R.I.P.

REVIEW: TRANSFORMERS: AGE of EXTINCTION (dir. Bay)

From my Guardian review:—

'Extinction really does seem to take an age in this film,  its running time distended to a lumbering 144 minutes by Bay’s love of check-out-my-shot slow-motion, so we catch the exact angle with which the Transformers pirouette through the air, and the exact number of inches by which they fail to miss an overhead bridge, and the precise scatter-pattern of cratering masonry that results.  Extinction really does take an age in this film — the Debbie Does Dallas of destruction porn.  The real progenitor of these films is not Steven Spielberg, or even Irwin Allen,  but Smokey and the Bandit, Honkytonk Freeway, and all those other Kentucky-fried, demolition derbies  that littered up the back end of the seventies with their multiple shunts, pile-ups and smasheroos.  “That was insane!” says one young scientist after the Autobots have torn up  much of Chicago’s Michigan avenue, “It was awesome but it was insane!” It is also curiously boring. One of the stranger aspects of the Transformer oeuvre is that you can watch all four movies back to back, find your eyes comprehensively boggled, your ears played like timpani, and yet discover that your pulse has not deviated once above a steady 60 bpm. Bay has all the attributes of a great action director except the ability to instill fear in an audience. He wants us thrust back in our seats, not on the edge of them, overwhelmed with awesomeness not fretting over what is going to happen next.  The summer blockbuster may originally have pitched battle against outsized antagonists — gigantic Death Stars, giant sharks — but their protagonists were pint-sized, Davids plucking up the  courage to face  Goliath. “Aren’t you a little short to be a stormtrooper?” asked a skeptical Princess Leia. ““I don't want to ever feel you could kill that shark,” Spielberg told Roy Sheider while shooting Jaws, filling out his cast with uber-nerds, beta-males and lily livers. Bay’s snickering giganticism, together with his withering disdain for anything that smacks of weakness, make him very much the man of America’s imperial hour.  The Transformer movies delivers a Hobbesian vision of man and machine, in which Goliaths are thumped by even bigger Goliaths, only to be creamed by even more vast uber-Goliaths, in infinite regress. Does the inside of Dick Cheney’s head look like this?' 

The Actor Who Broke The Movies

From my essay for  The Atlantic:—

'... Budd Schulberg’s original speech — “I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve had class and been somebody. Real class. Instead of a bum, lets face, it, which is what I am” — is streamlined by Brando into the more idiomatic, “I coulda had class, I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody — instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it” with the emphasis now falling on Molloy’s appalled self-recognition. For The Godfather, he reduced the Don’s scripted exchanges by half. “You come into my house on the wedding day of my daughter and you ask me to do murder and you say ‘how much shall I pay you?’” becomes  ”you come into my house on the day my daughter is to be married and you ask me to do murder for money”, the alliterative disgust of “murder for money” now irresistible, although the real kicker to the scene is, of course, the cat: a stray Brando had spotted on the set, scooped up, and cradled in his lap throughout, the very control required to be so gentle, while so angry, frightening in itself. 

 Brando touched everything. In that scene in The Godfather alone he touches the cat, his hair, his chin, his cheeks, the chair. He peels hard-boiled eggs in Streetcar, fondles a quarter in The Wild One, picks up Eve Marie Saint’s gloves in Waterfront, plays with puppies in Zapata, and lampshades in Last Tango in Paris. “He touched whatever he touched as if it were part of him,” wrote David Foster Wallace in a wonderful passage in Infinite Jest, one of the most perceptive things ever written about the actor. “The world he only seemed to manhandle for was him sentient, feeling.” Brando’s fondlings were a both a means of centring himself in the here-and-now, an instance of rampant scene stealing, and a means of rendering fond communion with the universe, his playful epicureanism often serving as an uncanny premonition of death. Those puppies in Zapata are almost the last thing he touches before he is mown down by federal agents, just as Don Corleone’s last act, before the attempt on his life, is to pick out fruit from a vendor’s stall (“he points so as not to disturb the vendor display” notes Mizrahi, with pleasing delicacy). Its telling that when asked to name their favorite movies in the 2008 presidential election, John McCain picked Zapata, while Obama went for The Godfather, the rebel and the patriarch, both picks telling you much about the extent to which that presidential contest was fought out between conflicting notions of paternal authority: McCain’s maverick instincts honed in the shadow of his famous admiral father, Obama’s more patient paternalism a simulacra reconstructed in the absence of his.'

25th ANNIVERSARY: BATMAN (d. Burton)

“They’re saying to me, these record guys, it needs this and that, and they give you this whole thing about it’s an expensive movie so you need it. And what happens is, you get engaged in this world, and then there’s no way out. There’s too much money. My major concern is that there is so much awareness and hype. I keep thinking, ‘I hope there’s a movie attached to all of this’.” — Tim Burton   

 What is hype, exactly? Where does it come from? Newspapers use the word to refer to the the publicity blitzes concocted by the studios —”studio hype.” The studios, on the other hand, use it to describe the self-induced feeding frenzy of the press — ”media hype.” The film director, meanwhile, sits in the middle, observing that it has a “life of its own.” Hype, it seems, is something a catch-all, a nonce-word, covering a multitude of sins, none of them ever your own. I anticipate, you expect, others hype. It’s a bit like trying to work out where air comes from. Even its commonly presumed etymology is fake: “We live in a world of hyperbole,” said a Doubleday editor in 1980. '”Hyperbole has become so common that we now refer to it by a cozy contraction. We call it 'hype.' We decide to apply it, as if it were a wax compound for shining up a car.” But hype is not a shortening of “hyperbole” but of ''hypodermic needle'', and refers to the hopped-up state of drug users; when newspaper columnist Billy Rose praised a 1950 movie for having “No fireworks, no fake suspense, no hyped-up glamour,” his assumption was not that hype was something applied to a movie’s surface, buffing it up to a nice shine; but something internal, intravenous — which is much the way it works in Hollywood: As Will Rogers once remarked, “The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself”, in which case the blockbuster is the only species of movie in which the hype is at its loudest within that movie itself. One of the more curious aspects about the hype for Batman, for instance, is that it never quite cleared. After all the hype, that’s what Batman turned out to be about: it was about hype. 

“Tell your friends, tell all your friends,” whispers Batman to his first criminal catch, before letting them go, having realised that the benefits of good word-of-mouth far outweigh the benefit of having two more petty criminals behind bars. He then gets involved with newspaper photographer Vicki Vale ( Kim Basinger), who ensures that Batman’s name is spread city-wide, and it is the quality of Batman’s media coverage, far more than his actual deeds, that most enrages the Joker, flushing him out of hiding. “Can someone please tell me what kind of a world we live in where a man dressed as a bat gets my airtime!” he complains, before shooting up his TV set. “Wait’ll they get a load of me!” he says and hits back with a PR campaign of his own, hijacking the airwaves to run a series of advertisements for himself — parodies of the hard-sell adverts of the fifties, with Batman in the opposite corner, representing the matte-black, soft-sell eighties. This is how the central battles in Batman are played out, not on the streets, but at press conferences, across the airwaves and in the newspapers. It is a PR war for the soul of Gotham city, and it resembles less the battle between two superhero colossi, than it does a presidential race, with two candidates endlessly finessing their public personae. What kind of a movie it is where all the villain wants to do is be more popular than its hero? It goes some way to explaining why Jon Peters had so much trouble trying to inject some genuine antagonism into the actual meetings between the Batman and The Joker: they’re like two presidential candidates who have somehow slipped their entourages, and accidentally met, away from the spit and fury of the hustings, only to find themselves getting along fine. There’s nothing between them personally. It’s all for the folks back home. 

The one thing you don’t see much of in Batman, though, is folk. For all the energy that Batman and the Joker expend to win the hearts and minds of Gotham, it’s a strangely underpopulated place: at a press conference in front of the town hall, a gaggle of extras do their best to suggest a pullulating crowd, but Burton’s heart is not really in it — he doesn’t really have the bullying instinct for crowd scenes. He can’t summon the demagogic charge that you catch off all the great popular film directors — Capra, a great rouser of rabbles, or Hitchcock, never happier than when losing his heroes in a sea of faces. Nothing signalled Steven Spielberg’s entry into their hallowed company better than the crowd scenes in Jaws, with their ebb and flow of push and panic; there’s even a nun in there, just to remind us that this is the seventies. The thrill of the crowd pushes straight past Burton, who much prefers the sequestered darkness of the bat cave or the lonely eyrie of Batman’s perch atop a skyscraper — he is one of cinema’s natural loners, like Nicholas Ray. But he is no action director, and everything in Batman — its stop-start pace, its sputters of visual wit, its hero’s entrapment within a costume that gives him all the mobility of a neckbrace — suggests sulky self-sabotage on it’s directors part: revenge on a hero he just didn’t get. There’s not much to get, but you do need an honest instinct for hero-worship to shoot a comic-book, and Burton’s temperament is naturally mock-heroic; he can’t fake the tones — the athletic heft, the blockbuster high style — needed to sweep a movie like this along. Despite what he thought, “Death Wish in a batsuit” is almost exactly what it should have been. Reading the re-writes ordered up by Peters, its not to hard to figure out what was going on: the producers were using the Joker to smuggle back into the movie all the showmanship they felt their recalcitrant director was refusing to provide, and the movie belongs, in the end, to them. “Have fun, cause the party’s on me!” shouts Nicholson at the end, a version of Peters’ own high-rolling largesse, distributing cash to the greedy Gothamites, in what amounts to the movie’s last word on the delicate art of winning public favour: we can be bought.  

And they were right — up to a point. The summer Batman opened was a one of the blockbuster’s landmark summers, just as 1984 had been before it, and whose records its casually smashed. “There’s a point beyond which no one can project,” said one Box-office analyst, “Anticipation is so high, the question this summer seems to be, how high is high?” The anticipation was guaranteed, however, if for no other reason than that 1989 saw the tidal wave of sequels set loose on the mid-eighties finally engulf cinemas — Lethal Weapon 2, Ghostbusters II, Karate Kid III, A Nightmare on Elm Street V, Star Trek V: The Final frontier, Friday the 13th part VIII, The Return of the Musketeers, Eddie and the Cruisers: Eddie Lives, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Police Academy V, The Fly II and Back to the Future II. “We’re thinking of calling it The Abyss II,” said Fox’s Tom Sherak, entrusted with the task of promoting one of the seasons few non-sequels, James Cameron’s The Abyss. If for nothing else, 1989 deserves a place in the history books as the year in which fewest people had an original idea for a movies than at any other time in Hollywood’s history. What this meant for cinema-goers was an equally dense barrage of promotional campaigns, all vying for their attention. That year, the discerning movie-goer could choose between entering the James Bond License to Thrill sweepstakes to win a weekend getaway to Key West, the Indiana Jones Pepsi-Cola sweepstakes, and a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids McDonald’s promotion. You could win a trip to Tasmania courtesy of Young Einstein, you could follow the Great Balls of Fire publicity junket to Memphis. You could trot along to the Hollywood palladium to listen to Bobby brown and Run DMC sing the Ghostbusters theme, and try and win yourself the Ectomobile, all the while chewing on your Slimer Bubble Gum. Or you could go for a replica of The Batmobile, courtesy of a promotion on MTV, and jig around to ‘Batdance’ by Prince — ”an ode of the movie,” as he called it, which is rock-star speak for “they didn't use any of my tracks in their lousy movie but you might as well have them anyway.” Alternatively, you could always go see a movie. Or the movie, for Batman soon became the blockbuster to see, unless you wished to announce your recent decision to join an order of Trappist monks.  

 It opened in 2,194 cinemas  and took $42.7 million in its first weekend, ”the biggest opening weekend in history” proclaimed Warner Brothers, and proceeded to take $100 million in under ten days — another record, breaking Hollywood’s four-minute mile. But it also slid from pole position faster than any movie that has ever made that much money, too, taking just $30 million in its second weekend, a drop of about 25%, and the weekend after that, $19 million, a drop of 36%.. Blockbusters never used to fade like this — E.T.  had stayed at the top for 10 weeks (see graph), and increased its grosses as it went along, while Back to the Future had stayed up there for 13. But Batman came and went in the blink of an eye — that year, even Look Who’s Talking had greater staying power at the number-one spot. The most popular movie of all time was also just flavour of the month. Far more so than Jaws, it marked the beginning of the long, slow erosion of audience word-of-mouth — asked how much influence he thought the negative reviews in Variety and Time would have, Peters responded, “none” —  and with it, a crucial shortening of the audience’s reaction times, which is to say our ability to respond to a movie, and then signal our collective approval or dislike by either staying away, or flocking to it in greater numbers. Who could tell, looking at Batman’s grosses, and their tail-off, to what degree people had enjoyed the film or not? More importantly, who was even interested in concluding anything from grosses of $251 million? “The audience can smell it faster than we can sell it,” Spielberg had said of E.T.’s release. As of 1989, we had just a little less time in which to do so. The art of selling bats had caught up with the art of smelling rats.

From my book Blockbuster

T H E B E S T O F 2 0 1 4 S O F A R

F I L M S:—

1. Under The Skin
2. Grand Budapest Hotel
3. Boyhood
4. We're The Best!
5. Edge of Tomorrow

B O O K S:—

1. Updike, Adam Begley
2. Five Came Back, Mark Harris
3. The Wes Anderson Collection, Matt Zoller Seitz
4. The Panopticon, Jenni Fagan
5. Bark, Lorrie Moore

M U S I C:—

1. Morning Phase, Beck
2. G I R L, Pharrell
3. Are We There, Sharon Van Etten
4. The Voyager, Jenny Lewis
5. Stay Gold, First Aid Kit

T E L E V I S I O N:—

1. True Detective
2. Silicon Valley
3. Last Week Tonight With John Oliver
4. The Americans
5. Mad Men

P E R F O R M A N C E S:—

1. Ralph Fiennes, Grand Budapest Hotel
2. Angelina Jolie, Malificent
3. Matthew McConaughey, True Detective
4. Tom Hardy, Locke
5. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep

REVIEW: THE ROVER (dir. Michod)

From my Guardian review:—

'It’s time to put away those Edward Pattinson jokes — the kid can act. He showed more attachment to the elephant in Water for Elephants than costar Reese Witherspoon, but then he probably knew better how it felt: Twilight turned him into the most gawped at mammal on the planet. He cut like a blade through the first film, cheekbones set to stun, as pale as a rock-star-in-recovery, summoning a palpable sense of threat.  The series emasculated Edward as it wore on, shoving him to the side of the action, while Bella grew increasingly impatient— it was the only vampire series in which the vampires were afraid of the virgins, and exploited Pattinson’s greatest flaw as an actor: his passivity. He was coolly dissipated in In David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis as a megastar essaying the end of the world in blacked-out limo shades, but the film, and the role, both stayed well within the confines of the comfortably numb.  In his new film, The Rover, Pattinson tries a different tack in his pursuit of a world seen without yellow contact lenses: he acts his socks off. 

When we first see him, he is face down in the Australian outback, bleeding out into the dirt. He’s been abandoned by his brother (Scoot McNairy), who heads up a gang of thugs making their getaways in a truck, with another member bleeding in the back. What they have done, or even who they are, is never made clear. The film, directed by David Michod, is set “ten years after the collapse”, in a future where resources like petrol and water have gone much the same place as the world’s reserves of narrative exposition.  You could waterboard this movie and still not get much more out of it. The whole thing is told in the mythic-elliptic style first pioneered in the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and later retrofitted as pulp by George Miller in the Mad Max films — where the post-apocalypse means never having to explain yourself.  So we never find out the exact circumstances that led to Pattinson being left for dead, or why he is speaking in a Southern White Trash accent, while everyone else speaks Australian, or why he is being hunted by squadron of American soldiers. Did he desert? What is important is that he crosses paths with Guy Pearce, about whom we know even less, except that a) He never cracks a smile. B) He looks pissed even before the gang make off with his car. And c) He wants it back. That’s how mythic he is, his character carved out in the dust cloud left by his actions. He’s the Man With No Ride Home. For the first 20 minutes or so, all this enigma flashes brilliantly in the mid-day sun. The director David Michod draws his two plot-lines together as if gathering a noose, the sense of suspense   brought to a head by a wonderful of shot of Pearce sitting in a dimly-lit bar, his eardrums pounded by karaoke, as a car tumbles past the window behind him, unheard, in the blinding sunlight — it’s the kind of shot that makes you yelp with joy, it’s so damn good. There follows a chase, with Pearce in hot pursuit, the camera slung down at fender level, as it was for Spielberg’s Duel, which ends with a tense stand-off between the two vehicles, now stationary at 30 yards distance, the camera lodged just behind the front tyre of one, watching to see who makes the first move.   

What Michod has made, you realise, is a kind of Western — one of those zero-sum Peckinpahs in which men, like scorpions, sting each other to death beneath a baking sun — and would that it were anywhere near as good as those electrifying first twenty minutes. The rest of it is a road movie that runs out of road, as Pearce, now with a captive Pattinson in tow, attempts to turn him against his brother and get that car back. That’s it. I would happily deliver more spoilers but the whole thing is so studiously minimal, that you are now in possession of as many facts about this movie as I am. “You must really love that car,” says the madam of a local brothel which, like everyone, claws out an existence servicing mankind’s baser needs from a ramshackle out-house tucked to the side of the highway. The soundtrack, meanwhile features an assortment of ambient twangs and shivers that can best be described as the world’s first didgeridoo gang-rape. It’s all enough to make you wonder if post-apocalyptic road movies aren’t for Australian directors merely a way of toning up, like Shakespeare for Brits, of movies about losing your virginity for the French.' 

REVIEW: THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

From my Guardian review:—

'Oh to be a teenager in love, suffering from stage four cancer! Adapted from John Green’s bestselling YA novel about love-struck cancer teens — a piece of doomed-love romanticism served up with bright-eyed, almost evangelical zeal — the film is dubious in the extreme, morally and ethically objectionable from just about every angle. It elevates cancer sufferers to the same exalted state of higher being to which tuberculosis-sufferers were once hoisted by Keats and Byron, or vampires by Kristen Stewart fans. It’s Twilight on chemo. It’s a few inches shy of launching a fully-fledged romantic death cult. It’s the swoony, drop-dead hit of the summer. You’ll love it.'

AN APPRECIATION: CAREY MULLIGAN

For Intelligent Life:—

'It’s the contrast between face and voice that does it. The face is round, pure, with two dimples holding her smile in place—it is the face of childhood yearning, Juliette Gréco EPS and moon-gazing through suburban windows. But the voice is something else: about half an octave lower than you expect, luxuriantly so, with unexpected notes of sanguinity and self-amusement—it is unambiguously the voice of a woman, if not fully grown, then bearing a secret apprehension of the oncoming battle between dreams and their disappointment. Yes, the world will let me down, it seems to say, but must we talk about this now? Such was the paradox powering Carey Mulligan’s performance in “An Education” in 2009: that a young actress whose gamine charms sent critics into gauzy reveries of Audrey Hepburn nonetheless packed the pipes of Rita Hayworth, or—better yet—Jenny Agutter. Since that first spring of Hollywood’s infatuation with her, Mulligan has carefully plucked the petals from any career playing English roses, avoiding costume dramas like the plague, instead playing a broken torch-singer in Steve McQueen’s “Shame”, and making pit-stops in Nicolas Winding Refn’s ultra-violent “Drive” and “Inside Llewyn Davis”, where she rained down cold fury on the Coens’ luckless hero. If a great leading film role has eluded her—she seemed more like Daisy Buchanan’s better-read elder sister in Baz Luhrmann’s gaudy, tricked-out Gatsby—onstage Mulligan has broken into long, galloping runs. She was a terrific Nina in a 2007 production of “The Seagull”, and as Karin in Bergman’s “Through a Glass Darkly” in 2011, caught perfectly the pain of someone suicidal denied suicide...'

Screengrab: Performances Summer / Fall 2014

AN APPRECIATION: ANGELINA JOLIE

One of the great things about kid’s movies is that these days, they are one of the few places where movie stars are willing to play to type. The rest of the time, they’re too busy proving themselves actors, don’t you know, getting all Method with fake noses and funny accents that allow them to ‘disappear’ into roles.  Whoever decreed that it is the job of the star to disappear? But if fame turns humans into cartoons; cartoons allow the famous to be themselves. Eddie Murphy may wish to put his days playing the ass behind him, but literally playing an ass in the Shrek movies loosed some of his most inspired shtick since Axel Foley hung up his badge. Tom Hanks may spend a good proportion of his time putting dents in his nice guy image in movies like Captain Phillips but seeing him snap back into his Dudley-do-right persona in the Toy Story movies had the snug satisfaction of an old well-loved pair of slippers. These days, Angelina Jolie is busy filling out her boots as movie director and philanthropist; but channeling her inner momma grizzly onscreen in A Mighty Heart and Changeling, she unveiled a talent for over-acting that was barely hinted at in her previous incarnation as action-movie dominatrix in films like Wanted, Salt, Mr and Mrs Smith, whose minimalist acting style seemed to suit her down to the ground. Rumor has it that she wants to play Cleopatra, but really she’s the Sphinx. A fame-enamelled Goddess who wears her beauty like a mask, she’s a geek Dietrich, her contempt for the male invertebrates who prostrate themselves at her feet, angling their cameras up her torso, matched only by the self-control with which she hides it. Not completely: a single raised eyebrow, a scintilla of a smirk, and the game is up. (You thought she was a puppet of the male-gaze in the Lara Croft movies? She was taking notes.)  If contempt is her key-note, then in Malificent she plays it like a flugelhorn: face as white as parchment,  cheekbones remolded into Max Headroomish fenders, a pair of huge horns leaping from her head, like a cross between a stag and a supermodel,  she leaves Elle Fanning likea gnat-smudge on the windshield. It's Hannibal Lecter vs Tinkerbell. “There is evil in this world,” sighs Jolie, in a dulcet English accent that plumes like a single drop of blood in water, “hatred and revenge”, before giving a bashful giggle, as if the very idea of decency were fit for no more than a smile. In an age when acting newbies apply darkness like eye-shadow or an adhesive tattoo — yes, I'm talking you, Natalie Portman — Jolie’s velveteen perfidy is the real thing: Wicked Stepmother Interrupted.  

My favorite Jolie roles:—

1. Girl, Interrupted  

2. Gia  

3. Malificent  

4. Salt  

5. Mr and Mrs Smith  

6. Kung Fu Panda  

7. Playing by Heart  

8. Wanted  

9. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow  

10. A Shark's Tale

REVIEW: We're the Best! (dir. Moodysson)

From my Guardian review:—

'... The film repeatedly pulls of something of the same trick:  channelling punk’s sneer in the direction of more charitable embrace, Moodysson has fashioned a sweet, spirited misfit anthem — a spirited ode to anarchy, teen spirit and home-made haircuts. He may be the only film director in whom the legacies of Ingmar Bergman and ABBA might be said to be, if not reconciled, then put on the same page, hawk-eyed observation of his fellow humans duking it out with the equally acute desire to join them when they bum-rush the dance-floor. Just recently, it’s looked like Bergman had the upper hand, with Moodysson going on a prolonged dark tear, making films on sex trafficking (Lilja 4-Ever),  pornography (A Hole in My Heart) and globalisation (Mammoth).  We’re The Best! sees him returning to the warm-hearted vitality, and suburban mileu, of his 2000 film, Together, about life on a hippie commune in the seventies as viewed through the eyes of it’s latchkey kids. You’d call it a coming-of-age film except the ages were reversed: the adults squabbling like kids, the kids sombre and purposeful, like miniature adults. That reversal is present in softer, refracted form, too, in We’re The Best, which boasts its share of unsorted out parents, negotiating their forties by arguing about politics, getting drunk and playing spin-the-bottle.  Bobo’s mother, in particular, seems to be emerging from her divorce a newly-born 13-year-old, sobbing on the bed when her latest boyfriend breaks up with her. Bobo administers a hug, then makes dinner for herself by popping fish-sticks in the toaster. Bobo’s grown in the opposite direction, you realise: desexualized to the point of boyishness, she stares at her squashed-potato face in the mirror in a manner both deeply unimpressed and mutely accepting of what she sees —— “nyeah,” the look seems to say, “What are you going to do.”  

Quote of the Day: James Lever on Birth

'... that kind of oblique, and always beautiful, psychological thriller which on release is described as 'elegant claptrap' or something similar (the elegance allegedly a misdirection while the claptrap tries to burgle your unconscious) and which then ages disturbingly well, as if there is after all something occult about the way you've been beguiled. Which there is. Vertigo was an elegant claptrap movie in its day — so was The Tenant, even Don't Look Now — films which like Birth concern muffled or inarticulate attempts at communication by the past. It suits these movies to call to us across time — they become, over the years, even more like themselves.' – James Lever, Arete

INTERVIEW: JOHN TURTURRO

From my john Turturro interview for The Guardian:

'John Turturro is much less tortured than I was expecting. One doesn't like to get performers too mixed up with their roles, but I can’t get the image of him as Barton Fink, the tortured playwright caught in a long dark night of the soul in the Coen’s Palme’ D’Or winning comedy of 1991, out of my head. Of all the Coens patises, Turturro played put-upon best: He seemed somehow twisted around himself, like a corkscrew, his smile forever on the point of sliding slowly off his face, and in roles for Spike Lee and Robert Redford he seemed to specialize in the kind of guys — embattled, tightly wound, thin-skinned —who draw injury from the universe like lightning. That high-rise ‘Fro seemed frazzled with bad karma. His curls are speckled with a little salt and pepper, these days. A wiry 57, he arrives for lunch at Bar Pitti on Sixth Avenue looking debonair in a cashmere Canali sports jacket. Posing for a selfie with a fan on the way in, he is guided to a corner table of the restaurant by its owners, who greet him on first name terms. Turturro likes his neighborhood joints. He gets his coffee from the same Puerto Rico coffee house in Park Slope every morning, and gives money to his favorite down-town cinema, Film Forum. “If I come here I know what I can get with the kind of cooking it is,” he says as a waiter arrives bearing a portable blackboard of specials that he perches on his knee. He’s a little nervous: this weekend his latest movie, Fading Gigolo, which he both wrote directed and stars in, adds 100 cinemas to its release in the US. “I was on the phone all day yesterday saying, "That's too much,” he says. “But all the theaters want it. People are enjoying the movie so much. That’s why you do it for, but I'm like, ‘Wow, really that’s a little much...’ I’ll have the plate of asparagus please.”'

R.I.P.  

SO GLAD I DON'T HAVE TO SEE*: WINTER SLEEP

'"Winter Sleep" is unabashed essay cinema that makes difficulty its prime artistic objective. Not difficulty of interpretation, you understand: Ceylan has perhaps never presented his ideas quite so forthcomingly, as his actors converse in self-sealed analytical paragraphs that allow little room for idiosyncratic reading or reflection... Ceylan has never been a merchant of merriment, and nor should he be: his best films have achieved a kind of humane grace through their severity that rewards the work they require. Recently, his foray into genre-infused territory -- the dense procedural web of "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia," the florid noir of "Three Monkeys" -- gave punch and urgency to his more remote thematic preoccupations. " Winter Sleep" steps back from that development, returning to the less disciplined, ruminative structures of "Distant" or "Climates," though with the grandiose formal heft he has since cultivated.... The perils of verbosity is indeed one of the talking points in a film that isn't devoid of self-awareness: "Sometimes the disguise of lyricism makes it stink of sentimentality," says Necla (Demet Akbag) witheringly to her brother Aydin (Haluk Biginer) a pompous, embittered actor-turned-hotelier-turned-essayist who has seemingly devoted himself to none of these professions with the commitment of his full-time gasbaggery. She's having a dig at the rhetoric-heavy advice columns he writes for the local paper in their sleepy Anatolian village.'" — Guy Lodge, HiFix

* An occasional column devoted to those books, movies and art works which would, on balance, better serve us by remaining unread, unwatched and unseen, based on the principle that our reactions to art in absentia can be every bit as rich and meaningful as to works demanding our urgent personal attention. Previous entries here, here, here, and here.

REVIEW: THE IMMIGRANT (dir. Gray)

From my Guardian review:—

It’s something of a mystery why James Gray’s The Immigrant isn’t a great movie. It looks like one and sounds like one, summoning   a vision of New York in the 1920s to rivals Coppola’s in The Godfather, the sooty tenements of the Lower East side seeming to glow under the touch of cinematographer Darius Khondji. The whole film has a spectral beauty — like a sun-faded photograph, or some long-forgotten classic from the 1970s, back when moviemakers like Coppola and Sergio Leone took on the immigrant experience as the American subject in films.  That’s how The Immigrant feels: a slightly faded classic that you can’t remember whether you've seen or not.    

Marion Cotillard plays Ewa, a polish immigrant coming through Ellis Island when her sickly sister is quarantined by the authorities. Spring from deportation by a well-dressed gentleman in a bowler hat (Joaquin Phoenix), who gives her board and lodging, alongside some other women whom he boards. It’s all vaguely creepy in a way you can't put your finger on. Cotillard is wide-eyed with mistrust, Phoenix fastidious and kindly, but overly so by just a few degrees so when his fury arrives it comes almost as confirmation of your worst fears. The women, it transpires, perform nightly for him in a burlesque house that also serves as a speakeasy and brothel. Ewa, bit by bit, is pushed into prostitution in order to secure her sister’s release.The role was written by Gray specifically for Cotillard, and it’s an actress’s dream, which isn't to say all dreams should be granted. A vessel of pure, noble suffering in the mould of Hardy’s Tess, or Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Ewa is one of those fallen women whose internal purity is only accentuated by being dragged through the mud — an inverted saint. Cotillard goes digging for the same place she found her Edith Piaf and comes up with another tremulous waif, her big eyes wide with hunger for a new life, delivering her lines in a breathy, Silesian whisper as if barely aware she is even speaking.  Indeed, slap a little panstick on her and she could pass muster as a silent-era heroine, in one of D W Griffith’s melodramas.  Gray is one of the unsung directorial talents, unequestionably, unafraid of melodrama, or big emotions. This film could almost be a prequel to his previous films, sombre, morally knotted tragedies — We Own the Night, Little Odessa, Two Lovers, The Yards — in which protagonists return to, and are ensnared in, their own backyards.
But The Immigrant is missing his usual urgency — that doomy, thrilling undertow that sucks people to their fate. The whole thing feels under-powered, as if by the same gas-lamps that light the streets with soft dim pools of light. 

It’s at its strongest the closer it draws to music: a performance at Ellis island by the opera singer Caruso, for example, where Ewa first meets Bruno’s cousin, Orlando (Jeremy Renner) a handsome magician who talks of whisking her away to California, telling her “You have a right to be happy.” You can see Renner panicking a little over how to play this dreamboat, and deciding in the end to let the Errol Flynn Moustache decide the matter. But Renner’s a firestarter by nature, with a wonderful crackle of unpredictability. I wonder what would have happened if Gray had swapped his two male leads?  Phoenix might have brought a few dents to this knight in shining armor, while Renner would have brought a much-needed sense of danger to Bruno. It’s been conceived in part as a beauty-and-the-beast romance, but Phoenix’s love for Ewa, slow to register, ends up doubling him over like an impacted molar. He’s a self-harmer, not a brute, and his mournful, misshapen presence seems to subdue the movie further. Gray has made four movies with the actor now and I wonder if the two men haven't grown a little invisible to one another — the same thing happened with Scorsese and De Niro.

REVIEW: GODZILLA (dir. Edwards)

From my Guardian review:—

 'We are a long way from the  man-in-a-rubber-suit who wobbled through a model Tokyo in the 1954 original, its scratch-penny budget itself evidence of a pleasing and feisty cinematic asymmetry. Newly scaled up to keep pace with the latest skyscrapers, Godzilla is glimpsed teasingly, through Cloverfield POV shots for the first hour, before finally taking centre stage to defend mankind from MUTOs, giant nuclear mutants that look like the queen alien in Aliens and snack on nuclear missiles like Twinkie bars. The scenes of cataclysm, most of them at night, have a sulphurous power, as if Edwards had prepared by boning up on Dore's engravings for Paradise Lost. At one point we see a mountain — or a silhouette our eye had taken to be a mountain — move, one of the best such sleights of hand since Spielberg’s headlights-in-the-rearview-mirror gag in Close Encounters. If only Edwards had held it longer.

Needless to say, all human scale is obliterated. Cranston, as the nuclear engineer reduced to conspiratorial babbling, may be the smartest casting choice of the summer: when even Walter White throws a hissy fit, you know things are bad. He and Binoche hold the screen for as long as they are allowed, but soon have to make way for the demographically-approved Chosen Ones, Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron-Taylor-Wood, a physical actor who likes to storm into a room and pace it’s four corners like a lion, but when faced with the sight of two giant nuclear mutants treating masonry like meringue wears an expression of mild consternation, as if just remembering he’d left the oven on.  He spends most of the movie trying to catch a train to get back to Olsen, but we couldn’t care less. Unlike King Kong, this was  never  a story scaled with a human adversary in mind. “What are we supposed to do?” asks Navy Commander David Straithairn. “Sit back and watch?” 

Well, actually, yes.  What makes Godzilla such a curious summer-blockbuster property is it rootedness in failure...  If the cycle of disaster movies that gripped audiences in the 1990s were notable for their busy screens and jocular Oops-Apocalypse tone — “Ha Ha! It's the wonder of nature, baby!” boomed Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as tornadoes ripped up the South in Jan De Bont’s Twister — our contemporary variants are joke-free zones in which mankind isn’t just threatened with extinction. We deserve it. Not only do we bring our own nuclear doom upon our heads in Godzilla, but in a few weeks time we stand in the dock  once again, indicted for crimes against the primate in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. And this just a few Sundays after God annihilated the Earth on account of our wickedness in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. “The wickedness is not just in them, it’s in all of us,” insisted Russell Crowe’s prophet.  “It had to be what He wanted—a world without men.  You see that, don’t you?”  The right went into its usual tizzy over Aronofsky’s film, Glenn Beck saying “it’s just so pro-animal and anti-human, and I mean strongly anti-human,” but for once, the nut fringe was basically right. The blockbuster has finally gone post-human. Forget national loyalty: we’ve shrugged off species loyalty. The Godzilla movies always tilted audience sympathy towards the monster of course, but as Edward’s lizard takes a bow and slips into the ocean once more at the end of the film, I felt something else: a nip of the old Avatar blues. The first true hero of summer and he doesn’t even say goodbye.'