iPad Round-Up 2 - THE CONSIPIRATOR

Yet another thumpingly pedestrian issues-film from Robert Redford.  The movie takes the form of an historic court-room drama, with James McAvoy playing the lawyer defending Robin Wright's Mary Surrat of conspiracy to murder President Lincoln (she was Booth's landlady and her son has mysteriously fled.)  This being a Redford film, the politics are naively simple and oppositional: McAvoy's lawyer is the champion of all things good - liberty, the constitution and the right to a fair trial even in the wake of an appalling political crime.  Kevin Kline's war minister represents the forces of evil:  putting ends before means, willing to sacrifice right to expediency, with a contemporary relevance in that Surrat was denied a civilian trial before her peers, and tried under military law. 

The issues are fascinating, the casting top notch, Newton Thomas Sigel's cinematography is superb, and the dilemmas at the movie's heart are clearly highly relevant today.  The problem is that it feels like a college debate rather than a movie.  Movies must entertain. If they educate and provoke as well, then all to the good. But no-one ever learned anything while their eyes were rolling to the back of their head in boredom.  Castigat ridendo mores. Moliere knew this. Redford apparently does not  He needs to treat his subject matter with a little less respect and his audiences with a little more.  

THE CONSPIRATOR played Toronto 2010 and opened in summer 2011 in the USA, Hong Kong, South Korea, Ireland, the UK, Portugal, Australia, Turkey, Kuwait and Germany. It opened last month in Singapore. It goes on release in Belgium on November 16th and in Spain on December 2nd. It is available to rent and own.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS - Gentlemen, you can't fight in here: this is the war room!

I have always been rather conflicted about the X-MEN movies. On the one hand, I found the comic book tale of mutants, whose mutations had the appearance of superhero powers, rather confused and illogical. In a cosmic tale of "scissors-paper-stone" how was I to know whether a particular mutant's ability to whip up a storm could be trumped by another mutant's ability to throw fireballs? It all seemed too easy for the writers to whip up a deus ex machina. On the other hand, I absolutely loved the profundity of the intellectual debate at the heart of THE X-MEN. The comic books served as a plea for the acceptance of "freaks" - and for mutants one can read those who are sexually or racially oppressed in real life. The real battle was not between humans and mutants but between Professor X and Magneto. Professor X believes mutants can "be the better people", helping humanity, even though humanity is not always supportive of mutants. By contrast, Magneto believes that humanity will inevitably hunt what it fears and fear what is different. Mutants should therefore go on the offensive. This is the debate between Dr King and Malcolm X - the language of acceptance and self-hatred - the conflict between appeasement and aggression.

The great news is that X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, by taking us back to the origin story of Professor X aka Charles Xavier and Magneto aka Erik Lensherr, really delves into these issues. For the first time in the franchise, I really felt as though I had equal sympathy for both sides (rather than disdain for Magneto), and felt the emotional conflict that ultimately ripped these two friends apart and led Xavier's adopted sister Raven/Mystique to leave him for Erik. I can't say enough about James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender's nuanced and emotionally affecting performances as Xavier and Erik respectively. I truly believed in their friendship between opposites - the little boy who grew up amidst great wealth and led a sheltered life at Oxford befriending the angry, tortured soul, brutalised by the Nazi scientist Sebastian Shaw. And Jennifer Lawrence, given far less to do than in her Oscar nominated role in WINTER'S BONE, brings real depth to her performance as Raven - the girl who cannot hide her mutation in plain sight and has self-esteem issues that any teenager can relate to. Because you care about these people, your perception of the stakes shift. Every good action movie needs you to feel the stakes to make you care. But the stakes here aren't stopping Sebastian Shaw from inciting the USA and Soviet Union to turn the Cuban Missile Crisis into Nuclear War. (Although these serve as an amazing setting for the final action set-pieces and made me wish Matthew Vaughn could direct a James Bond movie starring Michael Fassbender). No, the real stakes are whether the disagreement between Magneto and Xavier will destroy their friendship and tear apart the mutant family.

All of which makes the movie sound rather ponderous, but that really isn't the case. It is intelligent, yes, and takes its material seriously. But it also has a sense of wit and, even cheekiness! What I really love about Matthew Vaughn's direction is that he takes the 1960s Cold War setting and really mines it well, with production design that has an air of those early Sean Connery Bond films and costumes for January Jones' that are practically Austin Powers-esque. I mean, we have January Jones (Emma Frost) in fem-bot spangly bikinis; an urbane Bond-like action hero in the form of Fassbender's Erik; and Kevin Bacon is pure Blofeld, with his double-breasted suits, yachts and obsession with atomic energy. Other comedic touches included a training montage of the type spoofed in TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE, that stays just the right-side of camp. A set-piece with the mutant kids showing off their skills that involves a choreographed move that feels like SCOOBY-DOO. And when the action set-piece reaches its climax, with Erik pulling off an amazing feat, we get a soundtrack that comes straight out of TOP GUN. Not to mention the war-room looking like something out of STRANGELOVE!

The genius of X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is, then, that it combines the intelligence of Jane Goldman, Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz's script with the pop-culture sensibility of director Matthew Vaughn. It's a movie so earnestly in love with the comic book material and its cinematic antecedents, that it can be intelligent but also witty - it can be self-referential (viz. the Hugh Jackman cameo) but never kitschy. I truly think this is a great summer blockbuster - and is far more entertaining and quietly clever than INCEPTION ever was. It has restored my faith in big summer action movies, after the disappointment of PIRATES 4 and THE HANGOVER 2. I can't wait for the next installment!

X-MEN FIRST CLASS is released today in the UK, Denmark, France and Serbia. It is released on June 2nd in Argentina, Australia, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Singapore and Thailand. It is released on June 3rd in the US, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, India, Norway, Paraguay, Poland, Spain, Sweden and Turkey. It is released on JUne 8th in Italy; on June 9th in Germany and Greece; on June 11th in Japan; on June 18th in Armenia and on June 23rd in Georgia.

THE LAST STATION - patronising and superficial

THE LAST STATION is a lavishly produced but patronising biopic of Leo Tolstoy's last years - when he was the world's most famous author, but had turned his back on literary fame to pursue a life as a natural philosopher and advocate of interior spirituality and an austere life of renunciation. The movie is written and directed by Michael Hoffman - a director with a somewhat patchy history. In the early 1990s, he directed the scabrous network TV satire SOAPDISH but then settled into much more banal fare such as the Clooney-Pfeiffer rom-com ONE FINE DAY and the warmly photographed but morally equivocal curio THE EMPEROR'S CLUB. THE LAST STATION is also a rather odd film. The warm glow of its lavish photography (Sebastian Edschmid) and the beautiful production design (Patrizia von Brandestein) lend the whole enterprise a Merchant-Ivory glow. Who wouldn't want to be sitting in the real Yasnaya Polyana drinking tea with jam and listening to opera? Everything is wonderfully appointed and nothing more so that the fine cast. There may be grumblings about Anthony Hopkins and Meryl Streep pulling out of their roles as the ageing Lev and his wife Sofya, but their replacements, Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren are no less weighty. And in his typical role as callow naive voyeur we have James McAvoy, fresh from his apparent success in ATONEMENT, as Lev's secretary Valentin. This being a sort of Merchant Ivory world in which weighty literary stuff slips easily down the throat, Valentin has a love interest - an independent young woman called Masha (ROME's Kerry Condon). Naturally, in a world where all intellectual brain-ache has been banished, we shall be led through the story by our charming ingenu Valentin, and have the larger issue of Love versus Rules thought through by Valentin and Masha.

The tragedy of this film is that it had the real locations and a fine cast and production team at its disposal but chose to create nothing more complicated than a soupy melodrama. Sofya is the matriarch who loves her husband and is proud of his fiction but is contemptuous of the men who would turn his Confession into dogma, and steal her children's inheritance into the bargain. This could have been tragic: a woman of genuine nobility and strength forced to flatter and manipulate and throw hysterics in order to be heard. But Helen Mirren's broad performance plays right out of the newspaper reports that Chertkov would've been planting. Plummer's Tolsoy could have been more tragic still - a deperately intelligent man who is forced to hurt the one he loves in order to move forward with what he thinks is his larger plan - or a tragic buffoon manipulated by the ideologues who want to use his name and claim the copyright on his novels. Who knows? Michael Hoffman makes him a jovial old cock, but nothing more. He never acts but is acted upon. It is a curious void at the centre of the film. I have little to say about the character of Valentin other than that this is a rather stereotypical role for McAvoy and rather unworthy of the opposing (and fictional) character Masha. Kerry Condon is impressive - the only actor who seems to be embracing some kind of truth, but she has little to do. And as for Paul Giamatti's Chertkov, wouldn't it have been more interesting to make him sympathetic? To have us believe that he genuinely cares for, and believes in, Tolstoy, rather than being a cartoon-villain puritan and chancer.

What I'm trying to say is that, at the start of this film, we have established the dramatic tension within ten minutes. Sofya loves Tolstoy and wants his attention and his money. Chertkov loves Tolstoy and wants his name and his money. Sofya shouts and schemes. Chertkov wheedles and schemes. Tolstoy hobbles about between the two and then carc's it in a provincial train station. If you want to make a movie on this subject matter that sustains itself for two hours you have to be willing to dig deeper into motives and to play in shades of grey. You have to be willing to roll up your sleeeves and deal in moral ambiguities as well as in moral certainties. You can't just loll about in beautifully photographed countryside bouncing the same argument back and forth like the world's most dull tennis match.

Additional tags: Michael Hoffman, Kerry Condon, Patrick Kennedy, John Sessions, Sergei Yevtushenko, Sebastian Edschmid, Patrizia von Bradenstein

THE LAST STATION played Telluride 2009 and was released in the US, Canada, Germany and Austria earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens next weekend in the Netherlands. It opens in Singapore on March 4th and in Switzerland on April 1st. Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer have been nominated both for Golden Globes and Academy Awards.