Taking Barack To The Movies

REVIEW: The Grey (dir. Carnahan)

2012-01-29T09:26:00.026+05:00

Is Liam Neeson's the last voice you'd want to hear before you die? An early scene in Joe Carnahan's tough, magnificent film The Grey, answers that question, although the title is ambiguous. After much consultation with my date, I have decided it refers to either a) the soft striation of hair at Liam Neeson's temples; 2) the delicate period of mid-life at which, rather than date models or a buy a porsche, Neeson has decided to reinvent himself as an action hero; or c) the pack of ravening wolves picking off his band of air-crash survivors as they claw their way through the snowy arctic tundra. Let's try c). Next to the manufactured conflicts and airy kill-ratios of your average Hollywood thriller, The Grey is a keening, white-knuckled scrap of a film — these guys have a real fight on their hands, the wind at their backs, the wolves at their heels, and death settling on their spirits like chloroform. Joe Carnahan's film is all the things action films like to think of themselves as being — tough, edgy, flinty, gritty, etc — but mostly aren't, and adds a wind-chapped sense of Fatalism you almost don't recognise so long has it been since you felt it at the cinema: when was the last time you looked at a man on screen and thought 'that man is going to die,' and felt it, not as a brief fillip of excitement, but a deep, low bone-marrow certainty somewhere in your solar plexus. The film's surgeon-like calm is riveting. "In about five seconds I am going to start beating the shit out of you," says Liam Neeson at one point and both the directness of the writing and Neeson's low, urgent delivery cut through the bombast of the multiplex like wire through wedding cake: the large Saturday night audience I watched it with last night sat there in something close to awe, silenced. This film was serious. It seemed to contain important information about life and death and God and the fine art of attaching shotgun shells to the end of long pointy sticks to defend yourself against a line of advancing wolves. Good to know. I could have done without the flashbacks to Neeson's father — we already have a dead wife — but otherwise: a minor classic, the first exceptional film of 2012. B+

ON MY IPOD: January 2012

2012-01-28T05:15:00.005+05:00

1. You Belong In My Arms — Chairlift
2. Simple Song — The Shins
3. Going Home — Charlie Haden & Hank Jones
4. Empty Threat — Kathleen Edwards
5. Mariachi — Ani diFranco
6. Dream a Little Dream — Eddie Vedder
7. Change The Sheets _ Kathleen Edwards
8. Summertime Sadness — Lana Del Ray
9. Into Giants — Patrick Watson
10. We Take Care of Our Own — Bruce Springsteen

Those Oscar nominations in full

2012-01-25T04:53:00.013+05:00

I was thinking of posting about the Oscar nominations, but thanks to the six month long blogathon that is the awards season these days that I almost feel like the winners have already been announced. The whole thing feels thoroughly pre-masticated. Hasn't everyone known for months now that The Artist is going to win? That Viola Davis and George Clooney are the most likely best actors, with Christopher Plummer and Octavia Spencer shoe-ins for supporting? Many of the Oscar blogs, faced with the chiselled inevitability of all this, have take on a fractious tone of late, one even asking its readers their vote for Most Likely Upset would be if the field weren't so pre-determined — like school kids dreaming up Unlikely Ends for teacher. I am glad for Rooney Mara and also for The Tree of Life — I appreciate the novelty-factor of the Academy going for someone like Malick. I'm not too outraged by Albert Brooks' omission — I found his turn in Drive a little chewy — and I applaud the snubbing of Harry Potter — an appalling series of films — but am sullen at the prospect of further glory for Scorsese's fancy dud, Hugo, disheartened by Bennett Miller's snub and even more so by the score excludees: Mychael Danna (Moneyball), Trent Reznor (Dragon Tattoo) and Cliff Martinez (Drive). Which means I don't have a horse in the race, though I would, of course, use my sofa as a trampoline if Brad Pitt won.

INTERVIEW: Christoph Waltz

2012-01-23T18:58:00.006+05:00

'Over by the pool, in the shade of some lime trees, James Franco is being pitched a movie about a couple in space (“the music is going to be really important” he insists.) The hotel’s entrance, meanwhile, is being converted into a red carpet run for this evening’s party, for W magazine, at which the fanboys and paparazzi will clamor, hoping for a glimpse of Charleze Theron or Tilda Swinton (“We love you Tilda!”). It’s hard when considering the change in Waltz’ fortunes not to be awed by the sheer heft of American soft power — the entertainment industry’s ability to pluck a man from East Finchley tube station, and set him down next to Charleze Theron.

“When I say I can’t believe it, trust me: that’s the truth,” says Waltz, wearing a long grey-streaked beard, that he has grown out for a role and fondles often. “But look. I started when I was 19, now I’m 55. I didn’t come up that fast. This is very exciting and wonderful that it happens at all. If it happens to a 25 year-old or a 20-year-old and they say they can’t believe it, its kind of obvious because almost anything else would be beyond his belief as well. I have a different perspective. After 30 years if you haven’t understood certain realities in this business, you’d have a different problem.”

The Polanski film is Carnage, an adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s play, Gods of Carnage, about two Brooklyn couples — played by Waltz, Kate Winslett, John C Reilly and Jodie Foster — at war after their respective sons get into an altercation in the park. It’s basically a four-way cat fight, doused liberally with Scotch, with Waltz playing gleeful ringmaster, delighting in the thinly-veiled savagery beneath everyone’s civilized veneer. “Its my comedy,” he says. “I consider this character the only one I’ve played with his two bits together. Kate’s too a little bit. She’s more erratic but I think he’s the only one who doesn’t sway. He sticks to his reality.”

Waltz speaks in softly-accented, sibilant-heavy English, with slightly lunatic precision, his long chin lending him an air somewhere between impish and lubricious. He could be a professor of drama at an obscure redbrick university whose students speculate as to whether he pays women to walk across his back in stilletos every night. There is a distinct hint of kinkiness to Waltz who, in a Pythonesque comedy segment taped for The Jimmy Kimmel Show, filmed shortly after his Oscar win, was shown lip-syncing a lyric-less folk song (“tro-lo-lo-lo-lo”), while humping various household objects — a lamp, a telephone, a ukulele — all intercut with a fake BBC interview in which he answered sober questions about his acting career (“in a way the strive, the quest, becomes the goal…”).

A surreal send-up of actorish affectation, a neat joke deflecting the horrors in his own back catalogue, it was also completely bonkers. Imagine Ralph Fiennes doing something similar after Schindler’s List and you realize how fully Waltz takes his place at the head of an illustrious table of Teutonic eccentrics which goes back to Klaus Kinski and fellow Austrian, Egon Schiele. The news that he once played Friedrich Nietzche in a German-French co-production should come as no surprise; there’s no mistaking the megalomaniac gleam to Waltz’s eye or the imperious jut of that chin. Those 30 years spent in obscurity seem to have lent his performances — as an SS officer in Inglorious Basterds, the villain of The Green Hornet, a sadistic circus master in Water for Elephants — a jack-in-the-box floridity.

It’s not hard to see why Tarantino liked him so much. Waltz’s obscurity was key: he kept Waltz from rehearsing too much with the other actors, and when he did told him to tone down the performance. “He didn’t want the others to get too comfortable with me. He wanted this insecurity on their part.” Only when the cameras rolled did he let loose: digging into the part of polyglot SS sadist Hans Lauda as if kissing each word in the script, his performance tip-toeing up to the edge of over-acting, dancing on the line, and then, with a dainty pirhouette, swan-diving into the end-zone — postmodern caricature meets Brechtian commedia dell'arte. “I revel in his writing, I really do,” says Waltz. “You can really play. You don’t just have to say it, you can do all thing with it, turn it upside down. And it will still hold. It will not fall apart. It does not require one singular delivery on which it depends. You can’t harm it. He’s a genius. I am completely, unconditionally devoted.”

The two men are now good friends, and are often to be found around the director’s Mulholland Drive mansion watching rare 35mm prints of old films, salvaged from closed-down theatres and distribution companies. Tarantino provides the post-match commentary — “maybe the story is contrived but he’ll go ‘yes but look at this actor….’” says Waltz. Other times, “we will meet for dinner without a single sentence uttered about movies.” In LA, and around Quentin Tarantino’s house in particular, that is what is known as a ‘comfortable silence.’'

— from my interview with Christoph Waltz in The Sunday Times

The world in which we live in

2012-01-22T22:00:00.010+05:00

"In a N.Y. Times interview with former Village Voice film critic Jim Hoberman, co-authors A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis include a quote that struck a chord with me. Hoberman mentions Francois Truffaut's Shoot The Piano Player as "the first movie I really wanted to live." He meant that Truffaut's film was the first "sacred text...a kind of synthesis" that he really want to live in... I used to dream about submerging myself in the 1959 world of North By Northwest, providing I was well dressed and had lots of cash in my pockets. In the early '80s I wanted to live inside Michael Mann's Thief, and inside Heat and The Insider in the '90s. I do know that one realm I would never, ever want to live in would be the world of Jason Statham movies. That would be hell." – Hollywood Elsewhere

For me it breaks down more specifically: the russian hotel in Fincher's Benjamin Button and the writing cabin in Dragon Tattoo, Deckard's apartment in Blade Runner, the lantern-filled atrium in Raise the Red Lantern, the French's Veronique's bedroom-in-a-rain-storm in The Double Life of Veronique, the prairie house in Days of Heaven, the Parisian shopping bits of The Conformist, yes of course to the overnight train in North by Northwest, Jimmy Stewart's apartment in Rear Window, and the top floor of Katherine Hepburn's mansion in Holiday.

And the Oscar nominations (should) go to....

2012-01-22T05:55:00.052+05:00

Best Film: Moneyball, Rise of the Planet of The Apes, Win Win, The Descendants, Beginners, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Best Director: Alexander Payne (The Descendants), Bennett Miller (Moneyball), Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive), David Fincher (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), Mike Mills (Beginners)

Best Actor: Brad Pitt (Moneyball), Paul Giametti (Win Win), Viggo Mortenson (A Dangerous Method), George Clooney (The Descendants), Jean Dujardin (The Artist)

Best Actress: Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Macy May Marlene), Olivia Coleman (Tyrannosaur), Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn), Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids)

Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer (Beginners), Colin Firth (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), Corey Stohl (Midnight in Paris), Ralph Fiennes (Harry Potter And the Deathly Hallows), John Hawkes (Martha Macy May Marlene)

Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer (The Help), Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids), Judy Greer (The Descendants), Melanie Laurent (Beginners), Amy Ryan (Win Win)

Best Original Screenplay: A Separation, Win Win, Midnight in Paris, Bridesmaids, Beginners

Best Adapted Screenplay: Moneyball, The Descendants, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Drive, A Dangerous Method

Best Score: Mychael Danna (Moneyball), Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), Ludovic Bource (The Artist), Harry Escott (Shame), Cliff Martinez (Drive)

Best Art Direction: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Hugo, Water For Elephants, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Drive

Best Costumes: A Dangerous Method, Hugo, The Descendants, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Artist

Best Editing: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Drive, Moneyball, The Artist, The Descendants

Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki (The Tree Of Life), Peter Suchitzsky (A Dangerous Method), Jeff Cronenweth (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), Wally Pfister (Moneyball), Van Hoytema (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

Best Visual Effects: Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Transformers 3, Hugo, Super 8, The Adventures Of Tin Tin

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (8), Moneyball (7), The Descendants (7), Drive (5), Win Win (4), Beginners (4), The Artist (4), A Dangerous Method (4), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (3), Hugo (3), Martha Macy May Marlene (2), Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2), Midnight in Paris (2), Bridesmaids (2)

Why the Golden Globes beat the Oscars

2012-01-14T09:33:00.008+05:00

My piece about the Golden Globes for Slate:—

'Imagine a world in which most of the cosmic injustices perpetuated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not take place. I know it’s hard, with the wound of of The King’s Speech’s victory over The Social Network so fresh but imagine a world in which Fincher’s film had been victorious; a world where Brokeback Mountain did not lose out to Crash; Where E.T. beat Ghandi, where Chinatown won Best Film and Coppola Best director for Apocalypse Now. Oh, and while we’re at it, an armful of trophies for Some Like Hot and a little something for Alfred Hitchcock.

Before someone objects on the grounds of cruelty, let me reassure you: this fragrant arcadia exists. It is the world as reflected back to us in those big shiny iridescent orbs, the Golden Globes. I’ve never understood the vilification rained down on the Globes every year—"the entertainment industry's dirty little secret," "just a group of whores from other countries," “a non-event raised to epic proportions by Dick Clark getting them a network television slot,” “a scam that would make Bernie Madoff blush." Agreed, the organization comprises a deeply suspect cabal of just 83 foreign ”journalists,” writing for such illustrious journals as Malaysia's Galaxie magazine and Australia's FilmInk, who appear to dish out nominations on the basis of which star can be persuaded to get drunk with them on awards night, in return for a boost for their Oscar chances. So the Globes are venal, easily corrupted and wish for nothing more than to get drunk with Sharon Stone: so, too, do half my friends.

The scandal is not that the Golden Globes are handed out by a bunch of star-struck foreign hacks with lucrative sidelines in the world of hairdressing and personal fitness; the greater scandal is that a bunch of star-struck, scandal-ridden foreign hacks make aesthetic choices that are consistently the equal of, if not better than, those of the 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They gave best director to Francis Ford Coppola for Apocalypse Now rather than Robert Benton for Kramer vs Kramer. They went for Tom Hanks when he was still funny, in Big, long before everyone came down with a case of the Gumps. The same for Murray, Murphy, Roberts and Carrey. And they were the only major awards group to spot Marilyn Monroe’s gifts as a comedienne, giving her Best Actress for her performance in Some Like It Hot, a film which won an armful of Globes but limped away from Academy awards with just a single lousy Oscar: best costume.

Actually what they gave Monroe was “Best Actress in a Motion Picture (Comedy or Musical),” not the sweetest of endearments, but one pointing to the single most important reason why the Globes taste profile feels so supple when compared to that of the fusty old Academy: they recognize comedy. The Oscars, on the other hand, are the place the entertainment industry goes to be reassured that it is not just in the business of entertainment. For 364 days of the year the good citizens of Hollywood graze elbows and knees in their efforts to put bums on cinema seats. Then, come January, they clutch their foreheads, stare into the middle distance, and attempt to divine whether the anti-racism tract playing on their flat screen TVs is, in fact, art—a vague and amorphous term, that strikes terror in the heart of the average studio executive. The Oscars are first and foremost designed to alleviate that terror. The question the awards are concerned with is not “what film marks the greatest artistic effort?” but “which film can best be defend against the charge of philistinism?” Hence their nose for films garlanded with extra-curricular socio-political-humanitarian importance—Ghandi, Platoon, Dances With Wolves, A Beautiful Mind, Crash — designed to Hollywood feel good about itself for one night, but which everybody else forgets almost instantaneously.

Spend some time with the list of Golden Globes winners for Best Musical or Comedy—a list which includes The Apartment, The Graduate, M.A.S.H., Tootsie, Prizzi’s Honor, Hannah And Her Sisters, Working Girl, The Player, Toy Story 2, Almost Famous, Sideways, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Lost in Translation—and it reads suspiciously like the list of films we will actually be watching in 50 years time, once Crash is but a distant blip in our rear view mirrors.

Of course, the Globes do not completely sidestep the marsh of the middlebrow. They preferred Love Story to Patton, Gigi to Vertigo and The Greatest Show on Earth to Singing in the Rain. Notoriously, they named Pia Zadora Newcomer of the Year after her husband showered the HFPA with lavish parties. They nominated Sharon Stone in The Muse after her representative plied them with 82 gold watches. And in 2009 they nominated The Tourist for Best Motion Picture, Actor, and Actress seemingly out of nothing more than an intense desire to clap eyes on the sinuous forms of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie hopping tables.

“The Golden Globes are not taken seriously as artistic milestones and have a history of voting idiosyncrasies,” noted the New York Times recently. “The group tends to nominate based on star wattage instead of performance in an effort to orchestrate a red-carpet spectacle." As opposed to the rest of us, who like to take in Bresson films with the bed-sheets tucked into our armpits, sucking on a lemon. I would put this the other way around: It is in the warmth of the welcome they give movie stars that the Globes give the slip to the insincere self-admonishments of the Academy and score their deepest consonance with the viewing habits of actual live human beings. They do not worship at the altar of Star Uglification. They do not give awards to anyone found within a 20-mile radius of a fictional concentration camp. While the Academy was going bonkers for Roberto Benigni, the Globes handed best actor to Jim Carrey for The Truman Show. Nor are they in the lifetime achievement business. In 1999, while the Academy was waxing nostalgic with Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules, the Globes were too busy being electrified by Tom Cruise in Magnolia.

In other words: the Globes recognize stars quicker and earlier, while they still have some life in them. In 1995, while the Academy was coming over all mopey with Susan Sarandon for her part in the turgid death-row drama Dead Man Walking, the globes went to Sharon Stone for her part in Casino and Nicole Kidman for her frisky, star-making turn in To Die For—long before she had donned a fake nose to win the Oscar. The list of performances rewarded at the Globes but not the Oscars goes on—Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, John Travolta in Get Shorty, Cruise in Jerry Maguire, George Clooney in Oh Brother Where Art Thou, Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums, Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, Sasha Baron Cohen in Borat, Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada...

It reads like a list from an alternate universe, where entertainers are rewarded, for being, you know, entertaining. If the Academy is serious about its search for younger viewers, I would suggest they take a leaf out of the Globes book, and 1) Supply more alcohol. Watching George Clooney get up and be witty on a couple of glasses of Scotch is almost exactly what Hollywood should be about. 2) Loosen the fatwa against comedy and comic performances. And 3) Don’t punish stars for ‘being themselves.’ It’s a rarer gift than mere acting. Bill Murray has won a Golden Globe. He has never won an Oscar. I rest my case.'

THE GOLDEN GLOBES’ BEST CALLS

— In the Golden Globes first ceremony in 1951, Billy Wilder wins Best Director for Sunset Boulevard. The Oscar that year goes to George Stevens for A Place In The Sun.

— East of Eden (1955) wins Best Motion Picture (Drama) and a posthumous acting award for James Dean. At the Oscars it is bested by Marty.

— Alfred Hitchcock wins the Golden Globe for Best TV Show for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1958) — not much but it beats his zero wins at the Academy Awards.

— Some Like It Hot (1959) wins the Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) Best Actor (Jack Lemmon) and Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. At the Oscars it wins only Best Costume.

—Peter O’Toole wins the Best Actor (Drama) for his role in Beckett (1964) and subsequently wins three more golden Globes. Despite being nominated for an Academy Awards 8 times he wins none, necessitating an honorary Oscar in 2003.
— Al Pacino wins Best Actor for his performance in Serpico (1973). The Best Actor Oscar that year goes to Jack Lemmon for Save the Tiger.
— Chinatown (1974) wins Golden Globes for Best Actor, Best Motion Picture (Drama), Best Director and Best Screenplay. At the Oscars it wins only Screenplay. Best Actor that year goes to Art Carney for Harry and Tonto.

— Apolcaypse Now (1979) wins Best and Best Supporting actor for Robert Duvall. The directing Oscar that year goes to Robert Benton for Kramer vs Kramer. Duvall wins the Oscar four years later for Tender Mercies.

— E.T. Wins Best Motion Picture (drama). The Best Film Oscar, like much else that year, goes to Ghandi.
— John Huston wins Best Director for Prizzi’s Honor (1985). At the Oscars, Best Director goes to Sydney Pollack for Out of Africa.

— Tom Hanks wins Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical for his performances in Big (1988). At the Oscars, Dustin Hoffman wins Best Actor for Rain Man.

— Jim Carrey wins Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical for The Truman Show (1998). That year, the best actor Oscar goes to Roberto Benigni for Life Is Beautiful
— Tom Cruise wins Best Supporting Actor for his role in Magnolia (1999). The Best Supporting Actor Oscar goes to Michael Caine for The Cider House Rules.

— Robert Altman wins Best Director for Gosford Park (2001). That year, the directing Oscar goes to Ron Howard for A Beautiful Mind.

— Brokeback Mountain (2005) wins Best Director for Ang Lee and Best Motion Picture (Drama). At the Oscars, Best Film goes to Crash.

— The Social Network wins Best Motion Picture (drama), best director and Best Adapted screenplay. At the Oscars it loses Best Film and Director to The King’s Speech.

BEST FILMS OF 2011 (Final)

2011-12-30T06:52:00.023+05:00

So I've seen War Horse now and it's slotted neatly into place at number 7. Not the greatest of Spielberg's films — the central performance by Jeremy Irvine is the weak link here, with his simpering soprano voice and suspiciously smooth complexion; and who knew that 1916 Devon boasted, among its floral and fauna, such a sizeable population of 1,000-watt arc lights — but I was newly wowed by Spielberg's unembarrassable command of the big emotions: barely 20 minutes in, family honor had been restored by a ploughing scene, and I was a mess. Compared to the anaemic grip on our emotions exercise by most of the year's films, War Horse exudes a muscular confidence, it's emotional power all the more to be admired given its episodic structure: every 20 minutes a new set of characters are introduced and yet you can feel the gravitational pull of each almost instantaneously. Outstanding were Benedict Cumberpatch as a superbly stiff-spined officer ("be brave!") who could have commanded me to stand to attention on my seat and I would have obeyed; also a beautifully grizzled Niels Arestrop, silver-haired and squashed of feature, with possibly the most beautiful voice in movies right now — all sand and molasses. Richard Curtis's script could have done with a prune — I remain unconvinced that "as if" was common currency in 1916 and "git" should never be used of a man heading into no man's land unless you are scripting an episode of Blackadder — but the film's so-called homage to the technicolor vistas and sweeping emotions of the 1940s and 1950s feels full-throated, unironic, immersive. There's not a wink of self-consciousness to the whole thing: it's as wholesome and stirring as a hymn. B+

1. Moneyball A-
2. Win Win A-
3. Rise of the Planet of the Apes B+
4. The Descendants B+
5. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo B+
6. Beginners B+
7. Martha Macy May Marlene B+
8. The Artist B+
9. Drive B+
10. War Horse B+

11. Living In The Material World B+
12. Bridesmaids B
13. Bill Cunningham New York B
14. A Separation B
15. Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy B
16. Shame B
17. The Tree Of Life B
18. A Dangerous Method B
19. The Adventures of Tin Tin: Secret of the Unicorn B
20. Take Shelter B
21. Cedar Rapids B
22. Hanna B
23. Friends with Benefits B
24. The Lincoln Lawyer B
25. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol B-

The unbearable lightness of Spielberg

2011-12-26T07:23:00.026+05:00

"... For Spielberg, violence is no Hemingway-esque test, it’s just an awful thing to be avoided at all costs and to be faced only if it’s absolutely unavoidable. He’s in the line of Eddie Cantor, Bob Hope, Woody Allen—a self-preserving adventurer, a timid homebody cast into troubled waters, an unambiguous opponent of death and anything that may cause it... The lust for violence is as alien to Spielberg as is lust itself; there’s no place in his work for any perverse ecstasy of suffering or of its infliction. (And far be it from this timid desk-jockey to suggest otherwise. But I’d hardly call my own modest comfort the engine of art—rather, it’s what I look to art to challenge.) Spielberg is an Id-free filmmaker, one with seemingly no wildness and no sympathy, overt or latent, for the devil. And it seems somehow churlish to feel cheated by its absence, as if one were ragging on niceness itself. Given Spielberg’s incontrovertible commercial success, calling out the hollow core of his work feels like laying oneself open to the charge of élitism, of “hating Hollywood” (a glance at my best-of lists should make it plain that I don’t)—as if it were the job of anyone but a studio publicist to endorse the industry as a whole rather than its best works." — Richard Brody, The Front Row

Firstly, I agree that Tin Tin ring a little hollow next to Spielberg's best work, but I do not agree that all of his work is hollow, and suspect the age-old prejudice against optimists is at work here. “It’s a strange critical phenomenon that only works of art that are ‘edgy’ or ‘scary’ or ‘dangerous’ are regarded as in anyway noteworthy,” wrote Nick Hornby recently. ““Can’t we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer? Please?” One should tread carefully: Brody has the critical consensus of a century to back him up. “Like the orange, Matisse’s work is a fruit bursting with light,” wrote Apollinaire in 1918. Picasso’s work, on the other hand “offers a thousand opportunities for meditation, all illuminated by an internal light. Beyond that light, however, lies an abyss of mysterious darkness... is this not the greatest aesthetic effort we have ever witnessed?” Got that? Light = lightweight. Dark = the greatest aesthetic effort in the history of mankind. (Matisse was aghast at his friend’s bias. “If people knew," he said, "what Matisse, the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome . . . they would also realise that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.”) For Matisse vs Picasso read Lennon vs McCartney, Spielberg vs Scorsese, Morrissey vs the Pet Shop Boys, or any other of the cultural multiple choices by which it is determined whether you are un homme serieux, with the soul of a Russian, or a irretrievable lightweight with the depth of a puddle. When Carol Ann Duffy recently wrote in the pages of the New York Review of Books about a Ted Hughes poem that “seems to touch a deeper, darker place than any poem he’s ever written,” (it was about who Hughes was shagging the weekend Slyvia Plath committed suicide) we assume she meant it as praise. "Dark means serious,” commented Peter Steinfeld wrote on the Commonweal blog. “Dark means shadows. Dark means not evading the sad and inexplicable complexities of life.”

Why though? Why is darkness more profound? Press most people on the issue and you don't get much more than tautology in response: "it just is." I strongly suspect the reasons may be more temperamental than philosophical. For my part, I simply prefer McCartney to Lennon, Spielberg to Scorsese, and Matisse to Picasso and I do so because I have the same recoil from morbidity that Brody has from untormented artistic souls. I do have any argument to hand to prove that optimists have it "right," that they are "better" than pessimists. I do take mild issue with the assertion that Spielberg "is an Id-free filmmaker, one with seemingly no wildness and no sympathy, overt or latent, for the devil" but I would not contest it's underlying truth. What bugs me is that Spielberg is seen as a lesser artist on account of it. Where is it written that "perverse ecstasy of suffering", "sympathy for the devil" and a "lust for violence" are prerequisites for genuine artistic achievement? I get that these things look sexier on one's CV, but why not delight, consolation, light-heartedness, transcendence, good cheer and sympathy for the better angels of our natures that sit in the cockpits of brightly-colored UFOs? What about — to use a slightly embarrassing term — spiritual values? The equation of darkness with profundity is a largely 20th century development, traceable in part and in broad outline to the decline of organised religion. Roll back the centuries and things start to lighten up, quite literally. The Renaissence is shot through with shafts of Godly radiance; in Paradise Lost, He is variously described as "the Eternal coeternal beam," "bright essence increate," and "pure ethereal stream,” obscured by his own brilliant light, an image unmatched in Western culture until the release of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. Try as I might I cannot find that film "hollow" or certainly any more so than the morbidity of Aronofsky or the misanthropy of Fincher. Maybe there's no argument to be won here. Half the problem, it seems to me, is that cultural Eeyores are the only ones interested in arguing such things; which is why they always win the arguments. Arguing the toss against optimism is what they spend their time training to do. (I picture an Al Qeada-style training camp, in which Beckett wonks compete with Schopenhauer nerds on the monkey bars to see who get to the perverse ecstasy of suffering first. But that's enough about the offices of The New Yorker.) Which is why I was so heartened to read this, in A O Scott's review of War Horse:—

"Mr. Spielberg’s answers to this question tend to be hopeful, and his taste for happy, or at least redemptive endings is frequently criticized. But his ruthless optimism, while it has helped to make him an enormously successful showman, is also crucial to his identity as an artist, and is more complicated than many of his detractors realize. “War Horse” registers the loss and horror of a gruesomely irrational episode in history, a convulsion that can still seem like an invitation to despair. To refuse that, to choose compassion and consolation, requires a measure of obstinacy, a muscular and brutish willfulness that is also an authentic kind of grace."

There. A generous, lovely thought.

BEST FILMS of 2011 (updated)

2011-12-25T11:20:00.031+05:00

Not much time to post but my original top ten thoughts here. I found Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a lot warmer than people have been saying, certainly when set next to Se7en and Zodiac. Fincher gets their odd-angled relationship with unexpected tenderness — there's something of a Klute vibe to the pairing of Mara and Craig, one damaged but tough, the other shambolic but gentle. I was impressed with Daniel Craig's gentleness, wardrobe and writing cabin, the most inviting interior in a Fincher film since Benjamin Button holed up in a Moscow hotel with Tilda Swinton and a bottle of vodka. Fincher's lighting and color palette are consistently exquisite and exquisitely morbid, his shadows infused with burnt ochres, blues and Rothko magentas. He makes light appear bruised. There's nothing he can do about the plotting - the book's highhandedness with regard to clues and characters remains intact - but it wraps up satisfyingly, with a great 'Hello Darkness My Old Friend' moment and Salander loosed upon an unsuspecting world, Lecterishly. B+

1. Moneyball A
2. Win Win A-
3. Rise of the Planet of the Apes B+
4. The Descendants B+
5. Martha Marcy May Marlene B+
6. Beginners B+
7. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo B+
8. Drive B+
9. The Artist B+
10. Living In The Material World B+
11. Bridesmaids B
12. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy B
13. Bill Cunningham New York B
14. The Adventures of Tin Tin: Secret of the Unicorn B
15. Friends with Benefits B
16. A Separation B
17. Shame B
18. The Tree Of Life B
19. A Dangerous Method B
20. Take Shelter B
21. Cedar Rapids B
22. Hanna B
23. The Lincoln Lawyer B
24. Submarine B-
25. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol B-

QUOTE of the DAY: Wolcott on Metropolitan

2011-12-24T05:46:00.003+05:00

"The poignance of the film--akin to the poignance of Barry Levinson’s Diner--is our understanding that this is the last time the gang will be together before the diaspora of adulthood, and that they are already nostalgic for what they haven’t quite left behind. A cloud of reminiscence hangs over the characters as they’re starting to miss something that hasn’t yet gone. Fewer movies better evoke the vague melancholy and tonic anticipation of that interregnum of being home between semesters, suspended between graduation and grownup-hood, that unhurried pause at the station-stop before the next stage of your life begins; a melancholy that suits the Christmas season, where the holiday lights and decorations accent the darkness of winter deep backgrounding everything. Christmas always seems slightly elegiac. The streets are cold, it’s hard to get a cab, and your jacket isn’t warm enough--Metropolitan captures that chill discomfort and how the conversations that string between two people walking from one bleak stretch of the block to the corner are part of the invisible wiring of the city, the connective tissue through which memories, memoirs, novels, and, yes, movies are eventually made." — James Wolcott, VF

2011-12-23T04:50:00.003+05:00

Someone has turned Michelle Williams into a pop star

REVIEW: Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol

2011-12-22T08:11:00.015+05:00

Looking a little thick around the midriff these days, his locked shoulders in urgent need of a massage, Tom Cruise radiates a dry-ice shimmer of thinly-controlled rage in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Entering rooms, he is tense, bunched, jumpy, like an Olympic athlete awaiting the starter's gun; barking orders at his fellow spies, his tendons seem to shiver and twang like ship's cable. Watching a Cruise performance these days is much like watching him execute a daily work out. He huffs, puffs, blows, clenches, tenses, springs, swings, pivots his way through Ghost Protocol with such grim-faced determination that you half expect a contingent of Chinese judges at the end holding up score cards that read, "9.8." "9.9." "10". He seems at his most happiest — certainly at his most relaxed— when swinging from the rigging of 130-floor middle-eastern skyscrapers. Held by a thin guy rope, he runs up, down and around the building as if jogging around the block, seemingly oblivious to the vertiginous drop below. Cruise takes great pride in his stunt-work and rightly so. From the beginning, what has nudged the Mission Impossible series ahead of the rest of the pack is its star's willingness to dedicate his physical form in the cause of seamless trompe l'oeil derring-do — to use his own body as a special effect. Ghost Protocol is neither the best nor the worst of the bunch, its plot the usual dose of symbolist vers libre involving nuclear codes, a Russian terrorist, a smashing looking French assassin (Lea Seydoux), some BMWs, a sand storm and Simon Pegg tapping urgently at his lap-top, in no particular order. Director Brad Bird models his set-pieces on a triple-decker club sandwich. So: Jeremy Renner must crack a vault using an anti-grav suit, Paula Patton must seduce a Mumbai billionaire (the guy from Slumdog Millionaire, in fact, and Cruise must chase down a suitcase in a giant BMW factory all at the same time. That these actions have nothing to do with one another is not the point; the points is for Bird and his editor to cut back and forth between them in such a fashion that you are seized by the immediate temptation to lower yourself into the nearest lift shaft in pursuit of Russian nuclear codes. I'm a huge Jeremy Renner fan but he's a little underwhelming here — these franchise parts don't conduct his particular brand of lightning. Patton is overly encouraged to emote about some dead hubby we've never heard of — huh? — and Pegg is intermittently amusing as the lily-livered Brit. But it's Cruise I was transfixed by. His early performances ran on glide rails; these days he looks ready to blow. When is someone going to let him? B-

The limits of manipulation

2011-12-20T07:25:00.010+05:00

"If there is one recurring image that defines the cinema of Steven Spielberg, it is The Spielberg Face. Eyes open, staring in wordless wonder in a moment where time stands still. But above all, a child-like surrender in the act of watching, both theirs and ours. It’s as if their total submission to what they are seeing mirrors our own. The face tells us that a monumental event is happening; in doing so, it also tells us how we should feel. If Spielberg deserves to be called a master of audience manipulation, then this is his signature stroke. You can’t think of the most iconic moments in Spielberg’s cinema without The Spielberg Face." — The Spielberg Face, Fandor

Let's be clear about what we mean here. It doesn't mean that Spielberg has carte blanche to "tell the audience how we should feel", as Fandor puts it. It's easy enough to disprove this: if Spielberg cut from a shot aliens landing to the face of an aroused woman, or from a shot of Americans being shot to a close-up of President Roosevelt smiling, the audience would not follow suit. We would likely recoil. In other words, Spielberg cannot dictate which emotion the audience is to feel. He can only guess what emotion we are likely to be feeling anyway and then augment it. He can guess right or he can guess wrong. His reputation rests on the fact that 99% of the time he guesses right, but that does not alter the mutuality of the arrangement. He follows us as surely as we follow him. 'Manipulation' is a misnomer. His primary activity is play. And like all games, his films require mutual assent. His films are not soliloques but conversations.

New favorite album alert!

2011-12-19T08:16:00.009+05:00

A late addition to my albums of the year: Gotye's Making Mirrors. If you put Steve Winwood, Beck and early Phil Collins into a blender you might come up with something similar to this second album from Australian singer/instrumentalist Wouter De Backer. I'd never heard of him before, but this album is easily and immediately one of my top three favorite records of 2011, mixing 60s soul, ska and eighties pop for a series of full-tilt, aerodynamic pop belters — notably I Feel Better, In Your Light and Somebody That I Used to Know — which achieve near vertical lift-off. B+

BEST POP SONGS of 2011

2011-12-16T02:33:00.019+05:00

1. Lucky Guy — The Belle Brigade
2. Bedouin Dress — Fleet Foxes
3. Immigrant Song — Karen O, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
4. Change the Sheets— Kathleen Edwards
5. Take Care — Drake & Rihanna
6. Hello — Martin Solveig & Dragonette
7. County Line — Cass McCombs
8. We Found Love — Rihanna
9. In Your Light — Gotye
10. Take Me Back Again — Teddy Thompson
11. Holocene — Bon Iver
12. Dust On The Dancefloor — The Leisure Society
13. Video Games — Lana del Ray
14. Hurts Like Heaven — Coldplay
15. 17 Hills — Thomas Dolby
16. You Always Come To Mind — Samantha Savage Smith
17. Lippy Kids — Elbow
18. Turning Tables — Adele
19. Domino — Jessie J
20. Fall Creek Boy's Choir — James Blake & Bon Iver

Why the Globes are better than the Oscars

2011-12-15T21:16:00.030+05:00

"The Golden Globes are not taken seriously as artistic milestones and have a history of voting idiosyncrasies; “True Grit” received no Globe nominationslast year, for instance, but went on to garner 10 nominations at the Academy Awards (albeit winning nothing). Studios have long complained that the group tends to nominate based on star wattage instead of performance in an effort to orchestrate a red-carpet spectacle." — NYT

"The Hollywood Foreign Press Association loves their stars. And that’s why there were really no surprises in their nominations for the Golden Globes this morning." — Deadline Hollywood

That's precisely why I've always preferred them to the Oscars. Unburdened by notions of phony prestige and false merit, honestly dazzled by stars and red-carpet spectacle, the Globes actually come closer to most moviegoers experience of the movies than the Oscars do. So the HFPA love their stars! What sinful wretches! Frankly I'm grateful at least one awards organization does something to stem the tide of 'respectability' sought by the modern film community. It kills what spark Hollywood has. To survey the history of the Golden Globes is to enter a fragrant Arcadia where all the great Oscar howlers of the last 30 years simply didn't happen. Where E.T. smushes Ghandi, Brokeback Mountain kicks Crash to the curb, and The Social Network roundly thrashes The King's Speech. Where both Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love win together. Where Tarantino is rewarded for Pulp Fiction, Annette Bening, Martin Scorsese and Eddie Murphy are not shut-outs, Roberto Benigni gets no look-in, Kate Winslet wins for Revolutionary Road rather than The Reader and Tom Hanks for Big way before Philadelphia. Where comedies are put on equal footing with dramas and films like Funny Girl, The Graduate, M.A.S.H, Breaking Away, Tootsie, Prizzi's Honor, Hannah And Her Sisters, Working Girl, The Player, Toy Story 2, Lost in Translation, Sideways, and The Hangover are all counted winners. The Globes lack of high-brow aspiration — the absence of artistic cred — is precisely why they get things right, more often than not. If this year they want to go a little gaga over Gosling, and give a fighting chance to David Fincher, Rooney Mara and Kristen Wiig, who is complaining?

Best Motion Picture, Drama
The Descendants
The Help
Hugo
The Ides of March
Moneyball
War Horse
Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy
50/50
The Artist
Bridesmaids
Midnight in Paris
My Week With Marilyn
Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Drama
George Clooney, The Descendants
Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar
Michael Fassbender, Shame
Ryan Gosling, The Ides of March
Brad Pitt, Moneyball
Best Actor in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy
Jean DuJardin, The Artist
Brendon Gleeson, The Guard
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, 50/50
Ryan Gosling, Crazy Stupid Love
Owen Wilson, Midnight in Paris
Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Drama
Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis, The Help
Rooney Mara, The Girl
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy
Jodie Foster, Carnage
Charlize Theron, Young Adult
Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids
Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn
Kate Winslet, Carnage
Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture
Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
Albert Brooks, Drive
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture
Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer, The Help
Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
Best Director
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
George Clooney, The Ides of March
Michael Hazanavicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Best Screenplay, Motion Picture
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
George Clooney, Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon, The Ides of March
Michael Hazanavicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, Nat Faxwon and Jim Rash, The Descendants
Steve Derian and Aaron Sorkin, Moneyball

Hugo: the kids are not alright

2011-12-15T18:17:00.015+05:00

Hugo dribbles on at the box office: $34 million at the last count. On its current course it should take about $50 million — a terrible figure for a kid's film costing $170 million, not an out-and-out bomb but perilously close. To give you some idea of figures for comparable films, the first Narnia film took $290, Bridge to Terebithia took $82 million, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory $206 million, Lemony Snicket $118 million, Jumanji $100 million, Toy Story $191 million. The critics love Scorsese's film. Scorsese fans are in seventh heaven. But the kids aren't buying. And yet Scorsese's sluggish marvel trundles through awards season, nobody says a word, and the critics continue to blame audiences for being too "mainstream" ("may be too esoteric for mainstream audiences", "may be an obstacle for mainstream acceptance" and so on). What on earth are they talking about? It's not Taxi Driver! It's a $170 million Christmas kid's movie in 3-D. I guess that's the problem with small children — too mainstream in their tastes. Bourgeois! Phillistines!

BEST ALBUMS / EPs of 2011

2011-12-15T07:57:00.024+05:00

1) The Belle Brigade — The Belle Brigade
2) Helplessness Blues — Fleet Foxes
3) Making Mirrors — Gotye
4) Ashes & Fire — Ryan Adams
5) 21 — Adele
6) So Beautiful Or So What — Paul Simon
7) Tough Cookie — Samantha Savage Smith
8) Bon Iver — Bon Iver
9) Experiments — Florrie
10) A Map of the Floating City — Thomas Dolby

BEST FILM SCORES of 2011

2011-12-15T07:30:00.015+05:00

1) Moneyball — Mychael Danna
2) The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
3) War Horse — John Williams
4) Shame — Harry Escott
5) Drive — Cliff Martinez
6) Rise of the Planet of the Apes — Patrick Doyle
7) We Bought a Zoo — Jonsi
8) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — Alberto Iglesias
9) Straw Dogs — Larry Groupe
10) Rango — Hans Zimmer

It's not been a great year for film scores (But what does that even mean, as if each individual piece of music were augmented, or diminished, by the company it keeps). What Howard Shore did on Hugo — a thin, constant dribble of mellodiousness, never quite rousing itself to a melody — was as close to muzak as a score gets. Despite Alexandre Desplat's work on no less than six films none of them came close to approaching the startling beauty of his score for Birth — he may be doing too much. And I don't think anyone could figure out what Thomas Newman was doing scoring The Help — least of all Newman. What have pan pipes to do with the American South? John Williams's Tin Tin score was surprisingly riff-free (very un-Indy-like), his score for War Horse much better (the good news: the first world war apparently doesn't merit angelic choirs, maybe because less Americans died?). Cliff Martinez's provided Drive with its electronic heart beat — and Refn's track selection (Kavinsky's Night Call, College's Real Hero) was the year's best bit of pop curatorship, alongside Cameron Crowe's pillaging of Jonsi for We Bought a Zoo. Harry Escott's score for Shame was suitably dire — the best use of Glenn Gould since The Silence of the Lambs (poor Gould: serial killers and sex addicts his cinematic lot). Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross gave us the world's first concept album soundtrack for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, much of it not stuff you would ever listen to again, with the exception of an astonishing cover of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song — all surging grandeur and whistle-clean production. But my winner has to be Mychael Danna's shimmering, minimalist accompaniment to Moneyball. Most film scores are present tense — 'this is happening now', they thump. Danna's is all tingly expectancy — future tense through and through. As Jonah Hill put it in a recent interview, Danna's score "watches the movie with you." Wonderfully put.

BEST FILM SCENES of 2011

2011-12-15T05:49:00.011+05:00

The St. Louis Gateway Film Critics Association have an interesting category for "best scene." Their 2011 nominees are as follows:—

"The Artist" (dance scene finale)
"Drive" (the elevator beating scene)
"Drive" (opening get-away scene)
"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" (opening credits)
"Hanna" (Hanna’s escape from captivity sequence)
"Melancholia" (the last scene)

I think they reason they're attracted to the elevator scene in Drive is because it is the worst scene in the movie — not the best — but I love the idea. My top ten would run as follows:—

1) The subway undressing in Shame
2) The daughter's song in Moneyball
3) Elle Faning's close-up in Super 8
4) The silent date in Beginners
5) The drowning of Ron Perlman in Drive
6) The final scene of The Artist (not the dance but what follows)
7) The murder attempt in Living in the Material World
8) Caeser's first word in Rise of the Planet of the Apes
9) Haddock's desert DTs in The Adventures of Tin Tin
10) The sex scene(s) in Friends with Benefits

BEST FILM of 2011: Moneyball (dir. Miller)

2011-12-13T00:52:00.045+05:00

1. Moneyball A
2. Win Win A-
3. Rise of the Planet of the Apes B+
4. The Descendants B+
5. Martha Marcy May Marlene B+
6. Beginners B+
7. War Horse B+
8. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo B+
9. Drive B+
10. The Artist B+

*A big asterisk: I have not yet seen War Horse.

I certainly didn't think it was going to be Moneyball. So let's work out why it wasn't the others. The Descendants has faded slightly, as many George Clooney films seem to: there's something about the Clooney penchant for endless nuance that blurs the bolder strokes that ensure memorability ("show me the money!"). Every time one of his pictures comes out, everyone runs around raving "I know you think you know George Clooney but you've never seen him like this before" and I go along, and see him wince with the left side of his face, as opposed to the right, and think: is that it? They get me every time, like Lucy suckering Charlie Brown with the football. Which is not to say that Payne's film isn't subtle, well-written, and packs a wallop at the end, but it also knows precisely how good it is, and the writing sometimes gets in the way (that first voiceover! that final speech! Oy). I think I preferred Sideways, which came animated by Paul Giametti's more cartoonish turn, and suggests Payne is better away from big stars (indeed, in interviews, he seems a little in denial about the fact that The Descendants has a star in it at all.) The Artist seemed slight to me. And Hugo was anything but — a vast, mechanical marvel, but lifeless until the final reel. Which leaves me with Win Win's rock-steady humanism, and the slow, righteous build of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Both those films feel like solid achievements to me. But Moneyball just sneaks it, that glorious hymn to the unsung, with its mixture of smarts and heart, it's lightly exultant climax and lovely, care-worn central performance Brad Pitt — one of the few truly surprising star turns I can remember, and my favorite of the year. (Unless Rooney Mara gets me at the final post. Or that horse godammit).

Best Films of 2010

REVIEW: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

2011-12-11T18:14:00.018+05:00

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy is a difficult film to assess because there are fantastic things in it — a plane descending into view behind a scene of dialogue until it's propellors appear to clip the actors; a small, sooty mark that appears on someone's cheek that turns out to be a bullet entry point; some extraordinary soundtrack choices probing the chintzier end of early seventies brass-band pop — but I was blessed with only the faintest inkling of what was going on at any given point. That I was never quite bored tells you just how close to greatness Tomas Alfredson's film cis: the twitchy, rats-in-a-sack treacherousness of the upper eschelons of British intelligence is marvellously conveyed; John Hurt goads everyone on with bitchy disgust, as if willing everyone to sink to a depth at which he can properly hate them; Colin Firth is so bouyed by hail-fellow good cheer that you have no option but to think him capable of perfect perfidy; and Gary Oldman's Smiley wields predatory silences that work on his interlocutors like a cold window pane sucking warmth from a room. But. If everyone had swapped dialogue with the person standing to their right, I would barely have noticed, not for several scenes at least, so benignly and trustingly was I assenting to every plot twist. The film is like a modernist deconstruction of a much more plodding, longer version of the same film, which exists somewhere — in Alfredson's head, or buried somewhere behind Oldman's bifocals — and which you can only discern glimpses of, through the nooks, crannies and ellipses of the film in front of you. Like reading an annotated Ulysses that is all annotations and no Ulysses. Who knows. I was on a night-time transatlantic flight when I saw it. If it watch it again on the return leg — defecting, so to speak — I may unearth more treasure. B

REVIEW: Shame (dir. McQueen)

2011-12-09T07:10:00.012+05:00

Steve McQueen's Shame may be the best date movie for married couples I've ever seen. Kate and I arrived to find a theatre sparsely populated with couples and retirees — the two groups who most need to be reminded that quick, hard hook-ups against the side of dumpsters are not all they're cracked up to be. "That looks so uncomfortable," whispered Kate at one point, but then her favorite movie is The Sound of Music. I see it as one of my ongoing life projects to ply her away from films about the pleasures of close-harmony singing and redirect her gently towards austere films featuring the music of Glenn Gould about the pleasureless slog of three-in-a-bed romps and 24-hour wanking. That's what Shame is about: the daily grind of being a sex addict. It kicks off with a spellbinding sequence in which Fassbender undresses a woman on the subway with his eyes — an entire sexual act unto itself, from first blush to to shaky aftermath. You half expect them to light up. There's even a stab at comedy: a scene in which Brandon goes on an actual date. As the poor girl starts to ply him with personal questions you can practically see the curtain come down in Fassbender's eyes: he's long gone. Fassbender has a great smile for the purposes of this film: tight and clenched, barely a smile at all — even having fun he looks like he's undergoing root canal. During the day he works at a high-paying but unspecified corporate job — there's talk of "pitches" and "viral campaigns" — but the unspecificity is purposeful, the vagueness enshrouding everything like low-lying cloud, or amnesia: his sister Cissy (Carey Mulligan) turns up unnaounced, in need of a place to crash while she performs at the Boom Boom room. Isn't that a rather chi-chi gig for someone as strung out as Cissy? Never mind. What matters are the cool, austere compositions and the abstract curlicues of dialogue left hanging in the air: "Your hard drive is filthy, "you want to play" and so on. This minimalism only becomes a problem las McQueen ratchets up the emotional temperature of the Fassbender-Mulligan confrontations and the two actors find themselves grabbing for lines of dialogue like "I'm trying to help you" and "What are you trying to do to me?" It's all a little actors work-shoppy — urgent but context-free. And the final descent is a little slow to get going – I wanted more dire intimations, maybe some consequences at work, to kick in at about the hour mark — but the ending has a pleasing grimness to it. Kate and I exited the cinema clinging to one another, grateful. B

2011-12-01T05:44:00.003+05:00

Daniel Day-Lewis photographed eating dinner at a restaurant in Virginia while shooting Lincoln

BEST PERFORMANCES of 2011

2011-11-29T08:22:00.080+05:00

For much of the year my favorite performance of was Ralph Fiennes's Voldemort in the final Harry Potter film. Voldemort has always been the best reason to sit through a Harry Potter film — a sinuous wraith, infused with the physical grace of Nureyev and the haggard fixity of Max Shreck, blue eyes blazing with hatred, ladylike wrists delicately cocked as he looses hellfire upon the denizens of Hogwarts. By the end Fiennes had layered him into a figure of tragic dimension: daring to believe that he might have that wretched boy within his grasp, positively giddy at the prospect of his death, before feeling his heart break again — the look on his face when Harry returns is unforgettably dire. March brought the sight of John C Reilly standing in a swimming pool with a trash lid on his head, too drunk to do anything but stare at Ed Helms making out with Ann Heche, like a child — a glorious sight, sad and funny and pathetic all at the same time; freed from Will Ferrell's side, Reilly seemed as liberated as Dudley Moore was from Peter Cooke — a man possessed of his own comedy djinn. I was tickled by Adrian Brody's Dali in Midnight in Paris, ("Dal-i!"), impressed by Hayley Atwell's upper-cut in Captain America and thrilled by the movie-star apprenticeship of Ryan Gosling, channeling McQueen, Delon and Rumblefish-era Mickey Rourke in Crazy Stupid Love and Drive. In decades to come, students of career chess will, I believe, study Gosling's tack-to-centre in 2011 as they now study Livitsky's classic moves. My crush of the year was Melanie Laurent, giving a performance as direct and pleasurable as sunlight on your skin in Mike Mills's Beginners. Jennifer Ehle was one of the best scientists I have ever seen — a wonderful mixture of blitheness and concentration — in Contagion. My favorite comic performance was Kristin Wiig's in Bridesmaids, mining a vein of spaz-out so loose-limbed and Thurberish she seemed capable of running into her own behind. My favorite piece of casting was Viggo Mortenson as Sigmund Freud, going big on the cigars and chiselled shrewdness but remembering to make him a voyager, feeling his way in the dark. "Columbus didn't know what country he'd discovered," he says, like Aragon on the threshold of Mordor, "only that he'd touched land." My favorite piece of type-casting was Amy Ryan's terrific mom in Win Win — tough and compassionate, quietly taking up residence as the movie's moral centre; in the same film, Paul Giamatti delivered one of his most yeoman-like performances — one with all the soft defeat of a deflated souffle. Jessica Chastain arrived aloft the pearlescent shell of Tree of Life like Botticelli's Venus, and quickly made up for the lack of a part with a small fusillade of films (Take Shelter, The Help and The Debt) in which she revealed quick, sure and unshowy acting instincts and a fascinating, multi-planed beauty — luscious and drawn by turns — that left you hungry for as many angles as possible. Someone put her in a 3-D movie. Olivia Coleman was astounding in Tyrannosaur — a woman surviving lightning strikes, summoning storms of her own. Viola Davis was a picture of mute forbearance in The Help, but seemed oddly out of place in that film's largely comic universe; I much preferred Octavia Spencer's Minnie, with her pear-shape, duck face and comic fast-ball. Elizabeth Olsen was subtly arresting in Martha Marcy May Marlene: lost in others' surfaces, as if learning to be human by osmosis. (In interview she was even more impressive, sounding somewhere between 17 and 70.) But my favorite performance of the year was also the greatest bit of movie-star trompe-l'oeil: Brad Pitt's Billy Beane in Moneyball. First off: that name, the perfect follow-up to Benjamin Button. Secondly: his eyes, shot in extreme close up, and the mixture of bravado and panic combined therein — always the combo in any Pitt performance, but normally tripping it up, rather than powering it along, as they did here, his usual frolicsome flicks of the tail acquiring notes of sadness and weariness which induced, in this viewer at least, the strangely pleasurable chagrin that comes from knowing you have misjudged an actor. A genuine surprise, unlike so many star turns, and a heavy-boned portrait of unflagging devotion.

1) Brad Pitt, Moneyball
2) Elizabeth Olsen, Martha Macy May Marlene
3) Ralph Fiennes, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
4) Olivia Coleman, Tyrannosaur
5) Octavia Spencer, The Help
6) Viggo Mortenson, A Dangerous Practice
7) Jessica Chastain, The Help
8) Amy Ryan, Win Win
9) Kristin Wiig, Bridesmaids
10) Paul Giamatti, Win Win

INTERVIEW: Brit Marling

2011-11-29T01:11:00.007+05:00

'The first thing Brit Marling does, upon entering the suite at the Crosby street hotel where our interview is to take place, is to walk right over to the large promotional cut-out for her movie Another Earth — on which she is depicted staring dreamily at the camera in front of a large milky planet— and turn it back to front. “We can’t have a serious conversation with this looming over us,” she says. “Remind me to turn it back when they come to get me.”
Take it as a sign of her newness to the Hollywood hall of mirrors. Just six months, Marling was just another hopeful, living in shared digs with two screenwriter friends, trying to find a distributor for two micro-budget movies which were all that stood between her and a role in torture porn. Then both films, Another Earth and Sound of my Voice, got accepted at Sundance where they were picked up by Fox Searchlight and overnight Marling became the festival’s breakout darling: a brainy, beautiful poster girl for soft-knit, eco-conscious, indie fabulosity. Which is how she finds herself in a hotel suite in New York, staring at a cardboard cut-out of herself posing in front of the planet Earth. No wonder she flips it. “The thing that is so crazy about it is that you are the same person before and after,” she says. “Your skill set hasn’t changed. You are the same person who could not audition anywhere in town and nobody would hire you do anything, and now suddenly you can read some of the best scripts that are being written. What is that all about? I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.”

To get the obvious out of the way: she is extremely beautiful, with sky-blue eyes and long, fine, blonde hair of the kind rarely seen outside ads for conditioner, exuding a kind of alt-rock singer-songwriter vibe that pulls her towards paisley and floppy hats. She’s like a Manhattan-era Meryl Streep, reinvented for the Wikileaks generation, holding forth on a variety of subjects from the invention of the light-bulb to the macro-economics of the paper napkin in front of her with the high-flying radicalism of youth, while registering consistent bookworm-in-the-limelight amazement that the world is paying her any attention at all. A beautiful intellectual! And in the movies, no less!'
— from my interview with Brit Marling for The Independent

INTERVIEW: Martin Scorsese

2011-11-26T02:20:00.006+05:00

'There were times during the shooting of his new movie, Hugo, a $170-million dollar blockbuster set in 1920s Paris, when Martin Scorsese would return home, his head aching with the logistics of shooting in 3-D, exhausted by his insanely accelerated schedule, to find his 12-year-old daughter wanted to have a conversation about armadillos.
“The child doesn’t know what’s going on, you’re exhausted,” he remembers. “She goes ‘look at this I need you to see this — is that a horse to you, or is at armadillo?’ There was a time when I would have walked right by. But now you say, ‘waidaminute, waidaminute, are you trying to tell me that’s an armadillo? Because that’s not an armadillo. That is an anteater’. ‘No its not.’ Suddenly there’s a hole in the world that you’ve gotta fill.” His voice lowers to an imploring whisper. “‘But look I gotta get to sleep, honey, I gotta get to sleep. I’m going to go into the room upstairs, there’s a little room, I’m going go to lock myself in, I want you to be quiet.” ‘Oh I’ll be quiet….’ ‘Because I’ve got to get up tomorrow morning at 5 O’Clock….’ This is my life.”
He laughs — a rocket of a laugh that fills the room, and doubles him over. You half expect him to slap his knee. Scorsese’s hair is snowy white these days, lending him the air of someone lit by a higher calling — maybe the priesthood, for which he once trained, or the cinema that turned out to be his true religion. Alongside Woody Allen and Steven Spielberg, he is one of the handful of movie directors who are not just household names, but household faces, his wraparound grin, thick, caterpillar eyebrows and thick horn-rims making up an instantly recognizable trademark which signifies “film director” as surely as Hitchcock’s protuberant silhouette once did.These days, one reaches him through a chain of sotto voce female assistants, well-versed in the art of shepherding the maestro with the minimum of fuss or interruption. “Do you think you could come and stand outside the door,” one of them calls my cell-phone to ask me, in a whisper. “Don’t knock. And don’t call. We’ll come get you.”
Finally you get to the man himself. Small, at 5ft 3, he brims with undiminished vigor, standing on the earth staunchly, like a boxer in the ring, barrel-chested, unrockable — the better position from which to launch those glorious riffs of his. Scorsese is, like his mobsters, an overpowering talker, a ferocious monologist whose rapid, rat-tat-tat speech patterns were once compared by New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane to those of a “preacher caught between the pulpit and the gents.” Any hint of shyness is limited to his posture when it is your turn to ask a question: head down, arms crossed, staring into his lap, as if your words were incoming missiles, whose intent can only be divined by an act of feral concentration. I caught him a few days off his 69^th birthday, recently released from the editing suite where he has been beavering away to get Hugo finished in time for its Thanksgiving release.
“He was the happiest I’ve ever seen him,” says Hugo’s producer, Graham King, who has worked with the director on Gangs of New York, The Aviator and the Oscar-winning The Departed. “He had new toys to play with. He saw a whole new way of filmmaking. He would come on set and you would hear that great laugh rippling through the train station. He was loving it, loving the process — the hair, the make up — loved having two kids as leads. They were so naïve as to who he was. Leo di Caprio, Mark Wahlburg, Nicholson, Damon, Day Lewis, they know who he is and act accordingly. These kids didn’t know and didn’t really care. ‘Hey Marty, what did you do last night? What did you have for dinner?’ Leonardo Di Caprio does not come onto set and ask Martin Scorsese that.”
Was that why he made it? The chance to slip his own post-Oscar coronation and enjoy a King-Lear-with-flowers-in-his-hair moment? Hugo doesn’t just represent a departure, I tell him. It detonates the entire airport. Scorsese looses another rocket. “Thank you, thank, you. The story itself was a joy….. wait, that sounds…. It was…..pleasant, the story, in a sense, it was…. Exciting. I enjoyed the cleverness of it,” he says, his hesitations perhaps suggestive of a man unused to having his cinematic fate held in the palms of 8-year-olds. “I used to like that W C Fields line about never working with animals or kids,” he says, before proceeding to tell me a story about the fluffy white bijon frise bought him by his fourth wife, producer Barbara de Fina, the moral of which appears to be: the Sentimental Education of Martin Scorsese.

“I was really against it for the first four days. It was everywhere, it was not housebroken. You know, I left the lower east side, where nothing was housebroken. The whole place was not housebroken, I’m outta there. By the fourth or fifth day the way the dog was looking at me, I guess it was sentimental. There was something about the dog that expected something from me. Attention and help of some kind. What does she expect me to do? Does she want this? I do something. No. What about this? Yes! That was it! Isn’t that interesting. I’ve communicated with this dog. And I fell madly in love with her. I put Zoe in The Age of Innocence, my mothers holding her in Goodfellas, she was on my lap while I was directing a lot of the scenes in Goodfellas. Poor dog became a nervous wreck because of all the shouting and gunshots.”
This is so wonderfully entertaining in the classic Scorsese-wiseguy manner — one thinks, in particular, of Joe Pesci’s cod art-crit session in Goodfellas (“one dog goes one way, the other dog goes the other way, and this guy's sayin', ’whaddaya want from me?’) — that it takes me a few seconds to realise Scorsese has ducked my question. I ask him again why he made the film.

“The kids,” he says. “At a late age, I’ve been living with a child almost every day for the past 12 years. It changes things. It was different from when I had my other daughters. I was much younger, you had the future ahead of you. Now it’s different. So now I’m seeing the future through the eyes of my child. She is perceiving the world around her: ‘what does that mean? What is this? Who’s that? I believe this, I don’t believe that…’ All this goes on, you talk and talk and talk and before you know it you’re living with this, your dealing with it every day — animals or different stickers, or laminated tings that you can see in 3-D, or the museum she went to that day.”

Scorsese two other daughters, Catherine, by his first wife whom he met while still a NYU film student in the mid-sixties, and Domenica, by his second wife, journalist Julia Cameron whom he married in 1975 after she interviewed him for Rolling Stone. Both daughters are now grown up — he recently attended Catherine’s wedding in Chicago — but it his fifth marriage, to book editor Helen Morris, whom he met while filming Kundun, that has lasted the longest, and this third pass at fatherhood seems to have had the deepest impact. Together with two West Highland terriers named Flora and Desmond, the family share a brownstone townhouse on the Upper East Side, filled with wall-to-wall bookshelves, wooden Laurel & Hardy figurines, and a Stratocaster belonging to the Robbie Robertson from The Band. “I’ve seen the change in him,” says King. “When you have kids at an older time eat life, it means more than when you’re 30. That has a lot to do with this. No question.”

For all Scorsese’s frank bafflement at Hollywood cliché — “what’s a fish-out-of-water?” he is said to have remarked, upon turning down the chance to direct Beverley Hills Cop — his career breaks down into a classic three-act, rise-fall-comeback structure. First we have his bullet-like trajectory from the lower east side to Hollywood, making films like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull: personal, incendiary, hair-trigger works performing root-canal on the director’s obsessions, seeming to fly centrifugally from his own cratered psyche. Scorsese had a famously loose temper — he was a phone thrower and wall smasher. His office had the phone guy on constant call, so frequently did he rip it from the wall. On one occasion, he was yelling down the phone at his producer, threw the phone and broke it, went down the elevator, put a dime in a pay phone, and continued to yell at his producer from the street.
“His first words when he woke up were always fuck-fuck-fuck fuck-fuck,” recalls Isabella Rossellini, who met the director at the height of his fame, after winning the Palme D’Or for Taxi Driver, and married him in 1979. “I think he used rage as his gasoline to get out of bed and confront the world. If he wasn’t a fighter wanting to fight I think he would have felt overwhelmed — because he’s very small and constantly asthmatic, with his oxygen masks and tanks. I think he needed that rage. Friends would say ‘oh calm down don’t be angry.’ But I saw it more like an engine, a little car, catching in the morning. BBRRRRMMM. BBRRRMMM.”

These were the days of coronation and excess — of forcing 150 extras to stand around waiting while Scorsese spoke to his therapist from trailer on set of New York, New York; of dispatching a private jet from the 1978 Cannes film festival to score some coke in Paris. Things finally came crashing down on Labor day of that year, when, succumbed to a mixture of bad coke, asthma and high altitude at the Telluride film festival, Scorsese was admitted to hospital, weighing just 109 pounds, bleeding internally, his platelet count down to zero.
“It was very frightening,” says Rossellini. “Marty was very sick. I wasn’t sure I was going to see him alive again.” While recuperating in hospital in New York, Scorsese was visited by Robert de Niro, who held in his hand a battered copy of the script for Raging Bull, his pet project about the methodical self-destruction of boxer Jake La Motta. Scorsese didn’t want anything to do with it.
“I didn’t know anything about boxing,” remembers Scorsese. “But Bob came to me in hospital, and said ‘come on what is it you want to do? Do you want to die, is that it? Don’t you want to live to see your daughter grow up and get married? Are you gonna be one of those directors who makes a couple of good movies and then its over for them?' He said ‘you could really make this picture.’ I found myself saying okay. Ultimately, finally, when I was down and out, I realized yes I should do this movie. Going down in flames meant that if it was going to go down, let it go down. I didn’t care anymore, I just knew this was the last thing to say. If I could say anything, this was the last chance to do it.”

It was Raging Bull’s failure to secure an Academy Award for best film or director — Scorsese lost out to Robert Redford’s Ordinary People — that set the pattern for Oscar shut-outs for years to come and set the stage for his second act: this time as long-suffering saint of American cinema, crucified by the suits and studio bean-counters, cast out into the wilderness, unable to raise the cash to make dream projects like The Last Temptation of Christ, putting himself through career rehab on pictures like The Color of Money, the budget for which didn’t even stretch to a phone for the director. Cruise and Newman both got phones — not Scorsese.

“The last studio movie I made in Hollywood, The King of Comedy, was considered ‘the flop of the year.’ No-one would come near me. I tried to get Last Temptation made. That was cancelled. So it’s time to go home. I came back to New York and made independent films. I was like a wounded person trying to get back in shape. I tried a few pictures to see if I could just be a pro. I don’t mean that as false modesty. A pro is a very important, professional person. They can be depended on. They can work.”

When I put it to him that these leans years were arguably the best thing that ever happened to him — toning him up for the glories of Goodfellas, quite possibly his best film — he agrees. “I am American, so I have to work within the system, whether it’s studio or independent.” He has little time, these days, he says, for the old battle-lines between the artists and the suits, and readily admits to a financial motive for making movies. “I do have to pay for the school, for the kid. And some clothes And I don’t really know any other way,” he says. “I was doing this Q and A with Jim Cameron in LA the other day. Maybe a film that costs a lot of money like I’m doing…. could be a good film. That could happen… That could happen…. Maybe a film that cost no money, is not good does not stand the test of time….. That could also happen.”
He says this warily, as if half expecting the ground to give out beneath his feet. His third act is a balancing act, a tightly-fought compromise between the lures of commerce and the demands of his artistic conscience, between his work-life and the recent outbreak of domestic tranquility. When I ask him what it was about his marriage and fatherhood, this time around, that made it stick, he thinks for a long time before replying.
“We all became older, some of us our friends are gone now. At that time we were learning from each other and it was new and it was fresh and as time moved on we all changed. What can we learn from each other now. What do you learn from a party? Besides what do you go to a party for. Do you need that? At a certain point, you leave. I enjoy the company of people but these days, we are pretty much closed off. It’s the wasting of time, putting that time into work, finding the time that’s more rewarding with people you love, people who love you.”
Perhaps it should come as no surprise. Martin Scorsese, the mobster king, poet laureate of addled loners, smalltime hoods and spiritual misfits everywhere, just wants to love and be loved, like the rest of us. His Oscar win for The Departed, after decades shut out in the cold, clearly meant a lot to him. “Everyone teases me ‘Scorsese did not expect the Oscar.’ I did not. I was just tying to continue working. Because the real success and satisfaction was having made these movies without having major box office without having academy awards. That was the thing.”
Did it have anything to do with Hugo, which is to say his newfound desire to take on the mantle of Entertainer-in-Chief? “It may have. Whether its Shutter Island or Hugo or Living in the Material World [his George Harrison documentary] in the end they’re all responses to that. I do like making Hollywood narrative cinema, the kind that I grew up on, so I’ll always be drawn there but I don’t have the time any more. I try. I try to find that something that you’re burning to say.”
His mention of time is revealing. There are clocks ticking throughout Hugo, which, together with Shutter Island, another haunted house, cobwebbed with memories and bent on bringing the dead to life, marks the decisive arrival of Scorsese’s late period, a Prospero-like summary of confabulation and magic. I ask him if he ever thinks about the amount of time has left — the number of films he still has in him.

“That’s really what it is now, the only consideration really, the amount of time I have left,” he says, detailing three possible future projects: another delve into the criminal underworld with De Niro, an HBO series about the business of rock’n’roll with Mick Jagger and, most promising of all, Silence, an adaptation of a Shusaku Endo novel about two Jesuit priests, to be played by Daniel Day Lewis and Benicio Del Toro, attempting to spread the gospel in 17^th century Japan.
“There are some technical, legal issues we’re working out but literally it’s imminent. I’m watching my Blackberry,” he says. “It’s always the material. Are you attracted to the material at all? Can you find a way to saying something that sit your heart or your mind? All I can do it try and put as much as myself into it I as I can — give it the attention, the love, the anger, the patience, the humor, the drama, all the craziness that goes into the making of a picture until the very, very end. I've gotta do that."
He glances at his blackberry, lying on the table next to him, as if willing it to ring." — my interview with Martin Scorsese in The Times

Quote of the day: Martin Scorsese

2011-11-25T20:10:00.007+05:00

"You have films with happy endings, which show the triumph of the human spirit, in films like Rocky. And then you have pictures that are a little more realistic and deal with certain emotions and psychological character studies, and they don't necessarily have that uplifting effect. In the 50s through the 70s, they seemed to exist together. Now, it seems that some films don't even have the right to exist. With the advent of Rocky and Star Wars and the Spielberg pictures, on the best side they're morally uplifting; you leave the theatre the way you did at the end of Casablanca. And on the worst side, they're sentimental. Lies. That's the problem And where I fit in there, I don't know" — interview with Chris Hodenfield in American Film, 1989, collected in Martin Scorsese Interviews (Univ. of Miss.), edited by Peter Brunette

REVIEW: A Dangerous Method (Cronenberg)

2011-11-25T01:07:00.033+05:00

A new discovery! 11.00am on Thanksgiving morning turns out to be the perfect time and occasion on which to see Kiera Knightley getting spanked in the new David Cronenberg psychoanalysis flick! It's a pitiless, David-Cronenberg time of day, 11 o'clock in the morning. You're awake, but you haven't eaten a full meal yet, insatiate yet alert — the perfect state in which to take in a cerebral chamber-piece about fin-de-siecle sexual repression and the birth of psychoanalysis. Michael Fassbender plays Carl Jung, unhappily married, sexually repressed and therefore wearing a suit half-a-size too small for him, so the Fassbender physique seems to be bursting at the seams. Kiera Knightley plays his hysterical patient, jutting her jaw and screaming with a Russian accent at least two sizes too big for her so you spend most of the film waiting for the invention of valium. Best of all we have Viggo Mortenson as Freud — the happiest piece of casting I have come across all year. There is probably no actor today more in contact with his unconscious mind than Mortenson, with his air of Oceanic internal fixation, his mesmerising horse-whisperer manner and unerring instinct for where the bones of a part lie. Here he goes big on the cigars and chiselled shrewdness — his Freud seems to spend much of his time weighing chess moves against his detractors — but also remembers to make him a voyager, feeling his way in the dark, like Aragon on the threshold of the pit of Mordor. "Columbus didn't know what country he'd discovered," he says, "only that he'd touched land." The script has two versions of why Jung and Freud fell out: one involving their principled difference of opinion on whether psychoanalysis should be allowed to touch upon matters of religion, mysticism and the like; and the second involving their principled difference of opinion over whether Jung should be allowed to paddle the ass of Knightley, which looks almost as much fun as beheading Orcs. You'll never guess which turns out to be the more compelling plot-line. That's always been the way with Cronenberg, whose talking heads have always come a distant second to his exploding ones, and A Dangerous Method certainly tends towards the chalkier end of the spectrum — as befits its origins as a stage play by Christopher Hampton, there are one too many lines of the "I take issue with his dogmatic pragmatism!" variety — but it also summons a nice tone of subdued hysteria, like the thinnest of cracks through the finest bone-china, and the period is beautifully observed, the Fassbender-Knightley relationship playing out against a Lake Geneva that looks so placid and dreamy you'll easily believe it the birth-place of the Jungian unconscious. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! B

The Return of Silent Cinema

2011-11-21T23:30:00.005+05:00

'Of all the cinematic surprises of 2011—the ascendency of Elizabeth Olsen, the excellence of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Woody Allen’s return as hit-maker the renaissence of silent cinema was probably the hardest to see coming down the pike. When Harvey Weinstein enthused about a silent back-and-white film, starring two unknown French stars, which he’d just bought at Cannes, brother Bob suggested he check himself into a mental asylum. After it received a 15-minute standing ovation, Michel Hazanavicius’s homage to the days of swashbuckling matinee idols, iris shots, and Busby Berkeley dance numbers, The Artist, was marked up by Oscarologists as the outside favorite to win Best Picture.
Come November 23^rd, cinemagoers will have a choice of two valentines to the silent era: The Artist or Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s 3D adaptation of Brian Selznick’s bestselling children’s book, whose poster echoes Harold Lloyd’s clock shenanigans in Safety Last (1923) and whose final 25 minutes fondly revisit the earliest days of cinema, from Melies's A Trip to the Moon to the Lumière Brothers Arrival of a train at La Ciotat station, which sent its audience flying in panic from the theatre to avoid being crushed by that train. For the earliest filmgoers, 2D was 3D enough. “Two ladies in one of the boxes on the left-hand of the horseshoe, which is just where the flyer vanishes from view, screamed and nearly fainted as it came apparently rushing upon them,” ran one newspaper’s account of a similar film, Empire State Express, in 1897. “They recovered in time to laugh at their needless excitement.”
Finally, in December, we have The Adventures of Tin Tin: Secret of the Unicorn, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the much-loved Belgian comic strip, a movie whose sight gags and breakneck pace hail back to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and from there to the hey-day of Mack Sennett and the Keystone cops. Nobody could accuse modern blockbusters of silence, but the aesthetics of silent cinema—its favoring of the visual over the literary, action beats over dialogue, international markets over domestic— is alive and well. Over at Pixar, filmmakers have been steadily mining Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to give us the opening 20 minutes of WALL-E and the first ten minutes of Up—modern silent-movie classics. Meanwhile, James Cameron’s Avatar, whose earthling-alien romance, like that in E.T., proceeded via sign language (I-see-you), marked the evolution of an international movie grammar which vaulted borders and left critical sniping about Cameron’s creaky dialogue looking like the nit-picking of flat-earthers. And the guilty secret of Michael Bay’s Transformer movies? They play equally well with the sound down, if not better.
“The eye and mind are both bewildered by the too sudden and too frequent shifts of scene,” wrote William Eaton in American Magazine. “There is a terrible sense of rush and hurry and flying about, which is intensified by the twitching film and generally whang-bang music.” Eaton wrote this in 1914, but it could as easily pass muster as a critical harrumph from the summer of 2011. In fact, the further back you push, the more familiar it gets, as dialogue, plots, and characters all fall away to reveal an exo-skeleton of pure action beats. The very first movies were by definition action movies, made fast and sold by the brand (“every day a Biograph feature”) to an audience made up of largely immigrants and teens, all demanding something “happening every minute, allowing for no padding with word-painting, following climax after climax” as the Brooklyn Eagle put it in 1906. “The backbone of today’s business is the attendance of young people from seventeen to twenty-three years of age,” sniffed Harold Corey in Everybody’s Magazine in 1919. “At 23 other interests develop.”
For The Lonedale Operator, D. W. Griffith mounted his camera on the front of a speeding train in order to better capture the rush; for A Girl and Her Trust, he placed it onboard a car that was racing alongside a racing train, with another car in hot pursuit. His mastery of intercutting between parallel action reached its apogee in the chase sequence of The Birth of a Nation. When that film was released, in 1916, the film’s cinematographer, Karl Brown, noted “bigger and better, bigger and better became the constantly chanted watchwords of the year. Soon the two words became one. Bigger meant better, and a sort of giganticism overwhelmed the world, especially the world of motion pictures.” In many ways, this whizz-bang landscape of thrill rides, cheap scares and teen kicks feels closer to us than the Golden Age of the 1940s and 1950s, or even the 1960s and 1970s, when Hollywood, high on a mixture of the French new wave, auteurism, and pot, enjoyed an unparalleled creative growth spurt, one cut cruelly short by thekerr-ching of the cash registers for Jaws, and the boom of the laser cannons in Star Wars. As we all know by heart now, those two blockbusters flushed delicate arthouse sensitivities down the garbage chute and “pioneered the cinema of moments, of images, of sensory stimuli increasingly divorced from story” in Peter Biskind’s formulation.
This is fine as far as it goes, but if it’s the soul of cinema we’re fighting over, “the cinema of moments, of images, of sensory stimuli increasingly divorced from story” has a far greater claim on cinema’s central nervous system than the woozy psychedelia of Easy Rider. Looked at one way, Star Wars did not betray cinema at all, but plugged it back into the mains, returning the medium, after a brief spell of aesthetic etiolation, to its roots as a carnival sideshow, a magic act, one big special effect, punching through the fourth wall and rocking the audience back in their seats, as they were first rocked by the Lumière brothers cho-choo trains. “Star Wars is basically a silent film, was designed to be a silent film,” said George Lucas when I interviewed him for my book Blockbuster. “In terms of people’s aesthetics, especially critics: they complained bitterly when sound came in, that the medium had been destroyed, but the concept of cinema started as a vaudeville show. It started as a magic act. They took the magician off the bill, put up this sheet and they ran this magic thing, where you could see things you couldn’t see. They say summer is now dominated by films that are aimed towards kids. Well, kids are the audience. It’s a market-driven medium and it always has been.”'
—from my piece on silent cinema for Slate

REVIEW: J.Edgar / Tyrannosaur

2011-11-21T23:16:00.016+05:00

One of the opportunities presented me by my wife's absence — apart from those for weeping fits, dietary experimentation and dust-ball accumulation — is the opportunity it presents me to catch up on the most depressing movies I can lay my hands on — the more depressing, the better. For some reason that escapes me we spent last Christmas apart, which I took that as a sign to go on a massive Michael Haneke bender, during the course of which I lost all sense of time and space, human warmth leaching from me, the lights of nearby towns and hamlets blurring into a distant memory, until I stood in our apartment — a poor, bare, forked animal, ready to feast on any Romanian abortion epic or neo-brutalist British kitchen-sink drama you could throw my way. The only problem was resurfacing without getting the bends. Kate came back for New Year's Eve and I — still in some kind of altered state — suggested we watch Ken Loach's first film Kes, forgetting that in the final reel the poor falcon, by virtue of symbolising youth's only hope of escape from the grim, dehumanising totalitarianism of the English education system, gets it in the neck with a shovel. I should have known better — all animals appearing English films from the seventies get it in the neck, be they otters or rabbits, if not with a shovel then a bullet. It's the closest we ever got to making The Way We Were. I'm not sure Kate has forgiven me.

Much better to keep this kind of filth for when she's gone. So my first thought, upon waving her off to see her parents in Ohio, was simple: J Edgar. I knew there had to be a place in my life for Clint's stolid two hours of desaturated gay repression and institutionalised paranoia and this was surely it. I wore my Navy Peacoat, rather than my usual Mackintosh, not because I have any particular fear of being thought gay, but a closeted gay is a different matter. In the end, Eastwood didn't quite deliver: despite a lighting scheme that made me worry I'd paid the electricity bill, and the sight of Judi Dench bearing down on poor J Edgar's soul like the mother of Norman Bates herself, I rather enjoyed his movie, and even felt a little trembly of lip towards the end. Nothing like the unconsolable storm of grief that descended on me at the end of Bridges of Madison County, but a tremble nonetheless and for that I was grateful. Clint really getsrepressed emotion, the more depth-charged the better, and something about the tidy little kiss that Leonardo Di Caprio lands on Armie Hammer's forehead at the end of J Edgar did the trick. B-

But not nearly depressing enough, so this afternoon I headed off to see Paddy Considine'sTyrannosaur, which promised so much: alcoholism, wife battery, Northern pubs, rottweilers, the lot. Could it deliver? I wore my peacoat again — big mistake. I should have gone with the Mackintosh. Peter Mullan wears an almost identical peacoat in the movie, thus pointing the finger of shame my way, singling me out as I left the theatre as a fellow wife-beater and drunk. Naturally, there were only five or six men in the theatre, all of them were on their own, and all of them were, in my mind, as I was in theirs, wife-beaters, come to make their amends, to pay silent penance for their sins. You can't win, you see. Closeted gay or wife-beater — these are the two options faced by any man in his forties with limited wardrobe options going to the cinema alone. Anyway. The film. It's grim. A firm proponent of the fark-you-you-farking-caant school of British filmmaking. There's black eyes, racism, dog bludgeoning — and drinking, lots of drinking, of the kind that necessitates you stare into your pint as if discerning in the bleak apartheid of your Guinness the unbudging, fulminous morass of your life. Mullan is a little acting-workshopy — I preferred his alcoholic in My Name is Joe — and the ending is an out-and-out wrist-slasher, but Olivia Colman is as terrific as everyone says she is, and the Leisure Society song at the end is heaven sent. B-

NOTABLE FILM RELEASES: 2012

2011-11-21T20:57:00.017+05:00

February 3rd
Chronicle (20th Century Fox)

March 9th
John Carter — Andrew Stanton (Pixar)

March 23rd
The Hunger Games — Jennifer Lawrence (Lionsgate)

April 6th
Titanic 3-D (Fox)

May 11th
Dark Shadows — Burton, Pfeiffer, Eva Green (Warner Bros)
The Dictator — Cohen, Kingsley (Paramount)

June 1st
Rock Of Ages — Cruise, Giametti (Warner Bros)

June 8th
Prometheus — Scott, Fassbender (Fox)

June 22nd
Brave (Pixar)

July 3rd
The Amazing Spiderman (Columbia)

July 22nd
The Dark Knight Rises (Warner Bros)

Aug 17th
ParaNorman — Casey Affleck (Focus)

September 14th
Argo — Affleck, Arkin, Cranston (Warner Bros)

September 28th
Savages — Del Toro, Lively, Stone (Universal)

October 19th
Untitled David Chase Project — Gandolfini (Paramount Vantage)

November 9th
Bond 23 — Mendes, Craig, Bardem (Sony)

November 21
Gravity — Clooney, Bullock, Cuaron (Warner Bros)

Deecember 14th
Great Hope Springs — Streep, Carrell, Jones (Columbia)

December 21
The Life of Pi — Lee, Maguire (Fox 2000)
This is Forty — Rudd, Mann, Apatow (Universal)

December 25th
Django Unchained — Di Caprio, Tarantino (Weinstein)
The Great Gatsby — Di Caprio, Mulligan (Warner Bros)

Undated
Moonlight Kingdom — Anderson, Willis (Focus)
Anna Karenina — Knightley, Wright, Johnson (Focus)
Lincoln — Day-Lewis, Spielberg (Touchstone)
Gotti: Three Generations — Levinson, Travolta, Pesci, Pacino (Fiore)
My Wild Life — Noyce, Kidman (Universal)
Take This Waltz — Rogen, Williams (Magnolia)
Untitled Bin Laden Project — Bigelow (Sony)

Photo: Eva Green

REVIEW: Hugo (dir. Scorsese)

2011-11-19T21:47:00.109+05:00

Well, Spielberg can breathe a sigh of relief. Turns out Scorsese can't do his job any more than Spielberg can do Scorsese's (what is it with these directors that they want to morph into one another all the time?). There are those in the higher echelons of the Church of Scorsology who are already denying that his new kid's movie, Hugo, adapted from Brian Selznick's bestselling kid's book, starring kids, and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey in time for the Christmas audience, is actually for kids at all. It's mind is on higher things — film critics. "This movie is too good for children," Fran Lebowitz has pronounced. What poppycock. Try telling that to the investors that ponied up $170 million so that Scorsese could have the pleasure of swinging his camera up and down and around a Dante-Ferreti-designed Parisian train station, as young Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is chased by the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his Dobermann in fulsome 3-D. But here's the thing: for all the dexterity, you never feel Cohen's fingers on Butterfield's collar, or his breath down his neck, just the sinuous panther-like glide of that camera. Later on, Hugo gets down onto the tracks to look for a key and and by the time the looks up — too late! — the train is upon him. How did that happen? It's a small thing — wouldn't the vibrating rails have alerted him to the oncoming train? in which case what's he still doing on the tracks? in which case solve it — and Hugo is full of such misfires. Slapstick that urgently needs tightening up. Some intermittently funny comic pedantry from Cohen. (You can practically hear clocks chime in the background.) A gumption-filled effort from Chloe Moretz to revivify the ghost of Hayley Mills. Some sentimental business involving a couple of puppies, and some more heartfelt stuff involving Hugo's dead father that seems to leave Scorsese as cold as the automaton at the centre of the story. What made him think that after all this time, he would turn out to be good at sentiment, or slapstick, or suspense, or happy endings and all the other things which he tries here for the first time but which he's spent the best part of three decades proclaiming himself allergic to ("they're sentimental. Lies," he once said of Hollywood blockbusters. "That's the problem. And where I fit in there, I don't know")? What changed his mind? Was it the Oscar? Some critics will doubtless take the film's stiffness as evidence of Scorsese's higher artistry — a sign that he's above such cheap effects. He may well be. He is probably the least manipulative filmmaker working in America. He's a pathological artist, a fantasist of the glandular rather than wish-fulfillment variety, his movies drilling into the side of obsessions which exceed even their maker's understanding, but lacking the fine-tuned antennae for what an audience may be thinking or feeling at any given point. The problem with Hugo comes down to this: for all its production-value dazzle and technological razzmatazz, I just didn't believe that Scorsese felt much for his boy save as a pair of eyes through which to view that fabulous set. We never feel Hugo's hunger, or impoverishment, or loneliness: the picture is too busy and rich and surfeited. Scorsese never thinks "how can I best dramatize my hero's plight?", he thinks "wouldn't it be cool to spin a double-loop figure-of-eight with my camera around that clock-tower?" Hugo lacks the simplicity and emotional directness of a genuine children's classic — The Black Stallion, E.T., Toy Story, Fly Away Home, Spirited Away. Next to those films it feels like a cold marvel, with a view of the human heart as just another piece of clockwork: old Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), neglected and bitter, will be pulled out of his funk, apparently, by the merest contact with that automaton, which will serve as a reminder that someone once loved his work. Voila! It's a bizarrely mechanical piece of psychology and plotting, gauzier than anything Spielberg or Hitchcock ever tried to pull off. The film warms in the final furlong with some fond revivifications of Méliès films, with Scorsese playing a delighted Prospero to the earliest days of cinema. Finally, Thelma Schoonmaker's editing rhythm quickens (where was she during the chase sequences?) and you feel the pulse of the movie flutter into life, the embers of one filmmaker's work glowing with the breath of another. With its imagery of ash and scattered papers, its dragons and mermaids, the final 25 minutes of this movie form something of a companion piece to Shutter Island, another haunted house suffused with melancholy and mazy with confabulation, bent on exhuming the past and raising the dead. Nobody could deny Scorsese the chance to kick up his heels and enjoy a Lear-With-Flowers-in-His-Hair moment, but can I be the only one uncomfortable with the idea of a bunch of cineastes hijacking a children's entertainment to enjoy a highlight reel of silent cinema's greatest hits*? It's like one of those wooden toys children pretend to like so the adults can feel they're not giving into the commercialisation of Christmas. I'm reminded of the last time the director composed a love letter to the movies — when, head-swollen by his Palme d'Or for Taxi Driver, he ran aground the motiveless magnificence of New York, New York. Hugo is New York, New York for Pokemonites. My inner child sat drumming his fingers throughout. C+

* A rhetorical question. Most cineastes are completely okay with this idea.

REVIEW: The Descendants

2011-11-15T19:21:00.020+05:00

Things I loved about Alexander Payne's The Descendants:—

— the rattier bits of Honolulu.
— Clooney's tears by the side of the road, his back to us like Queen Elizabeth II.
— yes, alright, the running in sandals.
— the line about Hawaiian businessmen bearing a striking resemblance to "bums and stuntmen."
— Shailene Woodley's scenes on the couch, eyes raw and red. Her blend of prettiness and plainness.
— the link-up of the two plots via a cousin. The cousins in general, and the dramatic use made of this overextended brood.
— seeing Beau Bridges again.
— the ambling pace.
— Judy Greer's brand of guileless, vulnerable optimism. The heartbreak of seeing it depleted.
— Payne's emotional ambition and reach, and the invisible cover it lends the comic switchbacks, to the point where you can't say which came first. Born together, in mid-air.
— One in particular, Greer's bedside speech + Clooney's reaction, is faultless.
— the reveal of Sid's family history, together with his use of the word "boss".

Things I wasn't so keen on:—

— The first scene where they talk to the mother.
— the line "my joy, my pain". Too written. He had me at "my love."

A-

'Take Care' - Drake & Rihanna

2011-11-12T22:31:00.002+05:00

Notes on Martin Scorsese's late style — All Things Must Pass

2011-11-12T03:42:00.040+05:00

I'm going to review Hugo properly later in the month but for now would like to note a few stylistic similarities I noticed with Shutter Island — the imagery of ash and scattered paper-storms, together with a preoccupation with artifice and loss which reminded me of Shakespeare's late romances, particularly The Winter's Tale, in which the statue of a wife, long thought dead, comes to life, much as Leo Di Caprio summons Michelle Williams in Shutter Island, and The Tempest, in which an exiled artist-magician conjures storms and monsters:—

These are actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

That could equally well describe Hugo, a Faberge egg of cgi-confabulation featuring its own magician-hero, cobwebbed with loss, who in a climactic act of remembrance, summons his own insubstantial pageants from thin air. What kids will make of it, I can only guess, although I suspect many will find their attention wandering, but as a Melies festshrift, a fond exhalation warming the embers of one filmmaker's work with the breath of another, it works its own brand of wonder, offering us another slice of the gamey neo-Jamesian style with which Scorsese seems to make movies these days. In his review of Edward Said's On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain in The New Yorker John Updike wrote:—

What does haunt late works is the author’s previous works: he is burdensomely conscious that he has been cast, unlike his ingénue self, as an author who writes in a certain way, with the inexorable consistency of his own handwriting. Turning this way and that in his last creative torment, he kept meeting, with a shudder, his pet modes of imagining, chimeras on the fault line between the imaginary and the actual.

In other words, late works are haunted houses, characterised, as Hawthorne put it by “a drawing away of veils, a lifting of heavy, magnificent curtains". As the artist's imagination prepares for its final Check-Out, the vividness of lived experience recedes like a fading coal, veiled by a skein of remembrance and nestled within plots that unfurl like Russian dolls. "Late style is what happens if art does not abdicate its rights in favor of reality,” says Said. A perfect description of both Shutter Island and Hugo with their onion-layering of illusion, their urgent summoning of the dead, and air of mazy, elegaic confabulation. The dead are rescusitated, the past disinterred; there are even a few statues looking ominously like they are about to spring to life; the recurring imagery of ash and scattered papers act as vivid memento mori — a previsualisation of all that remains when we, too, are vanished. Scorsese's late period would appear to be firmly in session.

ON MY IPOD: Nov 8th 2011

2011-11-08T19:32:00.027+05:00

'It's Real' — Real Estate
'Facing the Sun' — Treefight for Sunlight
'Hurts like Heaven' — Coldplay
'Change the Sheets' — Kathleen Edwards
'Helix' — Justice
'We Found Love' — Rihanna
'Domino' — Jessie J
'1979' — RAC
'Jesus Fever' — Kurt Vile
'The Same Thing' — Cass McCombs
'Dust on the Dancefloor' — The Leisure Society

I take great pride in not hating Coldplay but instead sifting through the chaff looking for the good stuff and 'Hurts Like Heaven', despite lyrics extolling the virtues of emotional masochism, is a full tilt into the wind, with harmonies that slice the room at shoulder-height: they make self-pity as exciting as bungee-jumping. I've never heard of Real Estate before but their entire album, 'Days', has me hooked: they sound like someone melodic from Manchester but in fact are from New Jersey and look to be barely out of their teens. I can't find a mix of Rihanna's 'We Found Love' that I'm happy with (is there one that doesn't sound so Hamburg rave-y?) but the song has me nevertheless. Nothing wrong with the production of Jessie J's 'Domino': the song hangs in mid-air, perfect as a plum. Kathleen Edwards I've already praised on this blog, but 'Change the Sheets' isn't getting any worse. Justice's 'Helix' is a guilty, chunky synth-funk pleasure: the song I most like restraining myself to on the subway. The Leisure Society: this song has really grown on me, but then the song itself keeps evolving, only repeating itself at the 1:50 minute mark. That's halfway through the song — my favorite example of chrysalis structure since Oasis's 'I Hope, I Think, I Know'.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Steven Spielberg

2011-11-08T00:49:00.007+05:00

“What? What did he say, again? Well! If he really said that, you just made my last four decades. You're responsible for making my last four decades. I've never heard that!” — Steven Spielberg upon hearing Alfred Hitchcock's comment “young Spielberg is the first one of us who doesn't see the proscenium arch” seemingly for the first time

Films I am most looking forward to in 2012

2011-11-07T04:02:00.036+05:00

1. Moonlight Kingdom. To see if young love (and a return to American soil) can revive Wes Anderson's live-action filmmaking.

2. Lincoln. Because Daniel-Day Lewis's feel for American-historical sinew is second-to-none.

3. Under The Skin. Scarlett Johannson is a man-eating alien in Jonathan Glazer's first film since Birth (2004), the most under-seen great movie of the 2000s.

4. Life of Pi. Ang Lee + Depardieu + 3D + tiger. The choice of project feels both surprising and inevitable — our best hope for a masterpiece.

5. This is Forty. Judd Apatow, Paul Rudd, Megan Fox in a companion piece to Knocked Up.

6. Django Unchained. The rhythms of black speech = Tarantino defibrillator.

7. The Dictator. Crunch time for Sasha Baron Cohen.

8. The Amazing Spiderman. For Emma Stone.

9. John Carter. Andrew Stanton's live-action follow up to WALL-E.

10. Brave. Hogmanay and haggis from Pixar.

Also: — Argo, ParaNorman, My Wild Life, The Cabin In the Woods, Chronicle

CAREER BEST: Leonardo Di Caprio

2011-11-05T19:38:00.031+05:00

“When I can’t immediately define the character, and there’s an element of mystery to it and still a lot to be explored, that’s when I say yes,” the 36-year-old Mr. DiCaprio said in an interview last week on a patio at the Bel Air Hotel here. “I like those kinds of complicated characters. I just do.” Hollywood typically doesn’t like that answer. The star system may have become more subtle since the days of Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart, but it’s still a system: American actors are supposed to be more steady persona, less shape shifter. “The apparatus likes to box actors up,” said Brian Grazer, a producer of “J. Edgar,” which is set for release on Wednesday. “Once they become successful in one role, get them into picture after picture where they can do exactly the same thing.” — The New York Times

Why is it that in any battle between a movie star keen to prove his "method" credentials and the wicked studios, who want to entrap him in the role of movie star, I always tend to side with the studios? Nobody likes stereotyping, and yet there is nothing dumb about the aggregate wisdom that seeks out the platonic essence of an actor — in Di Cario's case, a young man's sprezzatura combined with a Huck Finnish resourcefulness. I'm thinking of his diamond smuggler in Blood Diamond and his teen fugitive in Catch Me If You Can, a role which perhaps more than the caught Di Caprio's brand of fleet-footedness, which seems to carry him across the screen like the moving dot over karaoke lyrics. Such gifts, even if they tend towards lightness, are not to be taken lightly. On the contrary they place him in the rarest company — one thinks of the very best movers, Fred Astaire and Cary Grant, both of whom raised the art of ease onscreen to a state of unparalleled grace. But effortlessness has fallen into disfavor these days — we prefer performances that break sweat — so naturally, it's the performance Di Caprio most disdains. The story goes that after filming Catch Me If You Can the actor foreswore ever taking on another ingenue role, preferring the more strenuous acting work-outs he got with Martin Scorsese. I must confess I love di Caprio as an actor and yet his recent career makes me miserable, his performances tending towards the twitchy and self-hating — strangely solitary affairs, as most attempts to prove something to oneself generally are. He goes the distance, but he doesn't take the audience with him, seemingly caught in a permanent state of self-chastisement for not growing up faster. Which is probably why he hated working for Spielberg, hellbent in the opposite direction, but there is something Peter Pannish about Di Caprio. He plays younger than he appears, which mean these attempts to play older seem misbegotten — a cat stroked backwards. He was appropriately feral in Gangs of New York, seething with hidden hatred for Bill the Butcher, but the role turned him into a sneak, so Day-Lewis blew him away. He was simply miscast in The Aviator — too young for the role, and badly let down by his voice, which can never quite hide its high spirits, despite no end of growling on Di Caprio's part. (If he had Kiefer Sutherland's stentorian boom, he would have had an Oscar by now). For The Departed he dug deep into his character's drug-addled psychosis, as if he we were appearing in one of Scorsese's Paul-Schrader-era collaborations, in orbit around a single lost soul, but even Scorsese doesn't summon the tone, or the energy, for such descents any more and Di Caprio looked stranded, even faintly comic, as if he didn't realise there were other people in the movie: every time we cut back to him, he just seemed more bug-eyed and out of it. Maybe that's why his best performances have been playing solipsists, in both Shutter Island and Inception, whose shared preoccupation with fantasy and reality suggests that these mazy, inner-space refugees may turn out to be defining roles for him. One can't but worry about the state of the Di Caprio psyche these days. All those supermodels can't be good for the soul; Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover, taken together, suggest an attempt at some sort of self-diagnosis. I hope he's having fun.

1. Blood Diamond
2. Catch Me If You Can
3. Shutter Island
4. What's Eating Gilbert Grape
5. Titanic
6. Inception
7. Romeo + Juliet
8. This Boy's Life
9. The Basketball Diaries
10. Revolutionary Road

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Bill Simmons

2011-11-05T08:59:00.006+05:00

'Why don't we remember Eddie's peak from 1981 to 1988 a little more reverentially? Why don't we think about race when we think about Eddie? Why doesn't Eddie get mentioned with Poitier, Cosby and Pryor every time? Why doesn't it matter that every successful black comic or actor that came after him — Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, any of the Wayans brothers, Will Smith, you name it — profusely credited Eddie for influencing him? Why doesn't Eddie get more credit for flipping Saturday Night Live on its lily-white ass, reinvigorating itand becoming its only truly successful black cast member? Why doesn't Eddie get more credit for, as he puts it, becoming "the first black actor to take charge in a white world onscreen?" Why doesn't everyone ever point out that Eddie is the most successful comedian ever, by any calculation?' — Bill Simmons, Grantland

Amen.

2011-11-05T04:23:00.003+05:00

Contenders for poster of the year — suggestions welcomed...

INTERVIEW: Peter Sarsgaard

2011-11-03T05:42:00.009+05:00

'The actor Peter Sarsgaard recently attended the 40^th birthday party of a guy from his high school – an all-boys Jesuit school in Connecticut. “One of them said the wildest thing to me. He said, ‘we all knew you were like artistic, but you also looked like you were really out of it. Were you actually thinking about something interesting or thinking about something? Were you think about, like, us?’”

He laughs — more of a giggle, girlishly high. “I told him, ‘I was probably just spaced out.”
Sarsgaard gets this a lot. With his low-lidded, almond-shaped eyes, and sly, insolent manner, he often plays men honeycombed with secrets — a killer in Boy’s Don’t Cry, an editor in Shattered Glass, a sharpshooter in Jarhead, the seducer of Carey Mulligan in An Education — parts which instill in the audience a similar paranoia: what is that guy thinking? Is he thinking about us? If so, is it nice or nasty? “I do think a decent amount of what I do as an actor comes from my ability to not express,” he says. “I just smoulder. I combust internally.”
— from my interview with Peter Sarsgaard for Mr Porter

The uses of enchantment

2011-11-03T04:28:00.009+05:00

"Truly exceptional. Do see it. Walked out of cinema into the falling snow...lovely!" (from@raeofdawn...but what's falling snow got to do with anything? Unreliable viewer, too impressionable)." — Hollywood Elsewhere

I must say: that mention of snow makes me believe @raeofdawn all the more. That's one of the truest sign of enchantment, when you walk outside the movie theatre to find the air outside filled with the movie you've just seen — or else amazed that it has gotten dark, or that the world is even still there.

In agreement with herself, most of the time

2011-11-01T21:28:00.010+05:00

"My father had a subscription to The New Yorker, and every week I would pick it up and start an argument with Kael. The argument had to remain in my own head, as that was well before the Web made it possible to storm into a comments section and tell off a critic. Usually, I didn’t want to tell off Kael, not exactly, no matter how much I objected to what she had written, and I objected to quite a lot. I wanted to ask her questions. I wanted some interaction with that brain. I would read her capsules in the front, or her ever-lengthening reviews in the back, and marvel at the syncopated, give-a-damn writing style and her utter faith in her own judgment. The fact that she was a woman mattered to me, too. Growing up in Alabama, I did not encounter many women with that kind of intellectual aggressiveness. Only gradually did I realize how widely Kael is criticized, even despised. The volume of things for which Kael is faulted begins to approach the size of her own output. She had too much power and wielded it unwisely. She collected acolytes, she started feuds. She overpraised Last Tango in Paris, she was blind to the virtues of Dr. Strangelove. She had no consistent set of criteria. She placed too much emphasis on screenwriters. Her kinship with ugly ducklings meant she gave too much credit to Liza Minnelli and Barbra Streisand. She sent David Lean into a spiraling depression with her review of Ryan’s Daughter. She helped ruin Orson Welles and the piece that did it, “Raising Kane,” showed lack of ethics, as did her stint in Hollywood, as did her rave over the rough cut for Nashville. She palled around with filmmakers, tuts Dargis, as though friendships with Woody Allen and Robert Altman kept Kael from hating Stardust Memories or 3 Women--the latter judgment prompting Altman to scream at her in the middle of an airport. (Altman got over it; Allen did not.) Others fault her for lack of loyalty to directors we now idolize. She never expounded “a theory, a system, or even a consistent set of principles,” points out A.O. Scott. And my response is, “well, thank god for that.” But the question also arises, is that the highest goal of criticism? Start Your Own -Ism?" — Self-Styled Siren

From the Siren's superb double-barrelled review of the Wolcott and Kael books. I've been amazed at the amount of sniping at Kael along the lines of "she was wrong about such-and-such", as if it were her job to get anybody's opinion right but her own. Who would they have her be in agreement with? Themselves, naturally, but even if she devoted herself to agreeing with person A, she would probably find herself in disagreement with person B and quickly run afoul of the old adage about not being able to please everyone all of the time. The worst thing you can say about a critic is not: she doesn't agree with me, but: she is not in agreement with herself. And Kael got herself right about 99% of the time.

INTERVIEW: Justin Timberlake

2011-10-31T17:34:00.012+05:00

“I’ve been really, really lucky,” says Justin Timberlake, sitting back on a sofa at the Ritz Carlton in Battery Park, on the Southern most tip of Manhattan. “Because I look back and I don’t think I’m the most talented singer, or dancer or actor. I don’t think I’m that good. It just takes this inner head-down type of thing. That will-to-achieve was the other half of why things probably happened for me. It takes balls."

Oh to be in possession of Justin Timberlake’s balls. Let’s not be greedy. Just one would suffice to rescue the average Englishman from the confines of Prufrockish self-doubt, and propel him, blinking, towards the klieg lights of Grammy-winning pop superstardom. Two of those beauties beneath the bonnet and you would in all likelihood now be transitioning — via a successful clothing line, golf course, restaurant and vodka brand — towards the megawatt beneficence of movie stardom, as Timberlake is now.

“Its kind of like being on a rollercoaster,” he says. “ You don’t know when that rollercoaster is going to end, so you realise that enjoying every single loop and every left and right turn is the fun of it. You just get to a point — I feel like I’ve been through it in the last year or two — which is: you realize that who you are is not what you do” Timberlake presents a personable, even placid exterior. For someone who once sang “I'll let you whip me if I misbehave” on ‘Bringing Sexy Back’, he’s the politest sex God you ever could hope to meet, dressed head-to-toe in black like a studly waiter, with smooth, babyish skin, and pale blue eyes. “I feel that I’m painfully normal,” he says. “Other than the fact that I have an extremely aspirational profession.”
Only the worry lines on his forehead give some clue to the duck legs paddling furiously beneath the waterline. He peppers me with questions about the screening of the film I attended the night before. “Was Craig’s score on the film? They just did all the color. They ’re just doing all the sound mixing right now, which I think is a very integral part of the film. To hear the time going – ft ftf ft ft ft – and also the score. I’ve heard some of Craig’s score. It’s beautiful.”
— from my interview with Justin Timberlake in The Times

REVIEW: In Time (dir. Niccol)

2011-10-27T06:18:00.020+05:00

In Time has such a rich premise — a future in which the poor run out of time at 25, and the rich stay 25 forever — that it is at least 20 minutes before you notice it's as dead as a Dodo. The film was written and directed by Andrew Niccol, whose fascination with fake utopias (he directed Gattaca and wrote The Truman Show) here furnishes him with a world divided, as has been traditional since the time of H G Wells, into the Haves and the Have Nots, with the Have Nots haggling for extra time via a device on their wrist — 'Got a minute?" ask the beggars on the street — and the Haves swanning around tony mansions, looking beautiful and 25 forever. Time is quite literally money. It looks like the longest credit card commercial you ever saw, the styling at its densest in the exquisite, paradisal form of Amanda Seyfried, wearing a Louise Brooks bob and Le Louboutin heels, in which she teeters heroically, like a refugee model, while fleeing the film's villains. There are three of them — a blonde one, a dark one, and Pete from Mad Men — all showing up for chases duties on a rotation scheme. They are first sign that the film is losing forward puff, the clincher being a plot that, for lack of anything better to do, devolves into an attempt to Overturn the Order of Things — viva la revolucion! — in order to get back to the pre-lapserian state we all enjoyed before the movie's writers came up with their bright idea in the first place. Never trust a movie whose second half basically entails undoing it's first. It's like someone arriving at a party with the announcement they're leaving — the conversation can't settle. Which is a shame because the first half has a nicely concealed satirical sting, at its sharpest in the scene where Timberlake, being shown his table in a fancy restaurant, is gently corrected by a waitress: she can tell he's ghetto, because he does everything so quickly. I'd never thought about this before but but's true: rich lives run slower, although they affect rush as a way of appearing not too ostentatiously idle. Much like In Time, in fact, which does a perfect impersonation of action-movie kinetics without proceeding an inch. C-

REVIEW: Lucking out (Wolcott)

2011-10-26T18:03:00.010+05:00

I tore through James Wolcott's Lucking Out after managing to get my hands on a copy earlier this week — it took me three nights. I knew I was going to love the writing, Wolcott's prose inspiring in me the same gobsmacked awe that I get watching Chinese gymnasts and Grand Slam tennis champs. Responding to Patti Smith, the prose of Normal Mailer, Talking Heads, David Lynch, porn, Balanchine, Wolcott maps his own synapses with such a heady mixture of pinpoint accuracy and wind-blown abandon, that you don't have time to be astonished, for here comes some fresh wonder down the pike: "the women women in particular suggested minor characters in Dawn Powell novels who had slipped down several rungs in life and were left with nothing but late innings rituals and brief flurries of bother"; (his co-inhabitants at the Latham Hotel) "every phrase quivered like the handle of a knife whose blade has just lodged in the tree bark" (Kael). There's something like that on every page — a Federesque barrage of aces. What stops his writing from descending into mere Fine Writing — or, since Wolcott is too energetic a talent for silver-birch finery, the hyper-caffeinated rock-press equivalent, distracted by its own snarl in the bath-room mirror — are his sure, unshakable rhythms, and the simpatico match-up between his prose and his subjects. In each case, he locks into some obstreperous vitality in his subjects — a gnarly, wriggling life force — and then proceeds to write like a man possessed.

"Patti already has her stage persona pencil-sharpened into a self-conscious, couldn't-care-less wild child, playing with a zipper like a teenage boy with a horny itch, pistoning her hips, hocking an amoeba blob of spit between songs, scratching her breast as if addressing a stray thought, and, during the incantatory highs, spreading her fingers like a preacher woman summoning the spirits from the Pere Lachaise graveyard where Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde were buried to rise and reclaim their former glory."

Notice how, at the very point where most writers would be sneaking off for a well-deserved fag break, Wolcott whips one more delightful image out of the bag — the resurrection of Morrison and Wilde — like a sealion ending its balancing act with one final nudge, sending the ball flying into the delighted crowd. Being this deeply embedded in both the world and one's own reactions to it — a double patrol of two equally fierce perimeters — is hard, and he makes it look easy. Maybe we have New York to thank. "If nothing else the seventies in New York taught me situational awareness, a vital attribute for every slow-moving mammal prone to daydreaming." This book is a must for every such mammal.

Travis Bickle is dead

2011-10-24T19:11:00.003+05:00

From my piece for Slate about the accelerated careers of today's young stars:—

"You remember child stars: those tap-dancing, ringlet-haired moppets, shoved onto stage by their mothers with a bright smile on their faces that, somewhere past the age of 12, required a cocaine habit to properly maintain. By contrast, the new generation are remarkable for their minimal flame-out rate, aerodynamic flight paths and Powerpoint career plans. They didn’t need mom to elbow them onstage. Drawn by the ghostly, pixillated light of the Mickey Mouse Club, like little Heather Rourke in Poltergeist, they heeded Hollywood’s siren call themselves and, newly arrived, immediately locked into Auteurist orbit. Think of Hailee Stanfeld holding her own in the Coen’s cussed remake of True Grit, Kristen Stewart narrowly surviving David Fincher’s Panic Room, Chloe Moretz slicing and dicing her way through drug dealers in Kick Ass, and now appearing in the new Scorsese film—the model for this kind of x-rated child performance being, of course, Jodie Foster's child prostitute Iris, ducking the arterial gouts at the end of Taxi Driver age 12. The Coens. Fincher. Scorsese. These are not kiddie directors. These are not kiddie careers. They are adult careers. They’re just happening sooner.
The irony is that if you ask any young actor worth their salt which filmmaking decade they most revere, the answer is almost unanimous—the seventies—but most of the actors that decade turned into stars had been lying in wait for some time: the young turks of the counter-culture were decidedly long in the tooth. “Taxi Driver is the ultimate independent-movie performance,” Leonardo Di Caprio told GQrecently. “Playing a character like Travis Bickle is every young actors wet dream” but De Niro was 33 when he appeared in that movie, having spent most of his twenties scrounging a living from the dinner theatre circuit, making movies that couldn’t even find distributors, and gluing the windows of his one-room walk-up together to keep the New York winters out. The stew of alienation and resentment that propelled Travis Bickle across the screen was very real. Gene Hackman, meanwhile, spent most of his twenties in the Marine Corps, serving as a radio field operator, and later working as a New York doorman before getting his break in movies—he was 37 by the time he appeared in Bonnie & Clyde and 41 in The French Connection. Robert Duvall was 41 by the time he got his big break in The Godfather, after serving as a Private in the US Army and worked as a post office clerk. Dustin Hoffman had worked as a restaurant coat-check, a typist with the Yellow Pages, and a stringer of Hawaiian Leis, and was 30 when he appeared in The Graduate—a good nine years beyond graduation. Is it any wonder that when placed next to that lot, the performances of today’s young stars can feel experientally thin, both too smooth and too strenuous in their search for imported texture, edge, grit? “The idea is you learn to use everything that happened in your life and you learn to use it in creating the character you're working on,” said Brando of the Method. “You learn to dig into your unconscious and make use of every experience you ever had.” What experiences can these young actors draw on, besides that of having been stars their entire life?
This moebius paradox has, in turn, become the dominant theme of today’s prize performances. For the most part, Di Caprio’s recent performances have felt like grim-faced self-expurgations, fretful with a young man’s self-war— he hasn’t taken an audience along for the ride since Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, a role he disdains—the exception being the reel of Shutter Island, when you finally felt his protracted apprenticeship with Scorsese paying off. But it’s no accident that Shutter Island shares with Inception a mazy preoccupation with veils of fantasy, and a quixotic search for the real. It is the theme, too, of Black Swan, in which Portman’s ballerina, lacking the experience that would round out her performance as the black swan, tries to speed-dial it, like Trinity in the Matrix downloading helicopter piloting skills. That’s why Black Swan was such a pivotal film for young Hollywood: over-compensating for experiential thinness was what the film was about. It’s safe to say, in fact, that one consequence of the Tween revolution is to sound the death knell of Method acting. In which case, Gosling’s advice is sound: actors should accelerate into the curve, not resist it. Travis Bickle is dead. The world belongs to Iris." — Slate

REVIEW: Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011-10-23T01:12:00.007+05:00

Most filmmakers misunderstand depravity, which is a shame because they sure like to film it. Ask a director like Oliver Stone to show you Hell's innermost circle and he whips the screen into an orgiastic blur of strippers, mescalin and birds of prey. Ask Darren Aronofsky to show you the heart of darkness and he merely gets out his double-ended dildos, or — if he really wants to blow the doors of perception off their hinges — girls kissing girls. (Girl-on-girl action is honestly the worst thing he can imagine. The thing waiting for us all in room 101. The sight that will cause Western Civilization to hoist it's pantaloons and run shrieking from the room.) But look to David Lynch's Blue Velvet for a reliable guide to what lies beyond that final veil: the eerie stillness of Pussy Heaven, where Dean Stockwell gently sways, lip-synching Roy Orbison, and two giantesses sit on the couch, guarding what lies in the room beyond — the whole scene as outwardly still as an opium den, a drug deal, or a pervert's beady transfixion. I found the whole of Martha Marcy May Marlene to be like that. It's a real mesmeriser, casting an opiate spell from its first frame to its last, hitting the spot that last year's Winters Bone — with which it shares much, not least a girl-in-peril theme, and a terrific performance form John Hawkes — seemed to for so many people. I was a little thrown by the way the plot circled back on itself, via a character Witholding Crucial Information, rather than pressing on deeper into the mysteries of that forest. Martha takes that plunge, courtesy of a story whose beautiful ellipses would send a shiver down the spine of Ian McEwan (the trailer, as sharp and stealthy as a paper-cut, is the best I have seen this year). I don't want to say much more about it: this is one of those films that deserves complete purity of audience reaction, not least because it is about the despoiliation of a young girl's innocence. I've the odd niggle: two years does not seem like a sufficiently long time to have forgotten basic social niceties like "don't climb into bed with people while they are having sex." And when leading another young girl through the initiation she once endured, it wouldn't have hurt for Elizabeth Olsen to have let show just a flicker of misgiving. Otherwise, she is very good: an unusually sombre actress, with a low, intelligent voice and a broad moon face, like Lillian Gish's, that seems to catch and absorb everything happening in the frame. In many ways, these slices of rural American-Gothic are The Perils of Pauline for the indie-arthouse crowd. Director Sean Durkin, here making his debut, works up a bruising sense of threat in the corners of his frame, places Olsen somewhere left of centre, like Wyeth, and allows the resulting electromagnetic hum to power his entire picture. Wonderful. B+

PROFILE: Saul Bellow

2011-10-22T23:50:00.011+05:00

Here is a list of the things that have failed to kill Saul Bellow. A double dose of peritonitis and pneumonia, aged 8. A crocodile in Egypt – which gave him and Saul Steinberg a scare (Steinberg’s imagined headline ran, ‘crocodile kills two Sauls’). A poisonous Red Snapper that left him in a coma for two weeks, aged 79. Then there’s the alcoholism, cancer, AIDS and sheer old age that have silenced his late contemporaries ‘with the regularity of a drum tattoo’. At which point one can easily imagine Death simply shrugging and moving on – leaving Bellow to write yet another full–length novel, to father another child, and to contemplate the century he has done so much to document, not to mention outlast. ‘It remains to be seen what the 20th Century has made of Saul Bellow, or what Saul Bellow has made of the 20th Century,’ he said recently, with characteristically grandiose self–deprecation, as if the 20th Century were someone he met at a party last night. This gift for concretised abstraction is one of the things that Bellow fans treasure – his casual ability to be on better speaking terms with a Big Idea than most of us are with our neighbours. An article of 1990 rounded up Heidegger, Ronald Reagan, the Ancient Mariner, the Information Revolution, postmodernism and daytime TV – the usual suspects – and ran them through the blender to produce a vivid harangue against ‘the ceaseless world crisis, also known as the chaos of the present age.’ It’s that ‘aka’ I love – the Chaos of The Present Age as just another Bellovian hoodlum prowling the perimeter of his fiction, collecting poker debts and suckers. No shit, you just got mugged by the Human Condition.

So what’s the final diagnosis? What has Bellow made of the 20th Century, or the century of Bellow? You need a good head for heights to answer both questions – to negotiate both the gyroscopic perspective shifts of his fiction and to survive the sheer vertigo of the Bellow reputation. For to get to Bellow you must first get past all the praise for Bellow, most of it designed along roughly the same principles as electric cattle prods. Leslie Fielder has called him ‘one with whom it is necessary to come to terms’, which is simply a mean thing to say about anybody. James Atlas says that Bellow progressed from being ‘a promising writer, to being an interesting one, to being an exciting one, to being a major one’ – as thuggish a mob of adjectives as ever ganged up on a reader. By the end of Atlas’s book, Bellow has become such a glinting assemblage of plaques and Pulitzers, National Book Awards and Nobels that you could almost forget the novelist under there somewhere – a novelist with Russian blood in his veins, a nose for a scam, and ear for the streets, and a taste for big–bosomed women surpassed only by his taste for top–heavy rumination.

That there might also be a man in there has always been a strong possibility, too, although so far Bellow has only attracted the attentions of the biography industry’s more lunatic fringe. Mark Harris’s dotty, meandering U&I–style book on Bellow elicited the following response from his subject: ‘It was as if one of my joints were to turn author and write its own chronicle of one of my joints.’ At 674 pages, James Atlas’s Bellow (Faber 25 pounds) is much the weightiest specimen to date – tirelessly researched, rich in incident, and fleshed out with shrewd critical judgments. Atlas is clearly the man for the job, from the ringing endorsements offered by his CV (a previous biography of Delmore Schwarz, the model for Humboldt) right down to the seemliness of that surname: try and keep up with the young Bellow’s globe–trotting – France, Spain, Mexico, Egypt, Eastern Europe – and you’ll find an Atlas comes in pretty handy. AS for keeping track of the wives, well, the Manhattan telephone directory is a fairly good place to start– once it listed two Mrs Bellows in West End Avenue alone. And the mistresses? How much time do you have on your hands? More to the point: how did Bellow find the time? If all references to novels and novel–writing were to be excised from this book, you would not, I think, guess that its subject was a literary man. You would think: playboy, financier, jewel thief, airline pilot, superhero, sugar daddy, heart–throb. You would not think Nobel Laureate. You would think Bruce Wayne.

It begins on the hoof, in 1913, with Bellow’s parents – Russian Jews – fleeing the St Petersburg Tsarist police to relocate in Canada, where Bellow Snr, emboldened by a heady rush of pioneer spirit, tried his hand at a variety of jobs, only to prove a rousing failure at them all. One cannot but warm to Abraham Bellow, ‘a sharpie circa 1905’ who tried on occupations in much the same manner that Inspector Clouseau tried on disguises: peddling, bootlegging, matchmaking, insurance broking, selling cemetery lots, before finally moving from Montreal to Chicago where he became a baker. We clearly have a lot to thank him for. Abraham was not a literary man – a letter congratulating his son on the success of one of his novels urged him to ‘wright soon’ – but there’s as distinctly Augie March–ish tinge to that wild roster of misfitting jobs: it’s not hard to see how that fecklessness might, refitted with sufficient ambition, be turned outward as the hard–nosed yearning which was to be his son’s speciality. More importantly perhaps, he stopped his peregrinations at exactly the right point of the map. His son was to grow into a writer set on transforming his ugly, anti–poetic home city in ‘the place – incredible, vital, sinful, fascinating’ – as recognisable as Joyce’s Dublin, or Proust’s Paris. But there is a limit to what a writer can transform – the world was not, I think, quite ready for Bellow’s Montreal.

Bellow almost didn’t get to grow up at all: that peritonitis and pneumonia laid him up in hospital for six months, taking him close to death. Death, having failed in its first run–and–grab for the boy, returned for the mother, who succumbed to breast cancer when Bellow was 17. These two events became crucial elements of Bellow’s self–mythology – the life–epiphanies, the ‘batch of poems’ which every man carries around with him – although the keenly–judged pathos of that phrase should serve as both goad and warning to trauma junkies. To scan the outlines of this childhood, you’d have the child pegged as a sickly melancholic, bookish and inward, but the portrait won’t quite stick. Admittedly, an early job working for his brother’s coal truck company was severely compromised by Bellow’s tendency to read rather than count coal trucks. But on the other hand the book he happened to be reading was a soot–stained copy of Marx’s Value Price and Profit, which I guess beats Mallarme when it comes to explaining why you got fired.

The life of the young Bellow is instead marked by a Huck Finn–ish taste for adventure. Aged 17, and with the Depression in full swing, Bellow and a school–friend spent a summer hitching lifts with the hobos on dustbowl freight trains. This was followed by a night in jail, and then college, where Bellow was more drawn to performance than study, spending most of his time arguing the merits of Trotskyism with his friend Isaac Rosenfeld, improvising skits – a dissertation on beet Borscht, a Yiddish version of ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufock’. Atlas gives us a lovely portrait of Bellow at the time: standing out form the student mass of grubby corduroy in his navy blue suit and white shirt, ‘a sensuous mouth, a gap between his teeth, and wide eyes that were like a doe’s. He bounced on his toes as he walked’. Your basic dish. After the success of Dangling Man, Bellow even got a call from an agent convinced Bellow had a future in Hollywood – not as an Errol Flynn or George Raft type, perhaps, but as ‘the guy who loses the girl to George Raft or Errol Flynn type’. AS a prophetic act of literary criticism, this is well–nigh unsurpassable – it’s pretty much the plot of Herzog – and one can only mourn the possibility of a double career. The Nobel Prize ceremony – a notorious stiff – would surely be enlivened considerably, were its winners to bound onto the stage in green tights, plant their feet a yard apart, and let loose with one of those Errol Flynn laughs where it sounds as if you’re counting all the ‘ha’s.

Bellow resisted these blandishments, as he resisted anything that threatened his freedom: politics, marriage, and later, his Jewishness (asked if he felt he’s won the Nobel as a Jewish writer or an American writer, he replied ‘I thought I’d won it as a writer’). After he graduated, he did the customary tour of Europe, but found Paris a ‘sullen, grumbling city’. ‘One suspects that the main problem with Paris was the Parisians,’ writes Atlas, ‘they didn’t seem to know who Saul Bellow was.’ Actually, one suspects that the main problem with Paris was Hemingway – the last writer single–handedly to reshape American prose. What Bellow had in mind would resist Hemingway’s terse ruggedness just as surely as it would resist nail–paring exquisiteness. After his first two novels, Bellow rejected the Flaubertian standard and wrote at a gallop, abandoning wholesale what didn’t work – starting from the beginning again, storing what did work in the freezer, in case the house burnt down. Like Dickens, Bellow felt domestic chaos was a spur, not a hindrance to his creativity. ‘I feel like a man trying to sign his name in the back seat of a rollercoaster,’ he said, only half complaining.

The result of all this ferment was The Adventures of Augie March, a novel barrelled along by its own distinctive strain of brainy garrulity. The book was its own rollercoaster, as outward bound as it was inner–directed. For one thing, was ever a Bildungsroman so well populated? Dickens’s Pip meets a few colourful folk along the way and Stephen Dedalus talks of forging, in the smithy of his soul, the conscience of his race, but he prefers his own company. In Bellow’s novel, we get to meet the race. It is thronged with the peoples of America and their movements – ‘Danish sility, dago ingenuity’ – and Bellow’s powers of observation are sharpened into Instamatic indelibility by the need to catch the swarm of faces, the Brueghelian frieze, as it goes milling by: “We came up the walk, between the slow, thought–brewing, beat–up old heads, liver–spotted, of choked old bloodsalts and wastes, hard and bone–abare domes, or swollen, the elevens of sinews up on collarless necks crazy with the assaults of Kansas heats and Wyoming freezes, and with the strains of kitchen toil, Far West digging, Cincinnati retailing, Omaha slaughtering, peddling, harvesting, laborious or pegging enterprise from whale–sized to infusorial that collect into the labour of the nation.’ It is one of those extraordinary reverse–zooms that are a Bellow speciality: from a single set of sinews to the collective labour of the nation in a single sentence. His crowd control would be the envy of D W Griffith. The Adventures of Augie March at times resembles not so much a novel as a population explosion between hardcovers.

And where is Augie in all of this? To come to this novel from late Bellow novels, which are self–centred in every sense – launching into sustained orbit around a single soul – is quite a shock. For the first 200 pages or so, Augie is more of a satellite, physically undescribed, without character traits. All we get are the crowds, the people, and Augie’s reactions to them. ‘I’m not sure Augie can bear so much traffic and yet he must bear it,” worried Bellow. The gamble paid off. Augie’s is that peculiar brand of passivity which attracts events and people to him as surely as a lightning rod, yet hides a deep stubbornness of soul – a sense of self–determination so fierce that the only option is to echo the personalities of those around, all the while waiting the moment to strike. Augie March is unquestionably a young man’s novel, fired up with cunning and brio, and was received with appropriate rapture, succeeded by an expectant hush: how on earth would Bellow follow it up? How top the radiant verve – the ‘grand vital discord’ – of a novel like Augie? With a slim, infinitely sad novella like Seize the Day, of course – death whittled and dusted with melancholy, bone to Augie’s flesh.

Such a display of reach confounds our traditional ideas of the way careers should proceed. It also serves as warning to anyone trying to get the measure of a man so clearly capable of chopping and changing at will. Bellow seems to have conducted his personal life along similar lines: a terrible husband who left his wives before they could leave him, yet juggled events to portray himself as the wronged party – a selfish lover, whose legendary list of conquests concealed terrible technique in the sack – and a lousy friend who regularly pillaged his friends’ lives for material, and refused event to attend their funerals. There is something a little seamy and dispiriting about this portrait of the artist as Utter Scoundrel. The problem is not that one doesn't’ believe it. One does believe it: the problem is that the psychological profile echoes that of most literary biographies you’ve ever read.

After all, it is in their work that writers achieve distinction. In their personal lives they are second–rate copyists and rip–off merchants – plagiarising the same subset of personality defects and character flaws. The rich and varied language of Freudianism tends to hide one basic truth: that personalities tend to fuck up in roughly the same way. You are either fucked up or you are not. One day, someone will write the literary biography of a modest, monogamous, thick–skinned sweetiepie who cleans out his mother–in–law’s budgerigar cage every week: that would be an event worth recording. Whether he would be a writer worth reading is another matter. Personally, I distrust any writer still on speaking terms with more than half of his telephone book. Surely a writer’s primary duty is to louse up as much of his private life as he possibly can, so that at the end of a hard day I can curl up with a book that is of marginally better quality than the book that would have been written had he not. In this, readers are quite free from the normal constraints of etiquette and morality. If Bellow felt it necessary to steal his friend’s stories – and if he further thought that not attending funerals would help matters any further – then so be it. If it will help his books any, he is quite free not to attend my funeral. I will not mind.

Being a smart man, Atlas knows all this. He quotes at length a letter from Bellow to Dave Peltz, who accused Bellow of pilfering an incident about a poker debt for Humboldt’s Gift: ‘The name of the game is Give All. You are welcome to all my facts. You know them, I give them to you – if you have the strength to pick them up, take them with my blessing.’ Aside from being magisterially cocky, this also happens to be the absolute last word on the subject, the debate clincher, an end of the matter. Atlas, however, has a biography to write, and so on it goes, the parade of pettinesses, the repeat revelations of Bellow’s beagling self–interest. ‘In Bellow’s case, the process of mourning was intensified by his habit of experiencing his dead friends as aspects of himself. Or, of his letter–writing style: ‘it was as if he was writing to just one person: himself.’ Do letter–writers – or mourners, for that matter – ever do anything else? You find yourself wondering if these criticisms don’t amount to much more than the observation that lives tend to get lived from the centre out: each heart, as Bellow once noted, beats only for itself. A certain self–centredness is surely bound to hang over any biography, as over any life. To write a book about Saul Bellow and then complain about the amount of undiluted Saul Bellow in it comes close to unfairness – like grilling someone at a party about their career and then complaining that they seemed a little career–obsessed.

The best comment on Bellow comes from his shrink, who confessed, after many years of administering Reichian therapy: ‘To put it quite frankly, I never quite figured this man out.’ He added that even when Bellow was caught in the middle of some domestic travail, ‘I could never make up my mind how unhappy he was’. This frank bafflement is infinitely suggestive, and furthers an understanding of Bellow’s achievement more than any amount of mother issues or narcissistic complexes. Read and reread his work as you may, it is well–nigh impossible to say how unhappy he is exactly – whether the work is ‘optimistic’ or ‘pessimistic’. At a distance certain novels seem written on the up – Augie, Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift. Others – Seize The Day, Mr Sammler’s Planet, The Dean’s December – seem written from under a king–sized depression. But close to, certainty crumbles: the two moods break up and bleed into one another, the joys come limned with sadness, the anguish tinged with wit. Bellow suffers in great style.

Take Herzog, having a high old time feeling down about himself: ‘To his own parents he had been an ungrateful child. To his country, an indifferent citizen. To his brothers and sisters, affectionate but remote. With his friends, an egotist. With love, lazy. With brightness, dull. With power, passive. With his own soul evasive. Satisfied with his own severity, positively enjoying the hardness and factual rigour of his judgment, he lay on his sofa, his arms rising behind him, his legs extended without aim.’ That final sentence is the killer, detecting self–satisfaction where you least expect it, as if consciousness were a false–bottomed drawer. It is one thing to purge yourself ruthlessly of vanity, but an altogether different order of insight to detect still more vanity in the severity of your attempt. The self–regard of self–criticism: this is prime Bellow territory, treacherous underfoot, fogged with self–doubt, and delimited by boundaries that seem to shift and shimmer the more you look at them. Is self–knowledge a form of transcendence or simply another trap?

Herzog sets the pattern for most of Bellow’s future protagonists: a bruised and brooding, soft and sore of heart, apt to panic under pressure, and with a weakness for abstract thought so chronic they almost seem in the grip of a brain fever – a swoon of higher thought. Bellow’s novels are seized by such constant, if casual, urges towards transcendence that at times they seem like the child’s balloon in The Dean’s December, ‘snatched upwards’ by the Chicago winds. His heroes are men caught in the updraft, dangling men all, unable to stop the ascent of their thought balloons, equally unable to let them go. ‘Could I say that morning I had been reading Hegel’s Phenomenology, the pages of freedom and death?’ thinks Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift. ‘Could I say that I had been thinking about the history of human consciousness with special emphasis on the question of boredom? Could I say that for years now I had been preoccupied with this theme and that I had discussed it with the late poet Von Humboldt Fleisher?’

For many readers, the simple response to this will be ‘no’. Miss Ferguson, Bellow’s high–school teacher, used to chant the words “Be specific!’ to the tune of Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’. I’d love to know what she thought of her ex–pupil’s novels, with their speedy powers of generalisation and inflation, like over–sensitive life rafts. For we are here at the much–debated heart of Bellow’s achievement, the moment of truth, the point where fans and mere admirers part company – where those who are capable of being World–Historical before 9am in the morning shoulder the burden of their World–History city, while the rest of us shrink under the bed–covers. In short: what is the correct height at which to pitch our admiration for Bellow’s ideas?

One of the more instructive antagonisms that Bellow nursed through–out his career was with Nabokov. The two men took one of those instant snarling–dog antagonisms toward one another, Nabokov dismissing Bellow as a ‘miserable mediocrity’, Bellow gently condescending to Lolita: ‘I could write a better novel from Lolit’as poitn of view.’ It’s not too hard to see why this should be. For Nabokov, a novel of ideas was a contradiction in terms, novels no more needing to concern themselves with ideas than with dairy products. If your novel happens to be about a philosopher, there’s no ducking a certain amount of Hegel, just as if your novel is about a milkman, then a certain amount of Dairylea is t be expected. But the amounts are the same – no more and no less. Bellow, however, is a self–confessed ‘greatness freak’. His heroes are plumed philosophers, tenured intellectuals, great men wreathed in thought. Their unabashed grandiloquence embarrasses a slovenly anti–heroic century, but it also loosens Bellow’s hold on the Great American Novel, precisely because his protagonists have the head–start of their own greatness before the novel has even begun. How much of an aesthetic challenge is it to smuggle intelligence into a novel about an intelligent person?

Hence the slight frictionlessness – the suspicious ease – of Bellows later books, as if he were simply decanting his sensibility whole onto the page. As Martin Amis said in his review of The Dean’s December: ‘not a jot of Bellow’s intellectualism is withheld’, which is one way of putting it. Another might be that the books are straight brain transplants. Amis is one of Bellow’s more generous and perceptive critics, but he can sometimes sound like a force–fed man trying to convince himself that he’s a bit peckish. Later in that review, he praises something he calls Bellow’s ‘didactic generosity, as if such a unicorn could actually exist.

It can’t, of course. Didacticism is death, whichever way you cut it, and as the intellectual musculature of the novels increases, their blood thins, their fictive tissue weakens – the hero’s swoons of thought seeming more like fiction’s dead faint. The key text here is Humboldt’s Gift, which isn’t so much comic as light–headed, giddy: failed seriousness sending up its failure as it falls. ‘This wasn’t the time to remember certain words of John Stuart Mill, but I remembered them anyway,’ thinks Charlie Citrine, while getting arrested, of all things. When, eleven years earlier, Herzog got arrested, you really felt the hard crunch of reality – not to mention the actual thwack of a car bumper – muscling in on his cogitations. But throughout Humboldt’s Gift, Charlie’s collision with reality is softened, finessed by an inexplicably reciprocated friendship with the gangster Canile – one of the ‘reality instructors’ who traditionally serve in Bellow’s fiction to bring his heroes down to earth. The difference here being that Canile, incredibly, seems aware of his literary function – taking Citrine on a helpful tour of Chicago’s seamier sides with the words, ‘I figure it’s your duty to examine American society from the White House to Skid Row’. No it’s not, just as it’s not Canile’s duty to point it out. At times, Bellow seems to enlist his entire cast to carry out duties which are, strictly speaking, his alone to perform. His themes come self–indexing– his characters characterise themselves – his writer heroes do his writing for him.

All this is maddening, but it never quite proves fatal. For the net effect is the required one: American society from the White House to Skid Row does get itself examined. For 300 pages of a Saul Bellow novel, Saul Bellow is doing the writing, and Bellow in full flood is something to behold. Humboldt’s Gift also happens to be Bellow’s best Chicago novel – and the images of urban hellfire worked into The Dean’s December are as haunting a vision of modern apocalypse as you could wish for. Of course, there is a bathetic, over–strident side to the Bellow Jeremiad – sometimes when he sets about describing the inner circles of the moronic inferno – whether it be Hitchcock movies, or the Beatles, or Nintendo, or, most recently ‘The Simpsons, jittering away on TV’ – he has an uncanny knack of describing exactly what I happened to be doing last Thursday night. But with didactic talent, disagreement is the true test, because it frees you up to roam the books unfettered, scouting for epigrammatic and descriptive gems: an ex–wife whose ‘fig leaf turned out to be a price tag’ – the debt collector who ‘breathed the air as if he were stealing it’ – a father ‘brought down by the heavy tackle of death’ – a corpse’s face with ‘the subtracted look of the just dead’ – the wrinkles on a lover’s face identified as the work of “Death, the artist, very slow’.

Bellow has matched him. Death has been a lifelong subject for Bellow – a life’s work, requiring all the patience and cunning of the enemy – and all of his heroes have had to make room for it. From Einhorn, that ‘Thanatopsis stoic’ doing daily battle with the ‘cheating old rascal with bones showing in buckskin fringes – to Sammler, emboldened by his ‘earth–departure objectivity’, now free to make ‘sober, decent terms with death’ – right up to Ravelstein, a memoir of his friend Allan Bloom, who died in 1992 of AIDS. Bellow’s last novella was written after his own most recent skirmish with the grave – courtesy of that Red Snapper, which Bellow ate while on holiday with his fifth wife, Janis, in the West Indies. It sent him into convulsions, and then a coma and had him in intensive care for three weeks. ‘I was given up for dead. The doctors told me so themselves,’ he recalled, ‘I had some brilliant hallucinations, so great that what I was writing dwindled by contrast with these visions.’ The incident makes its way into Ravelstein, whose narrator, Chick, also makes a Lazarus–like recovery: ‘If I had stopped to consider it, I would have been aware that I was underground digging myself out with my bare hands.’

What keeps Chick alive is his promise to write a memoir of his late friend, Abe Ravelstein, a world–class brain whose book on American academia has made him millions. Now holed up in a luxury penthouse, his Japanese kimono parted to reveal ‘legs paler than milk’, Ravelstein discourses on everything from Thucydides to Mel Brooks. We never get to hear many of those ideas first–hand – enough to recognise a facsimile of Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, but no more. Chick is as keen to note the appearance of this head as it contents: ‘On his bald head you felt that what you were looking at were the finger marks of its shaper.’ Bellow has always known that the best way to get to souls is through bodies – he is the fleshiest of transcendentalists – but here his method is given added punch because body and soul are at ware with one another. For Ravelstein is dying: ‘this head was rolling toward the grave.’

The result is a portrait designed to revivify the dead, but also written to keep the writer alive – almost an I–V drip of ink, feeding both ways. ‘Ravelstein expected me to make good on my promise – To keep my word I’d have to live. Of course there was an obvious corollary: once the memoir was written, I love my protection, and I became as expendable as anybody else.’ The memoir could well prove Bellow’s last full–length work – I hope not, but the man is 84. If anything, Ravelstein feels even later than that, a work from beyond the grave – a self–penned obituary handed out from the coffin, written right up to the line. And as epitaphs go, it’s pretty accurate. Two friends, both dying, having one final head–to–head across a hospital bed, finding the words they want for the things they still have to say: the image sets the benchmark for the exacting level of truth Bellow has set for himself in his fiction. For Chick on Ravelstein, read Bellow on Bellow: ‘This was his way of laying open a subject – not entirely flattering, but then he never flattered anyone, nor did he level with you in order to put you down. He simply believed that willingness to let the self–esteem structure be attacked and burned to the ground was a measure of your seriousness. A man should be able to hear, and to bear, and the worst that can be said about him.’

— my review of James Atlas's Saul Bellow for Arete

Where my A+ grades go

2011-10-22T07:56:00.056+05:00

I never used to give grades when I reviewed movies professionally, possessed of a young man's unwillingness to tabulate his passions, plus a desire to signal my disdain for my editor's unhealthy precoccupation with the chicken-sexing aspect of the job, as opposed to its pearlescent-prose-writing aspect. I didn't issue grade point averages to my girlfriends ("Susie's attendence is good, her concentration levels continue to improve but she must resist the temptation to issue her teachers with assignments") so why would I do the same to movies? But age is a numbers game, and the older you get the more statistically-inclined your grow. When I started this blog, I started handing out grades, a little guiltily at first, then accompanied by increasingly knotted bouts of deliberation, and finally a certain camp-scholastic enjoyment. (Scholasticism is camp, I think: just look at all the silly gowns and hats). As some readers noticed, my rankings had a tendency to shift a little over time, not so much a consequence of me changing my mind about a film, and more to do with the relational realignments that happened when I looked back at a given year and thought "can Inception really beat Animal Kingdom?" I think of it a little like building subsidence, all the bricks and mortar of those individual judgments having shift a little before locking down into adamantine, lasting judgment. I didn't want to be one of those graders that hands out A+s as if they were candy — giving, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind too high a mark and leaving no room for Chinatown to stretch. I wanted a grading system that encompassed the weekly hustle and flow of my on-the-ground enthusiasms and also the films, released in my lifetime, that I think of as classics. Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Blue Velvet were going to have to duke it out against one another, by the same metric, and to hell with what that did to Bueller's chances. But nor did I want it miserish, spiritually parched, or mooning over some lost era of cinematic greatness — an endemic problem with film critics who tend to plucked from the same gene pool as the connoisseurs of historical ruins. I feel the same way about nostalgia as I do about deep vein thrombosis — a regrettable, if inevitable, human frailty.

Anyway, I just finished the retroactive bit of the assignment. The pictures that received A grades were as follows:—

The Wild Bunch, Klute, The French Connection, The Godfather Part II, Mean Streets, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Halloween, Alien, The Elephant Man, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Aliens, Dangerous Liaisons, The Double Life of Veronique, Pulp Fiction, Before Sunrise, Kundun, The English Patient, The Piano Teacher, Catch Me If You Can, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Hurt Locker, Toy Story 3, The Social Network.

So, in the course of my lifetime, 27 films have transported me — solid-gone, nape-of-the-neck, what's-my-name-again transports of delight.

An A+ grade, meanwhile, went to the following:—

Badlands, Chinatown, Jaws, Blue Velvet, Goodfellas, The Last of the Mohicans, Brokeback Mountain.

So now I know. Near mystical reverence — honest bafflement as to how such a miracle could come to pass, closely followed by the urge to get down on my knees and pray that the rest of my cinemagoing life will not be downhill from here — is reserved for just seven films. Three from the seventies, one from the eighties, two from the nineties and one from the 2000s. That feels about right. Which means that somewhere in there is may favorite film (released in my lifetime). I'm not ready to work that out just yet.

Best Films of 2010
Best Films of 2009
Best Films of 2008
Best Films of 2007
Best Films of 2006
Best Films of 2005
Best Films of 2004
Best Films of 2003
Best Films of 2002
Best Films of 2000
Best Films of 1999
Best Films of 1998
Best Films of 1997
Best Films of 1996
Best Films of 1995
Best Films of 1994
Best Films of 1993
Best Films of 1992
Best Films of 1991
Best Films of 1990
Best Films of 1989
Best Films of 1988
Best Films of 1987
Best Films of 1986
Best Films of 1985
Best Films of 1984
Best Films of 1983
Best Films of 1982
Best Films of 1981
Best Films of 1980
Best Films of 1979
Best Films of 1978
Best Films of 1977
Best Films of 1976
Best Films of 1975
Best Films of 1974
Best Films of 1973
Best Films of 1972
Best Films of 1971
Best Films of 1970
Best Films of 1969
Best Films of 1968
Best Films of 1967

My favorite news story of the year so far

2011-10-20T09:48:00.008+05:00

"(CBS/AP)
ZANESVILLE, Ohio -
Sheriff's deputies shot nearly 50 wild animals — including 18 rare Bengal tigers and 17 lions — in a big-game hunt across the state's countryside Wednesday after the owner of an exotic-animal park threw their cages open and committed suicide in what may have been one last act of spite against his neighbors and police....
Ohio Sheriff Matt Lutz said he is confident that the monkey missing from a Muskingum County exotic animal farm was dead on Wednesday, and therefore the active search for the primate was called off, reports CBS 10-TV. According to Lutz, the monkey is thought to have been eaten by one of the escaped cats." — CBS News

I find that monkey's death almost unbearably moving. On CNN, the police who had to shoot down the tigers and lions were speaking, in haggard tones, how hard it had been to tell their kids what they had had to do that day. But at least one of the escaped animals — that monkey, who also had Herpes, it later transpired — enjoyed the dignity of a natural death, at the hands, or claws, of his oldest nemeses, one of the big cats. What a fantastic way to end his sudden, last-minute burst of freedom. Freed briefly, but ultimately doomed, the monkey and the cat squared off like Samurais to engage in one last blood rite, a last hurrah of Darwinian tooth and claw , a final flurry of jungle law in rural Ohio — the ape going down with all the pathos of the great Kong himself. My favorite news story of the year so far by a long mile.

Fall Screengrab 2011: Actors

2011-10-15T02:41:00.029+05:00

From top: Michael Fassbender in Shame; Peter Mullan in Tyrannosaur; Max Von Sydow in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; Eddie Murphy in Tower Heist; Gary Oldman in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; George Clooney in The Descendents; Ben Kingsley in Hugo

REVIEW: Living in the Material World

2011-10-09T20:43:00.025+05:00

Things we loved about Martin Scorsese's George Harrison: Living in the Material World, all prompting the thought that is one of the most penetrating portraits of a rock musician ever made:—

1) Olivia Harrison's take on being married for a long time "knocking the edges off you". The fact that Scorsese included it and the way his presence worked throughout, by virtue of the compliment it entailed, to induce more candid answers from the interviewees.

2) Her vivid, harrowing account of the stabbing: the Biblical detail, the fire poker, the sheen of blood down his blond head, his refusal to die. Like the De Niro break-in in Cape Fear. One McEwanesque detail in particular stood out: Harrison's surprise at finding himself in the act of trying to murder someone — not something he had expected to have to do when he woke up that morning, or indeed, ever.

3) Jackie Stewart's self-confessed surprise at the length of his bereavement for Harrison, given how many racing drivers he has had to bury and how many people were closer to Harrison. A massive, accidental compliment — he really was trying to figure it out.

4) Eric Clapton's impersonation throughout of the Rebecca de Mornay character in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Still sick and suffering.

5) Ringo's tears.

6) The line "Nobody had ever asked 'what is making you sad, Klaus?'"

7) The affection in the portrait of Astrid Kirchherr — particularly the quote from Lennon, making it clear the respect was reciprocated.

8) The jump-cuts in and out of songs, also the scarcity of album versions.

9) McCartney's "fookin' turban" quote and the brief hope it entertains that he is not going to sound so throttled, this time, by the sheer pound-per-pound pressure of defending himself.

10) Harrison's hair, particularly circa Sgt Pepper. Also the slowness of his reactions to things, his expressions and smiles all dawning at half-speed — English wariness meets Eastern detachment.

B+

Kathleen Edwards: the female Springsteen

2011-10-05T07:54:00.023+05:00

Edwards's new album, Voyageur, released in January, is co-produced by Edwards and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. (Her 2003 album, Failer, is one of my favorite albums of the previous decade). 'Change The Sheets' is lovely, with Edwards singing in a slightly higher register than usual, atop a bubbling Fender Rhodes. She has a wonderfully heedless singing style — a mixture of throatily impassioned and regretful — that, like Springsteen's, feels the opposite of performing. She's thinking about anything but how she sounds, and when she hits those high notes, there's nothing to her except the note: her feet are off the ground. I'm going to be listening to this a lot.

Getting through the Oxford Interview

2011-10-05T06:43:00.007+05:00

"Why do lions have manes? Would it matter if tigers became extinct? Why are both ladybirds and strawberries red? If the punishment for parking on double yellow lines were death, and therefore nobody did it, would that be a just and effective law? In a world where English is a global language, why learn French?" — sample interview question used by Oxford dons

I wish I'd been asked more questions like that. (Mostly they just asked me questions about an essay I had written about painting, although I do remember one of them asking at one point whether Nietzsche's theory of eternal return could be applied to the color circle, a question I still don't really understand). Why do lions have manes? Maybe their whole bodies would like to have fur that thick but it gets in the way of running. Would it matter if tigers became extinct? It would matter to the tigers but strictly speaking it's none of any other species' business. Why are both ladybirds and strawberries red? Ladybirds so they don't get eaten, strawberries so they do. Death for parking would be neither effective nor just since it would encourage lawlessness in areas less stringently punished. Why speak French when English is a global language? To communicate with those who speak French but not English.

REVIEW: 50/50 (dir. Levine)

2011-10-03T05:17:00.009+05:00

50/50 was okay. Seth Rogen is a gutteral pleasure, one of the truly relaxed screen presences on offer right now — just watching his face contort, doughily, with lustful thoughts is enough — but I wasn't sold on Joseph Gordon Leavitt's performance, or the character he'd been given to play. I get the idea: most of the comedy comes from the fact that Leavitt underreacts to everyone else's overreaction to his cancer diagnosis. Thus: the therapist trying to coax his feelings of anger from him is an over-earnest newbie. His mother is a histrionic narcissist. His girlfriend is fixated on conveying an impression of caring — so much so she forgets to show up for him, etc. Leavitt floats through it all, a limpid noodle, coolly amused by other people's tics and preoccupations. To a degree, this is how it seems to anyone who has ever been handed a severe medical diagnosis: they spend as much time managing other people's reactions as their own. But the screenplay omits to give him a reaction, and while this works for 3 or 4 scenes, by the time you get to scene 7 or 8, you're sidetracked by curiosity: when is this guy going to stop fixating on other people's emotions, however indecorous and inappropriate, and freak out about the fact that he has a 50/50 chance of survival? The other characters cease to look like over-emoting cranks and more like reasonable people given short shrift by a callow script. There's something a little shut-down at the centre of this film that has little to do with cancer and much to do, one would suspect, with the kinks of screenwriter's Will Reiser's temperament: the fact that his character ends up dating his shrink is interesting, to say the least, although it's presented in straightforward rom-com shorthand (she's sucks at her job, etc). But the film is amiable enough, Leavitt gets a moving moment of panic prior to going under anesthesia — a bit of observation that truly sings — and Rogen breathes life into every scene he's in. B-/C+

Nigel Tufnel's Guide to William Shakespeare

2011-10-01T07:13:00.010+05:00

I don't get the whole "Shakespeare didn't write his plays" conspiracy theories, as given dramatic form in the new Roland Emmerich film, Anonymous. Who do they think Shakespeare is? So little is known about the guy that most scholars use the name "Shakespeare" near-tautologically to mean "the guy who wrote Shakespeare's plays." This puts Emmerich's film in the gymanastically ambitious position of having to fictionalise someone who it then wants to unmask as a fraud. To say that person is someone other than William Shakespeare is not far off Nigel Tufnel's boast that his amplifier "goes to eleven" in This is Spinal Tap.

Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?
Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

Similarly, I say to Roland Emmerich: so you think someone else other than William Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays? Why don't you just decide who wrote them and then call that guy Shakespeare? It wouldn't alter much.

2011-09-29T23:32:00.003+05:00

"Which is where “Ides of March” came in. That film teams a pair of stars who stand on either side of the generational line: George Clooney, who has hit his superstar peak (and who is now at about the same point where, say, Cary Grant was in the 1950s), and Ryan Gosling, who is just coming into his own. Everyone knows who Clooney is, as well as his cohort: Brad Pitt, Hugh Grant, Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe. They’re a generation of actors who picked up the gauntlet in the 1990s, battled their way through heartthrob and flavor-of-the-month status to achieve a certain longevity. They’ve now reached their prime or are just gliding past it. Gosling is now where Clooney or Pitt were 15 years or so ago: an actor with some strong credits but not quite the mass-audience awareness. Gosling and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are part of that new generation. And a few others: Jake Gyllenhaal, Ewan McGregor, James Franco, Adrien Brody, even (we’ll see) Seth Rogen and Jesse Eisenberg. You could put Leonardo DiCaprio at the head of this particular class, though he’s a few years older than Gosling and Gordon-Levitt. He’s the group’s biggest superstar, Scorsese’s new chosen muse; he is to his peer group what De Niro and Pacino were to their generation – the gold standard." — Marshall Fine, Hollywood & Fine

REVIEW: Moneyball (dir. Miller)

2011-09-26T00:03:00.034+05:00

Things we loved about Moneyball:—

1) The fact that ever single baseball movie cliche — it's about heart, spirit, pluck, je nes sais quoi and other time-tested intangibles — is to be found in the mouths of the scouts, not our heroes. The movie sets course against received wisdom and sticks to it.

2) The way the stats uncover the players with true worth — brushing aside the showboats and superstars. The confirmation this gives our sense of the insolence of office and the spurns / That patient merit of the unworthy takes.

3) Brad Pitt's eyes. Shot in extreme close up. The disappointments they have seen. The mixture of bravado and naked terror combined therein — always the combo in any Pitt performance, but normally tripping it up, rather than powering it along. Also, his name: Billy Beane. The perfect follow-up to Benjamin Button.

4) His snacking. Sometimes an irritant but here conveying this particular human's need for calories, energy — juice.

5) The dying fall of his dud pep talk (something like "You're winners, play like winners, and, uh, that's it") as opposed to the one-on-one advice he sprinkles in the next scene. The love of process. Patience. Of a piece with Miller's love of pixillated imagery.

6) The daughter's song — tuneful but not too much so. The look on his face when he listens to the lyrics. On both occasions but particularly the first.

7) Miller's love of horizon lines — Texas in Capote, the field in Moneyball — and the way it comports with his minimalist ethos: the use of silence, the wonderfully spare soundtrack from Mychael Danna, the uncultured frame. Crying out for a curve-ball.

8) The cruelty of baseball — the transfers, the cutting, the look on the player's faces, Pitt's tough love. Hoffman's sullenness.

9) Jonah Hill's inexpert high five. Also his deadened inflection.

10) The final speech from the Red Sox manager about revolutionary smarts, making this Sorkin's sequel to The Social Network. Two hours really seem to unlock him.

A

For everything else, there is Mastercard

2011-09-17T02:57:00.003+05:00

"There have long been some very strange contradictions. The first is the notion that we need to control healthcare costs so they stop strangling the private sector and racking up massive debt in the public. The second is that the private sector is much more efficient than the public, as it fosters competition, and that any attempt to restrict treatments or make cost-benefit analyses in healthcare is a form of Nazi eugenics. Even a simple measure that would cut healthcare costs drastically - counseling Medicare patients on power-of-attorney issues if they are incapacitated - is demonized as "death panels"- Andrew Sullivan

The argument between left and right over healthcare is, it seems to me, essentially an argument about something else: the value of money. If money is not just a means of buying things but the ultimate measure of an individual's worth, then yes, a private system makes sense. The rich get better care than the poor and that's not unfair because the rich are rich for a reason, and that reason goes to the heart of what makes a human life a worthwhile thing. If on the other hand, you believe that there are other ways of measuring human worth besides money, then a public, or state-sponsored system is better. The rich do not get better healthcare than the poor but are treated equally because their economic stature is secondary to other factors — such as their right to exist in the first place. It comes down to whether equality trumps economics, like that weaselly pivot in the Mastercard ad. "Some things money can buy. For everything else there is Mastercard."

REVIEW: Drive (dir. Refn)

2011-09-16T05:31:00.004+05:00

Drive is something else: a cocktail of candy-colored retro-eighties stylings and convulsive ultra-violence, in which people go around stomping on each other's heads to the sound of airy-smooth synth pop. The other major activities in this film, apart from executing hand-brake u-turns, are a) staring at a moody Ryan Gosling, b) being stared at moodily by Ryan Gosling, and c) staring moodily at Ryan Gosling while he takes you in staring at him, moodily. Boy is this film in love with its star. Gosling plays a getaway driver who chews on toothpicks and wears a satin jacket with a scorpion on the back, and if that isn't iconic enough for you: he's known only as The Driver. I always knew that the grin playing in the corner of Gosling's mouth was a sign that the unimpeachably scuffed naturalism of his performances wasn't entirely to be trusted: there was someone who longed to be a movie star in there, waiting to get out. Together with Crazy Stupid Love, Drive constitues something of a coming-out party for Gosling who here pushes his method-moochiness closer to classic less-is-more movie-star minimalism, channelling Steve McQueen and Rumblefish-era Mickey Rourke, wielding silences and silken sotto voce line deliveries that push the performance close to parody. I half expected a mob of Tigerbeat-reading teens to spill around the corner and mob him, instead of which we have young Carey Mulligan playing a slightly unlikely Los Angelino who needs protection from a violent gang. The film makes great hay with Gosling's gallant streak although I didn't buy his wild swing into psychopathology at the halfway mark. An apt summary of his movie career, which started withThe Notebook and then took a sudden left turn for roles in which he got to smoke crack or cross dress. There's a callowness to some of these explorations, to be sure — the sense of ex-Mouseketeer over-correction, trying on more darkness-of-soul than was rightfully his. Gosling is part of a generation of movie stars — including Kirsten Dunst, Anne Hathaway, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johannson, Justin Timberlake — for whom the term 'child star' means nothing for the simple reason that everyone is a child star these days: 12 is simply when most Hollywood careers get started. The result is radically foreshortened careers, like butterflies: your teens are your hey-day, your twenties the time you experiment and deconstruct your stardom, and if you haven't won your Oscar by the time you're 30 then forget it. The 'method' used to be the way actors in their 30s and 40s fortified their performances with real-life experience, but what have these guys got, in terms of lived experience, other than the experience of being stars? The result if that for all their talent, their performances suffer from an experiental dearth — an empty rattle at their heart. I felt it during last year's Black Swan, in which Natalie Portman jumped through the hoops for Darren Aronofsky, apologising endlessly for her lack of a dark side, trying desperately to get some mileage on her clock. That's what the film was about: a young artist attempting to speed-dial experience into her art. And I felt it watching the Driver who is set up as a sleek escapologist, the kind of guy beloved of Elmore Leonard who casually threads his way to the exit while everyone waves guns around — and then, an hour into the picture, he takes a sudden leftward lurch into violence himself. A big mistake. It's not the violence I disliked — which is instructively shocking — but the mess it makes of his character: an Leonard cool-cat mashed into a Scorsese hothead. I'm not sure that people will notice or care. The picture casts a spell. It's poisoned candy, all sugar and sting, with an acrylic, ersatz kick — with echoes of Michael Mann's Thief, Walter Hill's The Driver and John Hughes's Pretty In Pink. Even the Driver himself works part-time as a movie stunt driver, as if every self-respecting criminal thug dreams of a career in movies. This is their movie — viciously shallow, thoroughly enjoyable, noir lit with a vivid neon glare. B+

My first great musical love: Kraftwerk

2011-09-15T02:42:00.012+05:00

It's been a while since I last professed my deep and abiding love for Kraftwerk. Not that I've avoided the subject, exactly. It just so rarely comes up. So few conversations beckon in the direction of strange German synth quartets from the seventies who pretend to be robots. A conversation about Africa Bambaataa will get you there, because he sampled Trans Europe Express on Planet Rock. The other conversation that gets me there is "what was your first concert?" People normally say things like "Haircut 100" or "Bon Jovi" and laugh with affectionate irony for their old teenage selves in all their awkward, knock-kneed glory. Or they go "the Police" or "The Jam" and everyone goes: cool. Then someones says "What about you, Tom?" and I say "Kraftwerk" and everyone goes quiet. There's Strange German synth quarters from the seventies who pretend to be robots are kind of conversation killers. They're not the kind of thing you can put down to growing pains, or teenage angst, or anything awkward or embarrassing you can laugh about afterwards. They're about the opposite of all these things. They're about locking yourself up tight and pretending to be robot so that no-one can get to you. They're about much more than that, of course, but that was the appeal for me, primarily, in 1981, when I went along to the Dome in Brighton, a recent child of divorce, to see Kraftwerk perform live in 1981 along with my fellow Kraftwerk fan, Eddie Cresdee, with whom I had spent most of that summer recording Kraftwerk inspired dirges on two Moog synthesisers. We had chosen another friend of ours from school to provide the vocals, not because he could hold a note, but because he was German and wore black shirts that he buttoned up at the collar in an impressively emotionless fashion. Looking back, it's just as well that we had successfully located Kraftwerk as role models. If you are two English school boys with a couple of Moogs and a German friend who can't sing, Kraftwerk and not just a very comforting model to have, but pretty much the only one in sight. I don't know why Jan wasn't with us that night, but there we sat there, two whey-faced English boys obediently drinking in every bleep and bloop, swaying mesmerically to every electronic arabesque and arpeggio, contained and held aloft within a sonic universe that seemed to be unfold inside our heads and all around us, until it was difficult to tell where we ended and the forces of anonymous modernity began. I was moved and still am by Kraftwerk's music, in ways that are hard to explain. But I recently attempted with my wife. "What you have to imagine," I said, "is a Germany that was obliterated in the war, who could not even talk about the past and whose only hopes seemed to rest in the speed and efficiency with which technology could deliver them an entirely new future. The Trans Europe Express. The Autobahn. Nuclear power. To grow up in Post-War Germany was to be witness to a lot of construction and if you were a young German boy you saw a lot of cool-looking machines building stuff that all the adults around them seemed very invested in. They were the Marshall Plan made into music, basically." My wife seemed satisfied with that. She listened, nodded, and then she went back to her magazine.

REVIEW: Contagion (dir. Soderbergh)

2011-09-11T07:55:00.018+05:00

I wasn't as wild about Contagion as some. I loved Damon, who brings a wonderful lustrelessness to his Home Depot Dad, and Jennifer Ehle who plays one of the few believable scientists I have seen onscreen — a superb mixture of blitheness and feral concentration. The film is smart and forensically researched but a few more cheap thrills wouldn't have hurt. (Missing scenes: the story goes national, the first person to survive, and: a follow-up with Gwyneth's Chicago lover.) It feel skimpy, rather than elliptically modernist. I wanted another $10 million spent on it. B-