LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Thursday, October 16, 2014

'Electricity' (2014) directed by Bryn Higgins [LFF 2014]

Thursday, October 16, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

"I’ve never had a fit, and to be honest, it’s not high on my list of things to do. But after watching Bryn Higgins’ Electricity, I feel like I’ve got an inkling of how horrible it is. This tightly focused character drama puts its audience in the shoes of Lily (Agyness Deyn), a cool, smart and attractive young woman with debilitating epilepsy. 

As we open in the Yorkshire seaside town of Saltburn by the Sea, we meet Lily working the change counter in a seafront amusement arcade. Today she’s having some fun flirting with a customer, teasing him as he clumsily chats her up. But he’s nice enough, so the two swap numbers and make a date. Later, dressed to the nines, she walks down the seafront, spots him and waves. Then the world ends. Shooting sparks of colour tear apart the frame and the world heaves, swells and distorts. Blackness."

Read the rest of this review at We Got This Covered

★★★★★

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

'20,000 Days on Earth' (2014) directed by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard

Tuesday, September 23, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

In 20,000 Days on Earth Nick Cave climbs right up his own arse.  You can't make a film about your life that's stuffed with lengthy philosophical monologues, fetishistic performances and a trip to the hallowed halls of the  'Nick Cave Archive' without coming off as a bit of a narcissist. Soon we're dragged along with him, mentally donning shades, brothel creepers and a black suit and vicariously experiencing what it's like to spend a day as Brighton's most prominent doom-goth-preacher-poet-actor-junkie-polymath-rockstar.

Fortunately for all, though 20,000 Days... spends its entire run-time firmly jammed up Cave's arse, it's one hell of an interesting arse.  Occupying a no man's land between documentary and drama, the premise is that we're follow Cave around Brighton on the 20,000th day of his life.  We watch him wake up, do a spot of writing, tootle around in his car, record some songs, hallucination Ray Winstone, eat some dinner, hang out with his children and do a gig.  You know, typical rockstar stuff.

Reality and fiction blur around Cave, who appears to exert some weird gravitational pull on everything around him.  Though considerably more chilled out than in his mythic heroin egomonster Berlin days, he remains an exceedingly odd (and faintly ridiculous) man. Whether you'll enjoy spending this much time with him doesn't entirely rest on whether you're a fan of Nick Cave, but on your tolerance for calculated eccentricity, melodrama and the art of 'cool'.

There's a few thematic strands running through this, but top of the list is the art of self-transformation.  Cave discusses his childhood desire to transform into a rockstar, the ways his personality changes when he's writing or recording and how some kind of angelic inner-self is revealed when he's faced with an adoring audience.  Cave treats his skin and bones as clay; raw materials for the construction of the outlandish performance personality he now lives.

Occasionally this artifice slips a bit.  During conversations by Ray Winstone, Warren Ellis and Kylie Minogue Cave strives to keep this poker face intact, the mask slipping when he giggles at some forgotten memory or little in-joke.  These glimpses go a long way towards making Cave a likeable person to hang out with, able to poke a bit of fun at himself.

In one of the funniest sequences a deadpan Cave takes us through a series of concert photographs that show their bassist being urinated on.  He becomes a football pundit taking us through a particularly nasty foul, outlining the arc of the urine stream and calmly explaining how the bassist gave up playing and lamped the rogue pisser. Similarly fun is the conversation in which an awestruck Cave and Warren Ellis talk about a Nina Simone gig and particularly her demands for "champagne, cocaine and sausages!"

Cave is confident enough to allow audiences to laugh at him on occasion, safe in the knowledge that he can back it up with outstanding songs.  Don't expect this to be some trek through his considerable discography, rather, a few carefully chosen performances anchor the film.  Higgs Boson Blues stands out as particularly stunning, Cave acting his way through his lyrics, delivering a gentle, subtle performance.  Though his posey-archness feels a bit thickly laid on elsewhere, it's here that it synthesises into something truly magnificent, so damn intense that I felt the urge to applaud the screen when he finished.

It's moments of unalloyed genius like this that Cave earns his right to egotism. Also helping is that his lapses into philosophy are genuinely insightful and surprisingly uplifting. Towards the climax of the film there's a tremendous monologue about the importance of nurturing and realising your ideas.  For fleeting moments he allows you to fantasise about what it's like to have the whole world singing along to your tune.  The summary of his advice is that it's better to have an idea and watch it disastrously crash and burn rather than do nothing with it at all. After all we have only so many days in our lives; wasting them is a sin.

I know I've seen a good film when I walk out of a screening in a much better mood than when I walked in.  As I sat down for 20,000 Days... I was tired, aching and hungry.  97 minutes later I danced out of there on a cloud, fuelled by a climactic performance of Jubilee Street that seamlessly cuts between footage from across Cave's performative history.  It's a microcosm of the rest of the film, and an utterly exhilarating crescendo.

20,000 Days... isn't quite a documentary, it isn't quite a biopic, it isn't quite a concert film - what is emphatically is is very good cinema indeed.  It comes at Nick Cave from a variety of angles, finding him equally fascinating whichever way we look.  As a Nick Cave fan I'm predisposed to deeply dig this, but it's such a smoothly, smartly constructed film that every viewer will find something to admire within.

★★★★★

20,000 Days on Earth is on general release.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

'The Congress' (2013) directed by Ari Folman

Sunday, August 10, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

How on earth do films like this made? The Congress is an aggressively confusing, utterly idiosyncratic cocktail of a thousand different influences in which meaning, motivation and even the bare bones of the plot slip through your fingers like quicksilver.  Using the critically acclaimed Waltz With Bashir as a springboard, Ari Folman has wrung out the contents of his mind onto a the silver screen, ending up with a movie that explores the far reaches of what cinema might become by way of an animator's wet dream.

At first it seems so straightforward.  Robin Wright (Buttercup from The Princess Bride and Jenny from Forrest Gump) plays herself; a middle-aged actor for whom parts have almost entirely dried up.  Her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) lays it out to her: she's made too many bad choices, she was dealt a winning hand and bodged it, leaving her over the hill , unemployable, a cinematic liability.  There's only one option available to her; new technology allows the Miramount film studio to completely digitise an actor, scanning every millimeter of them into a computer and recreating them digitally on screen. While she ages in obscurity her digital self will remain forever young, able to be slotted into whatever roles the studio decrees.

The film is no slouch visually in the non-animated bits either.

"20 YEARS LATER".  Act two opens in the year 2033, where a 64 year old Wright attends the Futurological Congress,  introducing new chemical technology allowing people to don animated avatars.  Anyone can become whoever they want to be.  It's here that we transition from humdrum reality to an intense animated world of motion and colour.  The dirt and grime of reality is scrubbed away to leave a primary coloured psychedelia heavily influenced by animation legends like the Fleischer brothers, Gerald Scarfe and Ub Iwerks.

It's at this juncture that the Folman slams his foot down on the accelerator and zooms off into the realm of the bonkers.  Narrative fades away into a chaotic blizzard of references, characters transition from people into walking metaphors and every single frame vibrates with fractal levels of detail.  We feel like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, initially struggling to map out this Gordian knot of conflicting symbols, imagery and pop culture. Soon you realise your best bet is to relax, let yourself be swept along into a truly beautiful cinematic world that's like few other things I've ever seen in cinema.

Oh yeaaaah.

Visually the closest comparison I can make is to the densely populated, fast-paced cinematic worlds created by Studio 4°C, primarily the wonderful Tekkon Kinkreet and the avant-garde masterpiece Mind Game (a criminally unseen film).  What they and The Congress have in common is a desire to push animation as far as it can go.  After all, with just a few strokes of pencil on paper the animator becomes God, conjuring whole universes into being direct from his imagination.  Why settle for recreating desaturated, gritty dull old reality when you can spin a blanket of skyscrapers that flutter into the air like butterflies, faces that blossom into flowers and jet planes that flap, dovelike, through the sky?

Textually, though the film credits Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem (writer of Solaris) with inspiration I was more reminded of the work of Philip K. Dick, particularly the unsettling queasily drug-tinged worlds of Ubik and VALIS.  Part of what makes Dick's science fiction so compelling is the utter divorce from the familiar. In The Congress' future of inhaled experiences, where people change personae like we change t-shirts and where the human form tends to gloopily disintegrate at a moments notice, we feel this typically Dickian disconnection - us understanding the future is as unlikely as a caveman with an iPhone clutched in his hairy fingers figuring out Candy Crush Saga.

Good shit.

That said, in the midst of this beautiful confusion there are ideas that repeat like melodies. Folman uses the prehistory of animation as a vehicle to explore the future of cinema, a future that begins with digital actors and goes from there.  We see a studio executive excitedly proclaiming the end of cinema as we know it, the medium replaced with a kaleidoscope of individual, personal experiences in which we can cast whoever we want.  As if leading by example, Folman casually casts Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Jones, Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan, Jesus Christ and David Bowie (among many, many others). He teases the prospect of casting our girlfriend or boyfriend as the romantic lead in a sweeping epic, or your family in a lighthearted comedy.

He concludes with the idea of pop culture completely superseding reality entirely, masking the cruel realities of life with a consensual hallucination of day-glo beauty powered by limitless imagination.  Most impressively there's no moralising argument that the only acceptable way to experience the 'real world is without blinders, Folman correctly concluding that a topsy-turvy LSD influenced world where everyone can be whoever they want to be is as valid as any other.

My kinda movie.

God only knows how he managed to scrape together the funding for this - though the litany of logos at the end of the credits hints at a Herculean effort in convincing practically every film board in Europe to chip in.  All that hard work has paid off; in a swamp of fast food blockbusters advertising photorealistic HD carnage, The Congress shines as a monument to ambition, creativity, beauty and a bloody-nosed devotion to the ideal of cinema as artistic endeavour.

★★★★★

The Congress is on limited release from 15 August.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

'Boyhood' (2014) directed by Richard Linklater

Sunday, July 27, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Summarising Boyhood is a fool's errand.  How can you fit a film like this into a couple of paragraphs? Individual superlatives spring to mind; wonderful, touching, amazing, beautiful and so on, but even they fail to quite convey the gobsmacking majesty of the movie.  No film quite like Boyhood has ever come to cinemas before.  No film quite like Boyhood will again.  

Boiled down, Boyhood is a gimmick movie, but goddamn what a gimmick.  In 2002 Linklater began shooting a film starring six-year old Ellar Coltrane.  Twelve years later he wrapped.  The innocent six-year old has been replaced by an independent 18 year old man. This film is about what happens along the way to this journey.  Perplexingly, there's not even much of a narrative; the film functioning as a window into a normal life free from dramatic pretense and 'big problems', confident that merely exploring geological shifts in relationships will keep us engaged.

Coltrane plays Mason Jr, living a humdrum life in suburban Texas with his mother (Patricia Arquette) and older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater).  His often-absent father (Ethan Hawke) rolls up in a cool-as-hell muscle car every couple of weekends on visitation rights.  As the years swim by we're introduced to a cavalcade of friends, family, houses and haircuts, and just as we get used to them it's all change - onto the next phase.  

Linklater's directorial ability to make the mundane so gripping is straight-up superhuman. He's working some crazy alchemy here; no flashy camera work, no supercool dialogue and no show-offy grandstanding performances.  So what exactly keeps us interested?  Linklater has excavated an aspect of humanity in cinema that we rarely to get to experience; kindling real love in us as we watch Mason grow.

As Linklater cuts between the years we feel mild disorientation; just as we've become accustomed to Mason at one age we have to deal with his changes.  It's with surprise that we realise his voice has broken between scenes, he's experienced a sudden growth spurt, developed an interest in girls or grown a cool new haircut.  This progression puts us in the same shoes as Mason's father, stopping off every so often and having to deal with what's taken place in our absence.

Very quickly we get attached to Mason.  He's a likeable enough boy at every stage of his development whether he's disappointed to realise that there's no such things as elves in the world, going on a classically Linklaterian ramble about conspiracies or ingesting psychedelics with friends.  I began to feel like a ghost or guardian angel, a disembodied presence in his life silently observing and wishing the best for him - I've rarely felt so protective towards a character in a movie before.  This sensation is so strong because deep down in our bones we know that we're really watching this person grow up. 

Importantly, we're not just watching Mason grow up, we're not just watching his family wrinkle up - we're silently watching ourselves grow up too.  Boyhood is a record of what the early years of the 21st century;  characters smoking indoors, fiddling around with iMacs and playing splitscreen Halo 2.  Linklater has an uncanny knack for capturing precise elements of particular moments in time; the fact that the scenes are filmed in those years means, by definition, they're entirely free of anachronisms.

There's a marvellous scene where a young, excited Mason attends a midnight book shop opening for the release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.  Your first instinct is to marvel at how beautifully Linklater has recreated it - then you realise that he probably filmed it at a real midnight Harry Potter opening.  You get similar feelings watching technology gradually developing around our character; the progression from dumbphones to the ubiquity of iPhones; the rise of social networking and pop progressing from the Britney to the Gaga era.

This steady march through time underlines how quickly the world changes and how invisible these changes seem while you're living them.  Most of all it makes you feel old; a miasma of melancholy enveloping you as watch a 6 year Mason playing a GameBoy Advance SP and realising - holy shit - I was just starting university when that came out! Realisations like this reveal that it's time itself that's the real villain of Boyhood, a cruel master whipping us onwards - never allowing us to stand still, even for a moment.

Time chisels away at our characters like waves beating against a cliff.  We watch Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette softly slide into middle-age; their features softening as they wrinkle and grey.  We see people degenerate into alcoholism and bitterness.  Divisions growing between couples like weeds through paving stones.  Towards the end of the film there's a quiet, touching moment where its bemoaned that time passes too fast: the clichéd parental moan "they grow up so fast". By this point Linklater has more than earned a dab of cliché, and it's deeply, sincerely felt by both characters and audience.

This is an incredibly important, enormously ambitious film and it is obviously - obviously - going to go down in cinematic history as a stone cold classic.  There's a thousand beautiful observations within it; ranging from that we use gifts to mould people into what we want them to be, to appreciating the love in your life while you have it and so on - a fractal, infinite glimpse into humanity: life itself, captured on film.

Boyhood has got to be Linklater's magnum opus and with it he's undeniably entered the highest panethon of directors. If you have the slightest interest in cinema as a medium you need to see it.  If you have the slightest interest in people you need to see it.

★★★★★

Saturday, May 31, 2014

'Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets (2014) directed by Florian Habicht

Saturday, May 31, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

 
Pulp: A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets is the best film that could be made about Pulp. The majority of British pop bands were eager to be seen as “one of the lads,” with a pint in one hand and a copy of Loaded magazine in the other. Not Pulp, who wholeheartedly embraced an individualistic style of pervy proletariat, outsider chic. Their lyrics are the stuff of fluttering net curtains in run-down terraced houses, chaotic and confused teenage lust and not only not fitting in, but knowing you’ll never be able to. This documentary, centring on the band’s 2012 farewell concert, grasps everything that Pulp is about. It’s less a straightforward band biography and more a sociological study of the swamp of fears, loves and passions that bubbles away under the industrially cratered landscape of Sheffield.

Read the rest at We Got This Covered

★★★★★

Pulp, A Film About Life, Death and Supermarkets is released June 6th.

Friday, May 23, 2014

'Omar' (2013) directed by Hany Abu-Assad

Friday, May 23, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Omar is an emotional experience.  You'll feel fear, exhilaration, pride, envy, hate, sadness and anger.  Especially that last one.  Like the characters in the film you'll both bristle at the injustice and feel utterly impotent, getting mad as hell and not being able to do a damn thing about it.  Set in occupied Palestine, Omar gives us a taste of how living under a military cosh mutates social structures, twisting friends into enemies, enemies into allies and love into hate.

Our hero Omar (Adam Bakri) becomes the metaphorical battlefield over which the wider conflict is fought over.  He's a preternaturally handsome, athletic young Palestinian with an easy smile and a boyish crush on Nadia (Leem Lubany) that contrasts nicely with his adult revolutionary ambitions.  After suffering humiliation at the hands of the IDF, he retaliates, concocting a plan with his best friends Amjad and Tarek to assassinate an Israeli soldier. But soon consequences come knocking and Omar is banged up in a nightmarish torture camp where he undergoes intense psychological pressure to try and get him to turn collaborator for the occupying forces. 

The most obvious point of comparison is Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 masterpiece The Battle of Algiers.  Pontecorvo's film (and if you haven't seen it drop everything right now and go watch it) is the go-to cinematic text on urban insurgency, asymmetric warfare and the morality of revolutionary acts, so highly regarded it was screened at the Pentagon in 2003 as an warning of problems that would be faced by Coalition Forces during the Iraq War (not they apparently paid much attention to it). Omar and Algiers share a lot of filmic DNA, a visually similar setting, willingness to emotionally engage with both sides and, most importantly, a ballsy commitment to exploring violence as a valid response to oppression.

Nadia and Omar

Over the course of Omar we realise  that these characters and their respective countries are caught in an inescapable cycle of violent activity.  The casual (and occasionally murderous) brutality of the IDF breeds resentment in the Palestinian people, which bubbles over into ambushes, assassinations and suicide bombings.  This in turn causes Israel to tighten the screw ever more on the beleaguered country, which results in further retaliation - and so forth.  

After a half century of this, both sides are ten kinds of screwed up. Israel has twisted itself into a monstrous oppressive force: able to argue in favour of bombing hospitals and schools, bulldozing people's homes and conducting programmes designed to starve the Palestinian people, who appear to be regarded as little more than subhumans by the extreme right-wing government.  Faced with this military might, many Palestinians feel justified in strapping explosives to themselves and suicidally taking out their frustrations on the Israeli population in general.  The two countries have become deformed by violence: Israel, founded as a safe haven, has become genocidal and Palestine simmers with antisemitism and religious extremism.

This situation is too big, controversial and unwieldy for cinema to tackle directly - so Omar pares everything down to the personal level.  At the core of the film is the relationship between Omar and Nadia, two performances shot through with fevered, unrequited passion.  In happier times they'd be starcrossed lovers, destined for a long and happy life together.  Here, we see their affection perverted by war, trust undermined with suspicion: in military eyes love becomes just another variety of bomb.  Omar is sprinkled with these perversions of affection, the conflict warping everything that's good and kind about humanity into something horrible.

Leem Lubany is particularly great: tragic and beautiful.

The darkest the film gets are the nightmarish torture sequences. Omar is suspended naked by his wrists in an infinite dark space that recalls Glazer's recent Under the Skin.  Here he's beaten to a pulp, sexually humiliated and mentally manipulated.  These sequences have a ring of 1984's Room 101 with Omar and Nadia playing Winston and Julia.  Abu-Assad goes to great lengths to show us a situation where there is no right decision. Whether you're innocent or guilty the end result is the destruction of the self, followed by being tossed into a dark box and forgotten.  In many ways it's a riposte to Zero Dark Thirty, here we identify with the man whose testicles are being burnt rather than the one doing the burning.

Make no mistake about it, Omar is a deeply partisan film, coming firmly down on the side of the Palestinian people - though its representation of events is so clear minded and grounded that it resists easy classification as propaganda.  Abu-Assad neatly sidesteps religion to the extent that I don't think the words 'Jew' and 'Muslim' are even spoken in the script; the involvement of individual political entities within Israel and Palestine are similarly minimised, with just a few scant mentions of Hamas and Al-Aqsa. Again, this all works reduces the conflict to the bare bones; the oppressors vs the oppressed.

Omar is an outstanding piece of cinema; beautiful, heartfelt, political and intelligent. It never sags over its 98 minute run time, none of the actors put a foot wrong and the core romance of Adam Bakri and Leem Lubany is devastatingly well-executed.  Testament to this is that, as the credits rolled, the audience sat still in stunned silence.   Omar presents no easy answers; the Israelis effortlessly dominate the Palestinians through technology, finances and firepower, the human consequences of their occupation  misery, distrust and death.  With the West squarely behind this oppression their only possible response is fragmented desperate acts of violence.  Omar will leave you angry and sad - angry that we live in world where oppression like this is tacitly accepted for diplomatic reasons, and sad that the end of this country's hardships isn't even a faint dot on the horizon.

★★★★★

Omar is released on May 30th.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

'Locke' (2013) directed by Steven Knight

Tuesday, April 8, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The prospect of spending an entire film trapped inside a car with a miserable builder as he drives from Birmingham to Croydon isn't exactly the most tantalising of propositions.  But that's what Locke offers us: one man and one location, the only action to speak of coming down the end of a telephone line.  This could be a new definition of cinematic boredom.  But it's not.  Locke is amazing.

In place of scenery and locations, Locke has Tom Hardy.  This turns out to be a more than acceptable trade, Hardy putting in one of the most extraordinary performances I've seen in a very long time. He plays Ivan Locke, a construction manager who's due to supervise a record breaking pour of concrete at 5am the next day. As far as concrete goes this is a very big deal, roads are being closed and hundreds of trucks are due to converge on his site for a process that we quickly realise is absolutely crucial to the success of the entire project. It's crunch time for Ivan Locke.

Or it would be if he wasn't speeding in the opposite direction down the M6. Prior to this, Ivan Locke was the model of reliability - a methodical, disciplined, trustworthy man who's the exact kind of person you'd want running a multimillion pound construction job.  Everything about Locke screams permanence and precision; from his measured diction to his expensive, high tech German car.  A key piece of overt symbolism is his habit of leaving solid rocky concrete footprints whenever he returns from work, his wife having to chip them off the kitchen floor.

But tonight this paragon of care and thoughtfulness is being put through life's mangle. One of the things I most enjoyed about Locke was slowly discovering exactly why this ordered man's life has degenerated into chaos, so I'm not going to spoil the over-arching plot. But, like a Greek tragedy, Locke's strict personal discipline inexorably drives him towards misery, every decision he makes perfectly reasonable, yet each one sending him spiralling further and further down life's plughole.

"One flaw in the foundation and the entire building will collapse" just about sums up the message of the film.  This resonates throughout an extraordinarily tightly structured movie. In literal terms Locke is referring to the building project he's working on, explaining to his hapless assistant Donal that everything needs to proceed absolutely perfectly or cracks will appear and the entire edifice will tumble down. Locke himself has a flaw, an uncharacteristic moment of weakness that threatens to bring his life crashing down around him.

It's quietly amazing how much we learn about this character over just 85 minutes, Knight's meticulous script rapidly outlining his motivations, fears and ambitions - managing (almost in cinematic shorthand) to justify these extremely bizarre decisions.  Aside from the phone conversations, the only other person Locke speaks to is his dead father.  It's here, alone in the car, that he reveals the depth of his frustrations with life, desperate not to follow in the footsteps of an absent, useless father.  We soon realise that every aspect of Locke's life is a reaction against his Dad, to become everything that he's wasn't.  Now, as if being sucked into a genetic black-hole he finds himself, despite his best efforts, transforming into everything he hates.

All this is told through a career best performance from Tom Hardy.  This is an actor who's become known for hyper-masculine aggression in films; playing unhinged muscled colossii like Bane, Bronson or Bondurant.  But here,in tight confines of his car there's an inescapable vulnerability to him.  The car becomes a prison cell, the constant phonecalls the voices of his inquisitors, the character tortured by his memories and ethical code. There's definite echoes of Dreyer's 1928 silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc - both Hardy and Maria Falconetti's faces becoming the field on which morality and ethics do battle.

Knight and his cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukis, squeeze every ounce of visual flavour from the austere surroundings.  The motorway outside is a blurred tangle of fuzzy orange blips, punctuated by road works and the flash and wail of sirens.  The interior of the car is always in tight focus, but the outside world has become a chaotic mess. Visually it looks as if we're seeing the outside world through teary eyes, and this visual extension of the character's internal despair goes an awful long way to lifting this beyond a mere experiment in cinema.

The close attention to visual detail is ultimately why Locke works so well as a film.  It's arguable that the script could have been translated to television, the stage, or even a radio play and remained effective.  But there's a sense of crucial kinetic momentum here that wouldn't translate to stage or radio, and the sense of claustrophobia and time passing that would be lost on a smaller screen.  

For all it's audacious cinematic minimalism, Locke doesn't make huge demands on its audience.  It's not boring in the slightest, it openly explains its themes and, crucially, the situation and dialogue is utterly believable.  All Knight asks his audience to bring to the table is empathy; the willingness to place yourself in someone else's shoes and understand why people make decisions that at first glance appear bizarre.  The key to it all are the final shots of the film: the camera pulling back to reveal countless other cars on the road, each one containing a person just like us wrapped up in their own intimate, dramatic and exciting stories.  Steven Knight has some balls putting together a film this experimental, but with the crucial component of Hardy's outstanding performance, he has created something truly special.

★★★★★

Locke is released on April 18th.

Saturday, March 8, 2014

'The Grand Budapest Hotel' (2014) directed by Wes Anderson

Saturday, March 8, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

If Wes Anderson was God the world would be a much nicer place. Over the course of his cinematic career he's woven unique cinematic style; creating a fractally detailed, synchronised universe.  This is a world where every tiny thing on screen is a jigsaw piece in a bigger picture; the fabrics used in the productions, the style of beards; the fonts on the cover of books; the dents on cars and tiny sound effects and a thousand other minute, carefully considered elements adding up to a sumptuous feast - a beautiful world, an aesthetic world - a better world.

The Grand Budapest Hotel is pinnacle of Wes Anderson's style; a geometric, symmetric and rectilinear caper through beautiful spaces populated with the cream of modern acting talent. After watching this it's difficult to imagine how a film could be any more Wes Anderson than this; every frame packed to the rafters with his idiosyncratic style.  

At it's core, the film is the story of a hotel. Set in the cartoonish fake Eastern European country of Zubrowka, the film quickly reveals a pleasingly onion-like structure.  We open with a modern woman visiting a monument to a famous Zubrowkian writer known only as "The Author".  As she opens a book we flash-back to 1985 where the middle-aged author is explains his methods and how he gets his ideas.  From here we flash-back once more to the mid 1960s, where the author (now played by Jude Law) stays at the hotel; now bedraggled, largely unoccupied and suffering under a shabby Kubrickean refit.  Here he meets the unassuming owner of the hotel.  The two men have dinner and the elderly owner recounts the tale of how he came to run this building.

It's always nice to see Jeff Goldblum in a film.

Now we're in the meat of the story: it's 1932 and Zubrowka is on the verge of war. The hotel is its prime, every aspect overseen by the exacting eye of concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) with the assistance of his lobby boy protégé Zero (Tony Revolori).  With the death of elderly patron Madame D (Tilda Swinton) and her subsequent bequeathment of a painting to the concierge, the stage is set for adventure. For the rest of the film we plunge into an energetic, fast-paced farce as Gustave and Zero battle assassins, the military police, prison guards and sinister in-laws of Madame D. The plot twists and turns across Zubrowka, taking in cities, countryside and mountain-tops, showing us every inch of a country which usually only exists on the front of a chocolate box.

As with most Wes Anderson films, you'd be hard pressed to put together a better cast he can. Every few minutes a hugely talented actor pops up, does themselves proud then vanishes back into the crowd.  But though we see some memorable turns from luminaries like Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton and Adrien Brody, none of these can really touch Ralph Fiennes.  Quite simply he's marvellous, combining a brittle pansexual grace with a military man's attention to detail. Often, (sometimes within the space of a single line of dialogue!), he's paternal, horny, cruel and touching. It's a masterclass of a performance; turning what could have been a prissy Basil Fawlty type into a weirdly noble action hero.

One aspect of Wes Anderson's writing I deeply appreciate is the sincerity of his characters. They wear their passions on their sleeve, announcing their loves and fears at the drop of a hat. There's no ironic winking in a Wes Anderson film, when someone declares their love - whether it be for a hotel, an elderly lady or a resourceful baker, the film takes them at their word. It's important not to take this transparency as shallowness; just because these characters don't have secrets doesn't make them any less dramatically fascinating. My own theory as to why Anderson's characters behave so oddly is that they're children's ideas of what adult behaviour is like.

This is a very pretty film.

This is at the forefront of most of his films; the childish revenge of Herman Blume in Rushmore, the arrested development of the children in The Royal Tenenbaums; the swashbuckling (apparently) 'ideal' Dad Steve Zissou of The Life Aquatic.  Most of all it's at the forefront of his last film, the excellent Moonrise Kingdom, with two young runaways besotted with each other to the confusion of the neurotic adults.  In Grand Budapest we see Anderson's child-like world butting up against realpolitik, from the opening sequence we realise that this idealised 1930s world will be crushed under the boot of concrete realism - innocent childhood gradually and acceptingly replaced by the cool utilitarianism of adulthood.

This is furthered in the visual style of the film, the watercoloured matte-paintings and landscape wide-shots of Grand Budapest recalling children's pop-up books, the objects whizzing and wobbling through the scenery in a pleasingly analogue manner - looking like hand-made papercraft.  In fact, of all Wes Anderson's films, the closest aesthetic relation is the stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox - a film that's literally children's literature in motion.

With the clear divisions between goodies and baddies and fast-paced rhythmic action The Grand Budapest Hotel succeeds largely because it follows this basic template of children's adventure story, with laser-perfect moments of swearing and the odd bit of gruesome violence. This is pure escapism - a retreat into a reassuring world of order and beauty. The camera movements, locked into horizontal or vertical geometric motions underline this vision of an ordered universe, which ultimately becomes represented by the clockwork running of the titular hotel.

This is an absolute pleasure to watch from start to finish, tapping into the same base level of wonderment as you get when you peer into a miniature village, or pull open the doors of an extravagantly detailed doll's house and marvel at the detailing on every tiny piece of furniture. Under Anderson's steady hand everything in the film pulls in the same direction, the best moment being a pursuit up a mountain where every single sound effect squeaks and beats in time to Alexandre DeSplat's masterful score.  

The Grand Budapest Hotel makes no grand claims to sociological importance. It has no pretensions to tell us anything about the modern world. The message, such as it is, is essentially about the importance of good people sticking together - hardly news to a seasoned audience.  Yet there's something to be said for simple beauty, humour and craftsmanship in cinema. For a film to quite simply make you happy is reason enough for it to exist: with The Grand Budapest Hotel now out there in the world, things are minutely happier.

★★★★★

The Grand Budapest Hotel is out now.

Monday, February 24, 2014

'Nymph()maniac Parts I & II' (2014) directed by Lars von Trier

Monday, February 24, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

It's perverse that a film where women get repeatedly punched in the face, pissed on, fucked up the arse, slapped, gorily whipped and generally humiliated all round should wind up as one of the most straightforwardly feminist works of cinema around.  But that's Lars von Trier for you.  It's impossible to go into this film without preconceptions, but funnily enough, after all the breathlessly prurient press hype about hot n' heavy porno cinema, there's nothing in these sex scenes that's particularly shocking.  There's a small thrill of novelty in seeing bobbling boners and quivering quims blown up to enormous size across a cinema screen, but all thefucking is in obvious service to an intellectual message and never feels remotely gratuitous or for the matter, particularly erotic.  

Nymph()maniac isn't even a particularly difficult film to decode; von Trier explicitly outlines his argument throughout - that society is shot through with hypocrisy when it comes to dealing with the spectrum of female desire. Over two films comprising four and a half hours, von Trier performs an exhaustive autopsy on misogyny: delving deep into how we instinctively judge 'fallen' women, how we compartmentalise female sexual desire and just how constrictive our supposedly enlightened post-sexism society is.  

All that and we also get lessons on (among other things), fly fishing tactics, the Fibonacci sequence, the 'satanic' tri-tone, Bach's use of polyphony, the perfect way to park a car, a short history of the division between the Eastern and Western Christian churches and the lifesaving qualities of the Prusik knot.  

The primary vehicles for this are the titular nymphomaniac Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), who finds her bloody and beaten in an alley.  Refusing both ambulance and police, Joe is helped back to Seligman's dingy flat where he gives her a cup of tea and asks what happened to her.  The rest of the film is Joe's self-told life story, beginning with the immortal line "I was two years old when I discovered my cunt." (oh Lars...).  The rest of the run-time is divided into chapters, obliquely titled things like "The Compleat Angler" or "The Little Organ School".

After Antichrist and Melancholia, neither of which can really be described as pleasant experiences, it's surprising how lighthearted much of Nymph()maniac is.  Throughout Part I the cinema rang to the sound of laughter, von Trier confidently creating a kind of farcically absurd atmosphere - a distant comedy relative of Chris Morris' Jam.  It's in Part II where things darken up a bit, though no matter how disturbing things become they're always leavened by the bedrock of humour that underpins the film.  

By anyone's standards this film contains an embarrassment of cinematic treasures; the decadent run-time allowing von Trier the space to properly work through his argument. This is laid out upon a blank cultural canvas; though we see 40 or so years in the life of a woman we don't begin 40 years ago and we don't end in the modern day. The world of Nymph()maniac feels dislocated in time; a kludge of 1980s to contemporary fashion, technology and architecture - landing somewhere between Britain and Scandinavia, but never quite one or the other.  

In terms of performances there's a split between the von Trier veterans and the newcomers. Throughout Part I, which covers the first 25 or so years of Joe's life, she's played by newcomer Stacy Martin.  It's difficult to believe this is her first film, such is the gusto with which she hurls herself into the role - the prime weapon in her arsenal a devastating deadpan indolence. At times there's an eerie numbness as her face peers over the shoulders of the many men humping her  - giving the camera the bored expression you'd see on someone waiting at a bus stop.  At others, when she's at her most predatory, we detect the sadist lurking behind those big eyes, regarding the men around her like a snake might regard a mouse. 

Practically everyone else is great though; from Uma Thurman's bizarre scorned wife to Willem Dafoe's paternal gangster - all launching themselves into the material with total fearlessness. Particularly impressive is Jamie Bell as the s&m dom 'K'.  He runs a strip-lit utilitarian dungeon that looks like what the NHS would come up with if they started running a therapeutic sadomasochism service.  K is unreadable, clinically exacting and horribly violent, yet (as fucked up as this sounds) when he viciously beats Joe you sense the love in his blows.  The only real misstep is Shia LaBeouf as Joe's on/off longterm partner; his accent is one of the dodgiest I've heard for a long time, one moment somewhere around London, the next Sydney - then perhaps a short stop off in Cape Town.  

Though there's a ton a of A-listers here, the real prima donna of Nymph()maniac is von Trier himself. Every frame of this movie beats with his idiosyncratic heartbeat.  There isn't another director alive with an ego big enough to pull off some of this stuff; leaving his audiences open-mouthed as he launches into a stout defence of paedophiles who never act on their urges, pausing to argue that being anti-Zionist doesn't make you anti-semitic or, most bizarrely, a brief debate as to whether its acceptable to use the word 'negro'. At these points the characters (particularly Joe) transparently become mouthpieces for the director. It'd be easy to view this as a flaw in the movie but I enjoy this audacity, the marvellously bonkers self-confidence of a director who'd even consider putting this in a film. Anyway, despite the shaggy dog narrative, the digressions into trivia and the eyebrow-raising sociological arguments the film is never boring - an impressive feat given the gargantuan run-time.

At it's heart, Nymph()maniac is a baldly feminist statement about the hypocrisy of a society that supposedly strives for equality yet instinctively denigrates, slut-shames and abuses women that express themselves sexually.  One of the biggest character developments in the movie comes when Joe finally accepts that her proclivity for promiscuity is neither unnatural nor immoral - refusing to be characterised as a 'sex addict' and proudly adopting the label 'nymphomaniac'.  Throughout we also get jabs against rape culture - von Trier going out of his way to underline that no matter how many men a woman has slept with, no presumptions can be made as to whether she's going to sleep with you.  

The film goes so far as to equate feminine sexuality with religious awakening; orgasm associated with divinity and the labia visually linked to the spiritual 'third eye'.  In this vein, von Trier encourages us to view the beaten, bruised and damaged body of Joe as suffering passion in both the sexual and religious senses of the word, drawing direct parallels between Joe and Jesus Christ, both possessing a divine nature and both suffering under the fists, boots and scorn of a humanity that senses enlightenment and instinctively moves to crush it.

Modern culture tends to the juvenile, and consequently to the prudish - you only need to look as far as the kerfuffle surrounding this film's release to get an idea of just how immature a modern audience can be to a film that has a bit of fucking in it. It's deeply refreshing to see a film that's unapologetically positive about the whole of the sexual spectrum, casting off vestigial puritan moralities and presenting us with an unvarnished view of the world as is. Cinema is an art form that allows us view the world around us through others eyes; yet all too often these visions have blinders on them. In a von Trier film you never sense any restrictions as to what you're seeing - he alone apparently having unfettered access to the full range of human experience on film.

Nymph()maniac is a intelligent, beautiful and brave piece of cinema.  If you don't enjoy it then it speaks more to flaws within you than it does to any problems with the film. To know that there's people like von Trier out there with the guts to make these sprawling, messy, wonderful pieces of art that make this fucked up planet just about tolerable to live on.

★★★★★

Sunday, January 19, 2014

'The Wolf of Wall Street' (2013) directed by Martin Scorsese

Sunday, January 19, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

In The Wolf of Wall Street Martin Scorsese elevates financial trading to a dark religion that promises heaven on earth.  This is a story of mystical market forces, primal chest-beating, mind-bending narcotics and rapt crowds worshipping the most corrupt of high priests. Scorsese serves us up 3 hours of excess; horrible men engaged in horrible acts, their fabulous wealth the product of a million tiny swindles, men stickily fingering their way through our wallets and purses - a fingering we hate to acknowledge we're getting off to.

This is the world of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), the film chronicling his progress from ambitious penny stock trader to mentally deranged sociopath.  The meteoric rise and collapse of Jordan Belfort has neat parallels to Scorsese's Goodfellas and Casino, completing a thematic trilogy of predatory protagonists getting precisely what they want, then having this world crash down around them.  One of the cleverest decisions Scorsese makes is understanding that the minutia of financial trading is essentially irrelevant to the story.  In a marvellous voice-over, DiCaprio's Belfort often starts beginning a complicated explanation about how pump-and-dump schemes work before reminding us that all we really care about is that he's conjuring dump-trucks full of money apparently from thin air.

Much has been made of the morality of the film; the central criticism being that showcasing excess with such gleeful, stylish verve amounts to an advertisement for it - columnists fretting over reports of audiences of financial traders whooping in recognition as they recognise their own lives.  As I see it you'd have to brain dead to watch this and come to the conclusion that this is something to be sincerely emulated.  That said, it's honest film-making to acknowledge that living a purely hedonistic lifestyle is at minimum superficially attractive. We find ourselves comparing our own lives to this glitzy, chaotic free-for-all - a predatory, materialistic part of us wanting to be in Belfort's shoes as he blows coke up a prostitute's arse or trashes his sports car.

This pretty much sums it up.

The key to all this is the voiceover - revealing Belfort as a deeply unreliable narrator within the first few minutes as he corrects the film, explaining that his Ferrari is white rather than red, the reality of the film immediately warping to accommodate him.  That what we're seeing is malleable and fluid is Scorsese's secret weapon; this is Jordan Belfort's story, and he edits his life to make himself look great.  Sometimes reality peeps through though, like a telling moment when he recounts the story of one of his partners who committed suicide - a grisly crime-scene photo flashing on screen that's at odds with the glossy high-saturation aesthetic.  Almost as if realising that this is a bad route to go down - Belfort quickly skips past this and onto more extreme partying - constantly papering over the cracks in his ugly edifice.

For me, the most illustrative moment in the film is a faux 90s 'Get Rich Quick' infomercial starring Belfort, replete with neon-bikini babes, yachts and fast cars.  "All this could be yours..." informs a smartly suited Belfort.  We scoff at the cheesy production values and obviously manipulative message, yet even as we chortle at the suckers who'd be convinced in by this rubbish we can't help but envy Belfort's material success.  This infomercial is a microcosm of the film as a whole; revealing The Wolf of Wall Street as carefully constructed fantasy, seducing us with a soapy handjob as it exploits our secret, base desires.

It'd be real easy to make a film about Wall Street (or for that matter the City of London) that functions as a cathartic Django Unchained style revenge fantasy, showing us the baddies getting a violent comeuppance.  Scorsese goes deeper than this, showing the character's accumulation and worship of money as something endemic to capitalism, the excess of Belfort merely the logical conclusion of desires instilled in us throughout our lives. No matter what your political convictions, to grow up and live within a consumerist, capitalist society indoctrinates you into a world of possessions and property, a world where, as much as you might convince yourself otherwise, deep down you measure the worth of a person by the amount of money in their bank account.

Jordan Belfort, horrible though he is, is not a particularly unique or surprising kind of monster.  His existence is the inevitable consequence of the free market capitalism espoused by the great and powerful, his insatiable greed and willingness to exploit people leaving him a perfect amoral creature that naturally thrives within an economic system designed to reward his behaviour.  

Though the film doesn't cover the 2008 financial crash, the contemporary caricature of the slimy, profit-obsessed banker looms large in the background.  But again, despicable though these people are, it's us that's in the firing line - every moment we catch ourselves secretly envying Belfort's material success another condemnation of us.  Rubbing salt into the wound, Scorsese goes out of his way to undermine the glitziness by showing the sex as mechanical and unfulfilling, the drug-taking as nauseous and pathetic and the possessions as transitory and destructive - yet even though we know wealth won't bring us happiness we can't help but want it like an addict wants the needle.

Jonah Hill - two time Oscar nominee and deserves to be two time Oscar winner.

The last shot of the film sums it all up.  Belfort is reduced to giving motivational 'Get Rich Quick' talks, facing an audience of gormless, slack jawed nobodies who want to be just as horrible as him.  See that moron in the crowd pathetically dreaming of his shiny Ferrari and model wife?  The person who sees human scum like Belfort trotting around like a pig in shit, ripping off people to maintain his opulent existence and thinks "Oh my god, I could be that human scum!"  That's you that is.  

Scorsese thus posits disasters like the 2008 crash, the election of free-market promoting governments and the exploitation of the poor as symptoms of the beast that squats in our collective capitalist heart.  The events of the film rub our noses in the horrible world, but it's a horrible world that we've created by silent, inactive consensus - and there's no way out. As Žižek famously said, "it's much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" and so, because of our own limited imaginations and indoctrination, we're condemned to suffer the depredations of infinite Jordan Belforts.  And we probably deserve to.

The Wolf of Wall Street's 3 hours zip by, and the film contains an energy that you wouldn't necessarily expect from a 71 year old director.  It's got an impossibly witty script, is one of the funniest films of the year (there's even a brief sojourn into Mr Bean territory!) and has a dynamite cast - the standouts being DiCaprio, a fantastically demented Jonah Hill and an all too brief yet memorable appearance by Matthew McConaughey.  There's no reason why you shouldn't go and see this.  So go and see it already.

★★★★★

The Wolf of Wall Street is on general release now.