LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Monday, February 1, 2016

'Trumbo' (2015) directed by Jay Roach

Monday, February 1, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Hollywood rarely misses an opportunity to self-mythologise. Each year sees a smattering of glossy biopics, ranging from the great (Ed Wood) to the alright (Hitchcock) to the downright dreadful (Grace of Monaco). It's a decent excuse to have some pretty A-listers  swan around in tuxedos and retro frocks, vamping up that Golden Age Hollywood chic in a thick fug of cigarette smoke. 

Trumbo does all that, yet sets its sights on loftier goals. Its subject is Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston), celebrated screenwriter and Communist. Set in postwar Hollywood, the film explores the impact of the notorious Hollywood 'blacklist' and the creeping onset of Cold War anti-Communist paranoia.

The film is segmented into three loose acts. In the first we meet Trumbo at the height of his success; regarded by the studios as a guaranteed hitmaker and offered meaty writing contracts. He's surrounded by a loving family and living in bucolic rural luxury. Soon, dark clouds appear on the horizon as gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren) 'exposes' Trumbo as a left-wing political agitator.

With the help of John Wayne (David James Elliott) and his 'Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals', the rabidly anti-Communist Hopper pressures the studios to blacklist Trumbo and his political associates - who become known as the so-called 'Hollywood Ten'.

We then slide into a 'Mr Trumbo Goes to Washington' style courtroom drama, following their legal battle with HUAC, before eventually settling into a study of how blacklisted screenwriters continued to work (and win Oscars) despite them being persona non grata.

Trumbo tells this tale with a minimum of fuss and, as far as I can tell, provides ab accurate history lesson of the darker days of Hollywood. Purely on a surface level it's novel to see a piece of contemporary prestige awards bait that takes a passionate left-winger as its hero and dares to criticise 'legends' like the truly abominable John Wayne. 

Cranston is excellent as the grumpy, sardonic and undeniably talented Trumbo. He's continually evolving: the emotional and physical toll of his experiences clearly visible in his features and behaviour. Cranston captures the essence of the man, sustaining even through resigned misery of humiliating induction to prison, his amphetamine fuelled bathtub editing sessions or the many interactions with family and friends.

He's ably assisted by fun supporting turns from Mirren's diabolical hat-loving villainess, Louis CK as one of Trumbo's more committed Communist friends and, most enjoyably, John Goodman as a shouty, violent B-Movie impresario (I doubt there is a film that couldn't be improved by adding a furious John Goodman smashing things with a baseball bat.)

Great as all this is, Trumbo never rises too far above competent. It primarily falls into a familiar trap: how do you portray genius on screen? Sports and musical biopics have it relatively easy, but trying to make a genius writer cinematic often proves a tough proposition. Despite the many scenes of Trumbo slaving over a typewriter and furiously smoking, the film never comes close to analysing why his work on Roman Holiday, Spartacus et al is so magnificent. It settles for the lazy option: having practically every other character repeatedly state "this guy's a genius!" and hoping we'll go along with it.

Secondly, we get a rather shallow view of Trumbo's Communism. The deepest we get is a risible sun-dappled horse-riding scene in which Trumbo's poppet of a daughter innocently enquires "Daddy, are you a Communist?'. Trumbo proceeds to explain that if she'd share her sandwich with a hungry classmate, then she's a Communist too. I guess technically that works, but Trumbo's Communism quickly proves indistinguishable from contemporary liberalism.

Finally, there's a general lack of directorial oomph. Jay Roach, generally known for broad comedy (the Austin Powers series, Meet the Parents/Fockers and Borat) settles for a flavourless invisible style that's primarily two-shot, over the shoulder conversations. Things are further flattened out by a godawful plinky-plonky score that heavyhandedly commands you to feel emotion.

For all that, I liked Trumbo. I knew about the Hollywood blacklist and the anti-Communist witchhunts going in, but the particulars of how writers got around it and consequences on individuals eluded me. After this I feel that I've got a decent handle on the whos, the whats and the hows. I just wish the film had a but more bravery and adventurousness.

★★★

Trumbo is released 5th February.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

'Godzilla' (2014) directed by Gareth Edwards

Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Gareth Edward's reimagining of the Godzilla franchise is loaded with potential. Firstly there was the excitement of a hot young director with one excellent film, Monsters, already under his belt being let loose with a big budget.  Then came one of the finest teaser trailers I've seen; as the camera pans over scenes of mass destruction with bodies lying everywhere we hear Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." All that scored by the monolith theme from 2001, climaxing with a tremendously angry roar from a colossal stompy monster.

Sold!  Sitting down in my seat last night I was deeply excited to see what Edwards had come up with. Twenty minutes in  I had that queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that you get when you realise that you're watching a stinker.  Godzilla is not good.  Not by a long shot.  

Boiled down, the plot is that giant insectoid monsters appear, start wrecking up the place and then Godzilla turns up to beat the snot out of them.  It's a bit bare bones, but if you pay to see a Godzilla film then this is largely what you expect.  Wrapped around this is the human drama, and it's here that the film comes unstuck.  Working from an utterly inane, exposition-heavy script, the film proceeds to spend the majority of its runtime lumbering between a series of incredibly dull B-movie stereotypes.

The hero is as precisely as boring as he looks.

The prime offender in this is our hero, Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).  By quite a long shot he's the most blandest protagonist in a long time.  He has all the articulation of an action figure and the personality and motivations of a milporn videogame protagonist. It's a stretch to say he's even a character, functioning more as a convenient dramatic excuse to follow giant monsters around.  That'd be fine, but we spend an inordinate amount of time with Brody as he runs around doing dull (but I guess cheap to film) soldiery type things.

His boring presence very nearly sinks the film, though to be fair to Taylor-Johnson, nobody comes out of this smelling of roses.  Bryan Cranston, an incredibly talented actor, is just plain bad as the scientist-who-no-one-believes-until-it's-too-late stock character. Lost underneath a bizarrely unconvincing wig he looks embarrassed by his crap dialogue. The best I can say about him is that in a sea of bad acting, his performance is at least interestingly bad.  Ken Watanabe looks similarly checked out, a one note character who feels parachuted in from a different movie altogether, delivering his lines with the vague contempt they deserve.  As for the women?  There's two of them in Godzilla, their combined dialogue maybe taking up a page or two of script, both relegated to standing on the sidelines looking worried as the men fix things.

The women in this film are tasked with hugging children and gawping uselessly.

Finally, after perhaps an hour spent watching painful exposition and endless shots of worried people talking on telephones, Godzilla shows up.  The audience breathes out a collective sigh of relief; "alright, we sat through all that shite, now bring on the giant monsters!"  Then we immediately cut away from the giant monster fight to a kid watching blurry footage of it on TV news. Bullshit!

This cuts to the most obvious problem with Godzilla: not enough Godzilla.  The big guy is absent for most of the movie, only appearing properly in the final act.  Even when he does finally show up he's a bit underwhelming after all the hype.  Visually he's an indistinct dark green blob, his only distinguishing feature his back spines - other than that it's difficult to tell exactly what he looks like, what he's doing or even sometimes where he is in the shot (an impressive feat given he is 100m tall).  Compounding this is that he's nearly always wreathed in smoke, fog and clouds - and the action scenes take place at night. Compounding that is that in the 3D version I saw (which added precisely nothing to the experience), the glasses make a dark film even darker.

A very grey movie.  Godzilla is in this picture I think.

It all feels a bit sub-Pacific Rim, which did the whole giant monsters trashing cities thing much better than Godzilla does.  The Kaiju in that film spewed great blue gouts of neon blood everywhere, battles illuminated by fluorescence and flashes of colour.  By comparison Godzilla is muted and flat, the monsters grey, the sky grey and the clouds of dust around them grey - a disappointing choice given how colourful Monsters was.

Even Godzilla's subtext is starting to look clapped out.  Godzilla is as much a giant metaphor as he is giant lizard; a symbol of mankind's hubris and the dangers of messing with nature and so on. Here he comes to represent disaster, the scaly embodiment of tsunami and earthquake - the puny human characters realising that they are nothing in the face of all-powerful nature.  Fair enough, but that's the basic subtext of every single giant monster movie.  There is a slightly more interesting set of symbols linked with the giant insects, Edwards associating them with Fukushima and nuclear waste disposal - but it never really goes anywhere interesting.

Frustratingly there are occasional all-too-brief shots where everything is framed beautifully and sounds good - all moments without any actors in them. But there's no way it's worth sitting through the rest of the bilge that makes up the majority of Godzilla to get to these worthwhile bits.  I'd estimate that of 120 minutes there are, at maximum, maybe 10-15 minutes of worthwhile cinema in here.  Unfortunately this is a sloppy, boring and largely Godzilla-free waste of time. What a shame.

★

Godzilla is on general release from 15th May

Thursday, October 25, 2012

‘Argo’ (2012) directed by Ben Affleck, 22nd October 2012

Thursday, October 25, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 1 Comment

‘Argo’ is a film that tells you a story so preposterous that it must be true.  It’s a very funny film that gets seat-grippingly tense.  One that tries its level best to do justice to some pretty complex geopolitics but also fumbles the ball a bit in a few aspects.

The film is set in Iran at the time of the Iranian Embassy hostage crisis.  The Shah had just been deposed and was been granted sanctuary in the US.  The Iranian people wanted to put the Shah on trial, but the US refused to turn him over.  The boiling point came when a mob stormed the Iranian embassy in Tehran, and took 52 embassy staff hostage.  So far, so well known.  What’s less well known is that six embassy staff managed to escape onto the streets in the confusion, and took refuge in the house of the Canadian Ambassador.  Eventually the Iranians realised that they’re short six staff members, and came hunting for them.  The USA had got to get them out of there, and their best bet was Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) an ‘exfiltration’ expert.  His plan was to smuggle them out of the country under the guise of a Hollywood location scouting crew for a fake science fiction film called ‘Argo’.

Ben Affleck as Tony Mendez

It’s a hell of a good story, and Affleck has done a great job bringing it to life on screen.  There are some bravura directing moments in this film, particularly the opening sequence showing the embassy being stormed.  The film begins with a quick run-down of the C20th history of Iran, before moving straight into the midset of an furious mob demanding justice.  Almost immediately we get a sense of the geography of the situation through aerial shots of the building and the crowd.   As the situation becomes worse, and the protesters begin climbing the walls a well drilled panic sets in that gives way to chaos very quickly.  We see the Embassy staff frantically destroying as much classified information as they can, and the military desperately trying to work out how to contain this situation without pouring petrol onto an already out of control fire.

Affleck quickly cross-cuts between the embassy staff, and the crowd outside who are swarm ing the building from top to bottom.  The sense of things rapidly spiralling out of control is captured perfectly.  Suddenly there are people on the roof, in the cellar and before you know it, through the front door.  The mixture of aerial shots (which may be really great CG), and handheld grainy film gives everything a feeling of intense authenticity.  The scene is given added power by the recent embassy attack in Benghazi.  The similarities seem clear; staff initially taking the mob for granted ‘after all, there’s protests every day’ to the sudden cold sweat of panic when they realise all barriers have been overcome, and there’s nothing between you and an angry chaotic mob.

They may not look it in this picture, but trust me, those Iranians are FURIOUS

One of the main reasons why this scene works so well is that the Iranians are represented as more of an unstoppable force of nature than as individuals.  We see them seemingly acting as one, their faces twisted in anger, practically foaming at the mouth.  Affleck seems to use a lot of the same directorial tricks as you'd see in a zombie film, particularly Zack Snyder's remake of 'Dawn of the Dead' (2004).  Meanwhile, the embassy staff get quickly sketched character moments over the course of their escape.  These sketches evolve throughout the film, we quickly engage with the personalities of these six and sympathise easily with their plight.  Meanwhile, the Iranian people are generally represented by large mobs, and if we do get to see individuals, they are generally shouting aggressively in Farsi and terrifying our leads.

This obviously is a bit problematic, but to be fair the film seems conscious of the somewhat murky tools its using to create suspense.  As mentioned, it takes care to contextualise the story in the history of the country in a comic book style that seems to take direct inspiration from Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’ (2007).  So, theoretically the film justifies the anger of the mob, it's at least partly successful in explaining why these people are so angry and upset at Americans.  It’s less successful when it comes to the sole entirely sympathetic Iranian in the film, a loyal servant who sacrifices herself to aid her Western masters.  In going to so much trouble to outline her as ‘the one good Iranian’, they perversely make everyone else look much worse. 

The embassy staff trapped in the Canadian Ambassador's house

Ben Affleck seems like a conscientious film-maker (he even added a postscript praising Canadian involvement in the operation this film depicts after people got upset), but at the heart of the production process here is a catch 22.  To make it as tense and effective as possible, it’s dramatically necessary to portray the Iranian people as a single-minded, violent horde.  For narrative purposes they sort of have to be extremely otherised, the more sympathetic they become, the less we're scared of them.  I don’t believe Affleck sincerely wants to paint an entire people with an understandable political grievance as monsters, but he's in the difficult position of doing just that.

For me, this was a hard stumbling block to get over, as were the general politics of the film.  I’m not exactly inclined to buy into any narrative that posits the CIA as fine, upstanding, noble people when all evidence points to the fact that they’re one of the most sinister and immoral organisations of the 20^th century.  What I have to concede is that in this instance they seem to be acting justifiably, and anyway, I'm not going to side with the Ayatollah.

US exceptionalism clocking in for the day

It’s fortunate then, that the central plot of this film is so compelling and unique (well, maybe ‘Three Kings’ is a little similar).  ‘Argo’ uses the central plot device of a ‘fake’ movie shoot as a way to shine a light on the way intelligence services spar with one another.  In a fantastic sequence we see a fake press event for ‘Argo’, complete with bombshell actresses dressed in unlikely, cheesy looking Flash Gordon gear cross cut with footage from the hostage crisis.  The message seems clear, this is all theatre.  The difference is that if the hostage's performances aren't convincing enough then they're going to be killed.  

This comparison raises the film up from being just another espionage thriller, and the audience knowledge that all this really happened only adds to the feeling of import.  The film only really falters when it decides to artificially make things more exciting.  In the final sequences there are perhaps one too many hurdles placed in front of our intrepid heroes, one too many unlikely coincidences or times when they look doomed, and then are saved in the nick of time.  This adds up, and the fact that the film becomes a bit more self-consciously unrealistic saps some of the tension from the end of the film.  What should be a sudden, intense relaxation of tension ‘merely’ becomes a happy ending.  It’s a little frustrating, they had me!  I was on the hook for much of the film, fully involved with each little idiosyncratic twist the plot took, but you get the feeling they felt that their amazing real-life tale wasn't quite amazing enough, and had to embellish it a bit.

Ben Affleck and an angry, unnamed Iranian (one of many in this film)

So this is a film with issues, but ones that it’s possible to overlook.  It’s a fantastic achievement in direction for Ben Affleck too.  His performance in this is perfectly serviceable, playing as he does a man whose skill is in blending in, but it’s behind the camera where he shows some real élan.  This directorial confidence, coupled with a top notch supporting cast means ‘Argo’ is a fascinating snapshot of a rarely explored part of recent history. 

'Argo' is on general release from the 7th of November 2012