LONDON CITY NIGHTS: Ryan Gosling

Monday, October 10, 2016

Review: 'La La Land' (2016) directed by Damien Chazelle [LFF 2016]

Monday, October 10, 2016 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Roughly halfway through Damien Chazelle's La La Land, Emma Stone's would-be actor Mia is fretting about her upcoming one woman show. "It just feels really nostalgic to me." "That's the point." Ryan Gosling's jazz pianist boyfriend Sebastian replies. "Are people going to like it?" she responds. He turns to her with that cooler-than-cool Gosling gaze and replies "Fuck 'em".

"Fuck 'em" indeed. It's a naked bit of self-examination from writer/director Damien Chazelle, who's perhaps understandably worried that the reason the big budget tap-dancing trad-musicals have all but disappeared from our screens is because nobody wants to see them. Sure, you get the odd (generally iffy) Broadway adaption here and there, but we're a long way from the days of Singin' in the Rain, West Side Story and My Fair Lady.

He needn't worry, La La Land is one of the most sure-fire critical and commercial darlings I've seen in a very, very long time. It's got two of the most bankable, adored stars in Hollywood being very funny, very sweet and dancing their socks off. It's got gorgeous faux Technicolor palette and full Cinemascope photography. It's got a script that, despite the sugar-coated trappings of the genre, manages to feel vividly real. It's got musical numbers so dazzling that, in an auditorium full of jaded film critics at the London Film Festival, the opening sequence received a spontaneous round of rapturous applause.

Set in what feels like a dream of contemporary Los Angeles, La La Land is the story of Mia and Sebastian's relationship over one perma-summery year. They first meet when cutting each other up on the freeway, Sebastian honking his horn and giving Mia the finger as he pulls past her. "What an asshole..." she mutters. But soon all too soon - despite their protestations that they despise one another and there's absolutely no chemistry between them - they're falling in love.

What follows is admittedly cut from some pretty familiar cloth: their relationship grows, encounters problems and the two engage in some soul-searching about just what they mean to each other. But despite the familiar template this still surprises, serving up a romance that's simultaneously personal and universal, and one that concludes with an astonishingly effective emotional crescendo.

The ghosts of the golden age of Hollywood haunt these characters, looming in the background of scenes throughout, and at one point Chazelle stylishly and memorably mirrors an establishing shot from Rebel Without a Cause. But the film avoids outright fetishising old Hollywood, instead subjecting it to a mild critical examination via its most extroverted manifestation - the all singin' all dancin' musical. Though Gosling and Stone might tapdance their way down the streets like Astaire and Rogers, they're rooted firmly in 2016 - one of my favourite character touches is that the screen of Mia's iPhone 4S is cracked, an incidental detail that speaks volumes about her life.

Though crammed full of surface retro-stylings, the film consistently argues for innovation rather than slavish copying. The main vehicle for this is Gosling's Sebastian, who's initially obsessed with jazz dinosaurs and has an idea of musical purity lodged sometime in the 30s. It's only when he begins to experiment with form and removes the muso stick from up his own ass that he begins to loosen up and enjoy his art rather than merely appreciate it. Stone's Mia goes through a similar process, evolving from someone craving the approval of others to defining success in their own terms.

To convey all that while singing and dancing isn't going to be a picnic, but Chazelle simply couldn't have cast two better leads. Gosling in particular exudes a timeless style and poise, staring out from the screen with a hangdog yet confident expression that, appropriately enough, has more than a tinge of James Dean to it. He is every inch the moviestar, approaching every scene with grace and jaw-dropping cool. As a graduate of The Mickey Mouse Club it's no surprise that he can sing and dance, but few about these days could slide into a musical number so sleekly and naturally. Stone is also wonderful - the duo fizzing with refreshingly old-school chemistry.

I'd come to think that films like La La Land just couldn't get made anymore. These are insincere times, and this is a painfully sincere movie about two fools drifting in and out of love. It presents a gently loping, largely tension-free story without an atom of irony and resists the urge to insert vestigial elements like comedy best-friends and bitchy villains. It just is, functioning as a contemporary ideal of what the Hollywood studio machine once could (and amazingly, apparently still can) do best.

Damien Chazelle was already sniffing at the big leagues with Whiplash. After La La Land he's going to be white-hot. I can't wait to see what he does next.

★★★★★

Monday, February 10, 2014

'Seduced and Abandoned' (2013) directed by James Toback

Monday, February 10, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

It's a humid night in Tikrit, soundtracked only by the clatter of distant automatic weapons fire and muffled screaming. Into a dirty hotel room strides Alec Baldwin, buck naked, fully engorged and humming with sexual potency. Lying on the bed, softly biting her lower lip as she parts her thighs is a flushed Neve Campbell, her face a cocktail of arousal and disgust. This is The Last Tango in Paris for a modern era: Baldwin's right-wing government operative erotically exploring new frontiers with Neve Campbell's leftist protester.

Now, how much money can we put you down for to make this happen? $10 million? 20?

This is the question that powers James Toback's lively documentary about the film industry. And rarely has it seemed more like an industry. Toback forms a double-act with Alec Baldwin, and the two trek around the 2012 Cannes Film Festival trying to secure funding for the film, which I think is meant to be so ridiculous a concept that it would never be made - though honestly it's far from the silliest pitch I've heard. To get this made they meet a bevvy of perma-tanned, yacht-based billionaires, all of whom have their own opinions on what kind of movies make money.

Interspersed with these meetings are a series of freewheeling conversations with Hollywood directing luminaries (Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford-Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci and Roman Polanski) and genuine acting A-listers (Ryan Gosling, Jessica Chastain, James Caan, Bérénice Bejo). It's a hell of a credits reel; and to Toback and Baldwin's credit they seem able to winkle out of them answers that go beyond your usual PR static.

Though these faces twinkle like stars in the sky, the real leading performance is from Cannes as a whole. It looks like a farmer's market, but rather than livestock on the block there's films. Here you can buy Amour, or The Big Wedding, or Spring Breakers, less art and more assets that can make the right person a whole lot of money. Creativity and filmic excellence don't enter into this world, this is where people come to fatten up their wallets.

These well-fed individuals attach themselves like leeches to cinema. They hold court like feudal lords, halfheartedly tossing off ideas as they reek of privilege. Alec Baldwin is dismissed as someone only fit for comedy or submarine movies. Neve Campbell fares even worse, her casual dismissal always preceded by "Well, of course we love Neve but....". Forget Edward Cullen, Blade or Dracula, these people are the real cinematic vampires. The best illustration of this is coked out racist fascist Taki Theodoracopoulis who, bobbing up and down in his grotesquely opulent yacht, laughs and jokes about how rich he is while guzzling down a banquet. Still, at least he's a smart evil guy. the same can't be said for the aptly named Denise Rich, who blathers that her ambitions are "peace on earth" and "I want to go to space". I hope she achieves that last one - and never comes back.

It's these pillars of moral decrepitude that the modern film-maker has to whore themselves out to in order to get a film made. The 'seduction' of the title seems to work both ways; the film-makers and actors trying to administer an expert handjob to the egos of these bastards, and them in return basking in the radiance of real stars; treating the 'talent' like a particularly interesting accessory to display at a party. It's dispiriting yet blackly comic stuff - especially as Toback quickly begins to alter his putative film to suit their visions - wondering if he could change the location, the stars or even the basic tenets of the story in order to even start production.

Obviously he is cool as hell in this.

Balance is provided by the interviews with the directors and stars of the films. Scorsese talks engagingly about the differences in getting a movie made now as opposed to the halcyon days of 'New Hollywood', laying out his philosophies on life and how it relates to his cinematic style. Ryan Gosling explains the grind of attending constant auditions and never getting parts you want, the existential doubt of feeling like one face in a million hopefuls and never achieving anything. Granted, these people are enormous successes in their own right, yet you see the dent in their pride (especially in Alex Baldwin) at having made it, yet still having to scrabble around for money to make anything remotely interesting.

Entertaining though this journey is, there's a tinge of hypocrisy to the whole thing. You feel a tingle of annoyance as Toback and Baldwin casually dismiss a $5 million (!) budget as completely unworkable. Toback would quite like us to see him and Baldwin as scrappy artistic underdogs up against the brainless Hollywood corporate machine - something that's a bit hard to swallow considering the two are swanning through a sun-kissed heaven and living a life of opulence aboard his A-list friend's yachts.

But this is such good fun that it's easy to put these quivers of annoyance to one side. Toback is a great interviewer, his 'insider' status putting the stars at ease right away. He's clearly 'one of them', and so they reveal things they perhaps wouldn't normally. A highlight is Scorsese offhandedly explaining that all his films are about brothers looking out for each other - something so headslappingly simple that you can't believe you've missed it.

Even better is a sequence where Toback and Baldwin quiz everyone whether they're scared of death. Hollywood is here defined as a quest for immortality; to live on in the minds of an audience as an icon. The interviewees seem surprised by the question; some reacting to it philosophically, some obviously not expecting the interview to take this morbid turn - but all revealing something 'true' about themselves in that nanosecond before they respond.

If you're at all interested in the nuts and bolts of movie-financing then Seduced and Abandoned is pretty much required watching. It's a well-paced, well shot and smart look at a business that ventures into farce the more you learn about it. No conclusions are reached as to how to improve things, but simply watching the Mammon Machine of cinema in all its debauched glory is easily worth the price of admission.

★★★★

Seduced and Abandoned is available on DVD from February 17th

Monday, July 29, 2013

‘Only God Forgives’ (2013) directed by Nicholas Winding Refn

Monday, July 29, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

They panned It’s a Wonderful Life. They mocked the pretensions of The Shining. They dismissed The Thing as mere 'gore-porn'. Sometimes the critics get it wrong. Dead wrong. Only God Forgives (currently sitting in the mid-30s on the Tomatometer) will soon join these unfairly maligned classics. This is a film beautifully and intelligently put together with such an admirable purity of focus that nearly everything else I’ve seen this year pales in comparison.

'Gangster Squad' (2013) directed by Ruben Fleischer, 3rd January 2013

Saturday, January 5, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

'Gangster Squad' is not a film to take seriously. It's got all the trappings of a sober exploration of how organised crime can seep into every crack of a city, the drastic lengths to which a police force goes to wipe it out and the consequences for those who stand up to evil and say 'no'. But you've seen all that rubbish before, in 'Gangster Squad' the 'big themes' are just a peg to hang an utterly bonkers story about some very silly men running around blowing stuff up in late 40s Los Angeles. And it's brilliant, hilarious fun.

Something that first looks like it's going to follow in the footsteps of 'L.A. Confidential' actually shares more cinematic DNA with Robert Rodriguez' 'Sin City' (2005) or even Warren Beatty's 'Dick Tracy' (1990). We open to Sean Penn as MegaGangster 'Mickey Cohen'. He's grubbily beating the crap out of a punching bag in slow motion as slow, ponderous dialogue tells us about the nature of violence. Every rope-like muscle squeezes and strains as he beats the bag. It's over-the-top, ridiculous. At this point the film hangs on a knife edge; if it's going to be this kind of cod-philosophical twaddle for two hours this is going to be rough watching.

Sean Penn as Mickey Cohen

Then, finally, Penn's face hones into view next to the punching bag. I do a double-take, what the hell have they done to him? He looks like a leather handbag stuffed full of snooker balls. Penn is playing a man that's just stepped off the pages of a 4 colour pulp crime comic book. I'd recently watched 'Cloud Atlas' which featured a lot of talented actors struggling to act their way through heavy prosthetic makeup so I was a little wary of the look, but Penn acts his pants off. Moral complexity is left at the door, Cohen is a power-hungry, greedy, sadistic and cruel man, his monstrous personality amply mirrored in his twisted appearance.

L.A. is danger of being utterly corrupted by this man, so who are you gonna call? We're introduced to our hero, Sgt. John O'Mara in a sequence that ends with him brutalising some seedy gangsters who kidnap an innocent young ingenue. He busts down the door and gets busy thwacking gangsters before saving the dame and strolling off into the sunset. Played stonily by Josh Brolin, he's the flip side of Penn's madmen gangster, though both share pulp origins. Though Brolin doesn't have the crazy prosthetics that Penn has, his face is similarly mask-like. He's got a lantern jaw, an old fashioned face that has obviously seen a lot of serious shit. Brolin plays him as an impregnable human statue, a veteran who is still fighting World War II in his head.

Josh Brolin as O'Mara. Now that's a face you can set your watch to.

The only hints we get of genuine humanity in O'Mara are the scenes with his long-suffering pregnant wife Connie (Mireille Evans). At first you think she's going to fit into the thankless role of the disapproving wife; it's no fun playing the one who's actively trying to prevent the exciting gangster action scenes the audience is craving. Fortunately, after some mild rumbles of disapproval, she seems to realise what kind of film she's in, and figures if her boneheaded husband is going to take down the most powerful gangster in L.A. then she's going to help him pick the best damn team for the job.

THE GANGSTER SQUAD
left to right - Giovanni Ribisi (the smart guy), Josh Brolin (the leader), Ryan Gosling (the sexy one), Anthony Mackie (the knife guy), Michael Pena (the kid) and Robert Patrick (the gunslinger)

And boy, what a team! I do love a good genre flick, and I always love a good 'getting the gang together' montage, particularly when we're introduced to one awesome character actor after another. Even better, they all have their own particular special skills. So we meet the guy that's good with knives (Anthony Mackie), the guy that's good with guns and his hungry young sidekick (Robert Patrick and Michael Peña) and the smart one 'Giovanni Ribisi'. We also get the reluctant one joining soon enough, the excellently named Sgt. Jerry Wooters, as played by the inestimably awesome Ryan Gosling.

Oh, Ryan Gosling. You could be peeling potatoes and still be utterly entrancing in a way that smokes damn near everyone else off the screen. There's just something about the way he looks at people, keeping mostly expressionless but somehow smiling beatifically with just his eyes. It's the damndest thing. In a film populated by wild caricatures he stands out as a recognisable human being, carrying much of the emotional heft that the film just about needs to keep us caring about our heroes.

Ryan Gosling as Wooters..... (’-’*)

There isn't much room for women in this tale of vicious beatings and exploding cars, but the genre calls for a femme fatale and so we meet Grace Faraday (Emma Stone), girlfriend of both Mickey Cohen and Gosling's Sgt Wooter. She's introduced slinking her way across a nightclub wearing a bright red dress. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about her: she's trouble. Unfortunately she never quite lives up to her femme fatale image. Stone gives a perfectly competent performance, but I like my 40s gangster molls with bite and danger rather than bewildered confusion and fear. She's almost reduced to the status of an object for men to fight over, something the film notes, but calling attention to it doesn't quite excuse it.

The L.A. that this film takes place in is a heightened reality, a distillation of genre pictures. The streets teem with familiar archetypes, from our leads right down to the smart-mouthed young bootblack that charmingly grifts people outside Cohen's extravagantly detailed nightclub 'Slapsy Maxie's'. From the pools of neon light that fill the downtown areas to the gently sundappled suburbia, everything has been constructed in a way that pounds relentlessly on our sense of nostalgia created through classic films.

Emma Stone as Grace Faraday.

Though 'Gangster Squad' has an keenly observed retro sensibility, Fleischer doesn't hesitate to use cutting edge technology to tell his story. Stand out moments include a perfectly constructed car chase scene that uses a roving CG camera to seamlessly show us both the wider geography of the chase and the character moments taking place within each vehicle. Another brilliant sequence involves a character walking suicidally into a nightclub with the intention of blowing away our villain. I think it's shot using a SnorriCam rig; a camera attached to the chest of the actor. The music becomes muffled, everything slows down a bit, we're locked onto their face as they walk forwards. It's a short moment in the film, but stands out as a great marriage of an actor's performance and confident use of technology to elevate the moment. The only slightly misjudged moment is a 'bullet time' sequence late in the film that goes on far too long. It takes a lot for me to get tired of stuff exploding in beautiful slow motion, but by this point in the film you're aching for some dramatic resolution.

'Gangster Squad' takes a lot of cues from genres other than the crime drama it overtly models itself upon. There's strong thematic elements of the Western running through it, Robert Patrick in particular could literally walk into an 1880s saloon and you wouldn't bat an eyelid. Slightly more subtly Western is the unshakably implicit moral divide between our heroes and villains. It's a real white hats v black hats scenario, our leads mow down scarred, ugly looking gangsters by the dozen.

Another slightly more unexpected influence on the film are videogames. Once the plot gets going, the film shifts into showing us a series of set-pieces that feel an awful lot like levels from a game. We get the obligatory stealth level, where our characters must sneak stealthily around a mansion swarming with guards, there's little minibosses to defeat that stand out purely because of their unusual choice in weapons. This all comes to a head in the final sequences, which are shot in a way that echoes modern cover shooters like the popular 'Uncharted' or 'Gears of War' series. More directly it quotes Rockstar's 'L.A. Noire', a comparison its hard to shake as our characters move from cover to cover, popping up to shoot gangsters pouring out of every corner of the screen.

Saying something looks like a videogame is generally a term of derision when it comes to film criticism, but not here. Visually the film repeatedly quotes pulp literature; the digital colour grading setting out to reproduce the covers of lurid, violent noir fiction. If you're looking for a bloodthirsty, exploitative modern equivalent to this, then you could do a lot worse than by looking at videogames, which entertain you with a neverending stream of two-dimensional bad guys to satisfyingly mow down.

'Gangster Squad' is a fantastic film, it's conscious of what it is and successful at what it wants to be. It's incredibly violent, but manages to be hilariously deadpan right through. Just little shot choices leave the audience giggling at the audacity of what we're seeing. It's a shame the film had such a torturous gestation period, (its release delayed and sequences reshot after US shootings) but the final product is an utterly compelling, thrilling experience and deserves to be a box office hit.

****/*****

LONDON CITY NIGHTS