REVIEW: THE WIND RISES (Miyazaki)

From my Guardian review;—

The Wind Rises, the new film from 72-year-old Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki, takes its title from a line in a Paul Valery poem (“The wind is rising! We must try to live!") and is inspired by the life of aeronautical engineer Jirô Horikoshi who designed  Mitsubishi’s A6M Zero fighter. It’s probably the gentlest animated feature about an armaments designer you’ll ever see. “Poor countries want airplanes”, Jirô (Hideaki Anno) is told, as they watch oxen haul the latest prototype out onto the field for testing. Lacking the power of Western engines, Jirô and his fellow engineers must instead work with everything at his disposal — flush rivets, split flaps, retractable undercarriages, the lightest aluminium alloy — to reduce the drag on that aircraft and pluck it into the vast, blue yonder.

In that face-off between Western power and Eastern ingenuity you have both a portrait of pre-War Japan, its economy in the tank, desperate to pull itself into the 20^th century, and a clue to what gives Miyazaki’s film its lyrical lift. In many respects, the animation traditions of America and Japan follow the course of their aeronautics industries. Whether it be Mickey losing control of his magic in The Sorceror’s Apprentice, young Dash learning to temper his speed in The Incredibles (“I'll only be the best by a tiny bit”) to the young sorceress of this year’s Disney hit Frozen, relishing the icy thrill of female empowerment, America’s animated features are, to a large extent, soft power tutorials — parables of the risk and responsibilities of great power.  They put kids in the cockpit and teach them how to take their country for a spin. Mizyaki’s hero is instead marked by a more modest, even self-effacing gallantry. Too short-sighted to be a pilot, Jirô peers at the world through thick Harold Lloyd spectacles, watching planes carve great arcs against slowly moving cloudbanks. In his dreams, he talks a walk on their wings alongside his hero Italian aviator Giovanni Caproni (Mansai Nomura), who tells him "Airplanes are not for war or making money. Airplanes are beautiful dreams waiting to be swallowed by the sky.” Miyazaki’s fascination with flight goes all the way back to 1984’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, whose heroine negotiates the post-apocalyptic jungle by glider; was most fully explored in 1992's Porco Rosso, about a flying ace who happens to be a pig, chasing air pirates in the Adriatic sea.  

The Wind Rises certainly doesn't scrimp on its aeronautic minutiae— taking inspiration from a mackerel bone, Jiro’s designs for strut fittings spring to life from his table in demonstration of aerodynamic principle — but for Miyazaki, the wonkishness equally edges into another abiding obsessions: the animating power of nature herself. From it’s shots of blooming parasols, breeze-filled curtains, fluttering snowflakes and rustling bamboo grass, there is barely a frame of The Wind Rises that doesn't serve as a reminder why Miyazaki named his studio after a wind, the Ghibli, capable of reshaping whole desert landscapes at a single stroke. Sounds awfully lot like an animator to me. It even blew Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas into each other’s arms in The English Patient, if memory serves.  

OSCAR FUTURES: BEST ACTOR

From this week's Guardian Oscar column:— 

Mathew McConaughey hasn't had a “comeback” by the textbook definition of the term. He didn’t languish in movie jail like Mickey Rourke; he didn’t fall off the map for a decade like Dennis Hopper. Rather, like John Travolta, he sank in plain view — in the sunlit terrariums of rom-com-land, where, if anything, he seemed even to be enjoying himself. But the rescusitation of his critical fortunes has involved much the same course as Rourke’s: a scouring of the flesh, a purification of the body — “this old, broken down piece of meat” in Rourke’s delicious phrase from The Wrestler. Playing the stricken Ron Woodruff, in Dallas Buyer’s Club, McConnaughey is reptilian, feverish, emaciated, containing just the element of trompe o’oeile the academy has learned to consider ‘acting.’ They have decided to reward his role in Dallas Buyer’s Club but it could as easily have been for any of the roles that have marked out  the McConnaughaissence, starting with   2011’s The Lincoln Lawyer, in which he dirtied up the attorney role with which he first made his name in 1996’s A Time to Kill. In Magic Mike, he deconstructed his own reputation as Cinema’s One Truly Objectified Male, whipping up the waves of female lust that buffeted the stage of the Xquisite like a conductor. Last year the fusillade of roles had become unignorable: Bernie, Killer Joe, Mud, Dallas Buyer’s Club, The Wolf of Wall Street, which he stole with a piece of improv designed to get him into character. People have won Oscars with far less. If McConaughey wins Best Actor on March 2^n, as looks increasingly likely — with wins from the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild, and Broadcast Film Critics Association now under his belt — it will be for one of the more protracted hot streaks in recent years.

INTERVIEW: GARY SHTEYNGART

From my Sunday Times profile:—

“A make-out scene with James Franco is, I mean, so important for a trailer these days” says Shteyngart, seigneurially, when I catch up with him at his apartment in the East Village, in the middle of a book tour that has already covered the East and West coasts, and next week heads for Canada, the UK, Australia. Books line one wall of his sparsely furnished, Scandinavian-style living room; next door, a dishwasher can be heard finishing its cycle. “You do things that are insane. I'm reviewing a nose trimmer for the New York Times. Anything you can do.  It's a laser-guided one so I may lose half of my face.” Such ingenious outreach may speak to the perilous state of publishing in the goggled-eyed age of YouTube and Facebook. “The era of the big writer is over,” admits Shteyngart, “Roth is really the last one. And he stopped. So let's just bow out with dignity here. Or not. Stupid trailers. My fault.” But is also speaks to the semi-parodic gusto with which Shteyngart has thrown himself onto conquering what remains of it. A prodigious blurber and lit party hob-nobber, a teacher at Columbia who doesn’t think twice about calling on ex-students like Franco to help promote his books, Shteyngart is a ”publicist’s dream” in the words of his publicist, a literary showman and media entity whose persona — part Woody Allen nebbish, part Borat naïf, topped off with his amazing, elasticated Groucho eyebrows — has sometimes made him seem more a character sprung from the pages of his books —The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002), Absurdistan (2006), and Super Sad True Love Story (2010) — than their author, prompting one reviewer to ask: Can an author be too entertaining? “I don't know what happened to the idea that something can be illuminating and entertaining at the same time,” asks Shteyngart back, those eyebrows performing a pogo-dance of exasperation. “What happened to that?”

Preview of forthcoming attractions

The Beatles during a news conference before their first US concert, two days after their Ed Sullivan appearance — Time

REVIEW: THE MONUMENTS MEN

R.I.P.

PROFILE: MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY

From my profile for The Daily Telegraph:—

Matthew McConaughey is on his knees, begging me to take him back. “I am nothing!” he implores, his hands clasped, rocking back and forth on his heels. “My life is nothing without you! If you’ll take me back I can be something!.” 

He is halfway through explaining the DNA of the romcom to me. We’ve already done Boy Meets Girl and Boy Loses Girl. We’ve touched on one peculiarity of the romcoms McConaughey appeared in in the 2000s, which is Boy Strips for Girl — a scenario that tested the ingenuity of screenwriters in film after film (shower scene, surf scene, a change of shirt after a sweaty commute, change of T-shirt after it is splashed by passing truck, job as a submariner). Now we’ve got to the Man Chases after Girl, generally by motorbike (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) or moped (The Wedding Planner). We’re at the climax. The kisser. Crunch-time.

“The directors in those things always want the man to come crawling back on all fours,” McConaughey says. “‘I was nothing’, and so on and so forth... I was always like, what woman wants that guy? I’ve got to find a way to keep the balls on the guy. To walk back in with dignity and stand tall.” He leaps to his feet with one bound, and starts pacing. “I don’t mind going, ‘I’m sorry I screwed up.’ Say you want to give it another shot. I can do that. I can understand that. End it with a little bit of hope. But do we have to wrap it up with the guy completely emasculated going ‘Take me back!’ and we lived happily ever after and had eight kids. Who wants that guy?” He upturns his palms to the heavens. 

Nobody, I murmur, spellbound. But this guy? The one in front of me? The 188lb of glorious, 46-year-old Texan, buff and tanned, who throws his whole body into stories, springing around the room, loosing long, cascading riffs peppered with sun-kissed mysticism (“keep on livin’”), self-development bumper stickers (“find your frequency”), and other assorted personal hustle-and-jive? This guy? This guy is on fire. People have been noticing, too. In the past few years McConaughey has been on an acting tear, cutting loose from the money roles for a series of down-and-dirty acting roles — as a scuzzball lawyer in The Lincoln Lawyer, a mangy drifter in Mud, a strip-club owner in Magic Mike, a psychopathic killer-for-hire in Killer Joe and now a trash-talking Aids activist in Dallas Buyers Club — that have reminded everyone why they made such a big deal of him in the first place. After his win at the Golden Globes, McConaughey is now the front runner to win the Oscar. “Le come-back de l’année” France’s TF1 News said, or as GQ recently termed it —the “McConnaissance.”

“The Mer-CON-nay-SONCE,” McConaughey says with a grin when I trip over the pronunciation, before slipping into the third person he sometimes uses to dramatise important points in his self development. “I’m surprising people. ‘Jeez, You’re really emerging McConaughey. I’m seeing you differently. Things you’re doing are sticking. You’re like wet shit,’ as Ali Farka Ture would say. The African blues man? I asked him once. ‘Why don’t you play in the US and Europe more?’ ‘Because there I would be dried shit. Neither me nor my scent would stick with me,’ he told me. ‘But here I am wet shit. Both me and my scent stick with me.’ Evidently I’ve got some wet shit going on.” The physicality is entirely fitting. McConaughey is a physical actor, a physical talker and comebacks are a physical business, as Mickey Rourke found out in The Wrestler — “this broken down piece of meat”, offering up the one thing an actor has left after everything has been stripped from him. The star having fallen, his body must be offered up in fresh sacrifice. Playing a strip club impresario in Magic Mike, McConaughey, dressed in leather chaps, savouring out the waves of female lust buffeting the stage like a violin virtuoso, stunningly deconstructed his reputation as a Shirtless Lust Object Number One — cinema’s one truly objectified male.   

REVIEW: BYRON EASY

From my New York Times review:—

How disgusting the British find themselves! Let me rephrase that. If you were to go by the output of a certain strand of young, male British fiction writer, you could easily be forgiven for thinking the main activity of British life is being disgusted by the physical form of oneself and one’s fellows. Ian McEwan famously began a short story noting the peculiar smell that asparagus lends the urine (“it suggests sexual activity of some kind between exotic creatures…”). Martin Amis spent large parts of his early career detailing his character’s bleeding gums and cracked molars. Will Self’s books come so awash in bodily fluids, that throw any of them against a wall and they will likely stick. Male self-disgust, rooted in the moist tumult of adolescence, and extended into one’s twenties and thirties under cover of literary careers apeing the clinical imperturbality of Nabokov and Joyce, has almost bequethed us its own genre, which we might call, in the manner of those outraged letters to British broadsheets,   “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.” And now we have Byron Easy, the young hero of Jude Cook’s debut novel bearing his name, sandwiched between the “Hogarthian mob” of an intercity train bearing him from the “piss-filled” underpasses and “haggard” pigeons of “sewery, dogshitty London” (p44), towards his home-town in the North of England.  Byron is a poet of the self-published and permanently wine-stained variety, his single claim to fame being a pamphlet of poems entitled Hours of Endlessness. In flight from a collapsed marriage, he busies himself with unforgiving inventory of his fellow passengers (those “hawkers, tutters, scratchers, groaners, verbal diarrhoics, carol-hummers, dribblers, tongue-lollers”)  before zeroing in on a subject much closer to home: his ex-wife— his hatred of whom is to provide the engine of Cook’s 500-page comic novel with its furnace.   

REVIEW: LABOR DAY (dir. Reitman)

From my Gaurdian review:—

'No actress of modern times has subjected matrimony to more vigorous onscreen interrogation than Kate Winslet. What began in a fit of melodrama, with Winslet threatening to throw herself from the aft of the Titanic rather than face loveless marriage to caddish Billy Zane, has turned into a series of fine-grained portraits — in Little children, Revolutionary Road, Mildred Pierce — of suburban drudges, marooned in their marriages, doomed by their intelligence, staring at the dust motes. Her happy marriage to Alan Rickman at end of Sense & Sensibility is beginning to look like the joker in the pack. Winslet’s early performances fizzed like firecrackers, giddy with their own freedom, but now she dulls her own innate brightness to play American Madame Bovaries—then setting something loose in their breast and watching them come to life. She liberates domestic prisoners. Generally, the liberation is invariably more compelling, more believable, than the imprisonment. Winslet is a child of the bohemian seventies, and the freedoms she naturally enjoys as an actress — her behavioral and gestural laissez-faire — can lend an edge of well-intentioned superiority to her inquiries: she gives the impression of listening to the women of the previous generation until the point where they say they felt imprisoned and then tuning out, her indignation stoked. It’s all she needs to know. Her recent performance as Mildred Pierce seemed to proceed from the top down, from a perch of well-intentioned pity.' 

Quote of the day: Wolcott on McConaughey

"What lifts creator Nic Pizzolatto's show above the misabilerist monotony and addiction pathology of Nordic noir and its derivatives is Proustian time-shifting, sharp, sneaky-funny writing, and even sharper, sneaky acting from Matthew McConaughey, whose detective Rush Cohle is so stick-figure insectiile, his man-who-fell-to-earth alienation and perceptions ("I can smell the psychosphere") so cryptic and deflective, that he could have come across as a David Lynch scarecrow if it weren't for the real, ground-in, damaged-goods pain that McConaughey communicates on a deeper frequency, between cigarette drags and beer sips: a redneck existentialism that Flannery O'Connor might have summoned from beneath the rotting floorboards." — James Wolcott, Vanity Fair

Quote of the Day: The Oscar Bloggerati

“TIE AT THE PGA AWARDS!” —went the alarm-bell tweet from Kris Tapley, a chronicler of the Oscar race at Hitfix’s In Contention blog. Since the news Sunday that “12 Years a Slave” and “Gravity” took home the Producers Guild top prize, awards prognosticators have been busy dissecting what it means for the season. “For the first time in years, we have a legitimate best picture race,” Mark Harris, the pundit at Grantland, wrote on Twitter, noting that with the win for “American Hustle” at the Screen Actors Guild, it appears to be a three-way race. “This is the most competitive Oscar season I’ve ever covered,” Mr. Tapley wrote.  “I’m not sure there is anything that could definitively tip the scales at this point.” — Carpetbagger

Lest anyone forget, last year's was supposed to be " the most competitive in years," too, and not only is this one going like clockwork (Best Actress decided since June, Best Picture decided since September, Best Director decided since October), it's copying last year's playbook, with a Best Picture / Best Director split that most have seen coming for months. Last night's DGA split only neutralized what threat American Hustle posed to 12 Year's A Slave's ever-more inevitable win. But apart from that, yes,  yikes, it's a real nail-biter. 

REVIEW: JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT (dir. Branagh)

From my Guardian review:—

... The director is Kenneth Branagh whose makeover from  cinema’s foremost interpreter of Shakespeare into one of cinema’s more reliable reinterpreters of American pop icons is one of the more pleasing twists of recent years. The shedding of cultural aspirations has lent his filmmaking buoyancy: his Hamlet was fussy and over-wrought, but his Thor was clean and confident—pop Wagner.  The new movie is at its best in its first twenty minutes, which bespeak a ticklish sense of pacing. We first we see of Jack he is ploughing his way through mathematics text books at the London School of Economics before catching 9/11 on TV. Shot down from a helicopter over Afghanistan three years later, he winds up n Walter Reed nursing a spinal injury. Thus, in short order, is Jack  supplied with a sense of patriotic duty, combat skills and a decent excuse for his desk-jockey analyst job. The alternative, of course, would have been to finish his studies and graduate, but that would never do. For one thing, that would have denied him the ministrations of his almond-eyed doctor in rehab, Cathy,  who is played by Kiera Knightley. Knightley is, of course, British but her away-game is  strangely better—playing Americans, as the otherwise awful Seeking a Friend Until the End of the World showed, has a way both of loosening her up and allowing to hold more in reserve at the same time; here, she’s playful and poker-faced as she teases Jack for information about his job, about which he is sworn to secrecy, even after she becomes his fiancée. So she springs a surprise visit on him in Moscow, only to find him engaged in a top-secret counter-intelligence operation to foil a plot to collapse the US economy by artificially driving down the US dollar with hyper-inflation, the rat! “I thought you were having an affair!” she sobs, although I didn’t share her relief for long.  Economic warfare sounds shop-fresh and ripped-from-the-headlines, but it turns out to involve the same old shots of data downloading from encrypted laptops we’ve been trying to find fascinating since Sandra Bullock discovered the interwebben in The Net. “Do I have to remind you what’s at stake here?” says Costner, as everyone braces themselves for another round of staring at slowly descending LED bars.   “There’s a very real chance we don't get out of this alive!”   You know the action of a movie is a little on the undernourished side — basically, a couple of car chase and a Skyfallish break-in — when it has to include little promotional blurbs for itself... C+

R.I.P. Saul Zaentz

QUOTE OF THE DAY: PAUL SCHRADER

"What I think has happened is that the need to eventize a film has crossed into the area of content and performance. Predictable mainstream drama (watching stars do what you've seen them do before, watching familiar plot lines) has been driven into long form TV drama, which means that for a film to compete theatrically it must be an event. Ergo the glut of megabudget IMAX 3D CGI epics. But the need to eventize also is affecting story and performance. "Stunt" performances which were once relatively rare (DeNiro in Raging Bull, Cage in Leaving Las Vegas) are becoming a necessary audience hook: emaciated McConaughey, comb over Bale, silent Redford." — Paul Schrader, Facebook

REVIEW: THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

From my review of The Wolf of Wall Street:— 

Scorsese’s sense of sin, from Whose That Knocking At My Door? on has always been from the inside out. It’s not enough to show sin. Nor is it enough to tell the audience that sin is sinful. Scorsese wants the audience to feel as if they have sinned — exiting the theatre sheepish with our own enjoyment. His pitch-fork atunement to lives that are both spiritually dead and, at the same time, astonishingly vital — rotten but ripe, like apples in Dutch nature mortes — is even more acute than it was when he made Goodfellas and Casino, although he is not nearly as interested in the details of money-laundering, or bribery, as he was in those pictures. Winter’s script make no attempt to explain Belfont’s scams to us — several times, he tries, and then gives up, with a wave of his hand, “you don’t give a shit, do you?” — and the line gets at what is so shallow about Wolf of Wall Street and most gleeful. Whatever depths it possessed do not come from the world of finance, just as Raging Bull’s depths did not come from the world of boxing, but from the intimate knowledge of his own self-destruction that Scorsese experienced in the seventies as he rose, meteor-like, to drug-fuelled, Palme—D’Or-winning heights, before burning up in his own heat.   This is the story behind Raging Bull and Goodfellas and Casino, too. It is burned into his psyche — the only story really worth telling. Any time Scorsese’s filmmaking gets near this arc, it catches fire spectacularly and the movie takes off in a shower of sparks, but with slightly less sense consequence and greater giddiness each time, as the memory of the lows fade and the highs burn in retrospect ever brighter. In The Wolf of Wall Street the 71-year-old director films as if sucking the sap from his stripling actors. Make no mistake: He is the wolf. (A-) 

Approaching the final chapter of my Scorsese book, my listing of his films has altered a little. The top five are unaltered, but The Last Waltz  has risen (as have all the docs) and The Wolf of Wall Street has snuck into the top ten. The Departed has slipped a little. 

1. Taxi Driver
2. Goodfellas
3. Mean Streets
4. Raging Bull
5. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
6. Italianamerican
7. The Departed
8. The Last Waltz
9. The Color of Money 
10. The Wolf of Wall Street
11. Casino  
10. The King Of Comedy
13. Kundun
14. The Age of Innocence
15. Who's That Knocking at My Door?
16. After Hours
17. Shine a Light
18. Bringing Out The Dead
19. The Last Temptation of Christ
20. Shutter Island
21. Boxcar Bertha
22. Hugo
23. New York, New York
24. Gangs of New York
25. The Aviator
26. Cape Fear 

REVIEW: 12 YEARS A SLAVE

From my review for Intelligent Life:—

All of Steve McQueen's films thus far have centered on the fight for control of a body. In his first, “Hunger,” that body belonged to hunger-striker Bobby Sands, played by Irish actor Michael Fassbender, whose emaciated form became, essentially, a theatre of political war. The film was brutal, austere, minimalist — as furiously controlled as it’s subject. In McQueen’s second film, “Shame”, the body was that of a sex addict, also played by Fassbender, propelled around lower Manhattan by appetites uncurbed — the opposite of Sands’s predicament. Critics snickered but there was no doubting McQueen’s singleness of focus: In his films the body is a battlefield, scarred and cratered by a fierce, existential cat-fight for autonomy. It was only a matter of time before he made a film about slavery…. As the slave girl Patsy, newcomer Lupita Nyongo, in one extraordinary scene, begs for a mercy killing with the sweet urgency of someone imploring for a kiss. As her oppressor, Fassbender has already drawn the lion’s share of praise, and yet as much as he commits physically to the part — he barks and bellows, staggers, stumbles and roars his way across the screen  — I found myself missing the more filigree work that Ralph Fiennes put into Amon Goeth in “Schindler’s List”, alternating hatred of the jews and lust for his maid, the tension creating diabolical little folds of denial, which Fiennes, further locating vanity in the man, smoothed away as if straightening a cowlick. No such minor venality ruffles the surface of Fassbender’s Epps, a man constructed entirely from monstrous appetites: for power, lust, whiskey. The movie, over-enthralled by his psychopathology, is diminished slightly in his shadow. It didn't take psychopaths to implement slavery though it certainly did produce them, like mutant marrows — the script, by John Ridley, follows Epp’s degradations to the millimetre. Far more penetrating, for my money, is the scene, much earlier in the film, in which with Paul Giammetti’s slave trader takes a potential customer on a tour of his salesroom. It’s an ordinary-enough looking drawing room — nicely lit, with beautiful bay windows — but for the row of semi-naked human beings standing by the fire-place. As Giametti goes around the room, poking and prodding their chests, showing off their teeth like horses, his joviality is almost intolerable, the insult far more lasting for not being intended at all — there are no feelings to hurt, because, for him, there are no people in the room. You want slavery in a single scene —how it existed as a system, a norm as ordinary as daylight — there it is.

R.I.P.

BEST PERFORMANCES of 2013

1. ‎Adèle Exarchopoulos — Blue is the Warmest Color
2. Tom Hanks — Captain Phillips
3. Amy Adams — American Hustle
4. Lupita Nyong'o — 12 Years a Slave
5. Julia Louis-Dreyfus — Enough Said
6. Mathew McConnaughey — Dallas Buyer's Club 
7. Jennifer Lawrence — American Hustle
8. Jonah Hill — The Wolf of Wall Street
9. Melissa McCarthy — The Heat
10. Tom Hanks — Saving Mr Banks 

BEST FILMS OF 2013

1. 12 Years A Slave
2. Blue Is The Warmest Color
3. Gravity
4. Her
5. Inside Llewyn Davis
6. Captain Philips 
7. American Hustle
8. The Wolf of Wall Street
9. Before Midnight
10. All Is Lost

REVIEW: SAVING MR BANKS (Hancock)

From my Guardian review:— 

'There are only two reasons to part with your hard-earned cash and see this film. The first is Bradley Whitford, whose powers of intelligent forbearance were long ago established by his role playing Josh Lyman in The West Wing, and who summons here an entire symphony of sighs and long-sufferance as the head of the trio dealing with Travers. And the second is Tom Hanks, who has been diligently working his way through a Century of American Pop Culture — from the moon landings and D-Day, to the country’s toys and one-hit wonder pop bands — so it was inevitable that he would one day wind up at the doorstep of Disney. He delivers a beautifully grooved performance,  as much a cross between Disney and his creations as a portrait of the man himself. He doesn't play him — he animates him. There’s a cartoonist’s elegance of line to the way Hanks spins Disney in and out of rooms, as if blown in by his own East Wind, but also a miniaturist’s delight in uncovering the hucksterish glint beneath the bonhomie, whether handing out pre-signed autographs to fans or crouching down low to lock eyes with Travers, and impress upon her, in his beautiful low Kansas burr, why he and he alone is the man for her governess. Hanks gives us everything — Disney’s persistence, his optimism, his indefatigability, his bullying charm — and makes it look like something he dashed off before lunch. Coming so hot on the heels of his extraordinary turn in Captain Phillips, Hanks is in serious danger of delivering two of best performances of any screen actor this year. One of the great Hollywood careers is in it’s joyous second season right now. Catch him while you can. 

INTERVIEW: BEN STILLER

From my interview for the Sunday Times:—

BEN STILLER doesn't really do ‘ebullient’. I’ve met him before and he can be a little dour, in the way of off-duty comedians, speaking in mild, slightly over-chewed sentences from which all judgments have been carefully removed. “You have the worst tweets!” people complain when he goes on Twitter to talk about his charitable foundation in Haiti, “Be funny!” But towards the end of a long press day at the Crosby Street hotel in Soho, New York, Stiller is, if not ebullient, them as effusive as he gets — sat forward in his seat, knees together, green eyes alight, as he speaks animatedly about his new film, an adaptation of James Thurber’s classic tale of a daydreamer, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. “I feel like my own life experience up to this point is more connected to this than anything I’ve done before—” he says intently “— where I’m at in my life, being the age that I am, the questions that come up, people start to die. You start to feel your mortality.” He pauses.  “Really uplifting stuff,” he says and laughs a quick, jabbing laugh — hahhaha. “To me it gets more real. Everything gets more real.”

Now 46, his hair striated at the temples with a little grey, Stiller is no more obsessed with the passage of time than the next man  negotiating the forest of middle age. But in the modern-day Shangri-La that is Hollywood — where even 25-year-olds fret about their frown lines — time seems to fly by even more cruelly. There’s so much new stuff — new shows, new movies, new, funny people to stay on top of. Recently Stiller was watching old Star Trek episodes with his daughter, something he loves to do — “because she will actually sit and watch them with me,” he says, “to humor me.” — and he dropped the fact that Scotty once came on The Ben Stiller Show, the MTV sketch program that first launched his career in 1990. His daughter hasn't seen much of her dad’s work, outside of Night at the Museum, so he showed her the sketch where James Doohan is buried beneath an avalanche of Trekkie arcana by Stiller: “On the enemy within episode were you beam down that little dog, I don't understand, why did the dog survive then when it came back it turned into two different things?”.  Doohan can’t get a word in.

“She was like ‘daddy you look so different! look at your hair!’,” he says, with an expression that could be a smile. “It puts a whole different perspective on things. Everything goes so quickly. Suddenly my daughter is six, seven…. All of that informed the movie, and the process of making the movie. Just on the level of wanting to make the kinds of movies I’ve always been wanting to make in my head.”

TOP FILM SOUNDTRACKS OF 2013

1. All Is Lost — Alexander Ebert
2. Inside Llewyn Davis — Various
3. 12 Years a Slave — Hans Zimmer
4. How I Live Now — Jon Hopkins
5. Man of Steel — Hans Zimmer
6. Her — Arcade Fire & Owen Pallett
7. Gravity — Steven Price
8. Ain't Them Bodies Saints — Daniel Hart
9. Prisoners — Jóhann Jóhannsson
10. Only God Forgives — Cliff Martinez

TOP POP SONGS of 2013

1. Diane Young — Vampire Weekend
2. I Was A Fool — Tegan and Sara
3. Adolescence — Prefab Sprout
4. Do You Know Me Now? — David Sylvian
5. Black Skinhead — Kanye West
6. Don't Worry All Your Life — Sarah Cahoone
7. For Now I Am Winter — Olafur Arnalds
8. The Wire — Haim
9. GMF — John Grant
10. Hold On, We're Going Home - Drake

TOP TV SHOWS of 2013

1. Top of the Lake
2. House of Cards
3. Girls
4. Behind the Candelabra
5. Parade's End
6. Ray Donovan
7. The Killing
8. Breaking Bad
9. Masters of Sex
10. Enlightened

Mandela’s former cell, in Section B in the political prisoners’ area on Robben Island, off Cape Town. Photograph by Matt Shonfeld/Redux, courtesy The New Yorker's Photobooth

REVIEW: INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

From my Guardian review:—

'I do like the Coen brothers’ wintery ones. Anyone who thinks composition is a purely visual matter should re-watch Fargo, which happily inverted the old film noir tradition which says kidnappings and extortion should come wrapped in expressionistic shadow. Instead, the film pitched daylight robbery against a blinding white tundra — film blanc — with particular attention paid to the way the Minnesota winter obliterates the horizon line. The characters just seemed to hanging there twixt land and sky, like Bellow’s dangling man, caught between two voids, unsure which way is up. The Coens’ collaborators are said to feel much the same way.  The snow that covers much of Inside Llewyn Davis is another matter again: it’s the kind of old, grey city snow that stains brown from car exhaust, and gets into your boots on the long trudge home. We can be even more precise that that, I think: it's the kind of snow you see covering the East Village street walked by Bob Dylan, arm-in-arm with Suzy Rotolo, on the cover on Freewheelin’, as dawn breaks at behind them. Inside Llewyn Davis is set in the days preceding that dawn. It is 1961 in New York and all over the village, cafes are sprouting folk singers, chins are sprouting beards, and Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), at something of a loss after the other half of his double act jumped from the George Washington bridge, is doing his damndest not to sell out, while stifling his howls as contemporaries are signed up all around him… 

That Davis doesn’t suck the film under — and what ultimately rights the film’s entire leeward tilt — is simple: songs, eight of them, most of them folk standards rearranged by T Bone Burnett. Inside Llewyn Davis is not a musical, with everyone bursting into song when the mood takes them. The opposite:  When Davis sings, he does so because the plot requires it, for an audition, or in the car to pass the time, and frequently after he has taken a particularly bad beating. That makes it almost an anti-musical, with the hero opening his lungs, not in happiness, but pain. The entire film seems to hold its breath for Isaac’s pure, clear, plaintive voice.  The Coens could easily have taken this in the other direction, and rendered Llewyn talentless — the trailers play impishly with this possibility — but instead they tack towards a more Withnailish  paradox: if only the universe could stop oppressing Llewyn and listen to him then it would hear how beautiful it’s oppression is making him.But of course that would undo the whole magic. It’s fascinating to hear such an argument for authenticity from the Coens — kings of the unashamedly inauthentic and ersatz.   Inside Llewyn Davis is an exquisite objet d’art, beautifully photographed by Bruno Delbonnel, who desaturates the colors and reproduces exactly the silken grays and tobacco-stained whites of old Ektachrome. The plot, for all its pointlessness, has an elegant nautilus structure that spirals back to the beginning with one tug. If I were a Freudian I would be tempted to speculate that the brothers are feeling a little blind-sided by their lionization, post-Oscars, even annoyed about it, and that Llewyn Davis is their spectral alter-ego, summoned like Banquo’s ghost to remind them of what might have been — or replenish them with a reminder of their once-outsider status.  Maybe that’s why the nostalgia feels so piquant.' 

Samuel Beckett at an opening-night performance, April, 1970. Photograph by Reg Lancaster, courtesy of Photo Booth

QUOTE OF THE DAY: David O. Russell

"What I've discovered making these three films is that you need to have the magic of the things you love — of the people you love or the restaurant you love or the neighborhood you love. You need to find that and put it in the movie. Otherwise it's just telling stories…. Ten years ago I would have not wanted to say that I was motivated by love. I'd have wanted to be thought of as darker, tougher, crueler. But life can make you feel plenty bad. Look, I can do things in cinema that will really fuck you up, that will really make you feel horrible. But it's much harder to do the opposite, to show not just pain and heartbreak but enchantment and romance and magic." 

QUOTE OF THE DAY: John Goodman

"I got an email from Ethan one day that said, 'Dear Mad Man, we have something you might be interested in -- another gasbag.' I said, 'I'm your boy, where do I sign?'" 

BEST ALBUMS OF 2013

1. Crimson/Red – Prefab Sprout
2. Heartthrob – Tegan & Sara
3. Modern Vampires of the City — Vampire Weekend
4. Deer Creek Canyon— Sarah Cahoone
4. Trouble Will Find Me — The National
5. Fossils — Aoife O'Donovan
6. Inside Lewyn Davis —Various
7. Immunity — Jon Hopkins
8. The Ash And Clay — The Milk Carton Kids
9. American Kid — Patty Griffin

On my iPod: Nov 29

1. The Songs of Danny Galway – Prefab Sprout
2. Glowing Heart — Aoife O'Donovan
3. GMF— John Grant
4. For Now I Am Winter — Olafur Arnalds
5. Calling Cards — Neko Case
6. Human — Christina Perri
7. Do You Know Me? — David Sylvian
8. Annabel — Goldfrapp
9. Fare Thee Well— Oscar Isaac & Marcus Mumford
10. Shapeshifter — Laura Viers

REVIEW: FROZEN (dir. Lee/Buck)

From my Guardian review: — 

'It’s that time of year again, when our guardians turn to the moral education of the nation’s young, raising vexed questions about the ideological agenda that drives their roles models, the benefits of their educational texts, and the acute balance that must be struck between pedagogical substance and the public’s eternal desire to see talking chipmunks. In other words: a new Disney movie. A really good one, too, whose humming industry and multi-pixillated craft come lit by a spark of something close to genuine enchantment. Loosely based on The Snow Queen, Frozen extracts from Hans Christian Anderson’s 1845 tale  the Nordic setting, some trolls and the basic idea of sub-zero sorcery but gives the powers of wintery transmogrification not to an evil queen, but to the elder of two sisters — blonde, brooding princess Elsa (Idina Mendel), who is born with the ability of turning anything she touches to ice. Her parents, the king and queen or Ardendelle, warn her against ever revealing her power, for fear it will be misunderstood. “Conceal, don’t feel,” she is taught to recite, thus placing her in a long line of shame-filled spellbinders from Edward Scissorhands to Rogue in Marvel’s X-Men, and putting the icing on the cake of any doctoral thesis with the title ‘Out of the Closet and into the Forest: Hidden Powers And Sublimated Self in the Films of Walt Disney.’ 

Here there is younger sister Anna (Kristen Bell), a redhead who likes chocolate, boys, falling on her tush, and expresses herself via such well-known Norwegian colloquialisms and “you know” and “freaked out”, by which the film’s directors, Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, wish to designate her as Our Heroine, although for a while you're not sure — it would have been a brave move indeed to put the audience behind the witchier of the two girls. The Disney princess is such a tired trope that even the much-vaunted revisionism feels de trop, these days — find me a heroine who isn’t spunky, feisty, etc  — but where the film scores points for originality is the tenderness and acuity with which the relationship between the two sisters is observed. If only Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren had been available for the voices…   One of the great things about Frozen, in fact, is how well thought through the central theme is, on every level: Frozen is one on-message ice movie. The graphic possibilities of ice and snow are gorgeously realized in some of the most straightforwardly beautiful animation since those dalmation pups trotted through the snowdrifts in 101 Dalmations: make sure you catch the chase at sunset, with cool, mauve horizontal shadows cutting across the glittering tundra. Then there’s the possibilities for fans of the well-crafted action sequence:  a fast, slippery, surface, perfect for high-speed tobogganing and downhill races if — for example — you are a humble woodsman trying to save your one true love from marriage to a dastardly prince, and the snow-lift happens to be jammed. We’re all headed for a big thaw, of course, not to mention a melting of all hearts within a 20- mile radius, but Lee and Buck know how to spring their big moments from within small jack-in-the-box surprises. Suffice to say that for once, sisterhood feels like an abiding interest of the filmmakers and not a tacked-on after-thought. Mapping the contours, twists, intimacies and estrangements of siblinghood — a surprisingly underexplored subject for Disney — Frozen hews to real, recognizable plumb-lines and casts a lingering spell. ' 

REVIEW: OLDBOY (dir. Lee)

From my Guardian review: 

Spike Lee’s Oldboy is as far from a Spike Lee Joint as could be imagined. It’s actually a Park Chan-Wook joint — a remake of  Chan-Wook's 2003 South Korean cult classic about a man held in solitary confinement for 20 years before being loosing to wreak vengeance on his captors. Adapted from a manga comic-book, which was in turn adapted from an over-whelming desire to see what damage hammers do to foreheads, Chan-Wook’s film was a matte-black vengeance riff, decked out in playful camera angles, sicko violence, and one live octopus, which it’s hero ate, still wriggling, in one scene, although I like the think that afterwards, its cameo over, the octopus simply called “cut!” and resumed its position behind the camera.

What drew the maker of Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X, and Clockers to resolving this Rubik’s cube is anyone’s guess. In Lee’s version, Josh Brolin plays Joe Doucette, a two-bit ad exec who wakes up after an alcoholic bender in a motel room, and remains locked up there for the next 20 years. He has no idea who is captors are, only that they feed him a thoughtful tray of dim-sum and vodka every day, and pay the cable bills on time, so that Joe can watch his wife’s murder being pinned on him in his absence, a succession of presidents being sworn in, and — as luck would have it — a series of martial arts programs, which come in very handy when one day, he wakes up in a field, sporting a new buzzcut, a newly toned body, an iPhone and a headful of vengeance. Game on.

Quite literally.  Like Chan-Wook’s original, Lee’s film, with its vivid rendings of the flesh — by box cutter and hammer — and challenge-level plotting, has the maziness of a video game. Joe’s tormentor (Sharlto Copley), is with him every step of the way, helpfully phoning in clues that will enable him to solve the mystery —  “Who I am and why did I imprison you?” — even throwing in an extra hostage for “a little added motivation,” when the plot needs a freshener. And if that sounds to you suspiciously like a screenwriter outsourcing his dramatic duties to his villain, then give yourself a gold star.  I grew tired of these screenwriter-ex-machina bad guys, with their chummy phone manner and tedious riddles, around the time they first appeared: it’s been downhill since Speed, basically.  Once a villain starts tailoring his plot so specifically to the dramatic needs of the film around him, you know it’s going to end in one of two ways, either 1) an “I-am-he-as-you-are-he-as-you-are-me” fudge, or 2) a vast import of new expository material.'

REVIEW: Philomena (dir. Frears)

From my Guardian review:—

'Like all the best screen actors, Judi Dench’s face is a kind of pun,    working on two levels at once, both twinkly and tart, like someone handing you a Christmas present while sucking on a lemon. Our first sight of her in Stephen Frears new film, Philomena, that face is lit by church candlelight, her eyes brimming, whether from an excess of human kindness or some private pain is hard to say.   Best known in the UK as a sherry-dry sitcom comedienne before she starting playing crusty English monarchs in Shakespeare in Love and Mrs Brown, she here mixes it up a little for American audiences for the first time. Her Philomena is an ununflappable old dear who boasts of   her titanium hips and recounts the plots of whatever bodice-ripper she happens to be reading with a comprehensiveness that rivals that of their author. Coogan’s reaction as he listens, sat in the back seat of an electric cart leading them towards a transatlantic flight —  “Oh there’s a series of them” — is an unimprovable modulation of polite agony. It’s Coogan’s best dramatic role to date. Until now he’s had the kind of disjointed, slightly agonized career traditional for British comics trying to make it in the movie business — his haggard, death’s-door lugubriousness is an odd fit for Hollywood, and seemed most at home putting all dramatic pretense aside in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip, a mockumentary in which Coogan bantered his way around a series of restaurants in the British Midlands with comic Rob Brydon. If anything, Dench is an even better foil for Coogan than Brydon. Any worry that the role pushes the upper limits of her saintliness are offset by some of the unexpectedly salty dialogue she is given, happily detailing her sexual exploits in great detail to a dismayed Coogan, prompting him to mutter  “fucking Catholics” — the zinger of the film, accurately summarizing both its back-story, and the vein of anti-clerical anger running through the script.' 

My Coen brothers top ten

Horrified at the Coen brothers lists going around, I've caved and given my own. I clearly like the nicely plinthed stories better than the shaggy dogs and idiOdysseys — plot construction, people! plot construction! — and the snowy ones best of all.

1. Fargo
2. Miller's Crossing
3. Raising Arizona
4. No Country For Old Men
5. Blood Simple
6. Inside Llewyn Davis
7. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
8. True Grit
9. Barton Fink
10. The Big Lebowski

My favorite bit of acting this year

"His ordeal over, he's being examined in the ship's hospital by Albert. She asks questions about his condition. Her protocol is designed to get answers from traumatized patients. It may be necessary, but her manner is distant, cold, clinical. And, that is the precise, perfect counterpoint to the stream of Hanks' emotional release. He no longer needs to bear the mantle of control. It's all fragmented speech, emotional associations, tears and blood — it is one of the most powerful conclusions of a film in recent memory. " — Michael Mann on Captain Phillips