LONDON CITY NIGHTS: imogen poots

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.

★★

Thursday, March 13, 2014

'Need for Speed' (2014) directed by Scott Waugh

Thursday, March 13, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Cars are boring, complicated and dangerous death-machines. But on screen they become something more. The automobile and cinema have grown up alongside each other, and when a little petrol gets mixed in with your celluloid the results are often thrilling. I'm thinking of the classics, Bullitt, Two-Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point or modern greats like Drive and Rush - lean and muscular cinema made by people with oil-stained fingers. Need for Speed wants to hearken back to this golden age; ditching the CG of the Fast and the Furious series and showing us real cars rumbling around real cities, driven by real people.

So there's a good, working class car driver and an evil rich car driver. The evil car driver cheats, kills the good car driver's friend and then frames him. Now that he's out of prison the good car driver must avenge this crime the only way he knows how: by driving cars. This is less a story and more an excuse to have a lot of driving. It's to the film's credit that most of the film's run-time is spent behind the wheel, as we watch the drivers race to the race, then race the race.

The lead of a car film shares many traits with the kung-fu hero; both are in possession of an innate talent that needs to be honed through discipline and trials. Essentially, to win the big race/fight the big baddie the hero must prove their worth by overcoming their self-doubt. This is standard Campbellian stuff but the car genre has it's unique wrinkles; some of which Need for Speed 'gets' and some it blithely ignores.

They picked the weirdest press promo stills for this film. Here's a blue car I guess.

Prime among these is a straight up spiritual connection between man and machine. A car movie hero is only complete when sitting behind the wheel of his car - which becomes an extension of his mind and body. While he's sat in that driver's seat, the boundaries of the character extend outwards to the hubcaps and bumper. As his heart beats, so the engine throbs, the deep bass boom of his engine (the hero always has the coolest sounding engine) signifying the car hero's spiritual superiority over his rivals. Ideally he will have built the car himself and we'll have seen him slathered in swarfega as if he's just delivered a bouncing automotive baby.

On paper Need for Speed does this. The hero is well-regarded as a top mechanic; though we only briefly see him working on a car - and notably not his car. The hero car of the film is a modified blue and white sports car of some kind (I think it's referred to as a 'mustang') that's enormously fetishised by all that encounter it. It's this car that the hero seems to have some kind of spiritual connection with; able to make it reach speeds and execute maneuvers that no other driver can. But we never actually see him build it, the film squandering the chance for that crucial montage in a disarming cut from car as chassis to gleaming and finished end product.

Despite this early missed opportunity the relationship between man and car does develop as they rocket across the USA on their way the big race. Both car and man get a few dings, prove their mettle in tough scrapes and get nicely grimed up - then just as the car has developed a personality and bonded to its driver it's unceremoniously disposed of! In the last race the hero doesn't only drive a new car - he drives the villain's car!

Another great still from the press kit. I can't even tell what colour this car is.

Dammit Need for Speed, this isn't how the genre works. You can't just plop the hero in a car coded as murderously evil and expect us to get emotionally invested in this final race. It's like Luke Skywalker showing up for the big Death Star brou-ha-ha in a TIE Fighter! It's like Batman infiltrating the Joker's hideout while dressed as a clown! It's like James Bond spending an entire film stroking a white fluffy cat! It's just not on!

All that said, it's doubtful that Need for Speed could ever have worked with Aaron Paul cast as the lead. He's just awful; looking disarmingly like Dec from Ant and Dec and speaking in the kind of deep 'gargles with gravel' voice that you usually only hear from people trying to take the piss out of action heroes. Though he's obviously worked out quite a bit for the role, he doesn't have a chin at all. Given that by necessity the car hero will be shot in profile from the passenger's seat, this is a critical flaw. The pinnacle of this catastrophe is the scene where he sees his friend in a burning wreck; Paul marching into straight into Pythonesque over-acting, yelling "Nooooooo!" over and over again. I think at one point he may even have sunk to his knees and waved his fist at the sky!

Nobody really comes out this smelling of roses, though Imogen Poots at least seems to recognise this dialogue as utterly ridiculous. Michael Keaton, who it's always nice to see, even in trash like this, comes out similarly unscathed - though largely because his character never interacts with anyone and is confined to one room.

I guess there's some worth in the car action, at bare minimum there's a palpable physical sensation of motion and speed - but without the emotional and spiritual underpinning that's critical for a successful car film it's all so much antiseptic. If you're into this stuff you may as well just watch Top Gear or something, or preferably a better, purer and more sincere car movie.

★★

Need for Speed is on general release now.

Monday, April 22, 2013

'The Look of Love' (2013) directed by Michael Winterbottom

Monday, April 22, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

This movie stars Steve Coogan, it also features Stephen Fry, Matt Lucas, David Walliams, Dara O'Briain, Chris Addison, Sarah Solemani, Simon Bird and James Lance. All are famous for being incredibly funny. So you could be forgiven for thinking that The Look of Love is a comedy. It isn't. Or, if it is, it's not a funny one. This is a very strange goose; the film has a comedy pedigree second to none, the director's previous films with Coogan, A Cock and Bull Story and Twenty Four Hour Party People are both nicely pitched comedy dramas that exploit Coogan's distinctive charm to their own ends. His TV show, The Trip, also starring Coogan was actually perfect, knowing exactly what it wanted to achieve and effortlessly succeeding. But The Look of Love is strangely passionless, a film not quite sure either what it wants to do or what it wants to say.

‘A Late Quartet’ (2012) directed by Yaron Zilberman

Wednesday, April 3, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

To devote yourself to mastering a single craft takes an insane amount of discipline, dedication and perseverance. A Late Quartet shows us a tumultuous period in the life of the successful ‘Fugue String Quartet’, examining the physical and emotion toll of achieving musical perfection. The quartet consists of four outstanding actors: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Catherine Keener and Mark Ivanir. All have their quirks and issues, and all bounce off one another in increasingly destructive ways.

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