YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER

It has become fashionable for critics to patronise Woody Allen, a director who, apart from the odd freak hit such as VICKY, CHRISTINA, BARCELONA, hasn't produced a run of sustained hits since the late 1980s. He has been accused of cannibalising his back catalogue; producing dramas of diminishing quality; and for focusing his attention on an idea of the upper middle-class intellectual elite that is both anachronistic and irrelevant to modern life. Woody Allen has thus been condemned as a parody of himself. An old man who should do his reputation a favour and just retire. This view seems to be shared by the distributors. Outside of the Woody Allen-loving Parisians (and let's face it - they thought Jerry Lewis was a genius) most Woody Allen films receive a limited theatrical release or just go straight to video.

Still, for those of us who obsessively watched, loved and were provoked by his back catalogue, particularly the greats from the late 70s and 80s, a new Woody Allen film is hard to pass up. And when you get a movie based in your home town, starring actors of the calibre of Gemma Jones, Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas and the criminally under-used Lucy Punch, expectations are higher than the critics would allow.

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER is about the things that Woody Allen films are always about - the big questions of modern life. How far are we willing to delude ourselves into believing in love? How far are we willing to compromise our morals to achieve success? How crazy will we become to avoid admitting our mortality? If the first question was best explored in ANNIE HALL, and the second and third in CRIMES AND MISDEMEANOURS, what does YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER add?

Precious little. The mood is perhaps even more cynical and nihilistic. The location different. But the material is undoubtedly rehashed not to mention the use of characters such as brassy hookers (DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, MIGHT APHRODITE) and men who are willing to murder and steal to get ahead (CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS, MATCH POINT) let alone the idea of justice hanging on the throw of a dice or the fall of a coin (MATCH POINT). Humanity is portrayed as fickle, callow, self-serving and self-obsessed - life is a pathetic game of self-delusion - a desperate bid to outrun the inevitable. Woody Allen's characters may live in beautiful houses but they are rarely happy, and if they are, he mocks them for being idiots.

Having said all that, I still thoroughly enjoyed YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER for the simple pleasure of watching those familiar themes refracted through a new set of characters and a new set of actors. Because I didn't have to concentrate on surprises in the plot or thematic material - because I knew how the relationships would pan out from the start - I could simply luxuriate in the wonderful performances and three or four superb dramatic set-pieces that hold their own against any of Woody Allen's finer movies.

The first of those scenes is wonderful tragicomedy. Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) is an old man who doesn't want to admit that his life is nearing its end. He dumps his wife Helena (Gemma Jones) and bankrupts himself dating a money-grabbing hooker (Lucy Punch). Woody Allen skewers Alfie's vanity in a marvellous scene in which they sit in a sterile penthouse flat. She is draped on a fur coat she has just extorted for him, and he is waiting for his viagra to kick in, "Three more minutes..." Pathetic, beautifully observed, hilarious!

The second scene features Alfie's ex-wife Helena and their daughter Sally (Naomi Watts). Sally has married a failed author (Josh Brolin) and desperately needs her mother's money to start a new art gallery, but her mother has been wasting it on seeing a psychic who tells her she will meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and even worse, advises Helena not to give Sally money. The scene is wonderful because, as in life, you have two people who are related but who are in such different emotional and intellectual places that they simply cannot communicate. Helena comes across as smug, deluded and selfish in her manufactured happiness. Sally comes across as justifiably frustrated but also entitled and spoiled. It's beautifully acted and also tragic that this mother and daughter are unable to understand each other's needs.

The third scene features the wonderful Josh Brolin, schlubbed up as the failed writer Roy, so pissed off at his wife Sally's constant nagging for a baby that he has an affair with a pretty young woman (Freida Pinto) and so desperate for success that he steals an unpublished novel. There is a marvellous scene where he realises that he may well be busted and that look on his face - simply that - is worth the price of admission alone!

So, what can I say? YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER doesn't tell you anything you didn't know about Woody Allen's misanthropic world-view.  I don't need to see another brash hooker, and Freida Pinto certainly cannot hold her own among this cast-list. But, for all that, I enjoyed almost every minute, and certain scenes will stay with me as much as anything in Woody Allen's earlier work.

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER played Cannes and Toronto 2010 and opened last year in Spain, the USA, Canada, France, Belgium, Israel, Greece, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Estonia and Uruguay. It opened earlier this year in Mexico, Portugal, Romania, Argentina, Kazakhstan and Russia. It is currently on release in Poland and the UK.

TRUE GRIT

The Coen Brothers are, for me, film-makers who chronicle the absurd and the arbitrary. Their films feature ordinary folk living ordinary lives, taken up by Chance and led into crazy adventures.The protagonists may well be eccentric - and often, superficially, have crazy hair - but they have nothing on the people they meet and the circumstances they encounter. In the early films, Chance manifested itself in a kind of dark, absurd, comedy. The protagonists were put through the ringer but ultimately were set down back in their homes, happy and well. But of late, the Coen Brothers' films have taken on a darker tone, and become almost obsessive with the arbitrary nature of Chance. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, following directly from the novel, goes to black mid-sentence. The message seems to be that after all this cruelty, all this killing, there are no answers, no justice, no meaning. A SERIOUS MAN is similarly nihilistic. It's a film filled with search for meaning, typically religious meaning, but ultimately it holds no answers. A good, if complacent man, suffers the torments of man and nature. Why? There isn't a why.

It was, then, with some surprise that I learned that the Coen Brothers were adapting Charles Portis' True Grit for the screen - a novel whose over-arching theme is "You must pay for everything in this world, one way and another". For, at the most basic level, True Grit is a story about a young girl in late nineteenth century rural Arkansas, who hires a mercenary to help her get revenge on the thief that murdered her father. And at a more complicated level, it's a story about the sacrifices that those who seek to punish must make. The heroine, Mattie Ross, pays dearly for her single-minded obsession with revenge, but even her associates, Rooster Cogburn and LaBoeuf lead diminished lives as a result. Punishment is meted out to all, and in direct proportion to their crimes and faults. This is not, then, the world of arbitrary justice so often depicted in Coen Brothers films.

The Coen Brothers' adaptation of the book is faithful - as faithful as their adaptation of No Country For Old Men - and far more faithful than the 1969 film starring John Wayne, Glen Gampbell, Kim Darby and, in smaller roles, Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper. In this film, the voice of the narrator - Miss Mattie Ross - comes undiminished to the screen, and it's no surprise to see that it's Hailee Steinfeld, the young girl playing that character, who has the best of the dialogue and the pick of the award nominations. It's a gift of a role. In the book as in this film, Mattie is as particular as any Coen Brothers character. She's a teenage girl with a cool head for business, a strong religious sense of right and wrong, and a determination beyond her years. She weighs everything according to its cost and brooks no opposition. The funniest scenes in the film come early on, as we see wily adults try to fool her or dismiss her, only to be taken to the cleaners themselves. The lawman she hires, Rooster Cogburn (played by a wonderfully grizzled Jeff Bridges), comes to respect her after initially trying to shake her off. And even the vain Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf (a wonderfully funny Matt Damon), overcomes his initial frustration and distaste to feel affection for her. But Mattie is warned early on by a local lawyer that she will pay dearly for this stubborn determination, and as we see the movie's final scene and epilogue we can see that that has been the case. But we get no sense that she regrets her actions. She knew the cost, and accepted it. Her sense of justice is as cool whether concerning herself or her father's murderer, Tom Chaney. And that's the message of the novel and the film. True Grit is to do what you feel is right, but to look unflinchingly at the consequences. And when it comes to steadfast courage, Mattie beats the men she hires hands down.

The resulting film is a work of the highest quality and quiet strength. It's not as superficially provocative or quirky as many of the Coen Brothers' films, and because of its thematic material and lack of spectacular haircuts, many reviewers have dismissed it as being "not a Coen Brothers film". My view on this is that the Coen Brothers have become so reknowned for delivering films with rapier-like dialogue, superb acting performances, stunning cinematography (typically from Roger Deakins) and great scores (here, Carter Burwell), that viewers and reviewers have become complacent. It's as if the machine is so well-oiled that it is taken for having been effortless, or even banal. To my mind, this is utterly wrong-headed. TRUE GRIT is a kind of pantheon film - a film in which every part of the whole - lead performances, supporting performances, photography, design, editing, dialogue - blend seamlessly into a profound and affecting whole. No individual component stands out and attracts attention in the way that Javier Bardem's character did in NO COUNTRY, but the completed work is truly a thing of great art and craft.

To my mind, TRUE GRIT is simply the best film of the cinema year 2010-2011, and has been woefully underplayed during the awards season. It is being drowned out by more populist or more self-consciously dramatic fare (THE KING'S SPEECH, THE SOCIAL NETWORK and BLACK SWAN). But, foolish as it is to make such predictions, I believe that TRUE GRIT will stand the test of time far better than those, still very admirable, films. Quiet quality does not often get rewarded, but look at any aspect of this production and tell me it isn't first class.

TRUE GRIT opened last year in the US and Canada. It is currently on release in Norway, Australia, Mexico, Argentina, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Peru, Russia, Brazil, Iceland, Panama, Poland, Spain, the UK, Venezuela, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Kuwait, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Finland, Italy and Sweden. It opens next week in Belgium, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. It opens on March 18th in Japan.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - JONAH HEX

JONAH HEX should've been superb in the way that SOLOMON KANE was superb.  Based on pulp comics written by John Albano and illustrated by Tony DeZuniga, Jonah was a late ninteenth century bounty hunter in the Old West, sold to the Apaches by his father, his face disfigured by scars in  a tribal ritual, bound to protect the innocent, and battling alcoholism.  Jonah had no superpowers or skills other than being a damn fine shooter, and was the classic lone anti-hero.

The movie version of Jonah Hex abandons the simplicity of the original. It's as if the scriptwriters, Neveldine, Taylor (of CRANK fame) and William Farmer, just didn't trust the source material to be exciting enough, although as the former have disowned the script, perhaps the original was more coherent and faithful? Whatever the truth, the film version of Jonah Hex is given superpowers - he can speak to the dead - and his disfiguring scars aren't from an Apache battle but from being branded by his nemesis, evil Confederate general, Quentin Turnbull. The plot is also shoe-horned into contemporary political allegory, with Turnbull a kind of anti-Unionist terrorist determined to blow up the White House, and Jonah hired by President Grant to stop him.

The result is a short film (it's barely an hour and ten minutes long sans credits) that feels mashed up in the editing booth - over-stuffed with characters and allegory - and never given the time to breathe and establish itself. Josh Brolin's Jonah Hex is suitably brooding, but John Malkovich must go down as the most environmentally sustainable actor of all time, recycling his typical baddie tropes as Turnbull. Megan Fox looks sultry but is given little else to do as Hex's love interest, and actors of the calibre of Michael Sheen are wasted in small roles. It is a film destroyed in re-writes and conflicting visions - an unloved bastard of a film - and a crying shame.

JONAH HEX was released in summer/autumn 2010 and is now available to rent and buy.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 9 - THE TILLMAN STORY

Pat Tillman was a pro-footballer who gave up a million dollar contract to serve in the US Army in Iraq and then Afghanistan. He was an interesting guy - seems to have had a lot of integrity and charisma - but he wasn't some bible-thumping, pure of heart, All-American hero. He was a normal kid, very talented at sport, who joined the army. When Pat Tillman was killed, the US Army were keen to lionise him as a Patriot, a Hero and a poster-boy for the war. The story was depersonalised and publicised - Tillman wasn't Tillman, warts and all, but an Archetype. They covered up the fact that his death was the result of friendly fire, and arguably with no extenuating circumstances. And even when his mother and father pushed for the truth, a Congressional hearing only resulted in equivocation from the upper reaches of the chain of command.

This documentary allows the Tillman family to reclaim the Tillman Story from the US Army and to come to some closer approximation of an objective truth. But the project is itself fraught. Because, in using the Tillman Story to expose the PR machine within the US Army, director Amir Bar-Lev is also spinning his own version of the Tillman Story - now to excoriate the forces who originally exploited it. To its credit, I think the documentary is highly aware of this problem and exposes the ambiguity at the heart of the project. As much as the parents have exposed the crimes at the heart of the case, the myth of Tillman is already out there - the statues have been carved, the iconic images imprinted - and you can't put that back in the box. Moreover, as much as they want the US Army to respect Tillman's request for privacy, in agreeing to participate in this doc - by writing a book - in using his name for charitable causes - they are also part of that machine, albeit with earnest and good intentions.

THE TILLMAN STORY is then, a story about a story. It's about authors fighting over a narrative for their own purposes. But, let's be honest, government manipulation of the facts to support government policy is not new in life, and it's certainty not new in film. This shit has been happening since Homer, and in the movies you can watch Preston Sturges' superb HAIL THE CONQUERING HERO. Call me cynical, but there isn't enough new in the US Army using Pat Tillman to be interesting in and of itself. I wanted to see a rougher interrogative technique to make the story grip more. I wanted to see more interrogation of the US Army participants - particularly General Kensinger who was in charge of Tillman's unit. And I needed to be taken through the chain of command in more detail - I wanted to get into the case - other just seeing an org chart thrown up on screen and vague accusations being thrown.

If this story - the story of fighting over the story - is as old as the Greeks - what's new in the Iraqi/Afghani wars is the co-option of the media. That's because this is the first war with a) many competing 24 hour news channels b) embedded reporters and c) unprofitable editorial. In other words, this war happened at a moment of juncture with the commercial death of the old high quality foreign news stringers and the rise of content hungry 24 hours news channels. So, I think Amir Bar-Lev would have been better employed examining the complicity of the media in becoming the mouthpiece of the army in this matter. Sure, he hints at the media's complicity early on, but really, after that, he's going for the army not the journos.

So, often-times, I felt Amir Bar-Lev was asking the wrong questions, or not enough questions of the Army. And I felt his choice of focusing on the Army as a manipulator at the expense of the media as enablers was a misjudgement. But where he really does a great job is just letting the footage roll uneditorialised. Classic examples would include footage of the various ceremonies at which football teams decommissioned Tillman's number. The faces of the family say it all - their disgust and incomprehension. Even better the sheer crass vulgarity of having cheer-leaders cheer in front of them. It's in moments like this where the documentary becomes truly powerful and memorable. But, in not exploring the complicity of the media, this documentary looses the fresh insights of a film like IN THE LOOP, which took on the political-media nexus in all its complexity, and with a foul mouth that Pat Tillman might have appreciated.

THE TILLMAN STORY played Sundance and Toronto 2010 and was released in the US in August.

WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS

"We are all one trade from humility." Marv, WALL STREET.

WALL STREET (1987) - a movie that vocalised the mood of the time; gave birth to the world's greatest greedy capitalist bastard; and sent a population cohort into investment banking - that same cohort that by and large caused the global financial cluster-fuck whose ill effects we are still grappling with. A movie with a simple narrative; strong characters; and an innocence, almost, in retrospect, about what it was doing. Because make no mistake, WALL STREET, exposed something nasty and cut-throat, but oh so tempting, that was taking over corporate America.

Jump forward twenty years, and the world is a very, very different place. No disrespect to my mother, but even she can tell you why the credit crunch happened and has an opinion on the government sponsored bank bail-outs. Economic commentators from Nouriel Roubini to Gillian Tett have made reputations and fortunes explaining this crisis to the Ordinaries who are going to have to pay for it, maybe for the rest of their tax-paying lives. Bankers - their lifestyles, their economic power, their slippery ability to get a bail-out AND a bonus, still, still! - are out in the open. Even hedge fund managers have been exposed. And righteous anger runs forth.

Pity then, poor Oliver Stone, trying to bring a script to screen in a period when reality was over-taking even the most scandalous fictional depiction of high finance. A period, moreover, where every new book release - every new Rolling Stone magazine article - was beating him to the punch in exposing the corruption, greed and excess that led us to this Fall. By the time we got to Cannes 2010, what else was left to say? Was there, in short, an appetite, to see and be dazzled by the titans of finance when we were left in negative equity if we were lucky, and unemployed if we weren't? WALL STREET could surprise us, and tell us something we didn't know. WALL STREET 2 feels like a re-hash.

In short, WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS feels like a movie over-taken by events - a movie without a concrete idea of itself - without a clear idea of what it wants to say and what it wants to be.

But before we get to why it's such a mess - let's lay out its basic structure, post Cannes-2010-edits. (Spoilers follow.)

The movie plays in four acts. The first act sees a crypto-Lehman collapse, when the New York Fed, advised by the heads of her competitor banks, refuse to bail her out. As a consequence, the head of crypto-Lehmans (Frank Langella) tops himself, much to the horror of his mentee, a young energy prop trader called Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf). Jake is prompted to propose to his girlfriend Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan), estranged daughter of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), and in doing so, starts meeting Gordon on the sly.  

In Act Two, there is little evidence YET of the fallout from the Lehman collapse - the jewellery still glitters as the money is still there. Jake is corrupted both by Gordon Gekko and his business enemy Bretton James (Josh Brolin), CEO of a crypto-Goldman Sachs. Jake brokers a reunion with Winnie in exchange for Gordon dishing the dirt on who let crypto-Lehmans fail - and uses that info. to screw over Bretton James on a trade. Such is the fucked up value system of Wall Street that James reacts by offering Jake a job. 

In Act Three, the corruption goes further. The systemic financial collapse is in full effect. Crypto-GS is suffering, as is Jake's mother - a nurse turned realtor. Jake's corruption continues - he connives with Gordon to free up Winnie's $100m trust fund, thinking he'll invest it in clean-tech. Gordon, being Gordon, takes the money to London, opens a hedge fund, and makes a cool billion. Winnie, pissed off with Jake for being suckered by her dad, dumps him. 

In Act Four, Jake, not learning, again tries to trade with Gekko - access to his grandson against giving the money back. Gekko being Gekko says no. And then, in what one can only assume to be a tacked on post-Cannes 2010 ending, Gekko has a last minute change of heart, gives back the money, and plays happy family with his kid and grandkid. Meanwhile, Bretton James has been exposed as trading on his own account against the bets of his clients, getting him sacked from crypto-GS and indicted by the SEC.

So what's really going on here? There are four strands to the story. Strand number one is a romance. A guy, with partially good intentions, lies to his girlfriend, is found out, loses her, but is forgiven. This strand really doesn't work. Shia LaBeouf doesn't have the emotional range, and poor Carey Mulligan is given nothing to do by the script other than look tearful. We're meant to think Jake is basically a good kid, but what kind of arsehole tries to trade money for pictures of his unborn child's ultrasound. Horribly misjudged. Utterly unconvincing.

The second strand of the story is a revenge thriller. This could've been great but is crowded out by all the other crap in the film. Revenge part one sees a young trader punk a slippery CEO. This really works, is thrilling and well explained. Revenge part two sees Gekko use Jake to expose Bretton James. This could've worked - it could've been the dramatic heart of the film - but it isn't given a chance. Truly, Josh Brolin's Bretton James - deeply good-looking and even more attractive when dripping with power - is as charismatic as Gekko ever was. But they have no real screen-time together. What we really needed was a show-down scene, but the skinny idiot Jake is always used as the go-between, undermining the power of the whole thing.

The third strand of the story is a coming-of-age drama. This should've been Jake Moore's story. He should've gone through shit and come out of it with self-knowledge - just like Bud Foxx in the original movie. But of course he doesn't, because there are no consequences to what he does. He screws up time and again, but is forgiven. He doesn't even serve time for the original market manipulation in Revenge Part One. Where is the scene with Jake Moore crying in the rain in Central Park? It gets worse. Not only does WALL STREET 2 refuse to let Jake Moore learn from his mistakes, but it even retro-fits Bud Foxx's narrative arc. Rather than serve time, come out and do something useful with his life, we see him in a cameo in the sequel, a self-made billionaire, dripping with hot chicks and as morally vacuous as ever. But it gets even worse than this. Jake Moore and Bud Foxx should've been changed by their experiences in the film, but Gordon Gekko shouldn't have been. Gekko does what he does because he can do no other - that is his tragedy. By tacking on a last minute emotional U-turn, the movie betrays Gekko and assumes the audience are a bunch of idiots who are going to buy it.

The fourth strand of the movie is a fictional recreation of real events. This is where the movie both succeeds and fails most. To its credit, WALL STREET 2 creates some amazing set pieces surrounding the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the creation of the TARP bail-outs. Set in the New York Fed, with a room full of bank CEOs and a crypto-Paulson and Geithner, we get a real sense of the panic and time-pressure involved in taking these momentous decisions typically over the course of a weekend to pre-empt the markets. The slippery reasoning, the desperation, the brutality of the survival instinct - it's all there. Frankly, I would've paid good money just to see Oliver Stone take us through a fictional recreation of these real events, without all the romantic, personal crap in this film. In particular, you have to love Eli Wallach as a crypto-GS founder, with his ruthless survival instinct and enigmatic whistle.

But it's also in its attempt to chronicle a period that WALL STREET 2 fails. And this is perhaps nobody's fault - insofar as the screenwriters were trying to hit a moving target. Still, all that aside, I can't help but think that the screenwriters made a fundamental mistake in trying to anchor their story in a long-term vendetta between Bretton James and Gordon Gekko that's basically about exposing insider trading. The whole point of the current crisis is that it wasn't by and large about illegal trades. Kerviel, Madoff etc are not actually the point. The real point is that these bankers weren't actually doing anything wrong, legally speaking. They were acting in a loosely regulated system, with perverse incentives, enabled by cheap central bank credit, and they ran riot. If this story were about a single rogue trader we simply wouldn't be in the global meltdown we're in. So to try to pin it on something personal, something basically quite petty, like trading on one's own account, is to basically miss the point.

Just as the genius of WALL STREET is best seen in the seminal keynote speech by Gordon Gekko, the failures of WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS are best expressed in the new keynote speech by Gordon Gekko. The big speech - far from being prescient and persuasive as in the first film - sounds old-hat and banal in the second. There are no witty one-liners - no startling sucker-punches. I can't remember a single line that stood out. In fact, the best one-liner that sums up the current situation comes from the FIRST movie, and is quoted at the head of this review. There is no feeling that we are seeing fundamental truths exposed and taboos broken. Worst of all, as if in embarrassment at the poverty of the content, Stone directs the scene like a kid with ADD. It's all jump cuts and shifting camera angles - hardly a sentence is completed. Poor, poor, poor.

In fact, Stone's direction in general is pretty poor. There are too many editing visual tricks - especially in the many mobile phone conversations - and cheap effects. Take for example a scene in which the camera rapidly moves down the length of a sky scraper as we here the sound effect of a ball in a roulette wheel - supposedly to symbolise the market crash. Crude. And perhaps most unforgivable is that Stone breaks the fourth wall. By that, I don't mean that he has the characters speaking to the audience face-on. But he does something stylistically as jarring. He acknowledges, within the world of the film, just how iconic the original movie has become. In other words, he induldges in cameos that serve no purpose other than to show how desperate celebrities are to be associated with the world of WALL STREET. So we get Warren Buffett, Graydon Carter, Jim Cramer, Nouriel Roubini, and a host of CNBC anchors playing along, winking at the audience, and worst of all, that Bud Foxx redux. This all smacks of not taking the project, and the audience, seriously.

WALL STREET: MONEY NEVER SLEEPS is on global release.