a ragged parade of her friends and neighbours holding sparkling fireworks, the film has become little more than a sustained round of applause for its own loose, improvised novelty.

What Richard Did

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 20:10:00 +0000

Having explored the margins of Irish society in his first two films, Adam & Paul and Garage, director Lenny Abrahamson moves towards the centre of things with his new film What Richard Did, set in the leafy suburbs of South Dublin, and finds it can be just as lonely and rotten a place. Sensitively photographed and superbly acted by a talented young ensemble, the film is a major step forward for Abrahamson; a riveting, daringly ambiguous drama that defines a generation.

Loosely adapted by writer Malcolm Campbell from Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day in Blackrock, itself inspired by a notorious real-life violent crime, Abrahamson opens the story with a languid sequence at a summer house party in a holiday villa in Wicklow that carefully establishes the tone. Richard (Jack Reynor) has borrowed his doting parent’s (Lars Mikkelsen and Lorraine Pilkington) place for the weekend to celebrate the end of exams and the university fun to come.

A private-school student and captain of the rugby team, Richard is a leader among his peers, who look to him to guide them through their tricky teenage years. Among the kids hanging out on the beach is Lara (Roisin Murphy), who is in a relationship with Conor (Sam Keeley). As the summer continues, Richard sets his sights on Lara and the two start dating. But the heart-broken Conor keeps hanging around, making the previously confident and carefree Richard uncomfortable and insecure.

Jealousy, alcohol and bravado combine for a momentary brain-freeze. At a drunken house party deep in the suburbs, Richard becomes involved in an altercation with Conor. Badly hurt, the young man staggers away as Richard jumps into a taxi and goes home. The next morning, the radio news tells us that Conor has died. The fallout drops slowly, settling like a layer of radioactive dust across Richard’s life and the lives of those closest to him.

Unlike Abrahamson’s previous two films, Richard isn’t so much a victim of an uncaring society as its over-confident scion. He’s brilliantly played by newcomer Reynor, who combines an easy, swaggering affability with a brittle fragility, sometimes in the same scene. The ensemble cast are strong, with Murphy and Keeley distinguishing themselves in delicately drawn roles that, like the titular protagonist, skip lightly between obnoxiousness and overwhelming compassion: just like real teenagers. As the story inches towards its resolution and Richard grapples with his guilty conscience, Abrahamson deliberately avoids passing judgement on his characters, providing just enough information and the storytelling space for audiences to draw their own conclusions. The best Irish drama of the year, this hugely impressive and complex film is a must see.

The Imposter

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 10:14:00 +0000

Bart Layton’s frequently jaw-dropping documentary The Imposter nimbly illustrates the old cliché: truth is stranger than fiction. A sensational blend of interviews, archive footage, reconstructions and investigative reporting, the film arranges the real-life story of a missing child as a mesmerising psychological thriller. You’ll still be talking about it, as I am, weeks after seeing it.

In 1994, the Barclay family of blue-collar San Antonio, Texas were left distraught by the sudden disappearance of their 13-year-old son, Nicholas. He was the light of their lives, the family say, a bustling bundle of energy glimpsed in eerily fuzzy home video footage. Their frantic search for the youngster made the local news, for a couple of nights, but their hunt led nowhere and the police and media moved on to the next case. Three years later, the phone rings. It’s the Spanish police, who have picked up a teenager who claims to be Nicholas Barclay.

Found huddled in a phone box, traumatised and confused, Nicholas claims to have escaped from a secret prison in the desert, where he had been brought by child-abusing US military officials, experimented upon with drugs and tortured. It’s a surreal story, but it appears to check out. Within hours, Nicholas’ sister Carey is on a plane. In front of the Spanish authorities, she positively identifies the young man as her brother. Never mind that the blonde, blue-eyed 16 year-old now had brown hair, brown eyes, brown stubble and spoke with a French accent: Nicholas was found at last.

The mystery of the young teenager’s disappearance did not end with his apparent discovery: a far greater puzzle was about to reveal itself. The Barclay’s had brought a cuckoo into their nest. Frédéric Bourdin was a 23 year old French-Algerian orphan with a long history of impersonation, petty crime and manipulation. Somehow, he had discovered the details of Nicholas’ case and transformed himself into an American teenager. He fooled his own “mother” Beverly and the rest of his immediate family. He fooled the rest of the townspeople, the local news journalists and his old school friends. He fooled immigration officers, embassy officials and the FBI.

Consulting every interested party, whose testimony is sometimes contradictory, Layton’s extraordinary film poses two key questions: how was Bourdin able to achieve this deception and why did Nicholas’s family accept him as their long-lost son? The answer to the first is explained like a police procedural (and is astonishing enough by itself) but it’s when Layton and the loquacious and charismatic Bourdin get into the second question that the film’s strangest secrets uncover themselves. I’ll say no more: there are some stories you just have to hear for yourselves.

The Bourne Legacy

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 18:01:00 +0000

“The Bourne Redundancy” was the title that Paul Greengrass, who directed the last two Jason Bourne movies, proposed for any future installment. When you’ve successfully turned Robert Ludlum’s page-tuning spy novels into three genre-defining blockbusters, and titled the last film “Ultimatum”, where do you go from there? If you're Universal Pictures, you find a way to keep on going.

Rather than start from scratch with a new property, which would require acquainting the audience through expensive marketing, director Tony Gilroy, who scripted the original trilogy, has found a different approach for The Bourne Legacy: spinning off a parallel story that places a new character in Bourne’s cinematic universe, at the same time. Smooth-cheeked amnesiac Matt Damon has been substituted by Jeremy Renner’s squatter, lumpier Aaron Cross. If you’re going to make a Bourne movie without Damon, Renner isn’t a bad choice, but the results are less a thrilling reimagining of a popular franchise and more an exercise in squeezing the last toothpaste out of the tube. Renner is game, and there are a scattered few moments that approach the power and persuasion of the original but the overall mood is rehashed and redundant.

Gilroy opens his story with an echo of the curtain-raising shot in Doug Liman’s first Bourne film, as a body floats in clear blue water. The floater is Cross, in Alaska on a solo survival course equipped with only a powerful rifle and a pillbox filled with blue and green tablets. He is part of a CIA programme that develops better soldiers through chemistry; super-strong, steroidal geniuses with lightning-fast reflexes and endless stamina. When the spy is ready to come in from the cold, he makes his rendezvous with a fellow agent (Oscar Isaac) in a remote cabin, awaiting transport back to Washington. Instead, an unmanned drone descends through a flurry of snow and blows the place to bits. Having made it out alive, Cross makes the long trek home to discover he is one of nine super-agents whose spymasters (led by a grizzled Edward Norton and a whiskey-swilling Stacy Keach) have decided are now surplus to requirements. Now classified as a dangerous rogue agent and cut off from his supply of medication, Cross seeks out Dr Martha Shearing (Rachel Weisz), a medical scientist at a secret laboratory where the selected agents are tested and dosed.

When he finds her, the good doctor has just survived a mysterious shooting at the hands of a seemingly hypnotised colleague. Without his medication, the preternaturally agile Cross would revert back to his ordinary, everyday dull-mindedness, like the experimental subject in Flowers for Algernon. As the one link to the drugs, and with his powers slowly fading, Cross must convince Marta to escape with him. Her mind is made up when a tense interrogation with a seemingly kindly psychologist turns into another, even more deadly shootout. Somehow they must find their way to a clandestine drug factory on the other side of the world, with the massed weight of the CIA and their fantastic surveillance technology hot on their trail. There are glimpses of Matt Damon’s Bourne on television news reports and cameos from returning characters but none of that back-story feels connected to the frantic events unfolding.

Renner’s everyman anonymity worked to his advantage for his breakout role in The Hurt Locker but here he is overly convincing as a superhuman killing machine, robotic and efficient but burdened by an underwritten motivation and lacking any emotional ante. Gilroy’s script, co-written with his brother Dan, doesn’t help, with the story delivered in two-sentence chunks that follow a discernable, repetitive pattern: Norton glowers at a glowing computer screen and arranges his face in a pensive pinch while Renner and Weisz kick down doors and shoot off guns.

The limitless surveillance power of the agency is convincingly realised but smothered in a babble of jargon while the action sequences have all the jumpy, crunchy verisimilitude that money can buy but no cinematic point (which, of course, money cannot buy). In the closing stages Gilroy introduces an Asian super-villain with extraordinary staying-power who trails Renner and Weisz on a crushingly familiar chase over the vibrant roof-tops of a developing country, as the clock ticks slowly on and interest levels flat-line. We’ve seen it all before, and better, in the Bourne franchise. At one point, the words “no more” appear scrawled in eyeliner on a mirror, a promise nobody involved has any intention of keeping.

Ted

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 11:35:00 +0000

Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane brings all the comic crudeness and pop culture satire of Peter Griffin and his scatological chums to his big screen debut, Ted, the surprisingly sentimental story of a fraternal romance between a thirty-something man-child and his magical teddy bear.

A short pre-credits sequence, sonorously narrated by Patrick Stewart, introduces John (played later by Mark Wahlberg), a lonely boy growing up friendless in the suburbs of snowy Boston. On Christmas night in 1985 John makes a wish on a falling star, yearning for just one pal in the world. Magically, his beloved teddy-bear Ted (voiced by MacFarlane) comes to life. The boy and his bear become best friends, promising to always be there for one another through thick and thin.

John isn’t the only person who loves the talkative stuffed toy. The novelty of a real live teddy turns Ted into a celebrity overnight with a Forrest Gump-like montage showing his rise and fall from chat-show couches to handcuffed walks of shame. Back in Boston and doing nothing all day but smoke marijuana, lay about on the couch and continue arresting John’s development, Ted is at a loose end. More than that, he’s become a bit of a pest, particularly where John’s high-flying girlfriend Lori (Family Guy cast member Mila Kunis) is concerned. Short version, she wants her man to grow up and wants Ted stuffed in a box and thrown in an attic somewhere.

MacFarlane’s animated output has been criticised for favouring easy pop culture references over trickier character-based comedy, but the funniest stuff in Ted derives from the relationship between the Wahlberg’s innocent child-man and his adorably maladjusted teddy bear. Having never evolved beyond the nursery, the two characters are content to hang out and mess about with MacFarlane revelling in that easy, uncomplicated friendship, a chemistry that carries the story over the bumps in the inconsistent plot.

The romantic triangle that comprises the plot isn’t exactly earth-shatteringly original, but its MacFarlane’s unique comic trimmings that give the film its edge. Although Ted isn’t a million miles from Peter Griffin – at one point referencing the fact they sound awfully alike – MacFarlane has an enthusiast’s zeal for politically incorrect comedy and the perfect conduit in the seemingly innocent bear. The script’s targets run the gamut: sex, religion, race, drugs and endless pop culture references including a running joke about the pair’s abiding affection for Mike Hodges 80s camp sci-fi Flash Gordon and a cameo appearance from its one-hit wonder leading man, Sam Jones. For fans of the ten seasons of Family Guy, none of this will come as a shock, although the novelty of the material being delivered by a three foot tall talking teddy is not insignificant.

Freed from the restrictions of the television censors, with a 16 certificate MacFarlane can do and say what he likes. And he does. Live action filmmaking also gives him the chance to show that he can work with real actors, and he does this pretty well too, nimbly combining the real world with the computer-animated Ted and making the central relationships, between life-long friends and Kunis’s no-nonsense Lori feel real and well developed. What proves more difficult is turning 23 minutes of a cartoon episode into an hour and a half of cinema, which requires a different tempo and a more focused attention span, with the film sagging distractedly in the middle. But for all that, Ted is consistently funny, in a summer where so many other comedies have failed to raise a laugh.

The Dark Knight Rises

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 12:32:00 +0000

Director Christopher Nolan fulfils the promise made in the first two instalments of his Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, his circle-closing finale that isn’t just the year’s most anticipated blockbuster, but an epic in every conceivable way: almost three hours long, crammed with dense, sticky plot, thrilling action and gripping spectacle. With this extraordinary film, Nolan has raised the bar for genre cinema beyond all expectation: taken together, these three films make every other superhero adventure look like crayon drawings stuck to a fridge.

Not that Nolan ever intended his Batman to be a superman. From the opening frames of the first film, 2005s Batman Begins and on into the sequel, The Dark Knight, he has asked the question, ‘what if all this was for real?’ His vision for Gotham city looks like a cross between New York and Chicago, because those are the grand streets he shot on; places that feel palpably real. Eschewing trendy 3D, Nolan instead concentrates on creating three-dimensional characters that are psychologically complex, dark and conflicted. He uses digital effects sparingly, with much of the spectacular stunt-work done in-camera to emphasise danger and suspense and add an unnerving authenticity that computers cannot yet match. The Batman’s weaponry and gadgetry are a close fit for real-world military technologies while the narratives, co-written by Nolan with his brother Jonathan and screenwriter David S Goyer, marry the tropes of the superhero character with tangible issues; terrorism, corruption, economic collapse and class warfare.

Nolan’s achievement is to combine all this in a cutting-edge superhero blockbuster and still maintain a singular, auteurist vision. His Batman is a deeply personal story of a character that, since his conception in the pages of Detective Comics in 1939, has belonged to everyone. Unusually for modern mass-market cinema, where trailers are viewed millions of times within minutes of being uploaded to the internet, Nolan keeps the details of his story a secret. There’s no reason to reveal much more than he already has.

Although it’s only been four years since the release of the last film, eight years have elapsed in Gotham city. An injured Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has squirreled himself away in his mansion, suspiciously around the same time that Batman has disappeared. As the previous installment ended, the caped crusader had been blamed for the death of Gotham’s great liberator, Harvey Dent, who the public believe had cleansed the city of organised crime. With his people having turned their backs on him, and his loyal butler Alfred (Michael Caine) worried about his mental health, Batman is dragged back into his rubber suit by the simultaneous appearance of two masked villains, slinky, super-skilled cat-burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway, never referred to as Catwoman) and the hulking mercenary terrorist leader Bane (Tom Hardy), who wears a complicated breathing apparatus that gives his voice a sinister, crackling echo.

Bane has come, seemingly from nowhere, to cause mayhem. His goal is anarchy and he has a simple plan for bringing it about. First, he needs to lure Batman out of retirement and then he means to kill him. Standing in his way are the series’ returning characters, technical expert Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and new faces, graduates from Nolan’s franchise-breaking Inception, noble-hearted philanthropist Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s resourceful cop John Blake.

The rest of it is a highlight reel of the very best in epic cinema; intelligent, grippingly told and painstakingly crafted. Individual sequences are breathtakingly realised; a thunderous chase along crowded streets and through darkened tunnels, a thrilling attack on a crowded football stadium that acts as a shorthand for chaos, a pitched battle on Gotham’s equivalent of Wall Street that might have been taken from a news bulletin. The only moments that feel false are those unavoidable places where the requirement to push the story along in chunks of easily digested block text breaks the immersive spell that Nolan and Bale have crafted. It might be a little ungainly in execution but the plot, arcing across three lengthy films, is meticulously mapped and contains at least one superbly concealed surprise. Nolan and Bale have made it absolutely clear that they will not return to Batman, even though the final sequence indicates the likely direction an offshoot franchise by Warner Bros will inevitably take.

Magic Mike

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 09:29:00 +0000

In 2010 American director Steven Soderbergh declared he was about to retire from filmmaking. Since then, he has released three films in cinemas; low-budget, naturalistic examinations of shadowy, unseen worlds. There was the panic-stricken epidemic thriller Contagion, which brought us inside the laboratory as a virus threatens to end the world, the clandestine arena of international espionage in Haywire and now a peek behind the glittering curtain of male strippers in the funny, enjoyable Magic Mike, a film about money.

Based on star Channing Tatum’s experiences as an 18 year old exotic dancer in a Florida nightclub, Magic Mike opens with the now almost 30 year old as he wakes up, surrounded by women, in his Tampa home. An entrepreneurial spirit, Mike juggles a day job as a building contractor and a sideline in custom furniture manufacture with being the main attraction at a small-time, beach-side strip club called Xquisite. The club’s owner Dallas (Matthew McConaughey) has taken the young man under his wing, promoting him as the club’s main attraction, dressing him in overalls and hoodies as a blue-collar working stiff, to the whooping delight of his female clientele. Mike is a big star and makes big money. Dallas has plans to make him even bigger, moving the club to a bigger site in Miami where four thousand women will be given the chance to stuff his g-strings with sweaty dollar bills every night.

Having been mentored himself, Mike in turn acts as protector to Adam (Alex Pettyfer), a broke and desperate youngster he meets on a building site. He takes him out to the nightclubs and instructs him in the art of hustling customers for the strip-club, before a series of comical accidents lead the 19 year old to make his stripping debut. Adam’s sister Brooke (Cody Horn), a level-headed nurse, is not convinced that the change in direction is the best thing for the naïve teenager, but she trusts Mike when he says he will look after him. Soon, the club’s newest act has fans of his own and the summer season stretches before them filled with easy money, all-night parties and endless girls, set to a shrill, synthetic soundtrack.

Soderbergh does his best to balance the squeal-friendly dance routines with narrative substance, as the young men become involved in some unsavoury business dealings with dangerous people, but the off-stage story struggles to catch a spark. Magic Mike only truly takes off when focusing on the baby-oil skin and ritualized bumps and grinds of its muscled protagonists, with Soderbergh gradually revealing the repetitive, soul-destroying nature of the performances, where the men willingly trade their sexuality for crumpled cash. A scene where Tatum sits in his living room, ironing out the wads of currency and weighing them down with a book is balanced later by a moment where McConaughey lies supine on the stage and his audience shower him with bills.

Tatum, best known as an almost-silent presence in a series of dull action films, reveals an unsuspected depth as the titular hunk, gradually realising that his time as a stripper is running out and he has no back-up plan. But it’s McConaughey who steals the show as the heavily-varnished Dallas, throwing himself into the role with a cocky swagger with more than a hint of self-parody. Bound to find an appreciative audience among the hen-party set, Magic Mike is more than just a parade of bulging beefcake, but a witty, moral story about cold hard cash and commodified sex. The only trick Soderbergh misses is not presenting the film in 3D.

The Amazing Spider-Man

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 09:25:00 +0000

Nominative determinism is a theory in psychology that supposes a person’s name has some influence over what they do with their life. Mr Field might grow up to become a horticulturalist, for example and Mr Payne a glazier, or a dentist. So it was predestined that Marc Webb, in only his second feature, would direct The Amazing Spider-Man, Marvel Comics’ hasty re-imagining of their superhero franchise. Even that mild coincidence won’t be enough to distract attentive cinemagoers from the fact that they’ve already seen this film, exactly a decade ago, when Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire’s film (the first in a dwindling trilogy that finally exhausted itself in 2007) kick-started the current renaissance in comic-book blockbusters.

Since Raimi’s Spider-Man, almost every spandex-clad superhero has had a cinema outing: Batman, Superman, Iron Man, even second-tier champions such as The Green Lantern and Captain America. Just last month, Marvel Comics crammed as many of their characters as could possibly fit into one film, and made another billion at the international box-office. So, perhaps understandably, the industry giant thinks the time is right to reinvent Spider-Man for a new generation; anyone under the age of ten and hopeless amnesiacs. Myths and legends are designed to be told and retold, I suppose, but in a market saturated with superhero origin stories, blockbuster sequels and special-effects derived fireworks-displays, The Amazing Spider-Man really needs to live up to it’s over-confident billing.

Maguire has been replaced by the taller, leaner Andrew Garfield – the likeable British actor best known for his supporting role in The Social Network – but apart from a few tweaks, the story is stultifyingly familiar. This time it opens with young Peter Parker being separated from his parents, Richard and Mary (Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz) who leave him in the care of their relatives Uncle Ben and Aunt May (Martin Sheen and Sally Field, a great pairing) when Richard’s scientific research causes the family to be threatened by sinister forces. Growing up safe in suburban anonymity, Garfield’s lanky, awkward and now orphaned Peter is skateboarding around his school while tinkering with electronics and throwing forlorn glances at his crush, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone).

You already know the rest: Peter visits a laboratory and is bitten by a radioactive spider. Suddenly, he’s no longer a geeky beanpole, but a faster, stronger, stickier teenager; a development neatly captured in a scene on a subway where his abilities surprise himself as much as a potential mugger. Having acquired his red spandex suit, and started his campaign against evildoers, the story brings him into the orbit of one-armed geneticist Dr. Connors (Rhys Ifans), whose sense of right and wrong has been clouded by his obsessive scientific experimentation.

Where once superhero movies aspired to little more than recreating the experience of reading the comic-book; a series of set-pieces arranged as flat, highly-detailed tableaux, the genre has matured over time to incorporate credible, well-acted drama that adds credibility to their character’s emotional lives. Webb’s previous film 500 Days of Summer was a lightweight indie rom-com but it had heart and soul, something he carries with him to the superhero franchise, successfully combining shaded, complex characters with grandstanding spectacle, something Raimi’s brightly-coloured rollercoaster struggled to achieve. There are exhilarating moments of airborne acrobatics to enjoy as the whooping hero swoops through the Manhattan skyscrapers at the end of a silvery thread, but the 3D effect is too sparingly-used to justify the extra couple of euro on the ticket price.

In re-building Parker into an introspective, uncertain teenager more typical of his debut, Webb has cast well in Garfield, who might be ten years too old to be a high-school student but brings an air of genial befuddlement that helps to smooth out the bumps in the fantastical, sometimes illogical storyline. Opposite him, Stone’s Gwen is far more than elbow-gracing eye-candy, but a complicated, smart and high-achieving heroine with parental issues of her own to work out. Together, they make for a charming, charismatic screen couple. As Peter Parker struggles to adapt to a changed existence, he must endure meaty dramatic crises, abandonment, grief and sacrifice, given a commendably credible treatment by an in-form ensemble. However, as the plot scurries along, Webb introduces elements of a glossy corporate conspiracy thriller which he then more or less forgets about; leaving the strands of that sub-plot dangling amongst a frayed web of narrative dead-ends.

Killer Joe

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:59:00 +0000

Forty years ago, William Friedkin was at the vanguard of a new wave of young filmmakers that revitalised Hollywood; the hotshot director who followed The French Connection with the blockbuster horror The Exorcist. Having tried his hand at just about every genre of film, after 1985s cop conspiracy To Live and Die in LA, Friedkin was a spent creative force. His career went off a cliff in slow-motion, with the Oscar-winner reduced to making low-rent television movies and pilots for series that didn’t make it to air. When he did make films, they were ridiculed (1995s erotic thriller Jade) or poorly distributed (2003s action movie The Hunted).

They say there are no second acts in American lives, but at 76, Friedkin is enjoying a late-career run of something approaching his old form. Reunited with the playwright Tracy Letts, who wrote his last film, the needless to say little-seen 2006 psychological thriller Bug, Killer Joe is a deep-fried Southern redneck noir that feels like the work of a director half his age. A bleakly comic story of murder, duplicity and sexual exploitation, Friedkin’s film fizzes with scuzzy, fidgety energy until a fatally overcooked finale undermines everything that has gone before.

Skipping though the potholed puddles in a torrential downpour, ragged drug-dealer Chris (Emile Hirsch) turns up unannounced at mobile home where his dim-bulb father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) lives with his slatternly stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) and his virginal teenage sister Dottie (Juno Temple). Repeated cutaways to a vicious pit-bull snarling and pulling on its chain remind us that this is a dog-eat-dog world, and someone is going to get devoured. Chris is desperate for money to settle a debt with a local drug lord, who is threatening to kill him, and so proposes a Double Indemnity plan in which they kill his unseen mother, Ansel’s first wife, collect her $50,000 insurance payout and split it among themselves.

Reluctant to do any killing themselves, Chris tells his father about a police detective who has a lucrative sideline as a contract killer. Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey), is an ice-cold, Stetson-wearing assassin who is totally bad and quite possibly mad. With everyone agreed on the course of action, and already counting their share of the loot, the plan hits a snag when Chris is unable to come up with the hefty deposit for Joe’s unique services. Looking around the trailer and not seeing much in the way of collateral, Joe’s cold eye falls on the innocent Dottie, a child-woman who speaks in drawled nursery rhymes and sleeps surrounded by teddy bears. The deal is quickly sealed, but can Joe get the job done before the family tears itself apart?

Letts, who won a Pulitzer for his latest play, August: Osage County, has an aficionado’s understanding of disreputable genre cinema and a finely-tuned ear for how people talk to one another. Both Bug and Killer Joe are adapted from stage plays and although Friedkin does his best to open out the story, trailing his characters along endless strip-malls and through neon-lit strip-clubs, something of the story’s three-walled, stage-bound sensibility lingers. He has cast the story well, finding actors who can convincingly transform themselves into trailer-trash caricatures and giving McConaughey his best role in a decade.

But if you make a film about essentially nasty people, you risk making a nasty film. Friedkin, by turns amused and revolted by his characters sleazy shenanigans, is uncompromising in depicting the violence, abuse and degradation they endure. Where he errs is in making that violence the film’s sole reason for being. In its closing stages, Killer Joe becomes an unapologetic wallow in the mire, with a final scene so repugnant that the black comedy stops being comic and the film is just black, full stop.

Cosmopolis

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 08:51:00 +0000

After a decade-long run of accomplished and exciting films, David Cronenberg suffers an excruciating blow-out with his stilted, stuttering adaptation of Don DeLillo’s short novel Cosmopolis, the story of a twenty-something billionaire taking a limousine ride across Manhattan. Inert, stage-bound and self-conscious, Cronenberg’s journey is not worth the destination.

Twilight star Robert Pattinson stars as Eric Packer who has accumulated vast wealth by speculating on the international currency exchanges and all before his thirtieth birthday. Self made and “raised by wolves”, Packer has built up his massively-resourced corporation to be a globe-spanning money-machine. Isolated by his fortune, he has taken to sitting in a black leather throne in his stretch limo, surrounded by the latest information technologies and cocooned behind an inch of bullet-proof glass. From this impressive perch, Packer and his young, tech-savvy cohorts practise rarefied business strategies that allow them to predict currency fluctuations based on vast amounts of data collected from any and all available sources.

As the film opens, Packer has decided on a whim to travel across Manhattan to get a haircut from his childhood barber. His bodyguard Torval (Kevin Durand), one finger constantly pressed to his earpiece, warns him about the complications presented by a presidential motorcade, an anti-capitalist protest and what he refers to as a “credible threat” against Packer’s life. To make things worse, the tycoon has made a huge bet against the Chinese Yuan and his constantly updating computer screen isn’t delivering him any good news.

Ignoring all advice, Packer gets into the car and makes his meandering way across the city, like Leopold Bloom in a very expensive suit. From time to time, people in his life arrive at the car to have hollow, didactic conversations about nothing in particular. His snooty wife (Sarah Gadon) tells him she’d rather write poetry than consummate their marriage. His art-dealer (Juliette Binoche) tells him about a fabulously expensive Rothko painting that has just come on the market, while his financial guru (Samantha Morton) delivers an incomprehensible lecture about “the narrative quality of money”. His doctor arrives and, in the film’s sole attempt at humour, gives the billionaire a prostate examination as his head of computer security watches, aghast. Meanwhile, Packer’s car gets caught up in the simmering anti-capitalist protests on the city streets, which will eventually spill over into a tepid, tired-looking riot.

In Pattinson’s hands, the po-faced, frozen financier is really not a character you’d want to spend an hour and a half trapped in a car with, regardless of how plush the upholstery. Blandly handsome and wearily dull, the actor doesn’t help matters by being as wooden as a garden fence, delivering his convoluted dialogue in a tuneless monotone, complete with long sighs and pouted sneers. Like the film itself, there is nothing going on under the surface. The late arrival of Paul Giamatti as a half-crazed would-be assassin ups the ante on the non-stop chatter as Pattinson’s quest devolves into a twenty-minute snippet from a one-act play. The two characters bounce around an overdressed set, yapping interminably about inequality and injustice. Or at least, I think that’s what they’re talking about. By this point, Cronenberg’s dialogue has collapsed into a tedious, airless jumble of barely-connected words that escape coherence or meaning.

Adapting DeLillo’s 2003 novel himself (his first screenplay credit since 1999s Existenz) Cronenberg’s script comes off as an over-considered lecture on the amoral excesses of corporate America. Among all the jargon and double-speak, there is no perceptible anger. The director stages a riot, in which a man sets himself on fire in the manner of a Buddhist monk, and the scene has all the energy and impact of a sputtering candle on a birthday cake. Intended as a denunciation of the elite one per cent, this vapid, strained drama offers nothing but shiny emptiness.

Casa De Mi Padre

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 09:05:00 +0000

A joke that has to be explained isn’t really a joke at all. You get it or you don’t. Things that are kind-of funny are also kind-of not funny while stories that start out funny don’t always end up that way.

For his new comedy, Will Ferrell spoofs the peculiarly Mexican soap-opera known as the telenovela, supersaturated serial melodramas in which moustachioed men strut about in tight pants while scheming women heave their bosoms and throw random dagger-eyes. A particularly Mexican celebration of sex, death, glitz and trash (and watched by millions) the format hasn’t travelled to this side of the Atlantic. And neither does Casa de mi Padre, although unfamiliarity is only part of the reason why Ferrell’s parody is a dud. Stilted, choppy, weird and woefully short on laughs, what might have been a riotous eight-minute skit in a sketch show – or a viral sensation on Ferrell’s own Funny or Die website - feels horribly overextended at feature length.

Wide-eyed and innocent farmhand Armando Alvarez (Ferrell, speaking fluent Spanish) is the second son of a dairy rancher (the late Mexican actor Pedro Armendáriz Jr. in his last role) who lives deep in the backcountry in a hacienda filled with coloured tiles and heavy wooden furniture. Armando, devoted to the land, couldn’t be more different to his flashy older brother Raul (Diego Luna), who left the ranch to make it big in the drug-trade in Mexico City. When their father finds himself in financial difficulty, the prodigal Raul returns in his gleaming white limousine, with his gorgeous fiancée Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez) in tow, to save the homestead. When she stands and listens to her awkward soon-to-be brother-in-law expand on his notions of the ideal woman – someone who shares his love for the soil, Mexico, cattle and cactus-flowers – Sonia realises that this curly-haired buffoon is her soul mate. But how can Armando betray his only brother? And who will protect their homestead against the ruthless rival drug lord La Onza (Gael García Bernal)?

From the flashy opening credits to the obviously painted backdrops, the film mimics the sun-faded look of old two-reel serials, with undisguised rear-projections, intentional continuity errors and stuffed toys standing in for wild animals. Furthering the illusion are skipped frames, orange bursts of overexposed film and scratch marks that recall Tarantino’s 2007 retro-exercise Grindhouse. There’s even a moment, about half way through, where everything comes to a dead stop as the filmmakers read out an apology for the shabbiness of their special effects, blaming the chaos that resulted from an unfortunate coming together of a wild tiger and a bag of cocaine. A lot of time and effort has been spent making this pricey studio comedy look like something cobbled together on a shoestring in the 1970s, but nothing like the same level of care and attention has been paid to the script. What Casa de mi Padre lacks are funny jokes that follow, one after another, in a reasonably paced progression.

Ferrell does his usual deadpan innocent but the story only occasionally allows him to play to his strengths; child-like bemusement, simmering frustration and flights of surreal lunacy. The few times that the actor does get to let loose are, unsurprisingly, the best moments in the film, particularly an inspired moment where Armando sits with his ranchero buddies (Efren Ramirez and Adrian Martinez) at a campfire and signs a plaintive love song, pausing to clean the spit-valve on his trumpet before starting a bumptious solo. But it’s too little, too late for a film that clocks in at just 84 minutes but feels considerably longer. No mi gusta. No mi gusta one bit.

The Dictator

noreply@blogger.com (John Maguire) — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 11:51:00 +0000

From Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator to Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Team America’s puppet of Kim Jong-il, cinema comedy has a rich tradition of deflating the egos of tyrants and despots with deft satirical pinpricks. Dedicated to the “loving memory” of the late North Korean leader, Sacha Baron Cohen’s new comedy The Dictator is a jumpy collection of skits and set-ups – arranged as a kind-of romantic comedy - that starts promisingly but quickly exhausts itself.

Reunited with director Larry Charles, Baron Cohen continues to mine the same seam as Borat and Brüno in establishing an outlandishly foreign, monstrously egotistical idiot as a grandly exaggerated caricature before letting him loose on America. The difference this time is that rather than construct a mockumentary travelogue, The Dictator follows a conventional narrative line, albeit one with a decidedly scatological edge.

Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the ‘beloved oppressor’ of fictional rogue state Wadiya, somewhere on the Horn of Africa. A founding member of the Axis of Evil, Aladeen enjoys a life of gilded privilege, built on the backs of his enslaved populace. Clad in a golden military uniform with a spray of unearned medals over his heart, the trigger-happy Aladeen prances around his kingdom with his uncle and second-in-command (Ben Kingsley), executing those who disagree with him at whim. But dark clouds are gathering, expressed in snippets of real-life speeches from Obama and Hilary Clinton, which threaten the despot’s reign. His plan to build a nuclear bomb and aim it at Jerusalem has met with a visit from the UN weapons inspectors. War looms unless Aladeen visits the United Nations in New York to explain himself.

Once arrived in America, Aladeen is kidnapped by the CIA (personified by casual racist John C Reilly), is shorn of his trademark luxuriant beard and let loose on the city. Adrift in Brooklyn, he meets protestor Zoey (Anna Faris), who offers him a job at her vegan feminist supermarket. Assisted in varying degrees of helpfulness by the right-on Zooey and a former Wadiyan rocket scientist (Jason Mantzoukas), Aladeen struggles to restore himself to his former position and keep his country free from the scourge of democracy.

The Dictator is obscene, scabrous, vulgar and crude but it is only occasionally funny. Aladeen is a rather tired comic character, especially when compared to Baron Cohen’s predecessors. The script pushes every conceivable outrageous button, but what is sorely missing is the candid-camera interactions with real-life people that used Borat and Brüno’s bottomless ignorance to expose shades of the same bigotry and racism in those he met along the way.

After eighty minutes or so of hit-and-miss political incorrectness, Baron-Cohen finally hits his stride in a scene where Aladeen stands before a press conference and delivers a subversive speech against dictatorships that lists, in a mercilessly detailed way, the similarities between the classic model of tyranny and the current American political landscape. It is a moment of real wit and invention that has the effect of making what has gone before seem even cheaper and shabbier.