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.

SUBMARINE - as unsatisfying as onanism

This review is brought to you by The Ginger Dwarf, a man cursed not only with being short and ginger, but also with going to school in Wales.... 

I have never read “A Catcher in the Rye”. Perhaps this is why I felt deeply unsatisfied by “Submarine”, which, like onanism and caffeine, felt momentarily fantastic, but was ultimately disappointing. Its quirky humour, often delivered with deadpan voiceover, was at times inspired and very funny, but wasn’t sufficient to carry a movie which was too long and whose plot fell into facile traps towards the end. 

Richard Ayoade’s debut film (he wrote the screenplay and directed it, and most impressively, managed to live in Barry throughout the filming process, as anyone who has ever lived in South Wales will immediately understand), follows the travails of precocious pseudo-intellectual teen Oliver Tate. 

Oliver, best described as Wales’ answer to Adrian Mole, wears a duffle-coat and carries a briefcase around school. He obsesses about the nonchalant, twisted and red-coated Jordana Bevan, whose eczema and apparent bow-legs appear to be offset in his eyes by high-cheekbones and a flirtatious smile. That he is bound at some point to lose his virginity to her is a sine qua non, since this is a coming-of-age movie. And when the moment comes, pun intended, it is well executed and almost Andy Stitzer-like. Our solipsistic hero, encouraged by this victory and undamaged by life experience decides to try to save his parents’ marriage. Unfortunately for the viewers we simply don’t care enough about this awkward couple to care; they are just not likeable enough. They’re the sort of people who encourage their children to call them by their first names. We hardly envy their bourgeois hell. The juxtaposition of the parents’ decaying marriage and Tate’s burgeoning relationship with Jordana feels laboured. 

The only saving grace of this development is that it allows Paddy Considine’s character to run wild for a while. Much more of the dynamic between the mulleted Graham Purvis and Oliver could have been made, not least since, in their own ways, they believe equally in their own grandiose self-images. Prosaic characterisation is the film’s biggest let-down. Although he is bullied, it is refreshing that Oliver is not a total wimp, eschewing wholesale playground capitulation, but still he’s still whimsy and annoyingly affected. Jordana could have been more than the tough lass with a (barely) hidden soft side. Indeed, if this was a grown-up movie she’d have been a hooker-with-a-heart. Personally, I’d have preferred her to remain a hard-nosed and Juno-esque, or even better, like Sheeni Saunders’ “Portia Doubleday” in that other, excellent but neglected Michael Cera vehicle “Youth in Revolt”. Also noticeably implausible is the mother’s character. Albeit brilliantly played by Sally Hawkins, she comes across as far too sensible to fall for Purvis’ phoney wizard cum wedding DJ. Ayoade’s film has been frequently compared to Rushmore, indeed Wes Andersen regular Ben Stiller appears fleetingly as a TV soap star in Submarine. And yet the characters are self-involved and unpleasant, without the redeeming qualities which make Andersen’s films so textured. Despite the buzz, Submarine is underwhelming. Ayoade’s irreverent humour (he lists his influences for this film as Taxi Driver & Badlands – is he, even here, taking the piss?) is hit-and-miss and fails to convince in a movie which should have ended differently, and earlier. 

SUBMARINE played Toronto and London 2010 and Sundance 2011. It opens in the UK this weekend; in Norway on April 15th; in the US on June 3rd; in Poland in August and in Sweden on September 23rd.

Late and incomplete review - London Film Fest 2010 Day 10 - FILM SOCIALISME

We are on a cruise ship. We are in contemporary Europe. We are at the End of Days. We are in Palestine. We are in politics. We are listening to Alain Badiou. We are listening to Patti Smith.  We are in hi-def DV. We are in lo-def pixelated DV. We are in hi-camp Hollywood. We are in present-day desolation. We are mashing up images from everything and everywhere.

So what is the point? That we live in a post-political society? That we decadent capitalist Europeans care nothing for the class-struggle? That we are beyond political redemption? That we are living in a culture mediated by iconic media images, unable to disentangle reality from fiction? That we are merely repeating /parroting media image rather than critically engaging with life? Does there have to be a point? Is the point that there is no point?

FILM SOCIALISME is the worst kind of pretentious, patronising, pseudo-intellectual bilge that claims to have something profound to say about politics and the nature of cinema, but in fact is nothing more than self-indulgent, adolescent nonsense. The fact that it was produced by Jean-Luc Godard, French auteur, means that reviewers have been generous, ascribing to it meaning and coherence and earnest intentions that it simply does not possess. His film is insulting to us as viewers - it holds us in contempt. It tells us that we are not worth narrative structure or coherent exposition because we are party to the contemporary culture it is condemning. At least, that is the most generous explanation I can give for a film that plays like a collage, a scrapbook, where Godard has pasted in scenes from past films, news-reels and other sources into a layered, incoherent mess. Godard basically holds up two fingers to his audience in the film. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the most hateful film I have seen in recent years. The correct response is to walk out. And that is exactly what I did.

Now, a lot of the film's fans are going to say that basically I am just admitting my own ignorance. That I'm not well versed enough in Godard's back catalogue, that I don't speak French, that I don't understand the philosophical and political movements he is engaging with. That, basically, I am a poor creature who can only feel safe in the warm embrace of mindless Hollywood genre-cinema. To them, I say, in the words Godard might've have used as a title to this film, baise-toi! I speak French, I've watched his films, I read philosophy at university, and I like tough cinema. But this film is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. It reflects back the pretentions of the viewers and cinema-goers who love cinema, LOVE cinema, should fight back.

FILM SOCIALISME played Cannes, London and Toronto 2010. It was released in France in May 2010 and was released on DVD last month.