LONDON CITY NIGHTS: 2 stars

Thursday, December 4, 2014

'Exodus: Gods and Kings' (2014) directed by Ridley Scott

Thursday, December 4, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Exodus: Gods and Kings is very nearly a secular Bible adventure. Yahweh's influence is steadily pared back to a series of logically consistent natural disasters and vivid hallucinations after by Moses gets bonked on the head by a big rock. This is the core argument at the centre of Exodus: Moses fanatical religious revolution clashing with the pragmatic realpolitik of Rhamses. Ridley Scott appears to be asking "Is Moses crazy? And if he is does it matter?"

Set in 1300BCE we meet Moses (Christian Bale) as the adopted son and general in Pharoah Seti's (John Turturro) army. He's favoured by the court and gently rankles heir apparent Rhamses (Joel Edgerton). Still, the two are brothers-in-arms and it becomes quickly apparent that they'd die for one another. But once the Seti dies and Rhamses takes the throne political constraints begin to wind their way around the new Pharoah's heart.

With the revelation of Moses' birth to a slave mother he's summarily exiled from Memphis, wandering across the blasted landscape until he eventually comes across the model-sexy nomadic goat-tender Zipporah (Maria Valverde). Nine years later Moses is settled with a wife and kids, happily tending to his flock and whiling away the hours happily throwing rocks into a bucket.

But then he's whanged on the head by a big rock and has a hallucinatory freakout, concluding that God has told him to liberate the Jewish slaves of Egypt. He returns to Memphis as a crazed religious revolutionary, drawing followers to him with his magnetic presence while disturbing them with his fanaticism. After making his demands soon comes a river of blood, frogs, flies, locusts and so on.

John Turturro makes a neat Pharoah. But there's not much of him.

The obvious antecedent to Exodus is Darren Aronofsky's excellent Noah. These two biblical films share a rough aesthetic, dragging divine stories through the dust and giving their (literally) iconic heroes a big dollop of psychological turmoil. The difference is that while a large portion of Noah's success is derived from willingness to portray what's in scripture - no matter how weird - Exodus often feels a bit embarrassed about the whole God thing.

It's not quite spiritually insincere; Christian Bale's performance as Moses has a hyper-focussed intensity that reminds you why he's such a great actor. Key to his Moses is that Bale takes everything utterly seriously; doubling down on the madness of Moses and playing him as a genuinely weird, mad-eyed, scraggly bearded zealot. He's odd to the point where other characters treat him with kid gloves, hiding behind rocks and worriedly watching him argue with his imaginary friends.

Next to Bale's Moses everyone else feels a bit dulled. Edgerton's Rhamses eventually builds up to a maniacal emotional peak, but for most of the film he's stuck in a mild miff. Everyone else feels a bit wasted, with great actors playing underdeveloped characters that don't have proper dramatic arcs. A prime offender is Aaron Paul's Joshua, who's relegated to staring on in disbelief, any depth to him apparently left on the cutting room floor. Sigourney Weaver as Rhamses' mother Tuya fares even worse, getting just one or two clipped lines before unceremoniously vanishing.

This reeks of a future director's cut that fleshes out these trimmed subplots. It wouldn't be the first time Ridley Scott's directorial hand has been forced; critical consensus on Kingdom of Heaven was notably revised once the diluted theatrical version was supplanted by a longer cut on DVD. I suspect the same will happen to Exodus, even at two and a half hours it feels a bit cramped.

Where it does succeed is creating a sense of massiveness Scott is shooting for an old school, DW Griffiths/DeMille style and largely succeeds. The plague sequences are imaginatively and pretty grossly shot, with nauseating shots of swarming flies and writhing, wet frogs. The film reaches a visual peak in the parting of the sea sequence, which (as you'd expect) works as a neat depiction of mankind's powerlessness in the face of humongous elemental forces.

Despite Scott's easy talent for spectacle and the impressive production values (the eyeliner budget alone must be enormous) Exodus never quite emotionally connects with the audience, settling at showing us the story of Moses without asking us to become spiritually or emotionally involved with it. To be fair, some of this is a symptom of narrative problems with The Bible. Having a protagonist that begins as a proactive revolutionary end up as a reactive observer drains his autonomy. Ideally Moses would have been the instigator of the plagues, personally bearing the burden of deciding what's to happen to the Egyptians himself. But I suppose doing this is probably not worth having a load of Bible nerds getting all shirty that you'd taken liberties with the source material.

Exodus isn't a disaster but neither is it that great. This a competent, sometimes visually interesting film that plays the story of Moses about as safe as you reasonably can in 2014. Neither willing to go full Noah crazy with the miracles, nor bold enough to present a secular vision of Moses' story, it feels like it's trying to please believers and non-believers alike. And so, in the end it truly pleases no-one.

★★

Exodus: Gods and Kings is released 26th December in the UK, 12th December in the US.

Friday, November 28, 2014

'Get Santa' (2014) directed by Christopher Smith

Friday, November 28, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Get Santa is probably the only Christmas family movie that raises this question: could Santa be a child molester? The scene comes early in the film, when precocious moppet Tom has discovered a creepy, bearded man passed out in his garden shed in the middle of the night. Calling his dad excitedly, Tom explains that he’s chatting to a strange man who “wants to show me his plan.”

Dad’s eyes widen in horror, no doubt picturing his son becoming a victim of sick trouser-based rummaging. He hops in his van and burns rubber to the shed, threatening to beat the crap out of Santa if he ever so much as looks at another kid. It’s this skewed tone that fuels Get Santa, a film that can at least be given credit for taking Christmas cinema to bizarre new territory.

Read the rest of my review at We Got This Covered.

★★

Get Santa is released 5th December 2014

Friday, November 14, 2014

'My Old Lady' (2014) directed by Israel Horowitz

Friday, November 14, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

If you're a fan of French probate and property law then boy oh boy do I have a movie for you. The excitingly titled My Old Lady (adapted from the director's own play!) starts with a bang – explaining the intricacies of the French viager system. This is real adrenaline rush cinema, your heart thumping in your chest as you learn that the viager system is a system that allows elderly homeowners to realise the monetary value of their property as a lump sum (and also to receive an index-linked monthly stipend) while still remaining occupants until their death, at which point ownership of the property will transfer to the viager investor.

Essentially, the prospective buyer weighs the amount of the lump sum (plus the stipend) against the market value of the property and the life expectancy of the occupant and decides whether he (or she) is going to get a good deal. Now who needs Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson firing a minigun from a burning car that's also jumping through a massive explosion when you have action-packed cinema like this?!

….

…. okay fine I admit it this film is fucking booooooooring.

Boring isn't the kind of word I throw around lightly, but for nearly every one of it's 107 minutes, My Old Lady is deeply, almostly masterfully, boring. Here's the situation; broke alcoholic loser Mathias Gold (Kevin Kline) arrives in Paris having been beqeathed a house in his father's will. He intends to make a quick sale and skedaddle with the cash, but is stymied when he discovers that his father had entered into a viager with the elderly occupant.

The titular old lady is Mathilde Girard (Maggie Smith), a 93 year old English teacher who is very comfortable with Mathias' father's viager. She reveals to a dumbstruck Mathias that he must pay her for the privilege of living in what is essentially 'his' house. Complicating matters is the presence of her daughter Chloe (Kristin Scott Thomas), who immediately recognises Mathias as an opportunistic loser out to ruin their idyllic life.

The rest of the film charts Mathias' explorations of the French property law, his attempts to broker a deal for his stake in the viager and the growth of his relationship with Mathilde and Chloe, both of whom turn out to be more involved in his past than he first suspected.

Nearly entirely taking place within Mathilde's dark, dusty house, every inch of this feels like a stage adaptation. There's the odd jaunt out into the streets of Paris, but they're bizarrely devoid of life as if the populace had collectively decided to have an extended lie-in (and to be honest I don't blame them). This zeroes the drama in on Matthias, Mathilde and Girard, who, despite efforts to inject a bit of sizzle into their past are all rather dowdy, dull characters.

Mathias in particular is a deeply annoying protagonist, spending much of the latter half of the film drunkenly wandering about, wine bottle in hand, delivering misery-laced monologues about how crap his life is, how everybody has let him down and how horrible a person he is. Kline's supercilious performance style only serves to underline these annoying qualities. Let's face it, there are few things more tedious than a self-pitying pisshead, very quickly you find yourself wishing the very worst upon him.

Maggie Smith and Kristin Scott Thomas come out of this largely unscathed, but these are actors so talented that they can find something of worth even in the biggest heap of garbage. Smith in particular makes Mathilde quietly likeable, constantly hinting at a carefree Bohemian life without giving us too many particulars. She works on the principle that “precision is key to a long life”, a proverb that may as well also apply to Smith's acting style, working out every little flicker of the eyes or pursing of the lips to maximise our potential.

Scott-Thomas isn't given a lot to work with, but she latches onto Chloe's existential blues, showing us someone who has gotten used to setting her expectations low. Given that she's the one giving lameass sadsack Mathias a hard time we warm to her pretty quickly. Unfortunately the hard work of both women is undone by a series of revelations that make them mere cogs in Mathias' self actualisation. They submissively accept the abuse that Mathias heaps upon them, topped off with the ludicrous development of Chloe falling in love with Mathias. This is bizarre! The stuffed animals that populate the flat are a better romantic prospect than Mathias; a man any self respecting woman wouldn't let within 5 feet of her.

With its middle-aged to elderly cast My Old Lady is perhaps aiming for the now-lucrative silver screener audience. But surely even these audiences don't want an outright boring experience. With its muffled drama, hugely annoying protagonist, dull scenery, focus on financial affairs and tortoise-slow pace, the film is about as much fun as being stuck in an accountant's waiting room.

★★

My Old Lady is released 21st November 2014

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

'The White Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom' (2014) directed by Jacob Cheung [LFF 2014]

Wednesday, October 22, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Within the first ten minutes of The White Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom, you realize that you’re going to have to seriously recalibrate your cheese tolerance levels. An adaptation of a Chinese novel, the film quickly introduces an apparently endless parade of bearded, angry men in elaborate armour who smirk at the camera like 1950’s serial villains. The rest of the movie is devoted to a super-saccharine, vaseline-on-the-lens love story that comes with a strong whiff of Twilight.

Before I summarize the plot, I should confess that I didn’t understand most of it. The White Haired Witch of Lunar Kingdom is a pretty well known story in China, being a smash hit novel first and having been adapted to cinema multiple times. So, Jacob Cheung’s film assumes you’re going to know who’s who before it even begins, a tactic that might save on exposition for Chinese audiences but spells bewilderment for everyone else.

Read the rest of my review at We Got This Covered

★★

Monday, October 20, 2014

'Kill Me Three Times' (2014) directed by Kriv Stenders

Monday, October 20, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Even now, after Simon Pegg has conclusively 'made it', the sight of him on the big screen feels a bit mischievous. For many he'll always be Tim from Spaced, the sight of him conjuring up happy memories of late night Channel 4 and feeling like you're part of a secret gang for knowing about the show. This vague feeling of possessiveness towards him can swing both ways: on one hand his screen presence comes preloaded with an enormous amount of audience goodwill, on the other when he's in a bad film you feel a bit let down.

Kill Me Three Times isn't a bad film. But it's not very either. Pegg plays Charlie Wolf, hitman extraordinaire. He dresses in black, wears a handlebar moustache and drives a muscle car crammed with high powered weaponry. Wolf is essentially a cartoon assassin; his style influenced by European spy comics and pulp cinema. He's also completely amoral; willing to take any dirty job as long as there's a hefty payday at the end of it.

As Wolf puts it; "I don't die. I thrive!", which'd be an upbeat philosophy if he wasn't at that very moment dying on the sunny West Australian coast. The question is, how did he get there. The answer proves to be a complex web of murder, adultery, blackmail, idiocy, insurance fraud and, most interestingly, dental record falsification. Traversing this knot of a plot are stone-cold psycho Lucy (Teresa Palmer), her incompetent, gambling addict dentist husband Nathan (Sullivan Stapleton), the scummily violent bar owner Jack (Callan Mulvey), his adulterous wife Alic (Alice Braga) and hunky but dim mechanic Dylan (Luke Hemsworth).

Like a snowball growing in size as it tumbles down a mountain the body count quickly racks up. In fact, by the time the snowball crashes into the base it's stained crimson red and has legs, fingers and bits of ragged scalp poking from the top of it. This is a filmic universe where the Grim Reaper has finely honed senses of comic timing and dramatic irony. That, in combination with a cast of self-important scheming bunglers puts us firmly in wannabe-Coen brothers territory; the plot playing out like an antipodean spin on Fargo.

If you're going to stick closely to an established tone, you could pick far worse directors to ape than the Coens, but Kill Me Three Times feels like a bargain basement DVD ripoff of them. The main problems are with the lacklustre writing; each character has a one-note personality (bumbling, violent, scheming, protective etc) that gets hammered on relentlessly until the character pops it (sometimes by actually being hammered on).

Looking a touch Zardoz there.

This isn't helped by dialogue that's serviceable at best. Characters state their intentions and then carry them out, leaving precious little room for performative nuance. Teresa Palmer does a decent job of combining slightly shopworn beauty with homicidal ambition and makes an effective bully of Sullivan Stapleton's moronic dentist. There's a few weak links; but Alice Braga can be forgiven for being stuck in a part that gives her zero interesting qualities and Luke Hemsworth cements his status as a lesser Hemsworth (how many more damn Hemsworths are there anyway?!).

There's a similarly slack approach to the visuals; though the scenery is often quite beautiful it's shot in a perfunctory way. The general tactic is to impress with a postcard perfect establishing shot, then revert to a bog-standard framing technique that drains these otherwise rather scenic locations of any verve. The interiors fare a bit worse, overlit and with a whiff of cheap soap opera to them.

The one thing that makes this experience even vaguely worthwhile is Pegg, obviously relishing playing an out and out bastard. He plays Wolf as a normal guy who's watched a few too many movies; pretending (even to himself) that he's really a sinister, ultra-competent omniscient badass while actually being a bit dim and extremely lucky. At the very least Pegg is having fun and it's difficult to begrudge him choosing to spend two weeks in a sunny Australian paradise playing a comedy hitman.

That aside there's very little to recommend about Kill Me Three Times. It doesn't ever tip over into terribleness but coasts along in a mediocre, passionless gear until the credits finally roll. There are worse ways you could spend your time, but there's also far better ones too.

★★

Monday, September 29, 2014

'Gone Girl' (2014) directed by David Fincher

Monday, September 29, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Gone Girl is a beautifully crafted film. From its elegant editing to the moody Trent Reznor score to Jeff Cronenweth's evocative cinematography to the career-best performances from Affleck and Pike it radiates quality like a 100w bulb. David Fincher has been a personal favourite since a torrid teenage love affair with Fight Club, and my admiration of him only grew after Zodiac and The Social Network. Sure he's had a few bumps along the way, but even his failures are interesting. The release of a new Fincher film is a red letter day in cinema - audiences expect something special. So it's with no huge surprise that I happily confirm Gone Girl is a cornucopia of cinematic delights.

Problem is it's also a misogynistic piece of shit.

Oh fuck! The M-word! Deploying it is like waving a big red flag that says "liberal guilt incoming". Pallid and worn out from overuse it's a spat epithet used in haste as a weapon to shut down discourse: "X is misogynist, end of discussion." Using it casually kills its power; after all accusing something or someone of 'hating women' is a big claim to make.

So let me get a couple of things straight; I don't think David Fincher quivers with rage at the sight of a Tampax advert. I don't think author/screenwriter Gillian Flynn loathes her own sex. I don't think Ben Affleck gleefully rubbed his hands when he got the part, happy to finally stick it to those uppity dames. I doubt anyone at all involved on a creative level in this production literally hates women. Despite all that, in collaboration they have produced a profoundly misogynistic movie.

(There's no way to explain this without spoiling the film so considered yourself warned from this point on. I eventually give it two stars.)

Gone Girl showcases the unhappy marriage of Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck & Rosamund Pike). Nick returns home on the day of his fifth wedding anniversary to find a broken coffee table, a suspicious blood spot in the kitchen and no Amy. She has vanished. Amy is the basis for her mother's popular 'Amazing Amy' children's books, and thus a minor celebrity, so her mysterious disappearance rapidly becomes a major news event.

Meanwhile Nick is not doing a particularly good job of media management. He appears callous in interviews, acts suspiciously and, worst of all, smiles during the press conference appealing for information. As the days stretch on suspicion increasingly begins to fall on Nick, the media all but accusing him of murder. The public turn against him, the police consider him the most likely suspect - even his twin sister begins to have doubts.

Twist time. It turns out that Amy has faked her own murder in order to get back at a husband she perceives as ruining her life. Concealed underneath her wifely demeanour lies the heart of a Lecter-esque sociopath, one with the cunning and skills to create a perfect trail of breadcrumbs trail that leads the police to Nick, and leads Nick to the electric chair. The more we learn about Amy the more her evil is revealed; she has a history of falsifying rape allegations; she ensnares innocent men by stealing their precious bodily fluids and impregnating herself; she plays the perfect lover only to strike like a scorpion - at one point she literally bathes in male blood.

Amy is the physical manifestation of every masculine fear of femininity; the quintessential black widow that lures you into a relationship, paralyses you and holds you captive as she gloats over your misfortune. Skulk around the more pathetic corners of the internet and you'll run into Men's Rights Activists; a laughable bunch of losers who believe they're trapped in some kind of misandrist matriarchy. In Amy they will see their paranoid nightmares brought to life.

To give Gone Girl some credit Amy isn't entirely two-dimensional. The film tries to set out the roots of her sociopathy: intense frustration at a lifetime under other people's control. Her fictional counterpart Amazing Amy is shown to lead her life but better, embodying in fiction what she failed to achieve in life. She explains that she feels intensely claustrophobic in her marriage to Nick, especially when moving to his podunk town where she doesn't know anyone.

In a nicely written monologue she decries how he subtly forced her into the role of a "cool girl"; she has to be smart, sexy, fun, "one of the guys", thin and beautiful all at once. Later we see her being controlled more directly, the character moving between a series of gilded cages. Theoretically this gives her moral license to violently kick back against the pricks that try to mould her life without her consent, casting her campaign of manipulation and murder as feminist liberation. It's a pulpy, dime store kind of psychology, but it's this that Fincher relies on to justify her deeds.

Undermining this is the extremely sympathetic treatment of Ben Affleck's Nick. I don't know what he's like in the book, but here he's an unambiguous hero, we never suspect him of murder, his return home to care for his dying mother is noble and - crucially - we never see him mistreat Amy from an objective viewpoint. Sure he's got his flaws, notably that he's conducting an affair with a student behind his wife's back, but given that Amy is a straight-up, sadistic, cold-hearted monster who can blame him? The sympathy we feel for Nick robs Amy of her motive for framing him, resulting in her ending up (despite the author's protestations) as a simple "crazy psycho-bitch".

Even leaving Amy aside for a moment, Gone Girl makes a series of curiously anti-feminist statements. The arena for Nick's condemnation and shaming is The Ellen Abbott show. Abbott is a typical Fox Newsesque bundle of shining teeth, big-hair and perfect makeup and runs a show that appears to revolve around highlighting crimes against women.

This is Nick Dunne's crucible, Abbott constantly hurls insinuations of rape and incest against him, poisoning the well of public opinion against him. She invites on talking heads (who appear to be caricatures of feminists) to decry Nick. I'm just not sure what satirical point Fincher is making here - is there an abundance of rabidly ill-informed feminist news shows that needs to be exposed? Their presentation here is a strawman set up to be demolished.

What we see in Gone Girl is a flawed 'nice guy' under assault from an army of harridans with "fucking bitch" Amy leading the charge. Her instrument of destruction is a weaponised vagina, transformed into a tool to destroy men. Given that her Amy's motivations are unconvincingly defined, that her evil is defined purely in terms of her gender, the argument that the inevitable flipside of female liberation is male subjugation, the parade of vapid, ill-informed female characters and the heroic portrayal of Nick, Gone Girl is misogynist.

Pity, because otherwise it's a really good film. So good that I was scrabbling for a sympathetic reading that would allow me to enjoy it.

But I can't.

★★

Gone Girl is released 3rd October.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

'Life of Crime' (2014) directed by Daniel Schechter

Tuesday, September 2, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Poor Life of Crime. It never really stood a chance. You adapt an Elmore Leonard twisty-turny tale of witty criminals, pack it with awful haircuts and fashion and put together a decent cast. Things are looking up! Then, once the movie is in the can the studio sits on it and waits for a suitable release date. And waits. And waits...

While the film goes unseen along comes American Hustle, which covers the exact thematic, tonal and aesthetic territory to far superior effect. And so we come to September 2014, the film being gently snuck into theatres for a short run before finding its natural in the bargain DVD bucket. Don't get me wrong, Life of Crime most definitely isn't some hidden gem, but it's certainly worthy of a smidge of sympathy.

The movie revolves around petty thieves Ordell (Mos Def) and Louis (John Hawkes) deciding to climb up the criminal food chain by moving into kidnapping. Their target: Mickey Dawson (Jennifer Aniston), trophy wife to property magnate Frank Dawson (Tim Robbins). While he's away on business in the Bahamas they intend to snatch her, imprison her in a Neo-Nazi co-conspirator's spare room and ransom her back to him for a princely $1 million.

Predictably, it all goes a bit wrong. There's a faintly Coen-esque quality to this farce, the narrative propelled by a series of misunderstandings, coincidences and plain old stupidity. The kidnapper's biggest problem is that Frank Dawson doesn't particularly want his wife back. He's been having an affair with the sexy and amoral Melanie (Isla Fisher), and had arranged to have his wife served with divorce papers.

With no money forthcoming the kidnappers bicker amongst themselves, trying to work out how to best squeeze some money out of their investment. Meanwhile Mickey, trapped in a miserable marriage, doesn't seem to mind being kidnapped too much, and is forming a close bond with one of the kidnappers. And so not only do they kidnap Mickey, they also, just perhaps kidnap... her heart?

There's nothing obviously wrong with this loosely knotted tale of double-crossing, but the end result is leaden and devoid of tension. Nobody, not the criminals, the victims, the police or the peripheral characters really displays much passion about what's happening, and this lack of interest leaches right through the screen and infects the audience. If they don't give a shit, why should we?

Mos Def does a lot of half-hearted shrugging in this.

The prime offender is, unfortunately, Jennifer Aniston. While it's nice to see her appearing in a film whose title isn't in bright red sans-serif capitals, she just doesn't have the range for this material. In the initial scenes she's decent enough as a put upon trophy wife, but once she's kidnapped she seems less terrified and more blase, reverting to a Rachel Greenish baseline ironic distance. Even when she overhears her kidnappers arguing whether they should chop off her fingers she appears more annoyed than terrified.

It feels a bit unfair to lay too much blame at Aniston's door, especially given that the core of the movie shows a woman being liberated from unhappiness by forced abduction and threats of rape. It's... well, it's an interesting perspective on character development, and in better hands might produce something worthwhile. In Life of Crime it's fumbled and half baked, the message apparently (intentional or otherwise) is that being kidnapped and imprisoned can be a totally fun and positive life experience.

Further sucking out any excitement is that there's no proper villain in the film, which means there's no danger whatsoever. Our criminals are all loveable rogues rather than baddies, which extends to the bizarre bumbling comedy Neo-Nazi, portrayed as a goofy Swastika-loving doofus.

The 'real' villain is the despicable husband, with Tim Robbins apparently taking direct cues from 'Bad Future Biff Tannen' in Back to the Future Part II. But even he's a moronic figure of fun, Robbins almost going pantomime-broad with this greasy, horny middle-aged lothario. What remains is the extraneous character played by Will Forte who spends the entirety of the film wandering around with a gormless expression on his face not doing anything.

Inaction is the default mode for these characters, all of whom act like they'd rather be anywhere else than involved in a crime caper. This means that even at a svelte 98 minute run-time the film quickly runs out of steam, eventually shuddering to a complete halt as the credits roll mid-scene with nothing resolved.

It's odd. The bones of a good film are here. There's a decent fetishisation of the 1970s; all clashing patterns, plaid, lots of smoking and stupid haircuts, and there's the usual soundtrack of cool, guitar-led 70s rock. The cast is all capable of turning in above average performances and while it's not going to turn any heads with stylish cinematography, it's certainly not a markedly ugly film.

But there's a palpable lack of passion, as if everyone involved has their next project in mind. This isn't a crime against cinema, but the best I can say about Life of Crime is that it exists, it's pretty short and doesn't ask a great deal of the audience.

★★

Life of Crime is released 5th September.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

'All Is by My Side' (2014) directed by John Ridley

Thursday, August 14, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

A music biopic that's not allowed to use one solitary note of the subject's music is a tricky proposition. If we're not here for the music, then what are we here for? The musician's sparkling personality and social life? What fills the gap? Well, John Ridley's film is turns out to be less about the who and why of Jimi Hendrix and more about the sexual, racial and class politics of the 1960s, with Hendrix the prism through which we view society. The result is loose, zoned out and languorous, constantly off into odd little explorations of the psychology of swinging London.

André Benjamin's Jimi Hendrix is a frustratingly gnomic centrepiece. Your usual music biopic protagonist is driven by past tragedy that both accentuates his genius and wrecks his social life, Hendrix just plays guitar beautifully and that's pretty much that. There's a hint of annoyance regarding a broken family, but he's totally absent of any burning internal trauma. In fact he's absent of most things, mumbling his way through the movie while being coaxed towards stardom by a series of well-meaning white women.

First among them is Linda Keith (Imogen Poots). Keith, girlfriend of Keith Richards, spots Hendrix playing in a rubbish band in New York and it is immediately smitten. She coaxes him towards a solo career by essentially mothering him. Imbued with upper-class English forthrightness, she behaves like an LSD gobbling Mary Poppins - ordering that Hendrix sit up straight, eat his vegetables and be charismatic on stage. For all Poots' considerable charm Linda Keith is rather thankless character and, like Hendrix, we quickly grow sick of her.

So it's thankful that once the film reaches London we jettison her in favour of the slightly more interesting Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell). She's a broadly drawn Northern lass with a Sheffield accent, and a far more interesting person to spend time with than Daddy's girl Linda Keith. Even so, though Atwell really gives it some welly we still never quite zero in through the haze, as to what is actually going through her head.

Benjamin is great casting.

This loose vagueness is present throughout the entire film. You could charitably say that Ridley's ambition is to recreate a fuzzy, acid-tinged stoned atmosphere of drugged-out late 60s London. He plays fast and loose with the editing, demonstrating a willingness to make abrupt cuts in the middle of scenes, give us an unexpected dose of quickfire montage or the exact opposite; allowing conversations to ramble on awkwardly for minute after painful minute. There's echoes of Antionioni's Blow-Up and Nicholas Roeg's Performance, and by and large Ridley succeeds in recreating a woozy, chilled out mood with sinister notes distantly rumbling in the background.

Underlying all that care is that, unfortunately, this Jimi Hendrix just isn't very interesting. In a heartfelt and obviously carefully judged performance André Benjamin recaptures the tics and body language we've seen in archive footage, but accurate to reality it might be, this Hendrix just isn't particularly fun to be around. There's a notable scene where he meets Michael X, "the authentic voice of black bitterness" in London. Hendrix is interrogated as to whether he's merely a novelty act for his predominantly white audience, X pointing out that reviews refer to Hendrix as "wild" and "tribal" and that these adjectives never used for white musicians.

It's a fair point. Hendrix's response is a mushy-mouthed hippy-dippy ramble about how everyone is one people and the entire world is his audience. The film unjustly acts like he's won this argument. Later we hear Poots' character remark that Hendrix can be "annoyingly profound". This might well be true, but it's something we see precious little of in Ridley's film.

The fashion is also a high point. Hendrix wears some badass shirts.

The obvious counter-argument to Hendrix not being the most articulate bloke around is that he doesn't communicate with his words, but with his guitar. Problem is, there's not really that much guitar playing in the film and due to them not having any rights to Hendrix's iconic tunes, what we do hear is largely formless jamming. That we never hear even a smidge of classics like Voodoo Chile, All Along the Watchtower or Hey Joe genuinely hurts the film. Robbed of the music, it becomes a bit difficult to remember why we should care about Hendrix's story.

This all culminates in a late scene where Hendrix graphically beats Kathy, now his girlfriend, with a telephone receiver, the film taking it's time to show us the bruises and black eyes he's inflicted. This violence comes from nowhere and is very out of character for Benjamin's chilled out Hendrix. Crossing this moral event horizon makes Benjamin's Hendrix rather unpleasant, and the violence poisons the remaining scenes. It's a tone-deaf inclusion, made even more bizarre by the real life Kathy Etchingham insisting this didn't happen to the extent of considering legal action against the film.

There's a bunch of good stuff in All Is By My Side; Andre Benjamin is great, as is the supporting cast; the fashions of the time are beautifully recreated, the soundtrack is well-picked and there's a conscious effort made to evoke mood through clever editing. Unfortunately without Hendrix's songs the film feels half-formed, and it makes way too many character and tonal missteps to make up for their absence.

★★

Friday, July 18, 2014

'Mood Indigo' (2014) directed by Michel Gondry

Friday, July 18, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

There are few things more tedious than having someone tell you their dreams. This is precisely the same tedium that Mood Indigo induces: “and then the alarm clock turned into a spider, and a little mouse man ran out of a pipe, and then an eel popped its head out of a tap and I had to chase it! Isn't that CRAZY?!” If your measure of good filmmaking is how much random bullshit you can cram into a movie, then director Michael Gondry's latest definitely delivers.

The largely irrelevant plot concerns the relationship of Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloe (Audrey Tatou). Early in the film they meet, fall in love and get married. Then Chloe gets infected by a water lily which grows in her lung. Treatment is expensive and soon Colin's finances are spent, forcing him to take up a job incubating proton guns (which involves him lying on a pile of dirt for 24 hours at a time). Pretty crazy, right? Well, not really - underneath the constant visual assault and self-consciously surreal plot developments it's actually a straightforward terminal illness weepie, but one so wrapped up in tawdry quirks that it's difficult to care.

I have a hell of a lot of time for Michel Gondry: one of the smartest, most inventive directors around. His successes, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and his brilliant music videos are awe-inspiring works of genius. I even have a soft spot for his failures: Green Hornet was a deserved flop, but even within that there's solid gold nuggets of sublime cinema. With all that in mind it's with a heavy heart that I have to report that Mood Indigo just isn't very good.

What a wacky car. What will they think of next?

From the opening shots you sense that this is the product of a director let off the leash. It's as if Gondry has gone through his notebooks and realized every unused idea he's ever had – throwing everything into making this the most Michel Gondry film ever. But, like guzzling down a big box of chocolates in one go, too much of a good thing makes you sick. Concepts that would have made for a great three or four minute music video are splattered hodgepodge throughout the movie – and worse, they don't mean anything other than being weird for the sake of being weird.

For example, what does an ice-rink attendee having the head of a pigeon mean? How much does it inform us as to the themes of the film to have a pair of shoes growl like dogs? Why are the side panels of that car made of perspex? All this imagery piles up on top of itself in a chaotic, tangled mess – the few genuinely powerful symbolic elements drowned underneath. Worse, the stop motion, hand-made nature of Gondry's many, many weird gee-gaws induces a kind of doomy queasiness, like being on a drug trip that's starting to go bad.

The upshot of this is the near total crushing of any humanity in the film. Duris and Tatou, so moving together in Cedric Klapisch's recent Chinese Puzzle, do their best to wring a drop of pathos from this material, but even actors of their calibre can't contend with a cinematic world designed to focus our attention anywhere else other than on the human elements. The end result is that when the credits roll you think “that's it?!”

Oh right, some kind of cloud thing. Fair enough.

The closest cinematic companion to Mood Indigo isn't Gondry's previous work, but that of Terry Gilliam. At Gilliam's best, the rush of ideas and imagery is exhilarating, at his worst it induces a numb fatigue in the viewer, like a boxer who's gone a few too many rounds and stopped caring about taking the blows. More specifically, this film reminded me of Gilliam's 2005 nadir Tideland, a nauseatingly unpleasant movie that also throws everything it can at the screen in an attempt to disguise that there's not much going on (also the only film I've ever seen that opens with the director half apologizing as he explains that you probably won't like what you're about to see).

I feel incredibly guilty criticising a film for being too imaginative. The vast majority of cinema is a sludgy grey morass of cliches and banal platitudes. Mood Indigo certainly isn't that – on the rare moments that it does work it becomes briefly magnificent. The slow slide into desaturation throughout the film beautifully conveys depression and guilt, as do the cobwebs and muck that slowly accumulate in our hero's apartment. But these tiny highlights are swamped by a flood of pointless visual bullshit that distracts and annoys much more than it does inform.

For all that I didn't enjoy watching Mood Indigo, it's a difficult film to genuinely dislike. Even if the end result doesn't work, the enthusiasm baked into every single frame very faintly rubs off on you. Then again, I might be singing a more pissed off song had I seen the original 131 minute cut of the film. After a critical beating by festival critics, the theatrical release has been pared down to a svelte 94 minutes. Frankly, even the truncated version feels overlong – by the final act I was bordering on exasperated, checking my watch to see how much more I had to endure.

I respect the creativity that's gone into Mood Indigo. I appreciate the effort it must have taken to make. I'm glad that films like this can exist. But it's there's no escaping that this is a failure as a movie.

★★

Mood Indigo is released August 1st.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

'The Purge: Anarchy' (2014) directed by James DeMonaco

Thursday, July 17, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

As far as ridiculous movie premises go The Purge takes some beating. Set in a near-future US, the government has decreed that the best way to reduce crime is that for one night a year all crime (including murder) is legal. The thinking is that if the populace has a release valve for their repressed anger then the other 364 nights of the year will be relatively peaceful. Amazingly it sort of works - 'Purge Night' is in its sixth year as the film begins and, though it the majority barricade themselves inside their houses and pray for sunrise, it at least appears to generally accepted as a worthwhile endeavour.

This is a sequel to the 2013's The Purge, which used the night as an excuse to stage a relatively low-budget home invasion movie. The sequel sets its sights much higher, guiding us through the streets of Los Angeles as the citizens tear each other apart. With gangs of flamethrower wielding maniacs, van-based minigun nutters and ranting sniper rifle wielding egomaniacs prowling about it's a pretty crazy 12 hours.

Stuck in the middle of all the mayhem is a pretty standard gaggle of stock types. There's mother and daughter pair Eva and Cali, dragged out of their homes by a mysterious paramilitary army. Shane and Liz, whose car breaks down at the worst possible time and the mysterious 'Sergeant' - a thinly veiled ripoff of The Punisher. Thrown together by fate the group pick their way through the carnage, looking for a safe haven - or in The Punisher's case - bloody vengeance.

'yer cast

There's a pungent whiff of John Carpenter to all of this and DeMonaco relishes showing off seedy, urban environments populated with over-the-top, extravagantly costumed weirdoes. The premise allows for a cavalcade of violence throughout, mostly through gunshot wounds. This isn't some splatter flick though, and while you get your fair share of bloody squibs blasting holes in people, a surprisingly amount of the the violence is either threatened or left to our imagination - gotta get that R rating after all.

The central idea - that an awful lot of Americans are secretly frothing gun-crazy psychopaths with fear of punishment as the only thing stopping them heading off on a Grand Theft Autoesque rampage of death and destruction - is inherently satirical. The Purge: Anarchy is thus easily at its best when its directly engaging with politics. It doesn't feel enough to say the satire here is 'on the nose', more that it's screaming while beating the nose in with a baseball bat.

DeMonaco has refreshingly little time for nuance in his political commentary. Going straight for the jugular, he introduces the concept of being a 'Martyr'. Essentially if you're poor you can sell yourself to a wealthy family as a sacrificial lamb. They'll carve you up and send your relatives a hefty cheque for privilege. DeMonaco shoots this scene like a live action political cartoon - an elderly, dignified working class black man sitting Buddhalike surrounded by grinning, primped, psychotic WASPS.

Better is to come later in the film, when we enter an elite hunting club run by 1%ers with the 99% as their quarry. I have seen few more satisfying things than a load of hoity-toity snobs in suits getting their shit wrecked up bigtime by a very angry Punisher analogue. If nothing else DeMonaco has his finger on what the people want: when a horribly witchy Republican woman is held at gunpoint by our heroes the audience actually began murmuring "shoot the bitch!" at the screen. There's similar assent when we see a mutilated man strung up in front of a bank bearing a sign "This man stole our pensions." Eh, he probably deserved it.

The audience's palpable bloodlust makes you think that maybe DeMonaco is actually onto something with this Purge idea. After all we're all gathered to watch people getting blown away in increasingly creative ways - and it's undeniably pleasurable to watch a bunch of arrogant rich pricks getting theirs at the hands of our firmly proletariat heroes.

It's a shame then that these sequences are broken up by the rest of the film - which turns out to be a pretty by-the-numbers action thriller. The further we get away from political commentary the more we stray into territory that has the unmistakable stink of straight-to-DVD. None of the characters are particularly compelling, well written or well performed, though at least they manage to look believably terrified most of the time.

It's also a bit of a let down visually - the film is bathed in queasy piss-yellowish light that looks a shade too artificial for the grittiness of the material. DeMonaco obviously has it in him to compose a decent shot - there's a few moments that make you sit up and pay attention - but the majority of the direction is pretty bland - especially some of the later action sequences, which are so impersonal they could be lifted straight from any number of B movies.

The Purge: Anarchy is undoubtedly a B-movie; but when it's unapologetically acting out revolutionary wish-fulfilment it's at least a B-Movie with its heart in the right place. The rest of the time it's a faintly bland, largely identikit bit of fluff. This isn't a film to run out and see, but if you want a bit of schlock in your life you could do worse.

★★

Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist is on limited release from May 13th.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

'Begin Again' (2014) directed by John Carney

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

Begin Again is a lovely salad with a big lump of shit sitting proudly in the middle of it. Sure the shit is only touching a tiny bit of the salad, but you're sure as hell not going to be eating anything on that plate.

The film revolves around Dan (Mark Ruffalo) and Greta (Keira Knightley). Dan, channelling the rumpled, acerbic carelessness of a Groundhog Day era Bill Murray, is a fallen star record producer / A&R man. He rolls around New York drunk off his tits in a vintage black Jaguar with a strangely canine aura to him. This is a Mark Ruffalo you could imagine spotting behind the bars of the local dog pound, looking sorry for himself, whining and pawing at his cage. Naturally his personal life is a complete shambles, with a distant, troubled daughter and exasperated wife viewing him with outright contempt. After being sacked from his job and bopped in the face by an angry bouncer he hits rock bottom, contemplating jumping in front of a subway train and ending this miserable existence. But first another drink, so he stops in a bar where he finds...

Greta! Greta is a precision-tooled objet d'indie girl - from her casually tied back, shampoo ad glossy hair to her very on trend patterned summer dresses. She plays a beaten up acoustic guitar almost bent double over it, as if she's really, really into the music, man. She's a British girl in New York, having arrived as the girlfriend of Dave Kohl (Adam Levine) an indie superstar who is currently in the process of blowing up (unfortunately not literally). Their picture perfect relationship is shattered when Kohl starts banging a sexy A&R girl and Greta proceeds to mope around the city looking attractively wan and miserable, guitar in hand.

Greta plays a song in a bar that touches Dan, the two become friends and Dan's creative juices start flowing as he devises a new type of album - one entirely recorded on the actual streets of New York City! Soon the two are collecting various musicians, writing songs, recording and engaging in cute indie montages where they wander around smiling and listening to their music collections. As the album begins to come together, so do their fractured lives - the pair almost literally healed by the divine power of guitar led indie. Isn't music a wonderful thing?

It really is. But oh boy, not here. I'm going to bang on about how crappy the music in Begin Again is for quite a bit now, but if you want to skip that I can summarise what's wrong with this film with one simple point: the lead singer of Maroon 5 has a large role in the movie. Maroon 5. For FUCK'S sake. I mean... listen to this (not all of it obviously that would be insane):

(my blood boils over at precisely 02:45)

I'm really sorry I subjected you to that. But goddamn that's bad....

This is the lump of shit in the otherwise alright salad: the music in Begin Again really, really, really sucks. It's flaccid, over-produced, syrupy indie rock sung by oh-so-deep wankers in flannel shirts perched atop stools in depopulated prick-bars. This is music devoid of passion, imagination and feeling, made so much worse by the fact that these musicians consider themselves painfully authentic. As they incessantly drone on like delicate little flowers about their feelings, staring off into the middle distance with big doe eyes I wanted to jump into the movie screen, smash their bloody acoustic guitars over their heads and put on some Extreme Noise Terror or maybe a bit of hard acid techno.

I really hate this man.

As they go on to produce Greta's atrocious album they rope in a gaggle of musicians who proceed to fanny around on top of buildings in porkpie hats creating the kind of sludgy brainless acoustic whiffle that you'd generally expect to find as muzak in your local branch of Starbucks. Then, through furrowed, confused brows, we watch as everyone in the film simpers over how great it is. "Greta, your album is amazing!" they breathlessly intone. "No! It's shit shitty shit shit!" I (inwardly) heckled back.

For a film about the wonder, power and beauty of music to subject us to the guy from Maroon 5 repeatedly bleating his tortured little heart out feels like a particularly perverse form of torture. It's especially cruel given that, aside from the music, everything else isn't all that bad. Both Knightley and Ruffalo bring something neat to the table, there's a charismatic cameo from CeeLo Green and an appearance by an fascinatingly bearded Mos Def. It's all framed and lit beautifully, with cinematographer Yaron Orbach finding a bewilderingly impressive number of ways to frame two people sitting next to each other listening to headphones. Even James Corden is likeable here!

But all that good stuff is for naught. If you make a film about music where the music sucks then you're leaving port in a ship with a gaping hole in the side. Water is rushing in, people are futilely diving overboard, alarms are blaring, red lights are flashing. Eventually the boat keels over and vanishes beneath the waves. There are no survivors.

★★

Begin Again is released July 11th