London Film Fest 2011 Day 6 - RESTLESS

Gus Van Sant seems to alternate between directing genuinely art-house cinema often with an experimental edge and directing more mainstream fare.  It has to be said that RESTLESS is very much in the latter camp, and may well be his most banal film since FINDING FORRESTER.  Based on a debut feature film script by playwright Jason Lew, the movie feels like a sort of watered down romance with pretensions to the style and feel of HAROLD & MAUDE or even second-rate Wes Anderson (himself already derivative of H&M). You can't start a film with a lead character obsessively crashing funerals while wearing a three-piece suit and end the film to the sound of Nico without raising eyebrows.

If you set aside all that stylistic pilfering what do you get? A wannabe cute romance between two quirky teenagers: Mia Wasikowska's terminally ill Annabel and Henry Hopper's morbid, mournful Enoch.  They share a dark sense of humour, they don't quite fit into the world, and run around being kooky. We're meant to care. And then she dies. I just couldn't get into the film at all. I wanted the subversive comedy that the opening references to funerals implied, but which the movie didn't deliver aside from one very funny staged death scene.  I wanted the film to make more of it's one genuinely new and good idea - Enoch's imaginary friend, the kamikaze pilot Hiroshi (Ryo).  I wanted the movie to tackle the death from cancer with the honesty of Will Reiser's 50/50 but to no avail. I wanted to care, but just plain didn't.  I mean, there's something wrong with a movie when you care more about the plight of the hero's imaginary friend than the hero himself.  I think the problem here is the script, which once you strip it off its affectations, is pretty banal. The direction, photography and lead performances are just fine. Forgettable, derivative, blah.

RESTLESS opened earlier this year in Egypt, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Italy, Argentina and France. It played Cannes, Toronto and London.  It is currently on release in German, Greece, Russia and Spain and opens on October 21st in Finland and the UK. It opens in Portugal on November 10th; in Sweden on November 25th; in Hong Kong on December 1st and in Japan on December 23rd.

Preview - THE NEXT THREE DAYS

THE NEXT THREE DAYS is a faithful remake of Fred Cafave's French thriller, POUR ELLE / ANYTHING FOR HER. It has been remade by the American writer/director Paul Haggis, famous for scripts and films that are, to my mind, over-long, over-elaborate, over-technical and lacking in real emotion. Unfortunately, THE NEXT THREE DAYS is no exception.

Russell Crowe stars as a schlubby loser who loves his wife and little kid. So, when she's locked up for apparently murdering her boss in a fit of rage, he's devastated. When the conventional legal channels are exhausted, and his despairing wife attempts suicide, poor Schlub has no choice but to plan a prison break-out. Apparently, this is quite easy. You interview a guy who's already written books how to do it; watch a couple of YouTube How To videos; and while you are basically a good guy, you discover hidden physical strengths. These include the ability to a) cold-bloodedly murder some drug-dealers b) drive a car at high speed in on-coming traffic and c) hold on to your wife while your car performs a triple lutz with its door open.

As you might tell from my facetious tone, I wasn't any more convinced of the reality of this film any more than I was by the original. In both versions, the film-makers attempts to ground the movie in reality with a detailed slow-build of research before the prison break fails to do its job. And while Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks are just fine in their roles, the basic concept is simply too incredible to buy into.

Worst still, Paul Haggis direction and script adaptation contrives to bring us out of the film rather than keep us in it. For instance, why make the guy who sells Schlub fake passports deaf? I have nothing against deaf people, but when the actor playing him first spoke you could hear the audience wondering what was going on, (some of them tittering - shame on them) and it was a distraction. Another example is where Schlub has done something bad but then counters by doing something that's meant to be sympathetic. But as his car pulls away and we still the shot of what he's done, it's just plain funny. The audience in my preview screening laughed AT the movie, rather than being impressed by the emotional confusion of the protagonist. Third Paul Haggis does his typical thing of dumbing everything down. Why does he need to play a childish game, teasing us with whether or not the wife really did murder her boss? At least the French flick had the maturity to make that a non-issue. And finally, this movie has more endings than LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING.

Overall, dull, banal, incredible (literally), and while decently acted, utterly forgettable. Save your money, save your time.

THE NEXT THREE DAYS is on release in the US, Belgium, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, Poland, Egypt, Kuwait, Singapore, Bulgaria, Finland, Norway and the Philippines. It opens next weekend in France, Greece and the Netherlands. It opens on December 24th in Brazil; on January 7th in the UK; on January 20th in Germany and Hungary.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D - what is Tim Burton trying to say here?

My response to ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D was much the same as my response to Tim Burton's Roald Dahl adaptation, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY. The production design, costumes, and sheer visual imagery were wondrous to behold. But Tim Burton had made poor choices regarding the narrative structure, tone and very heart of the subject matter.

So let's go back to the beginning. This movie originates in the children's novels Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The novels were written by Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematician, better known as Lewis Carroll. On one level, the novels fall into the category of nonsense literature, in the same vein as Edward Lear. When the little girl Alice chases a small white rabbit, clothed in a waistcoat, down a rabbit hole, she enters a world that is surreal, sometimes sinister and that defies narrative logic. Potions and mushrooms make you larger or smaller. Animals talk, have tea parties and smoke hookah pipes. There are riddles, logic puzzles and chess moves; wonderful explorations of mirror-ing, double-ing and mathematical concepts; satirical sketches of donnish Oxford life; references to the Wars of the Roses - but ultimately, it's all just one giant non sequitor. Anything can happen because anything can follow. For a little child, this is a wonderfully liberating, but also an extraordinarily frightening concept. (The same conflicting reaction is at the heart of the most sinister of all the very sinister late Victorian and early Edwardian childrens' novels - Peter Pan. To this day, I am shocked that this is marketed as a children's novel rather than as horror.)

The genius of the original illustrations by Tenniel was to capture that strangeness - at once captivating and repulsive. Alice with her dark eyes and obnoxious self-confidence - the stern Victorian politicians anthropomorphicised into baffling characters. Wonderland is a world where one can fear drowning in a sea of one's own tears and where power is abused by a series of tyrannical and clearly insane aristos. It's hardly Disney. Unless of course you are watching the bland saccharine Disney version of the film. As adaptations go, it was faithful in the superficial - the characters were all there as were the each of the famous scenes in the right order - but completely failed to capture the sheer oddness of the world. To that end, Jonathan Miller's BBC film is my adaptation of choice - he fully explores the concept that Wonderland is really Oxford and makes the characters there so very close to real people, Wonderland isn't "other" or "under" but sits alongside reality.

Given how dark and surreal the source material is, I would've thought that Tim Burton would've been the perfect director for ALICE IN WONDERLAND 3D. And as the publicity stills were released I got more and more excited. I loved the make-up for Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter - he looked like a psychedelic version of McAdder. Helena Bonham Carter's encephelatic head as what I thought was the Queen of Hearts looked superb. Matt Lucas, who I'll always think of as the baby on Shooting Stars, looked born to play Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee. And when you looked down the cast list you could see lots of high-class British character actors in the voice roles, from Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat to most surprisingly and perfectly Barbara Windsor as the Doormouse. Most wonderfully of all, I was longing to Crispin Glover - a fascinating but little seen actor - as the Knave of Hearts. I suppose my suspicions might have been aroused by the casting of Australian Mia Wasikowska as Alice - not on the grounds that she can't act - she makes a perfectly decent fist of her role - but because she isn't a child. So there was obviously some serious re-writing at hand. And then, with the very appearance of the Tweedles and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) they were clearly conflating the two novels, most notably in the character that looks like the Queen of Hearts but is called the Red Queen.

The resulting film is a strange beast indeed, but in all the wrong ways. Script-writer Linda Woolverton (BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, MULAN, ALLADIN) has made Alice a teenager being pressured into marriage. She runs away from her fate and down the rabbithole, but refuses to believe that she has been there before, as a child, despite being haunted by recurring nightmares of talking caterpillars and smiling cats. When she reaches the Underland, which she had mistakenly called Wonderland, she finds a landscape of scorched earth, stormy skies and familiar characters suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. To echo LA Times reviewer, Kenneth Turan, the Mad Hatter's tea party seems to be set in a sort of ill-conceived Mordor and the Mad Hatter himself has lost his mind in reaction to the Red Queen's hostile take-over of Underland. When events get too much for him he trips into a pitch perfect Scottish accent, but this only serves to make him even more McAdderish! The loose plot sees Alice journey to the Red Queen's palace to capture the Vorpal Sword and free the Hatter. She then visits the White Queen and summons the courage to defeat the Jabberwocky on the frabjous day (calloo callay!) in a finale that would've mean more appropriate to LOTR.

Despite the lovely creations that are the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen and the lovely costumes for Alice, the movie feels rather dismal and flat. I suppose that can't be helped as this is a vanquished world, but somehow, that wasn't a problem for Narnia or Rohan. Alice is supposed to find herself but the transformation isn't particularly convincing. Back in the real world, the idea that she would then become a neo-feminist adventuress is ludicrous. I think the problem is that the movie shifts in tone rather abruptly. In the same scene, you'll have Johnny Depp playing it utterly straight as the traumatised hatter, but Anne Hathaway pastiching the idea of the pure, slightly unpractical, narcissistic White Queen, with her pure white dress but scarily black lips and nails. Both are fine, but do they belong in the same film? And the sheer ill-judgement of the 1980s dancing that the Hatter roles out in the penultimate scene defies description.

Overall, then, while I can see consistency of design, I didn't see a consistency of vision as to what this movie was really about and what it was trying to say. A fatal flaw, no matter how lovely the costumes. Burton refuses to let ALICE be a wonderfully nonsensical nonsequitor. He wants to give characters a back story and feeeeeelings. But at the same time, he doesn't take the time to actually explore them properly. Worst of all, with the exception of the rather lazy introduction of some real-world twins, nowhere do we see Alice's visions as subconscious reworkings of people she has seen in the real world.

Additional tags: Mia Wasikowska, Dariusz Wolski, Christopher Lee, Geraldine James, Tim Piggott-Smith, Frances de la Tour, Marton Csokas, Barbara Windsor, Leo Bill, Linda Woolverton.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND is on global release.

THE WOLFMAN - anaemic

Joe Johnston, hack director of such memorable fare as HIDALGO, JURASSIC PARK III and THE ROCKETEER (oh yes!) creates another cine-clunker with his ill-conceived remake of the Curt Siodomak classic, THE WOLF MAN.

The story is simple. Innocent Lawrence Talbot is bitten by a werewolf on Blackmoor while investigating his brother's savage death. He has to fight to stop the beast, while battling with his own lycophagia, all the time being hounded by the police and the psychiatrists, and with the help of his brother's attractive fiancée, Gwen.

Neither gory enough to be convincing as horror, nor well-acted enough to be convincing as familial drama, the movie occasionally plays as a campy spoof. It's surprising to me that the production design is so hi-rent - with richly textured costumes, and decadent gothic sets. And yet, the make-up design for The Wolfman is distinctly unconvincing, running a close second to Ang Lee's bouncing luminous green HULK as the most implausible filmic creation. You watch the sub-par transformation scenes, and the Teen-Wolf-laughable Wolfman bounding across London and you're taken out of the movie immediately. And as for the acting, despite the high quality cast (Anthony Hopkins, Geraldine Chaplin, Benicio del Toro, Emily Blunt, Antony Sher), the performances seem flat and uninspired. Only Hugo Weaving, as a mis-placed Inspector Abberline, looks like he's having any fun at all.

What a waste of a fine cast. What a waste of the beautifully decorated sets, period costumes, and lush Danny Elfman score. What a waste of my time and money.

Additional tags: Joe Johnston

THE WOLF MAN is on global release in all bar Russia, Australia and Poland where it opens next weekend, Israel where it opens on April 1st and Japan where it opens on April 23rd.

London Film Fest Day 13 - TAKING WOODSTOCK

TAKING WOODSTOCK sees Ang Lee, director of tense, beautiful tragic romances - LUST, CAUTION and BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - take a step back into gentle comedy. The resulting film is warm-hearted, earnest, occasionally funny, but also somewhat ramshackle, meandering and ultimately, unsatisfying. Interesting characters are given too little screen time in an ensemble film, uninteresting characters are left to over-act wildly, and the third act acid trip is a complete waste of half an hour. Maybe the problem is that Ang Lee doesn't quite have the conviction he needs to make a film about a famous concert that IS NOT a concert film. He wants to tell the story of the family who's run-down motel became the HQ of the organisers and the impact the festival had on them. He wants to make a point about Woodstock being, for most people, about the journey there and the people you met, rather than the concert itself. But Ang Lee does cave in and gives us his protagonist journeying toward the mainstage and getting dragged into acid trips and mud-slides. It's just too much of a tease! Either focus on the motel, or give us the concert, but don't flail around in the mud!

The movie starts of well. We have a likable protagonist called Elliot - a sweet kid, who's compromising on his dream of going to San Francisco because he's helping out on his parent's run-down motel in the Catskills and because he can't quite admit that he's gay. Faced with foreclosure, he decides to invite the Woodstock festival to relocate to his parents' motel and his neighbour's land, when the folks in that town rescind the permit, scared of thousands of freaks showing up. Before you know it, the cash is rolling in and Elliot's conservative parents are surrounded with hippies and beats. Both they, and Elliot, experience many-splendored life, and then the festival rolls of out town.

The period setting and casting are absolutely spot on, with the exception of rather broad performances from Emile Hirsch as Billy and Dan Fogler as Devon, the Earthlight Player. Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman are particularly good as Elliot's rather flummoxed parents, and Demetri Martin is affable and congenial as Elliot. But the two most interesting characters get way too little screen time. The first is Eugene Levy in a fairly straight performance as farmer Max Yasgur, the guy who actually rented out his fields to the festival. Why was such a provincial farmer so very liberal minded? Fascinating, but unexplored. The second fascinating, but too little explored character, was Vilma, a former US marine turned transvestite, played by Liev Schreiber. What a wonderful character! And what a fascinating nascent relationship with Elliot's father! I would have loved to spend more time with them. But instead we get Ang Lee trying, very clumsily, to speak to Vietnam in the form of the cliche of a battle-traumatised Vietnam vet, and to speak to the counter-culture in the form of a completely pointless acid trip. And when Ang Lee tries to create some real dramatic tension with a final act revelation involving Elliot's mother, it all seems out of tone with the rest of the film. Shame.

TAKING WOODSTOCK played Cannes 2009. It opened earlier this year in the US, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the USA, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Estonia, France and Spain. It is currently on release in Hong Kong, Israel, Singapore, India, Italy, Taiwan, Belgium and Greece. It opens in the UK on November 6th, in Argentina and Mexico on December 10th and in Brazil on January 15th 2010.