Uncle Frank's Film Blog

Martha Marcy May Marlene

2012-01-28T18:54:00.000Z

The gripping Martha Marcy May Marlene is one of those films that makes you want to rush out and urge everyone in sight to see it as soon as possible. I felt the same way about Winter’s Bone in 2010, and MMMM ticks some of the same boxes: an American indie centred around an incredible performance by a young actress I’d never previously heard of, with a great supporting turn by John Hawkes. But the film is very much its own beast.

The film opens with Martha – aka Marcy May (Elizabeth Olsen) – slipping away from a small country farm where, we learn, she has been living for a couple of years. Apparently terrified, she calls her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) to collect her. Once back at the home Lucy shares with her husband (James Darcy), Martha tries to settle in; refusing to discuss where she’s been or what has happened to her, it’s only gradually that they, and we, register how deeply traumatised she actually is.

This truth is revealed in part through a series of flashbacks to Martha’s time with the cult, which is presided over by the charismatic but evil Patrick (Hawkes). The situation so far is not unfamiliar if you’ve seen other films about Manson-inspired cult leaders (sure enough, the trailer reorders them into chronological order, making the film appear much more of a conventional thriller than it actually is). Plenty of horror films have taken the same basic premise, though the horror in MMMM is psychological rather than the more graphic horrors of, say, Kevin Smith’s Red State. Writer/director Sean Durkin constructs his film so that as the flashbacks become increasingly disturbing to watch, so Martha’s behaviour becomes more and more unpredictable. Starting out as merely odd – she sleeps curled on the edge of her bed, goes swimming naked and is surprised that anyone might be shocked – by the end she has become completely paranoid, barely able to tell what is real and what isn’t.

It’s a shame that James Darcy’s character is a rather two dimensional yuppie, as it weakens some sections of the film. Martha critiques his materialistic lifestyle, pointing out that there are other ways to live. If the intention is to suggest that modern capitalistic enslaves people just as much as crazy cult leaders in the middle of nowhere, it doesn’t quite come off. But it’s a minor problem.

Olsen is superb in the lead role, and deserves award recognition. As her mental state deteriorates, we are ultimately sucked entirely into her fractured world view. The way the film ends will not be liked by all. I’ve heard it compared to the ending of the recent Take Shelter, which I felt was entirely different, and more accurately to John Sayles’ Limbo. All I can say is that it worked for me, and the final scenes had my stomach in knots. This riveting film is a triumph for both Durkin and Olsen.

W.E.

2012-01-15T19:47:00.001Z

A deeply odd film, it is a struggle to work out exactly who the audience for W.E. is supposed to be – unless it’s Madonna herself. If you don’t happen to be Madonna, you are likely to find it fundamentally unsatisfying. A strange attempt to blend King's Speech style costume drama with The Hours and Drop Dead Fred, it doesn’t reach the high points of any.

The film flits between the stories of Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), the American divorcee for whom King Edward VIII (James D’Arcy) gave up the throne of England, and Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), unhappily married in the present day to a wealthy shrink (Richard Coyle). Wally is named after Wallis, and is obsessed with her story, spending hours hanging around the Sotheby’s exhibition of her soon-to-be-auctioned personal effects.

Madonna not only directed the film (and quite competently, actually, though perhaps a bit heavy on the homages); she also co-wrote it, with Alek Keshinian (director of the Madonna documentary In Bed with Madonna). And it’s the screenplay that’s the problem. It contains a fairly high level of bemoaning the difficult lives of the wealthy and privileged – much is made of Wallis’ sacrifice of privacy for her Royal affair, being endlessly pursued by the press, to the point that you feel Madonna is bringing her personal baggage to the table. Which does feel like a bit of an overstatement; they may have married in a castle, but Guy Ritchie was hardly royalty.

We are left to consider to what extent the historical sections are intended as a ‘true’ story (in the way that The King’s Speech, say, is presented as a ‘true’ story) and to what extent they are Wally’s fantasy versions; this is particularly pertinent in a party sequence which sees Wallis and her society chums dance with The Sex Pistols on the soundtrack. Is Wally adding her own preferred soundtrack to her image of what Wallis' life might have been like? Or is the scene there because Madonna has seen Sofia Coppolla's Marie Antoinette and thought, I'll try that?

The major difficulty with the dual storyline is that Wally is not particularly interesting. We know she has a fascination with Wallis and is in a crappy marriage, but that seems to be about all there is to her. Attempts to draw parallels between their lives are pretty superficial, so her sense of connection is never convincing. At the end, as Wally tells Wallis she no longer needs her, I had to stifle laughter. It felt as emotionally true as an episode of Ghost Whisperer.

The film is generally well acted and put together, but the shallow screenplay dooms it. It’s not the cataclysmically dire film some reports have claimed, but it never feels like much more than a vanity project.

Hugo and The Artist

2011-12-04T19:35:00.001Z

In the past week and a bit, I’ve seen two films which both act as loving tributes to early cinema: Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, and Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist. I enjoyed each one to a large degree, yet there’s something small but significant missing from both.

There’s an obvious difference between the two: The Artist is a silent film (or almost), produced in a manner that makes it look like the movies of the time in which it is set. Hugo, though steeped in visual references to the works of the 1920s and earlier, is in up-to-the-minute digital 3D. And while The Artist appears to take it as read that the audience will be broadly familiar, at least on some level, with the narrative conventions it adopts, Hugo functions in part as Scorsese’s introductory lecture on film history for kids.

Hugo is an adaptation of Brian Selznick’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, with which I am unfamiliar. It is set in a snow-covered, romanticised Paris between the wars, where orphan Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) lives in the walls of the central station; he spends his time winding the clocks, dodging the station inspector who is determined to pack him off to an orphanage, and stealing parts for the automaton he was trying to repair with his late father. This brings him into conflict with the grumpy old man who runs the station toy shop, who turns out to be – spoiler alert! – silent cinema pioneer George Méliès (Ben Kingsley). Bitter after the loss of his films and public following after the First World War, Méliès has kept his work secret from his goddaughter Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) who teams up with Hugo to discover his secret.

Though it’s being promoted as a family adventure, Hugo contains relatively little adventuring beyond the children scampering around the station hiding from adults. Not a problem in itself (though judging from the audience numbers at the multiplex where I saw the film, the distributors have miscalculated in releasing it on the same day as Happy Feet Two), but the film unfortunately comes grinding to a halt once Méliès’ true identity is revealed. This plot twist allows Scorsese to share a potted biography of Méliès, introduce his best known works, and indulge in some regrets about how much early cinema has been lost forever. I found myself wondering whether the handful of children in the audience grasped that the character on screen was based on a real person.

The story ends with lots of people watching a film, which is probably the happiest ending possible in Scorsese’s book. The lack of an actual villain (even the Inspector is treated sympathetically) means the stakes never feel particularly high, and the second half of the film ambles to its conclusion. But despite that, there is plenty to enjoy – the production design creates a delightful version of the Gare Montparnasse criss-crossed with the labyrinth of hidden passages in which Hugo makes his home. Butterfield and Moretz play their parts with plenty of wide-eyed charm, and the supporting cast is full of welcome faces - it's always a pleasure to see Christopher Lee.

It also has what is possibly the best use of 3D I’ve seen to date. In virtually all other modern 3D films – even Avatar – I’ve found myself become accustomed to the effect by the half way mark, only noticing it thereafter if something is very obviously stuck out of the screen at me, whereupon it becomes a distraction from the narrative. This reduces the effect to the level of a gimmick; fine for something like Final Destination 5, but an irritant when it comes to storytelling. In this case, I was conscious of the 3D throughout the film. Though it felt unnecessary in one or two places – a shot of three people talking in a room doesn’t require this kind of technical trimmings – for the most part it satisfyingly added to the world Scorsese and his team were building. He takes every opportunity to place objects in the foreground – lights hanging from the walls, Hugo’s hands as he winds a clock. At one point, Sacha Baron Cohen’s face looms menacingly from the screen. Yet Scorsese saves the best ‘til last, working in some 3D renderings of vintage Méliès films that present these familiar images in a thrilling new way.

The Artist is perhaps less concerned with saluting the pioneers of film than it is with showing audiences a good time, something it does quite successfully. Told largely in the language of silent films, it does have a few jokes that play to the modern audience’s expectations of soundtracks. They are far too much fun to spoil, but I’ll mention the opening sequence, which takes place at the premiere of George Valentin’s (Jean Dujardin) latest drama. The hero is being questioned by the enemy agents who have captured him: “I will never talk!” he assures them in the intertitle. (The gag is repeated later when his wife tells him, “We have to talk.”) As the screening ends, we see Valentin behind the screen listening for the audience’s reaction. To us it appears non-existent, until a shot of the audience reveals what the character could hear – they are all applauding wildly.

The film is set at the end of the silent era, as film studios start switching to sound (much as they would start enthusiastically converting everything to 3D decades later). Valentin dismisses sound as a gimmick, and refuses to even try it (what seems like a baffling attitude is neatly explained in the final scene). Consequently, his star does not fade so much as implode overnight, while Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), the starlet who adores him and played a small role in his last major feature, becomes a sensation.

While there’s no denying the success of the storytelling, but the actual story of The Artist is pretty weak. Valentin is not a particularly sympathetic, or even interesting, character; Dujardin’s broad playing is reminiscent of his lead role in the 0SS comedies, but The Artist is not a spoof. Peppy, though aptly named, is just as two dimensional. While I greatly enjoyed the film’s ingenuity and homages to a bygone age, I would have liked to have become emotionally invested in the story as well. I wonder what impression modern audiences, those unfamiliar with the breadth and artistry of the best silent films, will make of the form; Valentin’s swansong is, after all, a pretentious melodrama which seems to deserve its box office failure. Hugo, on the other hand, has its young leads sneak into a cinema to watch Harold Lloyd in Safety Last – a film which definitely still works as a crowdpleaser today.

It will be interesting to see whether either film helps spread an interest in early cinema, particularly among young audiences who may not yet have seen a silent film – which do still have showings across the country, albeit sporadically in most cases. I would say Hugo, with its more appealing characters and modern gloss, has the better chance of doing this; The Artist is more likely to find itself preaching to the converted, no matter how many Oscar nominations it ends up with. Either way, it’s good to see cinema’s history being celebrated so warmly by two such enjoyable films.

The silly bits of Shark Night 3D

2011-10-02T18:52:00.002+01:00

It’s not that I went into Shark Night 3D expecting anything particularly intelligent, obviously. I was just looking for something entertaining about pretty people being eaten, and that’s what I got. So I’m not complaining here, you understand; I enjoyed the film. But despite that, I did come away with rather more than the usual number of nagging questions.

Some questions are pretty trivial. For instance, did our heroine Sara (Sara Paxton) never once think that now might be a good moment to pop upstairs and put some trousers on? I don’t mind that she didn’t; I was quite happy for her to spend about three quarters of the film in her bikini (left). It just struck me as odd.

I was rather more concerned with the details of the villains’ evil plan (and the spoilers start here). Their plan really is pretty stupid, even for stupid villains in a stupid film (and one that comes from the director of Snakes on a Plane, so he’s not without form when it comes to films with implausible plots); it’s so stupid that you wonder if the characters (or the writers) have really bothered to stop and think it through.

Essentially, three men (I suppose they could have further partners who we don’t meet during the film) have decided to put lots of sharks into a salt water lake in order to create snuff films to be sold online – the logic being that Shark Week on TV is popular, so some people must be prepared to pay to see the real thing. Now, even if we avoid wondering too hard about how they got hold of all these sharks and put them in the lake, and what is happening to the lake’s ecosystem as a result, this plan seems riddled with holes. First of all, assuming the target market even exists (they don’t appear to have done any actual research), how do these rednecks expect to deliver the product? Sure, they’re savvy enough to attach cameras to the sharks and get footage of their kills. But where’s their website? How will they take payment? How many customers do they need before they can even cover their start-up costs?

One villain, while explaining his evil plan to the tied up hero (thereby giving him time to escape in the traditional manner), points out that Faces of Death “can be downloaded by any 8 year old, for free!” Without seeming to realise it, he has hit on a major problem for their potential business, one that should be factored into any film distributor’s business plan: the threat of online piracy.

The snuff movie angle makes the film sound a bit like a late arrival to the torture porn bandwagon, but it’s a bit too lightweight for that – anything too nasty, that might have cost the film a lower certificate, is carefully avoided. This does mean credibility suffers further (and I realise that discussing the credibility of a film like this is a pointless exercise), as the redneck villain who leers over the female victims in the early scenes then simply throws them to the sharks. I’m certainly not bemoaning the absence of an attempted rape scene, least of all in a ‘fun’ b-movie like this; just regretting that the film bothers to set up an implied sexual threat, but then acts like it doesn’t exist.

A further question (one that also kept popping into mind during this year’s FrightFest): how the hell do these fuckwits expect to get away with it? They’ve filled a lake, which people do appear to visit, with dozens of sharks. Will none of the locals notice? Are they all in on the plot? And clearly, they will need a steady supply of fresh victims in order to keep their potential customers coming back for more. This kind of killing spree only seems credible if the location is so incredibly remote that a huge search could conceivably fail to find the missing people (as in Wolf Creek, or Wrong Turn). How many vacationing college kids can they throw to the sharks before someone takes notice?

I enjoyed Shark Night, despite what the above might suggest; if you like this sort of thing, it’s worth a watch. I'd even accept that its barefaced fuckwittery added to the entertainment, in a way. But given that it’s sillier than Shark Attack 1, 2 and 3 put together, watching it in an actual cinema rather than on DVD seemed wrong somehow.

How Marvel messed up Captain America

2011-08-02T17:51:00.001+01:00

I don’t plan to spend much time on the first 105 minutes or so of Captain America. Suffice to say, I enjoyed it, as I have pretty much all the Marvel adaptations. It’s a fun adventure through an American folk memory version of World War II, with a few nods to Raiders of the Lost Ark as well as the rest of the Marvel canon. It looks good, has a decent cast, a few good jokes, and all in all should satisfy anyone who has enjoyed the original comics.

But then you get the ending. Which I’m going to talk about in detail, so beware if you haven’t seen the film yet.

It’s hardly a secret that the film is another designed to lead into next year’s The Avengers, which I’m looking forward to. So it’s also hardly a shocker that the film sets up Captain America’s unfortunate freezing, allowing him to be woken in the present day still looking like Chris Evans; this is alluded to in the opening scene of the film. But the way its handled is a major misjudgement.

Everything’s fine until we reach Cap’s final face off with the Red Skull, in the latter’s plane. At this point, Cap’s shield gives the Skull’s power source – the Cosmic Cube (I think that’s right, though I’m not 100% on all areas of Marvel lore). The Skull picks it up and is apparently disintegrated (or possibly beamed up to Asgard in order to scheme another day).

This is my first issue with the ending: Cap appears to have beaten the Skull more by luck than anything else. Unless I blinked and missed a bit of exposition (not impossible), he wasn’t fully clued up as to what the cube was and had no particular reason to think smacking it with his shield would solve all his problems. And the Skull was pretty stupid to just pick it up like that, but then he is evil and mad and all.

But the biggest problem comes shortly afterwards, as Cap realises he’s going to have to go down with the ship and says a tearful goodbye to his love interest. He crashes. Then wakes up in the present day, in the very next scene. That’s the end of the movie.

This is simply bad storytelling. All the things the film has apparently been about – you know, heroism, freedom, the American spirit and that – are abruptly chucked away, along with the characters who helped represent it. Because everyone is suddenly forgotten about; the people played by Hayley Atwell and Tommy Lee Jones and the rest are swept under the carpet. What the hell happened to them? The very least we could have had was a few captions letting us know what they went on to do; whether Peggy got married, whether Cap’s crack team of soldiers survived the war. A shot of some sort of memorial to Captain America would have been good. Something to show that his sacrifice was remembered, and had an effect on the people he cared about. (Look at the end of Titanic, where Rose’s photos briefly fill you in on her post-iceberg life, to see what I’m talking about.)

This is doubly necessary because Steve Rogers has not fundamentally changed at all since we met him. He starts out as a decent guy who just wants to do the right thing; he ends up the same way. If a story, even a broad and simplistic one like this, is going to satisfy the audience then it needs to show that the characters have changed. And if the lead can’t change, then we need to see how he has changed others.

Other Marvel movies understand this: Iron Man, Thor, Spider-Man all have lessons to learn in order to become heroes. That’s why those films (even Iron Man II, just about) satisfy as films in their own right. But Captain America doesn’t: what could have been a perfectly entertaining adventure is turned into nothing more than a two hour trailer for The Avengers, for which we’ve been charged the price of a normal ticket. I'd hoped for, and expected, more.

Edinburgh 2011 reviews continued

2011-06-21T14:23:00.000+01:00

Albatross: Enjoyable coming of age yarn that plays a little like Tamara Drewe, though for my money it's a lot more entertaining. The middle aged writer this time is Sebastian Koch, still living off and haunted by the success of his debut novel a couple of decades previously. The object of his desire is Emilia (Jessica Brown-Findlay), a free spirit, aspiring writer and new best friend to his daughter Beth (Felicity Jones).

Emilia is a gift of a role for Brown-Findlay, who will deservedly get a lot more work from this film (I was trying to remember what I recognised her from - turned out to be an episode of Misfits, though she was also in Downton Abbey). Koch and Jones are also strong, as is Julia Ormonds as Beth's bitter mother. It is perhaps a bit too tidily structured (it's like, everyone in the film has an albatross round their neck, yeah?) but a very worthwhile watch nonetheless.

Rabies: This Israeli horror starts like many a torture porn flick: a young woman is caught in a trap in the woods, a young man is struggling to free her, a killer is on the prowl. Once the rest of the characters turn up - two couples looking for a tennis club, a couple of cops - it becomes more of a black comedy. On those terms it works pretty well, though it does stretch credulity that so many stupid people could show up in the same remote spot in such a tight time period. The film has some decent jumps among the running around in the woods, and a good punchline, but the high level of fuckwittery on display makes you want to throttle many of the characters.

Troll Hunter: The hotly anticipated found footage comedy horror from Norway. A trio of students are attempting to make a film about an apparent poacher: it's not really spoiling things to say he turns out to be a troll hunter, secretly employed by the Norwegian authorities to manage the country's troll population.

My expectations for this were probably too high, and I suspect I'll like it more on a second viewing. First time round I felt the need for more scares among the comedy, and a subplot about one of the characters becoming ill ends up going nowhere. But the basic concept is strong, and the trolls themselves are beautifully rendered, looking just like you imagined them in childhood.

The Divide: There seem to be a quite a few apocalypses on screen at Edinburgh this year (apocalypti?), and this is the most depressing. After someone - we never know who - drops a nuke on New York, a group of characters hole up in a bunker under their apartment building to wait for rescue, which doesn't come. Things get gradually worse and worse for them, and the luckless audience. I can't honestly recommend that anyone see this film, but if you want something that crushes all sense of hope and fills you with loathing and contempt for your fellow man, then this certainly does the job.

Finally, The Caller. A slightly odd selection for the Festival - it's not bad by any means, but I'm not clear what it's doing here rather than the shelves of HMV in a box with 'the stars of Twilight and True Blood' plastered across it.

Rachel Lefevre moves into an old apartment after splitting from her violent husband, where she starts getting phone calls from a woman who thinks it's 1977. Our heroine decides it would be a good idea to encourage her to be less of a doormat, only to inadvertantly create a monster - a crazed murderer who who is able to bump off the people she cares about before she's even met them.

It reminded me of Asif Kapadia's The Return, in that it's a straight to DVD premise with greater stylistic aspirations. Lefevre and her love interest Stephen Moyer are both good, but it's one of those films that will work just as well on TV.

Edinburgh 2011 part II

2011-06-20T17:26:00.001+01:00

Interestingly, the first two documentaries I've seen at Edinburgh this year have followed very similar plot arcs. Both concern an individual who is feted from an early age for his unusual intellectual abilities. In both films, the subject becomes a media darling before his unpredictable and aggressive behaviour begins to drive his friends away. He becomes a lonely, tragic individual before a late partial redemption, thanks to old friends and supportive well-wishers, allows him to live out his days in a degree of comfort and security. Both tell their stories through a.mix of archive footage and interviews with people who knew and worked with the subject, who is now deceased.

Also, they're both excellent.

The comparison does fall down in that genius chess player Bobby Fischer- subject of Bobby Fischer Against the World- was brought down by his own paranoia and madness, whereas Nim Chimsky- the primate whose life is explored in Project Nim - was exploited from birth by humans whose motives he could not possibly understand. He was initially part of an experiment to study apes' potential to learn to communicate like humans, being raised in a family like human baby, and taught sign language. Later, as he became too strong and unpredictable to control, he ended up in an animal experimentation lab.

A number of his teachers clearly feel a degree of guilt for the part they played in Nim's unnatural life (though the project's originator might benefit from a little more self awareness). Nim's essential powerlessness makes his story the more emotionally affecting of the two, but both films are highly recommended.

Edinburgh 2011 reviews

2011-06-15T16:59:00.002+01:00

The first couple of days of screenings here have been a mixed bag. John Michael Macdonald's The Guard turned out to be a fine choice for opening film: a hugely entertaining crowd pleaser which sees In Bruges meet Lethal Weapon. The shared lineage with the former film is evident throughout; not only are the directors brothers, there's the presence of Brendan Gleeson, on top form with the hilariously sweary dialogue. Here, Gleeson's deceptively undistinguished Garda officer is teamed with Don Cheadle's FBI agent to track down team of drug smugglers led by Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong.
The Argentine end of the world drama Phase 7 had it's moments, but some odd shiftsin tone meant I couldn't enjoy it as much as I would have liked. As society collapses under the onslaught of a deadly virus, a young couple hole up in their apartment block while their neighbours take up arms against each other.
The scenario is played mostly straight, but with occasional jarring lurches into black comedy and slapstick that do little more than diffuse tension. Worse, the central couple are quite annoying - he guy is petulant and unreliable, while the woman spends most of her time complaining (often with some cause, but still). I was also distracted by the score, which is a homage (or rip off, if you're feeling less charitable) of John Carpenter's back catalogue. I've seen worse, but it's not a total success.
Much better is Tomboy, a tween variant on Boy's Don't Cry, from Water Lillies director Celine Sciamma. Lead character, a 10 year old girl called Laure, moves house and impulsively pretends to the local kids that she's a boy. It's very plausible at first - lead Zoe Heran is remarkable, and the film actually conceals her gender for the first 10 minutes - but the illusion proves harder and harder to maintain, and you're soon dreading the inevitable. A moving, believable film with a collection of superb child performances.
The Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr makes films for people who find the works of Ingmar Bergman to be on the frenetic side. Turin Horse, which may apparently be his final work, is described in the programme this: "In Turin in 1889, the philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche stopped a cab driver from whipping his horse and promptly collapsed, spending hs remaining years in more or less demented silence." Quite what this has to do with the events we seeon screen I'm unclear, though "demented silence" is certainly how the two main characters live. A man and his adult daughter living in an isolated house on a permanently windswept plain, we see then going about their daily routine: feeding the horse, cleaning, cooking (their diet consists of boiled potatoes and nothing else).
Gradually we become aware that something is wrong: a neighbour visits with warnings of doom, the horse become sick and refuses to eat. Just what apocalyptic events are unfolding we never learn: we simply observe the two people descend into silent, baffled despair.
Tarr - who has also programmed some vintage Hungarian cinema for this year's EIFF - can only be described as an acquired taste. His work makes no concessions to those who enjoy such things as plot and dialogue. You have to be willing to immerse yourself in his bleak, black and white, doom-laden visions to get any kind of pleasure from this film; not everyone will be willing to make that kind of leap.

Some thoughts on the BBFC ban of Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence

2011-06-06T19:57:00.000+01:00

So the BBFC have banned Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence. It’s very rare for them to refuse a certificate outright – it’s usually a matter of a few cuts, often to achieve a lower certificate. But this time it’s a flat no. Nobody in the UK will be able to watch the film legally. And my first thought was: Oh, thank fuck for that.

This disturbed me a bit, because I think of myself as being someone opposed to censorship of this nature. Certification, sure, making it clear that some material isn’t suitable for children – don’t have a problem with that. But telling adults that they aren’t grown up enough to watch a film, one that consists of a made up story performed by actors in the process of which nobody was hurt? That’s just not on.

My feeling was always that you’re either against censorship or you’re not. It’s no good being against it until you run into something you personally find offensive; that’s easy. It’s arguing for the right of people to watch (or read, or hear) material that turns your stomach that’s the challenge. And I used to be able to do that; I’ve no desire to see I Spit On Your Grave, for example (either the original or the recent-ish remake) but I’m happy to accept the makers’ assurances that its not intended as porn for rape fantasists and allow it to be seen by consenting grown ups. Years ago, I went to see Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer partly because of the trouble it had getting a UK certificate. More recently, I went to a screening of Last House on the Left at the ICA, aware that it might be my only chance to see it (it’s since been released uncut on DVD). It was horrible, but given the subject matter it should be.

This was partly because my interest in film started forming at around the time when a fair few of the films I would have liked to see were banned. I hadn’t really noticed the Video Nasties furore, which led to the passing of the 1984 Video Recordings Act; I was just a couple of years too young to take an interest. I only really found out about it a few years later, when I picked up a copy of Martin Barker’s book The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media. This was how I discovered the reasons why I wasn’t allowed to see (among others) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Exorcist.

I was particularly suspicious because of the sort of people who were making these decisions for me; they seemed to be ghastly Bible-bashers of the James Anderton variety, or hysterical ‘think of the children’ types. None of them seemed to speak for me, or have any grasp of the kind of films I was interested in.

But Human Centipede 2 is something else. It’s partly because I’m getting older; unrelenting misery and nihilism just doesn’t seem as clever to me as it did when I was a sixth former. Call me a big old softy, but I like a happy ending, or at least a glimmer of hope (which is why I still enjoy the Saw films: Jigsaw’s trying to help those people, not kill them!). I found Human Centipede 1 to be a thoroughly repugnant film, one that depressed me just by existing. Yet it’s apparently a picnic compared to the follow up, which the BBFC press release tells us “Unlike the first film, the sequel presents graphic images of sexual violence, forced defecation, and mutilation, and the viewer is invited to witness events from the perspective of the protagonist. Whereas in the first film the ‘centipede’ idea is presented as a revolting medical experiment, with the focus on whether the victims will be able to escape, this sequel presents the ‘centipede’ idea as the object of the protagonist’s depraved sexual fantasy.”

I certainly won’t lose any sleep from being denied the opportunity to see that. But looking at the extended plot description, I can’t help wondering if there isn’t something more going on here than the desire to shock. The BBFC release tells us the story is about “a man who becomes sexually obsessed with a DVD recording of the first film and who imagines putting the ‘centipede’ idea into practice... [there is] a scene early in the film in which he masturbates whilst he watches a DVD of the original Human Centipede film, with sandpaper wrapped around his penis, and a sequence later in the film in which he becomes aroused at the sight of the members of the ‘centipede’ being forced to defecate into one another’s mouths, culminating in sight of the man wrapping barbed wire around his penis and raping the woman at the rear of the ‘centipede’...”

What’s interesting is that the first film is here presented as a fictional work, and the villain is one of its viewers. It’s worth asking what director Tom Six is up to. Is he simply looking for a way to outdo the first film, or is he deliberately asking viewers to identify with his lead character? If so – if he has switched to making his torturer into the viewer’s point of identification, something you couldn’t say of the first film – is he implicating the people who watched and enjoyed his previous work?

From this perspective, Human Centipede 2 sounds closer to something like Michael Haneke’s Funny Games than anything else. Maybe he’s telling us that anyone who enjoyed the first film must be sick in the head. In that case, perhaps he’d agree with the BBFC’s ban.

The public mood changes over the years; many of the formerly banned video nasties have re-emerged uncut on DVD. Some can still shock, but in many cases you would wonder what all the fuss was about. Maybe the same thing will happen to Human Centipede 2; it’s hard to say, as I’m not allowed to see it. Perhaps I’d better keep an eye out for downloadable versions. That, or just shrug it off and accept that I’ve started to turn into a Tory.

Edinburgh 2011

2011-05-22T19:41:00.000+01:00

So with about a month to go before it starts, the Edinburgh Film Festival programme has been released. And it’s... interesting.

This year’s EIFF has been hit by funding cuts – a deal with the UK Film Council to support the move to June ended last year – and it’s noticeably smaller than before. Big premieres are noticeably by their absence (there’s no closing night film, for example, and no Best of the Fest on the final Sunday... maybe they’re not anticipating many sellouts). More puzzlingly, there’s no Michael Powell Award for Best British Film, which was something that made Edinburgh stand out from the rash of festivals, and can’t have encouraged the submission of potentially major films.

One film widely expected to be in the programme was We Need to Talk about Kevin, starring as it does EIFF Patron Tilda Swinton. Unfortunately, it’s late 2011 UK release date means Artificial Eye are holding it back – a perfectly sensible decision from their point of view (a UK premiere at the London Film Festival will make more sense), and there’s nothing new about big Cannes titles failing to show up in Edinburgh.

The Festival has retreated entirely from the Cineworld to the Cameo and Filmhouse (plus a few others). No doubt some will see this as a good thing – there is grumbling from the some sections of the press every year about having to see films in a multiplex usually patronised by – shudder – ordinary cinemagoers. To this I say, bollocks. Quite apart from the fact that a Festival of this nature ought to be reaching out to the non-Sight and Sound reading contingent, the Cineworld is a perfectly acceptable venue. Certainly, after a few screenings on the trot in the cramped and often stifling Filmhouse 1, I invariably find myself thinking wistfully of its generous leg room and air conditioning.

Given that last years EIFF was widely reported to have seen a drop in audiences (though by how much, and how it compared to the Festival’s last year in August, I don’t know; can anyone point me to the info?) it will be interesting to see how the organisers spin the eventual ticket sales for 2011. I’m not suggesting that ticket sales are the only indicator of a Festival’s success, but if last year’s event is being tagged by some as a disappointment, how will they react to an inevitable drop in a Festival almost half the size of its predecessor?

So, what have we got? The theme is ‘All That Heaven Allows’, which means... um... well, I’m not sure, really. It does involve a screening of the Douglas Sirk film of the same name, though. And it has involved films being picked by a number of guest curators. Some of these are very interesting choices; Bela Tarr, for example. He’s programmed Passion, a 1955 Hungarian version of The Postman Always Rings Twice. I can’t imagine getting too many other chances to see that. But there are quite a lot of guest curators, and they only seem to have picked one or two titles each. I would have preferred to have seen a more substantial selection from one or two curators.

But that’s enough grumbling; what am I actually looking forward to seeing? Well, The Guard looks like a promising pick for the opening night. I rarely get a must-see feeling about big screen documentaries, but a sensible link up with Sheffield’s documentary festival has created a strong non-fiction strand; my top picks are Bobby Fischer Against the World, Sound it Out (about an independent record shop) and Project Nim, from James Man on Wire Marsh. Studio Ghibli bring us the Mary Norton adaptation The Borrower Arietty (though the purist in me is vaguely resentful we seem to be getting the dubbed version). There’s The Last Circus, the new Alex de la Iglesia, and a number of horror/fantasy titles; I’m most anticipating Norwegian mockumentary Troll Hunter, but there’s also the Argentine end of the world tale Phase 7, and something called Rabies, about which the brochure seems oddly sheepish (“Horror fans will love this”, we’re assured, though it’s “silly”).

But brochure copy only tells you so much; the jury will remain out (even though Edinburgh doesn’t have a jury this year) until we’ve been able to see the films. It’s a big year for the EIFF, one the organisers readily describe as being transitional, and I’m hoping it will work. Either way, it will be interesting to see the choices the Festival makes for its future.

Island

2011-04-20T19:19:00.000+01:00

Island is one of those low-budget, defiantly arthouse British films that impress just by existing, but which you can’t wholeheartedly suggest people rush out and see.

Adapted by Elizabeth Mitchell (who also co-directs, with Brek Taylor) from a novel by Jane Rogers, it starts with a voiceover by Nikki (Natalie Press), stating, “When I was 29, I decided to kill my mother.” Mother is Phyllis Lovage (Janet McTeer), who lives in an isolated cottage on the titular Hebridean land mass with her son Calum (Colin ‘Merlin’ Morgan). Brought up in foster care, Nikki has discovered her mother’s identity and is intent on getting some answers, and possibly taking a violent revenge for her lost childhood.

Island is billed as a fairytale thriller, and that was probably why I couldn’t get too involved with it. It relies a lot for its atmosphere on shots of the foreboding Scottish landscape, probably too much (though I was at a disadvantage here, watching a screener DVD on TV; I don’t doubt that this aspect would work better on the big screen.) I’m tempted to suggest that the landscape did quite a bit of the first-time directors’ work for them, but that might be too harsh. While I found some of the dialogue scenes to be flatly shot, there are a number of visual moments that come close to the otherworldly feel the film is reaching for – in particular one fog-bound scene that I initially took for a dream sequence, and moments when Nikki’s drawings spring to animated life.

The small cast is strong, but they can’t make their characters feel like real people. They are kept isolated from any wider community – we never see anything of Nikki’s life in London, and even the villagers of the island are confined to a few cameo appearances. It’s difficult to care whether Nikki will murder her mother or not. Theoretically Nikki is becoming fascinated by the island, to the point of believing the fairy tales Calum narrates for her, but the script is too thinly written to really sell the change. Consequently there are few surprises as the film moves toward what the Screen International review accurately describes as “the expected mildly shocking ending”.

The film is being released in the UK by Soda Pictures through the New British Cinema Quarterly scheme (http://www.nbcq.co.uk/), which last year proved its worth by bringing us the excellent Skeletons. NBCQ films are given small releases, typically with the cast and/or crew touring independent venues across the country to support the film with Q&As. This strategy is the best chance for a film like Island, which would otherwise go unseen outside festivals, to find an audience; it sounds harsh, but I find it is sometimes more interesting to hear about the process of completing a film like this than it is to actually watch it (I don’t doubt that it’s hard work getting something completed just so that people like me can damn it with faint praise on the internet). That said, though I felt the film fell short of its aims, I’d certainly prefer to have British films like Island make it into cinemas rather than another gangster/football hooligan B-movie aimed at the DVD market. More details of screenings can be found here: http://theseachange.wordpress.com/

Limitless

2011-03-16T21:07:00.000Z

Warning: this review contains spoilers. Sorry. Couldn't really discuss it without talking about the ending.

Bradley Cooper discovers that the drugs do work, and extremely well, in this watchable thriller that doesn’t seem quite sure which side it’s on.

Cooper plays Eddie Morra, a failing writer freshly dumped by his exasperated girlfriend (Abbie Cornish, who is almost completely wasted in this). He happens to bump into his ex-wife’s brother who slips him a sample of MDT, a new pill that allows the user to access 100% of the mind’s ability. Unfortunately, it turns out that the pills aren’t quite as legal as Eddie had been led to believe, and he soon finds himself in possession of a large but finite stash on which he is becoming increasingly dependent, and which quite a lot of other people will kill to possess.

This feels at first like a spin on the Faust story – someone given everything they ever wanted, with no apparent strings attached. Eddie wins back his girl, becomes a successful writer, and starts to make millions on the stock market. But of course there’s going to be a price to pay, sooner or later; we know that, even if the opening scene hadn’t made it explicit.

Much of the film is good. There are twists; the identity of the person or persons following Edgar is kept well concealed – and director Neil Burger is particularly strong on the disorienting effect of the drug as Eddie starts to lose chunks of his memory. The difficulty is that Edgar is not a particularly sympathetic character. He starts out as a self-absorbed loser, becomes a drug-dependent overachieve, and at one point appears to have killed a woman (he can’t remember, and seems more concerned with the possibility of being arrested than with the idea that he might be guilty). Cooper’s movie star looks and a degree of charm allows him to carry us with him to an extent (Shia LaBeouf was apparently up for the role at one time, which would have been a different story) but even so, we want to see him brought down and learn his lesson.

But here’s what’s curious: he doesn’t. He merely learns how to control his intake of the drug to prevent ill effects. By the end he claims not to be using, but it’s unclear (presumably deliberately) from Cooper’s performance if this is true or not. Which begs the question: what has he learned? How has he grown as a character? He’s standing for public office, but for which party? What are his campaign goals and promises? Is he simply out for his own glory, or is he planning to use his influence to make the world a better place?

We’re not told. Consequently, Limitless becomes the tale of a man who achieves incredible success, fame and wealth by taking illegal drugs and getting away with it. Which somehow seems a little... odd.

My Oscar predictions

2011-02-26T18:47:00.000Z

This year’s Oscars have a pretty good selection of films up for awards; it’s so good, in fact, that I worry a bit that the next six months will see nothing but crap released (bit of a worry when you run a cinema). Whereas the Golden Globes were reduced to nominating The Tourist, and the BAFTAs managed to miss the fact that Winter’s Bone had even been released, the Oscars have managed to avoid any obvious omissions, and are pretty low on undeserving nominations. I’ve seen all the Best Picture nominees except The Kids Are All Right, so I’m having a crack at predicting the results of the major awards.

I’ll start with the no brainers. Natalie Portman clearly has Best Actress in the bag, and that’s in a year when she had a lot of strong competition (after Edinburgh this year I was certain Jennifer Lawrence had already nailed it). She’s the perfect candidate in that great things have been predicted for her since Leon, but she’s never really given the performance everyone thought she was capable of (possibly because the right role just hasn’t come along). Black Swan itself may be love it or hate it (I loved it myself) but most would agree this is a triumphant turn by someone who always seems like a nice person. I don’t think anyone (well, maybe Annette Bening) would begrudge her the award.

Similarly, it seems pretty clear that it’s Colin Firth’s turn. He’s come close before, so he’s shown patience and earned his spurs. And he is genuinely very good in The King’s Speech.

As for the rest, I would like to see The Social Network run off with the bulk of categories. However, it’s facing the twin threat of a reliable, very well made, traditional British costume drama on one side and a reliable, very well made, traditional American costume drama on the other (King’s Speech and True Grit). I might be wrong, but I suspect the Academy hive mind will share the awards out between these two, though I wouldn’t want to guess which will get Best Picture, with a smattering for the others. Aaron Sorkin should get something for the screenplay, but that could well be the lot.

The Supporting Actor/Actress awards are tougher to call. This is The Fighter’s best chance of picking up an award (well, unless it gets Best Sound Editing or one of the others that nobody really cares about) so it's supporters may well decide to concentrate their votes here. However, I will be actively enraged if Christian Bale gets something for his manic, scene hogging turn. I don’t care how close he is to the real person he’s playing; it’s too big for the film. But they love giving Oscars to people who play real people, and Bale is generally seen as Oscar worthy. Just not for this one, please. Similarly, though I’ve been a fan of Melissa Leo since her time in Homicide: Life on the Street, her turn in The Fighter is pitched to match Bale’s, and therefore becomes part of the problem.

I would rather see John Hawkes rewarded for Winter’s Bone, and Hailee Steinfield for True Grit (even though she’s playing the lead and should not, therefore, be in this category). But I wouldn't be totally surprised if the King’s Speech juggernaut takes these as well.

For director I would pick David Fincher, but the Coens will probably take it, leaving Original Screenplay for The King’s Speech. Not an ideal split, but at least the nominations are fairly spread over a good selection of films, so everyone will have something good to put on the DVD covers.

A small lament for the death of FU

2011-02-26T14:02:00.000Z

This morning, like most other mornings, I went online via my phone to have a quick look at any new posts on Film Unlimited, the film section of The Guardian’s talkboards. Only to find it wasn’t there. Someone had killed it overnight.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so surprised. There were rumours about it a few years ago, and I had noticed the ‘talk’ link had recently disappeared from the menu of the main Guardian film site; but that’s happened before and FU survived, so I just altered my bookmarks and thought nothing more of it. Little did I realise that the End Times were upon us.

I’ve been posting on FU for seven years (I remember my first post was on The Passion of the Christ, so it was easy to check the date). I had tried to start earlier; I first registered during the BBC2 run of 24 season 2, because the thread for that show was hilarious and I wanted to join in. Unfortunately the registration process took so baffling long that by the time Frank100 was up and running, the season had ended.

In that time, it’s been rare that I’ve gone more than 24 hours without checking in. I haven’t always posted, but I’ve always been reading. The number of regular posters in that time has always been fairly small, but that’s partly why I liked FU so much – it was relatively easy to get to know who was who (although people would sometimes switch usernames, causing temporary confusion) and to tune in to the various in jokes. Maybe that did make the place feel cliquey on occasion, but it was the right kind of cliquey, if you see what I mean (and newbies were hardly unwelcome, so long as they could get past being asked if they were Wolfie). Some of those people I’ve since met in real life; others I’ve only spoken with on the boards, but they feel like friends anyway.

Some of my personal highlights since have been TV threads for Harper’s Island and the Andrew Lloyd Webber talent shows, being a temporary dictator, and occasionally finding hundreds of new posts on a thread and realising there’d been an almighty row overnight. On the morning of the 7/7 attacks, FU was the best place to get updates on what was happening in central London. People were always ready with advice, and when I received a misaddressed threatening letter from an amusingly inept stalker a few years ago my first thought was, “Ooh, I must tell people on FU about this.” The releases threads were saved, going back years, and only last week I tracked down the thread for The Ruins after watching that film for the first time on TV. Good stuff was happening right up to the end, with the True Grit thread being busy yesterday. All of it gone, presumably forever. It’s hard to believe I’ll never be able to read that Lost in Translation thread again.

I’m sure the Graun had valid reasons for axing the Boards, and for doing so without any warning worthy of the term. There are other places on the web to gather; I’ve followed a further dozen or so FUers on Twitter so far today, and most followed me back in minutes. Nothing’s really changed, except that the Guardian has lost a little bit of my loyalty. But I’m feeling a tiny bit bereft all the same.

Paul

2011-02-03T11:59:00.000Z

An amiable ramble down the highways of UFOlogy, Paul has writers/stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost doing their geek bromance routine in America. Blending the genre parodies of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead with Judd Apatow style frat comedy, it’s a likeable enough piece that could maybe have tried a little bit harder.

Edgar Wright being busy elsewhere, the director is Greg Mottola (Superbad and the excellent Adventureland), with fellow comedy regular Seth Rogen providing the voice of the titular Grey alien. On the run from Jason Bateman’s Man in Black, Paul chances across Graeme Willy (Pegg) and Clive Gollings (Frost), two SF fans touring the UFO hotspots of America in a rented RV, and hotches a ride to the planned rendezvous with his people.

The main reason Shaun and (to a slightly lesser extent) Hot Fuzz worked was because the scripts were good. It didn’t matter if you’d never seen the films they riffed on, because the characters felt three dimensional, if broad. Paul doesn’t hold up quite so well. The two leads are affectionately drawn, but slightly too obvious: nervous around women, fond of comics, shielding themselves in fantasy. It’s a little closer to the average person’s view of Comic Con attendees than it needs to be. The matey camaraderie between the two helps (you suspect the trip is a dream come true for the actors as well as the characters). The script also falls into the trap of quoting other films, verbally and visually, as a wink to the fanboys in the audience so frequently that it becomes irritating rather than funny.

But these are minor points; my one major reservation about the script is that it takes the route of making the local small town folk the lads encounter to be bible and/or queer-bashing rednecks, which just feels lazy. Worse, there’s a peculiar plot strand in which Paul proves to Simon Pegg’s love interest (Kristen Wiig) that God doesn’t exist, and all the beliefs she was raised with are wrong. There’s no debate about this: the film takes it for granted that everyone watching will share this worldview and be ready to laugh at anyone who doesn’t. It’s a peculiar attitude for a comedy to adopt, and one which will surely cost it some potential ticket sales, particular in the areas where it’s set (I can’t wait to read the capalert review).

If you can get past that, there’s plenty of entertainment to be had. A terrific support cast includes Sigourney Weaver, Jeffrey Tambor, and Bill Hader and Joe Lo Truglio as Bateman’s stooges. These last two provide a lot of the biggest laughs. And Paul himself is an impressive bit of CGI.

Paul is one of those films you can’t actively dislike, and it benefits greatly from picking up the pace in the last act. It’s a shame that so many of the best gags are in the trailer, though there is some material on Paul’s influence on popular culture that I enjoyed a lot. Overall, a fair crowdpleaser that should find an audience among those with no religious sensibilities whatsoever.

Top 10 2010

2010-12-15T18:31:00.000Z

This year I’ve seen 125 films; 115 in one of 21 various cinemas and another on screeners and in various video rooms. I imagine I’ll squeeze in a couple more before 31 December, but unless Tron: Legacy turns out to be much less shite than I anticipate, my top 10 list of the year is pretty much set.

It might look a bit different if I’d manage to catch everything I wanted, but inevitably one or two of the limited releases slipped through my fingers (Uncle Boonmee and Still Walking being chief among them). Anyway, the ten have been arrived at without much in the way of deep thought – I’ve basically picked the ones I enjoyed most at the time, and arranged them in an approximate order. The top five, I think, are essential viewing; the rest maybe less so, but all provide solid entertainment that’s more interesting than average.

Tenth place was a struggle, and I nearly bottled the choice by replacing it with a whole bunch of runner ups. But in the end, The Illusionist, The Runaways, The Last Exorcism and The Town all had to settle for honourable mentions. No doubt they’re gutted.

10. Skeletons

A film I very nearly walked out of after about 20 minutes, but thankfully stuck with. A very peculiar British fantasy comedy drama it’s certainly not for everyone, but edges out the competition by being completely its own thing.

9. The Secret in Their Eyes

One of those films that was greatly enjoyed by an audience you suspect might have shunned it had it not been subtitled. Never mind, it was melodramatic tosh but I enjoyed it greatly for all that.

8. Dogtooth

7. Monsters

This gets pretty much everything right, starting with a first appearance by a monster that's as exciting as the one in The Host. After that we spend more time with the two leads than with the aliens, which is fine as they're both very likeable and they're traveling through some lovely scenery. Unfortunately I have some issues with the ending; I had been hoping throughout that they wouldn't go that cynical horror movie route where you think everyones survived and then they haven't. But they did.

6. Inception

My top ten usually has space for the year’s best blockbuster, and this was 2010s. An original screenplay (well, original in the sense that it’s not based on a comic book or another film – obviously it has its own antecedents), excellent cast and loads of cool visuals make it superior multiplex fodder.

5. Mother

A Bong Joon-Ho film is worth watching pretty much by definition, and if this didn’t seem quite up to his brilliant Memories of Murder it’s only because I now have such high expectations of him.

4. Four Lions

3. Toy Story 3

And the final two, which could easily switch places:

2. The Social Network

1. Winter’s Bone

Some stuff I saw over the weekend

2010-11-18T19:25:00.000Z

A big weekend of films meant I saw rather more Helen Mirren and Guy Pearce than is average for me. Some of the 10 titles I managed to fit in weren’t that great, or offered little unexpected to say – yes, The King’s Speech was excellent and is certainly highly recommended, but that’s hardly a surprise at this point – but there were some unexpected treats too.

Chief among these was Catfish. I went in knowing little about it, and what I did know turned out to be wrong (I’d been mixing it up in my head with a different film). This turned out to be the best way to see it, and I’d advise doing the same if at all possible.

It’s a documentary that follows photographer Nev Schulmann, his filmmaker brother Ariel and their collaborator Henry Joost after Nev strikes up an online friendship with a talented child artist (who has painted a copy of one of his photos and sent it to him). He also becomes close to her family, particularly her older sister. At times it’s fairly uncomfortable viewing, and left me feeling that I was watching something that should have been left private. You can’t help but question the filmmakers’ motives for continuing with the production, though Nev is seen to act with considerable sensitivity and dignity in the later scenes. Some may also wonder if the fly on the wall material is genuine (certainly one person at the screening believed the whole thing to be a scam, not an opinion I share). Either way, it’s a fascinating story.

If you though the only thing wrong with The Reader was that it didn’t have enough guns and fights, then John Maden's The Debt is very much the film for you. Helen Mirren gives some serious accent as Rachel Singer, an ex-Mossad agent whose daughter has written a book about her most famous mission – the capture and killing of a notorious SS war criminal. Cue flashbacks, plot twists, betrayals, the works.

I’d heard bad things about this one, so my expectations were low enough that I actually enjoyed myself. It’s a potboiler, and a rather self-important one, but entertaining for all that.

Mirren also had her classical hat on for The Tempest, Julie Taymor’s latest Shakespeare adaptation, playing the renamed Prospera in a gender swap that works perfectly well. Most of the rest of the cast are good as well: you get that nice Felicity Jones as Miranda, classy US types Chris Cooper and David Strathairn, plus Russell Brand. Brand looks just like he always looks, but is fine in the comic role of Trinculo, and manages (like Mirren) to make Shakespeare’s lines sound like normal dialogue. The only weak link is Reeve Carney as Ferdinand, who really is extraordinarily wet. Given the play’s subtexts though, I’d be interested to know if Taymor thought long and hard before casting Djimon Hounsou as Caliban. I'm not saying it was a bad idea, I'm just interested.

The film looks spectacular. The locations – it was filmed in Hawaii – are stunning, and various scenes are augmented by CGI, most extensively with the transformations of the spirit Ariel (I was reminded of Dave McKean’s film Mirrormask at several points). But you never get a proper sense of the geography of the island. Instead, various groups of actors step out onto the stage, do their scene, and are replaced by others – always a risk with theatrical adaptations, of course.

Finally, another highlight – David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, an excellent Australian crime drama following Josh (James Frecheville), a 17 year old who is taken in by his criminal family when his mother fatally overdoses. Already you can see that the odds are not in his favour, and soon he’s being drawn into his relatives’ nefarious activities – which are notorious enough to draw the attention of the ruthless Armed Robbery Squad. These relatives and their associates range from reasonably decent (Joel Edgerton as Barry, Luke Ford as Darren) to dangerously unpredictable (Ben Mendelsohn as Pope), headed by the thoroughly loathsome mum from hell Janine (Jacki Weaver).

Frecheville plays Josh with a blank-eyed reserve that could initially be mistaken for woodenness, but is in fact a very good portrayal of an inarticulate and confused youth. Guy Pearce is also in there as the cop trying to persuade Josh to stay on the straight and narrow. There’s considerable doubt over which path he’ll take. It’s a terrific feature debut from Michôd.

Burke & Hare

2010-10-27T20:01:00.000+01:00

It starts with the Ealing Studios logo, but while this tale of a lovable pair of graverobbers turned killers shares the black comedy of many Ealing titles, the execution is more akin to a Carry On film. We’re spared the constant double entendres, but do get a long line of cameos from familiar comedy faces (and Michael Winner), some of whom give fairly shonky performances. The opening scene, with our lovable anti-heroes getting splattered with shit, doesn’t really tell the whole story but isn’t a great omen.

Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis star as a pair of Irish chancers trying to earn a dishonest crust in 1820s Edinburgh. Rivalry between the head doctors at the city’s prominent medical teaching institutions creates a gap in the market for fresh bodies for dissection; a gap that Burke and Hare are quick to fill, first by taking advantage of a death by natural causes, then by more nefarious means.

Some might question the taste of turning the story of a pair of murderous into a jolly romp. Not me; I’m sick. But there is a challenge in making the leads both plausible – they turn to crime due to desperate need for money, which is a reasonably current issue – while seeming like people you might like, in order for the audience to care what happens about them. Both Pegg and director John Landis have form in mixing comedy with horror, in Shaun of the Dead and American Werewolf in London respectively. Those films worked because the scripts were good, with characters you both believed in and liked; Shaun and his mates felt like people you might actually meet down the pub, as did the luckless hitchhikers of American Werewolf. Burke & Hare doesn’t have such strong foundations; the thriller element doesn’t particularly excite, and the jokes just aren’t funny enough. The audience I saw it with only managed a few chuckles.

Pegg and Serkis do what they can; Pegg does best with the more morally troubled but easily lead of the two, falling puppyishly in love with actress Isla Fisher. Serkis has the more venal character to play, and works well with his screen wife (Jessica Hynes).

The rest of the cast varies considerably. Tom Wilkinson brings his usual dignity, and a couple of American Werewolf cast members also pop up (I won’t spoil it by telling you who). Against that, we have to suffer Ronnie Corbett, who destroys every scene he’s in as the leader of the militia hunting Burke and Hare. Laboriously delivering every line as though still in a late 70s Two Ronnies sketch doesn’t count as acting, I’m afraid.

The film looks good (I’m a bit of a sucker for anything set in Edinburgh), doesn’t overstay its welcome, and is amiable enough. However, I was hoping for a bit more.

Black Swan

2010-10-25T12:52:00.000+01:00

By some measure the most intense 105 minutes I’ve spent in a cinema this year, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a melodramatic psychological horror that plunges the viewer into the disintegrating mind of a young woman.

Natalie Portman stars as Nina, a driven ballerina whose major career break – the chance to perform the dual roles of the White and Black Swans in Swan Lake – places an intolerable strain on her psyche.

Early on, the company director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassell) helpfully explains the plot of Swan Lake for us, dwelling on the conflict between the good White Swan and her evil lustful twin, the Black Swan. Leroy has no doubt that Natalie is up to the role of the White Swan, but doubts she can embody the wilder, sensuous Black. But he nevertheless decides to give her a chance at the role. She continues to struggle: she constantly strives for perfection, but her idea of perfection is a purely technical one that doesn’t help her inhabit both roles. Egged on by her controlling mother, whose own dance career was cut short when Nina was conceived, Nina clearly has long-term issues with self harm (she scratches herself obsessively, and it’s safe to add anorexia into the mix). She also starts to feel increasingly threatened by Lily, a rival dancer who is... well, more of a Black Swan type.

The plot could have come from a 60s B movie; indeed, I couldn’t shake the idea that a version of the same script made 40 – 50 years earlier would have had Roger Corman and Vincent Price’s names in the credits (though whether Price would have been in the Cassell or Portman role is a question I couldn’t quite resolve). But the execution is another matter. I haven’t seen an Aronofsky film since Pi – not that I’ve particularly tried to avoid his stuff, it’s just sort of happened – so I can’t say if Black Swan is representative of his work (he states in the LFF catalogue that he sees it as a companion piece to The Wrestler, both films being about performers who use their bodies to express their souls). It’s certainly not an easy watch. Not only do we see the appalling punishment to which ballet dancers subject their feet (you want to beg them to take up a safer career, like maybe boxing, or juggling chainsaws while blindfold) but as Nina starts to hallucinate, various nasty things happen to nails in close up. I haven’t had to look away from the screen so often since Saw III.

What the film does brilliantly is oblige us to share Nina’s increasingly shaky grip on reality. It starts early on as Nina glimpses someone on the subway train who appears to be her double; we later discover that this is Lily, who gets off at the wrong stop on her way to her first rehearsal, but we – like Nina – are rattled already. The doppelganger theme continues as Nina feels under attack variously from Lily – who may or may not be seeking to replace her – but from an apparently imaginary double. It’s normally easy to spot which scenes in a film are real (in the context of the narrative) and which are fake. It’s less so in this one.

What really anchors the film is Natalie Portman as Nina; she is superb, and a sure bet for an Oscar nomination. A less committed performance would have sunk the film, leaving us laughing as the plot, and the imagery, becomes ever more hysterical. Portman is absolutely believable as the controlled, repressed, heartbreakingly fragile Nina. Aronofsky’s visual and audio tricks take the film into the realm of madness; his star keeps it firmly believable.

Black Swan is probably not for everyone, and may well be a love it or hate it film. I thought it was amazing, and would absolutely urge anyone interested to see it in a cinema for the most immersive experience possible.

The American

2010-10-25T12:48:00.000+01:00

George Clooney as a hitman dodging bullets in picturesque Italian towns sounds like a winner. However, Anton Corbijn’s follow up to Control takes a more existential route than the average moviegoer might wish.

Clooney stars as a butterfly loving assassin/gun supplier who, in the opening sequence, is targeted by couple of Swedes who have it in for him. Following the ensuing carnage – which includes one jaw-dropping shock moment – he is sent by his boss to Italy to hide out. Here, he hangs out in coffee bars, chats to a local priest, and contemplates the emptiness of his life while getting closer to a prostitute – despite having learned the hard way that friends are a bad idea in his game.

The film looks good, with beautiful locations and a hot cast. Emotionally, though, it’s cold. The film is as taciturn as its lead character, aiming very much for an arthouse atmosphere, even in the action scenes. It would not have been a surprise to see the director’s credit reading, ‘Steven Soderbergh, after Antonini’. I was also reminded of Asif Kapadia's The Warrior, another arthouse flick dressed up – possibly by the marketers rather than the makers – to look like an action thriller.

There’s plenty to admire here, but the general public may feel the film has been missold.

Let Me In

2010-10-14T21:03:00.000+01:00

We already have one adaptation of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Let the Right One In, and those who have seen it generally agree it’s a pretty good one. However, it has the bad luck not to be in English, so here comes Hollywood to provide us with a dumber remake.

Except it’s not dumb. It’s a very impressive film that manages to be loyal to both the source novel and the film, while adding a few extra shades of its own.

It’s interesting to see that this is the first cinema release from the freshly revived Hammer Films (they also have a new logo that uses old poster artwork, in a manner reminiscent of the Marvel Studios one). Hammer weren’t shy of remakes and adaptations in their golden years, though then the choices were usually familiar literary properties like Dracula and Frankenstein (OK, and On the Buses) rather than a recent arthouse hit. But they’ve made a wise move in looking beyond their back catalogue.

Lonely, bullied 12 year old Oscar seems to have made a new friend when a girl calls Abby moves in next door with a man who he assumes to be her father. But after a murder or two, Oscar comes to realise that Abby is not actually 12 – or rather, has been 12 for a very long time – and needs a fresh supply of blood to live.

Matt Reeve’s film has the taste to stay faithful to the visual and narrative style of Tomas Alfredson’s Swedish version; as with Gore Verbinski’s similarly close remake of The Ring, some shots are almost identical. He has also cast two excellent young actors, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Chloe Moretz in the lead roles, with the slightly more experienced Richard Jenkins providing support (his scenes with Moretz are tender and disturbing at the same time). As with The Ring, though, we do have to tolerate a few shots done up with unnecessary effects; Abby’s vampire attacks are sped up and enhanced with CGI, and look cartoony rather than horrific. (She also leaps on one victim in view of a witness who she must have been able to spot, which is a bit of a strange decision). But on the other hand, we lose the cat attack scene that was the original’s least convincing moment.

There are other changes, inevitably. The question about Abby/Eli’s gender has been given the chop (so to speak...) – not a loss newcomers would notice, though it does mean Abby’s question, “Would you like me if I wasn’t a girl”, loses a layer of meaning. But the biggest change comes in one small scene where Oscar finds photos of Abby with a young Father. A tiny moment, but it radically alters the Father’s character and, by implication, Abby’s. The Swedish film is not explicit, but my reading was that the ‘father’, Hakan, was a paedophile recruited by Eli to hunt for her and provide protection (this was confirmed by the novel, which I read subsequently). Making him a childhood friend of Abby’s suggests she may be consciously grooming Oscar as a replacement. I can’t see much sign of this in Moretz’s performance – she seems to be playing the character as written in the original version – so I’d be interested to know why Reeves made this change, and if he discussed its implication with his actors. It actually makes the ending of the film far bleaker than that of the original.

Let Me In may not escape the long shadow cast by its predecessors, but it is nevertheless the best kind of remake: one which stays respectful to the source material while standing firmly on its own.

Never Let Me Go

2010-10-14T18:53:00.000+01:00

The opening film of this year’s London Film Festival is an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s SF-tinged novel, directed by Mark Romanek and starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley as Kathy, Tommy and Ruth. Growing up together in a slightly odd boarding school – initially played by three child actors who look uncannily like their older counterparts, so much so that you half suspect Mulligan has been somehow digitally made younger – the threesome become entwined in a love triangle that plays out against the discovery of their true purpose in life.

The film suffers from the same problem as many literary adaptations: the use of voiceover to fill in chunks of plot. I don’t doubt that this works in the novel, but with Kathy effectively telling the whole story in flashback, the viewer is immediately at one remove from the events on screen: it gets in the way of emotional involvement.

But that’s a relatively minor problem. The big one is that at no point was I convinced by the world portrayed in the film. It’s set in a kind of dystopian alternative England with one foot still in the 1950s, where the use of cloned human beings for enforced organ donation is a fact of everyday life. How the hell does that work? We live in a society where the use of stem cells in cancer research is controversial, where abortion stirs passionate debate, where animal rights activists will adopt techniques usually associated with terrorist groups. Are we really supposed to believe that the general public blithely accept the use of human clones as body banks? They are out in the community, to some extent: certainly, the hospital staff all seem aware of what’s happening. Does nobody try to help these people? Do none of them try to escape?

Other questions I found myself asking: are these organ donations available to all and sundry, or only the wealthy and privileged? The former would presumably lead to a rise in the number of centenarians, so what’s that done to the pensions crisis? And if it’s the latter, if the bulk of the country can’t benefit from these medical advances, they’re surely more likely to indulge in moral qualms about what’s being done to the clones.

If I’m being bothered by questions like these while I’m watching the film, then I tend to think something’s wrong. I’m told by those who have read it that such issues aren’t a problem when reading the book, so maybe Ishiguro makes it work in print in a way that it doesn’t on screen. As it is, the film has to be regarded as a metaphor, with the central trio standing in for whichever exploited group you prefer: slaves, battery hens, take your pick. This is a valid approach, and could allow the film to raise questions about the extent to which any of us are controlled and have our freedoms restricted by the state (Kathy's final voiceover does just this, but too late). But I think screenwriter Alex Garland tried to make the film work as a convincing portrayal of a fascist - or arguably fascist - state, and it doesn't.

But if the film is hollow at the core, it does benefit from some terrific work by the cast, notably Mulligan and Garfield. It’s thanks to their work that the ending does pack a substantial emotional punch. But it should have been much more powerful; the knowledge of the full evil to which these innocents have been subjected should leave you utterly crushed. It doesn’t.

In the end, this is a superbly played, good looking and generally well mounted film that is, sadly, a little inert.

The Social Network

2010-10-10T22:30:00.000+01:00

The creation of the Facebook website did not sound, when I first heard about it, like a particularly gripping subject for a movie. But while the technical details may not enthrall, the story of jealousy and betrayal that lies behind it does.

Jesse Eisenberg stars as Dr Sheldon Cooper... oops, I mean Mark Zuckerberg. In the opening scene, he is dumped by his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) for a combination of arrogance, ambition, and a complete inability to understand why she’s annoyed with him. It sets up the film’s central irony – that a man with so little in the way of social skills managed to create the world’s biggest social networking site, before finding himself being sued by his one close friend. That’s Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who put up the initial funding for the site and helped write the initial code but ultimately found himself squeezed out.

The Social Network is credited as a David Fincher film; but when watching, it feels far more like an Aaron Sorkin film. That’s not to take anything away from Fincher’s work, only to acknowledge that Sorkin’s authorial hand can be sensed throughout. In The West Wing, he showed himself to be one of the few TV writer/producers with a distinctive, even unmistakable dialogue style. There, his favourite trick was to have characters talking about political matters very quickly, intensely and often wittily in order to avoid boring viewers; here, algorithms and coding are debated in the same manner. I don’t really understand what algorithms are (and when I say “not really” I mean “not at all”) and when people in the film don’t answer others because they’re coding, you might just as well tell me they’re communing with the matrix for all the sense it makes to me. But it sounds dramatic. Earlier in the day I’d seen Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which fails utterly to pull off the same trick; whenever the characters started talking about sub-prime, my eyes started to glaze over and I began to ponder more important questions, like what I might have for tea.

As played by Eisenberg, Zuckerberg is something of an enigma. He is variously accused of being an asshole, and of trying to be an asshole; it's left to the viewer to judge which verdict is closer to the truth. His failure to empathise with others reaches almost levels that appear almost autistic; he is consistently rude and condescending to authority figures; yet he appears to regret the loss of his friendship with Saverin, while it’s suggested that much of his motivation came from a desire to disprove Erica’s assessment of him. Indeed, many of the characters go round with sizable chips on their shoulders, stemming from their ethnicity, class or perceived (by themselves or others) social status. Whether these grudges really were behind the multi-million dollar rise of facebook and the subsequent lawsuits, or whether they are dramatic conceits of Sorkin and/or Ben Mezrich (who wrote the book The Accidental Millionaires, on which the screenplay is based) I can only guess. But I would love to know, just as I would love to know Zuckerberg’s honest opinion of the film.

The film is performed superbly by Eisenberg, Mara (who thankfully shows there’s more to her than dodgy 80s horror rehashes, and bodes well for her upcoming role in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo remake) and Justin Timberlake, as the unpredictable Napster founder Sean Parker. Garfield, though excellent as Saverin, does seem a bit too good looking and charismatic to play a nerd who supposedly has trouble getting girls. Still, that’s Hollywood. This is definitely one to like.

The Hole

2010-09-12T18:36:00.000+01:00

Here's something I've been anticipating ever since seeing director Joe Dante's talk at the Edinburgh Film Festival last year (I got my photo taken with him afterwards). The Hole is a pleasingly old fashioned horror(ish) film for kids – and by old fashioned, I mean it’s reminiscent of 80s favourites like Dante’s own Gremlins, Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad and the TV series Eerie, Indiana. There’s even a Dick Miller cameo.

Dane (Chris Massoglia), his mom and his kid brother (Nathan Gamble) move into a new suburban home, where the kids – along with Julie (Hayley Bennett), the hot girl next door – find a mysterious, heavily padlocked trap door in the basement. Naturally, they open it, to find an apparently bottomless hole. It seems to be empty, but before long some of their greatest fears are getting out, and are coming to get them...

The scares are strictly 12A-level. There’s a fair bit of creepy atmosphere-building at first, as odd things start to happen; though only those who share Lucas’s fear of clowns will be disturbed by his scenes, we also get a little ghost girl as disturbing as anything from the J-horror pantheon. (It’s very hard for a scary film to go wrong with little dead girls in my book.) Dane’s nightmare (of his violent father, currently in prison) is a little underwhelming by comparison, and leads to the climax being the film’s weak point. That’s unavoidable, given the film’s message about facing your fears – the threat is inevitably less scary once you look it in the eye than when it’s lurking in the dark. So although Hayley theorises that it’s a bottomless pit to Hell (quite correctly adding, “and that’s really cool,”), The Hole doesn’t go anywhere as nasty as that. I wouldn’t have minded a few more shocks, but that’s being selfish – I certainly wouldn’t wish to keep this film from the young audience it’s aimed at.

Dante also enjoys himself with the 3D, and wants to make sure the audience does too. A fan of the format from way back when, he has no qualms about throwing in every attention-grabbing coming-out-of-the-screen moment he can come up with. The plot lends itself easily to plenty of shots of people looking into, and dropping stuff into, the bottomless pit; rather charmingly, there’s even a shot of a kid on the bed, repeatedly tossing a baseball up toward the camera. It’s like Friday the 13th part III hadn’t happened. While the best bits will hold up fine in 2D, this is a pleasing example of form and content complementing each other.

I hope there’s space in cinemas for The Hole to settle, between the likes of Despicable Me and tween stuff like Twilight. It’s a well-crafted crowdpleaser which will entertain anyone with fond memories of the 80s fantasy/adventure films that generally had Dante and/or Steven Spielberg’s names on. And, if they’ve any taste, it’ll please their kids as well.

Tamara Drewe

2010-09-08T10:14:00.000+01:00

Someone seems to have been on autopilot throughout the making of this adaptation of Posy Simmond's graphic novel take on Far From the Madding Crowd... and we have to assume that someone is director Stephen Frears. Scene follows scene in a leisurely manner, without any kind of drive or pace developing. Small wonder the local kids moan that nothing ever happens in their village - despite the incidents in the plot, that's very much how it feels to the viewer.

It's not the fault of the cast, who all seem to be putting the effort in. Standouts are Tamsin Greig as Beth, long-suffering wife of philandering author Nicholas Hardiman (Roger Allam), while Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie as meddling teens Jody and Casey give zestful performances.

Dominic Cooper, on the other hand, can't make his cartoony rock star seem anything like a real person, and unfortunately nor can Gemma Arterton in the title role. Tamara Drewe is something of a blank; we really only see her through the (mostly lustful) eyes of others, and consequently don't get to know her. The script tells us bits about her history, but these glimpses never add up to a full person. It might have helped if we got to hear more of her own writing - everyone in the film is presumably familiar with her column - but the film doesn't share her inner voice with us. Maybe this is deliberate - I seem to remember feeling the same way about her character in the book, which I haven't read since its original serialisation in The Guardian - but if so, I'm not convinced everyone involved in the making of the film was aware of it.

Not an unwatchable film, then (and unlike Frears' last, Cheri, I at least stayed awake) but for a film ostensibly about lust and desire, it's an oddly passionless affair.

Hollywood Endings

2010-08-23T09:14:00.000+01:00

Alexandre Aja’s remake of Piranha is, for the most part, tremendous trashy fun. It has no pretensions to be anything other than an unashamed B-movie, with plenty of gratuitous gore and even more gratuitous nudity. I sometimes get depressed by nudity in films – it too often feels like a sop to a perceived audience of teenage boys who don’t get to see the real thing yet, and I feel bad for the actress whose only role in the film is to get her tits out and then get killed. But the nudity in Piranha is so frequent and blatant, so completely over the top that it punches through the barrier of offensiveness to be become almost innocent fun. There are so many breasts on view that after a while you stop noticing them.

But there’s one thing that let the film down for me, and that’s the ending. (Warning: spoilers for Piranha, and several other films, follow.)

Piranha follows what seems to be an increasing number of films in not having a proper ending: it just stops in what is, to all intents and purposes, the middle of a scene. The strategy is to make the audience think the film is over, and the threat has passed, only to pull the rug suddenly out from under them before the end credits crash in. In this case, just as we think our heroes have escaped being eaten by the piranhas, the Basil Exposition character (Christopher Lloyd) rings up to say they were in fact only babies. On cue, a giant – almost mega – adult piranha leaps from the water and swallows the male lead. End of film.

Obviously, twist endings aren’t new. Nor is the habit of horror movies suggesting that the evil has only temporarily been vanquished and will rise again at some indeterminate point in the future – whether that’s revealed by a shot of another baby alligator being flushed into the sewers, or a shot of Freddy Kreuger apparently reflected in a fountain. That’s fine. But with Piranha, we’re left asking – is that the only adult fish? Are all the other characters about to be eaten? Will that include the two children?

This, to my mind, is just bad storytelling; a cheap and lazy trick to play on the audience. It’s not that I object to downbeat endings. Although it’s true that as I get older and more sentimental I prefer at least a ray of hope at the end of a horror movie, sometimes an unhappy ending feels right. Take The Descent, which (at least in the UK) ends with the heroine alone in the caves, lost and apparently mad, as the monsters close in. This felt like the ending to which the film had been building all along; it played fair with the audience. (Shame they couldn’t stick to it; it would have spared us the redundant sequel.) Similarly, the Saw films regularly conclude with a doomed character realising, too late, all the ways they could have avoided becoming one of Jigsaw’s victims.

Piranha’s approach follows any number of other films: the first Friday the 13th, the original Nightmare on Elm Street (a film which famously struggled to get its ending right, and didn’t succeed). Brian de Palma’s Carrie has one of the most famous shock endings, though this is at least revealed to be a dream sequence.

The recent wave of 70s remakes seemingly delight in following the same pattern, so faithfully that you wonder if idiot producers have come to believe it’s a necessary part of the formula. The Hills Have Eyes (also the work of Aja) pulls back to reveal the surviving family members being watched by another mutant, suggesting that their fight isn’t over yet. The recent version of The Crazies pulls pretty much the same trick, though this one asks us to believe the US government is now planning to wipe out an entire city and try to cover it up; I don’t see them pulling that one off. Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead at least has the hope-crushing scenes play out under the end credits, which feels more honest that the “Ha ha! Gotcha!” approach of Piranha.

The Final Destination films love doing this, and one of the reasons that the second is my favourite of the series is that you can still read the ending as having the two lead characters survive. The two following films don’t even bother to pretend there’s any chance of the characters making it to the end, which severely lessens the suspense, and therefore the fun, of the film. The most recent, The Final Destination, is so uninterested in its characters that we learn virtually nothing about them – are they still in High School? College? Gainful careers? Do they have families? Who cares, they’ll all be dead meat in 85 minutes.

Ultimately, this kind of approach cheapens the film. If you want audiences to become involved in your story, however hackneyed it is, they have to care about at least some of the characters and want them to survive. Even a movie like Piranha, which is silly and shallow (that’s not a criticism in context), should take you on an emotional journey with the hero and/or heroine. The audience should feel a degree of empathy. To have that snatched away for the sake of cheap jolt makes a joke of that involvement, as though the filmmakers are mocking you for giving a shit. Hollywood: please stop doing it.

Scott Pilgrim vs the World

2010-08-18T09:15:00.000+01:00

Most comic book adaptations require the viewer to buy into a fantasy world. Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs the World asks us to accept two. First, there’s the cooler-than-cool muso slacker lifestyle of Scott and his friends – OK, maybe not technically a fantasy in the usual sense of the word, though from where I’m sitting it might as well be. Then there’s the way the story is told through a series of OTT fights, fantasy scenes and magic realism, as Scott faces various romantic challenges as though they were levels of a video game.

If you aren’t willing to accept either level of fantasy, then Scott Pilgrim will be something of a chore. If you can, it’s great fun.

Scott Pilgrim shares a flat with his gay friend Wallace Wells, plays in a band called Sex Bob-omb, and is still only just recovering from a traumatic dumping a year previously. Then he meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) the girl of his dreams (literally; he’s already dreamt about her, thanks to Ramona taking a handy short cut through his head). Just as their relationship is starting to blossom, Scott learns that Ramona has some major baggage in the form of 7 evil exes, who Scott must fight and defeat in order to win her hand.

I wasn’t sure about Michael Cera as Scott at first. We’re told that he’s really cool and awesome, but as Cera plays him as nervy and uncertain as every other character he’s played, it’s hard to judge if we’re meant to take this seriously. His portrayal works better once Ramona enters the picture and we see Scott desperate to impress her. Other cast members hit the right note of droll irony and/or broad comedy as required. Favourites include Chris Evans as a star of knucklehead Hollywood action movies, Kieran Culkin (who seems to be turning into Alan Tudyk, rather surprisingly) as Wallace and Alison Pill as Sex Bob-omb drummer Kim Pine, who looks as though she was drawn by a comic book artist.

The fact that a new partner may have weightier baggage than initially apparent is something most people would be able to relate to and you could, if you wished, see the fantasy battles of the film as metaphors: Scott’s image of his struggle to live up to Ramona’s memory of her former partners, filtered through his reference points of video games and music. But that would mean accepting the whole film as being told by someone who could be a very unreliable narrator indeed, so it’s probably best to just relax and enjoy the visual overload. The laughs started early at the screening I attended, with the videogame style rendering of the universal logo; other crowd pleasers included the explanation for Evil Ex Brandon Routh’s superpowers.

Scott Pilgrim is certainly not the most emotionally satisfying film about fighting for your one true love (I didn’t much care which girl Scott ended up with, if any) but it’s a fun, lively and entertaining couple of hours.

The UKFC: What comes next?

2010-08-15T10:23:00.000+01:00

Like many others, I was taken by surprise by the coalition government’s announcement about the demise of the UK Film Council. While the UKFC’s funding would certainly have been a likely target for the cost-cutting coalition, the idea that it would be swept away entirely was more of a shock – even to the UKFC themselves.

In the event, the UKFC will be in existence until 2012, albeit gradually winding down, so existing projects and commitments will not be casually brushed aside (like some kind of school building programme). But what happens after that?

The DCMS has said that lottery funding for UK production will continue. However, it has given no indication of how large that funding will be, or how it would be administered (my guess is that it will return to the Lottery itself, who presided over the fund prior to the UKFC’s formation, and gave the green light to films including Billy Elliott and Bend it Like Beckham). Inevitably, this will stall productions that might otherwise have gone ahead, as filmmakers and production companies wait in limbo for some kind of announcement.

Plenty of people have been lining up to dance on the UKFC’s grave. No surprise there: any body which holds the strings of so significant a purse is going to have to turn down a lot of projects, some of which deserved better, and make a lot of enemies. And every time it makes a bad call (Sex Lives of the Potato Men is the one most people bring up) it gives its vocal enemies more ammunition. Even so, there is plenty that the UKFC can be criticised for – the reluctance to fund more personal projects, the failure to develop a new generation of arthouse directors, the generously paid executives, the initiatives allowed to peter out (I’ve had my rant about the Digital Screen Network previously on this blog). But the good work should not be forgotten: whatever one may feel about the creative accounting that allows the UKFC to claim Harry Potter and James Bond movies as British, they have helped to encourage overseas – predominantly Hollywood – productions to come to this country, spending their budget on British crews, cast and locations.

They’ve also made some good choices when it comes to investing in production; commercially oriented films from The Last King of Scotland to The Duchess. The Prints and Advertising Fund is also worthy of praise, a scheme which allowed distributors of arthouse films with wider than usual audience potential (Pan’s Labyrinth, Downfall etc) to apply for funding to increase the number of prints available, taking advantage of critical and/or audience buzz.

That last is significant, because one of the major bugbears I have with the UKFC is that its avowed aim of increasing audiences to what it terms specialised film has repeatedly failed to materialise. It’s fine that Lottery funding should go to things like St Trinian’s or StreetDance – I have no problem with people enjoying shite, at least it’s 100% British shite – but the likes of Fish Tank have been given minimal support.

But the question remains: who is going to administer financial support for film production, and how much will they have to spend? This is significant to me as an exhibitor: a hefty percentage of the films I rely on to bring people to my venue enjoyed UKFC support. Among their upcoming projects which I would anticipate being hits for my business are Tamara Drewe, Another Year, Made in Dagenham and The King’s Speech. Will the supply of films like this dry up after 2012? And what will happen to excellent schemes like First Light?

For the future, I hope that whatever replaces the UKFC looks not just at funding film production but at getting it into cinemas, and getting audiences to come and see it. This means taking on the mantle of distributor as well as producer; working to persuade cinemas to book their product. This body needs to look carefully at each of its films and make judgements about who the audience is, and how best to get the film to them. If you have a mixed slate of (say) Wilderness, The Duchess, and Fish Tank, then you’re looking at three different films with different marketing and distribution needs. A genre piece will work better in the multiplexes; something by Andrea Arnold or Lynn Ramsey will pass through Vue unnoticed, but will flourish in city centre independents like the Picturehouse chain; and The Duchess will have a shot in both markets.

For the more specialised arm of the market, the body needs to offer some excellent financial deals to distributors, some of whom have been severely pissed off by the UKFC’s mishandling of the DSN. They might care to look at the work being done by Soda Pictures and the New British Cinema Quarterly, who are currently touring Skeletons with the support of Q&As from the cast and crew.

Oh, and it would help if the films are good. Did I mention that?

Baaria

2010-07-17T09:36:00.000+01:00

Giuseppe Tornatore’s Baaria is the story of the titular Italian town, through the eyes of community party activist Peppino (Francesco Scianna). It takes us from his pre-war childhood to the moment, around half a century later, when his son leaves home to make his own way in the world.

That’s a lot for one film to cover, even a very long film like this, and it’s not a great success. A succession of often disconnected scenes and incidents take us through the decades, but feel largely isolated from those around them. The effect is to reduce the likelihood of becoming emotionally involved with any of the characters.

Worse, the whole film is unashamedly nostalgic – even political corruption and mafia violence is seen through the glow of rose-tinted spectacles, and lovingly coated with Ennio Morricone’s strings. The fact that the narrative doesn’t take us up to the present day (not that I’m asking for another half hour...) implies these are problems that belong in Italy’s past.

Watch any half hour of Baaria and you’ll get a generous handful of scenes and sketches, any of which are perfectly watchable on their own merits, along with some lovely images of Italian countryside. Sadly, all these moments combined add up to little more than two and a half hours that you’ll never get back.

The Karate Kid

2010-07-12T09:52:00.001+01:00

Hollywood will remake anything that has a recognisable title, be it a book, a TV show or a movie – ideally one that people who liked the original will now take their kids to. Hence the new version of The Karate Kid – which doesn’t have any karate in it, though the more honest title of The King Fu Kid was presumably passed for lacking the necessary brand recognition. Still, at least this time he is an actual kid rather than a twentysomething faking it.
It also has an advantage in that the original film is not exactly a deathless classic (I expect – I haven’t seen it, though I did see the sequel), which leads to safely lowered expectations. Luckily, the new version is a very watchable film.
Jaden Smith, who seems to have inherited his dad’s charm, plays 12-year-old Dre, who is obliged to move to China with his mom. Soon he is having his ass kicked on a daily basis by the local bullies, who have been studying kung fu under evil bastard teacher Master Li (Rongguang Yu) who doesn’t have much truck with all that crap about fair play and showing mercy to your opponents. Luckily, the reclusive building handyman Mr Han (Jackie Chan) is a bit nifty at kung fu himself, and agrees to take Dre on as a pupil.
The only real problem with the film is that it’s very long – about 2 ¼ hours, which is a hell of a time for a film when you already know the ending going in (you may also be tempted to start humming that song about montages from Team America at certain points). It certainly didn’t have to be this long; for a start, I could have happily lived without quite so much scenery (sure, if you’re filming in China you don’t want to waste it, but the trip to the Forbidden City for one adds nothing to the film at all). A bit less puppy love with aspiring violinist Meiying would also have been an improvement.
The film’s highpoints come between Smith and Chan; their chemistry keeps the film watchable during potential longeurs, with the most exciting moment being the scene where Dre realises the repetitive task that has been occupying him for days – taking his jacket on and off – has in fact been teaching him kung fu moves. Chan gets a bit of backstory about his family, though some that you might have expected never emerges (his meeting with Master Li seems to be played as though the two have a history together, but this is never expanded on).
If they could have managed to hold the film at under two hours, I would have no complaints at all. As it is, The Karate Kid is as good a film about children learning to kick people in the head as you could really wish for.

Winter's Bone

2010-06-23T11:01:00.000+01:00

Winter’s Bone

Based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell, of whom I was previously unaware but intend to check out in the near future, Debra Granik’s engrossing, immersive thriller is my clear favourite of the Festival. A dark drama that convincingly depicts a rural, poverty blighted society normally only seen as monsters in horror films, it also features a remarkable lead performance by Jennifer Lawrence.

Lawrence plays Ree Jolly, a 17 year old girl who – already responsible for her frail mother and two younger siblings – is told that her drug-dealing father has put their home up as security on his bail bond. Currently missing, he needs to show up for his court hearing or the family will be made homeless. Ree is obliged to undertake a dangerous quest to track him down – dead or alive.

In this desolate mountain town, drug addiction is endemic and drug dealing seems to be the major industry and source of income. The people involved, whose identities seem to be at best an open secret, are less than pleased to have Ree asking questions, and it soon starts to look as though she may the next to go mysteriously missing.

Watching the film, you can’t help but become angry that this young woman – who is demonstrably loyal, brave, occasionally droll – should be obliged to shoulder this kind of responsibility, even outside of the thriller plot. Looking at the older women in the film you see her likely future, and it’s infuriating. In a way, one of the most distressing scenes has Ree teaching her little brother how to shoot – distressing both because seeing small children handle weapons feels wrong, but also because you understand the lesson is actually necessary just so the family can continue to eat.

The supporting cast features a seamless blend of local people alongside more familiar faces like Deadwood’s John Hawkes, Garret Dillahunt and Twin Peaks’ Sheryl Lee. All contribute to the feeling that this is a window onto a very real, specific world, one rarely explored in cinema. It’s being released in the UK in September by Artificial Eye, and comes hugely recommended.

More Edinburgh Reviews

2010-06-23T10:41:00.000+01:00

Thunder Soul
One of those films that leaves you feeling a little bit better about the world, Thunder Soul is the story of the Kashmere Stage Band, its founder, and its members. A Houston high school jazz band, Kashmere achieved local, national and even international fame in the 1970s under the leadership of committed music teacher Conrad ‘Prof’ Johnson.
The film centres on a reunion gig by past band members for their now 90+ and ailing Prof. All speak movingly of how his dedication and refusal to accept anything less than the best inspired and changed them, to the point where several credit him with keeping them out of jail. Meanwhile, some of the band’s more recent fans – their recordings have been widely sampled, and now re-released on CD – discuss how Prof revolutionised the high school band scene by introducing soul and funk, and amping up the performance.
Teachers like Johnson are not unique, but are sadly rare, and don’t always fit well into the system. Though he was responsibility for transforming the fortunes of the impoverished school, ongoing battles with the administrators eventually led to his retirement. He speaks passionately in interviews of the importance of music and arts programmes in schools; anyone who doubts their worth should be obliged to watch this film. Johnson’s legacy is clear to see: not just the music, but in the now fiftysomething students whose lives he transformed.

Boy
Every year at Edinburgh there’s one really good film about early adolescence and growing up (actually, this is probably true of most festivals). This year’s is set in a Maori community in 1984, and comes from Taika Waitiki (of Flight of the Conchords/Eagle versus Shark fame) and successfully mixes 80s nostalgia, comedy and family drama.
11 year old Boy is delighted when his father returns home after an extended absence. Supposedly there to reconnect with his kids, he’s really planning to dig up some hidden loot. Boy likes to see his father as a glamorous, fearless rogue, beholden to no man; he’s actually a petty crook and habitual spinner of tall tales.
Waitiki’s performance as the father may be the showiest turn but it’s the likeable group of child actors who stay with you the most, as Boy gradually comes to see his real father, flaws and all. The bittersweet elements are shot through with crowd pleasing visual comedy, culminating in a version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller under the end credits.

Pelican Blood
Pelican Blood starts Harry Treadaway as Nikko, a birdwatcher with a past of OCD and self harming which culminated in a failed suicide attempt. When his similarly troubled ex-girlfriend Stevie (Emma Booth) re-enters his life, his friends and family soon become concerned for his well being... with good reason.
I liked Pelican Blood while watching it, but seeing Third Star the following day really threw its flaws into sharp relief. We never learn the source of Nikko and Stevie’s self-destructive streak (perhaps there isn’t one) beyond the fact that they met on a suicide website.
Unfortunately, while the banter between Nikko and his fellow birdwatchers feel natural, his scenes with Stevie are artificial in comparison. There’s nothing wrong with shifting tones in a film, but in this case – though you are certainly rooting for a happy ending for Nikko – the film never really comes together as a whole.

Third Star
Like Pelican Blood, Third Star is about a young man facing his premature death. But this one is not self inflicted: James (Benedict Cumberbatch) has terminal cancer. While he still has time, he undertakes a camping trip to his favourite Welsh beauty spot with his three best mates.
Though the trip starts in a cordial manner, you know the quartet’s various tensions, neuroses and rivalries are guaranteed to come to the surface before the destination is reached. And indeed they do, prompted in part by various setbacks along the way, and partly by James’s desire to make his friends face up to their individual failings and compromises, inspired by his frustration that that they are failing to make the most of the years he has been denied.
Such a set up could easily lead to something unbearably clichéd and mawkish – as indeed it has, in countess TV episodes and films of the hugs and life lessons variety. Thankfully, Vaughan Sivelli’s fine screenplay skilfully avoids every potential trap, even having the character of Miles (JJ Feild) pour scorn on such hollow mawkishness. It’s coupled with four great lead performances – it’s easy to believe these four have really been friends for year – to make an immensely moving film.
The ending may be seen as depressing, but while it’s undeniably very sad, I found James’s defiance in the face of the inevitable also very uplifting. My second favourite film of the Festival.

Cherry Tree Lane and Jackboots on Whitehall

2010-06-19T11:47:00.000+01:00

Cherry Tree Lane

Home invasion horror from Paul Andrew Williams, director of the much admired London to Brighton. Like that debut (he's subsequently made The Cottage, which I haven't seen) it's a film that boasts some strong performances but is also manipulative, and has a credibility gap that it tough to buy into.

London to Brighton, the story of a prostitute's attempts to protect a young girl from a gangster, lacked tension for me because I did not believe for one moment that the film was going to end with the murder of a child. Cherry Tree Lane, similarly, tries to unsettle the audience but a predictability to the plotting makes it hard to emotionally invest in the characters.

A suburban, 40ish couple (Tom Butcher and Rachael Blake) are eating at home when they are visited and tied up by three violent youths who are looking for their son. The film plays out in real time as they, and we, await the boy's return.

The action is kept tight, the claustrophobic nature of the situation reinforced by keeping the shots largely confined to close ups. Much of the potentially upsetting images - specifically the rape of the wife by the young leader - are wisely kept offscreen, leaving us (and the husband) to mentally fill in the details. But in the climactic scenes the camera still holds back, when it should be dragging us into the thick of the horror along with the supposed viewpoint character.

Don't be fooled into thinking this has anything to say about knife crime, youth violence or drugs culture. It's a slasher film for middle class parents, pure and simple, and every bit as shallow and manipulative as that implies. If you accept it on these terms, the film succeeds reasonably well but for it to really work you need not to have seen Last House on the Left (others also disparagingly compared it to Funny Games). I have, and I didn't need to see it again.

Jackboots on Whitehall

Bizarre animation that mixes It Happened Here with Team America: World Police. A starry cast, including Ewan McGregor, Rosamund Pike and Timothy Spall (as Winston Churchill) voice the Action Man/Barbie style characters in the story of a Nazi invasion of Britain following an unsuccessful evacuation of Dunkirk.

Though the film is rarely less than amusing, the jokes are far too thinly spread out - really, this is a terrific short film that's been extended by about an hour too much. But the model characters are a joy, from big-naded hero Christopher to the Gollum/Scream style Goebbels and perpetually-smoking Churchill. Given how stiff the actual puppets are (their mouths flap, Thunderbirds style, but that's pretty much it) they are surprisingly expressive. It all feels a bit childish though. You're left with the feeling that it would be more fun to spend the time playing with all the fabulous little model soldiers, planes and tanks.

More Edinburgh Reviews

2010-06-17T18:10:00.000+01:00

Huge

Ben Miller's directorial debut, based on a play what he co-wrote, follows would-be stand up comedians Warren and Clark (Johnny Farrell and Noel Clarke) on the rocky road to fame.

It's a bit of a mixed bag. After a nicely done meeting between the two (Clarke's character heckles Farrell's at an open mike slot, inadvertently giving him the only laughs he gets that night) there are some painfully plausible scenes of the two struggling to get their foot in the door of the capital's comedy clubs. A host of real life stand ups cameo, some performing their own material, and you can have fun seeing how many you can name - many are familiar from TV, but others will be recognised only by those who frequent the live circuit.

Later scenes don't feel so truthful. After the pair fall out, Clarke apparently becomes a minor celebrity as a chicken in a series of TV ads. How? Is this all he does? It's not made clear. This seems to be an attempt to pull the rug from under the audience by first suggesting he's become a star, before revealing he's merely humiliating himself. It only confuses matters, and simply doesn't work.

The real low point comes at the very end, with a series of images under the closing credits detailing teh duo's future success ina way that brings to mind Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. It's a major misjudgement, frankly - there's been nothing in the preceding 84 minutes to suggest they could ever be that good.

Outcast

Werewolf on a council estate movie that does a pretty good job of mixing social miserabilism with gore.

A tabloid newspaper clipping posted in the delegate centre played up the fact that Karen 'Amy from off of Doctor Who' Gillan was appearing in a raunchy, bloody film shot before her TV fame; an unnamed (and possibly fictitious 'film insider' claimed the BBC would never let her do it now. The film immediately shot to the top of my must-see list. In the event, she's only in a couple of scenes, and shows less skin than James Nesbitt.

Kate Dickie stars as mother to Fergus, a teenager who is being hunted by his father. It sounds like the set up for a drama about domestic violence, but the macguffin is more supernatural in nature. There's a pagan/traveller background to the characters that might be bollocks for all I know, but it feels like it's been fully researched. This, and the straight faced performances from all the cast - Nesbitt has thankfully left his Cold Feet/Yellow Pages twinkly-eyed schtick at the door - keep the film tense and grounded in reality.

That said, some of the plot details are left a little vague. I'm not fully clear on why the beast is cursed in this way - I think an explanation was proffered, but was buried under someone's accent.

The beast itself is a thoroughly nasty looking piece of work, and the effects are good enough to avoid the atmosphere being punctured. Though the film feels a little like Ken Loach's Stephen King's Sleepwalkers, the well-maintained mix of setting and subject make it very much its own beast.

Soulboy

Coming of age drama set in the early 70s, with a nostalgic soundtrack. Christ, another one? Yes, and it conforms pretty much to expectations (it starts with an ironic promotional film for Stoke on Trent that recalls the opening of The Full Monty). The USP is the setting, based as it is around the famous Wigan Casino nightclub. Our hero (Martin Compston) is introduced to the music and moves by the beautiful but spoken-for Nichola Burley. In his attempts to impress her, he fails to notice that his classmate's sister (Felicity Jones) is smitten with him. Which girl will he end up with? You may have already guessed.

The recent failure of Cemetery Junction to make the expected box office impact may count against the possibility of Soul Boy seeing the inside of many cinemas. A shame, as it's a solidly-written, well performed tale, albeit a predictable one. Soundtrack's pretty good, too.

Edinburgh Film Festival: The Illusionist

2010-06-16T15:57:00.000+01:00

The new film from Belleville Rendez-vous director Sylvian Chomet is a reworking of a previously unproduced Jacques tati script. A lament for the dying days of Music Hall and old fashioned stage variety acts, it follows the titular stage magician as he journeys from France to Scotland in an attempt to earn an honest crust in a world turning to the newfangled rock'n'roll bands and television.

This kind of nostalgia for the lost clowns of a bygone age is something of an acquired taste, and I've never really acquired it - I find it all a bit too self-pitying. Yes, it's sad to see a whole generation of performers being swept aside, but performers must know that the public is fickle. So perhaps it's ironic that what I enjoyed most about the film is the defiantly old school craftmanship of the animation, the watercolour backgrounds and 2D artwork. It's a pleasure to see this present and correct in a Festival that's also running the 3D, computer animated Toy Story 3.

The film is infused with a strong sense of time and place, evoking life in an ancient city on the cusp of the swinging sixties; perhaps not surprising when you know Chomet moved the story to Edinburgh after falling in love with the city at a previous EIFF. The portraits of Edinburgh are a delight, as you find yourself mentally ticking off the locations - there's North Bridge, there's Princes Street, there's Grassmarket - and they culminate in a breathtaking aerial panorama of the whole city by night that is over far too quickly. That brief scene is the lovliest thing I've seen at the Festival so far.

First couple of things seen at Edinburgh

2010-06-16T10:40:00.001+01:00

Two Eyes Staring

Dutch chiller in which a family move into an old house inherited from Mum's estranged mother, only to be threatened by a Dark Family Secret. Early on, Dad Paul remarks "You could fit a whole orphanage in here," which only further serves to remind one of the Spanish film - though this time it's the nine year old daughter, rather than the mother, who may or may not be seeing a ghost.

This starts out well, with the mysterious noises and sudden spectral appearances all handled well (including a classic something-under-the-bed moment). But in plot terms, things go a bit awry in the second half. While director Elbert van Strein and his co-writer Paulo van Vliet manage to keep us guessing about what's really going on, the final revelations make the nature of the haunting very clear (though to be fair, the twist is not the one I had been expecting). I like a little more ambiguity in my ghost stories. But it remains a worthwhile watch for J-Horror fans, and has an excellent performance from child actor Isabelle Stokkel, who manages to switch between childish glee, terror and blank-eyed menace as required.

The Last Rites of Ransom Pride

Perhaps it's because I saw this right after the slow-burning Two Eyes Staring, but Tiller Russell's western began to annoy me immediately. With it's flashy sharp cutting, time-lapse shots and brief flashbacks used as scene breaks, it's the very definition of (attempted) style over substance. And that's a shame, because there's some potentially good stuff in here.

Lizzy Caplan, who looks remarkably good for someone who lives a pretty rough life, stars as Juliette Flowers. Her attempts to retrieve the body of her outlaw lover Ransom Pride make her, and ultimately Ransom's younger brother, thye target for a string of killers. The film boasts a number of what could have been interesting characters, and a fantastic supporting cast: among them, Peter Dinklage as a shotgun wielding dwarf, Dwight Yoakam as an alcoholic killer turned preacher, and Jason Priestley (who I would never have recognised in a million years) as a thoroughly unpleasant bounty hunter.

Sadly, their work gets no opportunity to shine, as Russell seems perpetually in a rush to get to the next scene (the picture only runs to 84 minutes). It also suffers from having been shot digitally, presumably for budgetary reasons, leaving the fast action - already cut so quickly you can barely tell what's supposed to be happening - with that irritating blurry effect you get with digital filming. This could have been so much better, but as it stands is eminently missable.

Couple of quick mentions for two more good films: World's Greatest Dad, a black comedy starring Robin Williams, and The People Versus George Lucas, a documentary about Star Wars fans and their love/hate relationship with the films' creator.

Seven sleeps to Edinburgh

2010-06-05T11:39:00.000+01:00

One of the highlights of my filmgoing year is the annual visit to my favourite city for the Edinburgh International Film Festival. In fact, my single favourite place to watch films is screen 1 of the Cameo Cinema. I still remember my accidental discovery of the Cameo during a visit to the Fringe Festival some years ago. Not only were you allowed to take alcoholic drinks in with you (a sign chalked up on the foyer board explained, ‘We’re civilised at the Cameo and we like to think you are too’) but the seats were like armchairs, quite the most luxurious I’d experienced in cinemas to that point, and particularly welcome after the bum-numbing church hall chairs I’d been sitting on for much of that week. (The film I watched – because I know you’re wondering – was Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty).

I love the Cameo so much that my choice of screenings to attend is often influenced by whether or not the film is showing there. I’m certainly fond of the EIFF’s other venues too; the Cineworld is a multiplex like many others, though a perfectly acceptable one, and its large seats and generous legroom come as a relief after a few screenings in the cramped and often stuffy Filmhouse screen 1.

I do still regret the EIFF’s decoupling from the various other August festivals – I can’t imagine a better place to be than Edinburgh during August – but as they’re selling far more tickets without the distraction of all those pesky live events, there’s no chance of it moving back, and you can hardly blame them. In fact, the 2009 Festival was so successful that there were far fewer tickets available for industry liggers like me for the evening public screenings, obliging me to spend more time watching films on the little computer screens in the videotheque.

For me, the best thing about Festivals is walking into a film about which you know next to nothing, but which turns out to be fantastic – something you immediately want to push to an audience, to share it with as many people as possible. Past examples off the top of my head include Incident at Loch Ness, a hilarious mix of Blair Witch and Spinal Tap starring Werner Herzog as himself that sadly never had a UK release, and last year’s The First Day of the Rest of Your Life. I know very little about most of the films at this year’s Festival (with the obvious exception of Toy Story 3 – pretty sure I’ve heard something about that one) but they are showing a couple of things I’ve seen and liked.

One is The Runaways, the story of the 70s US teen girl band I’d previously never heard of (though their line-up did include Joan Jett – her I did know of, though I’d always assumed she only ever recorded one song). It features good work from Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning as Jett and singer Cherie Currie, and captures the heady atmosphere of being young, famous and off your head very well (or so I suppose, having little experience of any of those things).

The other is The Secret in their Eyes, the Argentinian film that won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. That’s one category the Academy can be guaranteed to get wrong, pretty much every year. In a year that included Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, they gave the award to a potboiler thriller. I’ve absolutely nothing against the film – it’s a perfectly competent, entertaining watch that deserves an audience – but it’s no work of art. It should appeal to the many who enjoyed the film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, although as the source novel is unknown over here and the film is being released by the not-exactly-flush-with-cash Metrodome, it will only do a fraction of the business.

To an extent, I’ll try not to find out too much detail about the programme, but scrolling through the website, there are things I’m already keen to see. Obviously this includes the gala opening, Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, which the Belleville Rendezvous creator set in Edinburgh after falling in love with the city during a previous festival. Then there's the Dutch horror Two Eyes Staring, Brit thriller Cherry Tree Lane, plus the retrospective strand on forgotten British film: a chance to see some vintage films I’d never even heard of, let alone had the chance to watch.

I’ll be there for the first six days of the Festival. That’s time to see 30 films, easy. Plenty to discover. I can’t wait.

The five Woody Allen films you actually need to see

2010-06-01T09:10:00.000+01:00

There’s a scene early in Whatever Works, Woody Allen’s latest film as writer/director, where the protagonist Boris (Larry David) looks directly into the camera and points out to his fellow characters: “Look! There’s an audience out there!” And I thought to myself: wow, you’re being a bit optimistic there, mate.

Whatever Works is quite a watchable film, but it’s yet another Allen tale of an aging neurotic who takes up with a much, much younger woman – in this case, Melody, a runaway played by Evan Rachel Wood. Melody's lack of sophistication and education, and the attempts of Allen/David’s character to improve her, is played for comedy; you wonder if Soon-Yi ever watches these films and says, hang on, is that supposed to be me? Chances are that she, and you, have already seen quite a few of these films. Do you really feel that you need to see another?

Allen has never been a particularly big player in financial terms, but prior to his catastrophic break up with Mia Farrow had enough of a following to make it worthwhile bankrolling his films. After that, the (thrown out) allegations of child abuse and his relationship with his ex-partner’s adopted daughter, his portrayal of a man dating a high school girl in Manhattan seemed less like self-deprecating analysis and more like a warning.

His stock, at least in the UK, has sunk so low that the films in which he takes a lead role are guaranteed to go straight to DVD. His most successful recent films, Match Point and Vicky Christina Barcelona, were promoted respectively as a sexy thriller and a starry romcom set in a beautiful city. In both cases, you had to squint to see his name on the poster.

Even in the films where Allen hands over the lead to another actor, his authorial voice is so strong and familiar that the surrogate is almost forced into an Allen-esque performance; such as John Cusack in Bullets over Broadway. (Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity is reportedly one of the worst offenders, though I haven’t seen that one.) Vicky Christina Barcelona successfully disguises this problem by giving the Allen role to a woman, Rebecca Hall.

Larry David’s screen persona is, at least on paper, cut from similar cloth to Allen’s. Despite – or maybe because – of this, he manages not to come over purely as Allen’s sock puppet in Whatever Works. In fact, some of the most interesting moments came when I found myself thinking, “Hmm, Woody would have delivered that line differently.”

The film’s only real problem – but it’s a big one – is overfamiliarity; it feels like all the other Woody Allen films you’ve already seen. Perhaps if he didn’t knock one out every year, despite now having to chase across Europe for funding, this wouldn’t be a problem. But as it is, a new Allen film isn’t an event, it’s just something that happens on a regular basis, and the reality is that you only really need to see about five of his films before you die. For my money, those five would be Annie Hall, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanours. Now, some might wish to substitute a personal favourite for one or more of those (and if you do want more, there are plenty to choose from) but the fact remains that if you’ve seen any five Allen films, you’ve pretty much seen them all... even the good ones.

She's Out of My League

2010-05-24T12:39:00.000+01:00

She’s Out of My League is one of many films that attempt to marry romantic comedy with a healthy dollop of lowbrow, crowdpleasing humour, in the manner of There’s Something About Mary. Unfortunately it doesn’t manage either strand as successfully as the Farrelly brothers.

The film is the story of an average guy called Kirk (Jay Baruchel) who, by a quirk of product placement, meets and starts dating Molly (Alice Eve). Molly is something of a looker, whereas the nicest thing you could say about Jay is pale but interesting. She is, on the face of it, very much out of his league, as she would be out of most people’s. Surely, then, the possibility of this relationship being a success is so against the odds as to be an offence to the laws of nature?

The script goes out to emasculate Kirk at the start, having him still pining for his ex-girlfriend after two years, and have her and her current boyfriend living with his parents. His entire family is so ghastly that they never rise above the level of cartoons. It’s made plain that Molly has her own neuroses, but some of these are left unresolved – a sub plot about her lying to her parents (played by Alice Eve’s real life parents) about her job is left dangling.

The film’s comic highlight comes when Kirk becomes over excited as Molly gets amorous, only for her parents to unexpectedly visit at the worst possible moment. It works because everyone can relate to the fear of this happening, even if they haven’t suffered it themselves.

The other amusing scenes come courtesy of Kirk’s little team of friends, who painstakingly explain that Molly is a 10, whereas Kirk is closer to 5 (and this includes points for being funny, and deductions for driving a crap car) – thinking that adds to Kirk’s lack of confidence. A lot of the other laughs are centred around knob gags, with varying degrees of success. Factor in Molly’s sharp-tongued sidekick Patty, and you have one of those films where the supporting cast are more fun than the leads.

So, watchable enough, quite amusing, but not really in the big leagues.

StreetDance 3D

2010-05-17T09:02:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, a film like Robin Hood just looks too bloated and pompous, too long and dull. Sometimes you just want something light and frothy. Preferably in 3D. Which is when you want something like StreetDance.

StreetDance is about a crew of street dancers, whose leader Jay takes time out five weeks before the UK street dancing championships – because, like, work and uni and that are getting really heavy, yeah? His roles of choreographer and deliverer of inspiring motivational speeches are left to his girlfriend Carly (Nichola Burley) who, unable to afford rehearsal space, makes a deal with ballet school tutor Charlotte Rampling; she will have unlimited studio time in return for taking some of the ballet students into her crew.

Well, you think, I don’t see that working out. Ballet and streetdance mixing? Why, they’re worlds apart! It’s not like they’re going to learn valuable lessons from each other, mix their disparate styles in ways that tear up the rulebooks and come up with a winning routine in just five weeks, is it? (Spoiler alert: actually, it is.)

Nobody ever went to a film like this for the screenplay, and the dialogue here barely reaches the level of functional. Casting for dance skills over acting ability means you have to expect some wooden turns, and indeed you get them. More disappointingly, Nicola Burley (who can be good – just watch Kicks for the evidence) seems to have been dragged down to the same level. In one early scene she manages to make the line, “Why didn’t you tell me? I looked completely stupid,” sound as though it was written as “Why didn’t you tell me I looked completely stupid?”. As for her various morale-raising speeches to her crew, she doesn’t sound as though she believes a word of it.

But the dancing is what counts, and StreetDance offers plenty of it. Various people from TV talent shows crop up; of the ones I’d heard of, Diversity only get one scene, but George Sampson pops in and out throughout before his big solo near the climax. There were probably others.

I’m something of a 3D agnostic; it’s fun for a bit, but after a while I stop noticing it (even in Avatar) – which makes me wonder what the point is. Still, if any film ought to benefit from 3D it’s this one, and the technique is indeed used well throughout. It’s quite consciously designed to show off the moves, throwing in some funky bullet time moments, though some of the overhead shots make people appear freakishly tall.

You can’t pretend StreetDance is a good film, but it delivers what it says on the tin, and I didn’t look at my watch once. Bet that wouldn’t have been true of Robin Hood.

What Went Wrong with the Digital Screen Network

2010-05-04T14:51:00.000+01:00

Unless you live in a major city, it’s never been easy getting to see arthouse films in the UK. London may be well served, and the bulk of the foreign language films to reach these shores do get round the larger conurbations, if only briefly. But anywhere else? Not so lucky.

The Digital Screen Network (http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/dsn) was an attempt by the UK Film Council to tackle this. The idea was to kickstart the growth of digital projection in the UK, enabling smaller films to appear on more screens at once, and encouraging cinemas to play more specialised product, thereby encouraging more people to try them.

It sounded good in theory. 35mm prints are very expensive, and for a lot of foreign language/arthouse films distributors can only afford to risk investing in a handful. This means the films take forever to make their way round the country’s arthouse and indie cinemas, whereas a major Hollywood release can play everywhere at once. And if an art release does start generating word of mouth and becomes unexpectedly popular, there aren’t enough copies to meet public demand. With digital, a hard drive can be sent round any number of cinemas, the film downloaded and played at each one. Popular films can be shown wherever there’s a demand, and the wider distribution encourages mainstream audiences to take a risk on something from beyond Hollywood.

A network of 240 screens was set up, with a new digital projector provided for each participating cinema. The deal was each venue would play an agreed percentage of specialised films in return for this very expensive bit of new kit – one which also allows a variety of other events (noticed any opera, theatre or comedy events showing at your nearest Picturehouse? All thanks to digital). Naturally, a lot of cinemas leaped at this. And that’s where things started to go wrong.

Far more cinemas applied than could be included in the network. And by making the application process competitive – cinemas needed to promise an increasing number of specialised screenings across the 5 year timescale of the scheme – the UKFC encouraged people to make major promises that they wouldn’t have to worry about for a few years. This included some of the UK’s major arthouse venues, as well as independently owned small town venues and multiplexes.

That’s right, multiplexes were included. Now, I’ve no issue with such venues being encouraged to show a wider range of films, but some might question the wisdom of a publically-funded body to subsidise digital conversion for the commercial sector. In addition, I would be very interested to know just how big an increase those venues promised; the UKFC’s definition of ‘specialised’, which you can see at http://www.ukfilmcouncil.org.uk/media/pdf/r/2/Defining_Specialsied_Film_Update_20_04_08_.pdf , is broad enough to include Bollywood (which is utterly mainstream for some venues), as well as the likes of Inglorious Basterds, Fantastic Mr Fox, and Slumdog Millionaire: all product that would have made it to the Odeons and Cineworlds without any encouragement.

But still, you can see the UKFC’s thinking on this. It’s not really where they went wrong. Their mistake – and it’s a massive one – is that having set up the DSN, they then proceeded to do exactly jackshit with it. For about two years.

I’ve spoken to or corresponded with a number of cinema managers about this, and they all tell much the same story. Initially, the UKFC asked for records of specialised films shown by spreadsheet, but that soon stopped, with the promise that all reporting would soon be done over the internet. Then they went quiet. No feedback was received on the programming to date (at least, not to any venue Uncle Frank contacted). No sign of the promised internet reporting. No contact at all over a year.

I don’t think it takes a genius to see that if you want over 200 cinemas to increase their specialised programming – which could potentially be a commercial risk for them – you don’t just leave them to get on with it. You keep an eye on them, you maybe flag up films they might like to consider, keep them up to date with any specialised titles that have proven to do well with audiences. If cinemas are failing to keep up their end of the bargain, you might like to ask them what the problem is, and see if you can come up with a solution. What you do, in other words, is nurture your creation.

But the UKFC didn’t do that. They just clammed up, and left most of the cinemas to assume they’d lost interest and had stopped taking notes.

Eventually, the long-promised online reporting system appeared, and venues were asked to check and confirm a couple of years of programming. Hardly a surprise that many had underperformed, mostly through no fault of their own. And someone at the UKFC must have woken up at around this time, because they started making very bullish noises; Peter Buckingham, the UKFC’s Head of Distribution, was telling industry conferences that “if you don’t meet your contractual commitments, you will lose your digital projector.”

This helpful attitude was carried on to a letter sent out to underperforming cinemas in summer 2009, threatening to find any cinemas failing to meet their required number of specialised screenings in breach of contract, meaning they could lose their digital projector. Having trouble? Need to run popular films to pay the bills? Discovered your audience prefers Mamma Mia and Sex and the City to non-stop arthouse? Tough.

With hindsight, one has to wonder how much of this hard-ass posturing (because nobody seriously believed the UKFC was going to have all these projectors removed from cinemas up and down the country – aside from being a very public admission of the DSN’s failure, it would be a massive pain in the arse) was down to the impending budget cuts at the UKFC, and the publically raised possibility of a merger with the British Film Institute. Were I of a cynical bent, I might wonder if people were suddenly feeling the need to justify their continued employment.

Eventually, the UKFC blinked. Having stated that they would not renegotiate any venues’ contracted specialised levels, they sent out a letter carefully worded so as not to sound like a complete reversal of that position. Instead, the agreements have now been extended by a year, and underperforming venues are being asked to keep to a noticeably lower average number of screenings per week. This will allow them to ‘catch up’, apparently.

It won’t, obviously, but it saves face all round. The UKFC may even withdraw a few projectors, just so that they can look tough. But really it just hides the fact that the aims of the DSN have been spectacularly missed. Just by how much is difficult to tell – the UKFC to date have not published the numbers. Their annual statistical yearbook is due out in a couple of months – can we perhaps hope for some hard info on how much specialised film provision has increased in the UK compared to the pre-DSN days, whether that increase is taking place across the commercial and independent sector equally, and who the biggest underperformers are.

I suspect they’ll keep that to themselves. It’s a shame; the objectives of the DSN were laudable and ambitious. Pity that the UKFC didn’t seem all that interested in following them through in practice.

Hot Tub Time Machine

2010-04-29T17:25:00.001+01:00

In the latest issue of Empire, John Cusack says of Hot Tub Time Machine, “I think if you get a great title for a movie, the rest will write itself.” One hopes he’s not being entirely serious. Unfortunately, the makers of HTTM seem happy enough to let the concept do most of the work.

Adam (Cusack), his old buddy Nick Webber and his nephew take their suicidal, alcoholic friend Lou back to the ski resort where they spent some of the highlights of their youth. Here, an accident with a hit tub turns it into a time machine which transports them back to 1986, obliging them to grapple with the risks of the Butterfly Effect and the temptation of changing their futures for the better.

So far, so good. But much of the comedy is puerile; lots of dick and blow job gags, with a ridiculously unconvincing bit of projectile vomiting near the start setting the tone. I like a good knob gag as much as the next man, but the regret the characters feels for their hopes and dreams – you know, the emotional core of the film – gets smothered under a steady flow of bodily fluids.

Cusack is good, of course, but deserves better. Chevy Chase has a peculiar cameo as a possibly magical/science-fictional hot tub repairman, which doesn’t really work. If going for an 80s icon, why not someone who was in Back to the Future (Crispin Glover has a part, after all)? Then again, Bill Murray would have been better, but frankly the film isn’t aiming for that kind of quality.

A couple of other good points: Lizzy Caplan is in it, though in a too-small part, and any film which includes Animotion’s Obsession on the soundtrack wins points from Uncle Frank. Though it also reminded me how much more I enjoyed Adventureland last year.

Still, if you like toilet humour and are old enough to have seen Back to the Future in the cinema, this is very much the film for you.

Four Lions and The Infidel

2010-04-28T16:38:00.001+01:00

Honestly – you wait ages for a British comedy about crazy Islamists, then two come along (almost) at once. Kind of.

OK, not really. But The Infidel and Four Lions – two comedies with Muslim protagonists, both written by white men more associated with TV comedy – have been released in sufficient proximity to make comparisons inevitable, if arguably unwarranted.

Of the two, The Infidel is the least political. It focuses on the odd friendship between Omid Djalili’s not-very-devout Muslim who learns he is a Jew adopted at birth, and Richard Schiff’s drunken cabbie. Much comedy of embarrassment follows, as Mahmud Nasir (Djalili) attempts to act Jewish, attends a bar mitzvah, and an Islamist protest rally.

His identity crisis offers some decent laughs, though drawn from often quite broad stereotypes. But David Baddiel’s screenplay also throws in an antagonist for our confused hero in the form of Arshad El Masri, a fanatical preacher who espouses his own selective reading of the Koran, and is Mahmud’s prospective father in law.

El Masri is the sort of smiling, but mad, preacher who might have helped radicalise the protagonists of Four Lions. Baddiel is rightly unafraid to mock him – he has a follower with a metal claw in place of one hand, clearly inspired by the tabloids’ favourite panto villain, Abu Hamza. The latter part of the film is driven by the clash between him and Mahmud’s we’re-not-so-different-under-it-all philosophy.

Sadly, the resolution to this clash and the way in which Mahmud triumphs is based on an absurd plot twist that is straight ouot of a TV sitcom of the My Family mould. It doesn’t ring even faintly true for a moment, and lets the film down badly.

Chris Morris’ feature debut Four Lions is much harder edged. It follows in the comedy tradition of a group of apparent friends, bound to each other by some need without necessarily liking each other, who manage to disastrously overcomplicate a simple plan. Other tales of male camaraderie would feature a group of people trying to organise a stag night, or maybe start a business together, or become a bunch of strippers... with hilarious consequences (I’ve always wanted to write that).

The film follows a group of bumbling would-be jihadis as they variously plan a suicide bombing campaign, flunk their training in Afghanistan – a sequence which pays off with a corking gag at the close – and record their suicide videos, ending up only with outtakes. The comedy comes from the fact that they fumble their way through their schemes less like a Spooks-style sleeper cell, and more like the heroes of Dad’s Army. It’s often very funny, but also chilling as the consequences of the group’s fanaticism are illustrated; a mix that the less sharp toothed The Infidel does not attempt.

If the film has a weakness, it’s that their motivations for mass murder are suggested, but left unexplored. Sure, some of them are none too bright and easily led. Barry, the white Islamic convert, is a crazed nihilists looking for a way to channel his hatred of everything. But Omar – the film’s central figure and hero of sorts – must surely have thought about it more deeply. What exactly was the point when this husband and father decided to kill himself, and as many others as possible, and why does his wife support it? (Does she think he won’t actually go through with it?)

Whether Four Lions will result in a storm of Brass Eye style outrage from idiots who can’t cope with the idea of finding humour from suicide bombers remains to be seen (the Daily Mail might still be getting its breath back after it’s fury over Kick Ass). Perhaps Chris Morris will have to go into hiding to escape a fatwa. I hope the film will be widely seen; not only is it good entertainment, it might just make a few possible suicide bombers think twice.

The declining art of cinema participation

2010-04-23T14:03:00.000+01:00

One of the common complaints people make about cinemas and cinemagoing generally is the fact that you are obliged to share the experience with other people – people who do things like eat, talk and make phone calls throughout the film instead of sitting in respectful silence. I’ve had my share of irritating fellow viewers, but it’s also true that some vocal participation can enhance the entertainment.

This used to happen a lot at the local three screen ABC/Cannon cinema I attended in my teens, where the Friday night audience could be more than averagely chatty. This could of course be massively annoying, but for the right film was a lot of fun. This could range from an isolated pithy remark (like the pissed-off viewer of Alien 3, who piped up in that films climactic moments with, “Well, someone’s gotta survive, or else how can they have a story?”) to the family who kept a running commentary throughout Lethal Weapon 3.

They started by shouting out jolly encouragement to the film’s star, Mel Gibson, along the lines of: Come on, Mel! Hit him, Mel! (Midway through, it dawned on them that Sugartits was actually playing a character named Riggs, and this changed to Hit him Riggs, etc).

The twists and turns of the plot did prove a little baffling on occasion. The story involved particularly dangerous guns finding their way into the hands of teenagers in local gangs, which allowed for plenty of shootouts interspersed with a bit of paternal angst from Gibson and Danny Glover. In one scene, the latter shoots and kills a gang member who has taken a shot at them, only to be horrified to discover it’s a kid of his son’s age. As he emotes over the corpse, a gasp came from my left: “Oh no! It were ‘is lad! E’s shot ‘is lad!” When the next scene showed Glover talking to his son about what had happened, this was corrected to: “Oh. It weren’t ‘is lad. It were... someone else.”

In another scene, an eager beaver young cop is allowed to accompany our heroes on another shootout, on condition that he keeps his head down should the lead start flying. Naturally, he is immediately shot. “Another baby,” sighs Danny Glover sadly. “Well,” said one of my insightful commentators, “they warned him.”

“Aye,” agreed another. “They warned him.”

At the climax of the film, they fell silent altogether, which by this point was a bit of a surprise. Looking down the row, I saw that all three of them were literally, genuinely on the edges of their seats. It was really quite sweet.

Alice in Wonderland and the shrinking cinema window

2010-04-12T15:41:00.000+01:00

No big surprise to see that Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland has become a major cinema success, helped by the current popularity of 3D. The widely publicised dispute between several multiplex chains and Disney over the early DVD release does not seem to have had any significant impact on the general public’s decision as to whether or not to see the film in the cinema.

But it was never likely to. Alice was always going to be OK, and the cinemas knew that. What they’re concerned about is not the odd blockbuster slipping out early, but the effect on cinemas of a general ongoing erosion of that period of exclusivity. There will always be a handful of films which absolutely demand to be seen at the cinema, be they of the Avatar school of spectacle or the Mamma Mia-style shared experience; but these are relatively rare.

At the other end of the scale to Alice, there have been some experiments with window breaking in the arthouse market; Artificial Eye have released several titles simultaneously in cinemas and through Sky Box Office, and titles from other distributors like The September Issue have had similar releases without the sky falling in on anyone’s heads. But these are films with a limited market, and that market likes to support its local arthouse venue. Given the choice between watching the film with an audience (or at least the right kind of audience, ie people like them) and watching it on telly, they will actively opt for the former.

A bigger question mark is over middle-ranking titles; the likes of Up in the Air, The Blind Side etc. Films which can do well in multiplexes, but need a bit of heat behind them in order to do well, whether it comes from award nominations, a popular star, or both. Will people bother making the effort to see these films, if they know the DVD/download is only a few weeks away? And once that happens, will the people who currently only visit the cinema a few times a year lose the habit altogether?

One possible effect is that we may see fewer films given a cinema release. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as there are certainly too many being released right now. Anything up to ten titles come out on any given Friday; there just isn’t room for all of them to find an audience. Look at something like Everybody’s Fine – a perfectly watchable film, which lasted barely a fortnight on general release. Nobody went to see it, but there was no reason for them to. It’s a film that works just as well on TV; there is no impulse to go to the time and effort and making it to the cinema. Wouldn’t it be cheaper to go straight to DVD? The only benefit of a cinema release for a title like this is the potential publicity from the reviews, and perhaps avoiding the stigma of the direct to video stinker. (Whether distributors actually worry about this, I have no idea. Perhaps it’s more of a contractual obligation than anything else.)

Either way, once the theatrical window becomes a thing of the past – and it seems as though ultimately it will – are cinemas living on borrowed time? There’s bound to be a contraction in the market; one or two of the major chains may contract, or give up their theatres altogether. Or maybe they will diversify, presenting more alternative content – big sporting events, more live comedy, opera, theatre. Smaller, locally based cinemas and chains may also be able to weather any contraction in the market, if they can focus on their specific local audience.

But while I don’t see cinemas as being in any way doomed – however threatened their current business model may be – I still regret the loss of the special nature of the cinema experience. I still love seeing films in a big room, and sharing that with a large group of other people. And I wish the people running the studios felt the same way.