REVIEW: Rudo y Cursi (dir. Carlos Cuarón)

Cast: Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, Guillermo Francella, Jessica Mas

Tonight I was invited by The Script Factory to attend a special screening of ‘Rudo y Cursi’, followed by a Q&A with the film’s makers. ‘Rudo y Cursi’ is the directoral debut of ‘Y tu mamá también’ scribe Carlos Cuaron. It is also the first first film to be unveiled by the new Mexican production powerhouse, Cha Cha Cha Films.

It’s a new company but the names of the three founders might ring some bells somewhere in the deep recesses of your mind: Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárittu! The film also happens to star the two most iconic faces of the Mexican New Wave, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna.

There is no equivalent to this film anywhere in the canons of cinema. It is the Mexican equivalent of Coppolla, Peckinpah, and Scorcese teaming up to produce the directorial debut of Robert Towne, starring De Niro and Nicholson. Or Christopher Nolan, Gus Van Sant and David O. Russel teaming up to produce… well you get the picture.

So what sort of film has the triptych of Mexican cinema chosen as a calling card for their new company? Is it a searing urban drama with a fractured narrative? A CGI epic with a historical twist? A buddy/ road movie with a dark heart? Or a Dickens adaptation? (hands up those who forgot Alfonso Cuaron’s modern retelling of Great Expectations!)

The answer is a merger between a few of these things, but with a result that bears no resemblance to any of them. This is a film that is surprisingly rudo (rough) but also unashamedly cursi (corny); and within this mutually beneficial dialectic can be found the unique, inexplicable beauty of Mexican cinema in its modern guise.

It is a film that shares the sweaty, energetic aesthetic of ‘Amores Perros’ and ‘Y tu mamá también’; but it also has a humour and free-flowing ease that allows it to float away from the filmography of it’s creators and waft across the screen in waves of laughter.

Carlos Cuaron conceived the idea of a football mockumentary, and announced it to Bernal and Luna, during a publicity tour for ‘Y tu mamá también’; but when both actors expressed a desire to play the part of the footballing buffoon destined for fame and humiliation, Cuaron was forced to write in a brother (which character is the brother is a point of endless contention between the jibing stars who are lifelong friends).

The result is a story in which to awkwardly-placed brothers are forced to jostle with each other for the attention of their football scout, their mother, and the affection of the nation. Beto (Luna) is nicknamed Rudo because of his ruthless style of goalkeeping; Tato (Bernal) is given his nickname Cursi because of his shamelessly cheesy attempts at achieving pop star fame with a rendition of Cheap Trick’s ‘I want you to want me”.

The film follows the brothers from their humble banana plantation to the ‘monster’ of Mexico City. As they both achieve fame for their football talent, they both fall into the traditional trappings of excess: egotism, socialite girlfriends, spending sprees, and gambling addictions. The film leads towards the traditional ‘big game’, but not in a way that you would expect of a normal sports film.

In fact, nothing in this film fits within the genre of ‘sports film’, or any other genre for that matter. It is the rags to riches, and then back to rags, story of two football players and yet there are approximately ten seconds of football footage in the entire film. It is a film about so many of Mexico’s social ills (corruption, the drug trade, the irresponsible treatment of young sportsmen) and yet it only glances at these problems with the inquisitive eye of a satirist. It is a modern comedy and yet it owes so much of its visual and situational humour to Hollywood’s Screwball years.

Del Toro called the film a “sheep in wolves clothing”, and that has proved to be the case. Just listening to the Cuaron brothers and the two stars talking on stage, it was so clear that they had an enormous amount of fun making this film. And yet the film has had just as enormous an effect on Mexican society as any of their previous films that were made with social criticism much closer to the forefront of their minds. Politicians in Mexico have been using Tato’s embarrassing Pop song in campaigns (some to gain support, others to humiliate rivals) and the very phrase ‘rudo y cursi’ has entered the Mexican lexicon (I have always wanted to combine those words) and spread far beyond the world of film.

The modest and quietly spoken Alfonso Cuaron was humble in his assessment of the way Mexican cinema has changed since his arrival on the world stage. He pointed out the irrelevance of a ‘film’ industry in a country that desperately needs to support so many other industries that are truly necessary. But where he seemed truly optimistic and burning with pride was when he spoke of the space that Mexican cinema has demanded for itself on the crowded and unfairly distributed ‘world cinema’stage. Cuaron and his band of brothers have taken the world by storm before; I have no doubt that they will do it again, and eventually go down as one of the most important and determined movements in film history.

Backyard Theatres: A death knell for multiplexes

I rarely go to the cinema now unless it is under duress. I attend the BFI Southbank fairly regularly because my knowledge of film history is not comprehensive enough to bully other film critics into submission… yet. But even this bastion of cineastes has been penetrated by the Benugo-bar media hipsters who burst out of Soho and Clerkenwell on sunny evenings and descend on our humble National Film theatre. The cowering remnants of European film lovers are therefore forced to pick their way carefully through a heaving mass of colourful shirts, leather satchels, and thick-rimmed glasses to reach NFT2 (which now shares an entrance with the men’s toilets).

The Curzon cinemas and Picturehouses of London are bearable in the afternoon, when most people are still at work, but the likes of Cineworld and Odeon cinemas are the filmic equivalent of a night out at Yates’ Bar and I really don’t understand how anybody can enjoy themselves there. You pay around £11 for a ticket, and the extortion not only continues but is actually elevated to eye-watering levels when you get into the foyer and try to buy a bag of M&Ms and a paper tankard of some bright-orange sticky fluid for about £9.

People often refer to the advances in ‘Home Cinema’ as providing the foundations for a revolution in cinematic exhibition. And it is certainly true that DVD sales and other subsidiary markets have eclipsed theatrical revenue to such an extent that a film’s theatrical release is now seen as part of the marketing campaign for the release of the DVD. But all these Blu-Ray players, surround-sound systems, and giant Plasma screens are not fulfilling their potential because 90% of us are cramming them into living rooms and damaging our eyes and ears.

The real revolution is underway, however, and it is time to get involved. The movement in Backyard Theaters (I’m spelling it their way because they started it) has swept across the US – just visit www.backyardtheater.com if you don’t believe me – and I feel certain that the trend will continue in Europe. Whether you drag your dad’s old projector out of the attic and point it at the side of your house, or invest your children’s college fund in a state-of-the-art HD projector, popcorn machines, and a giant tarp screen that eclipses your house and leaves your neighbour in a permanent shadow; this is the summer for turning your garden into a private cinema.

Invite your friends and family round, have a barbeque, and settle down to watch a film of your choice (although I would suggest starting with some old Drive-In classics just to set the mood… maybe Gun Crazy or It Happened One Night) in the comfort of your own garden. The advantages of choosing your own films, making your own food and drinks, and inviting your own audience, must surely outweigh the initial investment of a cheap projector and some white paint!

REVIEW: Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen (dir. Michael Bay)

Cast: Shia LeBouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel, Tyrese Gibson, John Turturro

Yesterday evening I returned, weary and beaten, from an unbearably hot but gut-churningly exciting Download Festival. I had just enough time to wash the first few layers of grime and sweat from my beleaguered body before the phone rang with an invitation to attend the European Premiere of ‘Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen’.

Now, I am not usually tempted by the allure of CGI spectacle, ex-Disney channel action heroes, and pin-up actresses who take themselves too seriously – and I am especially wary of sequels to films that aren’t supposed to have sequels – but Michael Bay’s first Transformers film did not actually leave me feeling empty and disgusted so I thought I would give him the benefit of the doubt again. If anybody reading this feels the same way and is considering watching this film on the merit of its predecessor…. DON’T!!

Everything that just about worked in the first film is either cut or amped up to a farcical level. Jason Friedberg – the writer of every spoof film since Scary Movie –couldn’t have written this sequel if he had tried. Let me give you one example: the relationship between the film’s hero, Sam Witwicky, and his ‘cheap-gag-laden’ parents. In the first film this was a humorous device for relieving tension, in the sequel we are subjected to huge set pieces where these two-dimensional characters trade predictable, droll insults and embarrass Sam on his first day at college (and don’t even get me started on the fact that this is a ‘first-day-at-college’ film!)

The epic robotic fights and ‘Transformations’ that provided the real wow-factor in the first film have not been developed or worked on to provide a new awe-inspiring spectacle in the sequel, there are just more of them. It is almost impressive to see Optimus Prime transforming in mid-air while free falling from a military plane, but after this the fighting between Decepticons and Autobots is just a confusing blur and has absolutely no visceral effect on the viewer.

The premise is… well there isn’t really one. Apparently Sam and Megan Fox (I still don’t know her character’s name, but after a lot of concentration I think I can confirm she is a 34C) are having relationship trouble, but that is all sorted out by the end when Sam learns to say the L-word (I nearly vomited). And apparently there is another source of power on earth and only Sam can find it (yeah… there was literally no food left in my stomach by this point.)

I mentioned my trip to Download Festival as some sort of desperate attempt to defend the film. Maybe I was just too tired to appreciate the beauty and complexity of Bay’s latest epic. But I really hope that even the most sheepish and easily-impressed film-goer will see through the predictable plot elements and cheap entertainment that this film barely provides. If this film doesn’t fail at the box-office then there might be another one in two years time… and that is a truly terrifying prospect.

REVIEW: King Of California (dir. Mike Cahill)

Cast: Michael Douglas, Evan Rachel Wood, Willis Burks II

“Its still the middle of nowhere… there’s just more people here.”

I am what the UK Film Council’s survey on ‘UK Audiences and Indicators of Commercial Viability’ would refer to as a film ‘aficionado’. The word sounds complimentary – perhaps it’s just the Hispanic twang – but it really means ‘devoted amateur’.

This is essentially another way of saying that I am pretentious enough to watch foreign language and art house films, but I still need to have my opinions formed for me by critics and real ‘film buffs’. The thing I hate most about this typology is not that it is reductive… but that it is 100% accurate!

I studied cinema for three years at university, and I am still working my way through the titanic backlog of films and filmmakers that I want to be well versed in. Every new film throws up five more that inspired, or were inspired by, said film. It is a losing battle, and at no point am I making an independent, creative decision about which film to watch.

But a few weeks ago I found myself in Qatar for a long weekend with no films. Doha is not famed for its art cinema scene, and after a few hours trawling through ex-pat forums on the Internet, all I could find was a Virgin Megastore on the fringe of the city.

One hair-raising taxi ride later and I found myself staring at three extraordinarily long walls stacked to the rafters with films I had hoped I would never have to subject myself to: everything the Olsen twins ever made mixed with box-sets of Smallville and all the Shrek films.

But in a dark, dusty corner of the store (I’m using poetic license here… it was actually just in the section marked ‘K’) I found a film whose minimalist yellow cover and classic ‘Indie’ typeface reminded me of David O Russell’s Spanking The Monkey.

It turned out to be Mike Cahill’s King of California, and it might be the first film in over half a decade that I have watched entirely independently and found as thought provoking, emotionally-engaging, and thoroughly enjoyable as any of the most famous films of the past century.

The story concerns a middle-aged man, Charlie (Michael Douglas in my favourite performance of his career), who is released from a mental institution and his luckless daughter, Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood), who is forced to look after him. Miranda had to leave school, get a job and a car, and lie to child welfare in order to look after herself while Charlie was institutionalised. His release doesn’t mean she can finally become a 16-year-old girl again… it just means she has one more thing to look after!

When Charlie tries to persuade Miranda that he has found Spanish treasure buried under the local Costco, she has an important decision to make: have him sectioned, or believe in him and follow him on what may be his final adventure. Needless to say, she chooses the second option; and what follows is a heart-warming, realistic, and thoughtful exploration of the sacrifices people are willing to make to believe in their loved ones.

This is a debut feature from an inexperienced director, but you would never believe it. Cahill holds this interesting story together by allowing the truly unique characters to dictate the action, rather than falling into the safety blanket of cliché and generic story beats.

He was certainly aided by the presence of Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) as producer and Douglas and Wood as the starring duo. Michael Douglas is not my favourite actor by a country light-year; but here he is witty, confused, vulnerable, and yet strangely courageous and capable of carrying the hopes of so many people.

He manages to persuade us of Charlie’s mental frailty, but then forces us to take the same leap of faith that Miranda has taken. We end up following Charlie on his mad adventure to find the treasure, and we really do want to believe him.

Evan Rachel Wood is as captivating and mysterious as ever. She was perfect in Thirteen, Running with Scissors, and The Wrestler. Why she isn’t already considered Hollywood’s leading lady is beyond me. Maybe it has something to do with her choice of boyfriends.

This really should feel like a whimsical ‘Indie’ film about the American family: floating in a haze somewhere above the snow-capped hills of Sundance, but failing to have any real resonance with the social context it manages to completely ignore (i.e. anything by Wes Anderson).

That it doesn’t feel this way is testament to the depth of Cahill’s love and understanding for his subjects. He never foregrounds the social implications and causes of Charlie and Miranda’s situation, but it is always purposefully and unavoidably present in the background.

They live in an old house, which feels more like something out of The Searchers than the manufactured, assembly line houses we are so used to seeing in films about suburban America. All around them, these cloned stucco neighbourhoods are rising up out of the dust.

Miranda works at a MacDonald’s in a neighbourhood that didn’t even exist before Charlie was sectioned. How can we expect anyone to feel a sense of belonging, normality of self-control in a world that is constantly changing and growing at such an uncontrollable and senseless rate?

Of course, this also fits in with the symbolic message of the film: Charlie’s ‘treasure’ (the chances of acceptance and a sense of belonging) is buried under ‘Costco’ (the soulless expansion of corporate America that douses the flames of the individual in favour of the ‘good of the many over the few’).

I know this sounds cliché, and it easily could have been; but all the elements of this film – the cast, the director, the producer, and most importantly the idea and characters – come together to explore the expansion of the American Nightmare and the effects it has on individuals in a new and interesting light.

Was Charlie right about the treasure?... You’ll have to watch the film to find out!

If you do take my advice and watch this film then I might be able to reach up and grab on to the final rung of the UK Film Council’s ‘UK audience’ ladder… that of the ‘Film Buff’. But when I get there I won’t look down on aficionados. I think that the world needs more people who value the opinions of others over their own.

REVIEW: Sugar (dir. Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck)

Cast: Algenis Perez Soto, Rayniel Rufino, Andre Holland, Ellary Porterfield

Anybody who saw Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s stunning feature debut, ‘Half Nelson’, will recall its unflinching and raw exploration of a troubled soul; anybody who didn’t see it… should. ‘Sugar’ is Boden and Fleck’s second feature, and I hope the general consensus will be that they have succeeded where promising feature debutantes so often fail.

‘Sugar’ follows the story of Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos (Perez Soto), a young Dominican baseball player plucked from poverty to star in the American Minor Baseball League. There are so many genre staples available to the makers of this film – coming-of-age, rags-to-riches, the socio-political divide between the US and Latin America, the inspiring success of a sportsman through determination and passion – but they have resisted these temptations, leaving a rich tapestry of dramatic but insincere stories behind in order to focus on the thankless and barren journey of one young man.

While we do see Sugar in his poor Dominican community, we are never invited to see this poverty in the way Jose Padilha or Fernando Meirelles would have us see it. We see the world through Sugar’s eyes: a loving family, an adoring gaggle of street children, and an unfinished table that will someday decorate the family home. This unswerving concentration on Sugar continues as he is swept away to the bustling metropolis of Kansas City. We might expect to witness racism or bewilderment at the wasteful wealth of the world’s most “developed” nation; but these details are once again left unfocused in the background, resigned to occasional establishing shots and barely audible taunts at a nightclub. The most dramatic conflict for Sugar in Kansas is how to order any food other than “French Toast”. When Sugar is sent to play in the minor leagues for Bridgetown, Iowa, he is forced to live with the stony-faced couple from Grant Wood’s American Gothic. But once again the potential for a gritty, but probably unrealistic, conflict between a religious pastoral community and a young Hispanic sportsman is avoided, and in its place stands an awkward relationship between well-meaning people who will never understand each other.

Much of the film maintains the pace and camaraderie of a generic sport drama, but heartache is always simmering beneath the veneer of this short-lived American dream. When Sugar’s only Dominican friend is unjustly dropped from the league after an injury affects his performance, we see the slow unravelling of Sugar’s confidence and love for the great American past time. As his own performance begins to drop and another pitcher replaces him, Sugar decides not to wait around to be unjustly fired and runs away to New York.

This final section of the film felt, at first, as if it was beginning to drag. But then I realised that this was only because I felt so uncomfortable in this new setting, so entirely divorced from the purposeful narrative of the rest of the film… and that is exactly how we should feel. Sugar wasn’t supposed to end up in New York, he was supposed to succeed and overcome the antagonistic forces of the world to become a symbol of hope for all those suffering indignation and oppression in their lives. By the time he fails, it is too late for us to turn away and pretend we can’t see him. We must sit and watch as he makes himself invisible again: from a hopeful young Dominican child, he now becomes a faceless New York immigrant with a dead-end job and a weekend ball team. But once again this tragic drama is offset by a quirk of realism; it is here, in the urban sprawl of a Hispanic neighbourhood in New York, that Sugar finally finds the romance, acceptance, and friendship he was looking for all along. The film ends with a montage of the other players on his amateur team in New York… all Latin American men with little education and a brief career as American League baseball players before being inexcusably dropped by their team, the sport, and the millions of people who didn’t care where they came from or where they went.

REVIEW: Anything For Her (dir. Fred Cavayé)

Cast: Vincent Lindon, Diane Kruger, Lancelot Roch, Olivier Marchal

‘Anything For Her’ is the first major international outing for French director Fred Cavaye, but with a little help from lead actress Diane Kruger the film was deemed suitable for an audience outside France and so we in Blighty have been treated to a brief run at Curzon cinemas.

I cannot claim to have an enormously wide-ranging knowledge of French films, but most of the fare that has travelled across the channel from the home of cinema and fallen upon my humble optic nerve has been in the Michael Haneke vein of fractured narratives or the Christophe Honore mould of languid emotional tales.

‘Anything For Her’ certainly doesn’t fit into either of these categories. It is a dark, gritty, noirish story about a husband desperately trying to free his innocent wife from jail. An academic somewhere in the dusty corners of Birkbeck College is probably trying to find proof that the film is really a comment on the nature of cinema and perspective; but in my opinion it is really just a hard-hitting – dare I say it even populist – thriller with an engaging performance from Vincent Lindon as the grief-stricken husband, Julien.

The film follows Julien from his last, passionate evening with wife Lisa (Kruger) before she is abruptly and violently wrested from his grasp by a group of faceless policemen. Time passes and we find Julien awaiting the results of the final appeal. The appeal fails and Julien is left in despairing grief, trying to continue his life as a teacher and single parent to their toddler son.

The film could have been a ‘Winslow Boy’-esque examination of a family’s ruinous attempts to defend the honour of a family member whose innocence is suspect. But I am not giving too much away when I tell you that Lisa is certainly innocent. Nor does the film waste any time on court cases and the mundane trials of bureaucracy, covering the entire appeal in a series of reactions to unheard phone calls with lawyers. The film wastes no time reaching the thrilling, gritty heart of the story… Julien’s decision to mastermind a jailbreak for his innocent wife.

To continue narrating the film’s unfolding story would be to treat it like an academic product rather than the entertaining thriller that it is. Suffice to say, Julien is dragged out of his classroom and into the gritty underworld of what I am narrow-mindedly willing to assume is Paris, but could quite frankly be any city in any French-speaking country (I am not so well travelled geographically).

The moody but evocative cinematography is perfectly in tune with the pace and tone of Cavaye’s direction, which sees slow, tense scenes of a lonely and broken Julien interspersed with action-packed, fast-paced scenes of his unfolding plans. The film is a true joy to watch; and it is only the laziness of the general cinema-going public (who are not so much ‘scared’ of foreign films as just unwilling to read the subtitles) that stops films like this achieving immediate commercial success. I only hope that the Internet and DVD sales will elevate this film to the level of ‘Tell No One’ and ‘La Haine’.

Perhaps anyone who has seen the film and is reading this article (and the cross-over demographic is probably negligible at best) will consider spreading the this film and some of my other suggestions by setting up a ‘Backyard Theatre’. My next column will be exploring the growing trend in D.I.Y cinemas in back gardens that has swept the US and is set to invade Britain this summer.