REVIEW: Noah (dir. Aronofsky)

From my piece about God and the movies for The Guardian:

'... In place of a sultry middle East, Aronofsky shoots against the black sands of Iceland in a parched, dessicated landscape that looks less pre-apocalyptic than post-apocalyptic. Like many post-punk imaginations Aronofsky makes a fetish of impurity. This earth looks already destroyed, as indeed, in his telling it has been: by man. The word “God” is absent from this ecological retelling of the Biblical narrative; Noah instead talks throughout of “the Creator,” and the earth is destroyed not for its unchecked fertility and murder rate but the despoliation of it’s natural resources. The film’s boldest stroke, though, comes from a logical quibble with the Book of Genesis: if God was asking Noah and his family to repopulate the earth, was he not demanding incest? Aronofsky adds an adopted daughter, Ila, played by Emma Watson, to give them an out, but Noah remains convinced that God’s intention was to exterminate all of mankind for his sins, including him and his family; he grows homicidal on the Ark, and afterwards drinks himself into nightly oblivion, convinced he has failed. All this is perfectly in line with Aronofsky’s prevailing ethos of adamantine self-punishment, even as it usurps divine prerogative— Noah has almost become a deity unto himself, dispensing his own justice.  He even steals one of His best lines, “be fertile and multiply.” The irony is that if a self-recriminating protagonist, bent on oblivion, was what he was after, the Bible had one all along, maybe not as overtly self destructive as Randy “the Ram” Robinson, or Nina in Black Swan, but a creative, just like them, a perfectionist driven by rage for the imperfections of his creation  (“for I regret that I made them…” 6:7), and so annihilating it in what amounts to a massive fit of artistic pique. Aronofsky’s clearest aesthetic alter ego is entirely off-stage.' 

REVIEW: DIVERGENT (dir. Burger)

From my Guardian review:—

How Orwellian is college?  Very, if Divergent is to be believed.  Adapted from Veronica Roth’s bestselling YA novel, it stars Shaylene Woodley as Beatrice a young 16-year-old girl trying to find her place in a world seemingly modelled on a series of giant Frat houses, each named after an abstract virtue or noun.  There’s Amity, who farm the land Amish-style; there’s Abnegation, who think only of others and work in government; there’s Candor, who tell the truth, doubtless on course for a career in daytime TV; there’s Erudite, who like to show off their vocabulary but can’t for the life of them work out they are an adjective not a noun like everyone else. Finally there’s Dauntless, very much the Extreme Sports set, defined principly by their carelessness with regard to train timetables, since they always run, jump and leap for the train home to an accompaniment of Stomp-style drumming. These gonks are being groomed for jobs in the military although how you would get them to show up on the battlefield is anyone’s guess. I’ve seen better discipline in the Keystone cops. Beatrice, who wears baggy skirts, boots and her hair in a loose bun like an Emily Bronte Fan, jumps ship at her initiation ceremony and choses Dauntless over her native Abnegation, and very soon, she is running and jumping for moving trains, too, all the while harboring a secret: her aptitude test revealed her to be “divergent”, a freakish original thinker, fated to be hunted and killed if she is ever found out.  Quite why she faces this drastic a penalty, given that the rest of Roth’s future society seems wholly bent to the task of identifying and nurturing the skill-sets of its teenagers is hard to fathom. Roth has filled out her world without thinking it through as a dramatic space. She's built a utopia that thinks itself a dystopia.  “They built fences for a reason,” Beatrice is told, which in any other story would be a prelude to monsters, but no more is heard of it. Instead, the bulk of this 2 hour and 40 minute film is taken up with an endless slog of evaluations and physical aptitude tests in smoky, diffusely lit interiors that look like a Bill Fitzgibbons art installation. Director Neil Burger amps up every snap crackle and pop but there’s no escaping the fact: what we have is science fiction that devotes its considerable resources to imagining the future of SAT tests. Maybe that’s why Winston Smith went AWOL: a droopy grade point average.  

REVIEW: NYMPHOMANIAC (d. Von Trier)

From my piece about bad sex cinema for The Guardian:—

What is it about sex that leaves so many films teetering perilously between the pornographic and the parodic? Maybe because it is one of the few activities to actually rival cinema, less a subject among many others than a rival medium. It asks people to act on their fantasies, usually takes place in the dark, can involve looking and role-play, pulls people into their bodies but aims for a blissful loss of self. To adapt the old quote, making a movie about sex is like dancing about architecture — a redundancy, both too much and never enough. Good sex, anyway. Bad sex restores cinema to full representative powers. Bad sex — which is to say, empty, compulsive, spiritually-deadening sex against graffiti-strewn dumpsters by the light of a thin, existential dawn — is something the camera excels at depicting. In fact, we are in the middle of what some might called a bad sex renaissance. What started with Hannah Horvath having her face planted into the sofa in the first season of Girls has spread like a damp patch to the sticky sheets against which Michael Fassbender grimaced and rutted in Steve McQueen’s Shame (2011), Mark Ruffalo speed-dialled Estonian call-girls in Thank-you for Sharing (2012), Joseph Gordon-Leavitt made love to his porn collection in Don Jon (2013) and Leonardo di Caprio got humped with candles in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). The figure of the sex addict has become for the indie-auteur sphere what the serial killer was for mainstream thrillers in the 1990s: a repeat offender, plot driver and sensation source, drawing audiences with a mixture of curiosity, skepticism and blimey-mate astonishment. This week, comes one such masterwork, Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume I—in many ways the Kane of bad sex movies, in which Charlotte Gainsborough, or her body doubles, including one with the delightful name of Eljira Friss, is pinned against headboards, dirty mattresses, kitchen tables and train-lavatories to blasts of Teutonic industrial-hard-core while Von Trier swings his camera from thrusting buttocks to bored face. “I’m ashamed of what I became, but there’s nothing I can do now,” she tells the middle-aged academic Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) to whom she is narrating her story and who interrupts her to launch lofty digressions on fly fishing, piano chords, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and Bach. "That's a very clear parallel to fishing in a stream," he yelps excitedly upon hearing that she and her friend competed to seduce men on a train.  “Those are Fibernaci numbers!” he exclaims upon hearing that Shia la Boeuf took her virginity with three thrusts, then five, in the basement of a gutted building.  This leads, as it so frequently does, to a discussion of polyphony and the cantus firmus in work music of Johann Sebastian Bach, as Von Trier splits his screen three ways to view Joe being taken from behind by one lover, given a jungle-cat–style mauling by another, and licked all over by Shia LaBeouf in a third, although if the Transformers star had outsourced the job to one of his robot friends we might have really been in for something special. 

 There’s a deliberately specious feel to this, like Bart Simpson’s sarcastic homework, as if Von Trier were mocking the tendentiousness with which the European art-house has served up sex under cover of metaphysical speculation — Antonioni’s pensées on alienation and lingering shots of women’s legs, Fellini’s mixture of Jungian sublimation and cleavage. The film is all about its frames.  If it had been shot in France, or Von Trier’s native Denmark, it would have been a less provocative beast, but Von Trier’s single masterstroke was to set the whole thing in some unspecified Euro-capital, and have everyone — La Boeuf, Uma Thurman, Christian Slater — speak in wobbly British accents, upping the propriety levels, and pushing the film towards teetering, Pinteresque comedy, as the actors flip their non-sequiters back and forth across railway compartments and breakfast tables. “For me nymphomania was callousness,” croaks Gainsborough in her best Kate-Moss-on-tranquillizers tone, as if advertising a new scent — Sex Doll, perhaps. “We were committed to combating the love-fixated society.” A sensation-seeking nihilist, Joe has sex the same way Von Trier makes movies: to keep the wounds open and salted.  His interest in a return to psychic health is precisely zero... What’s most interesting about the film is the tension between its bristling air of art-terrorist provocation, and the clear nostalgia, left over from Von Trier’s previous film, Melancholia, for the older, more humanist forms of centuries gone: the music of Bach, the novels of Edgar Allen Poe, the penny dreadfuls of the Victorians, which drew readers with promises of lewdness under cover of concern for the nation’s youth. Maybe not so much has changed after all—the Victorians mixture of sentimentalism and moralism is not so alien to the era of Dr Drew, VH1’s Behind-The Music and Celebrity Rehab. Von Trier’s fondness for the formal structures he has long since detonated, is, in some senses, the oldest story in the book. Guess what? Cinema’s enfant terrible misses his parents.   
    

I'd like to thank the academy...

Most anticipated films of 2014

Boyhood (Linklater), Gone Girl (Affleck, Fincher, Oct 3) Midnight Special (Dunst, Driver, Nichols) Fury (Pitt, Ayer, Nov 14)  Mr Turner (Spall, Leigh) Foxcatcher (Carrell, Miller), Interstellar (Nolan, Nov 7), Wild (Witherspoon, Vallee, Sept 21), We Are The Best (Moodyson, May 30) Carol (Haynes, Mara, Blanchett), The Judge (Duvall, Downey, Oct), Inherent Vice (Phoenix, Anderson, Dec 12) Birdman (Keaton, Iñárritu), A Very Violent Year (Chandor, Isaac, Chastain), The Giver (Bridges, Noyce, August 15), St Vincent de Van Nuys (Murray, April 11) Godzilla (Olsen, Binoche, May 16) Unbroken (Jolie, Dec 25)  A Most Wanted Man (Hoffman, McAdams, Corbijn) The Skeleton Twins (Wiig, Wilson) While We're Young (Baumbach) Miss Julie (Chastain, Ullman), The Interview (Rogen, Franco, Oct) Far From the Madding Crowd (Mulligan, Vinterberg) Big Eyes (Adams, Burton) Sweet Blood of Jesus (Lee)  The Cobbler (Sandler, McCarthy), Child 44 (Espinosa, Oldman) The Equalizer (Washington, Fuqua), The Double (Wasikowska, Ayoade), The Immigrant (Gray, Cotillard), Locke (Hardy), Manglehorn (Pacino, Hunter, Green), Stranger by the Lake (Guiraudie), Blue Ruin (Saulnier), The Two Faces of January (Mortenson, Dunst, Isaac), Suite Francaise (Williams, Schoenearts), True Story (Hill, Franco), The Gambler (Monahan, Wahlberg), The Rover (Michod, Pattinson, Pearce), Everest (Gyllenhaal, Clarkson), The Imitation Game (Cumberbatch).

My 2014 Oscar Picks: Will Win

My Oscar picks for The Guardian:—

Best Picture: 12 Years A Slave Best Director: Alfonso Cuaron Best Actress: Cate Blanchett Best Actor: Matthew McConaughey Best Supporting Actor: Jared Leto Best Supporting Actress: Lupita Nyong'o Best Original Screenplay: Her Best Adapted Screenplay: 12 Years A Slave Best Editing: Captain Phillips Best Visual Effects: Gravity Best Sound Editing: Gravity Best Sound Mixing: Gravity Best Score: Gravity Best Cinematography: Gravity Best Foreign Film: The Great Beauty Best Documentary: 20 Feet From Stardom Best Costume Design: The Great Gatsby Best Production Design: The Great Gatsby Best Make-up and Hairstyling: Dallas Buyer’s Club Best Animated Feature: Frozen Best Animated Short: Get a Horse! Best Original Song: Let it Go Best Documentary Short: The Lady in Number 6 Best Live Action Short: Helium

REVIEW: NON-STOP (dir. Collet-Serra)

From my Guardian review:—

 “Nervous flyer?” asks Julianne Moore after she notices Liam Neeson fiddling nervously before take off.  “It never quiet goes way,” Neeson replies. You don’t know the half it it, lady. The last flight Neeson was on crash-landed in the Alaskan Tundra, where his fellow passengers were picked off, one by one, by a pack of ravenous grey wolves. The year before that, in Unknown, Neeson landed at Berlin Tagel Airport for a biotechnology summit only to have someone steal his wife, his identity and all respect for German traffic codes. And before that we had Taken, in which Neeson had his daughter kidnapped at Charles De Gaulle airport by Albanian slave traffickers. Neeson and foreigners don’t mix. Neeson and airports don’t mix. But Neeson and foreign airports is really asking for trouble. If Moore had any sense, she would have seen who was sat next to her, excused herself and caught the next flight. Such are the lessons of the Neeson action thriller, or Neesploitation film, as it is affectionately known. The affection is genuine enough. Every year, as everyone is booking their Oscar de La Renta gowns for the red carpet at the Oscars, the studio release a thriller in which Neeson has his daughter or wife stolen from him, thus forcing him to drive construction nails into men’s thighs and say things like “I’ll tear down the Eiffel tower if I have to!” For all their brutality, the films plug into and rely upon the essential gentleness of the Neeson persona — that soft protective burr.  Only Neeson could deliver a line like, “In about five seconds I am going to start beating the shit out of you” as he did in The Grey and make it sound, not like a boast, or a threat, but merely a helpful piece of information, shared in the interests of a peaceful resolution for all concerned parties.  

Still setting flight attendant hearts a flutter, but too decent to flirt with the too-young tootsie in the seat behind him, Neeson enjoys a nice, relaxed rapport with Moore, whose looser, Keatonesque side seems to come out when cast opposite noble hunks. Neeson plays Bill Marks, a retired air marshal with a drink problem and a picture of his daughter in his wallet. In case you haven’t heard: someone on the plane starts texting Neeson, threatening to kill a passenger every 20 minutes unless $150 million is deposited in a bank account.  I’m a sucker for aircraft thrillers that try to observe the Aristotelian unities — a small if flawed group that includes Executive Decision, Passenger 57, Flight Plan, and Wes Craven’s half-brilliant Red Eye — although I’m less of a fan of these screenwriter-ex-machina villains, with their overly precise demands and insinuating insights into the hero’s private life. They’re really little more than Post-It notes from the screenwriter saying “Villain to Come…”   The general rule seems to be that the amount of threat summoned in the first half of the movie is exactly equal to the ludicrousness of the explanation tying everything together in the second. The director, Jaume Collet-Serra, has improved on the pacing of his last collaboration with Neeson, 2011’s Unknown. He’s also assembled quite a cast: Lupita Nyong’o, in her first post-Oscar role, as a flight attendant with two or three lines to rattle off in a cockney accent; Corey Stoll as a NYPD officer also on the flight; and Downtown Abbey’s Michelle Dockery, whose elegantly dulcet voice threatens to mesmerize all within a 30-yard radius every time she opens her mouth.  Collet-Serra shoots with a shallow depth of field, blurring everyone into shapes looming in Bill’s background, whether because of the Scotch he downed before the flight or his incipient paranoia is hard to tell. 

 For all the brushed-steel modernism of the film’s cinematography, the plot pays touching tribute to Miss Marple, and in particular to the old Agatha Christie trick of ushering the entire dramatis persona into the vicarage, before allowing the finger of suspicion to fall on each in turn. Substitute an aircraft at 40,000 feet for the vicarage and Liam Neeson for Angela Lansbury and you pretty much have Non-Stop. “I’m not a good father! I’m not a good man! But I want to save this plane!” declaims Neeson at one point, as the bodies start to pile up at his feet, and the tide of suspicion threatens to sweep him away. He’s asked to rough-house a few of the passengers and it looks a little unconvincing, to be honest — bouts of Segal-ish brutality that Neeson can't be done with fast enough. He’s big and bearish, but he’s never been a brute. He’s at his best striding up and down the aisles of the aircraft with that big, rolling gait of his, carving out great wads of air with his hands, barking orders, his face in Rodinish profile, his destiny, like Mitchum’s, enlivened by a nobility far greater than the film he finds himself in — the true sign of a b-movie king. Only once has the Neesploitation film touched greatness, in Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, a keening, white-knuckled scrap of a film about life and death in the Tundra that is on its way, I believe, to becoming a minor classic.  Non-stop is the flimsiest of black box recorders, by contrast, that never threatens to make even intermittent sense, but it hangs together on the bulky shoulders of its star. Nothing I saw on TV this week was quite as civilized as the actor’s admission, on Sixty Minutes, that he was a “wee bit embarrassed” by the prospecting of beating people up at the age of 61. As if violence were something young men grow out of. Imagine. 
 

What constitutes great screening acting?

From my Intelligent Life column:—

“My dear boy, “ replied Alfred Hitchcock after being pestered by Gregory Peck as to his character’s motivation in Spellbound, “I couldn’t care less what you're thinking. Just let you face drain of all expression.” Some 60 years later, are we any clearer on what, exactly, constitutes great screen acting? The Academy awards will be presented on March 2^nd, to a set of Blanche du bois impressions, drunkalogues and drag acts nominees with gummed-on toupees, bloated bellies and false teeth. Screen acting has never been showier than it is right now. “‘Stunt’ performances which were once relatively rare are becoming a necessary audience hook,” wrote Raging Bull’s screenwriter Paul Schrader in a Facebook posting recently, “emaciated McConaughey, comb-over Bale, silent Redford…”He should know. It was De Niro’s performance in Raging Bull, for which the actor ate his way around Northern Italy to get his weight up from 145lbs to 215llbs, turning his body into a form of cinematic ‘event’ that had to be seen to be believed, that first showed the way for actors to hold their own in the age of special-effects spectacle. They would make quite literal spectacles of themselves—not so much acting as morphing. More than ever before, screen acting has become a series of spectacular coups de theatre— come see Nicole Kidman’s nose! Meryl Streep’s dementia! Tom Hanks’ weight loss! Christina Bale’s weigh gain!—even as some of us wonder what has happened to the magnificent ease that used to mark their progress across the screen. 

 In a famous experiment in the 1920s, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov cut between the blank expression of a Tsarist matinee idol and a series of shots showing plate of soup, a girl in a coffin, a woman on a divan, then showed it to an audience, all of whom praised the actor for his display of hunger, grief, sexual attraction, etc. Hitchcock had a version of this in Rear Window, when he cut from the same shot of James Stewart looking out his window at variously, a dog going pee-pee, a pianist, and a nubile girl exercising in her bedroom, his character turning into a peeping tom with one cut.   The best screen actors have always known this — the enormous limbic power of a look, or gesture, as well as the filmmakers power to recontextualize it — and taken appropriate action. Ceding control of the scene to filmmaker, they seek gravitational influence within the frame. They become gestural minimalists, concentrating on the two areas eye-tracking experiments have revealed as the audience’s first ports of call: eyes and hands. Gary Cooper’s eyes were beautiful, but so were his hands, and he liked to keep them occupied—in one scene in Morocco (1930), he played with, variously, a burnt match, a child’s doll, a fan, a whiskey tumbler, and an apple, as if finding replacements for the one thing he would like to get his hands on, Marlene Dietrich, who stood framed in a doorway. From Cooper flow all the tricks in the modern scene-stealers handbook, including: chewing toothpicks (Ryan Gosling), constant snacking (Brad Pitt), speaking sotte voce (Kevin Spacey), refusing to look your co-stares in the eye (Al Pacino, who was doing this even before he played blind in Scent of a Woman, and after which he simply doubled down on the technique. He hasn't looked at anyone in decades). You may smile, but such tricks points to the importance, more than mere acting, of existing on screen—capturing the camera, holding the space, compelling and keeping the audience’s gaze.