Sundance London 2012 - LUV

LUV is an earnest film with flashes of brilliance, but ultimately it stretches credulity too far to be taken seriously. Written by Justin Wilson and directed by Sheldon Candis (YOUNG CAESAR), it tells the tale of a young kid called Woody living with his uncle and grandmother in Baltimore. The opening scenes clash with every preconception we have from watching The Wire. His clothes for school are neatly laid out and he's getting a proper breakfast.  But Woody's day takes a wrong turn when his Uncle - an ex-con ex-dealer trying to go straight - decides to take Woody under his wing and teach him about "real life".  This, it turns out, encompasses a quick lesson in firing a gun and driving a car - clumsy foreshadowing anyone?  Woody doesn't actually do much for half the film. He just watches his Uncle get drawn back into the game.  They share some sweet moments but the relationship is always slippery and slightly sinister - and I love that delicacy of writing.  

The problem is in the second half of the film when Woody becomes a Mary Sue figure, and the finale is quite simply absurd.  At the Sundance London screening, the director asked us to accept the film as a fable rather than as a realistic portrayal of events, but frankly there wasn't enough in the stylistic choices within the film to support this reading.

On the positive side, the film contains strong performances from Common as the Uncle and Michael Rainey Jr as Woody.  There's also some nice cameos from Dennis Haysbert, Danny Glover and the legendary Michael K Williams.  The tech package, however, leaves something to be desired. A lot of the film takes place outside at night at the Red One's inability to capture true deep black is a problem. 

LUV played Sundance and Sundance London 2012.

Sundance London 2012 - THE HOUSE I LIVE IN

Eugene Jarecki's Sundance award winning documentary, THE HOUSE I LIVE IN, is a powerful and insightful examination of the US war in drugs. Inspired by the family history of his family friend and employee, Nani Jeter, Jarecki comes to the topic with fresh eyes and enquiring heart.  He interviews everyone from cops, judges and prison officers, to dealers, addicts and their families.  He brings in medical experts and historians of social policy.  Most prominently, Jarecki brings in investigative journalist turned screenwriter, David Simon, the man who created The Wire. 

I came the this documentary a little complacent that because of obsessive viewing of The Wire and reading in this subject, I wasn't going to learn anything new.  But I was wrong.  Where Simon gave us a deep and penetrating analysis of once city, from he Senator down to the kid on the corner, savagely indicting current policy, Jarecki takes a broader view.  He traces the war's origins to the early decades of the last century, when drug use was criminalised to provide enforcement agents with a hook upon which to arrest elements in society that were an economic threat.  And, then, with the urbanisation of the black population, the situation was compounded by housing policy that concentrated the "target" populations and made a simplistic policing policy of low level arrests easy and efficient to organise.  

The irony is that policies that were once either designed, or had the unintended consequence of marginalising the urban black poor, are now capturing the rural white poor, as disenfranchised blue collar workers are turning to meth.  Simon in particular makes a strong case for the war on drugs as basically as a class war, in which Americans rendered economic valueless are conveniently rounded up and incarcerated.  It's powerful stuff, even more so when an historian compares the marginalization of these people to the marginalization  of the Jews in 1930s Germany.

It's testament to the intelligence of his documentary that that parallel isn't pushed too far.  But after two hours witnessing the futility of a policy that takes people with no economic opportunity and further punishes them, we need as provocative an ending.  The result is a documentary that is in the best tradition of agitprop, well organised enough for the viewer with no prior knowledge but with enough new material for the armchair specialist.

THE HOUSE I LIVE IN played Sundance 2012 where it won the Grand Jury Prize - Documentary. It also played Sundance London.

Runtime - 117 minutes. US rating - R.

This is not a review of - 2 DAYS IN NEW YORK

Because Sundance projected the film for 30 minutes without subtitles, then faffed about for 10 minutes, then cancelled the screening. In all my years of going to LIFF and watching c50 films per fest, I've never seen something like that happen. Just sayin'

Sundance London 2012 - NOBODY WALKS

NOBODY WALKS is a beautifully made drama in which very little happens and yet the viewer feels intimately connected to each character, and invested in the emotional response to a new situation.  The performances are subtle and brave, the visual design of the film stylised and impactful: the overall effect one of establishing and maintaining an uneasy tone where seemingly banal occurrences hide emotional crises.

The single plot point that sets the movie off is the introduction of a newcomer to a family that is playing at being beautiful and privileged but evidently isn't functioning at some basic level. The newcomer is vibrant, sexy Martine (Olivia Thirlby) - a young experimental filmmaker from New York. The family consists of Julie (Rosemarie Dewitt), her daughter Kolt (India Ennenga), her husband, Peter (John Krasinki) and their son.  Peter is a sound designer helping Martine out with her film, but while he feels an attraction to her its her that initiates a relationship.  This doesn't go unnoticed by Julie, who is also facing temptation from her inappropriately keen patient (Justin Kirk). Meanwhile, the daughter, Kolt, is envious of Martine's flirtation with Peter's assistant David; equivocal about dating the sweet but unexciting Avi; and sleazed upon by her Italian tutor.

What I love about this film is that characters do things that may or may not be morally reprehensible but their motivations and the morality of their actions is always ambiguous and the more interesting for that.  Is there something more honest in Peter's reaction to Martine than in Julie's response to her parent?  And what are Martine's real motives? Is she consciously exploiting her sex appeal or a victim of men projecting their desires and assumptions onto her.  It's this kind of provocation that makes NOBODY WALKS such an elusive and fascinating film.  I hope it gets the distribution it deserves.

NOBODY WALKS played Sundance and Sundance London 2012. The run-time is 83 minutes.

Sundance London 2012 - SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED

I guess it was a sure bet.  Any movie based on a cutesy internet meme (see above graphic) was gonna rub me up the wrong way.  SAFTEY NOT GUARANTEED is the kind of hipster, quirky, indulgent comedy that I hate.  In fact, even calling it a comedy is a stretch given that it peddles the gentlest of gentle comedy.  I only laughed out loud three times, so on that basis it fails the Wittertainment 5-Laughs rule.  I predict that this will end up like last year's lauded hit, LIKE CRAZY. That was another movie the indie community loved and I hated. It too ended up in a bidding war at Sundance only to fail at the box office.

The problem with the film is that everything about it is so contrived that goofy that there's nothing to relate to - no point of entry unless you're also a wannabe oddball hipster.  It also contains precious few proper jokes (as mentioned above), and uneven tone, as it skirts past various genres. I blame Derek Connolly's pretentious script and Colin Trevorrow's lacklustre direction.  Performances are mostly so-so.  Aubrey Plaza (PARKS AND RECREATION) does her snarky, moody thing, but predictably melts when she meets Mark Duplass' oddball paranoid wannabe time-traveller.  They meet up because she an intern at a magazine and her boss Jeff is faking interest in the madcap scheme so as to write a funny story on the guy.  Jake M Johnson provides the only real laughs as Jeff, nicely playing against the "nice Nick" character in THE NEW GIRL.  As for Karan Soni's Arnau, it's nice that we people of Indian origin are starting to get more airtime in movies, but does it always have to be a clichéd geeky hard-working student? I'm starting to get offended.

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED played Sundance 2012 where Derek Connolly won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It also played Sundance London. It will play SXSW 2012 and will be released in the USA on June 8th.

Sundance London 2012 - SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS

So I walked into the screening of SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS having never heard of the band LCD soundsystem nor caring that it was a super influential synth rock group that had apparently retired at he top of its game with a show at Madison Square Gardens last year.  

And this new concert film by British directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace (BLUR: LIVE IN HYDE PARK) made no concessions to viewers who Kent not know what the fuss was about.   We get a short clip from the Colbert Report where the schlubby middle aged front man tells us he wants to retire and do non specific stuff. He likes coffee. And then we're into songs from the last gig interspersed with the random clips of the post concert wind down. 

This, it turns out, is a genius choice. The music, and the lead singer James Murphy, speak for themselves. The music, it turns out, is amazing. A kind of David Byrnes-esque synth pop. And the footage makes you feel like you're right in the mix of the concert. And the off stage footage gives you an idea about the crazy-sane decision to quit. 

Watch this flick.  It doesn't matter if you've heard of the band (and I'm sure everyone but me has!). This is great music, and a great doc.

SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS played Sundance and Sundance London 2012.  It will be released in the US this summer. 

Sundance London 2012 - THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES

THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES says everything that needs saying about the cycle of greed between consumers and banks that collapsed with the Global Financial Crisis.  And it does so not by interviewing Wall Street bankers and earnestly explaining the securitisation market, but by taking us into the stupendously large home of the Siegler family, whose fortunes were magnificently swept up in the boom bust cycle.  

Papa Siegler was the king of timeshare.  Credit fuelled his business at every level. Poor American families bought his units on credit -subprime credit as it turns out - and he in turn used the massive revenues he was generating to build ever more resorts and build ever more palatial houses.  The lines between business and personal wealth were blurred.  He mortgaged the gigantic Versailles house - the biggest house in America as it turns out -  and ploughed the money into building a timeshare tower in Vegas.  And when the credit cycle burst, he found himself in dire straits.  

Papa Siegler comes across as a stern, hard-ball businessman: tenacious, clever, hubristic at the start, and bloodied but unbowed at the end. His self awareness about the opiate of cheap finance does him credit.  He is prickly, but sympathetic. But the really fascinating character is his second wife, a college educated girl who became a beauty queen, and married this man, thirty years her senior. With her plastic body and botoxed face, her seeming inability to curb her spending, and her lackadaisical approach to household management, Jackie would be easy to mock.  But it's a tribute to director Lauren Greenfield that Jackie is not caricatured through editing but is allowed to come across as a sympathetic character. She seems to genuinely care about her friends and neighbours getting foreclosed upon, and to be genuinely worried about her stressed out husband. She loves the good life, but she's willing to stick by her husband for better or for worse.

What I love about this documentary is that it shows you the morbid excess of consumerism -especially when put it in contrast with the lives of the Filipino nanny - but it also shows you how these people aren't bad people.  It's hard to get perspective on the whirlwind when you're in it.  To me, this movie is the flip side of the brilliant MARGIN CALL, which made a similar case for empathising with the Wall Street bankers who were running on the same hamster wheel of greed as the sub prime borrowers. We were all drinking the same Kool aid.

THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES played Sundance and Sundance London 2012. It will be released in the USA on 6th July 2012.

Sundance London 2012 - LIBERAL ARTS

LIBERAL ARTS is a trite, cliché-ridden, entirely unbelievable movie that runs too long, and bores during its run-time.  Written by, directed by and starring Josh Radnor aka Ted in HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER, the movie reads as a mash-up of rom-com set pieces, with pretensions at saying something more profound.  

That profound insight is basically that most of us reach a point where we're happy in our small contained world, and once we leave it, life is basically a series of disappointments. For some kids, that'll be high school. For others, when they leave college.  For some lucky folk, it's when they retire. The point that the movie wants to make is that no matter how tempting it is to go back to that place of nostalgia, it isn't healthy. You have to move on and grow up.

All of which is fair enough.  I can relate. That could've been the backbone of an interesting movie. But what we get instead is half a film showing a soupy meet-cute and falling-in-love story between Radnor's 35 year old arrested development book-worm and Elizabeth Olsen's 19 year old Liberal Arts college student.  They share music mixes and feel uplifted by Schubert!  To make this bearable, Radnor needed to be a lot more self-aware and ironic with the material than he was. The second half of the movie zings all over the place, with one plot twist involving Olsen that rang hollow - another plot twist featuring a depressed student called Dean ( a very impressive turn by John Magaro - want to see more of him) that seems to come from another film altogether - and so many resolutions and endings that the film drags itself out worse than RETURN OF THE KING.

In the midst of all this, Richard Jenkins' reluctantly retiring Professor gets too little screen time. Allison Janney's brilliantly acerbic Professor gets just enough but steals the show. And Zac Efron has a charismatic cameo. But all this does is to reinforce the feeling that what we have here is an ill-written jumble of scenes, some of which work, some of which don't - a hammy sensibility aiming at something better. All of which is coupled with a pretty basic technical package.

Move along. There's nothing to see here. 

LIBERAL ARTS played Sundance and Sundance London 2012 and will be released in Australia on September 20th 2012.

Sundance London 2012 - UNDER AFRICAN SKIES

In 1986 Paul Simon went to South Africa, and collaborated with black South African musicians to create Graceland, an iconic album that introduced the West to the vibrant South African music culture, and arguably did more than anything to raise consciousness about the disgrace of Apartheid - then at its violent height.

Problem was, in going to South Africa, he broke the UN cultural boycott, and despite sound advice from Harry Belafonte, failed to go under the auspices of the ANC. Unsurprisingly, when the album came out, the praise for the music was almost drowned out by the political controversy.  Was Simon exploiting African musicians? Were they right to tour with him? Was his project well-meaning but ultimately destructive of the anti-apartheid struggle?

Joe Berlinger's documentary explores these issues in depth thanks to unlimited access to Paul Simon, Belafonte, Dali Tambo (Simon's most vocal opponent, and son of the former ANC leader) and the musicians who played on the album. Berlinger uses video footage of the original sessions and 2011's 25 year reunion concert to frame interview footage, and to take us through the timeline of the controversy.

Paul Simon comes across as devastatingly honest, but slippery in his reasoning.  He knew he wanted to go record with these musicians - it was an obsession - and he knew he was on thin ice so didn't tell Harry.  He claims again and again that he was invited to go - as if the volition of the South African artists over-rides the ANC - but he was the one who pushed his record label for introductions, and most of the artists had never heard of him.  To my mind, Simon is on more solid ground when he points out that the boycott twice punished the oppressed.  It was designed to isolate white South Africa (hence the importance of maintaining the cricket and rugby boycotts) but the black South African musicians were effectively cut off from cultural exchange too.  That said, Simon remains ambiguous to the end, even through the Q&A.

The documentary is provocative and Joe Berlinger is admirably even handed - allowing the opposing sides to present their arguments clearly and calmly. But it's almost too cool - too detached - too focused on the politics and not enough on the power of the music.  The near two-hour run-time felt long (longer than the fast paced 150 minute MARLEY), and I was impatient for the documentary to end.  For me, this is a movie that's really a 60 minute TV political doc. 

UNDER AFRICAN SKIES played Sundance, Newport Beach and Sundance London 2012. It does not yet have a commercial release date.

MARGIN CALL - the best film to date on the Great Crash

MARGIN CALL may well be the first Hollywood movie that doesn't elevate investment bankers into glamorous devils. It comes as close as any movie I can think of to depicting the reality of working in financial services. The key concept that behind the gravity-defying numbers are a bunch of normal people, with the same frailties and smallness of vision. People want to believe that Wall Street is run by a bunch of cackling, Mr-Burns-like speculators. But in reality, it's just a bunch of insecure kids who are good at maths. Sure, there are tails of mega-bonuses and luxurious off-sites. But what the movies never got until now was the dreary drudgery of the trading floor, the long hours, the self-aware sacrifice of family-time, the awful truth that no matter what you earn, you'll always be made to feel that it isn't enough. That there's always a bigger house, that isn't quite as big as the senior partner's. The absurd fact that you can earn millions at thirty and still feel stretched for cash. You never feel like you have a choice at the time, you probably don't even realise how much you've sacrificed until it's too late. These aren't Machiavellian geniuses but prisoners of the Game as much as the poor schmuck consumers who loaded up on cheap debt and are now trapped in negative equity. We were all conned into living a lifestyle that, in our hearts, we knew we weren't earning - we couldn't afford. 

Debut feature director J C Chandor depicts this pathetic and soul-destroying world with an authenticity that is breath-taking. There are some minor slip-ups - no security guard would allow a sacked employee to pass a USB key to a retained employee in plain sight; there is no killer margin call made in the film. But the crumpled messy trading floor, the tired crumpled traders, the coded conversations in which workers fearful for their jobs jockey for position - these things are actually pitch perfect. There are no Gordon Gekko grand-standing speeches in defence of capitalism. No adrenaline-fuelled boardroom shouting matches. Decisions are taken by tired men in boardrooms at three am. Dialogue is measured, non-actionable. But in a few short sentences, laden with unspoken meaning, a career can be an ended - a business shut down.

The movie takes place over a 48 hour period on the commercial mortgage backed securities trading floor of a Lehman Brothers type investment bank. The first day starts with the brutal sacking of half the floor - eerily similar to what you'll see in any FS firm in a down-turn. The relief, the guilt of the survivors - the repressed anger, acceptance of the shafted. After work, a talented young analyst (Zachary Quinto) figures out that the wild gyrations in the market have pushed the bank to the point of bankruptcy. He escalates the matter up the scale, through his direct line manager (Paul Bettany) to his boss (Kevin Spacey) to his boss (Simon Baker) until we get to a 3am board meeting where the super-boss (Jeremy Irons) decides to offload the toxic assets before the rest of Wall Street figures out that the party has ended. This of course means shafting everyone the bank has every traded with, doing it quickly, and for the people actually executing the trades, an end to their jobs. 

The second half of the film shows each character dealing with the ramifications of this decision. The senior trader (Kevin Spacey) has to trade-off loyalty to his firm with decency toward the street. The had of risk management (Demi Moore) has to come to terms with the end of her career. And in a superbly written and executed scene with Stanley Tucci's sacked risk analyst, where she asks if he has kids, you realise that she really has nothing now. Tucci's character has his dignity, his family, but is going to lose his house. Penn Badgley's young trader, the guy who bought the Wall Street mythos, has to come to terms with the fact that he's going to be sacked, and that The Street is dead. Only Paul Bettany's character seems to emerge unscathed. He had no illusions about The Street or his own lifestyle - he's been through market crashes before - and he's unsurprised by the super-boss' ruthless self-preservation.

Paul Bettany's character also has the best, most insightful, most lucid speech about the nature of the credit bubble and the ensuing popular backlash against bankers - the 99 percent who want fair pay and fair reward but still took three holidays a year and had a flat screen TV in each room on credit. "I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin' fair really fuckin' quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don't. They want what we have to give them but they also wanna, you know, play innocent and pretend they have know idea where it came from. Well, thats more hypocrisy than I'm willing to swallow, so fuck em. Fuck normal people."

I love that speech. I believe it. Problem is, it's the best and worst thing about this movie. Because the only serious flaw with this film is the editorialising. I'm sure that many a sacked Lehman Brothers employee, many a current investment banker, has thought the same things, but in the months and years that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers - not in the moments when it was actually happening. That kind of soul-searching happens when the dust has settled. It feels too prescient to have those speeches while the bank is still alive. 

Still, for all that, this is an amazingly well written and perfectly acted film. It explains, empathises, never glamourises Wall Street. It has tension and stakes, without ever using cheap tricks, grandstanding, flashy trading scenes. Jeremy Irons and Demi Moore are easily worth Best Supporting Actor nods. But I guess the lack of pyrotechnics means this film never really had a chance. 

MARGIN CALL played Sundance and Berlin 2011 and was released last year in Germany, Russia, Estonia, Spain, the USA, Romania, the Netherlands, Canada, Hong Kong, Lithuania, Turkey, Brazil, Greece, Poland and Singapore. It is currently on release in the UK and Ireland. It opens on January 19th in Israel; on January 25th in Belgium and Portugal; on March 16th in Sweden and on April 4th in France. It is available to rent and own in the US.

iPad Round-Up 2 - THE INTERRUPTERS

Steve James' (HOOP DREAMS) documentary, THE INTERRUPTERS, is an absolutely fascinating, compelling and politically incisive film about tackling gang-related crime in contemporary Chicago. He shadows volunteers working for a project called CeaseFire - a programme that takes former gang-members and has them "interrupt" violent situations before they happen, trying to talk  kids down from dangerous situations.  Sounds simple enough. But within this simple format comes a nuanced, emotionally affecting exposition of life in deprived inner cities - a film that is as incisive and unblinking as David Simons' superb THE WIRE, but without that show's defeatist message. If there is a "star" in this documentary, then it has to be Ameena Matthews, a former gang-member in the same mode as THE WIRE's real-life Snoop. She has turned her life around, become a committed muslim, but still has that same scary authority that she must have had as a gang leader. She speaks so much sense, so straightforwardly, that you wish her influence were greater, that there were more people like her working the streets. Few Hollywood starts speak with such charisma and authority, and it's her presence that transforms this film from being earnest and didactical into being a genuinely fascinating watch.  

THE INTERRUPTERS played Sundance 2011 and went on limited release in the US and UK in summer 2011. 

London Film Fest 2011 Day 12 - TAKE SHELTER

Writer-director Jeff Nichols's psychological drama, TAKE SHELTER, has been winning rave reviews, and with screeners already sent out to the Oscar electorate, I am sure Michael Shannon (BOARDWALK EMPIRE, BUG) will be receiving Oscar buzz for his performance of a man conscious that he is losing his mind.  But to be frank, I found this movie near un-watchable - so languorous was its pace, so obvious was its plot trajectory.   

Shannon plays Curtis, a hard-working man, whose nightmares of violent storms and biting dogs start to seep into his waking life.  Convinced that a violent storm is coming he puts himself in financial jeopardy to extend and stock up a storm shelter in his garden, at the same time alienating himself from his sweet wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain).  Shannon is always committed and convincing in his performances, but has become typecast as the sympathetic insane person. I also feel that Chastain needs to move beyond roles where she is just an archetypal sweet wife to be adored and put on a pedestal. She needs to break free of this typecasting. I feel that I have yet to see her really act. But the story just moves at such a slow pace, and doesn't really go anywhere. Over-hyped tedium.   

TAKE SHELTER played Sundance, Cannes where it won the Critics Week Grand Prize, and Jeff Nichols won the SACD award for Best Feature.  It also played Hollywood 2011 where Jessica Chastain won Breakthrough Actress, and London 2011. It opened in September in the US and opens on November 11th in the UK. It opens in France on December 7th.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 8 - TERRI

TERRI is a movie that is so unique, goes so much at its own pace and with its own concerns, that it's hard to characterise and hard to know what to make of it. What I can say is that it is beautifully observed, well-acted, causes moments of genuine un-ease but also genuine human warmth.....It is perhaps the most idiosyncratic movie of the festival and none the worse for that. 

Essentially, this is a movie about a group of misfits - the odd kids, the marginalised adults - that make up society but rarely make it onto the big screen. Chief among them is Terri (a fearless performance by Jacob Wysocki), an obese kid who lives with his ailing uncle in a ramshackle house, wears pyjamas to school, gets teased as a result, and yet has a Good Heart. He forms unlikely friendships with another troubled kid, Chad (Bridger Zadina) and is mentored by the bizarrely intense assistant principal, Mr Fitzgerald (John C Reilly). Perhaps most bizarrely of all, he ends up on a weird night of drinking and intimacy with the school's hottest girl (another fearless performance from Olivia Crocicchia) after he unintentionally precipitates her near-expulsion.

What I love about this film is its refusal to sentimalise or smooth over the strange weirdness of these people and their relationships, but also it's evident fondness for them. The subject matter is honest, brutally so, but as Roger Ebert has pointed out, this film in no way deserves its US "R" rating. One can only hope the BBFC is more mature, if and when this film gets a UK release. That's not to say that there weren't passages in the first half hour when I was wondering where the film was going. But if you stick with it, this really is a wonderful film, full of humanity, insight and beauty, as encapsulated in a truly memorable speech by Mr Fitzgerald on frailty and trying to do the best we can.

TERRI played Sundance 2011. It opened in the US in July and in Canada in August.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 4 - LIKE CRAZY

God I hated this movie. I hated it from the opening scene where kookily sweet English girl Anna (Felicity Jones) propositions  goofy, nerdy American boy Jacob (Anton Yelchin) with a quirkily, goofily, cutesy letter under his windscreen-wiper.  I hated the falling in love scenes - all reading each other's poetry and carving each other's names on a chair - adolescent crappiness - and the self-indulgent, stupid manner in which the girl screws up her visa application by over-staying her welcome.  I had no sympathy for the couple. She just seemed selfish and juvenile - he just seemed weedy and pathetic.  Her parents seemed unbelievably nice - why didn't they just slap them both round the face and tell them to get on with it?  And as for so-called honest insights about the problems with long-distance relationships - jealousy, cheating, feeling left out, expense - frankly, there's nothing more profound in this flick than in the mainstream rom-com GOING THE DISTANCE.  

Just because you film everything in a ramshackle indie style; give it a score by Dustin O'Halloran; and neither of the lead characters ever wash or comb their hair, doesn't make a movie authentic or interesting.  I really just don't get the hype it's receiving.  It struck me as juvenile, self-indulgent and banal - just like its milquetoast lead characters.  ENOUGH ALREADY!  

LIKE CRAZY played Sundance 2011 where it won the Grand Jury Prize - Dramatic beating TERRI, MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE and HERE. Felicity Jones won the Special Jury Prize for Acting.  The version shown at London 2011 has been cut to achieve a PG-13 rating.  LIKE CRAZY will be released in the US on October 28th and in the UK on February 3rd.

Felicity Jones on the red carpet for the UK premiere
of LIKE CRAZY at the BFI London Film Festival

TYRANNOSAUR

Comedic actors in dramatic roles have a new champion in Olivia Colman. In this feature-length debut from Paddy Considine, Colman plays Hannah, a charity shop worker, who befriends local thug Joseph (Peter Mullan) whilst living with the secret abusive violence of her husband James, played by Eddie Marsan. These regrettably familiar characters and the bonds they form anchor Considine’s film for the reliably impressive work of Mullan and Marsan, but it is Colman’s performance that rises beyond them, searing and breathtaking and nothing less than captivating in its course. In the spectrum of movies touching this subject matter, Iciar Bollain’s TE DOY MIS OJOS (TAKE MY EYES) may be a recent masterwork, yet TYRANNOSAUR remains a haunting achievement – the legacy of its landscape James and Hannah’s middle-class suburban house, neat and red-brick and home to the most deep and fearsome darkness.

TYRANNOSAUR played Sundance, where Paddy Considine won the Directing Award - World Cinema Dramatic, and Olivia Colman and Peter Mullan won the Special Jury Prize - Dramatic. It also played Toronto 2011. It is currently on release in the UK and Ireland. It opens on October 13th in Germany; on November 17th in Russia; on November 2th in Greece and on January 4th in Sweden.

Late review by Sikander - THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE- a schintzy, duplicitous tale

The 80's were brilliant. If you were in charge.

There are echoes of classical themes such as Dr Frankenstein and his monster and Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde in THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE, a portrayal of moral dilemma by director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day, Mulholland Falls, Once Were Warriors). Decorated and patriotic soldier Latif Yahia is chosen by Uday Hussein, Saddam’s eldest son, to become his body double. He is reluctant, but a spell in Abu Ghraib soon convinces him that the choice is not his to make.
In order to begin his new life afresh in the Hussein household, he is forced to allow his family to think he has died in battle. Making things even worse, in doing so, the deeply moral Yahia becomes an enabler for the psychotic and paranoid rapist Uday.

This predicament is about as nuanced and complex as Tamahori’s kitsch study in 1980’s opulence and corrupt dictatorship gets. Full of marble and gold plating, disco balls, it boasts an impressive soundtrack, including Depeche mode’s excellent “Personal Jesus”. There are obvious nods to De Palma’s Scarface in the machine guns, Cuban cigars, decadence and overactive thyroid glands which abound. Violent and unsubtle, it is nevertheless fun to watch (partly because of the aforementioned bold production values) and the main cast are convincing.

The mercurial Dominic Cooper plays both lead characters very well, switching between both contrasting personalities with ease. I’ll admit to a slight man-crush on our leading man, and Cooper is at his best, a charismatic uber-mensch in one breath and a spineless, Oedipal and repellent sociopath the next. This is Cooper in Band of Brothers, AN EDUCATION, and THE HISTORY BOYS, not TAMARA DREWE or MAMMA MIA. Revel in it.Ludivine Sagnier has smouldered since THE SWIMMING POOL and does not disappoint as Uday’s Lebanese mistress Sarrab. Sadly, the love affair between her and Yahia spoils an otherwise crisp and on-message story, but then it wouldn’t be the first time that a romantic sub-plotline has spoilt a film.

THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE is hardly a contemplative analysis of Iraq’s descent from the educated, professional and middle-class country it was in the 1970’s, a leader amongst Arab nations, to the pariah state it became after the first Gulf war, however there is a subtle point to be made in Yahia’s principled, everyman who feels feisance to his country but revulsion at the family which have styled themselves as it’s benevolent master whilst defiling it.Consider this movie an amuse bouche for Charles Ferguson’s excellent investigation into the failing of Operation Iraqi Freedom and its aftermath NO END IN SIGHT, and the equally impressive documentary THE FOG OF WAR.

THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE played Sundance, Berlin and Toronto 2011. It opened earlier this year in the US, UK, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ireland, Malta, Iceland and the Netherlands.

SENNA - a documentary worthy of Ayrton

Never has a movie inspired such tear-stained reminiscence among my close friends and family - some of whom worked in F1 racing - as Asif Kapadia's new documentary, SENNA.  For those of us who watched racing in the 80s and 90s, Ayrton Senna was an icon. Young, handsome, rich, for sure, but more than that -  brilliant at driving in wet conditions, and bold in exploiting a gap to take the lead.  He was everything a racing driver should be. 

Of course, at the time, as a kid, while I knew of his rivalry with the French incumbent world champion, Alain Prost, I hadn't realised just how poisonous that rivalry had been, nor the mechanics of their famous clashes in Japan.  Nor had I realised just how political FISA had been, with its French boss, Jean-Marie Balestre apparently hand in glove with Prost, the Sepp "Colonel" Blatter of his day. I hadn't appreciated how revolutionary the Williams' team use of electronics in the early 1990s had been, and that this had prompted Senna's move from Maclaren run by the true gent., Ron Dennis. I remembered the tragic build-up to race day at Imola 1994, but I had no idea how reluctant Senna had been to race that day.  The memory of that day is still with me. It's like remembering Hillsborough - one of those searing moments where you realise that you are watching tragedy unfold in front of you in real time, and feeling powerless but transfixed - that a young handsome boy who had so much talent had died on, of all things, the seemingly benign Tamburella turn.  

The brilliance of this documentary is twofold. First, that the director and producers managed to persuade the Senna family and Bernie Ecclestone to co-operate - giving them access to the home videos, their impressions of what Ayrton was thinking at crucial moments, not to mention the extensive F1 archives, with footage of everything from on-board cameras, to drivers' briefings, to conversations in the pit. This level of access is unprecedented and results in a documentary that has the freedom of a feature film in terms of camera placing and editorial choices. More importantly, it takes the movie beyond recreation of key races to the emotional state of mind of Ayrton - most crucially in interviews with his sister and team-medic.  

But access is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a great documentary. And SENNA *is* a great documentary. The reason for that is that it has a clear narrative arc (kudos to writer Manish Pandey) and some of the tropes of a classic fiction drama. This helps focus a film that could've been over-whelmed by the sheer weight of material, and become unbalanced by Imola.  Indeed, the wonderful thing about this doc. is that it focuses on Senna's life - gives you a sense of how important his faith was to him, reminds you of his charitable work, situates him within a loving but fearful family, and shows both sides of his character - both the integrity and humility but also the pride and fall from grace in Suzuka 1990.  

The resulting documentary is insightful, well-constructed and powerful.  I started crying at Interlagos 1991 - the sheer force of will that made Senna drive 10 laps with just sixth gear and to lift that trophy in front of his home crowd.  And when the race day at Imola began, it was game over.  That sense of anticipation - the directorial choice to keep us with the on-board camera - and Antonio Pinto's sensitive score....What can I say?  It all adds up to a documentary that is unmissable for F1 fans, but - and here I can speak to the experience of Doctor007 - a movie that works even for those who have never heard of Ayrton Senna.   For Doctor007, SENNA worked as a fascinating character study that gripped him on an almost Shakespearian level.  After all, is there anything more archetypal - more universally translatable - as the story of a young pretender facing an older incumbent - of a man of faith battling the corruption of the establishment - of the under-dog making good - of a good man dying young?   

SENNA opened in Japan and Brazil in 2010 and in Italy, Germany and France earlier this year. It played Sundance 2011 and opens in the UK on June 3rd. It opens in Australia on July 21st.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - THE ROMANTICS

THE ROMANTICS is a movie about a bunch of late-twenties college friends reunited at the Long Island wedding of two of the group. The marriage forces the group to re-assess their friendships, loyalties and sexual attraction - and all this should create tension around whether the wedding between Tom and Lila (Josh Duhamel and Anna Paquin) will actually go ahead given that Laura (Katie Holmes) is still carrying a torch for the groom. The audience is meant to be drawn into the emotional lives of characters who feel mixed-up and sympathetic - just like us! And debut feature director, Galt Niederhoffer (adapting her own novel, employs lots of obvious tricks to try and manufacture that empathy and a sense that we are watching an hip counter-culture indie flick rather than an inauthentic Hollywood rom-com: gloomy lighting; painfully indie sound-track; deliberately obscure ending. Sadly though, the film fails on every level. Casting 40 year olds like Josh Duhamel breaks the credibility of the film, especially when we're meant to believe he was a peer of THE OC's Adam Brody. The acting is universally bad and yet for diametrically opposite reasons: chip-board performances from Duhamel and Katie Holmes but hammy, over-the-top acting from Elijah Woods, Malin Akerman and Anna Paquin. The whole thing struck me as self-indulgent; pretentious; inauthentic and dull, dull, dull. Distributors were right to scorn it: there is a reason why it appeared in the UK as a straight to video/TV release. 

THE ROMANTICS played Sundance 2010 and was released in 2010 in the US and Slovenia. It was released in Iceland in March 2011.

UNCLE KENT - Mumblecore, softcore, borecore

While kicking up a riot at Scoundrels Chicago, I managed to break out and detox for a little over an hour in the mecca for all film reviewers - The Gene Siskel Film Center. I wandered in to the first film showing - which happened to be Joe Swanberg's mumblecore flick, UNCLE KENT. Just as its genre conventions require, UNCLE KENT is a low-budget lo-fi drama basically consisting of a bunch of financially comfortable but emotionally illiterate twenty and thirty somethings whining about their personal problems and jacking off. That might sound dismissive and I think the genre does have a tendency toward self-indulgence and baggy-narratives. However, when in the right hands it has managed to throw up movies of real warmth, depth and honesty. Think Alex Holdridge's IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS and the Duplass brothers' CYRUS - both of which made it to my Best Of lists.

Unfortunately, UNCLE KENT is no CYRUS. In fact, at a 72 minute run time including credits, it's barely a feature length film. It stars Kent Osborne (real-life animator on Spongebob Squarepants as "Kent" - a commitment-phobe jack-ass in the body of a forty-year old who dresses ten years too young. As with most mumblecore flicks, Kent espouses a kind of slacker freedom and mediates all his personal relationships through the internet. As the film opens, Kent picks up a girl called Kate (Jennifer Prediger) on Chatroulette - a website usually known for men jacking off on webcam - a point later demonstrated in the film. Still from such unpromising beginnings, the pair to seem to have a genuine connection. The tragedy is that they can only express it by having a threesome with a girl they meet on Craigslist. And as the weekend winds up, the downside of "slacker freedom" is painfully obvious to us and to Kent - not knowing where you stand - not being able to speak honestly about feelings, but constantly speaking openly about sex.

The movie looks better - more tripod shots - than in Swanberg's previous work, although he still uses POV shots and handheld cameras to annoyingly trite effect. The narrative is baggy and meandering and bores, even though the run-time is short. Most of all, while the movie did contain flashes of honesty about how my generation dates via the the web, it didn't really get under the skin of their emotional lives. One day, Swanberg is going to have to sit down and write a proper script and move beyond superficial "wisdom" about the distancing effect of the internet.

UNCLE KENT played Sundance 2011 and was released on a variety of media in the US earlier this year. It is currently playing at the Gene Siskel Center in Chicago.

Overlooked DVD of the month - MARY AND MAX

MARY AND MAX is an amazing film, and all the more wonderful for being un-expectedly so. It's a darkly comic, emotionally raw clay-animated drama about the unlikely friendship between two very lonely people - a little girl called Mary, who lives in Australia, and an old man called Max, who lives in New York. Mary Daisy Dinkle is lonely because her mum is a mean drunk and her father is a withdrawn taxidermist. She hates how she looks, she's socially awkward and other kids tease her. Max is lonely because he finds the world strange and irrational and frustrating and retreats into a closed existence of comfort-eating and writing angry letters. They are each other's only and best friends. 

The movie takes us from the early heady days of their friendship - the first not to involve an imaginary friend for both of them - through Mary's adolescence and marriage. The friendship blossoms, then flounders on betrayal, and is finally redeemed. The journey is genuinely moving - I cried like a baby at the end of the film - and I was happy to have spent time with these intriguing people despite the harsh material I was forced to endure - drug abuse, sexual infidelity, self-loathing, suicide and chronic disease. 

If all this makes MARY AND MAX sound about as much fun as shock-therapy, then please believe me that despite the unbearable sadness as its heart, it's also a very funny, and ultimately uplifting film. The detail of the art design is wonderfully witty, with lots of clever details to repay a repeat viewing, and the verbal humour is at once pathetic and laugh-out-loud funny. I have always had nothing but praise for Philip Seymour Hoffman, but he really surpasses himself as Max, imbuing every sentence with common-sense, hurt, longing, fear and unintentional wit. Toni Colette is wonderfully misguided and sympathetic as Mary, and even Eric Bana gives a sweet cameo. So, if you love the kind of gentle, warm, heart-breaking humour found in the following quotations, please check MAX AND MARY out. As for me, I just can't wait to see what Australian writer-director Adam Eliot does next.

Max Jerry Horovitz: When I was young, I invented an invisible friend called Mr Ravioli. My psychiatrist says I don't need him anymore, so he just sits in the corner and reads. 

Max Jerry Horovitz: Butts are bad because they wash out to sea, and fish smoke them and become nicotine-dependent. 

MARY AND MAX played Sundance and Berlin 2009 and opened in Australia, the Czech Republic, New Zealand and Russia that year. It opened last year in Denmark, Belgium, Greece, Norway, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Hungary and the UK. It is currently on release in Singapore and opens in Japan on April 23rd. It is available to rent and own.