REVIEW: The Deep Blue Sea (dir. Terence Davies)

Cast: Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale, Ann Mitchell, Karl Johnson

Terence Davies’ adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea is the finale that marks the end of Rattigan’s centenary year. One of the most underrated playwrights of the twentieth century, Rattigan’s devastating wit and subtle emotional depth need to be broadcast to a new generation; and nobody is better suited for the task than Terence Davies.

Her suicide note penned, Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) is lying in a foetal position before the gas fireplace; staring at the rippling stream of noxious fumes for which there is no flame to burn. As she drifts off we see a quiet montage of images: Hester with an older gentleman, her husband, Hester with a younger gentleman, her lover. If you have any expectations of a Rattigan adaptation, they are not being met. This is no kitchen sink drama. This is Luis Bunuel. Abstract, surreal dream sequences; soft hazy memories that have the faint chill of something nightmarish. Davies finds a way to imbue all the tingling anxiety of a Rattigan play into this very cinematic opening.

But the opening subsides, as they all do, and makes way for a more traditional reworking of the play. Hester leaves her stuffy aristocrat husband (played with grace and poise by the inestimable Simon Russell Beale) to pursue love of a more lustful flavour with Battle of Britain survivor Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston). She is a victim of the post-war appetite for freedom and discovery. The world has changed since she was married, and she wants to be out there getting dirty in it. But it doesn’t take long for her to realise that her love for Freddie, and for that brand new sparkling world, cannot be requited.

Davies knows how to fracture a narrative, and does so here with effortless skill. The basic story is simple and coherent, but scenes from different points in the story interrupt each other, creating an extra layer of emotional and psychological distress. Alas, somehow the freshness of the narrative structure is choked out by the traditional, yawning melodrama. Everything from the stained rococo wallpaper to the raucous sing-a-long in the local pub conspires against innovation. There is something timeless about Rattigan’s work, but also something inherently nostalgic and dated; and Davies doesn’t help matters by plastering a violin score onto the film that is too loud and overdramatic.

At 40, Rachel Weisz was the right age to play Hester when filming commenced; but Davies knew that she wouldn’t look a day over 30 on screen. Hester’s youthfulness turns the entire play on its head: what should be a broken adult running away from life is now a doe-eyed English rose escaping the shackles of aristocracy and joining the excited ranks of England’s post-war youth. As this lustful dream crumbles around her, however, we realise that she is not so young after all: she is old enough to be both cruel and utterly dependent.

Without this new perspective this is really just the story of a woman who can’t make her mind up; but fortunately Weisz revels in it. Her weary, haunted gaze veils her delicate features throughout, and were this a more surreal film one might almost suggest that the entire story is a figment of her fume-choked imagination during the throws of attempted suicide. If Davies has borrowed from Bunuel, then Weisz is his Deneuve: she is distant, never quite there, but when she crumbles into tears we feel them in our own throats.

There is a pleasant circularity to the film that is all Davies. Left alone and in tatters, Hester once again lies before the fireplace and allows the fumes to leak out; but with a flick of her wrist she ignites the fire, introducing a flame that warms her already radiant face. She will live to fight on.

REVIEW: J. Edgar (dir. Clint Eastwood)

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench, Geoff Pierson

J. Edgar examines the life of one of America’s most mysterious figures, FBI Director Hoover. The film follows Hoover (played by an unrecognisable Leonardo DiCaprio) towards the end of his life, as he attempts to dictate his memoirs and the story of the FBI (the two being wholly intertwined).

In 1924, at the tender age of twenty-nine, Hoover was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation, and remained until his death in 1972. The Bureau was his life: he never married or had children, and he kept his secretary, Miss Gandy (Naomi Watts), and deputy Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), with him throughout his career.

Hoover’s tenure at the Bureau oversaw some of the most important controversies and scandals of the American century: John Dillinger’s capture, The Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, the death of Marilyn Monroe, Hoover’s name crops up everywhere. Clint Eastwood’s film stumbles nervously through a few of these energetic and utterly cinematic situations before settling on the most stale and untenable facets of Hoover’s life: his cynical involvement in the Lindbergh kidnapping case, and his homosexual love affair with Tolson.

In March 1932 legendary aviator Charles A. Lindbergh’s infant son was kidnapped from the family home. It was a case for the state police, but Hoover used the ensuing trial to widen the scope of the FBI and to create a centralised fingerprint database. It is an important part of American history, but a comparatively boring one. As for Hoover’s homosexuality: it can never be proven, and allowing it to consume our understanding of the man is demeaning. He wasn’t a good person, but he was a multi-faceted one. Tarring him (for two hours) with this brush is irresponsible and, again, boring.

This is all a huge shame, because Hoover was unarguably one of the most sinister and shadowy figures of the 20th Century. He answered to nobody, and used his power to amass private files on every political figure and celebrity in the United States. He was Norman Bates with a more attuned and sinister “Mummy” complex. He didn’t need to spy through a hole in the shower, he had the most well funded institution in Washington for that. He spied on John F Kennedy and used the resulting sex tape to bribe brother Bobby, then Attorney General, to fund his ongoing and entirely pointless anti-Communist campaigns. You could close your eyes and poke a stick into almost any part of the man’s life and come up with a story bristling with intrigue and energy.

How Eastwood has managed to create so dull a film is actually quite stunning. Nor can Eastwood argue that he didn’t want to cast aspersions on unproven stories: if this were the case, he surely wouldn't spend half the film watching Hoover and Tolson’s wild and emotional love affair, for which there has never been a shred of corroborated evidence.

The film is almost saved by its three central performances. DiCaprio, Hammer and Watts have their faces caked in varying degrees of makeup and prosthetics throughout the film in an attempt to convey the almost half a century over which the story takes place. The makeup is as good as you will see without the overpriced CGI geekery of Cameron or Fincher, but it is hugely distracting for the viewer and, with less capable actors, might have destroyed the natural performances.

Fortunately these are not lesser actors. DiCaprio is, as we have come to expect, excellent as Hoover. He transcends the prosthetic appendages and conveys the slow deterioration of a powerful man in ways no makeup or CGI ever could. His eyes are always alight, but his voice slowly weakens to a croak, and his shoulders stoop to creaking. It is a powerful performance, supported admirably by the understated grace of Naomi Watts and the chirpy, disarming Armie Hammer.

REVIEW: Cowboys & Aliens (dir. Jon Favreau)

Cast: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Paul Dano

Arizona, 1873. Jake Lonergan (Craig) doesn’t remember anything. He doesn’t know that he is a wanted man, he doesn’t know that he is on the outskirts of a town run by ruthless landowner Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford), and he certainly doesn’t know how this damn extraterrestrial bracelet got shackled to his wrist. He doesn’t know that he shouldn’t be talking back to the pistol-wielding town drunk (Dano) because he is Dolarhyde’s heir, and he doesn’t know why the doe-eyed beauty at the bar (Wilde) is so desperate to know where he came from. Jake’s amnesia is getting him into a whole world of trouble; but then an alien strike-force descends and plunges the whole world into trouble.

That’s right, it turns out New Yorkers weren’t the only impatient alien species invading the Wild West during the nineteenth century in search of gold. This brutal species carpet bombs the frontier town and lassoes innocent men, women and children before disappearing into the night. With so powerful a common enemy, Lonergan and Dolarhyde’s conflict pales into insignificance; along with the remaining townsmen and Ella (the mysterious beauty from the bar) they race off in pursuit of the alien base, hoping to recover their loved ones.

Just in case anybody is still uncertain, we really are talking about actual aliens here. This isn’t about a gang of Mexican’s crossing the border; these are the sort of aliens that man, even a century later, was unable to destroy without the help of a suicidally drunk Randy Quaid. So how does Favreau get around the obvious imbalance of power? Well his previous masterpieces (the Iron Man dilogy) should point the way to the disappointing answer: man is boring and worthless, but stick a futuristic machine on his body and he can be a hero. Jake’s mysterious bracelet, which blows up aliens when they get too close, is the humans’ only weapon throughout the entire film. Unsurprisingly, this one simple device gets old quickly; but Favreau never attempts to escalate the conflict by finding a new and interesting way for the cowboys to fight the aliens. So in much the same way that Transformers is essentially a robot war with a few humans stumbling around trying to get laid; this film should really have been called ‘Alien bracelet vs Aliens… with some cowboys falling off their horses’.

Disappointing conflicts aside, there is actually something in the tone of this film that commends it. After all, who doesn’t love a film set in the Wild West with Harrison Ford on the team? The cinematography is often exquisite, and the central performances are solid throughout. You can’t ask for much more than 007 and Indiana Jones for a central duo; and Sam Rockwell and Olivia Wilde round out the palette beautifully. The aliens are mysterious and eerie while they stick to aerial attacks; but when we meet them up-close-and-personal it is a shame to see how anthropomorphic the animation team have gone. All-in-all, an average disaster movie with enough heart and production quality to justify the cinema entry price.

REVIEW: Project Nim (dir. James Marsh)

In 1973, Columbia University professor Dr. Herb Terrace embarked on one of the strangest scientific experiments of his generation (a generation, let’s not forget, that included Timothy Leary). He decided that by bringing up a newborn chimp, Nim, in a human environment and teaching him sign language, he could prove that the capacity to form language is not a uniquely human trait. The experiment failed to provide conclusive results; but what Terrace did prove is that if language is a defining characteristic that separates man from ape, then it is the only one, because compassion, reason and foresight clearly do not play a part.

The opening of Marsh’s film follows the aesthetic of his previous project, Man on Wire, by splicing grainy documentary footage with a stylised, almost noirish dramatic element. This approach worked so well for the suspense of Man on Wire, but it does little justice to Nim’s melancholy and bizarre story. Where Man on Wire was a high-octane heist movie, Project Nim is a slow-burning story of human endeavour and pathos. Marsh quickly retires this style, but with no back up plan he never quite works out how best to tell his story, and reverts to ‘talking heads’ and archive footage for the rest of the film.

It doesn’t take long to realise that Nim’s first surrogate, Stephanie, is bat shit insane. She allows him to run amock and becomes obsessed with his “sexual awakening” and watching him masturbate. When Nim outgrows city life Terrace sets him up in a huge country mansion with a harem of buxom and pliable young female teachers who, in the space of a few months, teach Nim a considerable vocabulary of signs with which to express himself. Terrace remains distant throughout, his interest only piqued by occasional newspaper attention and regular sex with one or more of the “teachers”.

Eventually the entire experiment is abandoned as Nim becomes too powerful for his teachers; and he is dumped in a chimpanzee enclosure. Terrace confirms himself as a repulsive and apathetic man: he has satiated his lust and is happy enough with the half-baked and arbitrary results of his mangled experiment. He allows Nim to tumble from enclosure to medical testing facility to lonely farm sanctuary without ever trying to intervene.

After 10 years of confusion, one of Nim’s old carers locates him and decides to visit. Bob approaches cautiously as a barely recognisable Nim rocks back and forth in his cage. Nim turns to face his old friend and immediately throws out his most simple and favourite sign, one of the few signs he created on his own, “play”.

Our sympathy for Nim, and our wonder at the madness of his captors, only takes us so far, however. By the end of the film we feel as if we know a bit more about Project Nim, but we aren’t sure why. Marsh is too content framing the entire film around the narrative spun by its subjects, rather than stamping his own authorship on the film, and as a result it lacks the power and depth of his previous work.

INTERVIEW: Ryan Roberts on Oliver Sherman

Ryan Roberts’ feature debut, Oliver Sherman, follows the lives of two US war veterans as they struggle to come to terms with life after war. Franklin has left his old life behind and is happily married with children; but this tranquil life is thrown into turmoil when old friend Sherman shows up on his doorstep in need of bed and board. Sherman has not recovered from the trauma of war, and his presence in Franklin’s home has chilling consequences. Roberts’ film, based on Rachel Ingalls’ short story Veterans, is a tragic and poetic exploration of friendship, trauma, and broken masculinity.

FtF: So what attracted you to Ingalls’ short story?

RR: Well I had spent almost five years on what I thought was going to be my first feature, but it turned out to be too big for a first feature. And there was a momentum behind it in terms of development and financing, in terms of producers and crew attached, so I knew I could get some sort of movie made. I had never attempted adaptation before but I thought that it might provide an easier immediate answer in terms of making a movie; so I started reading short stories by the boat load thinking I could read something and than make it my own if it was a short story. I was in Canada, in my local bookstore Indigo Chapters, and I spotted this book that I had seen over five years earlier in a Village Voice ‘Best of Year’ list. And just in the store I started reading this short story and read the whole thing in one fell swoop and started having ideas then and there. I suggested to my producers that maybe this should be the first feature; so they went and got the rights, and that’s how it happened.

FtF: So you weren’t actively seeking something in the thriller genre? Or something with a military theme?

RR: No, but weirdly it turned out to be quite similar, thematically, to the project I had been working on for the previous few years: in terms of the threat of violence and the notion of damaged masculinity. Those things from the previous project are evident in what I did with this short story.

FtF: What was your experience of adapting the story?

RR: Well it was almost a novella, it was about 70 pages, but this is a very loose adaptation. I didn’t work with the author in any way because I didn’t want to be indebted to her or feel guilty that I was deviating from her initial impulse. So I never talked to her or contacted her, and I don’t know if she has seen the movie. The short story is more literary than the movie; the main character is a bit more cold and removed than he is in my movie. But I think the movie respects what she was doing.

I would say the short story was not inherently cinematic. The majority of scenes are not actually in the short story; they are a visual embodiment of ideas from the short story. What I like about her work is that it is very timeless and you don’t know where it’s set. I embrace that thoroughly in all my work. I try to aim at something lyrical and displaced, and that drives some people nuts but I like it a lot.

FtF: The film is certainly timeless. You avoid any mention of specific times and places for their military service.

RR: Yes that was a conscious decision. There have been so many movies that are political and are specifically about the Gulf, etc. But even if there wasn’t a war on I still would have made this movie. The novella actually takes place during the Korean War, but in the entire 70 pages I think it is only mentioned in one line. I would say her work is not really alluding to any given context. She doesn’t want to make political things, she wants to make timeless things, and that’s why I chose it.

FtF: Did you already have this superb cast in mind? And what was your experience working with them?

RR: Well the first person we cast was Molly Parker. It sounds ridiculous but to get Canadian financing you need to cast a Canadian actor in a lead role. But I thought she was perfect for the role, and I knew she had been on Deadwood with Garrett (Dillahunt) so I thought she could help us get to him as well. Sure enough she did help to facilitate that so I went to meet Garrett and we got along. Strangely the hardest part to cast was the third lead, the husband, because the Canadian financiers were literally counting lines and decided that Molly’s character had fewer lines than Garrett and the Franklin so we needed to cast another Canadian actor in the third role. So in the end we cast Donal (Logue) because it turned out that he had been born in Ottawa and lived there for about two days. But Garrett and Molly had been on Deadwood together and Garrett and Donal had been on Life together about a month prior to shooting. So I didn’t know them but they all knew each other well.

FtF: Did any of them bring anything specific to the table regarding their characters?

RR: Well, you would have to ask them. I mean I know that Garrett lived next door to a Vietnam vet when he was younger, and he said that a lot of what’s in that role is what he witnessed from that guy back in Seattle, where he is originally from. We had about five days of rehearsal, and it was sort of frightening for me because I had never done rehearsal before, so there was no one giving their all in terms of rehearsing scenes, it was more about the four of us reading through the script and talking through it, discussing what things meant and making sure we were all on the same path. I would say that Garrett, especially, was so disciplined and such a gentleman at all times during the making of the film. Nothing like his character at all! If every movie I make could have Garrett in it I would have him in it.

FtF: There is an unseen TV set playing in the background during some of the domestic scenes. What was that about?

RR: It is a movie without any real soundtrack; it is just natural sounds. So we were trying to figure out how you build tension with background sounds, and also how you fill the background without it being too predominant. But in that specific instance there is no hidden message or specific reason for that track; it was just an attempt to fill space without using some giant Spielberg score. I think it is more unnerving when there is no score and there are just background sounds. I embrace that, although it makes the sound design all the more difficult because you need to fill the spaces and stop things from being flat or boring. I wanted to keep things quiet, I didn’t want a score, we wanted to work with diegetic sound. People expect a score now, so to withhold that creates another type of tension.

FtF: So what are your plans for the future?

RR: Well I spent five years on what I thought would be my first feature. We had a whole crew for it, government funding for development, producers, etc. All of that ended up going into this so this film actually got made quite quickly. At the moment I sort of feel like I am recovering from this. Toronto was the festival premiere and that was almost a year ago. But at the moment I am still concentrating on this and we will see if the other project gets off the ground soon.

REVIEW: Jack Goes Boating (dir. Phillip Seymour Hoffman)

Cast: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Ryan, John Ortiz, Daphne Rubin-Vega

There are a lot of things Jack can’t do: two of them are swimming and cooking. As a chauffeur for his uncle’s limousine company, Jack spends his life counting the miles through New York’s hinterland of crumbling freeways and soot-stained tower blocks. He has locked all the colour of life away in a Reggae collection and a beanie hat that hides a tumbling mess of half-formed dreadlocks. But the time has come to open up his heart to the tempest, and see how it flies.

Jack agrees to a double date with best friend Clyde, his wife Lucy, and her colleague Connie. The timid first encounter prompts Jack to make two rash decisions: he agrees to go boating with Connie in the summer, and he promises her a dinner party. There are two problems: Jack can’t swim, and Jack can’t cook.

The ensuing film centres on Jack’s journey to improve himself and grasp life more firmly. It is a heart-warming exploration of how one man’s change can ripple through the lives of those closest to him. Jack is the hero, the centre of the story; but he is also a fulcrum, and his trio of friends will find the balance of their lives upended as he pivots and shifts and, finally, comes to rest once more. Nowhere is this shift clearer than in best friend Clyde. Jack may always have been a kind and attentive friend, but unburdened by the complexities of adult life he can hardly have been a helpful confidante. As Jack begins the journey into adulthood, the relief with which Clyde finally opens up about his haggard marriage is powerful and moving.

There is little tragedy or suspense – no churning upheavals or heartbreaking ennui – but this hole is plugged by the charming characters and bittersweet dialogue. Tradition dictates that Jack and Connie should fumble awkwardly, leaving feelings buried until it is almost too late, and then eventually, courageously, race through an airport as the score climaxes. But Jack and Connie aren’t like that at all…

They are hopelessly, wonderfully unromantic. When Jack suggests “a little good night kiss? Y’know, nothing overwhelming” Connie replies, “I’m not ready for penis penetration”. But then, surprisingly, when they do become intimate, Connie remarks, “I like how you touch me, how you barely touch my skin”. She has a powerful sensuality that has not spoiled, but untouched has become more refined. Jack might seem like the sort of man to shy away from passion; and when Connie suggests, “I might be ready, if you overwhelm me, if you force me” we assume this will be too much for our timid hero. He stands for an eternity, breathing heavily. Will he flee? Can he… then BAM… he bull charges her onto the bed and lands with a thud atop her. This man is charging forward with the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he won’t let that slow him down anymore.

Their disarming strength and confidence allows the film to turn away from cliché and venture into territory that is underexplored in romantic comedies: the necessity of friendship, the floodgate that opens when you invest in another life, the childish impulses that awaken when your heart is fiddled with.

Too many great actors ruin their directorial debuts by falling back on the crutch of their own performances; but the powerful, shy Phillip Seymour Hoffman does not allow himself so central a role in the fabric of his first film. This is not the sort of grumbling, frenetic tour de force we have come to expect from him as an actor; but it is a quiet, patient romantic comedy that breathes freely and never feels too much like a showcase for its director-star.

The film captures the warm glow and crisp freshness of New York in winter, but it is not a crass festive vision done up in tinsel and fairy lights. As with everything else in this film, it relies on a beguiling sincerity and quietness: frosty park benches, soiled piles of ploughed sidewalk snow, a strong winter sun melting the icy skyscrapers at dusk, all accompanied by the melancholy sounds of Grizzly Bear - perfect New York winter music.

REVIEW: Life in a Day (dir. Kevin Macdonald)

“It’s the 24th of July, and it’s the best day ever.”

When Kevin Macdonald – the acclaimed director behind Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland – decided to curate youtube footage into a feature film, he could not have expected to receive over 44,500hrs of footage from 192 countries. People of all ages, from every walk of life, and from every corner of the world celebrated the idea of recording their daily activities and contributing to this time capsule for the youtube generation.

That phrase, “youtube generation”, carries so many ugly connotations – of twenty-something Western youths giggling at kittens in jars and strumming along to True Love Waits – but this film highlights how the farthest reaches of civilisation have embraced this unique phenomenon. Humble American families, Arabian bachelors, quiet African tribesmen, terminally ill housewives – thousands upon thousands recorded the trivial thoughts and activities of Thursday 24th June 2010. The resulting film, Life in a Day, is an astounding, baffling, and strangely moving tapestry of human civilisation.

Under Macdonald’s guidance, the film never feels incomprehensibly fast as the hundreds of clips flitter past. He avoids the obvious dichotomies (East vs. West, US vs. Islam, old vs. young, etc) and chooses simply to tell the story of a day, from 00:01 to 23:59. The resulting story allows for an almost tranquil rumination on the subtle differences between cultures:

How do you cook an egg? In a wok on a street corner? Carefully prepared in a kitchen? Hastily cracking shells over a fire in the Armenian forests? And how do you brush your teeth? On the toilet? In an old pewter mug? With your toes? And how do you get to work? Riding a Shetland pony? Jumping on the back of a Paris bus? Sharing a motorbike into Delhi with three other men? The film allows glimpses of so many ways of living, and the differences between them are more often funny and charming than ominous or sombre.

Macdonald also allows a number of threads to trail through the meta-narrative: an American mother suffering from cancer, a Korean man who has been cycling the world for a decade, a young Latino boy who shines shoes and obsesses over Wikipedia. These eclectic stories are never exploited for laughs or tears – there is no time for any of that – but the emotional involvement we feel for this chorus of characters colours our understanding of the steady stream of images and clips that flows around them.

The film takes a dark turn with footage of the Love Parade Festival in Germany. The images of herds of innocent revellers collapsing in on one another in the unavoidable crush, while thousands of helpless onlookers watched, is painful and futile. From here the film delves into the Dionysian chaos that, some say, lies beneath the peaceful coherence of everyday life: street fights, baying crowds, Las Vegas excess, Football thugs, rockets and fireworks, bombs, darkness, fire and chaos.

The ending is purposefully trivial and remote: as midnight approaches, and the thunder and lightning envelopes her car in a parking lot, a young woman’s tear-filled eyes glimmer with pride and hope. She has been at work all day, and nothing of note has happened; but somehow she feels that something wonderful has taken place. A life shouldn’t need to be heroic, controversial, or glamorous for the wider world to take notice of it. Wonderful little things happen every day, and finally a film has come along that celebrates each and every one.

REVIEW: Hanna (dir. Joe Wright)

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett, Jessica Barden, Olivia Williams, Jason Flemyng

We are deep in the Scandinavian wilderness: the land of Narnia and countless Grimm fairytales. A half frozen river chortles harmlessly through the plains, and on its banks baby bears roll carelessly in the snow. But something is stirring in the trees, and we catch a glimpse of a child huntress, barely in her teens, with white hair and icy blue eyes. She has stolen upon a magnificent elk, and with the whip-thud of an arrow she dispenses with her quarry. This is no child, this is a killer… this is Hanna.

This opening seems to tell us everything we need to know about Joe Wright’s Hanna: the story of a teenage girl (Ronan) trained from birth to be the perfect assassin. But as she stands over the elk, pistol in hand, and pulls the trigger, the title of the film – HANNA – explodes across the screen in vibrant red and white, reminiscent of Michael Haneke or some angry German punk video. Joe Wright isn’t going to stick to the rules here; he is taking us somewhere new, and we are strapped in ready to go.

Hanna’s father, Erik (Bana), is a rogue CIA agent who has escaped to this remote wilderness, and dedicated his remaining days to training his daughter in the art of self-defence. Now that she has come of age, he decides to let her out into the world to meet her fate – a twisted CIA operative, Marissa (Blanchett), who will stop at nothing to kill her. Hanna and Erik break up and agree to meet in Berlin once Marissa has been killed, but this difficult and lonely journey takes Hanna halfway across the world, through hidden desert bunkers, strange gypsy countryside, and looming industrial strongholds.

Being critical, the story is familiar and many of the occurrences and plot points are too convenient. But this film isn’t about jaw-dropping twists or eerie realism; it is about taking the classical elements of an action thriller (escaping from bunkers, hiding from German double-agents, smuggling away on ferries, etc) and blending them with an exciting and adventurous vision. Joe Wright mixes elements of fantasy, hyperrealism, and music video to create the sort of action thriller that Danny Boyle would be proud of. Long, choreographed chase sequences are broken up by striking, languid road trip settings; all accompanied by a thundering electronic score courtesy of The Chemical Brothers.

Physically Hanna is superhuman, and is capable of extraordinary strength and agility. But mentally she is a child, threatened by the size of the world, and the sheer number of people and distractions in it. Nobody could have played this role but Saoirse Ronan. She is a captivating cross between Catherine Deneuve and some bewitching Gaelic Goddess. She is effortlessly unaware of the camera’s obscuring glare, and always seems to float above the earthly machinations of  “acting”. She is unreachable, and utterly compelling.

This film channels the haunting fantasy of the Brothers Grimm, with the hazy, colourful power of Lolita, and the thumping action of a Bourne film. It is not an original story, and in other hands it might have appeared trashy; but Joe Wright is in great shape, and a string of successes has given him the confidence to break out into a new and energetic style. His vision, along with Ronan’s near flawless performance, elevate this interesting story into one of the must-see films of 2011.

REVIEW: I Saw the Devil (dir. Jee-woon Kim)

Cast: Byung-hun Lee, Min-sik Choi, Gook-hwan Jeon, Ho-jin Jeon, San-ha Oh, Yoon-seo Kim

Jee-woon Kim's crazed vengeance thriller follows the bewildering cat-and-mouse conflict between Kim Soo-hyeon, one of Korea’s most ruthless secret agents, and Kyung-chul, the psychopath that murdered his wife. We are introduced to the serial killer almost immediately, and Kim captures him soon after, meaning that mystery and suspense are quickly dispensed with. The ensuing story takes its queue from a surprising act: after beating Kyung-chul half to death, Kim nurses him back to health and leaves him with a thick wad of cash. The good cop has broken bad, he isn’t interested in the death or imprisonment of his wife’s killer, he wants to play…

As Kyung-chul preys on new victims and attempts to lay low with accomplices, Kim regularly appears to provide another agonising and tortuous beating. Kyung-chul slowly realises that he will never escape the unpredictable punishments of his ghostly nemesis: the hunter is now the hunted, and his face, frozen in fear, becomes the mask of his many victims. He escapes, of course, and Kim is forced once again to hunt him down before the desperate murderer can kill another of Kim’s dearest intimates.

Jee-woon Kim doesn’t bother too much with subtlety or realism (there are severed heads tumbling out of forensic briefcases, for heaven’s sake). Instead he concentrates on eking out a truly haunting thrill from the long, mundane battle between the bumbling psychopath and his ghostly, grieving tormentor. It is a masochistic vision that takes great pleasure in the slow and methodical instruments of violence and pain. The moral story revolves around the futility of vengeance; and by the end of the film we really are numb to all the anger and violence.

The only respite we are given from this bleak and horrific vision is the maniacal sense of humour that skips in and out of scenes like Macbeth’s porter. It is a grotesque hysteria that only adds to the chilling tone of the film, but that doesn’t make it any less funny in the moment. Watch out for the moment that Kyung-chul agonisingly attempts to remove a screwdriver from his hand, only for the handle to pop off instead!

Kim’s relentless vision would be even less watchable if it weren’t for the superb performances of his leading men. Byung-hun Lee (a precociously talented actor who looks barely half of his 40 years) is superb as the broken cop. He has the capacity to appear entirely in control – a hero – and then in the flicker of an eyelid he descends into violent madness. He is utterly convincing as the grieving man who is only just learning what he is capable of.

When we first meet Min-sik Choi, our rampaging psychopath, it is only Kim’s sledgehammer bluntness that alerts us to the fact he is a madman at all, so innocent and charming is his demeanour. But as we sink deeper into his grasp, Choi finds alarming new ways to lower himself further into the mind of the beast.

REVIEW: Thor (dir. Kenneth Branagh)

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgård

It is difficult to watch this spate of Marvel films without sensing the derision with which they will be viewed by future generations. The way we snigger at Thundercats, so the teens of tomorrow will stare at us with revulsion when they discover that we not only survived a period of history where Iron Man 2 was considered the crowning highlight of the summer, but we were actually proud of it!

Thor, this year’s Marvel blockbuster, feels much the same as Iron Man 2 last year, and Captain America isn't going to break the mould when it is released in July.  The creative team behind this bland and forceful slagheap have picked the pockets of Hollywood’s recent success stories: the epic fantasy of Peter Jackson, the bullying energy of Michael Bay, and the tongue-in-cheek humour of Gore Verbinski. I am not especially enamoured of any of these Hollywood icons, so the pillaging of their respective muses is of trifling importance to me. But it is strange that the same legions of fanboys that flock to see their films also constitute the very demographic that allows this vacant and farcical Marvel franchise to sully their names and own our summers.

Thor is the headstrong son of Odin, King of Asgard and the unofficial figurehead of the ‘Nine Realms’. As Odin ages and his authority over the realms weakens, the Asgardians’ nemeses the Ice Giants begin to grumble, and another galactic war seems inevitable. Thor, persuaded by his silver-tongued brother Loki, tries to take matters into his own hands; but he succeeds only in speeding up the descent into war, and getting himself banished to Earth without his trusted hammer. While Loki steals to power in Asgard and slips towards the dark side, Thor must use his time in exile to grow into a reliable leader, so that he can return home and battle the forces of darkness.

The film… oh wait, he trots around after Natalie Portman while he’s on Earth… is the cinematic equivalent of diamante: it dazzles, but in a cheap and chintzy way. During the opening section we are given the entire history of intergalactic conflict in about thirty seconds; and I was too busy thinking up gags like, “where was this brevity in Hamlet, Kenneth?” to bother picking holes in the daft background narrative. After the history lesson, we retire to the floating, bronze and glass city of Asgard – the “brightest star in the firmament”. Somebody, somewhere, is proud of the art direction and animation that brings this city to life, but it just looks like a Lord of the Rings fan film. Even in three-dimensions it looks two-dimensional; and the costumes are a laughable cross between Spartacus and The Rocky Horror Show. In this setting, the twin delights of Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hiddleston (one of our country’s finest young talents) seem awkward and, rightly, ashamed.

When Thor arrives on Earth, Branagh substitutes CGI for cheap gags as our mighty hero is felled by a tazer and then a tranquiliser dart. Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgård are far too talented for their hopelessly under-developed comic book characters; and we breathe a bigger sigh of relief than Thor himself when his allies arrive from Asgard to take him back to the realm of turgid animation.

It seemed, for a while, as though graphic novel adaptations were reaching their own post-modernity. Fanboys were becoming aware of their own existential choices, auteurs were twisting the old clichés into something closely resembling art, and The Watchmen finally got its big screen debut. But this Marvel series proves that there are still millions of people who want nothing more from a summer blockbuster than the costumes and characters of their youth, filmed in 3D with expensive animation techniques. Well they are welcome to it. I for one will be spending the summer outside, looking forward to an autumn filled with pretentious, award-hungry indie flicks.

REVIEW: The Way (dir. Emilio Estevez)

Cast: Martin Sheen, Emilio Estevez, James Nesbitt, Deborah Kara Unger, Yorick van Wageningen

Tom is playing golf with his Country Club buddies in California when he receives news that his estranged son Daniel has been killed in a storm in the Pyrenees. Daniel was one day into the famed ‘Camino de Santiago de Compostela’ – an epic two month pilgrimage across the mountains from France to Spain, to the supposed resting place of St James. Tom travels to France to collect the ashes; and after a tormented, sleepless night he decides to take the trip in Daniel’s place, wanting to better understand the son he never knew.

But Tom is not alone for long, for the pilgrimage is a busy route populated with the world’s devout, overweight, and nicotine addicted. Joost is a sensitive and powerful Dutchman hoping to lose enough weight to persuade his wife back into the bedroom; Sarah is a sardonic Canadian with a smoking problem and a difficult past; and Irishman Jack, despite the torrential flow of words pouring from his mouth, is suffering from a rare case of writer’s block. These troubled souls – attracted to Tom’s aching, stubborn silence – form a makeshift gaggle, and help one another on their respective journeys.

Estevez’s script never quite does justice to the indescribable beauty of the pilgrimage. For each of the lonely souls that trudges through these mountains, the journey is an ethereal challenge: mundane and desperate, yet brilliant and life changing. But Estevez imposes a traditional narrative of highs and lows that will be enjoyed by even the most hardened of Hollywood hacks. This is supposed to be an adventure of discovery; but the route is all too familiar, the destination all too obvious.

The script is overly wordy, filled with twee clichés and simple emotional responses for actor and audience alike – do “sad”, do “elated”, do “flustered”. Long sequences that could have been beautifully rendered in silence are filled with the blabbering dialogue of a filmmaker too scared to film quietness in all its untameable beauty. Similarly, Estevez uses crass ghostly hallucinations to evoke the painful feelings of loss and guilt from which Tom is suffering; and every time ‘ghost Daniel’ appears on screen you can almost hear the frowns of those viewers hoping for a touch of subtlety.

But somehow, despite the simple and sometimes obtuse storytelling, there is something strangely intimate and mesmerising about this film. Estevez and his father, Martin Sheen, have a clear artistic chemistry, and a rare level of honesty that translates beautifully onto the screen. Sheen is excellent as Tom: he is fragile and confused, but still ruddy and headstrong. His explanation, to his doctor, that he is “going overseas to bring Daniel home” is a peculiarly American, almost military reaction to grief. We watch the walls of his California Country Club life come crashing down around him, and we know he is scared, exhilarated, and somehow relieved by it all.

Another reason for the mesmerising beauty of the film is the physical location of the pilgrimage. This long, meandering path has been etched into the ridges and fields of the Pyrenees for hundreds of years, and it doesn’t require a religious sensibility to feel overawed by the calm, gentle power of the area. It is not a beauty on the scale of the canyons of Utah or the mountains of Montana, but it is an unassuming beauty that lends the film a sense of eternal hopefulness.

REVIEW: Sucker Punch (dir. Zach Snyder)

Cast: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa  Hudgens… you get the picture

When Baby Doll tries to murder her drooling, abusive stepfather, she accidentally kills the angelic younger sister that she was trying to protect. She finds herself interred in an impossibly cold, creaking asylum; and locks herself away in an imaginary world to escape the pain. But as she moves around this alternate reality she quickly realises that she has jumped out of the frying pan and into the smoke-stained harem of a ruthless, sleazy pimp called Blue Jones. Fortunately, she discovers allies in the form of her alluring peers: Rocket, Sweet Pea, Blondie, and Amber.

Baby Doll decides to escape from the harem (and the asylum of her reality) with the help of her new accomplices. One essential part of her plan is to distract onlookers with her extraordinarily mesmerising dance routines; but in order to do this, she must remove herself to yet another plane of her imagination. It is this third and final plane that, one presumes, first got Zach Snyder’s juices flowing. It is an alternate reality that sees the burlesque girls dressed in all manner of military and “school girl” attire, brandishing heavy metal weapons and fighting everything from dragons to Nazi zombies. It is so far ‘over-the-top’ that I am amazed Snyder managed to keep it inside the Earth’s atmosphere for long enough to milk a few expensive Los Angeles lunches out of it.

The world will immediately judge this film with Snyder’s CV of comic book adaptations in mind; but this really has more in common with the disjointed stories and simple ‘level’ structures of early video games. The characters unlock new “worlds” and gather “tools” that will aid them in the final mission against the “big boss”. And with Hollywood’s recent myopic fascination with graphic novels, it is almost refreshing to see a filmmaker taking at least some inspiration from the aesthetic (but not the narrative) of retro video games.

Unfortunately, the video game vibe and bizarre fantasy world drown out what could have been an intriguing, noirish story of female teenage vengeance. There is something in the asylum/ harem stories that could have resulted in a fascinating film: a sort of Girl, Interrupted/ Sin City hybrid, with a gang of Lolitas tearing around a neo-noir dystopia reeking revenge on all the adults that have hurt them. But Snyder’s thirst for attention and dick-swinging enormity means that we spend far too much time stomaching the preposterous concoctions of Baby Doll’s deepest imagination instead.

The aesthetics of the film mirror this point perfectly. The first two levels are reminiscent of The Watchmen: using just the right amount of CGI to make the world feel fantastic and “graphic”, but permeating with enough reality to evoke the dirt and ageing smells of an asylum or harem. But when we are thrust into the final plane the CGI just feels tinny and weightless. When CGI is done well it can be an exciting and affecting tool, but when it is done badly it is a bore. It doesn’t matter how “big” the thing on screen is (an army of monsters, a burning cathedral, etc), it is too divorced from anything real to have any value: it is only so many pixels, and it is meaningless.

Emily Browning’s china Baby Doll is a pleasure to watch. Her quivering lip and watering eyes hide a terrifying capacity for calculated violence; she is a cross between a Happy Tree Friend and some darling tween heroine from a Nickelodeon cartoon. The other performances are half-etched: swaying between over-emotional and under-dressed, and usually merging the two.

One thing you cannot deny is the unflinching madness of Snyder’s idea. He isn’t apologising, stuttering or toning things down. As is often the case with this man, he is screaming at the top of his lungs, with a huge smile on his face.

REVIEW: Source Code (dir. Duncan Jones)

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright

I won’t mince words: Duncan Jones’ Source Code is a poor film and a disappointing follow up to his debut feature Moon. Where the latter was stylish and striking, the former is muddled, over-bearing, and obvious. I will give you a synopsis and some thoughts, but only because I feel compelled to do so (it is my default setting), and not because the film is worth discussing or arguing over.

Sean Fentress is on his way to work on his usual Chicago commuter train, with the same people he sees every day, and the same pretty friend, Cristina (Monaghan), that he always manoeuvres himself to sit opposite. But for some reason Sean cant remember a thing about his life: he doesn’t have a clue who all these people are, and he thinks he should be flying a helicopter in the Gulf. Is he mad? No. He is actually Colter Stevens (Gyllenhaal), a helicopter pilot for the US air force.

Stevens has been drafted into a new Top Secret military intelligence programme – Source Code – that manipulates brainwaves, allowing specially selected soldiers to inhabit the bodies of people who have recently passed away. Sean Fentress, along with Cristina and everybody else on the train, died when a terrorist bomb exploded onboard; but it was only a calling card for an unstoppable atrocity planned for downtown Chicago later in the day. Stevens is forced to relive the final 8 minutes of Fentress’ life over and over again until he finds the bomb and reveals the identity of the terrorists. But this is no easy task when he is also trying to find out what has happened to his own body (why isn’t he still flying a helicopter?) and falling in love with Cristina despite being told repeatedly by his superiors that he is only reliving a memory, and she is already dead.

Doesn’t that sound exhilarating? Doesn’t that sound like it could be spun out into an extraordinary psychological action thriller that would have Inception fans prolapsing all over the cinema? Well that may be the case, but the answers to all these exciting premises are as dull and disappointing as you could possibly imagine. As you read my little teaser, your 21st Century brain was registering the most obvious resolutions and dismissing them out of hand, because nobody makes thrillers without interesting twists anymore, right? Well Duncan Jones does, and if you rifle through the waste bin in your brain and find those obvious, boring answers, you will have just spoiled the ending of the film for yourself.

Admittedly, the first half hour of the film, before we begin to worry about where it is all going, is perfectly enjoyable. The basic structure of reliving the same 8 minutes is fairly exhilarating; and it is interesting to feel real anxiety, rather than just suspense, at the knowledge that your hero is going to blow up again in a few minutes. At first the subtle tweaks to the aesthetics and foundations of each replay ensure that the story doesn’t feel stagnant or repetitive; and Jake Gyllenhaal’s “watchability” manages to Spackle over any remaining cracks or worries.

But if you are sitting in the cinema waiting for the terrorist plot to escalate into some electrifying ‘Michael Bay’ catastrophe, while also shaking with anticipation at the thought of some Aronofsky/ Lynch psychological conspiracy thriller… then I just feel sorry for you. The terrorist plot is gallingly, almost offensively, simple; and the psychological element is half-baked and thoughtless. After the masterful consideration and patience of Moon, it seems that Jones has chased the stars and forgotten the gruelling hours of development needed to ensure a truly engaging thriller.

During the climax of the film, as Stevens and Cristina stare at all the naïve faces around the train carriage, Colter remarks, “look at all this life”, and Cristina suggests that if she knew she only had a minute to live, “she would make every second count.” I didn’t cringe, but only because my face was frozen into a mask of incredulity. Where did all the early promise go? How could a collection of talented filmmakers with a decent budget fail so completely to create a film that was in any way interesting or watchable?

To add insult to injury, Jones has also completely reneged on his artistic responsibility to find a cohesive visual framework through which to portray his vision. Moon was a Sci-Fi gem, harking back to the classics of the genre but subverting and invigorating them with new life. It was an astoundingly beautiful fugue to Solaris and Space Odyssey, and it marked the arrival of a new composer of light and images. Source Code has no integrity, no passion, no courage, and no patience. It is a pile of drivel, and surely Jones knows it.

REVIEW: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (dir. Luc Besson)

Cast: Louise Bourgoin, Mathieu Amalric, Gilles Lellouche, Jacky Nercessian, Nicolas Giraud

French directors have a strange habit of flirting with Hollywood – blowing a few kisses and getting everybody hot under the collar – but then turning heel, shaking their tail feathers, and shimmying back to Gaul without a hint of reluctance or regret. Godard allowed generations of Oscar voters to pin their flags to his mast before proclaiming that the Lifetime Achievement Award they handed him “meant nothing”. Jean-Pierre Jeunet had the Thirty Mile Zone creaming for more after Amelie and A Very Long Engagement, but then waited five years to create Micmacs, a film so impenetrably “French” that it never made it beyond the festival circuit in the US. Even Renoir graced Los Angeles with his presence for a few brief years before returning to his beloved homeland. Compare that to British or German filmmakers (Hitchcock, Mendes, Wilder, Lubitsch, etc) who cancelled their return ticket the moment they glimpsed the Pacific through the Santa Monica haze.

Luc Besson is no different. Leon catapulted him into the cradle of the stars, and The Fifth Element seemed to confirm him as a major force in global blockbuster cinema. But thirteen years later, and with very little to show for himself in that space of time, he has created a peculiar and whimsical Gallic fairytale that will almost certainly, almost intentionally, not make it across the Atlantic.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec is a wonderfully absurd, decadent farce without a smidgen of style or class. Adèle is a brazen bombshell of a heroine: she has the sort of ringlets and curves that have weakened men’s knees for centuries, and her brown eyes smoulder and purr until they flash with feisty energy. A director flirting with Hollywood might have had her racing around some Dystopian metropolis on a 15,000bhp motorbike, or guiding a gang of time-travelling pirates through Gary Oldman’s brain. But Besson isn’t flirting anymore… he isn’t even playing hard to get.

Adèle’s extraordinary adventures see her Raiding a Tomb™ so that she can enlist the help of a Pharoah’s physician to cure her ailing sister. The physician’s death, a few thousand years ago, is a hurdle that might intimidate a lesser hero, but not Adèle. She knows an ancient Parisian doctor who has mastered the ability to bring creatures back from the dead; but by the time she returns to Paris, the senile doctor has already bitten off more than he can chew bringing a pterodactyl back to life. The rest of the film continues in this farcical (and I don’t use that word negatively) mould, as the pompous and huffing Inspector Caponi hunts  the deadly dinosaur and our maverick heroine across the Arrondissements of 1911 Paris.

At the opening, Besson is bursting with energy and eager to tell his story, but he isn’t really sure where to begin. We follow a number of openly irrelevant characters and catch snippets of information on the doctor’s metaphysical powers and the raising of the pterodactyl, before zoning in on our heroine being lowered into the Pharoah’s tomb. From here, Besson never looks back. The long sequence in the tomb is pure Indiana Jones, without even a hint of irony or a twist of originality, but it perfectly frames the energetic nonsense and slapstick that is to come.

Spielberg and Lucas knew what they needed to do with Indiana Jones: thread the story from one chase to the next as seamlessly as possible. It is a shallow and predictable technique, but it is undeniably entertaining when done properly. That is what Besson did with The Fifth Element, and he has not lost this rousing and erratic ability over the past decade. Of course, the worldly archaeologist Jones travelled all over the planet, and it is harder to make a series of chases feel dramatic when the characters are running around in circles through the streets of Paris. But Besson has created a magical and surreal Paris that perfectly suits the tone of the story, and the fact that the same locations show up repeatedly only adds to the absurd, pantomime vibe. The zipping speed of the storytelling even drips down into the minutiae of the editing: with panning cuts and visual cues ensuring that the story never calms down for a second.

When a film skips along with this sort of energy and rhythm, it is hardly surprising to find that it also possesses a natural humour. A director who knows how to race through a story must have a masterful control of timing, and this lends itself perfectly to great visual comedy. Add to this the hysterical quality of the performances from Mathieu Amalric, Gilles Lellouche, and Jean-Paul Rouve, and you have a thoroughly enjoyable, irrasicible French farce.

This film feels much closer to Jean Pierre Jeunet than Luc Besson; and indeed Besson’s bulky compatriot might feel his feathers have been ruffled by this assault on his artistic territory. Besson has forgone any of the darkness of his iconic earlier work, and has thoroughly embraced the folkloric fantasy of Jeunet’s vision. The makeup is grotesque, reminiscent of Punch & Judy puppets in some antique Romany travelling show, and the whimsical treatment of this iconic city owes much more to Amelie than Leon.

In the end, this is not a return to the global stage for Besson; but it is a delightfully entertaining French film with a giant imagination and a tiny audience… and who’s to say that isn’t exactly what he was looking for?

REVIEW: The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (dir. Werner Herzog)

In 1994, a group of scientists scrambling around in the Ardèche wilderness felt the faintest of breezes emanating from the cliff face beside them. They managed to burrow their way into a hidden limestone cave, enclosed for thousands of years, and there they made a startling and historic discovery that would ripple through the worlds of anthropology, geology, and art history: cave paintings dating back some 35,000 years. Since that date, only a handful of carefully selected scientists have been granted access to the Chauvet Caves (named after one of the original scientists); and only one man has ever been allowed in without any academic or scientific justification. Fortunately for us he had a camera with him, and his name was Werner Herzog.

Werner Herzog is a berserk and poetic filmmaker, and it is difficult to imagine anyone more suited to the frightening responsibility of recording the caves, knowing that he might be the only person ever to be granted permission to film there. Herzog doesn’t approach the task with any contrived humbleness or gravity; he approaches it like the giddy, maniacal genius that he is. He has a truly unique vision of the world, a deep care for the most archetypal and basic of human dramas, and one of the most melodic and soothing voices ever recorded.

There is no attempt to hide the clunking, equipment-ridden nature of the caves. Chrome walkways and cement doors exist not just beside but actually within this most fascinating and spiritual of monuments to human thought. As Herzog and his crew traipse along the walkways with their battery-powered lights and rustling overalls, there is a real sense of the claustrophobic ‘humanness’ of this adventure. You feel as if you are there with them, crouching and grunting and trying to avoid crossing lenses. So when they suddenly arrive at the back of the cave and stare, speechless, into the darkness, you find yourself completely unprepared for the quiet power of the paintings. You are still standing there behind Werner, in the awesome stillness of the caves, holding your breath and forgetting to blink.

The paintings are disarmingly beautiful and evocative, and they remain with you for a long time after the film has finished. Fortunately Herzog has avoided the crass temptation to turn the paintings into some dramatic story or use animation to bring them to life. Instead, he somehow transports us to the spiritual stillness of the cave; allowing the magnanimity of the images – their composure, the rippling lines on the cave walls, and the perfect shading and facial expressions on the animals – to completely absorb the viewer. They are powerful now, in the age of Avatar and Halo, so just imagine how entrancing they would have been 35,000 years ago, flickering in the firelight.

At one point, hopefully tongue-in-cheek, Herzog suggests that the pictures are “proto-cinema”. But even if this is in jest, there is certainly something in the idea of venturing into a ‘darkness’, adjusting to it, and then being bombarded by an astounding array of images while you are in an almost dreamlike state. The ritual of drama really hasn’t changed that much in 35,000 years.

It could be argued that there are Avatar fans and there are Herzog fans, and never the twain shall meet. So Herzog’s decision to use 3D technology for this project was greeted with some controversy. But Herzog fans needn’t have worried: the cameras used to shoot the film are lo-fi to say the least, and the extra dimension only causes the flickering grain and overexposure of the footage to leap out at you in an uncomfortable and shoddy way. It is a half-baked experiment with a trashy technology, thank goodness. Sometimes the 3D actually manages to peer through the darkness of the caves and add some faint and unnecessary depth to the images. But with Werner’s wonderful throaty voice expounding on the mysteries of human thought that have been unlocked by these paintings, an extra pane of depth in the camera is an awkward and silly appendage. Herzog 1 : 3D 0.

R.I.P. Elizabeth Taylor (1932 - 2011)

There is little I can add to the thousands of tributes to Elizabeth Taylor. However fragile she seemed, and eventually became, I will always remember her as the most fearless and unquenchable star of Hollywood's Golden Age. Bette Davis may have had more nerve, Audrey Hepburn may have had more style, but none could equal Taylor's fire. She was a child star, an Oscar winner, a stunning beauty, a lioness an infamous loud mouth, an AIDS activist, and a million other wonderful things. I dont agree with naysayers who claim that the death of Golden Era legends (most recently Tony Curtis and now Taylor) is leaving a void that can never be filled. The world changes, and it will always be filled with wonderful, glamorous, and controversial things. But there will never be another like Elizabeth Taylor, the icon with "a woman's body and a child's emotions", and I will miss her greatly.

REVIEW: Here (dir. Braden King)

Cast: Ben Foster, Lubna Azabal, Christina Hovaguimyan, Narek Nersisyan

There is emerging from the US a cluster of filmmakers possessing not only a gutsy and unpredictable artistic temperament, but also a wonderfully casual and intuitive grasp of genre conventions. Perhaps the best American film of 2010, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone was a stunning example of a film noir, subverted by a young female lead, and twisted into some barren, ghoulish exploitation movie. It was Chinatown by way of Deliverance, with some other powerful emptiness besides. And in 2009 there was Ballast, a stirring and guttural study of a young black boy’s broken home. He totes a gun and gets in trouble with other youths, but the slumbering power of Lance Hammer’s film is closer to Béla Tarr than Spike Lee.

Braden King’s feature debut, Here, is a languid and ethereal take on another iconic Hollywood staple: the romantic road movie. But King lifts his story up off the comfortable blacktops of California and drops it into the harsh reality of Armenia’s border country. With all the ripened layers of Hollywood comfort and artifice stripped away, we are left alone with a lonely alcoholic geologist (Ben Foster) and a dissatisfied, pretty photographer (Lubna Azabal), travelling across a dangerous but muted landscape of mishmash fields. Yet somewhere deep inside, this film is still attuned to Frank Capra’s heartbeat. It is Andrzej Wajda by way of It Happened One Night, and it is mesmerising.

Will Shepard travels the world plotting landscapes for a Californian satellite navigation company. He has the stillness of a man who has learnt to be alone; but he is far from antisocial, and rarely does a day go by that he doesn’t end by drinking the night away with some aging vodka-soaked local. Gadarine is on her way back to her hometown after a long absence; but when Will offers her a lift she decides to join him beyond her original destination, and acts as his interpreter and guide as he heads off into Armenia’s dangerous, disputed territories.

They fall in love peacefully, journeying through the mountains and visiting some of Gadarine’s old friends and family. But as the landscape changes the tone darkens, and we begin to see the chasm that has always existed between these two lonely souls. Gadarine is dealing with old memories of her homeland; she has travelled the world trying to escape the powerful whirlwind of her country’s history, but she will never forget. Will is the ‘Yank’ who won’t take a second to think about anything that happened a second ago: he is the “quiet American” who thinks the past belongs to the Greeks, and the future belongs to whoever can trace its contours first. It is an easy dialectic, but it is plotted in such a simple and methodical way that it never feels laboured.

It is difficult to imagine the film without Ben Foster’s stirring performance. He is effortlessly charming and somehow manages to channel the excitable glint of Cary Grant or Richard Burton through the weary eyes of a geologist on a shrinking planet. But the angry, passive aggressive twitch that characterised his youthful performances in Six Feet Under and Alpha Dog is still there. It is the twitch of a dissatisfied man who doesn’t know where to scratch to make the emptiness go away. It turns every smile into a buried smirk, and every shot of vodka into a “running away from something”.

If there is a line that can be plotted through these films, it is the influence of cinematographer Lol Crawley, whose captivating ‘cinéma vérité’ camerawork and use of natural light forms the aesthetic basis for both Ballast and Here. Through Crawley’s camera, the settings are rendered in an effortlessly realistic and breathtakingly beautiful fashion. There is no unnecessary magic used to create some Ruskin landscape. This is a stark, sleek, undisturbed view of a bewitching part of the world that most of us will never see.

A THOUSAND WORDS: Becoming An Adult

For Pentti Sammallhati:

Your vulgar happy childhood world fragments.
The crumbling progression towards lonely afterthought laments.
Friends cease, hopes cease, you're sans eyes, sans teeth.
But you're YOU now, surrounded and confused, you're free.

INTERVIEW: Alma Har'el & Joe Lindquist on Bombay Beach

Alma Har’el is one of the most interesting freshman filmmakers of this year’s Berlinale. Her exciting debut, Bombay Beach, tells the story of a forgotten community of misfits and youngsters living on the east shore of the Salton Sea, deep in the California desert. The most immediately striking thing about this leonine filmmaker, hailing from Israel but based in Los Angeles, is her exclamation mark plume of tousled fiery hair. But as this feature documentary suggests, there are more vivid colours and jolts of energy lurking within. I had the good fortune to spend a chilly Berlin evening discussing the film with Har’el, along with her editor Joe Lindquist.

ND: So you shot the film entirely on your own?

AH: That’s right, I shot it on a Canon Vixia HD. It’s just a consumer camera, you can buy it for like $600 at Best Buy. I was alone out there, with the headphones on and the boom in one hand, holding the camera up to my face the whole time because it didn’t have a viewfinder and it was impossible to see the LCD screen in the sunlight. And it was 45°c out there! So it was sort of crazy; but it was so much fun hanging out with them for four months; it was like a second childhood. They are all so interesting, and they just became my friends. I still go to visit them every few weeks.

ND: It is clear from watching the film that you were really looking for the human aspect: telling the story of people you know, and not pretending not to know them?

AH: Well this was my first film, and I didn’t really have any interest in looking for the ‘drama’ as many documentary directors might. Like when Red had his stroke, some people might have thought, “Great! He’s in the hospital!” but that really wasn’t my state of mind. I mean there is a lot more stuff that I could have put in the film – there are paedophiles and meth addicts and hookers – but I didn’t think it was necessary or relevant to what I was doing. When we were editing we slowly noticed that there were just certain things we weren’t going to include. It became clearer and clearer what our stories were. While we were editing we brought in people to give us notes, and one quite famous editor said, “What are you? A filmmaker or a social worker?” I thought, “Well I don’t think I’m either of those things.”

ND: Was it a conscious decision to concentrate on the courage and strength of the community, and ignore the failure of outsiders to help them?

AH: You know, I don’t think it is as easy as it looks. It’s not as if there is someone that was supposed to be helping them. When I first came to America I thought everybody only cared about money; but the US actually has more philanthropy than anywhere else, so there are tons of organisations in the area that try to help educate, and give food, and do all sorts of things. Of course there are things that aren’t justified, and capitalism and greed do exist. I mean this area has just been completely forgotten, and they have been left there, and somebody should take care of it of course; but it’s just not what this film was about. What matters is how these people that I care about deal with their lives. And I think they are very heroic the way they go about it, and the dignity that they manage to find in their situation, and the love that they have, it is really beautiful.

ND: You do make a more overt statement on one specific social issue in the US: the pharmaceutical industry.

AH: Well I am not against pharmaceuticals at all, in fact I am on pharmaceuticals; but I think that the problem, as with most things, is how people use them. In America, things gets out of control and lose perspective. When I arrived there I was shocked and wanted to find out how it was possible for a child as young as Benny to be given so much lithium! There is so little research, and no one even knows if these drugs will help such a young mind because it is still developing. It is really tragic, but I tell myself that Benny’s spirit is so strong, and his imagination is so strong, I have faith that he is going to be stronger than the medication. I think it is sad because now, in America, one in every four children is medicated, and the children that are most medicated are actually in poor areas, and they don’t even get therapy with it.

ND: One of the most noticeable things about the film is the magical dance sequences that you created with the people in the community. Did you already have that idea before you started? Or was that something you thought of while you were there?

AH: I had an idea in my mind to do a film like that for about a year, but I just couldn’t find the right context. Then when I got to Bombay Beach I thought that these people could really get something out of it… and they might just be bored enough to agree! And also I knew that the location itself could pull it off. I believe that, in life in general, when contrasting feelings are embraced they can create beauty. So sadness and happiness, and loneliness and celebration; they can come together to create a more rounded feeling of what life is like. And I felt it so strongly when I got to Bombay Beach: it is surrounded by dead things but also bursting with life, with all these children running around with the dead fish. It is all together there, so I just wanted to try to take it all in, that was my journey.

ND: Can you both talk a bit about the process of discovering this fairly personal and pioneering style of documentary storytelling?

AH: There were a lot of people that wanted to edit this, and some of them had a lot more experience than Joe, but there was something about Joe where we both felt we were going to discover this thing together. When we had a rough cut we brought more experienced people in to give us notes, and everyone said they thought it was beautiful but they weren’t sure that it was working because they had never seen anything like it before. It was definitely a difficult process working out what we liked, and then holding onto it when we got told it wasn’t working.

JL: Yeah, after that visit we were all sort of down because we had been trying to make a point of not using any standard conventions, but people didn’t really get it. One of the first things I saw that Alma had put together was a rough assembly of the kids in the kitchen making fun of Benny, followed by “the Benny dance”. The essence of what it became in the film was all intact at that early stage, and for me that was the moment I knew I wanted to be a part of this, because of how unique it was. The dances are a reflection of what has just happened, they are birthed from the actual story, so I knew that if we could do that throughout the whole movie, which was Alma’s intuition, for me that was incredible.

ND: One of the people listed in the ‘Thanks to’ credits is Werner Herzog. How did that come about?

AH: Werner’s wife, Lene Herzog, is a beautiful photographer and a good friend of mine, and I showed them the film when it was finished. He gave me the funniest notes! They were mainly technical notes about the sound; but he loved the film and thought it was perfect the way it was. The people that came into the screenings would always say, “but what is this film about? Just put it in a logline.” But when I showed it to Werner he was the first person that just said, “Its about the American Dream, the broken American Dream.” And of course he was right.

ND: So you already had a relationship with Zach Condon [of the band Beirut] before you began the project? What was his involvement?

AH: That’s one of the best relationships I have. He is just a beautiful, inspiring, artistic person, and a very good friend. I am a huge fan of his on every level, and I have learnt a lot from him. So we did it like this: first I listened to all the albums, and I chose all the songs that I thought could maybe work, which was probably about fifteen or twenty songs. And then he sent me a hard drive with all the songs that I had picked in separated tracks (so each instrument in splits) and said, “Do whatever you want with it”. That was such a trusting thing to do and we were so thankful. So when we had a rough cut I went to New Mexico for a week and stayed with Zach. He has a studio there so everyday we would go and work on a scene and he would just write stuff and record it on the spot. And we went to his parent’s house in Santa Fe with microphones and recorded stuff on this organ that he used to play as a kid.

ND: Do you think your unusual decision to incorporate music video and magical realist elements into the film could attract a slightly different audience of music video fans?

AH: Yeah, perhaps. There is such a problem with music videos and with the industry in general. I loved doing them, but at a certain point I realised there is less and less room for them. I hear things are actually improving again now, but I took a break from that and realised I needed to find a new way to incorporate music videos into my work without needing to do it for a label. Because it is still a legitimate language.

ND: You finished the film two days before arriving in Berlin. What are your plans after this?

AH: Well we have already been invited to 20 more festivals after our Berlin screenings, and hopefully more will come along. So I think we will just go around and show it at film festivals and see if people like it. It’s not going to be easy; it’s not going to be a film that people jump on because they cant see how they would make money off it right away. But if people write about it and talk about it and get interested in it, then maybe it will make it to the cinema.

Bombay Beach screened in the Panorama section of the Berlinale and will certainly screen at a variety of festivals around the world this year. As for a general release – it would be a triumph for our languishing film medium if distributors could summon up the courage to bring this film to a cinema near you.

REVIEW: I Am Number Four (dir. D.J. Caruso)

Cast: Alex Pettyfer, Dianna Agron, Timothy Olyphant, Teresa Palmer, Kevin Durand

Number 4 (Pettyfer) is one of nine young Loriens born with special powers to protect their home planet from the evil Mogadorians. But the planet was destroyed before ‘The Nine’ had time to harness their powers, so their ‘protectors’ smuggled them away and scattered them across the planet Earth to await the day when their powers would mature. Oh… they are also protected by a charm that means they can only be killed in numerical order. Some years later, Number 4 is enjoying life as an all-American teen on an endless ‘Spring Break’ loop of jet skiing and girl canoodling. But the apple cart is upset by news that Number 3 has been killed (which means Number 4 is next… because 4, in case you weren’t aware, is directly after 3.)

Number 4 and his protector, Henri (Olyphant), flee to a provincial town in Ohio and change their identities to buy some time. Now called John Smith, Number 4 enrols at the nearest High School where he: (a) falls in love with Sarah (Agron), a cool girl who looks like a cheerleader but is actually very quiet and mysterious and likes photography; (b) begins an ongoing school boy stag fight with Mark, the school quarterback whose Pop also happens to be the local sheriff; and (c) befriends Sam, the school nerd, because John is far too special for trivial high school stereotypes. As John falls more deeply in love with Sarah, and becomes more desperate to live the Norman Rockwell American life, his powers become stronger and stronger. The Mogadorians eventually track him down, but with the help of his new friends (it turns out the geek is actually very brave and the jock is a good guy at heart) John is finally ready to do battle with his antagonists.

This film has two lucrative built-in demographics - teenagers who read the bestselling book, and teenagers who love/ want to be Alex Pettyfer or ‘Glee’ bad girl Dianna Agron - and it is clear that Dreamworks and D.J. Caruso have no intention of attracting a wider audience than this. If they had challenged themselves they might have found room for some sort of originality - a twist perhaps, or a few moments of tongue-in-cheek humour. There is not one moment in this film that astounds the senses, tickles the solar plexus, or surprises our expectations. We know the nerd and the jock will come good in the heat of battle; we know the mysterious blonde girl that is searching for Number 4 will turn out to be his saviour; and we know that he will fall deeply in love but then sacrifice his own happiness for the good of the planet. At least when Michael Bay, a producer on this project, directs a film there is something laughable about his grunting, maniacal action-madness. This film doesn't even have the cojones to compete with Bay; it is happy to brand itself as some slightly wet 'Twilight for Boys... with the girl from Glee in it".

A final note on the film’s shimmering young star, Alex Pettyfer. In recent years, lovelorn teens have had little to fantasise over beyond a disfigured flock of simpering geeks (Shia LeBouf) and gangly wimps (R-Patz); but Pettyfer channels the spirit of Tom Cruise in his clean-cut, tousle-haired, bronze mannequin performance. There is little risk of this dashing youngster wasting any time on the new wave of hipster chic – moving to a mews house in Hoxton and dressing to the nines in vintage cable-knit sweaters and thick-framed Ray-Bans to hide the effects of a three day ketamine binge. Barely out of his teens, Pettyfer has already escaped to the cultural void of Beverly Hills, dining with Michael Bay at Nobu, one assumes, and riding a gleaming Japanese motorbike around the Hollywood Hills to let off steam between gym sessions. Late-80s action hero purism has lay dormant for too long, but it is gloriously resurrected in Pettyfer’s homoerotic dimpled grin and desperate “smouldering puppy” stare.

REVIEW: Bombay Beach (dir. Alma Har'el)

In 1905 the Colorado River burst through a series of man-made dykes and flooded part of the California desert, creating The Salton Sea: a new, heaven-sent playground for the American people. Real estate developers descended on the unstable new lake; building entire communities for the hordes of eager holidaymakers that needed somewhere to rest after the slump of Europe’s wars. But by the 1970s it had become clear that rising salination levels and run-off from surrounding farmland were creating a toxic and unsustainable environment. The holidaymakers and developers packed up and headed back to the coast, leaving a skeletal graveyard of plywood bivouacs to bleach in the sun.

Alma Har’el’s beguiling and infectious debut feature is not the first film to take the Salton Sea as its location; but it is the first such film to avoid taking it as a primary subject. Everything that needs to be said about the Sea itself is said very early on with one simple cut: from archive footage of the shimmering Madison Avenue dream, to Har’el’s own footage (shot on a store-bought Canon video camera) of the barren, forgotten reality. From here, Har’el immediately hones in on the small, dilapidated community of Bombay Beach, on the Eastern shore. The stalwart residents of this arcane settlement form the basis of a fascinating study in loneliness, isolation, and the feeling of being forgotten and left behind by the century that lost its shape.

Red is an aged oil worker who has lived in the same trailer home for half a century, separated from his entire family and history. He enjoys his simple life of bootlegging cigarettes from the Indian reservation, and espousing, in his cracked Burroughs drawl, the importance of keeping “blacks and whites” separate. He is mean and bitter and dangerously out of touch, but he ain’t hurting nobody.

CeeJay is a bright, athletic teenager who escaped the ganglands of Los Angeles to pursue a safer life. He trains day and night, and keeps newspaper clippings of his football triumphs. Like most young American athletes, he dreams of college scholarships, the Draft, and a career in the NFL; but in CeeJay this traditional, rousing dream is somehow tainted with melancholy. It is as if his ponderous life in Bombay has exposed the emptiness of such trite American aspirations.

The Parish family brought the community into disrepute when the authorities discovered that they had created an illegal weapons store of explosives and firearms. In the wake of 9/11 this DIY militia seemed a malicious threat; but in reality, it was just the playground of a bored and angry group of young men lacking the qualifications to blow things up beyond US borders. News footage of their filthy hovel and feral children seemed the perfect representation of this strange anarchic frontier town; but eight years on the family have been reunited and are making a determined effort to obey the laws of the land.

But how can we blame the Parishes for their erring lifestyles? They didn’t ask to be left alone out here, with no guiding hand or civil services. If the government want to leave entire communities to their own devices, without any civil projects or healthy distractions, then they cant expect to like what they see when they finally show up with their guns drawn. And rather than providing the Parishes with career advice or lessons in parenting; they have simply handed them enough Lithium and Risperidone to send the Serengeti into a gurning stupor. Their profoundly troubled youngest child, Benny, takes these drugs to control his violent behaviour, but he thinks it is because he is a weirdo. The truth of the film is laid bare watching this lively 8yr-old dribbling in the back of a car, terrified to return to school in case he misbehaves again.

It is the brightness in Benny’s eyes whenever Har’el arrives with her camera that confirms the importance of this film. It will remain valuable as a piece of art, and as a recording of an important American story; but in its very production it was a valuable community service to the people of Bombay Beach. Har’el’s background in music videos may have inspired her decision to include surreal dance sequences performed by the shaven-headed children of the town. It is a bizarre amalgam of Busby Berkeley, Michel Gondry, and Harmony Korine (and this from a critic who hates drawing comparisons); and if it feels slightly awkward at times, this is soon assuaged by the sight of the excited children’s faces. The sequences are surreal, but if the definition of “surreal” is the removal of a familiar object to an unfamiliar setting… then there isn’t much in Bombay Beach that escapes this definition.

There are no answers or forecasts here, no insights into things beyond the confines of the Bombay Beach community (such as the recent Salton Sea Conservation Plan, which will see the surface area of the lake drastically reduced to a more manageable size). The film is utterly subjective and every moment of it is infected with Ha’rel’s whims and fancies. There is no plot or purpose, just a kind spirit filming and playing with a new gang of friends. Purists might prefer a more distanced and clinical approach to the subject matter, but Har’el has created a new way of dealing with a documentary subject: get involved, get creative, and get Zach Condon to write the soundtrack.