Guest review by George Ghon - CONTAGION

A ghastly virus breaks out. It kills so fast that any hope to find a suitable remedy in time becomes elusive. A father, whose wife had died, tries to protect his daughter from the evil disease (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Anna Jacoby-Heron respectively). The government official (Laurence Fishburne) with field experience shows his toughness and rigor to handle the nightmarish situation according to his professional standards. He cooperates with the World Health Organization, which in turn sends a cute epidemy specialist (Marion Cotillard) to analyse the trajectory of the virus and determine where it had come from, ending up on site in Hong Kong. The scientist in the laboratory (Jennifer Ehle) does what she can and all along the viewer waits for an unexpected turn in the plot. 

Is a James Bond villain behind all this? Does the CIA have secret intelligence? Can it be that a Swiss pharmaceuticals CEO has gone insane under the current economic pressure and a little experiment to boost the sales for Aspirin went way out of control? 

No, nothing, the story just continues and the source of the disease is backtracked to an obscure bat population in the Asian jungle. The whole trick box of elaborate Hollywood dramaturgy remains closed, giving preference to a Realistic account of a current-day bio-catastrophe. There is no evil scheme to be discovered. The guys in power are working hard, doing their job as best as they can. The alternative souls (Jude Law as Frisco-based wannabe journalist) are as corrupt and prone to sell their conscience to greedy hedge fund managers as every other human being could possibly be. And even the offices of high profile government organisations, and with them their functionaries, are suspiciously unattractive.

Steven Soderbergh, who wants to see this?Hollywood is the dream factory, not the documentary Mecca! It is easy to dismiss this film as unsuccessful try to wrap an action plot into some layers of the Real. Boring! On the other hand, do we need to see another hyper-stylized, action packed, fast cut, over-dramatized doomsday film? Isn’t Steven Soderbergh here discovering an interesting gap that uses all the tools Hollywood has on display, but does not heighten them to a flasher à la Michael Bay? 

The film is purely led by the prosaic unfolding of a story, which could happen any day, without any conspiracy scheming that goes unnoticed by the public. The lead characters are not immortal (Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, watch out for Mr. Soderbergh’s casting director, he might eventually get you), nor are they overly beautified (ok, Gwyneth Paltrow looks sexy in a party scene, but no one else would show her deliberately with reddened skin irritations on the neck, I guess) or morally beyond (the people having privileged access to the vaccine that is eventually found gladly take it, without making too much fuss about their ius primae seri). Contagion doesn’t bother too much with aesthetic conventions or viewer’s expectations. It just tells it how it is. Hollywood for the quotidian.

CONTAGION played Venice 2011 and opened in September in Hong Kong, Singapore, Italy and the US. It opened in Hungary on October 13th; and in Finland, Ireland, Poland, Sweden and the UK on October 21st; in Norway on October 28th. It opens in Belgium and France on November 9th; in Spain on November 29th; in Australia on December 3rd and in Germany on December 24th.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 4 - LITTLE WHITE LIES / LES PETITS MOUCHOIRS

LITTLE WHITE LIES is a superb film from French writer/actor/director Guillaume Canet (TELL NO ONE.) It is laugh-out-loud funny; wryly observed and reduced me to tears. What more could one want?

In a bravura opening sequence, Ludo (the beautiful, hilarious Jean DuJardin) is horrifically injured in a motorcycle crash. We watch his close friends gather at the hospital, distraught, but convincing themselves that they should still take their summer holiday in Bordeaux. After all, Ludo is in intensive care, and they can do nothing for him. It's a marvelous scene and reminded me of Austen's opening in Sense and Sensibility where Mr and Mrs Dashwood reason their relatives out of a bequest, all the time reassuring themselves that they are doing what duty requires of them. The friends then proceed to Max and Veronique beautiful summer home, where their neuroses, romantic entanglements and narcissism will be exposed. Francois Cluzet is absolutely superb playing the stressed-out, up-tight successful businessmen, ruining his and everyone else’s holiday with his strict schedules and castigation of his staff. But Max has another reason to be stressed out – his long-time, very married, friend Vincent (Benoît Magimel) has told him he’s in love with him! Poor Vincent’s wife, Isavelle (Pascale Arbillot) has no idea, other than that her husband would rather binge on chocolate than sleep with her. And then there’s Marie (Marion Cotillard), a beautiful woman who may or may not be in love with the injured Ludo, but is also being stalked by a soft-hearted musician, who turns up unexpectedly at the house with a guitar and an atmosphere of awkwardness. And finally we have two single men - Éric (Gilles Lellouche) and Antoine (Laurent Lafitte) – the former denying he is in love, the latter desperately, delusionally, boringly so. All of this emotional indulgence is played out in sharp contrast to Jean-Louis (Joël Dupuch) – the proprietor of a local beach-side restaurant who has to listen to all these characters whining, all the time fulfilling their expectation of him to play the role of jovial provincial host.

LITTLE WHITE LIES is a long film that doesn’t feel long, because we’re immersed into the emotional lives of a large cast of characters, all of whom are slightly eccentric and yet very much rooted in real life. Maybe it’s the kind of people I hang out with, or the fact that I’m much the same age as many of these characters, but it felt as if Guillaume Canet had perfectly captured the way in which an old bunch of friends interact. I found myself laughing with them, rather than at them, willing them to succeed in their romantic games, and moved to tears by their tragedies. I left the cinema feeling like I’d had an emotional work-out but also sad to be leaving their company. And that, I think, is pretty much the best praise one can give a film – when it immerses you in a world that feels authentic and makes you glad to spend time there.

LITTLE WHITE LIES played Toronto 2010 and goes on release in France and Belgium on October 20th.

INCEPTION - It'll be just like in the movies. Pretending to be somebody else.

INCEPTION combines the elegant structure and intelligence of Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough indie hit, MEMENTO, with the stunning in-camera visual effects of BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT. More than that, INCEPTION demonstrates for the first time that Nolan can do more than “just” create intelligent mainstream blockbusters. Finally, he moves beyond the assured technique and shining surfaces to deliver a convincing and emotionally engaging love story. All of this is a great achievement. But it does not compensate for the over-use of exposition, weak characterization of the supporting roles, and the fact the questions raised by the central conceit have been explored in many films before this one.

The plot is neither as complicated nor as impenetrable as the critics would have you believe, nor as liable to be ruined by too much information before you watch the film. That’s because, while this movie is a heist movie in the classic tradition of RAFIFI or LE CERCLE ROUGE, the real substance of the film has nothing to do with the heist at all. Still, for what it’s worth, let’s explore the set-up. In the near future, corporate espionage isn’t about stealing files from an executive’s laptop but about stealing ideas straight from his subconscious when he’s in a drug-induced dream. To steal the idea, the thieves also have to drug themselves and enter into the subconscious of the victim – thus becoming vulnerable to any nasties the victim might be hiding down there. In this film, the thieves are paid to not to steal an idea, but to plant an idea in the victim’s mind so subtly than when he wakes up he thinks it’s his own. And this is precisely the engine of the film. Leonardo diCaprio’s Cobb is hired by Saito (Ken Watanabe) to plant an idea in the mind of his business rival Fisher (Cillian Murply), prompting Murphy to break up the massive corporate entity that he inherited from his father (Pete Postlethwaite). To pull off this reverse-heist, Cobb has to assemble a crack-team, made up of all-round side-kick, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt); dream architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page); impersonator, Eames (Tom Hardy) and chemist, Yousuf (Dileep Rao). Together they engineer a situation in which they can sedate themselves and Fisher, engineer a dream within a dream within a dream, and plant an idea so deeply that they can achieve genuine inception.

There are, of course, plenty of rules about how this all works and the early parts of the film, and the characters played by Page, Levitt and Rao, do have a touch of the Basil Exposition about them. Even Pete Postlethwaite and Cillian Murphy, as dying father and grieving son, are similarly wasted. Once again, they exist merely as a sort of superbly tailored MacGuffin - the victims of the heist plot that propels the narrative. Only the superb Tom Hardy, through sheer force of personality, manages to carve out a memorable role for himself, stealing every scene that he’s in.

Still, I suppose that one shouldn’t begrudge Nolan the time setting up the intricate mechanics of Inception. There is something satisfying about the fact that, from what I can tell, the mechanics all hang together without any obvious holes in the logic. But for all the veneer of a sci-fi heist, let’s be honest, what we really care about – what drives our interest in the movie – is the central question of how someone so far steeped in the dream-world - in a dream within a dream within a dream – can tell the difference between the dream and reality. And, further, even if you could tell the difference, would you choose to live in the dream? In short, as my cousin Danny, conscious of this movie’s indebtedness to films like THE MATRIX put it, can you tell you’re living in a Matrix, and even if you could, would you choose to take the blue pill?

So, if the issues that Christopher Nolan is exploring aren’t particularly original, what makes this film worth watching? DP Wall Pfister’s beautiful cinematography; the elegant in-camera visual effects, so much more convincing that CGI; the wise-cracking Tom Hardy; and the intellectual puzzle at the heart of the film. All these things make it worth the price of entry. But to my mind, there are two genuine achievements. First, this is the first Nolan film where I feel he moved beyond being clever and technically accomplished to actually creating a relationship I cared about – that between Cobb and his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard). I completely bought into their difficult relationship and felt that diCaprio had given one of his most convincing performances in a decade – Cotillard was typically brilliant. Her central dilemma and his reaction to it are heart-breaking. Second, and most importantly, Nolan manages to involve the audience in exactly the same paranoia that infects Cobb and Mal. He doesn’t so much show us how a mind can get lost in the narrow margins between dream and reality but take us there with his ambiguous and cleverly constructed final act.

Additional tags: Tom Berenger, Talulah Riley, Hans Zimmer, Wally Pfister, Lee Smith

INCEPTION is on release in the UK, Egypt, Kuwait, Malaysia, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Ukraine, Canada, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Taiwan and Japan. It opens next week in Belgium, France, Norway, South Korea, Switzerland, Austrlia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Lithuania, Mexico and Sweden. It opens on July 29th in Argentina, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Austria, Poland, Romania and South Africa. It opens on August 6th in Brazil and Spain; on August 13th in Venezuela; and on August 24th in Greece. It opens in Italy on September 24th.

NINE - a series of songs sung by women who are basically in love with a shit

Rob Marshall directed two movies before NINE and I didn't like either of them. His movies are pretty on the surface and are obviously the product of much care and attention to detail. But somehow they miss the essential point of the story, not to mention any subtlety or subversion. And this is a major flaw in movies that deal with the the appearance and reality of sexual domination (MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA) and sexual and judicial corruption (CHICAGO).

And yet, still flush with the some-time success of CHICAGO, Marshall had the ambition to tackle NINE, a movie adaptation of a Broadway musical that was itself an adaptation of Fellini's seminal movie - perhaps one of the greatest movies of all time - 8 1/2. How can I explain to you what a technical, psychological and dramatic achievement Fellini's film was? It was a movie that dared to depict the impossibility and insanity of trying to create art in a commercial, celebrity-obsessed environment. Even more daring, it was a movie that threw its own director's psyche onto the screen - his narcissism, his eroticism, his conflicted relationship with his childhood, his relationship with his mother, his wife, his lovers....8 1/2 was a movie so radical and so brilliant that it redefined cinema. It was a movie so great that other directors tried to compete with it and came up short - Henri Georges Clouzot, with his INFERNO, had a heart attack trying.

If great artists have tried and failed to match Fellini, what can we say about Broadway composer and lyricist, Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston? Sadly not much. Yes, they have gotten the bare bones of the story - the narcissistic movie director battling writer's block and a kind of personal crisis - running between his wife and his lover - but never finding the pure adoration that only an Italian mother can give. But they fail to translate Fellini's daring and subversion to the Broadway stage. Worse still, the songs are rather anonymous. "Be Italian" has a decent melody but the rest are utterly forgettable. Worse still, the lyrics have none of the rapier-like wit of CHICAGO or CABARET. No, this is a poor vehicle indeed on which to hang a Hollywood film.

Rob Marshall takes poor fare and does nothing to improve it. Yes, there are a couple of new songs but none of them have any more punch than the originals. Indeed, the 60s pastiche Cinema Italiano, is truly bad. Worst of all, Marshall didn't have the balls to change the incredibly weak opening number. And, after all, what's a song and dance show without a bravura opening number? Catherine Zeta Jones in CHICAGO gripped the audience.

Okay, so the music is weak - hardly Marshall's fault. What about the purely cinematic choices? The casting is variable in its success. Daniel Day-Lewis is either miscast as the director, Guido Contini, or mis-directed by Marshall. Day-Lewis' attempt at an Italian accent distracts from his perfect physical embodiment of the distracted, harrassed, hunch-shouldered director. Penelope Cruz and Judi Dench have a lot of fun and perform with gusto as Guido's lover and loyal friend. Marion Cotillard is superb as Guido's suffering wife. Fergie of The Black Eyed Peas is the best singer and performer by far in the best song in the piece, despite Marshall saddling her with frightful hair and make-up and entirely missing the eroticism of the encounter with the kid. Less happily, we have Nicole Kidman doing nothing special as the Anita Ekberg inspired movie star Claudia. Sophia Loren survives on her iconic status. Kate Hudson is entirely out of her depth but luckily only has to do a MTV dance routine before she's off stage. Her part is entirely disposable.

Most importantly, Marshall doesn't attempt to translate the complexity at the heart of the piece. And without that, Guido comes across as merely annoying, unsympathetic and whiny - a big kid with a mamma complex and an over-extended libido. The women, with the exception of the wife, are not really developed. As a consequence, when one of them does something dramatic, it seems not so much out of character, as we don't know what her character really is, but out of the blue. It's just hard to care. The movie becomes a series of songs sung by women who are basically in love with a shit. And frankly, there's nothing entertaining about that.

NINE is on release in the US, UK and Slovenia. It opens next week in Greece and Canada. It opens in January in Israel, the Netherlands, South Korea, Cyprus, Denmark, Brazil, Italy, Australia, Spain, Taiwan and Romania. It opens in February in Argentina, Hungary, Sweden, France, Finland, Belgium, Germany and Singapore. It opens in March in Japan.