REVIEW: Glorious 39 (dir. Stephen Poliakoff)

Cast: Romola Garai, Bill Nighy, Eddie Redmayne, Julie Christie

Anne is the adopted daughter of an aristocratic family in 1940s Britain. The head of the family (a conservative MP) and his son, who works at the foreign office, are both opposed the approaching war with Germany and determined to maintain their way of life. When Anne stumbles across some recordings of secret government meetings at their family home, she believes there is a conspiracy to prevent the war. This gripping psychological thriller follows Anne as she becomes entangled in a web of dark and menacing secrets. She is betrayed by all around her, finally realising that an adopted daughter isn’t necessarily a member of the family, and many of those she holds dear are killed. Stephen Poliakoff is famed for his television period pieces, but this is a magnificent return to the big screen. The eeriness of the film, and the sudden sense of loneliness that we share with Anne as we realise the depth of the betrayal that she has suffered, bare comparison with ‘The Wicker Man’. And the directorial vision of the film is sumptuous and epic and yet claustrophobic and dark.

REVIEW: A Serious Man (dir. Joel & Ethan Coen)

Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Simon Helberg, Adam Arkin

Larry Gopnik (another inspired character name from the men that brought you Dude Lebowski and Barton Fink) might be the least fortunate man ever to walk God’s earth. He is a quiet professor at an unassuming Midwestern university, and he lives an uneventful and abstinent life with his seemingly happy family. Things begin to unravel after a misunderstanding with a curt and menacing Korean exchange student leads to Larry accidentally accepting a bribe. Shortly after, Larry’s rotund and explosive wife reveals that she is leave him, although she can’t explain why. The quietly spoken Larry is easily muscled out of his own home by her over-bearing and infuriatingly calm new lover; and he is forced to move into a crumbling motel with his parasitic brother.

His children seem completely apathetic to his removal from the family home, and to make matters worse, somebody is sending anonymous letters to the university accusing Larry of moral turpitude. Larry faces all of these catastrophic events with an appalled expression and a stuttering whine. He is a wonderfully pathetic character, and watching him desperately cling on to the fragments of his life is like watching Woody Allen trying to hold on to Annie Hall. He reluctantly agrees to visit a series of Rabbis, all of whom are completely incapable of helping Larry with these bizarre 21st century problems.

After an astounding, critically acclaimed literary adaptation, and a raucous screwball comedy, the Coen brother’s have returned to a more familiar location (middle America) and a more personal protagonist (a brow-beaten middle-aged man with terrible luck). But this is by no means a regression on their part; it is simply a more personal and easy-going film than their previous few outings. The Coens have a knack for creating faultlessly manicured structures; even in a film as seemingly lackadaisical and character driven as this, there is still a series of set-ups and pay-offs that harks back the Lebowksi years. Their sense of timing, and their self-deprecating humour, also comes to the fore in this film.

Michael Stuhlbarg is superb as Larry. While the Coen brothers can always be relied upon to create great characters and stories, it is still down to the individual actor to deliver these slightly manic and confused creations into the real world; and Stuhlbarg is faultless in this regard. Larry is just as rounded a character as Jerome Lundegaard Jeffrey Lebowski; he is a simple man, and a serious one, who can’t laugh at himself or view his life from a different perspective. He is trapped in his tiny world, where everything has been decimated, and even when he is forced out of his home, he only manages to go down the road to a local motel. He is bumbling fool, and he speaks to the bumbling fool in all of us.

REVIEW: The Informant! (dir. Stephen Soderbergh)

Cast: Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey

‘The Informant!’ is the true(ish) story of Mark Whitacre, the highest ranking whistleblower in corporate history. Mark (Damon) is a biochemist who has been promoted to the heady heights of agricultural giant ADM’s corporate infrastructure. But when his division loses money for a record year, he pretends that a Japanese competitor has infected ADM’s corn stock, and before he knows it the FBI is involved. Mark is clearly not a man who thinks his decisions through very carefully – he is one of those polite and hopelessly naïve Americans that we don’t see enough of outside the US – and so he decides to tell Agent Shepherd (Bakula) about ADM’s involvement in one of the largest global price-fixing scandals in corporate history.

What follows is basically what ‘The Insider’ would have looked like if Mel Brooks owned the rights. Mark agrees to wear a wire in order to incriminate the top executives at ADM, but he is so childishly excited about his foray into espionage that he never stops to think about what he is getting himself into. But the tables turn swiftly when ADM’s lawyers discover Mark has been skimming money from the company profits, and the FBI decides to sideline the ADM case and go after Mark instead!

This film easily fulfils, but never really exceeds, expectations. It is certainly not a genre-defying, complex, caustic comedy about the global agri-industry; but it is another fairly successful outing for Stephen Soderbergh and his pals George Clooney (who executive produced the picture) and Matt Damon. It shares with the ‘Oceans’ films an effortlessly well-paced and uplifting tone that only comes about through a sort of synergy when an experienced, confident, and supremely talented filmmaker like Soderbergh decides to let his hair down with a few trusted friends and remind himself how much fun filmmaking can be. The fact that the ‘friends’ who decided to join in are two of the most globally renowned actors in history certainly can’t have hurt either.

Matt Damon may have achieved international fame in the Bourne films, and critical acclaim working with directors like Gus Van Sant and Martin Scorsese, but rare appearances on ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Entourage’ (not to mention his friendship with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone) prove that he is also an incredibly astute and underrated comic actor who knows how to make fun out of himself. This film will hopefully broadcast this hidden talent to a global audience. His performance is slick and understated; he is never brash or knowingly ‘comic’ (a refreshing quality after so many years of Ferrell, Stiller, Rogen, et al) and he maintains that slightly dim, Middle American charm that effortlessly radiates from his calm, ‘farm boy’ physique. I am always amazed by how easy it is to overlook the fact that Damon is actually an Oscar-winning screenwriter from Boston; his demeanour and physiology are so fresh and agrarian that one almost wishes he was more like Private Ryan.

This may not be the most tightly honed comedy script in recent years, and I must admit that it is one of those films where the trailer is funnier than the actual film. When the court case gets under way the story becomes a bit heavy handed and loses some of the snappy pace and fleet-footed dialogue that defines the rest of the script. But if this was the sort of film where every last moment was painstakingly thought out to avoid stagnancy, then it wouldn’t be the sort of film that allowed Soderbergh and Damon to enjoy themselves and create such a thoroughly entertaining and raucous insight into their famous friendship; and I for one am willing to overlook the hiccups and slow-points in this generally well paced and thoroughly enjoyable film.

If anybody was looking forward to Steven Soderbergh’s cutting, fictional attack on the corn industry (similar to Linklater’s fantastic rebuke to cattle rearing in ‘Fast Food Nation’) then they will be disappointed. This film only touches very lightly on the ‘corn’ issue in America (in case you didn’t know, every American is eating far more corn than they should be because the US government has been over-subsidising corn production at an unsustainable level since World War 2). Similarly, if anybody was looking for a deep, three-dimensional character study of a torn soul stuck in the heart of a giant US corporation (à la ‘The Insider’) then they will leave unfulfilled. The script prioritises laughs ahead of depth of emotion in almost every instance; and while there is pathos by the bucket load, we can’t ever really say we care about Whitacre. If, on the other hand, you arrive at the cinema looking forward to a frivolous, expertly produced, and very funny movie with a few cracking performances, then I think you might just be in luck.

REVIEW: The White Ribbon (dir. Michael Haneke)

Cast: Christian Friedel, Ulrich Tukur, Rainer Bock, Burghart Klaussner

Since his shocking 1989 debut ‘The Seventh Continent’, Michael Haneke’s style of distanced, uncomfortable, but undeniably beautiful filmmaking has developed and expanded throughout his fascinating career. After a decade working in his native German tongue, Haneke made the move into French filmmaking at the turn of the millennium, with a sparse but emotionally rich ensemble film, ‘Code Unknown’. His subsequent work with actresses Isabelle Huppert and Juliette Binoche has resulted in some remarkable performances and breathtaking films. In 2001, ‘The Piano Teacher’ won the Grand Prix at Cannes (it also won Huppert the Best Actress award), and catapulted Haneke into the highest order of filmmakers.

Haneke’s career took another turn in 2007 when he decided to remake his sadistic and brutal 1997 film, ‘Funny Games’, in the US with an all-star cast. The film, which concerns two sadistic teenagers who trap a middle-class family in their lakeside home and torture them with ‘funny games’ before killing them, was just as horrifying and unrelenting as it’s German original, and once again conjured up some fantastic performances, this time from Tim Roth, Naomi Watts, and Michael Pitt.

‘The White Ribbon’, which earned Haneke the prestigious Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, marks yet another positive step in his faultless career. And yet the film also seems to be a conscious step back for this progressive and dynamic filmmaker. After two decades of testing new boundaries both artistically and personally (directing a film in a language you do not speak fluently is a terrifying prospect, but one that Haneke relished), Haneke has returned to his mother tongue, and seems to have taken solace and respite in the historical heartland of the Germanic culture… the countryside. It is not that simple, of course; Haneke has used this humble setting to dissect the themes and messages underlying his previous films, and so ‘The White Ribbon’ really is another magnificent, emotionally resonant, and aesthetically stunning tour de force.

The film follows the lives of a few families in a remote, feudal village in northern Germany on the eve of World War One. When the village doctor is tripped by a maliciously placed piece of wire while riding his horse, the village is alive with whispers and theories about who could have committed the crime. But when a barn is set on fire, and two children are abducted and tortured, the repressed sentiments of the village begin to boil over. The schoolteacher (Friedel) who investigates the crimes also narrates the tale as an old man, and we are not expected to treat his narration as omniscient. The families we follow are those of the Baron (Tukur), the doctor (Bock), and the pastor (Klaussner); and by witnessing their various reactions to events in the town, we are given a fascinating insight into the repression, fear, and violence that exists below the surface of this small society.

Haneke chose the spatial and temporal settings of the film very specifically: he wanted this small feudal town, on the cusp of the modern world, because it worked so wonderfully as a microcosm of society, and also because your view of the children is coloured by a subconscious understanding that they will grow up to be Nazis. But this is not a film about German fascism specifically; it is a film about the dangers of repression and indoctrination, and the failures of previous generations to properly prepare the young for the world in front of them.

Many of Haneke’s films are about people who reach a point in their lives where they realise they are completely unprepared for the road ahead. From the suicidal couple at the heart of ‘The Seventh Continent’ to Huppert’s piano teacher and the scared husband in ‘Hidden’, these are characters who have lost all faith in themselves and their pasts and find themselves stranded in a terrifying present with no understanding of the world around them. ‘The White Ribbon’ is an attempt by Haneke to look back into the pasts of all his characters and work out what it is in our collective childhoods that leaves us stranded later in life; and of course the temporal setting of this film means we must also look at this on a social level: if a society is unprepared for the future, they are liable to grasp at straws and accept the first man who comes along with promises of safety and prosperity.

This film is certainly more tangibly philosophical and academic than many of Haneke’s previous films, and this may be partially due to the exhaustive research undertaken by him. In a recent interview he explained that he wanted the viewer to feel more detached from this film; hence his decision to employ the schoolteacher’s narration. The schoolteacher is a Dostoevskian character: a humble and impartial outsider who views the events around him with a simple intelligence. Viewing the film from (or at least informed by) his perspective prevents us from becoming attached to any of the characters, and so we float around the village, surveying and analysing and questioning everything we see.

This need for detachment also explains the ‘look’ of the film. Shot in black and white, the film looks so much like a Bunuel film from the ‘Viridiana’ era. Bunuel never wanted to coax the viewer into his films with unnecessarily well-composed shots, he believed that the image should serve the story and the tone and not simply be beautiful for it’s own sake. Haneke has followed a similar path here, and while the film is unmistakably well composed and strangely beautiful, it is also stark and brutal and real.

This is another truly remarkable film from one of the finest living filmmakers. It is not easy to watch, and it is not as openly shocking as many of his previous films; but it is intelligent and mature and there is not a single moment in the entire 145-minute running time that you doubt you are in the hands of an absolute master of the cinema.

REVIEW: Paper Heart (dir. Charlyne Yi & Nick Jasenovec)

Cast: Charlyne Yi, Michael Cera, Jake Johnson

People are calling ‘Paper Heart’ a mockumentary; but that word doesn’t seem to do the film justice because it bears no resemblance or heritage whatsoever to Spinal Tap. ‘Paper Heart’ is really an honest study on the nature of ‘love’; it is a quirky docu-drama that blends narrative sequences with documentary footage, and weaves the two together so that they inform and affect each other. And if that doesn’t grab you, there are also some fantastic Gondry-esque animated sequences and original music from the poster boy of geek-chic, Michael Cera.

Charlyne Yi, a comedienne from California, has always wanted to make a documentary about real love (as opposed to the “Julia Roberts/ English Patient/ sobbing-in-the-rain stuff”); but it was not until she approached friend and director Nick Jasenovec that ‘Paper Heart’ began to form as an idea. Jasenovec forced Yi to accept that the film would be better if she placed herself, and her staunchly anti-love mindset, in front of the camera. When she confessed to being nervous, Jasenovec suggested they incorporate a scripted narrative into the documentary so that she could feel like she was ‘acting’. And so this fascinating new medium of docu-drama was born.

Yi and Jasenovec have gone to great lengths to ensure that the whole film feels real. The documentary footage and the scripted scenes are shot in exactly the same style, so that we never feel a jarring effect when we cross from one to the other; and they decided to cast an actor to play Nick, as Jake Johnson is more realistic as Nick than Nick would have been!

The result is a mish-mash of genres that really draws the viewer into the heart and message of the story. This is a buddy/ road trip movie about two friends travelling across America trying to find the meaning of love. But it is also a heart-warming romance story looking at the courting process in all its awkward splendour. As Charlyne “falls in love” with Cera, her real-life character begins to change as her questions to complete strangers become more hopeful and romantic.

There are so many things about the film that could have been annoying: it is a “film-about-a-film” (often pretentious), it is created by quirky, American Apparel youngsters from East LA (often pretentious), and it has episodes of animation to help describe the interviews (which can often be… well you get the picture.) But the story is so refreshing and honest that it would be almost impossible to find anything annoying here.

In the end, Nick becomes hell-bent on finishing the film, and his intrusive camera nearly ruins Charlyne and Michael’s relationship. But whether or not their romance survives is irrelevant (it doesn’t even exist!), the important thing is that Charlyne has learned to accept the possibility of love, and the lack of control we have over it.

REVIEW: Jennifer's Body (dir. Karen Kusama)

Cast: Megan Fox, Amanda Seyfried, Adam Brody

If anyone in the film industry claims that they aren’t at least a bit intrigued by the idea of a Diablo Cody horror film, then they are probably lying. Her sassy, infectious, and hugely popular debut, ‘Juno’, was the toast of the Oscars two years ago; and ‘Jennifer’s Body’ is her eagerly awaited follow-up.

The story concerns Jennifer (Megan Fox), the “hot girl” at Devil’s Kettle High School, who is sacrificed by the lead singer of a rock band (Adam Brody) looking to enlist Satan’s help in achieving fame. The sacrifice goes wrong because Jennifer is not a virgin; and she returns to life as a teenage-boy-eating demon. The only person who suspects Jennifer of the killings is her nerdy best friend, Needy (Amanda Seyfried).

While ‘Juno’ had pretentions of indie chic, ‘Jennifer’s Body’ is a comedy-horror that shamelessly targets the teenage market. The decision to cast Megan Fox (Transformers) and Adam Brody (The O.C.), while assembling a soundtrack stuffed with Emo-pop poster boys like Panic! At The Disco, is suggestive of the overall tone of the film. It is littered with teen references and gags and the hyper-real ‘teen speak’ that characterized ‘Juno’; phrases like “freak-tarded” and “cheese and fries” (as opposed to ‘Jesus Christ’) abound.

Lurking behind this teeny horror, however, are a few elements that deserve genuine praise. To begin with, some of the performances are excellent. Megan Fox is… Megan Fox. But Amanda Seyfried is an excellent young actress who brings a wild-eyed, eerie innocence to the part of Needy; and Adam Brody brings his characteristic charm and zany likeability to the role of Emo frontman Nikolei.

Secondly, the set design and general look of the film are commendable. It is a rich visual tapestry that fuses the mundane, small-town aesthetic of many legendary horror films (Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, etc) with the clean, sharp, colourful look of more modern teen-centred films.

Finally, there is Cody’s script itself. The task of dealing with an unfamiliar genre has forced Cody to stray away from her beloved quirky dialogue at certain points, and this is a positive because it forces some of her excellent observational humour to the fore. Nikolei’s defence of the sacrifice (it is impossible to make it as an indie rock band unless you have been on Letterman or made a song for a film soundtrack) is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek, and there are plenty of moments like this.

There is also the small matter of the ‘horror’ element of the film. There is nothing especially original about the horror here, but there is nothing excessively cheap or crass about it either. There are some genuinely scary sequences, and Karen Kusama has done an excellent job of teasing this uncomfortable element of the script out into the finished film. The result is a shamelessly quirky teen film that is actually quite funny, scary, and entertaining to watch.