Dogtooth

As his comedy counterpart Julian Barrat makes waves in the short film world with Curtains, Matt Berry (probably best known for his turns in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and The IT Crowd) stars in The Search, a beautifully measured film about a member of the SETI research team whose search for aliens disguises a desire to find something much closer to home. Those used to Berry’s comedy theatrics will find him deliver an understated and engaging performance in a film that’s a moving and tender piece of work.

Love Hate

More biting is Love Hate, a fun and nasty comedy about a man who comes face to face with the embodiment of his own hate. Ben Whishaw is splendid as Tom, a man who is walked over more than the park lawn, and Hayley Atwell has fun as the rather voluptuous manifestation of his inner hatred. It gets a little bit silly, but there are some well aimed barbs and everyone is clearly enjoying themselves. More serious stuff is abound in After Tomorrow, a tense and emotional affair which blends suspense with intense family drama. It’s a quite beautiful piece with excellent pacing and should be a favourite for awards in 2010.

Kid

Meanwhile Kieren O’Brien (probably best known for his turn in 9 Songs ) and Ralph Laurila (who – after his performance in the BAFTA award winning short film Ralph is gradually proving himself to be one of the hottest young actors in the UK) had amazing chemistry in Kid, a tale that blends an almost Oedipal battle between father and son with a depiction of illegal immigration in the 21st century. It’s a little long, and the themes don’t integrate as well as they could, but strong performances carry this through.

Away from fiction, Pollphail proved to be an excellent documentary about the disastrous plans for a Scottish power station that hoped to build a community but ultimately became a folly. Use of archive footage is sensitively handled alongside current interviews to create an absorbing story. There were also plenty of gems from outside of the UK with a particular highlight being The Six Dollar Fifty Man (main image), a tale of a small boy who attempts to deal with the injustice of school life. This New Zealand film takes a well worn tale and imbues it with a freshness and vitality with a dark sense of humour at its core.

Don’t Look Back

Naglinn (The Nail) was a extremely black comedy from Iceland about an important figure who – you guessed it – gets a nail through his head. Surreal and disturbing, it’s a unique short that goes for both laughs and scares. Also unique was Don’t Look Back, a fun little Polish affair that was filmed on a mobile phone. Quick and funny, it was an intriguing use of new technology and great to see it as part of the LFF programme. The French film Une Pute et Un Poussin (A Whore and a Chick) is a nice examination of the way in which people can judge each other on appearance whilst The Mill was a mysterious Irish a film about a small boy who goes wandering during a family trip.

The Australia film Hawker is a beautiful and stylish film that used very little dialogue in it’s depiction of the life of a travelling salesman whilst Arena – a Portuguese film about a layabout who becomes embroiled in a fight with local youths – was another excellent effort that was marked by some excellent cinematography. Other stand outs were Siltage (Seeds of the Fall) a very funny Swedish film about a couple who wonder whether one of them should sleep with the next door neighbour’s wife and Team Taliban, an intriguing documentary about a pro wrestler who takes on the persona of a Taliban sympathiser to antagonise the crowd.

At one point, to escape the intensity of the LFF, I decided to head towards Brick Lane where Kino London held the 10th of its Open Mic Film Nights. With no pre-selection, Kino simply ask filmmakers to abide by three simple rules: the films must be under six minutes, must feature the Kino London logo and must be presented on DVD. There was a fun atmosphere in the room as people had very little idea of what to expect, and whilst everything presented was slightly rough and ready, it was a real pleasure to be in a place where filmmakers and audiences were supporting each other and generally having a lot of fun.

There was some really nice films on offer too, including Ben Slotover’s Zantrox and Stockbroker, a really funny film about a stockbroker who teams up with his old toy to fight crime and Mariano Melman’s politically charged animation The Evolution of Puppetry. There was also a great live performance from musician Angrydan and even free bagels. Result! If you’re a filmmaker looking to show your work (as long as you abide by the rules of course) or just looking for a fun night out at the movies, then you should get along to the next Kino event which runs on November 18th.

Like many festivals, the shorts on offer at the London Film Festival are never really given the attention that they deserve. A shame as there was plenty of shorts that had as much flash and flare as the supposed ‘biggies’. One would expect that at least a few of the filmmakers with work in this year’s shorts programme will be finding themselves walking the red carpet in the next few years.

Bouncing = leaving
Bumba = ass
Bang = shoot
Blast = fire
Bull = fucked
Hydro = hydroponically grown marijuana
Dump = to shoot
Nitro = nitroglycerine
Darts = rhymes
Devil’s pie = what you get if you sell your soul to the devil
Ends = our area
Pumps = pump action
Bred > bredren = brethren
Ting = thing, a move, a deal
Blud = blood, a friend, also B.
500 bags = 500 thousand
Taking bare food out of Man’s mouth = you would be stealing from the Boss Man
Dog = man
Big men = older and more important men
What’s gwanning = what’s going on
My soldiers = one of my team
Cuzzie = mate
Boom = cool!
Scrilla, P’s > paper > paperwork = money
Papers = money
A ghost under your belt = you killed a man

Indeed, Korine speaks of his new work not as a film, but as a document; a record; a recovery of something. There is no discernible plot, progression or dramatic tension. Simply, it’s a fictionalised cinematic diary entry; eighty minutes of footage shot (on a really bad camera, recorded on a really bad tape) by a group of elderly folk, documenting their anti-social, vulgar and outrageous activity. This includes dry humping dustbins and defecating in the street.

But this is no Jackass for geriatrics. For one, Korine’s audience for the movie will be primarily art house as the alienating quality of the ‘footage’, the extremity of the material and the lack of any kind of narration or shape of the footage ensure this. And, secondly, if we are buying into the conceit of the film, we have to ask ourselves why these people were filming themselves at all.

Regardless of whether the film is any good, it’s work like this that gets us to examine the relationship between film and audience. This is not new, as there have been many recent examples covering such ground. Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, released a movie called Shirin, featuring a series of close-up shots of women watching a film (which we, as the audience, never see as we are viewing the viewer). Zidane: a 21^st Century Portrait was an impeccably filmed football match as filmed in the most glorious, cinematic way possible (blurring cinema and TV, art with ‘the people’). And of course The Blair Witch Project (itself inspired by The Last Broadcast and Cannibal Holocaust) brought the idea of the ‘found footage’ into the money-spinning mainstream. In this audience/content relationship field, Korine is not on his own.

In all these films, the filmmakers have brought a new way of looking at something and/or a new subject to an already established audience. Zidane is bringing football to the arthouse and arthouse to football fans. Shirin is asking arthouse audiences to watch themselves whilst Blair Witch made home movies frightening. All have transcended and questioned what an audience is and aimed to transform the ordinary expectations of a certain audience into something extraordinary. They convert things an audience wouldn’t stereotypically go near into spectacles.

Naturally, cinema began as a medium conveying spectacle, immediately provoking discussions concerning the role of the spectator and Korine appears to continue these discussions with Trash Humpers. If we take art, as amongst other things, something that presents life from a perspective we haven’t seen before, cinema never did become an art form; it was born one. As a fresh perspective is new and different, it will cause discussion and possible disagreement. From its big-screen birth (debatably starting with the Lumiere brothers’ shorts of everyday Paris life premiered in Paris’s Salon Indien du Grand Café, where proceedings were as much about the medium they were delivered through, than the subjects of the film itself) to the pioneering early twentieth century narrative, fiction films of Georges Méliès, valuable cinema has always provided these discussions about itself, the things it depicts and the people receiving it. It’s about the spectator as part of and aside from, a situation of an action.

This is exactly what Korine is discussing with Trash Humpers. On the surface, the shock and awe provocations of Trash Humpers are a natural extension of Jackass and Dirty Sanchez’s actions. And the almost unbelievable ridiculousness of events are clearly designed to make us laugh. However his filming style, the film’s lack of traditional narrative and structure (and also Korine’s revelations that there was no script, that the order we see things on screen is the order in which they were filmed) and the audience he is showing this to, seem somewhat out of kilter with the film’s content.

Perhaps Korine is bringing art house social commentary to the Jackass generation, or the art house audience to Jackass. Perhaps this film is actually profoundly frightening. The video camera has now been around for the period of time, that it has become available to the very fringes of society. Korine is turning the spectacle of outrageous street stunts back in our face, and providing no answers. Perhaps these old people have seen Dirty Sanchez and are keen to make their own version. He’s providing us with the bi-product of the Jackass generation, giving it both some kind of dignity but also exposing its awful truth, by increasing the size of it from TV to cinema screen.

It’s a fearless soul that makes a film like Trash Humpers. It’s made by someone who wants to get us to ask big questions, who is highly intelligent and very aware of what this film will do. Yet, somewhere at the back of my mind, I still have doubts. As the full, and well-received, screening of the movie at the LFF proves, perhaps there is an audience for both. Indeed, a certain free-spirit would be attracted to Korine’s provocations. Would this free-spirit also be attracted to Jackass originally? Clearly this film raises many questions, not least, the shock of the old.

Featuring a cover illustration from revered artist (and friend of Spike) Geoff McFetridge – part of an exclusive double cover with our sister mag Huck – there is, quite honestly, an outrageous amount of great stuff in this issue. Look!

LWLies 26 is out now, thumbing the serrated edge of film criticism. The Coen brothers find the lighter side of A Serious Man; Megan Fox devours Jennifer’s Body; Richard Kelly thinks outside The Box; Steven Soderbergh rats on The Informant!; Paul Giamatti warms the cockles in Cold Souls; and Michael Haneke unties The White Ribbon. We score an exclusive interview with reluctant genius Spike Jonze; take a trip through the precincts of his many personas; examine how Mother re-invented the ad agency; hail new skate vid hero Ty Evans; take a walk on the wild side with some illustrated monsters; track the rise of the fabled filmmaking class of ’99; step into Maurice Sendak’s weird world; and commiserate with the directors whose dream job turned into a nightmare. All this, plus exclusive interviews with Richard Kelly, Paddy Considine, Lynn Shelton, Ondi Timoner and more.

Release date: May 28, 2010.

The cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Ben Kingsley, Gemma Arterton, Alfred Molina.

The pitch: Prince and princess team up to defeat evil magician. Or, Pirates of the Caribbean meets The Mummy.

The strapline: Defy The Future

The buzz: Franchise alert! The subheading recently added to this suggests Disney are looking for a repeat of its wildly successful Pirates of the Caribbean series. Prince of Persia is one of the better-known franchises in the world of computer games, and more appropriate for the big screen treatment than, say, Sonic the Hedgehog. If director Mike Newell brings the quality he brought to Harry Potter IV – one of the better instalments of that franchise – then this could finally fix Jake Gyllenhaal onto the Hollywood A-list.

Reasons this could be good: As knockabout action trailers go, this delivers, if not in spades, then in magic time-travelling daggers. While there are nods to fans of the computer games (see him jumping from level to level at 1:36) there is enough good old-fashioned stuntwork to open this up to a mainstream audience. Newell’s pedigree is evident in the sweeping landscapes (0:59 and 1:57) and the Prince of Thieves-esque arrow POV shot (1:03) and, though it pains me to say it, Gyllenhaal’s English accent is really rather good, what?

Reasons this could be bad: Arterton’s English accent may be good, but that’s about the only thing remotely successful about her wooden delivery. And she’s English. The CGI action scenes may look well-executed, but there are so many of them! This trailer is like having a bucket of special effects thrown in your face. And doesn’t it seem a little bit like watching someone else play a really exciting Prince of Persia videogame? As anyone who had to share a games console with a relative while growing up will know, watching someone else play is not fun in the slightest.

We think: This really is Pirates by numbers, isn’t it? American heartthrob with Brit accent? Check. Beautiful-but-terrible Brit actress? Check. Supporting cast of Brit character actors? Check. Faintly ludicrous CGI action? Check. Although there are action setpieces galore in this trailer, there is a distinct dearth of killer one-liners. Watch any of the Pirates trailers again and see how many of Johnny Depp’s funny little Briticisms are in there. The only equivalent moment in this trailer is Gyllenhaal being lost for words in a vaguely amusing fashion. Films like this live and die by the quality of their scripts, so we’ll need more evidence of that before being convinced this is one to watch.

Music: My guess is an excerpt of the score from Pirates 3. All pounding strings and massed, portentous-sounding choirs.

Did you spot?: Richard Coyle, the scene-stealing Welsh funnyman from much-missed Britcom “Coupling” at 00:49

The odds of you seeing it: Pirates really split people down the middle. If you liked that, chances are you’ll see this. If not, there’s nothing new for you here.

A severely autocratic director, Clouzot fitted not into any of the cinematic schemes which narratise France’s cinematic development. Clouzot’s work is too esoteric and blackly misanthropic to fit into the more traditional embraces of the cinéma du papa/cinéma de qualité and the discussions around la politique des auteurs – although his ability to vivisect the layers of social pretence inherent within French provincial life could be logically linked with Chabrolian theme and form, he was never linked either to the groundswell of cinematic activity that became the more fashionable Nouvelle Vague.

Clouzot, then, operated as something of a maverick within the framework of French cinematic structures and, in doing so, found his own freedom to break the theatricality, quaint tradition and static cinematic convention in a different, perhaps more acute way than the young pups of the Nouvelle Vague who have so dominated historical cinematic appraisals. Clouzot was even barred by the French government from making films at one point, such was the offense he had caused and, unusually for an artist, he drew the wrath of the French Resistance, who accused him of making pro-German works.

His best known films are probably Quai des Orfèvres (the address of a famous Parisian cop shop), Le Salaire de la Peur, Le Corbeau (incidentally one of the film’s Tarantino had playing at Shosanna’s cinema in Inglourious Basterds, and seemingly a touchstone text for Michael Haneke’s imminent arrival the White Ribbon) and the film I want to revisit here – Les Diaboliques.

All these films have been mercilessly ploughed for content and structure over the years – Fatal Attraction is just one of the more famous magpies – and a couple have been remade several times; the most infamous rehash being the Sharon Stone, Isabelle Adjani and Chazz Palminteri starring Diabolique.

Clouzot’s original, though, is something to behold. Based on a novel She Who Was No More by the French noir authors Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (two authors who Alfred Hitchcock also adapted for Vertigo). Interestingly, Clouzot reverses the sexual triangle within the novel, which, at the time would have been a prime piece of Mail-bait.

Les Diaboliques is a film from which menace seeps at every pore. Starring Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse and a startlingly fragile Véra Clouzot (the director’s wife who had a genuinely weak heart to match that of her character), Les Diaboliques is the story of a privately run boarding school out in the country where the despotic headmaster Michel (played by by an ogre-like Meurisse) psychologically and physically browbeats his wife Christina (Véra Clouzot) and his mistress (Signoret). The wife and mistress subsequently conspire to off their tormentor and do so by drugging and drowning him. After hiding his body in the leaf-strewn swimming pool outside the school, they hope that his body will be discovered and his death assumed accidental. However, the next day when the pool is drained, the body has vanished and soon the suit that Michel was wearing at the point of his death, is returned anonymously from the dry-cleaners.

The film, like the best psychological horror, relies largely on an encroaching dread, an intensely gradual pace, a gaping and supremely disconcerting void of musical accompaniment and a heavy, sustained off-screen presence which is only visually realised in the final few frames. It is an ending now much copied but still retains much of its genuinely creepy sense of the macabre and jet black wit to match.

Set during a damp, mouldy autumn, the squelch of the sodden leaves is tangible and aligns well with the decaying walls and surrounds of the boarding house. Entropy has long since set in here; the brooding, gloomy tone is aided by a frozen, rigid camera which often plunges from on-high and is accompanied by intricately weaved chiaroscuro lighting alternately exposing and disguising the gothic confines of the boarding house. Our instinctive desire for the camera to move, to show and to tell is consistently denied. The smell, too, of grimy, unwashed children wafts from the screen and the viewer is left at the close with a profoundly disturbing residual unease.

Véra Clouzot, in her debut role, is seriously put through the emotional wringer by her husband and king puppeteer. Already suffering from the cold shoulders provoked by the apparently nepotistic casting, her awkward manner, inelastic body language and capacity for taut facial expression seem to denote her genuine terror at taking on the role.  They contribute hugely to the efficacy of the film. The final few scenes of the film are something of a coup de grâce for her character and her weak heart. Tragically, five years later her real heart finally gave out on her, a coincidence which was made much of at the time by the French press.

The film was released during France’s ‘dirty’ war with Algeria and it has been suggested that it is an indirect commentary on just that. This again connects Clouzot to Haneke who, with a contemporary set of cinematic tools, also tackled this subject in Hidden. It is curious, then, that these two masters of manipulation are currently enjoying a moment in the critical sun.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up to speed with the world of professional boxing, not to mention professional boxing film franchises, let me explain. This weekend David Devon Haye, aka ‘The Haymaker’ – a six foot, 15 stone heavyweight from Bermondsey – is going to attempt to fight Russian World Boxing Association champion, Nikolay Valuev; all seven foot, 23 stone of him. To mention David and Goliath here would just be lazy, so let us instead say that this is basically like a badger trying to KO a grizzly bear.

My friends, I give you Rocky IV made flesh.

Of course, I have been arguing that Stallone is a modern day Nostradamus for years. The man is patently a genius of transcendental proportions, so it’s hardly surprising that he can predict the future. I’m just surprised he’s kept it quiet for so long. So, that’s the background. Now let’s see if the parallels between Rocky IV and Haye’s upcoming Nuremburg fight could fill fifteen rounds.

Round One – 

The Opponents:

Like Stallone’s Italian Stallion, Haye is famed for his warmth, his good humour and his good looks. In a recent interview with the Observer, Haye joked that he had given up a lucrative modelling career for ‘a job where I can get brain damage in front of millions of people.’

As fans of Rocky will know, old Balboa has to overcome both the demons of injury and corporate modelling during the film series in order to fight Drago.

Now, David Haye may be big enough to scare the living shit out of most mortals, but the South London boxer will have to pull something extraordinary (I’m thinking maybe a blunderbuss) out of his gloves to fell his titanic opponent. Nikolay Valuev is said to eat three kilos of animal flesh a day, had hands the size of squash rackets and has size 18 feet. Similarly, in Rocky IV, Drago, played by Dolph Lundgren, was basically a Slavic killing machine. With a flat top that could break steel girders and biceps the size of new born babies, you really believed him when he said ‘I fight all my life and I never lose. Soon I fight Rocky Balboa, and the world will see his defeat.’

Round Two – 

The Training:

The training montage of Rocky IV is, by anyone’s reckoning, a masterpiece. Whilst being followed by the KGB and haunted by memories of Apollo’s defeat, Rocky lifts rocks, runs up mountains, ploughs through snow and, in a move that I think we all could learn from, bench-presses a wooden cart full of loved ones in front of a roaring Siberian fire. David Haye, on the other hand, has made his sparring partner wear platform boots (in order to prepare for the pulverising blows that will rain down on to his head), watched videos of Godzilla and has said that he will go in to ‘solitude’for just a day before the fight. Not the solitude of the Russian wilderness, either.

Valuev, of course, will be preparing with his new trainer, the diminutive Alexander Zimin. I might point out at this juncture that in no way am I comparing the training regime of a 7 foot, 23 stone professional fighter with the drugs cheating, semi-robotic, laboratory schedule of Drago in Rocky IV. And if I have mistakenly given any impression to the contrary then please God, never let him find me.

Round Three –

The Fight Itself:

Now, I hate to throw around spoilers here, but it’s pretty hard to talk about Rocky IV without mentioning the small fact that Rocky’s fight with Drago basically ends the Cold War. Through humility, perseverance and combination punches to the head piece, Rocky teaches the Russian Politburo the importance of friendship. Sadly, in the real world, Saturday’s fight between Haye and Valuev will probably end in little more than the transfer of enormous funds and equally unpalatable wounds.

So, there we have it. Not fifteen rounds, perhaps, but pretty darned close. Now, I wonder when Judge Dredd is going to come true….

Congratulations to Devorah Hall for the winning entry, which bags her a signed screenprint of our cover, illustrated exclusively for LWLies by Geoff Mcfetridge, designer of the title sequence and end-credit graphics for Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are.

This Wednesday London’s Genesis Cinema will host a special one-night-only screening of El Baño del Papa; a tender Uruguayan film about a small village sent into frenzy with the imminent visit of the Pope.

The night will be introduced by an industry professional and there’ll be an opportunity to discuss and debate the film afterwards in the bar. It’s a night you won’t want to miss.

For more information about the season schedule, or to book tickets go to www.sodapictures.com or www.genesiscinema.com

Set on the eve of World War 2, the well off Keyes family led by matriarch Alexander (Bill Nighy) are trying to uphold their family traditions (whatever they are) until it all goes awry when his eldest adopted daughter Anne (Romola Garai) loses her mind in the process of discovering secret recordings of the pro-appeasement movement. Glorious 39 has no discernable flaws and is a perfectly fine film with a Hitchcockian element of drama and mystery but it all gets thrown out the window with a frankly baffling ending. It’s like they couldn’t be bothered to make a decent ending to justify the story (and the audience sitting there for two hours) and just wrapped it up in the most haphazard way. The only way it could’ve been more frustrating is it was was revealed to be all a dream…

Blessed was a late addition to the festival schedule and is the latest film from Ana Kokkinos. Adapted from the gloriously named play, Who’s Afraid of The Working Class? It focuses on the relationship between mothers and they’re children and is split in half to show both sides of the coin. Another one of those, “it’s alright” films which almost came across as an Aussie version of Crash with the recurring melodic theme tune and somewhat honest look at relationships.

The beginning of the week didn’t exactly set the world alight so leave it to the always reliable Coen brothers to swoop in and save the day. A Serious Man is the kind of 180 we’ve come to expect from the Coens as much like their last two features, it’s completely different to their previous work. Set in Minnesota 1967 (after a prologue entirely spoken in Yiddish), Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a physics professor and a family man whos life quickly falls apart due to one problem that leads to another. He seeks solace in his religion and amongst people in his life and as to be expected from the Coens, there’s plenty of randomness, musical interludes and funny characters. I enjoyed it immensly and as I left the cinema the conversation raged amongst a group jittery journos (too much caffeine – clearly) about the ending. Without giving anything away it ends rather abrupty which may understandably annoy some but I’m a fan of films that never aim to have anyone learn anything or change in any way.

And now for the final film of the fest, the directorial debut from artist Sam Taylor-Wood, Nowhere Boy which focuses on the troubled and painful teenage years of John Lennon. Much will be made of her direction and Aaron Johnson’s great performance which perfectly captures the rebellious and deeply sarcastic nature of the teenage Lennon but really a lot should be said of the two women he was torn between; his free spirited mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) who abandoned him but later introduced music into his life and the militant aunt that raised him, Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas). Kudos to the director and writer (the same man behind Control) for only having subtle nods to The Beatles and the parts of the city that inspired them e.g. the quick flash of Strawberry Fields and the young Lennon behind turned away from The Cavern Club. An accomplished debut and much like Carey Mulligan in An Education, a star making role for young Johnson.

And with that, the Times Bfi 53rd London Film Festival drew to a close. So until next year, take care of yourselves and each other.