Confessions of a Film Critic

Public Enemies

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:46:00 +0000

The short, sensational life of 1930s Chicago gangster John Dillinger passed into folk legend even before his corpse grew cold. During the Great Depression, Dillinger robbed the banks that in turn had robbed the public, in the process becoming a hero to the public and a lightning rod for gangsterism. He was the first crook dubbed “Public Enemy Number One” by J Edgar Hoover’s newfound FBI, who eventually cornered their man outside a Chicago cinema, the Biograph. In time, Hollywood even came to made films about him; Lawrence Tierney scowling down the barrel of a tommy-gun in 1945’s mostly fictional Dillinger and Warren Oates repeating the trick in John Milius’ ribald 1970s retelling.

Now, following his redundant attempt to revitalise Miami Vice, Hollywood’s specialist crime auteur Michael Mann brings us his biopic of the ‘gangster’s gangster’, with Johnny Depp playing an unlikely but mesmerizing Dillinger. It is an electrifying story, brilliantly told by Mann from a historically precise script based on Bryan Burrough’s book of the same title, adapted by Irish writer Ronan Bennet, which casts the bank robber as a man caught between criminality and celebrity, a real life movie character.

Public Enemies opens at a gallop in 1933 with Dillinger already infamous and the head of his own criminal gang. Brought to a vast Ohio prison in shackles, Dillinger turns the tables on his jailors and breaks his gang out of the jail, including Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum), Harry Pierpont (David Wenham) and Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi). The gang are soon back doing what they do best, robbing banks across the American mid-West, a series of increasingly audacious robberies that makes Dillinger’s capture the priority for Hoover (Billy Crudup) and his best FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). As the cops start their pursuit, Dillinger becomes involved with Billie, a half-French nightclub dancer, played by Marion Cotillard in her first role since winning the Oscar for La Vie En Rose.

This is the crime movie stripped down to bare essentials; fedoras, sub-machine guns, bags of loot, fast cars, spinning headlines and lipsticked molls. Mann takes all these creaky devices and uses them to make an old story feel new and unexpected, exhilarating and emotionally moving. From the straightforward biography of a daring thief, Mann spins a multi-layered history that documents the seismic shifts in both crime and justice that defined the era; the establishment of a continental police force, the FBI, and the rise of the Mafia, who see Dillinger’s attention-seeking methods as dangerous to their way of life. However, Mann’s deliberate paring has the effect of rendering some of the secondary cast, including Stephen Dorff and Shawn Hatosy, almost completely anonymous.

Photographed with digital cameras in glorious deep focus, Public Enemies moves at a breathless pace, banging out the story in a series of staccato set-pieces and illuminative diversions. Jailbreaks are followed by bankheists and getaways in a tumble of adrenal scenes before the tension is broken by a moment of character, like an eerie sequence that sees Dillinger walking alone through a police station, looking at his own photograph on the wall. Better yet is a surreal scene, in a packed cinema, where Dillinger sits and watches a newsreel clip that asks the audience to check of the man sitting next to them isn’t the infamous gangster.

Depp plays Dillinger with effortless charisma and confidence, a timelessly glamorous cross between Robin Hood and Clark Gable. Opposite him, but relegated by the story into a grim-set cipher, Bale does well as the clenched, driven Purvis. There is a gripping inevitability to the way in which Mann places two opposing forces at either end of the spectrum and gradually, carefully brings them to a point of violent convergence, as he did in Heat, or Last of the Mohicans. With Public Enemies, this payoff happens during a bullet-ridden shootout at a remote hotel, filmed at the actual historical location, where Dillinger and his gang, including Stephen Graham’s Baby Face Nelson, are corner by the G-Men and must shoot their way out. It is an extraordinary centrepoint scene; frantic, percussive, bloody and brutal.

*Read my interview with Micheal Mann for Heat here.

Year One

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:07:00 +0000

Writer and director Harold Ramis has had a lean time of it since the days of Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day, a run that continues with Year One, an epoch-spanning comedy about a couple of Palaeolithic morons who get caught up in a series of scrapes with various Old Testament characters.

Jack Black and Michael Cera play caveman buddies Zed and Oh, literally an old-school double-act composed of obnoxious, zinger-spouting mammoth hunter and meek, straight-man fruit gatherer. When Zed eats a golden apple from a forbidden tree, they are both exiled from their village at the end of a pointy spear. Their quest proper begins when they stumble into the middle of the last argument between Cain and Abel (Cena’s Arrested Development co-star David Cross and Paul Rudd).

Things quickly go from bad to worse when Zed and Oh are sold into slavery and marched across the desert by the imperial Romans, led for some reason by the deeply unamusing Vinnie Jones. They escape their bonds, only to inadvertently intervene during a delicate moment between a sword-wielding Abraham (Hank Azaria) and his timorous son Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), at the top of a mountain.

From that point on, the story dissolves into a series of skits build around Biblical stories with much unprintable merriment derived from a visit to the notorious city of Sodom. There, the duo's aim is to rescue their slightly more evolved romantic interests, Maya (June Diane Raphael) and Eema (Juno Temple), taken as slave girls by the scheming Princess Inanna (Olivia Wilde).

Flat, broad and unnecessarily scatological, Year One is slow to get going and never quite picks up the kind of pace it needs to carry it forward. There are a few genuinely funny moments; a trip on an ox-driven cart and a discussion about the origins of circumcision, but far more gags fail to find their mark and many scenes seem to end before time or drag unnecessarily.

Although admirably mounted and photographed (with scant use of cheap computer graphics), the same care hasn’t been taken with the script, which draws heavily on Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part 1 by way of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s 1940s Road To… farces. These are jokes that have been told MCVXX’s of times before and there's little the cast can do to make then fresh again.

The bully Black should creates sparks opposite Cena’s withdrawn nerd but the dynamic doesn’t quite come off. As character comedians, both actors have staled badly; Cena’s drawling dreamer festering into an awkward passive-aggression while Black's energetic charm has been exhausted on almost-funny comedies like, well, like this one.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:40:00 +0000

The first instalment of the revitalised Transformers franchise was a well-crafted piece of summery distraction formed from a combination of spectacular special effects and a funny, self-aware script. For the sequel, Revenge of the Fallen, it is clearly director Michael Bay’s intention to deliver more of the same, a lot more. This instalment is almost two and a half hours long, features 42 separate robot characters and a bizarre, unintelligible story that spans the globe. What was spectacular before is mundane and prosaic now and what was witty and clever irritates the second time around.

Here's what I made of the story: Two years on from the events of the first film, the good Autobots remaining on Earth have allied with the US military to prevent further attacks from the bad Decepticon robots. Meanwhile, the boy at the centre of the story last time around, Shia LaBeouf's Sam Witwicky, is trying to forget that he discovered a race of gigantic robot aliens and is concentrating on his first year in college and concerned about how to maintain his relationship with his ridiculously oversexed girlfriend Mikaela (the returning Megan Fox). Unfortunately, as Autobot leader Optimus Prime solemnly intones, ‘fate never calls on us at the moment of our choosing’. The Decepticons have returned to resurrect their leader Megatron, at the behest of an ancient and evil Transformer known as The Fallen, who plans to reignite a super-weapon hidden in the Great Pyramid at Giza and destroy the Sun.

So, Transformers II is patent nonsense but the first film was too and that didn’t stop it from being entertaining. It is obvious from the outset that, a series of vast action sequences aside, Bay and his returning writers Ehren Kruger and Roberto Orci don’t have any clear idea of what form their sequel should take. The plot is baffling, a hodge-podge of pubescent college humour, soft-porn pouting, military jingoism and blurred special effects. The sense of wit that saved the first film is replaced by a constant procession of dull one-liners and strained slapstick. Events and locations become blurred and difficult to follow. The gang go looking for an allied robot at the Air & Space Museum in Washington, break down a wall to escape and emerge in a vast airplane graveyard, in the desert, ringed by snowcapped mountains. If Bay cannot keep track of this thing, how are we supposed to?

This bloated leviathan even boasts its own Jar Jar Binks – the blabbermouth aquatic creature that single-handedly ruined Star Wars - in two awful new characters, a pair of bickering African-American inspired compact cars with an endless torrent of unfunny, ethnically derived epithets. This is a film that doesn’t know when to stop, reaching its dramatic climax around half way through, in a well-realised scene set in a forest, before lumbering on regardless for another hour of flat fight sequences, eardrum-shattering noise and stroboscopic visual effects. Bay, who drops a series of blatant references to his own back catalogue of films, has suffered the same malaise before with the interminable Pearl Harbour or the over-blown, obnoxious Bad Boys II.

The first Transformers was, evidently, a blip. Bay has fallen back into the habitual formulae that he believes make for entertaining cinema. His storytelling senses have been so numbed by noise and sparks that it has atrophied away almost entirely. His sense of the spectacular is waning too, the slo-mo, one-on-one robot ballistic ballets from the first film are far less interesting when played out by a cast of dozens. As the clanking battle rages on screen, it becomes impossible to distinguish one robot from another or figure out what anyone is supposed to be doing. Long before the explosive final scenes, Transformers II has become a celluloid headache, a numbing, mind-wearying exercise in bombast and excess.

Terminator Salvation

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:59:00 +0000

With Batman on hiatus, Christian Bale’s back-up blockbuster franchise finds him playing John Connor, leader of the human resistance in a futuristic war against artificially-intelligent robots. Connor’s destiny, as laid down in the first trilogy, is to lead the human resistance army against the evil technological empire of Skynet, a defence system that turned on its creators. Opposite Connor stands Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a death-row inmate who donates his body to science in 2003, only to wake up, bruised and baffled, in 2018, in need of an oil-change. The process of re-establishing these characters and fitting them into a pre-determined timeline forms the majority of the story in Terminator Salvation. The rest of it is composed of fight-scenes and explosions.

Those arriving fresh to the story are not given much in the way of explanations to help figure out the tangled storyline or the significance of certain moments in the franchise’s long mythology. Frantic, confused and undeservedly self-important, the storytelling in Terminator Salvation is as grindingly mechanical as the robot villains. Fans of post-apocalyptic science-fiction will get some satisfaction from the occasionally arresting images of ash-strewn devastation but the action sequences, the main draw for the summer audience, are disappointing.

McG throws the camera around with abandon but, barring a couple of genuinely thrilling moments, the effect is more like playing a video game than watching a movie. It is understandable, given the iconic status of the series, that the new film would reference the Terminator franchise, but the director’s reliance on nods to other classic films; from The Great Escape to War of the Worlds, Alien and Blade Runner, are far less forgivable. Either McG is worried that his images will not carry any weight without echoing a greater work or, as I suspect, he is simply incapable of creating something original.

Bale is an actor that is at his best when grim-faced and taciturn, but he goes too far in his characterisation of John Connor, turning this legendary hero into an action-movie caricature. Monotonously intense and belligerent, Bale does achieve something original - or at least I have never seen it before – managing to shout each line of dialogue through gritted teeth. I was surprised to see Connor take orders from a squad of generals, headquartered in a secret submarine, as the Terminator mythology had consistently established that Connor was the boss. His mantle as the last messiah is further undermined by equipping him with a newly-developed gadget that, with a few frantic button presses, overrides the robot’s defence systems. Doesn’t that make the gadget the real hero? And isn’t the gadget a machine and therefore part of the problem?

Intended as a reboot for a long-dead franchise, Terminator Salvation lacks the emotion and innovation of the first two films, being a closer match for Jonathan Mostow’s uninspired third instalment than James Cameron’s original diptych. The script, which has passed through the hands of dozens of screenwriters, is constructed along an unswerving trajectory through a series of action set-pieces. Bale and Worthington aside, none of the secondary characters are given an introduction, arriving in the story when required before disappearing into the digitally composed background. The lack of connection with the characters means it doesn’t matter what happens to them, the effect is like watching a stranger crack open a toaster with a lump-hammer. There is a lot of noise and sparks but in the end, it is impossible to care.

With Bale having already signed up for two more Terminator films, the last ten minutes are spent setting up the sequel. On this pre-programmed evidence, the war might already be over. The robots won.

Drag Me To Hell

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:49:00 +0000

Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell might be considered cinematic loose change in comparison to the excesses of his billion-dollar Spiderman trilogy but this old-school genre horror comedy is nevertheless a pointed return to the director’s low-fidelity roots, a queasily entertaining mix of giggles and gore.

After a short prologue that establishes the supernatural roots of what is to come, we are introduced to bank official Christine (Alison Lohman) as she listens to an improve-your-diction tape on the drive to work. Her first customer on the day is Mrs Ganush, a cloudy-eyed old gypsy woman (played with uncommon verve by Lorna Raver), who is behind on her mortgage payments and looking for an extension. Christine, who is striving for a promotion and unwilling to disappoint her boss (David Paymer), turns her down and the crone retaliates with a curse.

After a showdown in a parking garage, Mrs. Ganush snatches a button from Christine’s coat and utters a croaking incantation. “Soon it will be you who comes begging to me,” she swears, before disappearing in a swirl of creepy mist. But the witch dies before Christine can ask her to lift the hex, leaving our every-woman heroine with no-one but her sceptical boyfriend (Justin Long) and a floundering pseudo-psychic (Dileep Rao) to help her escape her fate. Christine has been given just three days to live, while being increasingly tormented by a goat-like demon (a visual nod to the ghoul in Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon), before a fiery chasm will open beneath her feet and claim her.

With a straightforward plot and a scant back-story, Raimi’s objective here less about reinventing cinematic horror than it is to push all the genre-mandated buttons, in the right order. He does this by relying on the things he does best; flinging the camera around his carefully dressed sets in a series of pans and crash zooms, using creeping shadows and screeching sound effects to create inexpensive mood and splashing around the fake blood and crawling maggots in order to make the audience squirm in their seats.

Considering the current economic climate, it is perhaps strangely apposite to watch a banker being tormented by the malign spirit of a defaulting mortgage holder but given that Raimi and his brother Ivan wrote their script back in 1992, it is difficult to ascribe any particular political intention to his rollercoaster creep-show. Timeliness aside, what carries the film is its wicked sense of humour, each gruesome moment matched by a macabre gag, the narrative improbabilities and clanging coincidences becoming less important as the jokes pile up. It’s no classic, but it is a lot of fun.

Angels & Demons

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Mon, 25 May 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Ron Howard’s film of Dan Brown’s best-seller The Da Vinci Code is one of the most profitable films of the decade so far, propelled by hype and expectation to genuine blockbuster status, although you would struggle to find anyone - even fans of the book – who actually enjoyed it. Angels & Demons is a better film than The Da Vinci Code, but then they all are.

Tom Hanks reprises his role as Robert Langdon, esteemed Professor of Symbology, for another far-fetched lesson in medieval conspiracies, this time set in the Vatican. As the film opens, the Pope has died and the College of Cardinals, led by the sinister Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stall) and Deputy Pope McKenna (Ewan McGregor), is gathered in conclave to elect a new church leader. Then, four eminent cardinals are kidnapped with the announcement that one will be killed each hour leading up to a bombing that will destroy St Peter’s Square.

The kidnappers identify themselves as the Illuminati, a mythical sect of apostates that, three hundred years before, tried to reconcile religion and science. Summoned to Rome, Landon is asked by the hierarchy to decipher a series of arcane clues scattered around the city’s churches. He is assisted by Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer), an Italian scientist who discovered the combustible anti-matter, stolen to provide fuel for the Illuminati bomb.

The plot, which is far less elaborate than Howard would have you believe, is essentially the same collection of cod-history and pictorial rebuses as before, the difference being the biblical inventions of the first film are replaced by the dread spectre of contemporary terrorism. Hanks races through the inane dialogue with the same bemused expression as before, like a man working out a particularly fiendish sudoku, in pen, while being chased by rabid tigers. Opposite him, as the sexy scientist, Zurer has little to do beyond provide nodding confirmation for some of the story’s more elaborate fictions.

The relationship between the pair never develops into anything more than hero and sidekick, despite him being a mere symbologist (who can’t even read Latin) and her being a particle physicist with a white coat and a laboratory at Cern and all.

Perhaps recognising how flat and static the first film turned out, Howard and his returning cinematographer Salvatore Totino keep the camera in constant motion this time around, adding energy to Langdon’s incautious adventuring and keeping the viewer from realising that what they are watching is patent nonsense. The approach cannot, however, cover the fact that the film exists in an absurd and distracting time-frame which gives the characters mere minutes to discover the clues, figure out what to do next then negotiate their way through the damnable Roman traffic to the next location. The only joy in the join-the-dots narrative is seeing how Langdon distinguishes which of the ancient statues are pointing at vital clues and which are merely pointing.

Timing aside, screenwriters David Koep and Akiva Goldsman follow the ruts in the road laid down by Brown’s source book but arrive at a point where they must reveal the identity of their solitary hit-man far too soon; leaving the identity of the villain pulling the strings as the only mystery. Angels & Demons shares many of the same problems as its predecessor, being talkative, clumsy and po-faced but the biggest repeat offence is Howard’s plodding direction. The film, which leaves the door open for a third iteration, might make a lot of money but I cannot think of anyone who would want to watch it.

Synecdoche, New York

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 19 May 2009 16:18:00 +0000

Charlie Kaufman, the writer of head-melting movies like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, makes his directorial debut with the curious and complex Synecdoche, New York, a film about creative life and death.

First, a word about the daunting title, a typically Kaufmanesque word-play that connects the New York town of Schenectady, where the film is set, with the similarly-sounding synecdoche, meaning a play on words in which a part may be used for the whole or the whole for a part, like saying “wheels” in place of “car”. In the film, Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays theatre director Caden Cotard, who tires of adapting other people’s plays and sets about staging his own in a vast warehouse, a replica of his own life played out by a vast cast of actors, but one that can never end.

When we first meet Caden, his life is starting to unravel. Plagued by mysterious illnesses, he is suffocating in his own feelings of mortality and alienated from his artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener). Then, after a minor success in a regional theatre, Caden unexpectedly receives a grant from a wealthy arts body which allows him to stage a vast play of his own devising. As the fake world inside the theatre starts to consume his life on the outside, Caden stumbles through a series of personal crises. Adele leaves him, taking their daughter, and becomes a celebrated painter in Berlin. Alone at home, Caden has an unfulfilling flirtation with Hazel (Samantha Morton), who works at the theatre box office, before marrying Claire (Michelle Williams), an actress in his cast.

All of this happens in a fractured narrative that is as difficult to perceive as it is to explain. Time leaps forward sometimes in the course of a single scene or conversation, sometimes by months, sometimes by years. Characters age, marry and have children in moments, as do the actors in the play who are portraying them. Caden seems to exist in multiple worlds, as multiple people, awake and asleep. Kaufman and Hoffman construct the character from a combination of waking and dream states, realities and unrealties, blending the lot into an intricate dance across decades of time.

Later, when he hires an actor to play himself (Tom Noone), Caden discovers aspects of his true personality that he might prefer to keep hidden but are easily perceived by anyone who would care to look; his hypochondria, his vanity, his impotence. The endless play, about himself and the people around him, is Caden’s way of dealing with the difference between the man he thinks he is and the man he actually is. It’s an agonizing process of self-discovery, not helped by his depression and his constant struggle to be emotionally honest in his art. Caden is dying of women, as the poet puts it.

Synecdoche New York is, for better or worse, pure, undiluted Kaufman. Crammed with ideas about life and death, art and creativity, relationships and heartache, this is Kaufman’s 8 ½; a film about how hard it is to do much of anything at all, much less muster up the energy to make a film. If Fellini’s masterwork is a touchstone, Kaufman also pays homage to his literary heroes, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Philip K. Dick, generating the same sense of temporal instability, social paranoia and bodily discomfort.

But the strange spell doesn’t hold. As Caden cannot finish the play, Kaufman cannot finish the film. Synecdoche implodes in the third act as the director loses his grip on the story. Just at the point where he might have distilled his ideas about life and art into a grand unified theory, the film collapses into a mess of self-indulgent surrealism and non sequiturs. The complications and contemplations that had held such fascination are given a couple of twists too many and lose their elasticity becoming, if not tedious, then disappointingly slack. It ends on nothingness, a blank wall of white, like a canvas before the paint or a freshly opened notebook.

Star Trek

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:20:00 +0000

JJ Abrams’ comprehensive re-boot of the long-moribund Star Trek science-fiction franchise is nothing short of a cinematic miracle. With an all new cast, a punchy script and a determination to have fun, Abrams blazes his own trail through the dusty mythology of the 40 year old space opera franchise, boldly going where dozens have gone before. This is Star Trek, but not as we know it.

The film gets off to a thunderous start with a long prologue in which the USS Starship Kelvin is attacked by a gigantic, multi-pronged Romulan warship that emerges, suddenly, from a black hole. When the captain is lured to the enemy ship and assassinated by its commander Nero (Eric Bana), first officer George Kirk stays on board to ensure the escaping crew, including his pregnant wife, reach safety. While he dies, selflessly, she gives birth to their son James Tiberius, played as a twentysomething by Chris Pine.

Kirk grows up in a town beside a Federation training base, a rebellious young man who finds focus when he meets an older Starfleet officer (Bruce Greenwood), who knew his father. Meanwhile, on the planet Vulcan, Spock (Zachary Quinto) has endured his own difficult upbringing, his identity divided by his dual heritage, Vulcan and Human. Certain he will never be accepted as a true Vulcan, he joins Starfleet, leaving behind a privileged life as a government scientist to seek adventure. We are then introduced to the rest of the key cast in a series of quick-fire encounters; the beautiful language expert Uhura (Zoe Saldana), grumpy medical expert Bones (Karl Urban), Russian pilot Chekov (Anton Yelchin) and later, Caledonian engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg). The adventure proper begins when all the cadets are gathered on the bridge of the Enterprise, called out to answer a distress call from the planet Vulcan which bears eerie similarities to the attack that killed Kirk’s father twenty-five years previously.

Abrams’ warp speed storytelling balances the melodrama with invigorating shots of honest humour and eye-catching special effects. A standout sequence, inspired perhaps by Iain M Banks’ novel ‘Matter’, has Kirk, Lt Sulu (John Cho) and an ominously anonymous red-uniformed ensign, sky-dive down through the atmosphere to disable an enormous Romulan drill that is boring an apocalyptic hole through the planet Vulcan. Abrams peppers the shoot-outs and fist-fights with literal cliff-hangers, as characters repeatedly find themselves dangling over the edge of a steep precipice.

Abrams and his long-term writing collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman retell the story from the beginning; wiping clean the old cast’s incarnations of the characters and removing the stale crust of apathy that has built up over the decades. Unlike, say, Christopher Nolan’s re-imagining of Batman, Star Trek doesn’t contain any overt political allegories or moral conundrums; this is the straightforward story or how a group of people came together added to an age-old battle between good and evil. It redefines the characters without betraying them, or the fans who sustain them. Abrams remains true to the legacy of the franchise, taking the time to plant repeated references to key moments from the television series and subsequent films.

The flawless production design creates, from the opening frames, a familiar but far better looking environment. Visually, Abrams overuses his signature shaky-camera technique, further distorting the images with flares of fragmented light bouncing off every shiny surface that delight initially but become distracting. Later, the straightforward story runs slightly flat; having spent too much time establishing all of the good guys and not enough on making Bana’s time-travelling Nero as evil as he could have been.

Abrams’ brave new Star Trek is the first great blockbuster of the summer. It is sure to satisfy existing Trekkers while providing solid entertainment to the uninitiated, and with the promise of more to come.

The Uninvited

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Mon, 04 May 2009 21:53:00 +0000

There’s a significant twist in The Uninvited, a mangled remake of South Korean director Kim Jee-Woon’s exemplary chiller A Tale of Two Sisters. The fundamentals of the last-act surprise (which I cannot, obviously, reveal) remain intact but there is a vast gulf in how the two films arrive at the same point.

In short, The Uninvited offers certain proof, if it were required, that Hollywood should leave Asian horror to the Asians. The teenage demographic this workmanlike effort is aimed at might never have heard of Kim’s original and likely couldn’t care less one way or the other but they should know they are being short changed.

After almost a year in a mental hospital, Anna (Emily Browning) returns to her unfeasibly beautiful waterfront home with scarred wrists and a faraway look in her eyes. Soon, her only sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel) has filled her in on the new domestic set-up. Their novelist father (David Strathairn) has overcome the trauma of their late mother’s death in a mysterious fire by shacking up with the young blonde nurse (Elizabeth Banks) who was employed to look after her. So far, so Brothers Grimm, but Anna is plagued by visions of her dead mother and visitations from three spectral children. And that’s before her boyfriend starts pressing her for sex.

Browning has the open face and wide-eyed stare required to communicate her character’s innocence and shows some skills in communicating Anna’s mental fragility without resorting to hysterics. Beside her, Kebbel hasn’t the talent to keep up. Her cause is not helped by the script, credited to three screenwriters, which fails to develop the relationship between the two sisters. The original title might have been a clue.

Although stranded by his scant handful of scenes, Strathairn is a dud as the conflicted father, giving a performance that is casual to the point of invisibility. It falls to Banks as the sneaky step-mother to steal the show, for what it’s worth. Her deliberately ambiguous mix of public concern and private spite keeps the ground moving under what might otherwise have remained a character lifted from a fairytale.

The original film had a twist that came as a genuine surprise. Here, for the last twenty minutes, it’s all there is to think about, even if you don’t know its coming. This genre-mandated predictability suffocates the modicum of dread created by directing brothers Charles and Thomas Guard’s expensive-looking but unoriginal visual effects. Originator Kim, who went on to make the blistering mafia shoot-em-up A Bittersweet Life and the recent The Good The Bad The Weird, did more with far less.

State of Play

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:30:00 +0000

Adapted from the 2003 BBC miniseries of the same name, director Kevin McDonald’s complex contemporary thriller State of Play opens with a series of seemingly unconnected incidents. In one, a man flees for his life before being shot dead in a Washington back alley. The next morning, a beautiful young political intern commits suicide by jumping under a train.

Seemingly unconnected, that is, until grizzled veteran journalist Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) starts sniffing around. He’s a close friend of the dead girl’s boss, rising U.S. Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), who soon admits they were having an affair. Collins is deeply involved in a congressional investigation into a Haliburton-like private military corporation, so cannot afford the scandal. But there is much more to the story, as McAffrey and his newspaper’s bright on-line blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) come to realise.

Essentially, the story boils down to an analysis of two conjoined systems, government and journalism, and the individuals that get chewed up in their gears when an outside party tosses in a spanner. Director Kevin McDonald (The Last King of Scotland) has reams of story to get through but he frames his tangled conspiracy against a backdrop of topical headlines: the challenges faced by print news, the rise of private security firms, the collusion between arms companies and the military. His well-weaved references and allusions add consequence to the thriller, even if some of them flash past too quickly for comprehension.

State of Play races through the story in a series of fleeting moments, quick scenes that hint at further developments whiz by, sometimes hidden in exciting action scenes, sometimes buried among the everyday chores of a working newsroom. You have to keep at least one eye open to even begin to follow a story in which everything might be significant, a consequence of trying to cram the original series’ six-hour running time into a cinematic timeframe and I am not certain the rewards justify the exertion.

The screenplay, from Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy, and Billy Ray, gives us so much material to sift through, and at such pace, that it is tempting to watch the film with an editor’s red pencil. In comparison, there isn’t a word out of place in Alan Pakula’s All The President’s Men, which had the added challenge of being condensed from real events.

Crowe brings an authentic dishevelment to his role, his pasty body wrecked by hours sat at a desk, eyes reddened from peering at a screen; he looks exhausted in the opening frames, flipping crisps into his mouth as he drives to a crime scene. The actor maintains the sense of fatigue all the way through, but he is still enormously vital, quick-witted, strong and determined.

Rachel McAdams is well able for Crowe as the tough-cookie on-line reporter, matching him beat for beat through tricky dialogue and carrying her role’s heavy metaphorical weight lightly. In the secondary cast, Jason Bateman excels as a cynical PR guru who tries to talk himself out of a desperate situation while Helen Mirren does her clipped and acid turn as the British editor trying to keep the paper from going under. Robin Wright Penn, as Collins’ humiliated wife, channels her anger and desire for revenge into a series of tiny gestures, all designed to hold herself together.

A taut, well-acted thriller that also acts as a love-letter to print journalism, State of Play overcomes some unsubtle plot gyrations and a creeping sense of fragmentation with the brute intelligence of the dialogue and careful direction.

In The Loop

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:48:00 +0000

Writer and director Armando Iannucci expands on the world of his satirical political sit-com The Thick of It for In The Loop, a razor sharp, deeply cynical farce about the symbiotic relationship between Britain and the US in the run up to the second war in Iraq.

The film opens as the Prime Minister’s foul-mouthed Director of Communications Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) lambastes the new Minister of International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) for saying in an interview that “war is unforeseeable”. Tucker is a ferocious government attack-dog, more-or-less based on Prime Minister Tony Blair’s notoriously ruthless press secretary, Alastair Campbell, who is reviled and revered in Whitehall for his loathsome tongue. Nobody messes with him twice, except the ambitious Foster, who blithely repeats his opinionated error at a meeting with US officials. There he finds new allies in the scatterbrained State Department maven Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy) and US General Miller (James Gandolfini), busy fighting their own pro-war faction, led by gimlet-eyed neo-con Linton Barwick (David Rasche).

Looking for a justification for war, Barwick seizes on another stupid statement Foster makes during a kerbside interview where he urges Britain to “climb the mountain of conflict.” Tucker is incensed at Foster, not so much for speaking out of turn, but for having an opinion in the first place, so insists that he accompany him to Washington for a series of high-level meetings at the UN that will determine whether or not the warring factions will be given the green light for war. As a palate-cleansing sorbet, Iannucci offers us a minor domestic crisis as Foster battles an angry constituent (Steve Coogan) in his Northampton district over the status of a crumbling garden wall.

The inspired script, co-written by Iannucci and the writing team of Jesse Armstrong and Simon Blackwell (from the similarly acid Peep Show) balances rich, meaty satire with a masterclass in swearing. Apparently, Iannucci employs a specialist writer, known only as The Swear Doctor, whose only function is to go through the script, adding new and eye-wateringly vivid obscenities from the blackest depths of his imagination. Tucker takes the lion's share of these tirades, spewing language so salty at times it seems to crystallize mid-air.

These frequent and sustained outbursts of base language are shocking, malignant and extraordinarily funny. In The Loop is one of the few times this year when I have laughed out loud at a movie, but the film is far more than a litany of foul expressions; Iannucci and his cast revel in the rich, arcane language of politics and the meaningful ambiguity of governmental double-speak, tying each other up in Gordian knots of nonsense.

Iannucci hasn’t done anything with the larger, more expansive canvas of cinema to distinguish the film from television, maintaining the same hand-held, fly-on-the-wall aesthetic and blabbermouth dialogue. The same small-screen methods apply to the episodic story, which lands us in right the middle of these unpleasant characters without much in the way of explanation then asks us to keep up with a steadily trotting narrative, occasionally diverting the flow with one of a series of bubbling sub-plots that marry the passion of politics to the thrill of clandestine sex.

In the post-Bush era, some of his jibes land with less force than they might have done a year ago but in the end, the films lack of timeliness doesn’t detract from the joy in how cleverly Iannucci re-imagines the “dodgy dossier” scandal as a black farce, played out by idiots in a world of savage absurdity.

Let The Right One In

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 11:26:00 +0000

A lonely twelve year old finds his soulmate in a mysterious vampire girl in the beautiful and enigmatic horror fantasy Let The Right One In, one of the films of the year.

Adapted by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own bestselling novel, the story opens in Stockholm in 1982 where the ghostly pale Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) lives with his divorced mother in a modernist apartment block. A withdrawn and uncertain child, Oskar is being bullied at school and spends much of his time alone, hanging around the complex’s courtyard, playing with his hunting knife and dreaming of revenge. One night, he notices a new family moving in next door; a young girl around his own age and an older man, probably her father. The next evening, they meet at the playground and she introduces herself as Eli (Lina Leandersson). She is a misfit too, dressed in strange clothes, with filthy hands and casting a strange smell.

Eli lives with Hakan (Per Ragnar), an odd, older man whom the locals assume is her father but he is in fact her familiar, a serial killer she sends out at night to kill on her behalf. As the two become friends, Eli encourages Oskar to stand up to the boys that are bullying him, urging him to strike back or be forever cowed. This he does, with brutal efficiency, his thirst for revenge as strong in its way as her desire for blood. Slowly, the two form a bond, without saying much, sitting together in the courtyard. When she arrives unannounced one night in his bedroom, Oskar asks her to be his girlfriend. “But I am not a girl”, she answers. Later, he finds the courage to ask Eli if she is a vampire. He already knows the answer, and doesn’t care. He has a friend.

Eli being either too small or too vulnerable to feed herself, sends Hakan out to find her meals. This is his job, something he prepares for meticulously, but things sometimes go wrong. Hakan stalks the streets, gassing his victims and draining their blood into a plastic barrel before dragging it home. This is not the sexualised, intimate bite of Dracula or Nosferatu, it is something closer to alcoholism, a desperate desire to drink without sustenance or satisfaction. But Hakan is getting old and careless. Eli, it seems, has more than friendship on her mind; she needs a minder, someone who will do what is required to allow her to live. Is Oskar capable of murder, or is his violence a passing phase? Does Eli really love him, or is their relationship just an elaborate seduction?

Alfredson elegantly places this darkly gothic story against the brutal backdrop of high-rise concrete buildings, snow-covered walkways and empty streets. His carefully framed, calmly static camera seeks out detail everywhere it settles; the tangled colours of a Rubick’s cube, the torn pages of Oskar’s murder scrapbook, the dark splash of blood on snow. His film is beautifully photographed and tautly edited, benefiting from sparse, carefully placed special effects and an indelible atmosphere of threat and promise. His delicate use of sound adds a further dimension to the story, particularly when Oskar and Eli use Morse code to communicate through the walls of their adjoining apartments.

The two young actors perfectly embody their characters; their pale faces, photographed close-up, drawing out deep reserves of pain and isolation with little more than glances and sighs. They give flawless performances as the supposed innocents crafting an escape from lives that have become intolerable and dangerous.

Let The Right One In is a remarkable film, brilliantly conceived and hypnotically told. It makes the recent Twilight look the antics of the number-crunching Count on Sesame Street.

The Boat That Rocked

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:28:00 +0000

Six years on from the gruesome Love Actually, writer and director Richard Curtis returns with a limp comedy, set on board a 1960s pirate radio ship, that springs a leak soon after the opening credits and takes over two hours to sink. Nominally inspired by the real-life history of Radio Caroline, The Boat That Rocked is actually set in an alternate dimension, call it Curtis World; a jaunty, predominantly white and middle class place where silly people get up to all sorts of harmless fun and games.

The familiarity with which the film establishes the time and place is the first hint of trouble. A flashy arrangement of swinging stereotypes, fashioned after Richard Lester’s Help!, serves as shorthand for the burgeoning Age of Aquarius. Representing, in no particular order, youth, innocence, the audience and the absent Hugh Grant, fresh-faced, floppy haired teenager Carl (Tom Sturridge) is sent to be looked after by his louche godfather Quentin (Bill Nighy) when he gets into trouble at school. All Savile Row suits and charming insouciance, Quentin is skipper and owner of Radio Rock, a ship anchored in international waters off the British coast that broadcasts a steady stream of pop music to culture starved teenyboppers, a market ignored by the conservative mainstream.

The ship serves as studio and sleeping quarters for the all-male staff of DJs, led by alpha-male US import The Count (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), whose only stated desire is to be the first man to say 'fuck' on the radio. The rest of the ensemble is made up of Curtis’ standard British romantic-comedy archetypes; the eccentric one, Bob (Ralph Brown), the thick one, Kevin (Tom Brooke), the sole female one (Katherine Parkinson) and, later, the outrageous one, Gavin (Rhys Ifans). Much of the early action is devoted to Carl losing his virginity to any one of the dozens of dollybirds that descend, when required, on the ship like a Biba-clad horde. This momentous event appears imminent when he falls for worldly groupie Eleanora (Tallulah Riley) but, maddened by the pull of fame, she ends up with the fat one, Dave (Nick Frost). Curtis likes this bed-hopping joke so much that he repeats it twenty minutes later, when the sad one, melancholy breakfast presenter Simon (Chris O'Dowd), is gazumped by a rival on his wedding night. Yes, wedding. There is always a wedding in Curtis World.

The free-loving hippy DJs require an establishment against which to rebel so Kenneth Branagh arrives as the uptight square, Sir Alistair Dormandy, squirreling around Whitehall determined to find a loophole that will shut the pirates down. To this end Curtis gives him a sidekick named Twatt (Jack Davenport) and a comical moustache and then, as with all the other subplots, seems content to leave it at that.

It’s lame stuff indeed. The period sixties setting distinguishes the film from the rest of Curtis’ gelatinous repertoire, a feature the director hammers home in a series of extended Austin Powers montages that nestle uncomfortably between the casually sexist romps, nauseatingly contrived dance sequences and tired visual slapstick. Every so often Curtis cuts back to the mainland for a series of reaction shots; short sequences of everyday listeners responding to what is coming through the wireless exactly as they would if there was a movie camera pointed at them. Here too there is dancing but little evident joy.

Without anything of interest in the story to cling to, the extended running time turns what might have been a bright nostalgia trip into a deadening trudge. Unable to chart a steady course through his various storylines, Curtis is content to skip distractedly from skit to sketch but even with a well-chosen soundtrack of classic songs, he cannot sustain a mood and the film flags. His characters remain thin caricatures and look uniformly adrift in between the funny bits. Eventually, the film runs out of those; more than once an actor is asked to face the camera and lip-sync along to a song on the soundtrack, like karaoke. It is a striking waste of a talented cast, many of them mainstays of the director’s informal repertory company.

The Boat That Rocked might not be the worst Richard Curtis film ever, but it is the worst yet.

Lesbian Vampire Killers

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:41:00 +0000

Little and large comedy duo James Corden and Matthew Horne made their names with sit-com Gavin & Stacey but nothing of that series’ warmth and good humour transfers in their big-screen debut, the shrill and puerile Lesbian Vampire Killers. Sapphic-themed bloodsucker movies are a genre to themselves, from 1936s Dracula’s Daughter to Jess Franco’s enduring psychedelic cult classic Vampyros Lesbos, but director Phil Claydon is only interested in spoofing the already self-aware 1970s Hammer horror The Vampire Lovers, and evidently not all that interested even in that.

Corden and Horne play Fletch and Jimmy, a pair of listless Londoners who escape their tedious troubles by taking a holiday in a remote village in Norfolk. Upon arrival, they are invited to stay in an even-more-isolated cottage, free of charge, by a local pub landlord. But the kindly tavern owner has a nefarious ulterior motive: he is sending the boys as a sacrifice to the vampire queen who has enslaved the young women of the region in a lesbian death cult. To fill out the quotient of female flesh required of the Nuts and Zoo-reading audience, the boys meet up with a gaggle of sexy foreign exchange students, who run around in their knickers until the story demands they transform into lesbians. Somewhere in the middle of all this, Paul McGann pops up as a vicar who believes Horne is the descendant of a long-dead vampire slayer.

For a movie that boils down to ninety minutes of gags about being fat, LVK is surprisingly lean when it comes to laughs. Corden, the big-boned one, delights in his own corpulence, wobbling his belly and slobbering his jowls when given the chance, but his antics never once raise a genuine laugh. Corden takes the vast majority of the starchy dialogue and delivers every line in the same wheedling bark, like a queasy child that has recently eaten a hippopotamus, despite being told not to. Beside him, or more often behind him, slender straight man Horne is reduced to raised eyebrows and slapped cheeks in a succession of reaction shots and double-takes. This he does, but not well. The rest of it is clumsy slapstick and boobies.

A joyless visual style, cheap visual effects and arthritic gags combine in a wretched film, pitched at the level of the schoolyard and missing even that broad target by miles. Tittering homage isn’t nearly enough to satisfy a paying audience, comedy needs to be funny. Lesbian Vampire Killers isn’t funny; it’s cynical and lazy and stupid.

Il Divo

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:21:00 +0000

For his fourth feature film, director Paolo Sorrentino crafts a dazzling and damning biopic of disgraced former Italian Prime Minister Guido Andreotti, the seven-time premiere whose reputation was destroyed by allegations of mafia involvement, political assassination and financial corruption.

Il Divo opens with a long, information-heavy series of title cards before Sorrentino introduces his subject in a long, slow tracking shot that gradually fills the frame with Andreotti’s face, dotted with acupuncture needles, his tiny black eyes peering out from behind thick glasses. Fitted with pointy prosthetic ears and with his back stooped in a crouch, Sorrentino’s regular lead Toni Servillo plays the politician like Max Schreck’s Nosferatu, a misshapen man forced by chronic migraines to live in the shadows, an unsettled insomniac who stalks the corridors of power, constantly scheming.

Then, in the style of a flashy gangster movie, Andreotti’s cadre of closest supporters is given an individual slow-motion vignette as they emerge from sleek sports cars to gather in the courtyard of the prime minister’s Roman villa. These are the men that enact their master’s bidding; some of them serving him for decades under the banner of his Christian Democrat Party. They all have nicknames, The Brute, The Lemon, The Cardinal. The film’s title is what the used to call Andreotti, Il Divo, “the divine one”. Behind his back, they called him Beelzebub.

Andreotti’s gang have become accustomed to power and the gifts it bestows, but as they talk through their latest political plans, they are unaware that this will be their last stand. A scandal known as Tangentopoli (or “bribesville”), which exposed the political system as ruthless and corrupt, is about to blow up and nobody will escape unscathed.

On one level, Il Divo is a biography of a fascinating man told in a combination of real events and fantasies that mixes hard-nosed facts with equally flinty speculations. On another, the film is an extended metaphor for how Italian society has been bled dry by corruption, a position it shares with Matteo Garrone’s blistering Gomorrah. ‘Irony is the best defence against death’, Servillo whispers at one point, and although the film is filled with quotations from Andreotti, this one was written by Sorrentino. In keeping with the detached, sardonic style he has developed, the director condemns his subject at an oblique, making a political biopic in the style of a ganger movie, re-writing real events as hyper-stylised fictions and using sound and vision to create startling contrasts that subtly snip away at Andreotti’s reputation, and more cuttingly, his vanity. It is a remarkable performance from Servillo who show’s an uncanny ability to sustain a character who does not want you to know anything about him.

I went in knowing nothing about post-war Italian politics and I came out again having learned little more but I was gripped throughout by what is a brilliantly told story that, as we continue to wade through a decade or more of political sleaze, has a particular resonance for Irish audiences.

Bronson

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:21:00 +0000

Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn tells the story of the life and crimes of “the most dangerous prisoner in Britain” in Bronson.

Born Michael Peterson to a respectable 1950s Luton family, our subject was a school bully and petty criminal who had made a name for himself as a bare-knuckle boxer, changing his name to Charles Bronson, after the tough-guy actor, at his promoter’s suggestion. Then, in 1974, looking to find enough money to buy an engagement ring, Bronson robbed a post office. He got away with a little over £26 and the police arrested him within the hour. Since then, Bronson has spent almost 34 years in prison, 30 of them in solitary confinement, despite never having murdered anyone or committed a serious crime.

Refn, still best known for his trilogy of hard-boiled Pusher films, takes the bare bones of Bronson’s story to construct a visionary, highly-stylised biopic in concert with his lead actor, Tom Hardy. Hardy, who has a small part in Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla last year, has piled on muscle, shaved his head and cultivated a twirling Victorian moustache to completely inhabit his character. It is an extraordinary performance, part comic, part tragic, which focuses on the man’s self-confessed hunger for fame, any kind of fame, eventually settling on being the most notorious man in the prison system.

Brock Norman Brock’s script unfolds primarily in flashback, bringing us through the significant events of Bronson’s life on the outside before focusing on his need for violence and, once incarcerated, his campaign of kidnapping and assault against other prisoners and staff. Later, after time spent in a mental institution, Bronson starts his life in solitary confinement, his only respite being a weekly art class. His art teacher (who is eventually, inevitably held hostage) sees promise in his work and encourages him to express himself. Bronson sees physical violence as his medium, his fists as his brushes, his life inside as a vast, endless performance.

Cinematographer Larry Smith worked on The Shining and photographed Eyes Wide Shut and the influence of Kubrick, particularly A Clockwork Orange, is apparent in Refn’s long, slow moving takes, use of music and air of artificially elevated theatre. Regardless of his inspirations, the director real focus in on his lead actor and Hardy gives an incredibly powerful and physical performance that he sustains throughout every scene of the film, often addressing the camera directly in a peculiar combination of obnoxious charm and terrifying wrath. Refn’s recurring device, our anti-hero on stage in a cathedral-like theatre alone in front of an appreciative audience, becomes wearing after a while, despite Hardy filling the space with explosive bursts of manic, dangerous energy. Later, the director creates animations from the real Bronson’s child-like drawings and employs them to change the tone when, as it regularly does, events turn dark and mean.

Consistently challenging and ocassionally transcendent, Bronson is a film that stands alongside Andrew Dominik’s Chopper as a modern classic of the prison genre.

American Teen

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:27:00 +0000

The documentary American Teen takes a snapshot of the lives of adolescents in the flyover states, but the results feels somehow photoshopped.

Director Nanette Burstein (who waded through Robert Evan's bullshit for The Kid Stays in the Picture) spent ten months filming at a school in Warsaw, Indiana, a town we are told is “mostly white, mostly Christian and mostly Republican”. The result of her experiment was over 1,000 hours of footage which the filmmaker has condensed down into a snapshot of life as it is lived by the young in Middle America. As the school year starts, Burstein introduces her subjects, kids that could have been plucked out of any 1980s John Hughes movie: The Rebel, The Queen Bee, The Sporty Guy, The Nerd and the Heartthrob. Having established them as snug fits for stereotype, Burstein then looks to explore their lives in detail, analysing their relationships with one another, their families and the school.

The central character, arty rock-chick Hannah Bailey, likes music and movies and feels like a misfit in the conservative town. She dreams of escaping to San Francisco after graduation and becoming a filmmaker. Her parents warn her about the dangers of life for a young girl alone in the big city. “It’s my life,” she tells them, but there is a quiver in her voice. Earlier, Hannah had missed weeks of school after he boyfriend dumped her, unable to face the world she is so desperate to explore.

Her opposite number, blonde and pretty Prom Queen Megan Krizmanich, is the daughter of a wealthy family and the most popular student in the school. She drives a swanky car, has dozens of twittering friends and a mean streak a mile wide. Even the teachers are a little bit afraid of her. Megan dreams of following her father to Notre Dame University, but secretly fears she is not smart enough. As a distraction, she undertakes a campaign of social exclusion against anyone that comes into her orbit; a bitchy reign of terror that extends to petty social crimes like vandalism and nuisance phone calls. From the first moment we meet Megan, we are awaiting her comeuppance.

Colin Clemens, the sporty guy, is a well-liked, good natured basketball player who knows his best chance of getting a college scholarship derives from his athletic abilities. The alternatives, his father tells him repeatedly, are enlisting in the army or following in his footsteps as an Elvis impersonator on the hotel lounge circuit. Colin doesn’t care much for either option, but as the year continues the pressure proves too much for him and his form on the court dips.

The nerd, Jake Tusing, only breaks a sweat on his XBox. Jake has a bedroom full of taxidermy and a brain that is even less lively. A self-proclaimed introvert, Jake is desperate to find a girlfriend, but is restrained by his shyness, his braces and a spectacular spray of acne across his cheeks. Painfully awkward and grinding with self-consciousness, his silver tongue is in need of a polish. “I like you because you suck at life…like me”, he tells one prospective girlfriend, on a first date. She looks at him like he has five eyes. The heartthrob, Mitch Reinholt, has no such problems. A good-looking, sporty All-American teenager, white-bread Mitch comes into the story when - in a move that cuts across the school’s rigid social stratification - he starts dating kooky Hannah. Rather than hang out in Megan’s house with all the other popular kids, Hannah dresses Mitch in a green dragon costume and has him roll around on the grass while she films him. The love affair doesn’t last.

Essentially a vérité take on The Breakfast Club or Mean Girls, American Teen is a slickly produced documentary filled with incident and insight, some of which feels real and some of which feels scripted. Burstein spent most of her American publicity tour defending the film’s authenticity but still that nagging sensation that you are watching something pre-arranged never quite dispels. Given unlimited access to their lives, their computers and mobile phones, the ease with which events collide points towards the possibility of directorial guidance. If it's all true, it is fascinating. If it is not, it is an egregious cheat.

Watchmen

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:31:00 +0000

In the mid-1980s, revered comic-book writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons collaborated on a graphic novel called Watchmen that became an instant phenomenon; selling in the millions, inspiring countless imitators and establishing the graphic novel as a legitimate literary form. Almost as soon as it was published, movie studios lined up with their chequebooks out, only to shuffle quietly away once they had actually read the thing. A vast, meta-textual post-modern story about a group of damaged people pretending to be superheroes, set in an alternative 1984 where Nixon is still president and nuclear war looms on the horizon, the book was deemed ‘unfilmable’ for the last twenty years. Until, that is, Zack Snyder proved he could handle this sort of material with his frame-by-frame adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300 and the long-awaited Watchmen movie was resurrected.

Following a beautifully photographed credit sequence that sets out the breathtaking visual scheme and establishes an alternate historical context, Watchmen opens with the brutal murder of The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a retired super hero. After a cursory police investigation, it falls on Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a masked vigilante and our gravel-voiced narrator, to find out who killed his former colleague. Having reconnected with his now-outlawed crime-fighting group, Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), Silk Spectre (Malin Ackerman) and the only true superman, the atomically-mutated Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup), Rorschach uncovers a vast conspiracy to kill off all the remaining superheroes in an effort to provoke a nuclear war.

That’s the heavily abridged version. Snyder’s take on the book runs two hours and forty minutes, following the complicated contours of the source novel but without the same graceful mechanism that builds to a multi-layered philosophical enquiry. Watchmen the movie is frequently visually dazzling but the story is choppily told and lags badly before the end. Perhaps the problem is that Snyder uses Gibbons’ original panels as a storyboard but cannot find a straight line through the narrative. Following a series of disastrous adaptations of his work, the nadir being the gruesome League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore now refuses to take a screen credit and he had no involvement in the script. Gibbons is a supremely talented artist but Moore is a storytelling genius and Watchmen is probably his masterpiece.

Where Christopher Nolan’s staggeringly successful Dark Knight offered a simple binary relationship between order and chaos, good and evil, Watchmen presents a vast spectrum of moral positions and character perspectives. It asks why people want to be heroes in the first place, what drives ordinary men and women to fight crime and whether or not they are suited to the task of delivering justice. It explores their good and bad sides, their altered-egos, their private and public lives. We see their memories and dreams. Most of the third act takes places on Mars.

The novel is constructed like a Swiss watch, a recurring symbol, delicately establishing a cauldron of four or five disparate ways of seeing the world and explicitly asking the reader to figure it out for themselves. This isn’t really possible in cinema, which unfolds at a set rate, twenty four frames a second, and abhors eternally parallel narratives. You cannot flick back through the pages of a movie if you miss something or fail to make a connection. You have to get it the first time.

Snyder’s version grinds through the gears of the story but the director prefers slow-motion fight scenes to intellectual tussles. He stages the major incidents of the book with a fastidious eye for detail, guided by his own fanboy reverence and a team of special-effects imagineers, but his series of scenes, inventive and attractive, never come together in a dramatically satisfying way. If you haven’t read the book, I don’t see how you can follow the story as it is told here.

First and foremost a noir-influenced crime drama, Watchmen is also a fascinating alternative history of America (the home of the superhero), a meditation on the nature and value of heroism and a blood-soaked giallo horror. It is as close an adaptation of the original novel as it could possibly be, but it still misses something bigger lying just beneath the surface of its source, a sense of existential malaise and a fear of the future. Having made minor adjustments to the ending, in order to maintain some sense of realism, Snyder makes the bigger mistake of allowing his anti-heroes take on some of the characteristics of the supermen the original story is attempting to subvert. Regardless, Watchmen is - for fans at least - an essential film, brave and bold, beautiful but flawed.

Doubt

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 13:07:00 +0000

She’s spent most of the last decade raising laughs in comedies like Adaptation and The Devil Wears Prada but for John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, Meryl Streep goes back to her actorly roots for a stony-faced portrayal of a 1960s Brooklyn nun whose darkest suspicions are raised when a priest in her school becomes friendly with a newly arrived African American boy.

From beneath her midnight-black habit, topped with a bonnet, Streep’s Sister Aloysius radiates waves of ice cold professionalism. Her face is waxy pale, her red-ringed eyes are framed with tiny, glittering spectacles and her thin lips are pre-set in a cluck of disapproval. Dubbed ‘the dragon lady’ by her terrified charges, Sr Aloysius is the headmistress of the local Roman Catholic school, a private kingdom she rules with an iron grip. She plays everything by the book, imposing strict rules on both her students and her teachers, watching everything, absorbing all sources of information.

When, one morning, she spots Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) make a kindly gesture to Donald (Joseph Foster), a newly arrived boy, she makes an instant interpretation. With typical froideur, she asks a younger nun, Sister James (Amy Adams) to keep an eye on the priest. The timid, unworldly younger woman returns with her observations and Sr Aloysius gradually assembles her evidence. She begins circling Father Flynn, bringing him to her office on trivial matters of school policy before delicately turning the conversation towards the boy. Flynn, no fool, is quick to understand what the senior nun is accusing him of, and the two lock horns. He proclaims his innocence, offering excuses and witnesses, but she has already made up her mind.

Streep revels in what is a juicy, wholly absorbing character whose development is as carefully plotted as a roadmap. She plays the cunning old nun with shades of Gothic horror, a tyrannical presence who clings to process and procedure because it is the only way she knows, regardless of the outcome. Opposite her, Hoffman is an initially bright presence, delivering compassionate sermons at mass and pressing for simple reforms in the school, but as the story progresses his shadow lengthens. Between these two, acting as the referee, Adams is a wide-eyed innocent, slow to comprehend the implications of the mission she has been assigned and unwilling to allow her heart to harden.

Director Shanley, a Bronx native educated by nuns, has adapted his own play for the film but there remains a nagging sense that he hasn’t adapted it enough. His actors give remarkably involving performances, helped considerably by the reams of crackling dialogue and crested emotional peaks. All the pieces are here, but they are artlessly assembled. Shanley overplays his camerawork, seeking out odd, unnatural angles and settling on obvious, clamorous symbols that go towards undermining the film’s delicate nuance: the howling wind scatters ominous leaves, the lightning flares behind Streep’s cowled head, the camera swoops around the steeples.

Because of Shanley’s uncertain, indelicate approach, Doubt remains a piece of theatre; a stage-bound, solemn parable of faith and moral conviction that explicitly asks the viewer to take sides but seals the judgement in a dusty file.

The International

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:08:00 +0000

Sometimes timing is everything. In these calamitous days, what could be more appropriate than a paranoid thriller in which the bad guy turns out to be a bank? Run Lola Run director Tom Tykwer’s The International is a well-photographed, occasionally diverting pile of nonsense, as broad as the budget deficit and as stuttering as the Minister of Finance’s latest parliamentary speech.

After a taut opening sequence, which sees a man assassinated outside a train station, we meet grizzled Interpol agent Lou Salinger (Clive Owen), a righteous man fired by his determination to bring down a crooked Swiss bank which is funding arms sales to third world dictatorships. In keeping with his position as a renegade copper, Lou has a history of professional misconduct and a solitary private life. In the course of his dogged investigations, Lou has uncovered a wall full of photographs of creepy-looking bankers but every time he comes close to cracking the case and bringing down the bank, his witnesses are killed in freak accidents.

The bank, headed up by the narrow-eyed Jonas Skarssen (Ulrich Thomsen), has connections at every level of government, a team of sharp-suited lawyers and a secret division, more murders and assassinations than mergers and acquisitions, controlled by former Stasi commander Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Wexler handles the bank’s prime asset, a professional killer known only as The Consultant (played with unerring blankness by Brian F O’Byrne), who travels the world doing the dirty work while keeping one step ahead of the trailing Lou.

Into this already soggy pudding lands sharp-suited New York lawyer Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), who shares Lou’s bleak world-view and resolve to clean up the murky sewers of international finance. Together, the two race around Europe on the trail of the killer, knowing he is the key to cracking the case. This chase inspires a series of complicated action sequences, the highlight of which is a jaw-dropping fifteen minute shoot-out at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It is the finest on-screen gun battle since Michael Mann riddled downtown LA in Heat but much of the rest of the film is gibberish.

Owen clenches his jaw in his own peculiar approximation of a driven man, but Lou is an underwritten, underwhelming hero. Watts is just awful, a clanging, unconvincing character who exists only to provide the story with a female lead. To say she phones in her performance is an insult to telecommunications. The story whimpers to a dead stop after an hour, but Twyker keeps plugging on regardless, delivering a series of increasingly uninteresting finales that are as hard to watch as today’s news headlines and just as depressing.

Gran Torino

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:05:00 +0000

Approaching his eightieth birthday, Clint Eastwood directs himself in what might be his last screen appearance in Gran Torino, an intemperate State of the Nation address that mixes melodrama, social commentary, comedy and a lot of squint-eyed growling to winning effect.

Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a crusty former car-factory worker who, as the film opens, is burying his late wife. His two sons are raising their own families now so Walt lives alone in a big house in a neighbourhood that has seen an influx of Asian immigrants. Being an unrepentant bigot and a veteran of the Korean war, Walt doesn’t care much for the new arrivals, unleashing a tirade of racially insensitive epithets at the merest provocation. He sits on his veranda most evenings, knocking back cans of beer and smoking cigarettes, growling and snarling at whoever crosses his line of sight. Walt’s only kind words are reserved for his dog, Daisy. His most treasured possession is a mint-condition 1972 Ford Gran Torino, a throaty American muscle car that Walt built himself on the production line. It sits shining on his driveway, a symbol of the way things used to be.

Walt especially dislikes his next-door neighbours, a recently arrived family from the Hmong community in Laos; a recently divorced mother, her elderly grandmother and two young kids, Sue (Ahney Her) and Thao (Bee Vang). When a gang of local thugs start harassing the shy teenager Thao, Walt cannot help but get involved. Typically for the man, he does this by knocking the wannabe gangsters on their backsides, sticking the barrel of his enormous rifle in their faces and snarling. The thugs don’t get the message (they obviously haven’t seen Dirty Harry) and their campaign of harassment quickly escalates to drive-by shootings and assaults. Walt might be a racist but he can’t stand bullying and so a friendship develops under siege between the ancient dinosaur with his old-fashioned ideas and the two young kids.

I don’t want to say much more than that about the plot, except to note that Eastwood is far too smart (and far too liberally-minded) to allow his bile-spitting Walt to become a flag-bearer for intolerance. It's tough to listen to this old man bark racial epitets at the younger cast, and it doesn't matter that they are too polite to tell him he's wrong. They seem able to ignore the racial taunts, but we cannot, not really. This is a character primed from the opening scenes for change, the challenge being how successfully Eastwood brings this about. He does this, in part, by explicitly referencing his own back catalogue of tough-guy roles and then, gently but persistently, re-positioning Walt as an agent for good.

The script, from newcomer Nick Schenk, builds from the obvious to the unexpected with a certain clunking grace, even as it relies too much on cinematic shorthand to get its message across. Nevertheless, this is a fine film, initially disconcertingly odd and contrived but eventually both emotionally frank and satisfyingly redemptive.

Vicky Christina Barcelona

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:38:00 +0000

Woody Allen continues his late-period European tour with a trip to Spain for Vicky Christina Barcelona, an engaging but weightless story of a couple of American girls on extended summer vacation in the Catalan capital that get into all sorts of romantic adventures with the hot-blooded locals.

We first meet the titular Vicky and Christina as they step off the plane. Tall, serious brunette Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is there to stay with her ex-pat aunt and uncle (Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Dunn) while completing her graduate thesis on Catalan identity. Her best friend, the blonde and frivolous Christina (Allen’s latest muse Scarlett Johansson) is along for the ride, looking to relax after a year spent making a dull student film for her art school degree. Christina is looking for adventure but Vicky has had enough of all that, she's accepted a marriage proposal from her buttoned-down Wall Street sweetheart Doug (Chris Messina). She's safe.

Having completed their whistle-stop excursion around Barcelona’s landmarks – mostly Gaudi, mostly shot as postcards – the girls attend an art exhibition and meet Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a brooding artist and bon vivant. With devastating frankness, he asks the two young Americans to fly away with him for a weekend in the nearby town of Oviedo, ostensibly to see the sights, but also to share his bed. Just the three of them. Prim, proper Vicky is outraged but Christina is already sitting on the plane, buckling her seat belt, smitten by Juan Antonio’s other-worldly intensity and heavy-lidded stare.

Sexual misadventures and misunderstandings ensue. Vicky, torn between her duty to her fiancée and her desire to live a little, inoculates herself from Juan Antonio’s charms but Christina is badly smitten, spending her days in his studio and her nights in his bed. Then, about an hour in, the film kicks into life with the arrival of Juan Antonio’s tempestuous ex-wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), who explodes onto the screen in a blaze of bouffant hair and fiery eyes, bringing some much needed drama and passion to what was a fading scenario. The film is worth seeing for Cruz’s performance alone.

Allen fans, and they remain a legion, await his annual releases with an undying sense of anticipation, hoping for another Annie Hall or Manhattan. It doesn’t look like it’s ever going to happen. Vicky Christina Barcelona is a bright, fizzy concoction that zips along at a fair clip and contains pointed mediations on the nature of love and the passion of creativity. Intended as a spiky summer romance, there’s still something unnervingly odd about Bardem’s irresistible machismo and something of an indulgent male fantasy about his studied dalliances with the hearts of three beautiful women. Positioned as the centre of the Catalan universe, the actor has enough appeal to carry the role. We should be grateful for Bardem’s bulky pugnacity. Ten years ago Woody might have played the part himself.

After the dreadful gangster misfire Cassandra’s Dream, Allen’s return to comedy drama is welcome, although ‘comedy’ might be stretching it as, barring a great moment with a pistol, there aren’t really any jokes. Come to think of it, Oscar-winner Cruz aside, there isn’t all that much in the way of drama either. I’m not sure what that leaves us with, but it all looks very sunny and pretty.

Gabriel Byrne

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:36:00 +0000

Gabriel Byrne is standing before a hundred people in the tiny Phoenix cinema in Dingle watching two men struggle towards him bearing the Gregory Peck Award, a weighty collision of granite and engraved glass. With a theatrical stagger, Byrne takes the sculpture in both arms and sets it down on a table beside him. He gives a tender, sincere speech about how honoured he feels, how Peck is one of his inspirations, how even hearing his name in the same sentence as the great actor makes him humble. When he is finishes, the crowd rise to applaud him. He waves and smiles, genuinely delighted, standing for photographs and shaking every offered hand.

Ten minutes earlier, Byrne was slumped in his seat, gripping his girlfriend’s wrist, his eyes fixed on the floor. He shifted uncomfortably as the host gave an introduction and we watched a reel of highlights from his film career. The moments flickered past; a rousing speech from Miller’s Crossing, the shoot-out on the boat from The Usual Suspects, a spiteful row from Jindabyne. As the montage continued, the actor sank lower in his chair. It was a mild night in September but watching himself on the Phoenix’s crackling screen, Byrne looked flushed, almost embarrassed.

The moment the lights came up and his name was called, all that unease evaporated. Byrne straightened his spine and squared his shoulders and strode up to the podium. A look of infinite calm fell across his face and stayed there. He spoke fluently, with tremendous charm.

From two seats down in the same row, I watched Byrne’s transformation and wondered what it means to be an actor, to smoulder in the wings and glow on stage.

Earlier the same day, I sat with Byrne in a comfortable room in Emlagh House, by a vast window filled with slate autumnal clouds, looking out over the bay. In the broken afternoon light, he doesn’t look much like a man approaching his fifty-ninth birthday. His handsome face has taken on a crease or two and his black hair is fringed with grey, but the actor looks fresh and vital. I ask him if he can recall his first impressions of the cinema and he sips his coffee. “I grew up in a world before television”, he says. “The main source of entertainment for young kids of my age in working class Dublin was the cinema and there was one on every street. We’d go as a gang maybe three or four times a week to the Apollo in Walkinstown, The Star, The Leinster or The Kenilworth in Harold’s Cross. I liked cowboy movies, gangster films, comedies. My imaginative life was lived in the picture house. I was transfixed then and I still am, sometimes. Cinemas are magical places.”

The spell wasn’t broken when the credits rolled. Byrne recalls how his gang would re-enact scenes from the films in the streets around the neighbourhood, each of his pals taking a role and playing out their understanding of the plot. “One of the lad’s fathers was a plumber and had a garage. When he wasn’t there we’d sneak in and use it as a playground. I remember there was one old war film that made a big impression on us. Afterwards though, there was a problem. We fought each other to be the captured pilots but one poor fella had to play Rhonda Fleming, a spy interrogating us about where the guns were buried, or whatever. Our casting choices were limited.”

The first time Byrne realised that movies were made in the real world by working professionals, he was nine or ten. “I was on the mitch from school, on a bus going down through The Coombe. There was this enormous traffic jam and everyone was leaning out the windows, trying to see what was going on. Word came down the street that they were making a film called Quackser Fortune Has A Cousin In The Bronx, so I got off to get a proper look. There was this throng of people in St Patrick’s Park surrounding Gene Wilder, who was sitting on a bench. I pushed my way through to the front of the crowd and watched Wilder eating an onion sandwich for the scene. If he ate one sandwich he ate twenty of them, repeating the same facial expressions every time. I heard them call “cut!” and Wilder relaxed completely. He sat there quietly by himself until they shouted ‘action!’ again and his face lit up. That was the first time I had ever seen an actor working.”

“Very few films were made at that time in Ireland. I remember these stories that were going around about Ryan’s Daughter; whispered legends seeping up to Dublin from Dunquin about the nine months David Lean was kept waiting for this dramatic storm he needed for the finale. It was 1969 or 1970 now and I was in Sinnott’s pub one night. At around ten o’clock the door burst open and Archie O’Sullivan swept in. Archie was this great old Dublin actor who had a small part in the movie. But there was nothing small about Archie. This particular evening he had come all the way from Kerry to King Street in a taxi, for a pint. He nodded his order and lifted out of his pocket this big blue note, a fifty. Nobody had ever even seen one before, at least not in my circle. The bar fell quiet. Archie held the fifty aloft like a prize and let it flutter to the counter. ‘Film money’, he boomed. Jesus, I thought to myself, I am in the wrong job.”

Byrne wasn’t doing much of anything at that time in Dublin. “I had come back from a working holiday in Spain and trained to be a teacher. I was working away but there was this thing in the back of my mind all the time. I knew I wanted to keep travelling and see a bit of the world. Then I started going to the Dublin Shakespeare Society - which sounds much grander than it actually was - because I didn’t want to spend every evening in the pub. I discovered there were people that were into a lot of the same things I was into.”

With this, Byrne leans towards me, as if to impart a secret. “It was unusual, to say the least, to express a desire to be an actor in those days. Only about a month after I joined the Shakespeare Society the car bombs went off in Dublin and Monaghan. The walk up Parnell Square brought you along streets with cars parked on both sides, each of which now seemed like a threat. I remember feeling that my desire to go out and talk about Shakespeare was greater than my fear of a bomb going off. There was something driving me to go out and do this, something more than just the notion of acting or performing. It was half instinct and half uncontrollable passion.”

Byrne gives a throaty laugh at his own grandiloquence. For an actor habitually described as ‘brooding’, he laughs a lot, coughs of amusement that punctuate his steady, rolling conversational manner. He has the actor’s habit of voicing both sides when quoting conversations, dredging old encounters and memories for illuminating moments, which he then describes in a few precise words. Listening to him speak about his past I get the same sense of emotional recall that jumps from the pages of first volume of his memoirs, 'Pictures In My Head', written over a number of years and published in 2001. It is a book about childhood, mostly, vividly drawn stories about his childhood in 1950s Dublin as the eldest of six children.

When I mention the autobiography, Byrne tells me he is working on a second volume, picking up the story in Dublin in the 1970s and his beginnings as an actor, training at the Project theatre and the Abbey and his first big break, a role on rural soap-opera The Riordans. “In those days, there was only one channel so everyone watched that show. They didn’t have a choice. When my role finished, I found myself having somehow become a proper working actor. There was a spin-off called Bracken and when that came to an end, I knew the time was right to move to London. I was thinking to myself, if you can get away with doing that here, maybe you could get away with it on a bigger stage. I wanted to keep going.”

Byrne tells me there were a couple of factors involved in his making the first move abroad. “Television was more real to people in those days. I’d be stopped on the street and they used to say to me, ‘You’d better watch yourself. Benjy knows what you’re up to with Maggie’. I couldn’t deal with that kind of recognition at all. It wasn’t what I wanted.” The other aspect was his relationship with the late Áine O’Connor. “Áine was a presenter on RTE and was very well known and very popular. We were sitting in a pub one day, talking about my future and she turned to me and said, ‘Life is very short. Take your chance and don’t have any regrets’. She gave up her job on television, which was an enormous sacrifice to make, and came to London with me. We were together for ten years and were the best of friends. When she died [in 1998], I felt a huge loss.”

By the time he made the move to London, Byrne was almost thirty years of age. I ask him if coming relatively late to acting gave him any advantage over his competitors and he shakes his head emphatically. “Not a bit. Sometimes young actors ask me, ‘what do I need to do to make it?’ I tell them to prepare themselves for long stretches of unemployment and get their heads around the fact that they’ll spend a lot of their time not working.” He was out of work for eighteen months before being accepted into the Royal Court Theatre. “My father was made redundant at the age of 55 and I saw first hand what effect that had on him and his friends. When I was unemployed in London, I started to recognise those same signs in myself. We are all defined by what we do. One of the battles I have had in my life is trying to disengage who I am from what I am, if you follow me. If you’re not acting, can you call yourself an actor?” Doubt started to creep in, in himself and his plan. “That insecurity will always be there, no matter how successful you are. Months and years without the prospect of a job is hard for anyone’s self esteem.”

Unemployment and his new life as an exile in a hostile and unpredictable London had a formative effect on Byrne. “I didn’t know who I was or where I was, really. I had come from this incredibly close-knit society to a city that I didn’t know and didn’t care to know me. Being Irish in England at that time was hard. Going for a job as an actor, you had to be extremely careful about how you presented yourself because as an Irishman, you did not have the advantage. The IRA was in the middle of a bombing campaign and Arthur Scargill and the miners were being baton-charged in the streets. Thatcher was on the television every night, stoking the flames. I had a real sense, sitting in my digs in Wimbledon, that England was falling apart around me.”

His break, when it came, brought him home again. “Out of the blue, I got two auditions and, naturally, both jobs started on the same day. So I had to choose. I went for Excalibur with John Boorman and came back for the shoot in Wicklow. It lashed rain every day but I didn’t give a damn. Afterwards, I went back to London with a real sense of peace in myself. Then, very quickly afterwards, I made Defence of the Realm, which I still think is one of the best films about the relationship between the press and the government. I hadn’t seen it since it came out but I caught it on the television recently and watched for a while”. I ask him if he watches his old films and he shakes his head. “Almost never. With a film I always try to say to myself, ‘when it’s done, it’s done’. I’d hate to be the kind of person who will look at something and say, I should have done this or should have done that. I just let it go. The character doesn’t belong to me anymore, and whatever people make of him when the film is released, I can’t do anything about that.”

He takes a moment to sip his coffee and I ask him if he has, after thirty years, come up with his own theory on what an actor does. “My theory of acting is different to the way that I’ve heard other people talk about it. I believe that my job as an actor is to let the camera into those areas that are private to me. It’s not about make believe, it’s about telling the truth.” Earlier, Byrne had mentioned how his instincts drove him to seek out work as an actor, so I ask him how much of his work is intuitive and how much is craft. “I think it is all instinct. Anybody can learn the craft of it, somebody can teach you the nuts and bolts of acting, or you can read a book. But instinct is what makes the difference between proficiency and excellence. A cabinet maker putting together a sideboard will know what model to follow, but it’s his individual thought processes that makes the difference, knowing where to shave off another millimetre of wood. Instinct as an actor is something you have to learn to recognise and learn to trust. Sometimes it can be wrong but sometimes it can be absolutely right but either way, you have to go with your gut. It’s the only way it can be real. We all feel joy or sadness or regret. Those are the raw materials that an actor works with.”

When Defence of the Realm was released and became a hit, directors started to notice Byrne both for his good looks and his intense presence. He took a string of roles that established him as a natural romantic lead, playing a half-mad Byron in Ken Russell’s florid Gothic and the old flame in Mary Lambert’s sex-and-death drama Siesta, where he met his ex-wife Ellen Barkin. After filming concluded, the couple moved to America and set up home in her native New York. “Brooklyn suited me”, he says, “because it was like a small town that was part of this enormous city and I thought it was a great place to raise my children”. But the marriage wasn’t to last and the couple separated in 1993, after five years together.

By then, Byrne had established himself as a major force in American films playing the tortured gun-for-hire Tom Reagan in the Coen Brother’s extraordinary noir homage Miller’s Crossing. "When that film came along in 1990, it was an incredibly lucky break for me and dictated a lot of what happened in my life after that. I remember arriving at the audition and seeing this tall, nervous girl pacing the floor, smoking cigarettes. I said hello and asked if she was there for the part of Verna. She said ‘yes’ and that her name was Marcia Gay Harden. So the two of us ran our lines outside and went in together and we got the parts. The script was extraordinary. The Coens had each word in its place; each sentence had a rhythm to it. On some films, you can play it loose with the words, but that just doesn’t happen with the Coen brothers. They’d stop a take to say, ‘Gabriel, there’s an ‘and’ there that you missed’.”

Byrne’s Tom Regan is the central figure in a power struggle that sets two rival gangs of mobsters against each other. “Tom was a watcher”, says Byrne, “always aware of what was going on and seeing all the angles. I felt that the audience should always know what he was thinking, or at least have this idea that they knew what he was thinking.” As he’s telling me this, I notice Byrne is wearing the thick silver Claddagh ring, studded with rubies, that Tom Reagan wore in the film. He says he never takes it off.

It was a role in another modern gangster classic that set in motion what Byrne calls his ‘Hollywood Period’. “After The Usual Suspects I made a run of studio movies and a few of those were commercially successful. I did them for a variety of reasons but mainly for money. Hollywood is easy if you’re successful and I was, I suppose, for quite a while. I was there for eight years before I knew it, time that passed very quickly now that I look back on it.” Thinking about Los Angeles sparks something in Byrne and he leans back in his chair, with another sip of coffee. “I enjoyed my life in LA very much. It was a good life, and I’m not just talking about making films. The sun shone every day. I’d pick the oranges off my trees in the garden in the morning. If you did three movies, that’s about six months work in the year. The rest of the time is relaxation. I spent a lot of time travelling. I loved to visit San Francisco or drive up the coast to Big Sur. California is a remarkable place.”

Although he lived the life of a movie star with his house in Beverly Hills and parties with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, Byrne was never consciously trying to secure the position of a romantic leading man. “When I was starting out, I never thought about my marketability as an actor. I just wanted to work. I had no great career plan and didn’t do films just to get noticed by Hollywood. Most of my film career has been in independent, lower-budget projects and those are the ones that had, I thought, something to say. The problem though, is that those films don’t pay terribly well and I have two kids to put through school.” Somehow, Byrne balanced the Schwarzenegger movies and swooning period dramas with a series of cutting-edge films with directors like Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg and Wim Wenders. “Like I say, there was no real plan.”

In 2005, the international success of a low-key film he made in Australia re-established Byrne as one of the best actors working. Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne is a drama about a marriage that disintegrates over a moral issue. It marked the third time he worked with Laura Linney, an actor like himself, who started in the theatre. I make the observation that his character Stewart is the part that is the closest Byrne has come to playing himself on screen, and the actor nods his head. “There’s a pivotal moment in Jindabyne where my character finds the dead body of a young woman. Just before we shot the scene, I took Ray aside and asked him how an action hero would react when he spotted that body?’ And he replied, ‘Well, I don’t know, what do you think?’ I said to him that in my experience, a movie guy would marshal his faculties and calmly sort things out. But what if an ordinary guy, out fishing with his mates for the weekend, encounters the same situation? He loses it. He cannot cope. He is afraid and is scared and makes a mistake. That is much more me.”

“Even after all this time, acting continues to hold my fascination because it allows me to show who I am. If there is one common thing that I have noticed over my career and the choices I have made it’s a certain kind of emotional uncertainty. I’ve come to realise that there is nothing as simple as black and white. I can’t be just heroic or cowardly, happy or sad, because there is conflict in the heart of everything and there is certainly conflict in me and the camera sometimes can pick that up.”

Byrne’s latest success, the HBO series In Treatment, is all about conflict and emotion. He plays a psychotherapist, Dr Paul Weston, who takes weekly sessions with his various patients, seeing them through their crises while creating new ones of his own. Having seen Byrne describe his battle with depression and alcoholism in Pat Collins’ intimate documentary Stories From Home, I wondered if he had ever been in therapy? “No”, he says, “I have not. But doing the show has enlightened me about the process. My feeling about it is this; if you can share who you are with another human being, and acknowledge that contact, your problems lose their power over you. You can put the issue on the table and step away from it and get a new perspective. Or at the very least, you will find that whatever your troubles are, you are not alone in them. There are other people that feel the very same way, or have gone through the very same problem. The human condition, when you boil it down, is that we are all feeling the same way at one time or another.”

A long post, but worth it, I think. Photo courtesy of the Dingle Film Festival.

The Good The Bad The Weird

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:37:00 +0000

Korean director Kim Ji-Woon’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird is a hodgepodge Asian spaghetti western (should that be ‘eastern’?) that perfectly recreates a Sergio Leone gun-slinging bonanza on the Mongolian Steppe with uncommon bravado and a delight in complicated action sequences. It’s a hoot.

Opening with a frantic train robbery in the 1930s, the film never pauses for breath. All the horse opera tropes get an airing, but the title tells you all you need to know about the plot. A crack shot with his repeating Winchester, Jung Woo-Sung plays the good, a white-hatted hero and honest bounty hunter. Swathed in black and with a jarringly contemporary haircut Lee Byung-hun is the bad, a deranged bandit fashioned after Lee Van Cleef’s demonic Angel Eyes. Caught between them is an unkempt peasant chancer (Korea’s best known comic actor Song Kang-ho), the weird by subtraction but also the source of much of the film’s ironic humour. All three are searching for a legendary treasure map, an unsubtle McGuffin, which promises untold riches to the individual smart and brave enough to track it down.

A cursory introduction to the main players and a sketchy outline of the plot very soon gives way to a series of all-action sequences, the highlights of which are an elaborate shoot out in an abandoned village that transforms bullet-riddled violence into goofy slapstick and a deliriously over-extended chase across the desert, with the three heroes chasing each other and in turn, being chased by the imperial Japanese army.

It’s around this point that the film struggles to maintain its momentum, the galloping plot becoming more and more convoluted, piling up the chases, duplicities and flashbacks. Ji-Woon gives so many nods to Leone and his legion of followers that he is in danger of straining his neck. But with such beautifully realised stunt-work (all done without the assistance of computer post production) and the glowing talents of a perfectly chosen cast, his rip-snorting film rises above it’s origins as pastiche to become something wholly inventive and painstakingly entertaining that will reward the attention of an investigative audience.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

maguiresmovies@gmail.com (John) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:21:00 +0000

David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a three hour epic that hinges on a gimmick. It’s a gimmick with noble literary origins, being loosely based on a 1921 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it is a gimmick nonetheless. The film lives and dies by one’s willingness to accept a central character that is old when he is born and grows younger by the year, until he dies as an infant. Everyone he knows and loves grow older in the usual way, aging slowly as Benjamin goes backwards, passing them on the way down. Embrace that and you will embrace the film.

Attempting to synopsise a story that opens at the end of the First World War and comes to a close during Hurricane Katrina would take all day. The bare bones are these: Benjamin comes into the world in New Orleans during the Armistice to a mother that dies in childbirth and a father (Jason Flemyng) who abandons him, thinking the child, with his wizened face, is a monster. He is taken in by a loving black woman, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), who works in an old folk’s home in the city. She raises him as her own, tenderly caring for this bald headed, deeply wrinkled creature, who with his cataracts and cane, fits right in with her other charges.

When he is 13 (and looks about 65), Benjamin meets Daisy, the visiting granddaughter of another resident. Although she will come and go from his life, as Benjamin grows up, and appears younger, Daisy remains the love of his life. Then in the middle section of the film, the now middle-aged Benjamin sets out of his adventures, having been primed for the wider world by an entertaining encounter with a world-travelling African bon vivant (Rampai Mohadi). He takes a job on a boat, captained by a hard-drinking Irishman (Jared Harris) and, in a dream-like sequence has an affair in faraway Murmansk with the sophisticated Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), an ambassador's wife.

Eventually, however, the momentum of the story has Benjamin and Daisy (Cate Blanchett) come together in equilibrium at precisely the right time for both of them, eventually consummating a romance that has been mooted from the opening scenes. The catch, of course, being that their time together is limited by the magic that possesses him; she continues to age as he grows ever younger.

At first glance the film Benjamin Button most recalls is 1994s Forrest Gump, which placed a superficially similar character in the midst of a chronological span (including a war) and attempted to define the era through his adventures. The screenwriter in both instances is Eric Roth, but where Gump trudged blank-faced through the history of television, eating chocolates and playing ping-pong, Button glides through time itself, consistently engaged and aware but without a trace of Forrest’s wet-eyed sentimentality.

Still best known as the director of the serial killer thriller Se7en, the lush, sepia-toned period epic Benjamin Button is a significant chance of pace from director Fincher, but he brings every element of his technical and storytelling skills to the film to present an initially odd, gradually absorbing, eventually devastating treatise on the passage of time. But in some ways, Benjamin Button shares a theme with the director’s last film, Zodiac, which likewise revolved around the slow-drip erosion of time. Where that film tried and failed to solve a puzzle, this one is content to let the mystery lie.

Technically, the process involved in allowing Pitt to play each of the seven ages of a man is astonishing but from beneath the computerised slight-of-hand and prosthetic make-up, the actor gives a remarkable performance, emotionally nimble as a pre-adolescent geriatric and becoming convincingly more distant and weary as the reality of his curse becomes apparent. Opposite him, Blanchett is just as captivating, particularly in the central section when she moves to Paris to become a dancer. To close that section of the story, Fincher demonstrates his theory on time and chance in a bravura sequence that eventually brings Daisy and Benjamin back together, but at a terrible cost to her.

Whatever the director’s skills in realising the impossible on screen, the lasting impressions of his film are emotional rather than mechanical. There are whole sections of Benjamin Button that ran around in my head for days after I saw it. “Nothing lasts”, someone says at a crucial point. Some things do.