Late Review - MR NICE

Director Bernard Rose takes a break from contemporising Russian literature, with his straight-ahead adaptation of Howard Marks' autobiography, MR NICE. The charm of Marks' story is that he stands against the cliché of the drug dealer typically seen in films. He doesn't grow up in a mean urban setting - he doesn't push drugs to survive - he isn't particularly flash - he doesn't do whores - he's faithful to his wife and kids - and he studiously avoids Class A drugs - both dealing them and taking them. In fact, he is rather more like a hero of an Ealing Comedy - stumbling into drug dealing quite by accident and permanently amused that he is getting away with it.

Marks was basically just another middle-class kid studying at Oxford and smoking hash when a mate asked him to do a favour and drive a car stuffed with drugs back from Germany. Marks was quite happy to quit teaching for easy money-making and soon hooked up with the Provos to bring his hash into UK airports without the inconvenience of customs checks. Before long he's got the biggest outfit in the UK and tries to crack America. Moreover, he's been recruited by his old college chum to be a spy in Kabul - after all, he moves in circles they can't penetrate! The first time he's busted for dealing he gets off on grounds so spurious he seems to be amazed, but he does eventually serve time - and not because of hubris, or narcissism, or betrayal - but basically because he was too bored to quit.

The film is charming and fun, and uses a deliberately lo-fi amateurish style, with live action footage digitally inserted into grainy old vintage footage of the 60s and 70s. Rhys Ifans is suitably bumbling and charming as Marks and he and Chloe Sevigny as his wife seem genuinely in love. I also love David Thewlis - who has just that edge of danger required to play the Provo, Jim McCann. The charm and the fun is entirely in keeping with Marks' carefully cultivated persona as Mr. Nice. Yes, that was his real alias, but he also wants to be seen as basically a good guy. To that end, this movie drips with family values, and to watch it, one would think that his wife and daughters never blamed him for one second for being absent from their lives. The film also refuses to question how far his involvement with the Provos was morally pretty nasty - after all, the dodgy money they were earning wasn't going into real estate, was it? And there is a deliberately cultivated equivocation about how far he ever really did any spying for the British.

So, MR NICE is basically a rather fawning film - frothy, light, charming, disposable. It doesn't get to grips with Howard Marks - but provides him with a yet another self-justificatory platform. Is that bad? Who knows. But there is something rather, well, distasteful in an international drug dealer who consorted with the IRA palming himself of as a charming rogue.

MR NICE is currently on release in the UK.

London Film Fest 2010 - Day 16 - KABOOM

KABOOM is a bizarre little movie set in a surreal day-glo version of a So-Cal college campus. Said campus is populated by horny, promiscuous teens who spend all their time fucking, SMS-ing and...er...getting sucked into the machinations of an evil cult that's trying to bring about the end of the world.

Writer-director Gregg Araki's is exploring similar territory as in his previous work - teenage sexual shenanigans, gay, straight and everything in-between. But instead of the gritty, raw emotion of MYSTERIOUS SKIN, we get day-glo colour, 1980s kitsch stylings and a plot that seems like the spoof love-child of ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE. The resulting movie is basically a colourful, inconsequential mess. I didn't care about any of the characters, I didn't find the trying-too-hard-to-be-witty dialogue funny, I wasn't impressed by the sexual candour, and I didn't buy into the spoof-horror plot. This movie just isn't as well-written or as finely balanced as, say, DONNIE DARKO, and it certainly isn't as funny as it needs to be. Pretty much the only person who comes out of it with their reputation in tact is actress Juno Temple. Still, I guess, in the age of banal mainstream movies, you at least have to give Araki props for trying.

KABOOM played Cannes, Berlin and Toronto 2010. It was released earlier this year in the USA and France.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 14 - SUBMARINO

Nick and Martin are brothers living in contemporary Copenhagen, struggling to deal with the childhood trauma of their little brother dying of neglect as the result of their mother's alcoholism. Nick has served time, and now passes the day at the gym or drinking and the evenings with a hooker. Martin is a junkie who turns to pushing to support his little boy. Both of them, in their own fucked-up way, try to protect the kids in their lives, as a sort of penance for having failed their little brother.

The movie is austere, closely observed and unrelentingly grim. It is a return, if not in form, but in content, to the Dogme style of film-making that Thomas Vinterberg (DEAR WENDY) originated in. The lead performances are strong, and the stories of the two brothers - who are estranged for much of the film - are deftly inter-twined. However, I am not sure why, but I just couldn't get into the film. Something about the unrelenting self-annihilation kept me at a distance, just as the brothers try to distance themselves from their emotions, with alcohol and smack respectively. As a result, SUBMARINO is a film that I admired rather than enjoyed.

SUBMARINO played Berlin 2010 and was released in September in France, Finland and the Netherlands. It opens in Belgium on November 17th.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - FROM PARIS WITH LOVE

To my mind, the greatest tragedy of the Bush presidency was that the image America projected of itself was a crude caricature of all that was great in the idea of America. A country founded on lofty principles had descended into populist, xenophobic, knee-jerk foreign policy, and with figures like Sarah Palin and media outlets such as Fox News, was portraying itself as a country that gloried in its own ignorance - where a stubborn refusal to see the complexity of an issue was lauded as homespun wisdom.

The problem with playing with such caricatures (as I am sure many of the more savvy in Washington were consciously doing) is that others may take you at face value. And for every American who thinks of the French as cheese-eating surrender monkeys, and the average Pakistani as a terrorist-harbouring rag-head, there's a Frenchman and a Pakistani who believes that Americans are basically coming straight out of TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE with a cultural chauvinism and gun-totin' agenda that is as abhorrent as it is (I hope) mistaken.

If cinema reflects the times in which we live, FROM PARIS WITH LOVE is, then, a fascinating cultural artefact. A movie financed by a US studio, starring a major US movie star, in which a US secret agent comes to Paris to chase down a Pakistani terrorist cell that is pushing coke to launder money. (Presumably they have never heard of Liechtenstein). The French are impotent, bereaucratic fools; the Chinese are drug-dealers; the Pakistanis are terrorists; and the brave heroic Yanks are there to save the day, with their Jack-Bauer-inspired brand of summary justice. In a scene that could come from a Glenn Beck wet-dream, at the end of the film, the Ivy-League-educated protagonist, James Reece, overcomes his squeamishness about killing people to join up with his buddy Charlie Wax in a campaign of killing "bad guys".

And so, ladies and gentlemen, we have stepped through the looking glass. A Frenchman, Luc Besson, is peddling back to American mainstream cinema a vision of American chauvinism. I can't decide whether this is particularly insidious or just brilliant business.

The basic mechanics of the movie are the same as in most other Luc Besson-penned movies. As in TAKEN, a hard-ass American (John Travolta) comes to Paris to kick some Muslim terrorist ass. As in the TRANSPORTER movies, there will be a lot of driving really really fast through busy streets and some loud explosions. There will also be a lot of swearing and the occasional line that's trying to be as iconic as Arnie in TERMINATOR. (Is there any reason for John Travolta's character to be called Charlie Wax except to allow a lame KARATE KID joke? And for that matter, did they only cast John Travolta so that they could reference a Royale with Cheese?)

Still, for all that, I can't deny that FROM PARIS WITH LOVE zipped along at a pace, and wasn't as painfully shit as Besson's ANGEL-A. The stunts are fine; the car chases through the streets of Paris exhilarating; and John Travolta chews up the scenery. I even liked Jonathan Rhys Meyers as his square side-kick, Reece. In the one scene where Meyers gets to act - when he sees himself in a mirror covered in blood and his to react to his new life - he actually looks pretty convincing. The key point is that this movie is firmly in the B-grade of action flicks. It's treading well-worn ground and dripping in faintly offensive cliché. That they're being peddled by a Frenchman is about the most interesting thing about the whole enterprise.

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE was released in Spring 2010 and is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Additional tags: Frederic Thoraval, David Buckley, Richard Durden, Kasia Smutniak

GET HIM TO THE GREEK - They fuck you up, your mum and dad - Part Three

In fairness, the people doing the psychological damage in the alleged buddy-comedy, GET HIM TO THE GREEK, aren't just the parents. The record label, entourage, management and fans all take the blame in enabling viciously damaging pop star behaviour. That Aldous Snow, self-proclaimed white musical Jesus, manages to retain any humanity at all, in the haze of adulation and exploitation, is a miracle. This movie is about how Aldous Snow, washed up, alone, makes it from London to LA to play a comeback gig in spite of various attempts at self-sabotage. He does so in the company of a fan-boy turned record label chaperone, Aaron. It's meant to be a laugh-out-loud comedy, giving the character who stole every scene in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL more screen time. The problem is that while Russell Brand IS funny as Aldous Snow, he's also too good to leave his performance at the level of superficial pratfalls and lascivious word-play. Brand's Snow is actually a very sad man, and there's something faintly exploitative in the screen-writer, director and audience trying to find laughter in his pain. It's almost as though we're milking Aldous Snow in exactly the same way that his record company is milking him. "We know you're physically and psychologically harmed, mate, but go on, do that funny song-and-dance act!"

Maybe I'm taking it all too seriously. After all, this is a film in which Sean Combs is genuinely very funny spoofing himself as a hard-balled record exec. (I loved the line "you're three zippers away from Thriller"), It's a movie in which Rose Byrne is really very funny indeed as Aldous Snow's ex-wife and fame-junkie Jackie Q. Maybe I should just be happy with the laughs? But even as simple comedy this movie doesn't quite work. I know Jonah Hill is essentially playing the straight man to Russell Brand's comedy protagonist, but even then, Aaron could've been a lot more interesting as a character. Where's that slightly geeky creepiness that Hill brought to his cameo in FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL? And as for the scene where Snow tries to instigate a threesome with Aaron and his girlfriend (Elizabeth Moss) - excruciating just doesn't cover it.

The best Judd Apatow movies are both funny and touching. FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL isn't just great comedy - at some level we really feel for Jason Segel's Peter as he tries to get over his girlfriend, and we're really routing for him to get together with Mila Kunis' Rachel. Okay, we've probably never been dumped for a rock star, but I think everyone can empathise with Peter's pain - and even Sarah's despair at trying to make the relationship work. At the heart of all comedy, there has to be an emotional core we can relate to. The relationship arcs in GET HIM TO THE GREEK - between Aldous and his dad; Aldous and his ex-wife; and most of all between Aaron and his girlfriend - just don't feel real, and as a result I didn't care about them. The only part of the movie that felt real was Snow's addiction and loneliness. And I simply wasn't heartless enough to laugh at that.

Additional tags: William Kerr, Michael L Sale, Sean Combs, Elizabeth Moss

GET HIM TO THE GREEK is on release in the US, UK, Kazakhstan, Canada, Iceland, Australia, Georgia and the Netherlands. It opens in July in Greece, Portugal and Estonia. It opens in August in Sweden, Turkey, France, Finland, Norway, Germany and Spain. It opens in September in Denmark and Argentina and in October in Hungary.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - SHIFTY

SHIFTY is the impressive debut feature from British writer-director, Eran Creevey. It portrays 24 hours in the life of a second generation Pakistani boy nick0named Shifty (Riz Ahmed, THE ROAD TO GUANTANEMO), who has evolved from being a good schoolkid selling a bit of weed on the side into a hard core crack dealer. Shifty is on the edge of a knife - his elder brother Rez (Nitin Ganatra, EASTENDERS) and his best mate Chris (Daniel Mays, ATONEMENT), recently returned from Manchester, are trying to pull Shifty back from a life of crime. But Shifty is being set-up by his dealer Glen (Jason Flemyng).

The movie was shot for under £100,000 in just 18 days and captures the grim reality of suburban drug use in sludge colours and lower middle-class homes. This isn't London as Compton wannabe KIDULTHOOD style. Rather, you see drug use messing with real families. The movie is emotionally tense and builds suspense toward a dramatic conclusion. It feels authentic and while it makes some perceptive points about the cultural ironies of a being a second-gen Muslim immigrant, it wears its social critique lightly. SHIFTY is just superb guerilla film-making.

SHIFTY played London 2008 and opened in the UK in April 2009. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Additional tags: Eran Creevy, Riz Ahmed, Nitin Ganatra, Jay Simpson, Dannielle Brent, Jazon Maza, Harry Escott, Molly Nyman, Ed Wild.

HARRY BROWN - the only permissable bigotry

These days you can't hate people on the grounds of their race, sexual orientation, religion or political views. The only permissable form of bigotry in the UK is the hatred of the white working class, and in particular, white working class kids. The right-wing middle-class media make a living from depicting chav kids as feral, dope-addled, knife-wielding granny botherers and social menaces. English society is in decay! Suburbia is lawless! And it's all because a bunch of uneducated kids have taken to drinking cans of Super-tenants outside Burger King at 11 at night while wearing fake Burberry caps, and driving modified Novas. It says a lot about how insecure post-modern, recession-bound Britain is that the only new cinema we seem to be capable of producing is either lauding the "glory" days of 1980s soccer hooliganism (punching people IS our proud heritage) or decrying working class violence. Whether the films are glorifying or condemning chav-violence, they are still making the lethal assumption that this is the way life is. And you think to yourself, does Mike Leigh work in vain?

HARRY BROWN is a good film. It's technically well-made, visually impressive, suspenseful, and features a great central performance from Michael Caine as a pensioner who turns violent on the teenage drug-pushers terrorising his estate. There's a satisfyingly slow-build to a pretty convincing revenge thriller. Caine has some nice Tarantino-style one-liners while dispatching a dope-peddler. There's even some astute critiquing of how the police are riven by spin and politicking. Emily Mortimer gives a nuanced performance and Iain Glenn is absolutely menacing. There's no denying it - this is a good film. I would have really loved it had I not been continually wary of the fact that I was watching a sort of middle-class angst-porn, designed to push all my buttons as a tax-paying constructive member of society meant to be living in fear of being knifed on the Central Line.

I don't buy the Daily Mail and I'm not buying this. I don't care how nice the packaging and how gritty the performances.

HARRY BROWN played Toronto 2009 and is on release in the UK. It opens in the Netherlands on February 25th 2010.

London Film Fest Day 10 - PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL PUSH BY SAPPHIRE

PRECIOUS is a tremendously funny, moving film that has won Audience Awards and critical acclaim on the festival circuit. As the ungainly title says, it's based on a novel by an American author who had worked with young girls in the projects. The resulting protagonist, Clarice "Precious" Johnson, is a compendium of the troubles they experience. She is obese and illiterate, the mother of two children before she is 17, both the result of paternal rape. Her mother is obese, foul-mouthed and verbally and physically abuses the child she perceives to have stolen her man. Precious begins to rehabilitate after being kicked out of school and into the Each One Teach One programme. An heroic teacher gets her literacy and confidence up and she finds friends for the first time. But even then, author Sapphire loads more onto her, as she realises that her father made her HIV positive.

The technical choices in this film are superb. Lee Daniels preserves the stream of consciousness from the original novel, including the way Precious forces herself into a fantasy world to escape abuse. Horrific acts are shown to us, but when you think about it, we're shown less than we imagine through these brief flashbacks, especially concerning marital rape. But what really sets this movie apart are the performances. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe gives a great performance as Precious - able to play both the downtrodden teen and the confident, sexy girl of her fantasy life. Paula Patton (DEJA VU) is empathetic as her teacher. But the real surprises come from the celebrity cast. Lenny Kravitz gives a fine modulated performance as "Nurse John". Mariah Carey is astoundingly good as social worker Mrs Weiss. But most of all, someone needs to give Mo'nique as Oscar for her performance as Precious' mother. She plays a hideous monster for most of the film - appallingly abusive. But in a final confrontation with Mrs Weiss and Precious, Mo'nique gives depth, layers, and even vulnerability to that character that brought me to tears.

PRECIOUS played Sundance, Cannes and Toronto 2009. It will be released in the US on November 6th, in the Netherlands on November 12th, in Finland on January 22nd, in Sweden on January 29th, in Australia and New Zealand in February and in France on March 10th.