We can rebuild him

14 Genre Films from 2011

2012-01-08T02:24:00.001Z

As a sort of adjunct to my Best of 2011 list, this is a list of my favourite Genre films, all released in the UK in 2011:

FASTER
(George Tillman Jr.)
Alongside Jason Statham, the most dependable action star presently working in American cinema is Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson. He is utterly convincing in action sequences - this is a man who could cause serious damage if he felt like it - he can act just enough to never become laughable in emotional scenes, and he has an appealing ability to inject irony and wit into his performances where appropriate. He perhaps makes too many family films, but his regular forays into action are generally more than worthwhile.
Faster is exceptional; a taut and tight revenge thriller with a post-Tarantino sensibility to its characterisation, especially in the supporting cast, some brutally lucid action, a great Clint Mansell score and Johnson playing a driven, emotionless killer with commendable intensity.

ELITE SQUAD: THE ENEMY WITHIN
(Jose Padilla)
This somewhat schizophrenic Brazilian film is an angry cry of frustrated rage at the police and government corruption which besets the Country, told with the staccato rhythm of a documentary. But its also a ferocious action film in love with the adrenaline rush of violence, and fetishizing weaponry at every opportunity. There are massive shootouts with assault rifles in the Rio favelas, there are amped-up chases and beatings scattered regularly amidst the political debate. Somehow it all holds together coherently, and what's more, even works quite well.

THE EAGLE
(Kevin MacDonald)
An old-fashioned sword-and-sandal mini-Epic which could have been made, with only a few alterations, in the 1950s. I write that as a good thing, since it means an emphasis on strong storytelling, on classically shot scenes, and on solid characters and plotting. The two leads - Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell - should be the weak point, but they are both good here, and the action scenes are excellent; rousing and visually interesting but never gory or exploitative. Better than last years superficially similar Centurion, which I also liked.

THE MAN FROM NOWHERE
(Jeon-Beong Lee)
There are three Korean films on this list, testament to how well that particular national cinema handles genre material. Of the three, The Man from Nowhere is the most commercial and unoriginal, a familiar (in conception at any rate) action thriller about a hollow shell of an ex Government Agent tracking down the little girl next door who has been kidnapped by gangsters. Leading man Won Bin is a Superstar heartthrob in his homeland and he excels in the brilliant action scenes here, each of which crackles with visceral energy and bravura style. Added to that is a surprising dose of emotional weight and that inimitably Korean tonal variance which makes films like this so unpredictable and exhilarating.

THE MECHANIC
(Simon West)
Statham, playing your standard existential focused hit man - frowny, liable to have planned how to kill everybody in the room and get away Scott free at any moment - gets involved in a mash-up of two hoary old genre plot stand-bys. "This time its personal" meets "the student turns on the teacher". But this is a tight, commendably stripped down action film with strong set-pieces, Statham in the kind of role he's best at, Ben Foster offering great support as another of his damaged wild cards and slick direction from ex-Blockbuster genre hack West.

HANNA
(Joe Wright)
I love the collision of the art house and the action genre. Here Joe Wright takes the chilly European setting and choppily edited action of a Bourne film, blends in some fairy-tale whimsy, a little Godard, a touch of Brit sitcom, some Fassbinder, a little techno, and makes a thoroughly modern action film. Saoirse Ronan puts that unearthly quality to great use in the lead, the supporting cast are pure-breed class and having great fun, and the Chemical Brothers score is another example of a recent trend for dance, electronica and trip-hop musicians excelling while scoring movies. Add to that the best action scene of the year: Eric Bana fighting multiple agents in a subway. In a single take. Awesome.

13 ASSASSINS
(Takeshi Miike)
I had issues with Miike's distancing and deconstruction of the samurai genre in this film. But they all fall away, to some extent, during the lengthy carnage of the central battle, in which the 13 warriors face hundreds in classic fashion, and where Miike tries to have his cake AND eat it (ripping the genre to shreds while also indulging in it's greatest excess) and largely succeeds. Full of casually immortal classic action beats, face-offs and heroic deaths, and lots of blood. Lots and lots of blood.

IRONCLAD
(James English)
Speaking of blood, this ultra-violent siege and battle B-film has plenty of it. A small group of hardened warriors defend a castle from a larger force in a series of gritty, brutal clashes. James Purefoy has become something of a specialist at sword-wielding lead roles and he is central here as the killing machine Templar caught up in this fightnon his way back from the Crusades. The moment where he finally unleashes a massive broadsword he has held back is built up by director English and the chaos he causes with the weapon shows why. Paul Giamatti adds some class as the villainous King John, snarling and scenery-chewing his way through the film.

I SAW THE DEVIL
(Ji-Woon Kim)
A serial killer thriller so violent, intense and disturbing, it was cut for release in Korea, a country not exactly famed for squeamishness where cinematic standards of violence are concerned. A serial killer butchers the fiancee of a Special Agent, whose revenge is to make the murderers life a living hell in a game of cat and mouse, repeatedly hunting him down, beating and mutilating him, then releasing him only to do it all again. Undeniably overlong - its 140 minutes could have been cut down to 90 or so - but the genuine emotion of the first act infuses the entire film, giving it a weight denied to much work in this genre, Director Ji-Woon Kim stages, paces and shoots each scene brilliantly,particularly the set pieces, and its two leads are great.

DRIVE
(Nicolas Winding-Refn)
If this had come out in 1978, or 1983, it would have been taken for what it is; a cool, stylish little genre flick. A little bit Michael Mann, a little bit Walter Hill, a little bit To Live & Die in LA Freidkin allied to a pretty classic action-Noir plot (from James Sallis' smart little novel), it allowed Refn to show how good a technician he is, gave Ryan Gosling a movie star role to bask in, and somehow appealed to hipsters and a certain brand of Cineaste both. It's empty, beautiful, and full of pure cinematic pleasures.

DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME
(Tsui Hark)
This slightly overripe, consistently ravishing Kung Fu epic shows Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movies how this sort of material should be done. Andy Lau's Detective Dee investigates the spontaneous combustion of a couple of Government officials and gets into a fistful of sprawlingly impressive fights; all set against a vividly realised historical backdrop. There is also a talking deer, some dodgy cgi compositing, and Tsui Hark's direction, as imaginative and authoritive as ever.

INSIDIOUS
(James Wan)
The first half of this low budget shocker is absolutely terrific; creepy, disturbing, and atmospherically tense throughout as it lays out a generically familiar tale of the haunting of a typical suburban family. The central couple are played - very well - by the ever-excellent Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne, who invest it with more emotion than this material usually warrants. It all falls apart to some extent in the second half, with explanations mixed in with climactic narrative pyrotechnics, but this is still an interesting, high-quality horror film.

THE YELLOW SEA
(Na Hong-Jin)
No guns, but the most visceral and thrilling action film of this year concerns a taxi driver who gets into debt and agrees to carry out a hit for the mob. Only things get complicated - not least by his own plan to murder his cheating wife, once he's done - just as he's about to do the job and soon he finds himself on the run. Rooted in a grittily realist view of people scrabbling to make money on the margins of society, Na Hong-Jin's film showcases a series of brutal, awful knife fights and exhilarating chases through the city, and every minute of it has terrific impact. It starts off as a Noir, turns into a chase thriller and ends up a mix of gangster and action film, each element extraordinarily well-directed and gripping.

R
(Tobias Lindholm, Michael Noer)
Grim, hard-as-nails Danish prison film with some superficial similarities to Audiard's A Prophet. A young man ends up on a wing full of terrifying lifers during his first stint inside and has to learn the ropes fast; which means getting involved in the Prison drug business, selling to the Muslims in another wing. But that only makes his life more complicated. Starkly, intimately shot in mostly tight close up, full of moments of uncomfortable tension, dreadful suspense and horrible explosions of violence, and with a cast full of nastily-memorable character actors glaring at each other, this is a sort of perfect model of how to do this genre well: relentless, compelling, always convincingly hard-worn, with a cruelly unhappy ending.

20 from '11

2011-12-28T13:38:00.008Z

This just gets harder every year. I've reviewed most of these over at Capsule In Space, so head over there if you want more in-depth views. I'll be doing a separate list of genre films over the next week too, hopefully.

My Top 20; based on films released in Cinemas in the UK in 2011:

20. RANGO
(Gore Verbinski)
Pop surrealism in a ludicrously beautiful, utterly bizarre cgi- animated Kids Western. Might be the strangest corporate product released this year, and hurrah for that.

19. THE YELLOW SEA
(Na Hong-Jin)
The grittiest, most exhilarating thriller of the year in a year of great Korean action thrillers. Amazing set pieces, real emotional grip, brilliantly put together: all action films should aspire to this level of impact & quality.

18. DRIVE
(Nicolas Winding Refn)
Sheer style and sensual pleasure over the backing of solidly familiar genre beats, with a movie star front and centre. That this was greeted with such reverential reviews shows just how rare that kind of thing is nowadays.

17. COLD WEATHER
(Aaron Katz)
A lovely little drama-cum-detective comedy, rooted in the real world, beautifully directed.

16. THE GUARD
(John McDonagh)
The funniest film of the year. Also beautifully acted - Brendan Gleeson can seemingly do no wrong - and even quite gripping. Takes a few shots at cliches of rural Ireland along the way.

15. THE EAGLE
(Kevin MacDonald)
An old-fashioned adventure film; full of solid storytelling, action, archetypal characters, derring-do, and incredible landscapes. Give me something like this over Transformers 3 any day.

14. ANIMAL KINGDOM
(David Michod)
Nightmarishly intense crime saga, sharply characterised and directed with a real sense of tone and atmosphere.

13.WUTHERING HEIGHTS
(Andrea Arnold)
Arnold's film captures the wilds of Yorkshire within a 4:3 aspect ratio only to unleash it within Brontes characters and watches, swooning, while they suffer.

12. KILL LIST
(Ben Wheatley)
A wrenching horror, a glimpse of the pagan England beneath the out of town shopping malls and the motorway services, a genre film that isnt, quite. Unforgettable.

11. POST MORTEM
(Pablo Larrain)
The coup in 1970s Chile as personal disaster, the moral decay of a nation mirrored within one sad, lonely individual. Haunting, mesmeric, expertly directed.

10. WARRIOR
(Gavin O'Connor)
Manipulation so well-done it's a pleasure in and of itself. But also a magnificently acted, emotionally brutal study of the recession era, and an astoundingly great formula fight film. Should have been massive.

9. TAKE SHELTER
(Jeff Nichols)
Watch the skies. Michaell Shannon finds a role miraculously suited to his eerie presence, and acts the hell out of it. He's matched by the precision and control of the creeping dread Nichols orchestrates, right unto the awful, Shyamalanesque climax.

8. MEEKS CUTOFF
(Kelly Reichert)
A fine Western which ignores most all the genres rules and settles for a tensely claustrophobic(!) battle of wills between well-drawn characters in an impossible situation. Hypnotic, beautiful, provocative.

7. BEGINNERS
(Mike Mills)
A quirkfest that transcends its own language and assumptions, and approaches profundity with a real gentleness of spirit. Lovely.

6.TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY
(Thomas Alfredson)
Forensic study of deceit and decay, of class and intrigue, of England and the Cold War. Stupendously acted, miraculously adapted from complex material.

5. TRUE GRIT
(Coen Brothers)
The American creation myth in a rollicking Western, filled with great passages and performances, visually superb and absolutely entertaining.

4. A SEPARATION
(Asghar Farhadi)
Intricate, gripping drama/thriller of a dispute between two Tehran families. Sympathetic, tonally exact, and absolutely agonising in its precise evocation of a spiralling argument and its wider resonances and casualties.

3. OSLO, AUGUST 31st
(Joachim Trier)
Poetic, sublime study of Nordic depression (that makes Lars Von Trier's beautiful Melancholia look like the confused oddity that it is) without ever becoming depressing itself. Instead it is exhilarating: rapturous, nostalgic, full of longing.

2. MARGARET
(Kenneth Lonergan)
A complex, marvellously intimate epic, part character study, part polyphony, compulsive throughout.

1. TREE OF LIFE
(Terrence Malick)
Malick makes cinema a wondrous tool for exploration, and the resulting film, for all its flaws and missteps, is unlike anything made by anybody else. Vauntingly ambitious, ridiculously beautiful, always personal, this is the work of an artist who makes most directors look like mere photographers.

Bubbling Under:
You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger
Blue Valentine
The Fighter
Ballast
Armadillo
Senna
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
La Quatro Volte
Treacle Jnr
Contagion
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Hugo
Snowtown
Moneyball
Black Swan
Passenger Side
How I Ended the Summer
Norwegian Wood
Bridesmaids
Melancholia
Archipelago

You Can't See Everything (and I missed these):
Tyrannosaur, Las Acasias, The Artist, Mysteries of Lisbon, The Turin Horse, Poetry, The Future, Pina, Incendies, The Skin I Live In, Miss Bala, Dreams of a Life

FEVERISH ANTICIPATION

2011-12-23T11:15:00.006Z

Some films due for release in 2012 that I'm quite keen to see. And why.

THE GRANDMASTERS
(Wong Kar Wai)
A Wong Kar Wai biopic of legndary Martial artist Ip Man, you say? With Tony Leung and a trailer that looks frighteningly like the rain-lashed finale from The Matrix Revolutions? Well, yes. But if youre looking for a traditional Kung Fu movie crossed with an Ip Man biopic, then Donnie Yen already did that. Odds on here then, that Wong's version will be heavy on mood and period athmosphere, full of lovely, mysterious scenes of romantic longing, nostalgic for the Hong Kong of old, and thronged with beautiful women surrounding Leung, easily the great Chinese leading man of his era. Sounds pretty good to me..

JOHN CARTER
(Andrew Stanton)
The source material is ridiculous, but a great kind of ridiculous. Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs also created John Carter, Warlord of Mars, a Confederate Soldier from the American Civil War era who is transported to Mars via astral projection where, granted great speed, strength and agility by the gravity of the planet, he becomes involved in the complex wars between the various species of Martian he encounters, falls in love with a beautiful copper-coloured Martian Princess, and generally swashes his buckle. James Cameron's Avatar was a sort of updating on John Carter, mixed with Anne McCaffrey, but this is the real deal. People have been trying and failing to adapt Burroughs' character for decades without success, but Stanton suggested he had a visionary quality to him with the superb Wall-E, and that combined with the smooth, mythic purity of the storytelling evident in the best of Pixar's output makes me confident that he might have got this right. An immense budget, a great cast and that enigmatic first trailer, stuffed with glimpses of beautiful imagery, only increase that confidence. The second trailer is more about the action and the scale, and it makes the film look part Lawrence of Arabia, part Star Wars, and part Run of the Arrow. Sounds good to me. If you've seen Friday Night Lights the tv show then you'll know that lead here Taylor Kitsch is a star, he just needs the right vehicle. This year he's got three, following this with Peter Bergs Battleship and Oliver stones Savages. John Carter is the great unknown in the coming year of cinema; could be awful, could be incredible. It's out in March and I can't wait.

RUST AND BONE
(Jacques Audiard)
Audiard has earned loyalty by never making a bad film. The last two - A Prophet and The Beat That my Heart Skipped - were both brilliant, so I'd watch anything he decided to do. But it definitely helps that I'm a big fan of "Rust & Bone" by Craig Davidson, a short story collection focusing on gamblers, boxers, losers and outsiders on the make. Audiard is adapting some of those stories, which should prove a perfect fit with his own low down, character-based sensibility. Marion Cotillard leads the cast, which is never a bad thing, either..

POST TENEBRIS LUX
(Carlos Reygadas)
Mexican visionary Reygadas follows the amazing Silent Light with this mysterious, semi-autobiographical project. He said it will be a film where "reason will intervene as little as possible, like an expressionist painting where you try to express what you're feeling through the painting rather than depict what something looks like." He really knows how to sell a film, no?
His talent sells itself, is the unfunny truth.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
(Christopher Nolan)
THE AVENGERS
(Joss Whedon)
THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
(Marc Webb)
Another Summer Blockbuster Season, another Superhero invasion. Nolan's third Batman film will probably be the biggest film of the year, and for all I think that his approach has its flaws - namely excessive seriousness, shoddy action scenes and a slightly cringeworthy inability to prevent his characters from explaining his themes to the audience - he is still an interesting talent, and we are lucky he makes big summer tent poles with some intelligence and fine craftsmanship rather than the likes of Michael Bay or Brett Ratner. His Batman films are set in a clearly defined world, brilliantly cast, impressively epic, and are refreshingly (by superhero standards) cerebral. This one brings in some exciting actors - Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon Levitt - and Nolan's conception of villain Bane sounds far more interesting than The one from the comics. However, the trailer is slightly underwhelming, and crucially, for this Bat-fan; almost entirely lacking in Batman. What gives?
The Avengers looked silly from a distance; all those characters - Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye, Black Widow - thrown together in their silly costumes, when a common problem faced by the super hero genre is overstuffing. But Marvel have been so canny with the lead-up to this film, nicely setting up Thor and Captain America in cleverly pitched films, never being too ambitious, allowing their Universe to work on its own terms, and the trailer is so poppily exciting that I'm cautiously excited about it. Whedon understands the dynamics of the group in genre storytelling, as evinced by Buffy, Firefly and a stint writing X-Men comics, the cast is a fine balance of star power and acting chops, and it promises the biggest, loudest, most outright Superhero thrills of the summer. Plus: the Hulk fighting an alien invasion. Nuff said.
Spider-Man gets a needless reboot courtesy of 500 Days of Summer director Marc Webb, promising a younger, edgier take on the character. Webb brought some style to the romcom in that film, but the Amazing Spider-Man trailer looks dull and generic in a genre best-served by personality and strong storytelling. Nevertheless, Andrew Garfield seems a good choice in the lead, the Lizard is a great villain, and Emma Stone is an upgrade on Kirsten Dunst, for me. But still, the point isn't exactly obvious.

THE MASTER
(Paul Thomas Anderson)
The new Paul Thomas Anderson. A period drama about a Scientology-style Cult and its founder. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, score by Jonny Greenwood.
Anderson is quite probably the great American Director of his generation, as There Will Be Blood confirmed. Anything he does is something I have to see.
You need to know anymore?

THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
(David O. Russell)
Having rejuvenated his career with the success of The Fighter, Russell returns to the comedy-drama of Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees with this adaptation of Matthew Quick's novel starring Bradley Cooper as a man newly released after a 4 year stint in a mental hospital, who moves back in with his mother and tries to rekindle his relationship with his estranged wife. Sounds weird and maybe a little uncomfortable. That's good, both those things Russell does well.

COSMOPOLIS
(David Cronenberg)
Yes yes, it stars RPatz. But it's Cronenberg does Delillo, which is either a perfect meeting between author and director or too much of a good thing. Should be fascinating, either way.

LOOPER
(Rian Johnson)
A sci-fi time travel action movie from the young talent behind Brick, starring Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon Levitt and Emily Blunt. The reviews of an early cut of Looper have been pretty rapturous. Johnson seems a unique talent - Brick is quite unlike anything else I've ever seen, and quite remarkable, and The Brothers Bloom, while suffering from unmistakeable "difficult second album syndrome" is filled with good things - and this middle ground between mainstream genre thrills and personal indie filmmaking is exactly where he should be at this point in his career.

ONLY GOD FORGIVES
(Nicholas Winding Refn)
Refn, having finally got some recognition from hipsters with his study in 80s cool, Drive, reunites with Ryan Gosling on a Bangkok-set Noir about Thai boxing. He's long been one of World Cinemas more interesting directors, and this can be nothing less than fascinating.

THE WETTEST COUNTRY
(John Hillcoat)
Just like The Proposition, a Nick Cave/John Hillcoat collaboration, this prohibition-era Bootlegger drama has a strong cast (Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska) and subject matter seemingly perfectly suited to the director. Hardy and Shia Lebouef play two moonshine-making brothers. Violence, romance, and very probably some hard-bitten poetry ensue.

SHAME
(Steve McQueen)
McQueen and Michael Fassbinder reunite after the brilliant Hunger on this drama about a youngish marketing executive and his sex addiction in modern Manhattan. It's gotten very mixed reviews, but the Trailer is brilliant and Fassbinder is the real deal; a leading man movie star who can act. He's joined here by Cary Mulligan.

THE ASSASSIN
(Hou Hsiao-Hsien)
One of the Worlds great cinematic masters, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien has never made a martial arts film before. The Assassin has been in the works since 2007, stars HHHs frequent leading lady Shu Qi alongside Chang Chen, and concerns a female assassin. How his trademark style will work in the context of this genre is impossible to say, but I cant wait to find out.

THE BURIAL
(Terrence Malick)
Malick. Not actually called The Burial, either. A youngish cast (Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko, Barry Pepper) and - a first for Malick aside from the Sean Penn sequences in Tree of Life - a contemporary setting. Probably won't be out til 2014, but you never know...

HAYWIRE
(Steven Soderbergh)
Am I alone in loving Soderbergh most when he experiments in the boundaries of commercial cinema? When he uses his post Out of Sight heat to make an LA-set English Gangster movie by way of Alain Resnais? Or turns the second Oceans film into an insane collage of techniques and skits? Anyway, this is written by Lem Dobbs, his collaborator on The Limey, features an astounding cast of actors for real-life Martial artist Gina Carano to beat her way through (Michael Fassbinder, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas), locations in Barcelona, Dublin and the US, and looks a pretty stock double-crossed spy tale, only with fight-scenes shot the way they should be: with brutality and true impact. It's got a David Holmes score too...

EXTRATERRESTRIAL
(Nacho Vigalondo)
Vigalondo's debut, TimeCrimes, was a clever, stylish, gripping genre piece which suggested he might some day do great things. This unclassifiable sophomore film follows a man who wakes up beside a beautiful girl, in her apartment one evening with no memory of the drunken night before. He is Julio, she is Julia. Soon they discover an alien ship hovering above the city nearby. So then we get a romcom, a drama, and a genre film, wrapped up in a lovely little Spanish package. Looks brilliant.

THE BOURNE LEGACY
(Tony Gilroy)
Gilroy returns to the franchise his script began, Jeremy Renner replaces Matt Damon, playing not Bourne but another Treadstone Assassin, and I imagine it'll be more of the same globetrotting-gritty-wetwork stuff, only - given Gilroy's disparaging words about Paul Greengrass' direction of the last two Bourne films - probably more classically directed. Gilroy's Michael Clayton is one of the better American films of the last few years, but his Duplicity was a clever bore, so all bets are off here.

COGANS TRADE
(Andrew Dominik)
Dominik finally follows the sublime The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford with an adaptation of George V Higgins 1974 novel. The book is typical Higgins; told almost entirely in dazzling dialogue which reveals a tightly wound, beautifully simple plot about a card game heist and the vengeance wrought upon the hold-up men by the mob. Brad Pitt plays the mob fixer charged with finding and punishing those responsible, and Dominik has surrounded him with some fabulous character actors including James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins and Sam Shepherd. If Dominik's last film showed anything, it's that he has the talent to take a formidably distinctive novel and turn it into a distinctive film. This could be brilliant.

APRES MAI
(Olivier Assayas)
Assayas follows the impressive Carlos, which studied the politics of Europe and the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s, with this drama about a young man dealing with the social and political upheavals of Europe in the1960s. Assayas is one of the most consistently interesting filmmakers in France, making films which are accessible and involving but always deal in ideas and substantial themes. As a stylist he improves with each film, and this return to a slightly more intimate world after Carlos' epic canvas is a welcome move.

SKYFALL
(Sam Mendes)
I've never really liked a Sam Mendes film. He's obviously an intelligent, talented chap, with impeccable taste. But his films, for all that they all contain fantastic elements, great moments, lovely passages, for all that, they all feel a little safe and predictable. That may mean he's the perfect fit for a film in a series which demands some safety, something predictable. He's also the perfect age to understand what a Bond film should be, can be, must be. Daniel Craig is joined by a ridiculously classy cast: Ralph Fiennes (rumours suggest as Blofeld), Ben Whishaw (Q), Javier Bardem, Naomi Harris and Albert Finney. Roger Deakins, master cinematographer, shoots. A Bond film with serious pedigree.

THE LAST SUPPER
(Lu Chuan)
A big Chinese period drama. A bunch make it over here every year. But this one is directed by the talented Lu Chuan, who made City of Life and Death and Mountain Patrol, and that's reason enough to make me excited about it.

TWYLIGHT ZONES
(David Chase)
A semi-autobiographical debut film from an American director set in 60s New Jersey about a group of friends who form a band and try to make it big? Sounds like the kind of thing that goes straight to DVD in the UK with a cast of young prettyboys and generic starlets, a couple of whom might surprise us by making it big a few years later. Only this one is directed by David Chase, creator of the Sopranos, which often played like the longest movie ever made anyway, and suggests that this could be something better and more sophisticated. But then Ricky Gervais had made a couple of sublime tv series, and his first film - a comedy drama about a group of friends in Suburban England in the 70s - was a bit fa misfire, so who knows? Tv and cinema, for all their similarities, are very different.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA
(Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Ceylan's latest has gotten lots of paise at festivals, and sounds like a Change of pace for him, since it has genre elements. It's a 140 minute drama, methodically following a murder investigation in rural Turkey, and its reportedly brilliant.

DJANGO UNCHAINED
(Quentin Tarantino)
Tarantino finally makes that long-promised Western, and it turns out it's not really a Western at all, but a "Southern", a tale set in the South during the Civil War era, following a slave turned Bounty Hunter as he sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Plantation Owner. But the title suggests it'll be full of references to Spaghetti Westerns, it's already got a great cast (Jamie Foxx as the bounty hunter, Leonardo DiCaprio as the Plantation Owner, Kurt Russell, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Kerry Washington, Christoph Waltz, Don Johnson, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Samuel L Jackson in other parts) and it's Tarantino.

BIG HOUSE
(Matteo Garrone)
Garrone burst onto the International scene with the ferocious Gomorrah, and his follow-up is this Drama about the modern obsession with fame and celebrity. Not much else is known, but he's been working on it for three years, and expectations are high..

THE DICTATOR
(Larry Charles)
Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles complete a sort of "idiot trilogy" with this comedy about a Middle Eastern Dictator who may bear resemblance to certain real-life despots. For all the latters evident flaws, both Borat and Bruno made me laugh as much as anything I've seen in a cinema in years. Cohen is a brave comic, and Charles seems to get the best out of him. The trailer is middling but I'm there anyway.

PROMETHEUS
(Ridley Scott)
Scott is famously better at world-building than he is at narrative or characterisation or any of that boring old storytelling crap. That explains why all of his historical dramas - even the ones with massive flaws - are all set in vivid, beautiful worlds. He often feels more interested in the background than foreground action. That is a gift well-suited to sci-fi. But he hasn't made a sci-fi film since the one-two punch combo of Alien and Blade Runner established him as a giant of the genre thirty years ago. Prometheus is his return, and the images that have escaped the set so far and the arresting trailer promise a predictably visually strong production. The early confusion over whether or not it was an Alien prequel suggested a troubling amount of rewriting, but Losts Damon Lindelof seems a safe pair of hands, and Scotts work is rarely without a personality; Prometheus will be the film he wants to make. The cast is promising, too, full of mature class-acts from Michael Fassbinder and Charleze Theron through Idris Elba and Patrick Wilson to Guy Pearce and Rafe Spall.

KILL BIN LADEN
(Kathryn Bigelow)
That's not the title, only a rumour. Nobody knows the title yet. What is known is that Bigelow's follow-up to The Hurt Locker is this factual account of the Hunt for and Black Ops mission to assassinate Osama Bin Laden. The only confirmed cast members so far are promising character players Chris Pratt and Jason Clarke (better known from great work on tv in Parks And Recreation and Brotherhood, respectively) but you can be sure a director of Bigelow's talent - and expertise with action - will make this an exhilarating, intelligent, hot button thriller.

PARKER
(Taylor Hackford)
Jason Statham playing Richard Stark's Parker is worth a post all of it's own, but it's not an entirely terrible notion. And the fact that this is a Stark adaptation at all is a very good thing. The rest of the cast is very true to the noirish nastiness of Starks worldview: Nick Nolte, Michael Chiklis and even Jennifer Lopez could all have stepped comfortably from the pages of any of the Parker novels. As it happens this one is an adaptation of Flashfire, one of the recent books - Stark, a pseudonym for Donald Westlake, retired Parker for 23 years between 1973 and 1997 - and the only thing that really gives me pause is journeyman Director Taylor Hackford, who seems to have mediocrity running through his artistic veins.

LOVE
(Michael Haneke)
Haneke films are an event, even small-scale dramas like this one. It centres on an elderly couple whose relationship is tested when they have to care for their daughter (Isabelle Huppert) after she has a stroke. Haneke is on an incredible run of film's - his entire career, really - and him working with Huppert for the first time since The Piano Teacher is an exciting prospect.

SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS
(Martin McDonagh)
McDonagh follows In Bruges with this dark comedy about a screenwriter caught up in a dognapping plot, which sounds very mid-90s post-Tarantino. The cast includes Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson and Abbie Cornish. If it's half as good as McDonagh's debut film, that'll be fine with me.

DREDD
(Pete Travis)
Yeah, another Judge Dredd movie, sixteen years after the fudged Stallone version came and went with so little impact. This one is written by Alex Garland, whose track record as a screenwriter includes 28 Days Later and Sunshine, uncommonly interesting takes on familiar old genres both, and directed by the slightly less inspiring Travis, while the versatile Karl Urban plays the Lawman himself. As a character, Dredd could have been made for cinema: visually strong, suited to insertion into any plot or sort of story, his world is rich, funny and bizarre, and should always be full of visual wonders. Hopefully the film is too..

ELYSIUM
(Neil Blomkamp)
District 9 had its detractors, but it was an accomplished, ambitious, unusual sci-fi film from a filmmaker with a clearly defined aesthetic sensibility and a storytelling style all his own. His next film - actually due in 2013, I believe - is another sci-fi film, starring Matt Damon, Sharlito Kopley, Jodie Foster and a host of Latin actors (Diego Luna, Alice Braga, Rodrigo Mora). Its set 150 years in the future, concerns aliens and humans, Damon plays a convict; and aside from that, nobody really knows anything. Blomkamp has a big budget and big stars here, so I'm hoping the larger canvas doesn't overwhelm him, because this could possibly be something very special.

BULLET TO THE HEAD
(Walter Hill)
I find it inspiring that veteran Walter Hill, who made a fistful of pared down action classics in the late 70s and early 80s (The Warriors, The Driver, Southern Comfort), peaked commercially with the definitive buddy-cop movie (48 Hours) and has consistently made the best Westerns of the last few decades (The Long Riders, Geronimo, Wild Bill) is still directing. Here he's collaborating with another couple of veterans in the form of Sylvester Stallone and producer Joel Silver on an adaptation of a French Graphic Novel about a Hitman and a cop teaming up to solve some murders. I'm hoping for at least one slow motion action scene from Hill, once the master of the form.

NO
(Pablo Larrain)
Larrain has announced himself as a serious talent with his last two studies of the moral corruption of Chile under Pinochet. Both Tony Manero and Post Mortem were beautiful, disturbing, blackly funny and shocking, and here Larrain again takes on his countries past in a story tracing the experiences of aN advertising executive who devises a plan to beat Pinochet in a 1988 referendum. Larrain's rising status is signalled by the fact that Gael Garcia Bernal plays the executive.

THE LONELIEST PLANET
(Julia Loktev)
Bernal stars again here, working with young Russian-American director Loktev - whose last film, the extraordinary Day Night Day Night indicated that she might be an enormous talent, with a sensibility more Russian than American - on an adaptation of a brilliant Tom Bissell story about a young couple on a holiday Trek across the mountains of Georgia who run into some complications with the locals. I missed it at the London Film Festival, but all I've seen and read make it look and sound brilliant.

WHAT RICHARD DID
(Leonard Abrahamson)
Abrahamson is the Irish director of Adam & Paul and Garage, minor classics both, and this is an adaptation of Kevin Power's terrific novel " Bad Day in Blackrock", which fictionalised the murder of a young man outside a Dublin Nightclub by a group of affluent Teens and in doing so, skewered the condition of Celtic Tiger Ireland in all it's moral confusion. If anybody can do such a book justice, it's Abrahamson, who has displayed a great feel for tone and place alongside an ear for black comedy in his work so far.

GRAVITY
(Alfonso Cuaron)
Cuaron is, I think, the real deal; something of a visionary. This sci-fi drama reportedly follows two astronauts who have been accidentally cut loose in the middle of a space-walk and are floating into the void, alone together. They are played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney and rumours suggest Curaon is attempting to shoot the whole thing in what will looks like one Russian Ark-like single unbroken take. The script had better be good to support such an idea, but I have faith in Cuaron, and that starry cast suggests the material is strong too. Sounds incredible,

THE RAID
(Gareth Evans)
The trailer and festival responses to this Indonesian action thriller - directed by an expatriate Welshman - suggest that it's one of those envelope pushing b-movies, an efficient machine which delivers a succession of pummelling action scenes one after another. The concept finds a SWAT team raiding a building filled with dangerous criminals, then having to fight their way through it, room by room, floor by floor, man by man.

SNOW PIERCER
(Bong Joon-Ho)
Koreas most eclectic and interesting mainstream director (he made Memories of Murder, The Host and Mother, all excellent) returns with this Post-Apocalyptic story, adapted from a French comic and following a Disparate group of survivors travelling across the icy waste aboard a train...

SAVAGES
(Oliver Stone)
Don Winslow's novel is one of those books that reads like it was written to be adapted; it features strong, bold characters, a simple, compelling plot, and plenty of action. The story depicts two youngish middle class Californian drug producers who suddenly find themselves taking on a murderous Mexican Cartel who want their business. The cartel play dirty, abducting the duo's shared girlfriend and blackmailing them for their product. Only they decide to fight back.. The cast for Stone's version skews young (Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Johnson as the duo) and classy (Benicio DelToro and Salma Hayek as Cartel management) and he has some form with Noir and the crime genre in the shape of the entertaining U-Turn. He's also due a hit.

I WISH
(Hirokazu Koreeda)
Koreeda is a true master, capable of finely-tuned, perfectly weighted, surprisingly moving dramas, and this, like his earlier Nobody Knows, focuses on children. It tells the story of two young brothers, forced to live in different cities by their. Parents separation, and their dreams and attempts to be reunited. Some of the directors films have never made it to the UK, so fingers crossed that this on will.

MOONRISE KINGDOM
(Wes Anderson)
Wes Anderson directing Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzmann, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton and Bruce Willis, set in the 60s, Alexandr Desplat score. Oh yes.

Vintage Trailer of the Week 54

2011-07-06T14:00:00.000Z

Whatever happened to Christopher Crowe? Well, I know what happened, he now owns a business constructing racing cars for NASCAR, having apparently been a Racing Driver before he began his career in film. But what I mean is: what happened to that film career?

The answer seems to be that he emerged in television, and after a few cinematic projects of varying quality, he returned to television. Then, he just walked away. But he left a couple of intriguing credits behind him. Most obviously, he shares a writing credit with Michael Mann on The Last of the Mohicans, perhaps Mann's most accessible and downright entertaining film. He also wrote James Foley's Fear, a middling home invasion thriller with a Pre-stardom Reese Witherspoon and Mark Wahlberg. His best known tv work is probably the time travel show Seven Days or the Twilght Zone-aping The Watcher.

He wrote and directed two films which received theatrical distribution. In 1992, the derivative, badly cast erotic thriller Whispers in the Dark may have ended his budding directorial career, so abject was its failure.
His first feature, made in 1988, had marked him out as a director of promise. That film was also a thriller, only it was set in modish 60s Vietnam, in a city crawling with servicemen and the scum who feed off them. It was called Off Limits in the US, but given a better, far more evocative title in International territories; Saigon.

Coming near the end of that second, strangely eclectic cycle of Vietnam movies - which included comedies like Good Morning Vietnam alongside the likes of Platoon and Full Metal Jacket - it pairs Willem Dafoe and Gregory Hines - back when both still seemed like possible stars - as M.P. Investigators, hunting a killer who is murdering Vietnamese prostitutes. When they realise the man they're after may be Top Brass, a whole new World of corruption and other words commonly used in trailers for thrillers opens up to them. The plot may be pretty standard for the erotic thriller genre, but the movie is sweatily atmospheric and intense, with a great sense of place and a sure tone throughout. The performances are also strong in the main - Fred Ward is as reliably good value as ever - and in comparison to much of the genre cinema produced in America in 2011, it seems an impressively mature piece of work, for all its melodramatic excesses. It suggests that Crowe may have made an exceptional genre film, sooner or later, and that NASCAR's gain is cinemas loss.

Full trailer: http://youtu.be/2ehPfwCg3wk

Going Dutch

2011-04-30T22:54:00.001Z

Kenneth Branagh loves a Dutch Angle. That's when a frame is tilted, or "canted".
Here's an example from Thor, which is full of such shots:

That's not a problem for me. After all, you could argue that the Superhero genre is the home of the Dutch angle, historically at least:

But occasional attempts to pay tribute to the visuals of that series - which remains a fantastic, hilarious watch, fun, satirical, archly camp and knowing but never smug - have not always worked out well:

Brian DePalma may be the saviour of the Dutch angle. He loves them, utilises them in most of his work, and even incorporates them thematically. In Mission Impossible he tilts his frame whenever Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt feels he is being lied to (but also at other times):

A DePalma Superhero movie, now that would be worth watching. And give you a pain in the neck...

We Are Family

2011-04-26T02:00:00.000Z

There was an interview with Irish author Roddy Doyle in the Guardian last week which discusses, in some detail, his work as writer on the 1994 BBC mini-series Family, its reception and the effect that had on him.
I thought nobody else remembered Family. It's hard to find mention of it, even on the Internet in these days of finding everything on the Internet. This despite the fact that it was written by Booker-winning bestselling novelist Doyle and directed by subsequent Arthouse Superstar Michael Winterbottom. Also despite the fact that Doyle's novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors was a spin- off from the series, focusing intently on one character.

Well, Family was a big deal in Ireland at that time. As Doyle describes in the interview, Ireland was finally emerging into the 20th Century in the early 90s, with European Union money going into infrastructure and technology. The Irish National football team had qualified for two consecutive World Cups, and Riverdance, of all things, had been a massive feelgood success on its debut at the Eurovision Song Contest that year. Then came Doyle and Winterbottom's Family, with its poverty, criminality, drug abuse, domestic violence, chronic alcoholism and suggestions of incestuous lust. People - the kind of people who ring radio phone-ins - were appalled. But Family was an incredible piece of television drama; brilliantly written, uniformly well-acted and directed with Winterbottom's considerable feel for place and people.

Doyle's script is somewhat novelistic, attempting a polyphonic portrayal of these people, with each episode focusing on a different character. It begins with John-Paul, the eldest son, who is just beginning Secondary School, then his smalltime criminal father, Charlo, then the eldest daughter, Nicola, who is becoming uncomfortable about the way Charlo is looking a her, before finishing with Charlo's abused wife. Her emancipation and new self-respect gives the series an unexpectedly upbeat ending, but much of the preceding action is the bleakest Doyle ever wrote. Not that it's unrepresentative, on the contrary it captures working class Dublin perfectly, which is partly why it was so controversial. Sometimes looking in a mirror can be uncomfortable.

The performances are perhaps what make Family so memorable. Sean McGinley pops up in every major American or British production shot in or about Ireland or the Irish in a supporting role - there he is in Braveheart, Gangs of New York, The General etc - but as Charlo he is electric, full of rage and self-loathing and confusion but never too sympathetic, never downplaying his characters more monstrous side. Ger Ryan, mostly a jobbing actress on Irish television, more than matches him as Paula, and her transformation from long-suffering victim to independent single mother is the emotional uppercut of the climactic installment.

Family is finally released on DVD in June, which will hopefully restore it's reputation as one of the great tv dramas of the last couple of decades.

Live By the Sword

2011-03-29T15:38:00.000Z

Why have the folk storytelling traditions of the British Isles never really been reflected in the cinema produced here? These Islands are rich in myth and have an ancient tradition of storytelling, but British cinema has long seemed oblivious to both. Partly the success and influence of American cinema is to blame. In America, the first narrative film set the tone; it was a Western, a uniquely, distinctively American genre, and that genre was instantly embraced as the American genre, somehow embodying the American national myth.
Genres that were not native were rapidly Americanised: the Gangster story made more sense in America during and after the Depression and Prohibition than it ever had anywhere else before, and Hollywood took that area and established iconography and modes for it only slightly less powerful than the ones it had crystallised for the Western before it.

So British genre cinema already had a model in the earliest years of the medium as a commercial concern. And though British studios made thrillers and War films and adventure films and crime dramas, they were all, on some level, imitations of the American films playing in British cinemas. Most European Nations had similar issues: they made Westerns in Germany in the 1920s, and in France and Italy the dominant genres in the early years of Film were crime thrillers. German expressionism elevated the horror film but this was a brief aberrative period and American Cinema absorbed what those German films had done and made it mainstream and normalised. What Europe did well, even at that point, was heritage drama, costume period pieces akin to the traditions of much European theatre and literature. This was as true of Britain as it was of France.

But the big British National myths: the likes of King Arthur, Robin Hood, Dick Turpin and even the lesser-known Spring-Heeled Jack, they were never definitively tackled by British cinema. Director Percy Stow made a silent Robin Hood film in 1908 but in 1922 Robin Hood, an American silent starring Douglas Fairbanks, was released and became a massive hit. The version of the character featured in that film - the swashbuckling, mustachioed hero - entered into the collective cultural consciousness and that iconic figure was solidified by the 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn. Here was a British figure as interpreted by American Cinema, British myth repackaged for a Global Market by American tastes. King Arthur suffered a similar, though far less commercially successful, fate, even suffering the indignity of becoming a massively popular musical on stage and screen. Both icons would in time become the subjects of Animated Disney Films, making them culturally fixed as American icons as much as British.

Later British television would repeatedly address these characters, but they had been already co-opted by Hollywood and these portrayals are generally revisionist reimaginings working in the shadows of the American versions. The popular 1980s series Robin of Sherwood, for example, replaced the primary colours and straightforward manichean conflicts of most Robin Hood stories with a dirty realist visual approach - most likely taken from Richard Lester's superb Robin and Marian - and stirred in some Celtic mysticism and a little historical licence (one of Robin's Merry Men was a Moor), but British cinema, by the 1980s, never really waded into such waters.
All of this left Britain - from early on in its history as a film-producing Nation - without a natural action genre of its own. British adventure films had no fixed form; there were Colonial films set in the jungles of the East, the occasional American-style period swashbuckler, the odd Western-aping Highwayman film, War dramas and Spy stories, which could have been Hollywood productions if the accents of the performers were to change.
In contrast a nation like Japan already produced a steady supply of Samurai films and China had a rapidly developing Kung Fu cinema industry. Both these genres had similarities with the Western, but this was not quite a disadvantage, as the happy influence of John Ford, say, on the films of Akira Kurosawa suggests, and they were clearly indigenous genres which could have been developed nowhere else.

In the last few decades, the commercial instability of British cinema, by now a fraction of the industry it was in the 1940s and 50s, much of its creative and technical personnel at the service of American money, has meant that a couple of sub genres have tended to dominate production here. Britain has excelled at realistic drama since the "kitchen sink" movement of the 1960s, and much British output still takes this approach. High-profile directors like Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and even Shane Meadows all fall under this broad umbrella-term. Costume drama, driven by the continued popularity of television productions made by the BBC and ITV, is a consistently successful British form, much of it based on an unparalleled National literature, from Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen and the Brontes to Evelyn Waugh and William Golding. And the British sense of humour means that Comedy is still a thriving genre, with television providing a steady stream of creative comedic talent for Cinema. But action subgenres tend to copy Hollywood forms to a slavish extent; with the post-Tarantino mockney Gangster films of the 1990s ( which altered little about the American gangster genre) an obvious and dispiriting example.

Sword and sandal films, however, for lack of a better term, have recently begun to crop up in a fascinating little mini-Wave. Britain has the history, landscape and creative and technical know-how to thrive in this genre, but these films are really a sub-genre, albeit currently quite a rich and fertile one.
The release this month of Kevin McDonald's The Eagle offers up a fascinating contrast to the films I'm discussing. It is a big prestige Hollywood production, featuring a few rising stars( Channing Tatum, Jamie Bell, Tahar Rahim), made by a Director becoming a solid, somewhat anonymous craftsman, with strong production values, a massive marketing budget and the intention of being a classy, roundly entertaining epic.
Compare it to Neil Marshall's Centurion from last year, a film with a near-identical settting and somewhat similar premise. Marshall's film is a B-movie, quite proudly a bloodthirsty, action-heavy genre film with a budget roughly half that of McDonald's. The films share some characteristics; these days, dirty realism rules in period portrayals of the Medieval or pre-Medieval World, and so we get to see a world of mud and rust, dirt-streaked skin and tattered clothing, mostly rudimentary buildings, harsh weather and inhospitable landscapes.
But while McDonald's film is somewhat ambitious - it wants to be about Rome and colonialism, it wants to develop it's characters and give them journeys (it's not entirely successful in fulfilling these ambitions) - Centurion only has one ambition: it wants to be a ride. It prizes narrative momentum and exhilarating action scenes above all else, charging along in one long pursuit, interrupting itself only for violent combat and one inevitable romantic interlude.
Both films heavily feature sword battles, and it is perhaps here that Marshall's film reveals it true nature most freely. The violence in The Eagle is serious and visceral, reflecting McDonald's desire for the film to have some impact, and yet it remains strangely tasteful throughout, too sober in intent and careful in execution. The violence in Centurion is almost exploitative, with eye-stabbings and clubbings and limb-choppings featuring prominently amidst a sea of blood.

There is a long tradition of ultra-violence in Sword & Sandal cinema, some of it even originating in the genre's Half-brother, the Historical Drama. Orson Welles' Chimes At Midnight is notable for horrendously visceral battle scenes, and Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac juxtaposes its angsty conscience-wrestling and philosophising with Knights beheading one another so graphically it's worthy of Sam Peckinpah (and was soon parodied by Monty Python). Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (in the restored version from the 1990s, at any rate) features a couple of eye-popping action scenes, as does Clive Donner's Alfred the Great, and Mel Gibson's Braveheart, a film heavily influenced by Spartacus, pushes that angle even further, featuring extended Epic battles of stunningly gratuitous brutality: picks stud eye sockets only to erupt out of skulls, maces crush cheekbones, torsos are wrent asunder, limbs casually lopped off.

Marshall is the sort of director who is surely aware of this history. His previous film was the derivative movie geek wet dream Doomsday which mixed Escape from New York, Luc Besson and Mad Max to mediocre effect, but he would surely understand that many fans of Sword and Sandal films love the genre chiefly for its old-fashioned action, for men fighting with swords. Peter Jackson, another movie geek Director, understood this and his adaptations of Tolkein are filled with lavishly detailed and brilliantly executed battle scenes which crib from Kurosawa and Kung Fu movies as they go. These new British Sword and sandal b-movies all appreciate that bloody mayhem is a huge part of the appeal of their genre, and they are made by writers and directors who are extremely aware of the many ways such mayhem has been approached in the past.

So Centurion is really a revisionist 70s chase Western in disguise, with Picts replacing native Americans and Roman Legions instead of U.S. cavalry. But British history is long and interesting enough to have room for this story to be told - it could even have been set in an entirely different era with different sets of combatants; Vikings or Normans, the Civil War era, the Dark Ages - and still have qualified as a Sword and sandal film. Christopher Smith's Black Death, for instance, follows a disillusioned monk and a jaded bunch of Mercenaries during the 14th Century plague outbreak as they journey into eerie marshlands in search of a town reputedly free of infection. Financed and shot in Germany, Smith's film qualifies as British because of its setting and key creative personnel. Some of its most important influences are uniquely British, too. It seems to refer to three cult classics which all investigate the old, weird Britain of isolated rural communities and surviving pagan traditions; The Wicker Man, Blood on Satans Claw and Witchfinder General. In Smith's film, the Mercenaries, led by Sean Bean's iron-willed homicidal zealot, are searching for Witchcraft and they get that and more in this creepily mellow community (a sidelong suggestion of contemporary New Age worship is set with the costume design). The directors three previous films were all horror movies and he does a fine job here of maintaining a sense of dread and foreboding throughout, though the avoidance of the supernatural and ultimately human nature of the evil they encounter adds to this film's pessimistic impact. The coda is devastating, and if Black Death does have some aesthetic ambition, it's heart seems resolutely pulpy. It's battle scenes are filmed with real relish and gory aplomb and Smith has described it as a "men on a mission movie".

There are quieter, almost meditative moments in Black Death, however, and passages of it reminded me fleetingly of Andrei Tarkovsky and most particularly his extraordinary Medieval Epic, Andrei Rublev, which is, amongst other things, a fine example of Dirty realism in this genre. The Continental European approach to treatments of these eras has long differed from that presented by Hollywood. Directors like Frantisec Vlacil, Tarkovsky and Grigori Kontisev each depicted a muddy and brutal world where life was difficult, violence never distant, and death close behind it. Yet each was able to broach big, often awkward themes in his work: Kontisev's Shakespeare adaptations are as close to the complexity of the plays as any of the English-language versions, Vlacil's superb Valley of the Bees and Marketa Lazarova both examine themes of faith, loyalty and morality, and Andrei Rublev is a searching investigation into art, creativity and spirituality. Yet each made spectacular and beautiful films, convincing in their historical detail and authentically atmospheric. Perhaps the finest example of European art cinema treating the Medieval era, however, is Robert Bresson's fabulous Lancelot Du Lac, a mysterious, subtle yet grotesquely violent treatment of the Arthuran legend which Is unique in Bresson's filmography for it's strange Peckinpah-reads-a-courtly-romance effect.

These new English films resemble those European productions only visually; in their production design and photography (although those films were generally in black and White the effect of their muted looks are well-suggested by modern cinematography). The artistic ambition and imagination of those European directors is no longer present in Sword and Sandal films. Even in Mainland Europe, art films no longer command large enough budgets to allow for period recreation on anything but a small scale. So a modern Russian Medieval film is more likely to be a copy of an American production like the Conan-plagiarising fantasy Wolfhound. Even Sergei Bodrov's impressive Genghis Khan biopic Mongol plays more like an American Epic biopic such as Alexander or Braveheart than a uniquely Russian, artistically ambitious piece of work like Andrei Rublev.

Much of this has come about because of the huge success of Ridley Scott's Gladiator. A massive worldwide commercial and critical hit which won Awards and made Russell Crowe a star after many near misses, Scott's film also suggested that the public retained an appetite for sword and sandal movies, done right. Many of the American films which attempted to repeat it's success floundered on one or more elements of the recipe required - in the case of Oliver Stone's Alexander, Wolfgang Pederson's Troy and even Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, they all miscast their leading man after Gladiator had demonstrated the need for an actor capable of suggesting some old-fashioned masculinity without sounding silly speaking the Cod-English accented dialogue the established conventions of the genre demand.
The look of these newer English films is directly influenced by the first sequence in Gladiator, where Maximus' troops battle barbarians in wintry Northern Europe. The cold grey-blue muddy look established by Scott in that sequence - and repeated in the early European scenes in Kingdom of Heaven - has been a feature of all these films, and the majority have also borrowed Scott's approach to the first major battle there: an approach he in turn took from Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan, involving shaky handheld cameras, rapid cutting, shallowness of field and overexposed film. One film obviously indebted to Scott and which has proven surprisingly influential upon the films I'm discussing here is Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur with Clive Owen and Keira Knightly. It plays almost like a stylistic template for this material: it has the dirty visual pallette, the gritty production design, the Orc-like native barbarians, the gratuitous combat violence, the Kurosawa lifts and the Shaky-cam action scenes which have all now become commonplace. Unfortunately, it also has a terrible script, predictable plot and some downright bad acting, all of which make portions of it feel hilariously camp.

The success of Gladiator obviously indirectly led to the creation of HBOs Rome, too, and that show has given this new English wave one of it's leading men. James Purefoy had been a jobbing British actor for years, popping up in lead roles on stage and in tv in all sorts of material but never making the big breakthrough any actor needs. His role as a proud and lusty Mark Antony was one of the most memorable turns in Rome and it demonstrated that he was comfortable with period dialogue and looked good in armour, as did his small but crucial turn in A Knights Tale.

In England, when a film like Jonathan English's Ironclad needs a leading man, it finds Purefoy. He plays a classic archetype; the Warrior who has seen too much War and suffers for it. He plays a Templar who has taken a vow of silence after years of butchery in the Holy Land but is dragged into a new conflict in England. This film appears to have a little ambition, it's story of Nobility in conflict with Royalty fairly quaking with heft and import. And yet, English is plainly most interested in the gritty detail of his protracted battle scenes, and his character arcs make sure to focus on the way these men are changed and effected by the violence they experience. An hour or so in, after a couple of gruesome deaths by blunt instrument and a few disembowelments, the central idea - that these common men are fighting for their right to a voice - has more or less dissipated amidst the clouds of blood. English steals liberally from the usual sources. His early "getting the team together again" scenes especially echo Seven Samurai, and he displays a fine understanding of the dynamics of these sorts of action sequences: the scene where Purefoy first unleashes his immense broadsword is terrifically done and appropriately awesome in it's violence.

Ironclad in fact picks up where Ridley Scott's Robin Hood left off; with the signing of the Magna Carta. This make a comparison between the films inevitable (it doesn't hurt that Jonathan English is obviously a big fan of Scott's historical films). Robin Hood, like The Eagle is a big budget studio tentpole production, with big stars (Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett), massive action sequences, a bloated running time and a script that is a bit of a mess. Scott focuses far more than English upon the issues behind the creation of the Magna Carta, with much debate on rights and motivational speechifying from Crowe's Robin. This makes much of the film stolid, leaden and weighed down by it's determination to be serious. The action scenes are impressive enough - though the massive beach battle at the finale does feature a lazy slo-mo "Noooooo!!" - but English accomplishes more with a quarter of the budget. Crowe, with his brawny old-fashioned masculinity, was born for such meaty Historical roles and he carries the film as few actors could. Purefoy matches him, projecting an intensity that fits well with the sombre, bloody tone of the film. He had similar success in Solomon Kane, another violent semi-British historical pulp epic, where he played Robert E Howard's Puritan Warrior as a lethal, haunted West Country gunslinger, battling demons while praying to God.

Films like Solomon Kane and Nicolas Winding Refn's extraordinary Valhalla Rising don't quite belong to this sub-genre, though they are associated. Refn's film was shot in Scotland and is just as violent as any of the others I've mentioned, possibly moreso in it's unrelentingly savage first act, but it has aesthetic ambitions; a layer of pretension, even, which is beyond them. Comparable recent American productions, the Nicholas Cage-starring Season of the Witch, say, wander directly into camp territory even Centurion avoids, aided by a distinctively British yobbish sensibility. This is tricky material, a difficult period to get right, with a potential for a pantomime quality increased by the costumes and sets and hairstyles, but most of all by the language. Suggesting an archaic brand of speech in modern English is delicate, and having banal conversations about historical figures treads perilously close to Monty Python territory. Or, as one character in Centurion puts it: "A wall? Is that Hadrian's great plan?"

Much as I admire this rich young British sub-genre, I still mourn the absence of any films that really do capture the folksy, rural traditions of storytelling in Ireland and the U.K. instead of applying bastardised American genre principles to British history. But then European Cinema contains little of the kind of film I mean. The only example that springs readily to mind is Nils Gaup's excellent Finnish 1987 Pathfinder (Ofelas in Sami) which adapts a Sami legend into a taut, eerie and exciting adventure film which feels like it could almost have been made at any time over the last fifty years. I can't imagine anything like it ever getting made in a modern Britain so enslaved to mainstream cinematic modes and genres. And that's something of a shame.

Anticipation: Our Day Will Come

2011-03-22T10:35:00.006Z

It has undoubtedly been noted before how different to his father Romain Gavras is as a director. Costa-Gavras is best known for his political thrillers; the likes of the brilliant State of Siege, Missing and Z, all leftwing, politically engaged yet engrossing narratives with thriller elements. It says much about the contemporary global film industry that Romain's earliest notable work has been on music videos instead of low budget or independent films. After establishing a reputation in that area for boldness, stylistic fluency and an originality of vision, he has graduated to big time advertisements and his first feature.

That Feature, Notre Jour Viendra (Our Day Will Come) takes the central premise from his most famous work, the video for MIA's "Born Free" and takes it off in another direction. The setting is a world like our own, except in this world, redheads are subject to discrimination and abuse. In the "Born Free" video, we see a team of shock troops take a Ginger young man from his home by force, herd him onto a bus with a bunch of other Ginger men, drive them all out into the desert, and then force them at gunpoint to race across a minefield.
The money shot is the evisceration of a teenager into chunks of blood and bone in loving slow motion.
If that all sounds ridiculous, well it does serve as a sort of primitive satire, and is redeemed by Gavras' direction. He combines the slickness of a modern Hollywood director with a great eye, ruthlessly rhythmic editing to the song his images serve and a subtly European humorous artsiness (some might call it pretension) which you will either find amusing or infuriating. It combines to make a unique and unforgettable video:

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

For me his other great music video is for Justice's "Stress", a gritty, ultraviolet yet strangely haunting collision between La Haine and Gaspar Noe:

Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code

Just from those two promos a couple of his quirks are evident: he has a slightly adolescent awe of violence, a nice way of incorporating homage into his work ("Born Free" plays to me like a big tip of the hat to Peter Watkins' great Punishment Park), exemplary technical control, and a well-balanced mix of European and American sensibilities. All of this then suggests that Our Day Will Come should be worth waiting for. It stars Vincent Cassel, and is set in a Ginger-prejudiced world, evolving into a road movie as Cassel and a young red-haired friend journey across France towards Ireland, reputedly safe haven for all Gingers. It looks bizarre, in an interesting way, and even from the trailer you can tell it was made by a real Director:

Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code

It was released in France last year and already available on DVD there. Since then, Gavras' most high-profile work is the new Adidas spot, "Adidas Is In All" which showcases the new Justice track, "Civilisation", and is a pretty storming piece of brand iconography, filled with beautiful imagery. I love this longer version, much though I resent Lionel Messi having to share the screen with mere basketball players and skateboarders, and worse, Katy Perry:

Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code

Gavras founded the collective Kourtrajme with Kim Chapiron in 1994 and they worked on shorts and around the outskirts of the Parisian music industry for years before finding success (Chapiron was the first to direct Cassel in Sheitan) . This background explains his longstanding relationship with Justice. As well as the Adidas spot and the "Stress" video, he directed their tour documentary, A Cross The Universe, which he edited into a great little trailer-cum-video for their song "Phantom II":

Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code

A couple of his other more interesting Videos follow (for Simian Mobile Disco and DJ Medhi) together with an advert for Yves St Laurent which is quite different from the majority of his work in tone:

Get your own valid XHTML YouTube embed code

Our Day Will Come is presently without a distributor in the UK. It would be a shame not to see the debut feature work of such a visually muscular director on the big screen here, but it's not too late...

Innit.

2011-02-09T12:55:00.000Z

I once overheard a colleague and former film student say "No good films ever come from England". A stupendously ignorant claim, as Time Out London's terrific list of the 100 Best British Films suggests. Their list - and the many contributors individual lists - are a good reminder of the cinematic traditions of the UK and the richness and breadth of films produced here over the decades. For some reason, they ignored me, but I love a good list, as regular readers will know, and so, in no particular order, a Top 10:

(I'm excluding the likes of Blow Up and Barry Lyndon, which would both breeze into this list, since they're directed by foreigners, and would therefore seem to be about as British as, say, An American Werewolf in London)

Bad Timing (Nicholas Roeg, 1980)
Roeg's most challenging and rewarding film, elliptical, disturbing and erotic, it's an amazing piece of editing as style, with Roeg shuffling scenes, time frames, moods and emotional states to powerful effect.

Wonderland (Michael Winterbottom, 1999)
One of the only films to truly capture modern London, without tourist landmarks or mockney Gangsters, but in all it's beautiful energy and occasional desolation, Winterbottom's multi-character drama is lovely, brilliantly acted and benefits from one of Michael Nymans greatest scores.

Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)
Devastating, arty yet accessible, beautiful yet horrifying. Fassbender is extraordinary.

Nil By Mouth (Gary Oldman, 1997)
Grim but brilliant, Oldman takes what he learned from Mike Leigh and Alan Clarke and makes a social realist drama set in working class South East London, confronting big issues like domestic abuse without a hint of a flinch, and all of it is cinematic, remarkably visceral and visually exceptional.

Went the Day Well (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942)
A subtle, darkly funny satire on the nature of Englishness and English self-image and also a thrilling WWII action thriller with some shocking scenes, nicely handled by Cavalcanti.

The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965)
Watkins virtually invents a genre and creates a thrilling piece of cinematic propaganda in the process. Traumatically frightening and incredibly powerful, too.

Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000)
The best New wave British Gangster film, tipping a hat to Frears' great The Hit but entirely new with it's mix of moods and sub-genres, its moments of fantasy and Glazers stylish command. Ben Kingsley: awesome.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, 1943)
Any one of six Powell and Pressburgers would do, but this is my favourite, a sweet comedy on the life of a man and a Nation. Ravishing, too, like all their work.

Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963)
The least-dated of the kitchen sink films of the 60s and more universal in it's account of a dreamer planning an escape he'll never attempt. A great sense of place, too, and the best performance Tom Courtenay ever gave. Julie Christie doesn't hurt, either.

The Hill ( Sidney Lumet, 1965)
Brutal, remorselessly powerful stockade drama. Lumet was always happiest with his camera focused on faces, and this showcases that powerfully. Connery leaves 007 behind fully for the first time.

An Alternative 10 it hurts too much to leave unmentioned:

Winstanley (Kevin Brownlow, & Andrew Mollo,1975)

Elephant (Alan Clarke, 1989)

Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1989)

Radio On (Chris Petit, 1979)

Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968)

Bill Douglas Trilogy (Bill Douglas, 1972)

Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981)

Mona Lisa (Neil Jordan, 1984)

A Hard Days Night (Richard Lester, 1964)

Accident (Joseph Losey, 1968)

Vintage Trailer of the Week 53

2011-01-23T00:38:00.003Z

I've written here before about how I adore Elmore Leonard's Western writing; I think its his best material. Not nearly as dialogue-led as his Crime fiction - altough the dialogue is still tough and witty - his Western books and stories showcase his exceptional descriptive prose, fine storytelling and unmatched facility for creating brilliant villains and thoroughly impressive, capable heroes. My favourite of his Western books is Hombre, which was made into a terrific and seriously underrated film by director Martin Ritt in 1967.

Ritt and Newman were habitual collaborators at that time, with Hombre standing as their sixth - and last - film together (the most famous and celebrated of that series is probably the fabulous Hud (1963)). Ritt was a successful director for almost three decades but his reputation had declined since his death in 1990, perhaps because of the worthy, stolid nature of some of his more high-profile late work, particularly the likes of
The Front (1976) and Norma-Rae (1979) and the awkward stiffness of some of his earlier literary adaptations, such as The Sound and the Fury (1959) and the Newman co-starring Hemingways Adventures of a Young Man (1962). In this, he reminds me of Richard Brooks, a peer of his who liked risky literary adaptations (including films of Lord Jim, In Cold Blood, and The Brothers Karamazov) but whose gifts as a storyteller and technical expertise mean that his most lasting work is the genre material he occasionally lowered himself to, such as the Westerns The Professionals (1966) and Bite the Bullet (1975).

Similarly, Ritt's genre films are his most satisfying work. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) is a brilliantly dour, grim LeCarre adaptation, and the best of his social issue films is the one with genre elements: labour dispute drama The Molly Maguires (1970) with its gripping undercover plot. But Hombre is a purer genre film and a tense, exciting, well-mounted cinematic experience all round. It has the classy cast and James Wong Howe photography of an Oscar contender, and a fine Newman performance at its centre too. Its one of the best Leonard adaptations - certainly the best version of one of his Westerns - which alone should make it compulsive viewing...

Count for the Down: My 2010 in Cinema

2011-01-02T19:02:00.002Z

Somebody asked last year why I never go for a reverse Countdown on my top 10. So I thought I'd give that a go this year. Enjoy the crippling suspense.
So: All 2010 UK releases, from 15 to 1, with some also-rans and interesting failures below:

15. Greenberg (Noah Baumbach) -
Opening with a mini Rohmer movie following a seemingly aimless young woman through the ordinary hours of her days, Baumbach's character study-cum-comedy goes on to introduce its titular character and becomes something else altogether. How many films devote so much time to creating characters flawed and loathsome the way Ben Stiller's Roger Greenberg is? And manage to remain interesting, funny and even moving? For while we may cringe and laugh at Greenberg's intractability and stubborn insistence on being awkwardly himself, he is a recognisable human being, his interactions brilliantly authentic and truly felt. I love how Baumbach textures his world - his use of pop music is fantastic, as the Steve Miller Band track which opens the film shows best, and Harris Savides' lovely cinematography presents an LA just slightly askew from the one we are accustomed to from a thousand tv shows and movies. Here LA is bright yes, but oddly bleak, as our protagonist is frequently isolated in big frames, most stunningly in the early shot finding him awkward and alone at a party in a big backyard.
Stiller is splendid, twisting his nervous energy into something sad and damaged. Some of the moments of comic awkwardness are masterful, and yet the central relationship is curiously affecting, despite Greenberg himself coming across, ultimately, as a bit of a heel. At least he's an interesting heel..

14. White Material (Claire Denis) -
Claire Denis' amazing hot streak continues with this study of the effects of an armed revolution in a Francophone African country upon some colonial plantation owners. As always with Denis, its breathtakingly beautiful, from first shot to last - she has a fabulous eye. But her storytelling here is less elusive than it has been on occasion; the narrative is still elliptical and oft dreamlike, but the plot moves at a fair clip, and there is an impressive sense of dread and tension throughout. Her use of a shuddery handheld camera in some over-tight close-ups in the early scenes throws you off and recovering any equilbrium is never allowed; with a flashback structure and shifts in POV maintaining the unease of the viewer. The subtle - and not so subtle - digs at colonial exploitation, and indeed native brutality - are impressively controlled, and Isabelle Huppert is exemplary, as ever.

13. The Way Back (Peter Weir) -
Not for Peter Weir the spectacular, attention-grabbing money shot, no. His focus is solely on storytelling, and his mastery is unquestioned and exceptional. This historical endurance epic is beautifully mounted, gripping throughout its gruelling length, and refreshingly old-fashioned in its concentration upon characterisation and story.
Seven men escape a Soviet Siberian Gulag during the Second World War, and begin a long trek to freedom, thousands of miles across Mongolia and Tibet to India. The supporting characters - the likes of Colin Farrell and Ed Harris - are more interesting
than Jim Sturgess' lead, but Weir's understanding of this sort of Boys Own material is matchless, as Master & Commander and Gallipolli have proved in the past, and he makes this a great old yarn, immersive and intense, always intelligent and interesting, and magnificently well-made. He also makes some points about the horrors of totalitarianism and the comforts of faith and friendship, but never at the expense of his tale.
This is the kind of film that a 10 year old could enjoy just as much as an 80 year old, which is a rare quality these days, and Weir is one of the few Directors truly capable of making such Cinema. Long may he continue...

12. Centurion (Neil Marshall) -
If its genre thrills you're after, B-Movies are where its at. They do what they do without the bloat or pretension or excess of the bigger, more expensive Hollywood blockbusters. Neil Marshall's chase Western (replacing American Indians with Picts and Cavalry with Romans in Scotland) is a case in point. Roman legionaires flee Picts. 97 minutes. Thats it.
Yes, its full of cliches, but Marshall loves his cliches, embraces them, invests them with real feeling, and so they work. Yes, it rips off tons of other, better films, but Marshall understands why the elements he steals work, and he uses them cleverly.
Its a 70s-style allegory for whatever conflict you like - Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq - but really all its concerned with is forward momentum and butchery. The action scenes are incredibly bloody. Lead Michael Fassbender is something special - a great actor (see Hunger for proof) and also a leading man capable of credibly carrying an action movie, and he has the credible support of the likes of Riz Ahmed, a ripe Dominic West having a high old time and a dour Olga Kurelyenko as the implacable villainess.

11. The Social Network (David Fincher) -
Aaron Sorkin makes every story the story of a boys club. But he writes stories of boys clubs so well, I can't complain. Here he takes a modern subject - Facebook, the most modern subject - and sort of ignores it, concentrating instead on classical dramatic subjects: friendship, rivalry, greed, betrayal. In doing so he is able to comment obliquely on the way one geek made us all geeks, everyone reduced to staring at a computer screen. There are problems: halfway through the characters are all reduced to ciphers, it seems, the fast-talking semi-autistic Facebook crowd led by the wonderful Eisenberg, who I think makes Zuckerberg slightly less vile than Sorkin's script suggests, the wounded puppy dog of Andrew Garfield's Eduardo, who exists in the last act only to be hurt over and again, Timberlake's cartoon villain, but Fincher's slick, chilly stroytelling makes it all flash by in a ridiculously entertaining jiffy. Its major flaw - more apparent on a second viewing than a first, when its dazzle is so distracting - is the shallowness of its appeal. There seems to be little beneath Sorkin's wordplay and Finchers smooth control, little meaning, little meat. Its appearance at the top of countless Critics Polls may seem somewhat confusing, until one considers that this is a film about geeks and loners, concerned with geek hierarchy and vengeance. Critics and bloggers saw a movie about themselves, and they love nothing better...

10. The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel) -
Lucretia Martel is a phenomenal talent, of the type that has seen her become one of the major figures in Contemporary World Cinema after only three films. This disturbing, unusual drama may be her best.
A middle class woman from the Argentine interior hits something in her car. Thinking it was a person, she drives on. But the psychological effect of the incident seems to shake her loose from the world and she floats in a haze of guilt through her affluent, privileged life, following her daily routine; going to work, seeing her lover, gossiping with her friends and family. Only all of it has been given a new tint by the car accident, the banalities of everyday life recontextualised by violence, death, deception.
Martel uses this to consider the morality of modern Argentine life - the way the class system forces servants into such an uncomfortable yet anonymous intimacy with their employers, and indeed, the very fact of the class systems existence, the cosy moral avoidances of a bourgeois Argentinean couple and what happens when they are confronted with a moral imperative they cannot ignore (sort of; turns out they basically ignore that too), together with a sidelong look at the strains and strengths of an extended families bonds.
Martel's visual style is astounding, her compositional sense isolating her protagonist in shallow focus to emphasise her widening distance from her servants, family and friends, her lighting generally painterly and lovely, her camera gliding smoothly through complex. That combined with fantastic sound design - many scenes contain almost nightmarish ambient soundscapes - make the film something of a darkly atmospheric headfuck that stayed with me for days afterwards.

9. I Am Love (Luca Gaudagnino) -
Its a wonderful thing to see a Director arrive fully-formed, and though this is Gaudagnino's third film, it feels so thrillingly poised and fresh that it is the first time the true extent of his talent has been revealed. A big, old-fashioned family saga, all of the elements are superb - a layered script full of ambiguity and telling observation, perfectly judged performances, lovely cinematography, dynamic use of some of John Adams' music, and most especially Gaudagnino's direction, which somehow combines both stateliness and sensuality. The story concerns the wife of a Milanese Magnate who falls in love with her son's friend and how her feelings - she is the I of the title - enrich her rigid existence and ultimately destroy her family. So yes, its a story about rich people enduring emotional crises in opulent surroundings, bourgeois cinema at its most bourgeois. But Gaudagnino is aware of the dangers of this type of tale, and his camera dissects these people, noting their flaws and prejudices as well as offering some sympathy for the pain the story inflicts upon them. His camera is a marvellous observer; attentive to every nuance in every scene and alive to the sensual pleasures of food and sex in a way I have never really seen before in cinema. He composes his frames intelligently and elegantly and always trusts his story - this is an unabashed melodrama, Adams' music only underlining its operatic dimensions. Swinton is magnificent, as she so often is.

8. The Road (John Hillcoat) -
Cormac McCarthy's book is perhaps the only novel of the last few decades that I can imagine being told as an oral story around a campfire hundreds of years from now. It has that sort of mythic heft and simplicity: a man and a boy walk through a ruined world. As such, I'm sure there will be other attempts at adapting it. But I cannot imagine any of them doing as fine a job as John Hillcoat does here. His film is beautiful and horrifying, grim, tense and moving. It is always enthralling. Joe Penhall had an easy job, in one way; all of the dialogue and narration come verbatim from the novel. Viggo Mortensen and the boy are both great, as is the photography and score, altough that does stray into sentimentality on one or two occasions. But most impressive is the fact that the film gets the book, and does it a sort of justice. Whether I can ever bear to watch it again is another story entirely...

7. The Secret In Their Eyes (Juan Jose Campanella) -
This slick and engrossing Argentine thriller somehow triumphed at the Oscars to win Best Foreign Language film, beating out the vastly superior A Prophet and The White Ribbon in what was an exceptionally strong field. And while its not a patch on either of those masterpieces, it is a fine film, combining its generic elements seamlessly with its emotional narrative of a love story that never-quite-was bubbling to the surface once again 25 years later. It stars the great Ricardo Darin and plays like a Classic Hollywood thriller made for grown-ups, only even better, because it has excellently drawn characters, a script rich in great one-liners and speeches and is full of finely-observed details. Its also brutal, dark, disturbing and finally quite moving. The manner in which it allows the awful realities of late 20th Century Argentine History to colour the plot is subtle and hugely important to the impact of key plot elements: this is a film which links politics to violence, but never explicitly or stiffly.
Whereas most Argentine films feel low or at least medium budget, this is classy and well-made throughout, Director Juan Jose Campanella showing some great chops, particularly in the amazing sequence where the police hunt a suspect at a Football match, made to seem as if it was done in one seamless awesome take. Darin, one of world Cinemas great Movie Stars, is, as ever, superb.

6. Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn) -
Unlike anything else I have ever seen, Refn's film is a Viking epic, an action film, a sci-fi tale of exploration and alien encounter, slow cinema, and a consideration of faith in extremis. It vaguely resembles much other work in one element or another: there are traces of Tarkovsky and Malick, and some of Herzog's Aguirre the Wrath of God and a little-seen indie from a few years ago called Severed Ways alongside the definite genre touches - Refn designs some scenes to play out like they are in a horror film, and his action scenes betray the influence of Kurosawa. It is also extraordinary: breathtakingly beautiful, maddeningly slow and obscure, sickeningly violent. Some will see it and find it empty and pretentious, others will sense greatness in its hypnotic visual poetry and Refn's slow narrative. I was utterly transported. Mads Mikkelsen deploys his movie star charisma in a wordless role and carries the whole thing along, and the sound design - that howling wind, the ambient music - is almost as arresting as the awesome photography. The only thing preventing it placing even higher in this list is the suspicion that Refn didn't really have much in mind when he made it, and it is immaculately executed but probably meaningless. But despite that, to quote an old Time Out review of Once Upon a Time In the West: Critical tools needed are eyes and ears. This is Cinema.

5. Dogtooth (Yorgos Lantimos) -
Funny, disturbing, oddly erotic, baffling allegory of, well, whatever you want. Political dictatorship, organised religion, the power of the media? A man and woman in modern Greece keep their (grown-up) children prisoners in their house through the propagation of a series of lies about the state of the outside world and its manifold horrors and dangers: cats are dangerous killers, airplanes are the same size as toy planes. The way this affects the development of the children is the meat of the narrative, but the frequently hilarious details of the parents deceptions are just as important. Such a simple idea, so well executed. The direction - controlled, patient, sometimes painterly - is inspired.

4. City of Life & Death (Lu Chuan)-
In his 1961 review of Gillo Pontecorvo's Holocaust drama Kapo, then critic (now much-lauded Director) Jacques Rivette did not summarise the plot or give a close reading of the aesthetics except to describe one scene and more specifically one shot: "Look however in Kapo, the shot where Riva commits suicide by throwing herself on electric barbwire: the man who decides at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead body – carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the final framing – this man is worthy of the most profound contempt."
Lu Chuan's City of Life & Death made me think of Rivette's criticism, which is raised whenever a Holocaust film or any film about real-life instances of man's inhumanity to man is released.
This film is a somewhat impressionistic portrayal of the rape of Nanking, one of the great war crimes of the Second World War and a source of continued tension between China and Japan to this day. The first half is an elliptical, almost dreamlike, floating account of the Japanese conquest of the city, full of ferocious battle sequences and unwatchable mass murder. The second half shows the way the Japanese ran the conquered, half-destroyed city: by executing hundreds of civilians, sytematically raping women and throwing children out of windows.
It is often difficult to watch so much unending brutality, and this is where Rivette's criticism is relevant, for Chuan's film is also incredibly beautiful. The sumptuous black and white photography summons up a series of indelible, unforgettable images: small boys playing war with abandon in the ruins, surrounded by corpses, mere seconds after the firefight they just participated in has ended; a chapel full of keening, terrified refugees shrinking from a handful of Japanese soldiers ; the tips of executed mens heads above the sand as their executioners dance around them, flattening the grave.
Chuan is a new sort of Chinese filmmaker, combining the depth and artistry of the 5th generation with the technical mastery of a modern Hollywood director, and his approach here is radical. He does not linger too long on any one character, his narrative always moving along, observing all, context developing as the story progresses. And yet he is even-handed - the film has been massively controversial in China due to the humanity it allows its Japanese characters.
I can't agree with that criticism or with Rivette. This is a profound, magnificent , difficult film.

3. Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-Eda)
For a film by a leading Japanese filmmaker to so openly address the legacy of Ozu through a modern family drama with obvious echoes of Tokyo Story is a bold move. But Hirokazu Kore-Eda, a half-dozen films in to his career (most of them frustratingly never released in the UK) has an established, distinctive voice of his own, and he has made Still Walking an absolute triumph. So many films attempt to wring drama out of an everyday family gathering only to find themselves peddling in a sort of downbeat soap melodrama (Mike Leigh, I'm looking at you). But Kore-Eda avoids this by a quiet insistence on the truthfulness of his characters and their scenes together. Nothing much happens on a plot level, but the story is all in the pauses, the unseen facial expressions, the arguments which start but never climax, the non-sequiters and jokes, the misunderstandings and unspoken sentiments. The story follows a family gathering for the memorial of the death an adored eldest son twelve years before. His younger brother returns to his parents home with his wife, widowed with a young son, while his elder sister comes with her loud husband and children. Meanwhile their mother takes solace in religion and gossip and their father, a retired doctor, nurses resentments and gripes but never lets any emotion show through his grumpy facade.
They eat, chat, visit his grave, eat some more, bathe, chat. It is sublime. Delicate, always realist and more moving because of that, it is a snapshot into the life of three generations in all their tensions, frustrations and joy. Each of the Kore-Eda films I have seen has been rich with emotion, and this is no different. The cast all seem effortlessly real - testament to Kore-Eda's embrace of improvisation as well as the beauty of his script and understated, disarmingly simple direction. It came out in Japan in 2008 and he's made two films since, which is very good news if they ever get released here...

2. A Prophet (Jacques Audiard) -
Audiard's film is outstanding, a remarkable triumph. Somehow, here, and in his last two films, he has shown that he is capable of the rawest of realism and a you-are-there immediacy, and yet this film has some sublime grace notes, moments of silence and poetry and great beauty. Telling the story of a young man imprisoned at 19 for a minor offence who works his way up through the political criminal power structure inside through cunning and opportunism, it is gripping literally from the first shot to the last, the tension rarely slackening. It possesses all of the requisite qualities of the prison and gangster genres and yet is so much more. It functions as a criticism of French penal law, a riveting crime story with a couple of superb, brilliantly mounted set pieces, and an intriguing and sensitive character study. As such, debutant lead Tahim Raki is excellent. Charismatic, and brooding, he suggests the boiling, always whirling thoughts beneath the placid gaze of his young hero, and his intensity more than matches Nels Arstrup's moody Corsican gang boss. The prison itself is just as powerful and interesting a character in the film as either of these protagonists - vividly evoked by Audiard's roving, intimate handheld camera. Audiard has joined a small band of Directors who have made wholly satisfying genre cinema which is so fine it transcends its genre. A Prophet is that good.

1. Carlos (Olivier Assayas) -
Setting aside the politics, the approach to history, the glamour of the violence and the globetrotting for a moment, I love Assayas as a stylist. As befits a director who admires Michael Mann and Hou Hsiao Hsien and Vincente Minelli, Assayas is a stylist whose ability to infuse his scenes with a sensual charge is vital to the success of his films. The very first minutes of Carlos bear this out; the first shot is of a man rising naked from bed, a woman beside him. He dresses in the gloom and she sits up to smoke. You can smell that room, the chill on their skin, the warm sheets. The man meets a violent fate outside and that event is given weight by the reality of what has preceded it; this sets quite a tone for Assayas' Epic.
The next scene finds the title character arriving in Beirut, and again that city is beautifully, swiftly evoked, a whirl of colour, the back of a taxi drivers head. We are located in this narrative already, we are there with this young, cocky Venezualan who wants to head his own cell of terrorists in Europe. Almost 6 hours stretch before us.
And they are the quickest 6 hours of cinema I have ever experienced. Part of a small but important group of films seemingly influenced by the likes of The Wire (I would suggest that Soderbergh's Che and Fincher's Zodiac are other high-profile examples of this school of cinema) to adopt a sort of Epic Intimate Historical realism, cataloguing events with little authorial viewpoint made overly explicit, allowing the flow of history to develop its own rhythm and meaning, Carlos benefits by its superb, innately fascinating choice of subject matter and its classy pedigree.
The central passage - Carlos' 1975 attack on and seizure of the Vienna OPEC conference - is a riveting, pacy, brilliantly made mini-movie of its own, and it is often the tangents and solos of the material that bring its long stretches to life; Angie's escape from the "Revolution", Nada's fate, and Carlos' acquiring some middle-aged flab and bourgeois certainty in Budapest. But it is Edgar Ramirez's spectacular performance which holds the whole enterprise together. Ramirez portrays a complex man, passionate, intelligent and flawed, aware that sometimes he was shallow and weak but also vain and sensitive to his image. The scene in which Carlos first murders a man - a long, sweaty suspense set-piece - brings out the best in him as we see it all dance in his eyes through his mounting fear and exhilaration. But he and Assayas ensure that Carlos' private life is just as interesting as his "career". His many women and travels, his difficult relationships with various colleagues, all made human and grippingly real in this telling.
We are with his Carlos throughout, maturing from ambitious freedom fighter to symbolic legend and beyond. The rest of the cast match Ramirez all the way, and Assayas' direction is always calm and stylish, assured and flawless in its capture of tone and atmosphere. For such a big undertaking, its a remarkably coherent work, Assayas' use of a superb Post-Punk Soundtrack and his stylish storytelling giving it an easy accessibility surprising in a film with such a complex story containing multitudes of characters and locations.
A good sign; writing about it makes me want to watch it again, right now.

Almost, not quite, interesting but bad, or not good enough:

The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Chodolenko) -
Why has American comedy largely gone down the path it has? I mean the comedies made by Hollywood studios, with big stars and high concepts and a strange mix of leftfield and broad humour. The success of the big comedies of the late 70s and early 80s seems somehow to blame, and the major casualty is the adult comedy. That can be a difficult term, so lets say I mean the type of comedy which takes place against a real setting, in something resembling the real world, with recognisablly human characters at its centre. Woody Allen, to his credit, has been making adult comedies for decades now, as have the Brookses, James L and Albert. Not too many young directors seem to be emulating these men though. Lisa Cholodenko is. Her last film but one, the sublime and underseen Laurel Canyon, had moments of sharp comedy, but was a relationship drama. The Kids Are All Right treads more evenly between comedy and drama.

The Town (Ben Affleck) -
Another mournful Bostonion crime drama from Ben Affleck means another triumph: the Town is that rare Hollywood production; a genuinely classy and grown-up genre film. Affleck knows to hire strong collaborators: a cast including Pete Postelthwaite, John Hamm (whose handsome charisma balances the film, preventing it from becoming a wholesale glorification of the criminality it depicts), Jeremy Renner, Rebecca Hall and Chris Cooper; and photography by Robert Elswit mean that his film is always good to look at. It may at base be a load of old macho rubbish, but the script is solid, the characterisation meaty, plausible, and Affleck handles the action scenes surely so that they provide muscular surges of excitement. Engrossing and serious, the film creeps up on you; I was surprisingly moved by the ending, because without knowing it I had come to care about these characters. A critic (Guy Lodge?) wrote that if Eastwood had directed it, it would have been acclaimed as a masterpiece, and hes right. As it is, this is better than anything Clint's done in a long time...

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich) -
Pixar: Magicians. But: not as smooth in its storytelling as (the virtually faultless) Toy Story 2, for all that it is a tremendously moving experience. How they can engineer films that are so emotional, consistently funny - and funny in all shades, from slapstick to satire, and verbal wit to the broadest of stereotypes - while also delivering a steady rolling wave of incredible and inventive action sequences just about defies belief. We are blessed to live in this Pixar era.

Alamar (Pedro Gonzalez Rubio) -
The closest of all these films to cracking that list of 15, this is a wondrously pure & simple semi-documentary rhapsody of the ocean, the love between a father and a son and the glory of the natural life. Absolutely beautiful, and quietly moving too.

Up In The Air (Jason Reitman) -
The most middlebrow film I've ever seen.

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe) -
Gaspar Noe and his relentless need to rub our noses in it. Hes never seen an aborted fetus in a bloody kidney dish he didn't feel the need to shoot in close up. Or a traumatised teen fellating a japanese salaryman in a fire escape he couldn't observe for a minute or so, or a sex scene he couldn't "improve" with a shot from inside the vagina. In saying that, this film is Pure Cinema, an awesome sensory experience, and has one of the best credit sequences I've ever seen. Noe is worth all of the unavoidable issues his films drag along with them, and this has to be seen, in the biggest, loudest screen available....

Ondine (Neil Jordan) -
Jordan's best in a long long time. Doing what he does best - an adult fairytale with a mystical sense of beauty and poetry mixed with pulp storytelling. Farrell - enjoying a renaissance since he started doing character parts and stopped trying to be a Hollywood lead - as good as he's ever been, Chris Doyle photography, Sigur Ros music and a happy ending. Shouldve been a bigger deal than it was.

Agora (Alejandro Amenabar) -
A cerebral, relevant and cinematic Epic from Alejandro Amenabar, Agora is that rare thing in modern spectacle cinema: a film of ideas. Amenabar examines religious extremism and piles up the parallels with our world while also devoting lots of time to issues of philosohy and astronomy. But his film never stints on its own Epic trappings, and it is a handsome and fascinatingly detailed recreation of Roman Alexandria without recourse to empty CGI showcase. The balance between the rhetoric of the scholarly debates and the violent action of the religious strife that sweeps all away is kept beautifully organic by a filmmaker always true to himself. Rachel Weicz is great in the lead.

The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom) -
Casey Affleck confirms the suspicion aroused by Assassination of Jesse James, Gone Baby Gone and Gerry thats hes the great American actor of his generation. And though Winterbottom gets as close as anyone ever has to a real adaptation of Jim Thompson, he still misses. Good though his film is, it lacks some of the savagery, some of the pain and queasiness of Thompson. Its a little too intent and deliberate in its period set dressing, in its gingham and vintage automobile glory, for Thompson's brute lyricism. But some things are always there with Winterbottom - his fine eye and sense of rhythm, his ability to capture what feels like the real world, Our world, and his way with actors (Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, Simon Warner and Elias Koteas all lend Affleck fine support).

Black Death (Christopher Smith) -
in what would make a great double-bill with Valhalla Rising, Christopher Smith's medievel horror-western-thriller follows a group of knights during the black death in search of witchcraft and necromancy into a town seemingly untouched by the plague. Smith is a bright young UK genre talent and the accomplishment and power of this, his fourth film, really surprised me. It is thrillingly dark, unafraid to cover some weighty thematic ground, and yet founded on strong, clear storytelling redolent of classic Hollywood filmmaking. That the film also refers to Witchfinder General, The Devils, The Wicker Man and even Andrei Rublev - and yet always remains distinctively its own beast - is a testament to Smith's growing skill as a director. Each of his films has been a marked improvement on the last. Here he displays a great eye, finding some arresting imagery in his story, a good ability with his cast, and control over atmosphere which remains taut and eerie throughout. A film which deserved better than it got in the UK.

The Maid (Sebastian Silva) -
A lovely, perfectly observed little story of the maid to a bourgeois family in modern Santiago and her struggles with ageing, loneliness, unwanted competition and semen stains on adolescent bedsheets.

The American (Anton Corbjin) -
I love an existential Hitman movie. Echoes of Leone and Melville abound in Anton Corbjin's piece of designer pulp. Actually, it only gives in to the tug of convention in the last act, when the gunplay begins. Until then its quite spare and atmospheric, a 70s-style portrait of a lonely American enduring a European Winter with the help of a beautiful Italian prostitute. Yes, that is an unbearably cliched idea, but Corbijn's visuals are so lovely, the films pacing so languid and patient in its portrayal of star George Clooney's quiet routine, that it acquires a sort of hypnotic power. Clooney is perhaps the film's greatest flaw, dampening down his own charisma but unable to shake the baggage of his own persona - I kept on expecting him to grin. If I say that this is basically The Limits of Control minus any sense of humour, you will understand that I mean in as a compliment..

Monsters (Gareth Edwards) -
Forget the sci-fi element for a moment. What is most impressive in this low budget British film is director Gareth Edwards' superb eye. The long passages as his characters travel through Central America are illuminated by his ability to pull beautiful tableaux from out of the air. He observes reality, and enhances its beauty with his camera, an exciting talent in a young director. Meanwhile, his script and actors are fine, his high concept sells itself, and that climactic scene with the aliens at the Petrol station is genuinely awesome, and somehow, even moving.

Somewhere (Sofia Coppola) -
I love Sofia Coppola's aesthetic: her poetic realism is delicate, nicely observed and generally perfectly judged. Sure, her films are all studies of birds in gilded cages, but she is plainly intelligent enough to realise this, which is perhaps what helps her prevent them from becoming utterly insufferable. Here her subtle wit and the quiet, clever performances of her leads make this sketch flicker to life then snuff itself out again without leaving much impression beyond her command of atmosphere and visual style, though the ambiguous ending seemed exceptionally bleak to my mind.

Inception (Christopher Nolan) -
The great thing about Chris Nolan is his ambition. Warners give him untold Millions to make them a new blockbuster, and he spends it on a 2.5 hour maddeningly complex and personal action/heist thriller. Rather that than a third Transformers film for most people, I would imagine.
Nolan has the control and skill to enable him to bring his ambitious visions to the screen. Moreover he does it in the context of massive action spectacles, which is an odd but laudable position for a filmmaker to adopt. But it is a problem, too. Because Nolan is not a good director of action. Take, for example, the zero-gravity battle at the heart of Inception, between Joseph Gordon Levitt and a henchman, spinning and flying through the turning Hotel corrdiors. That should be an amazing, unforgettable scene, an action scene stuffed with images and ideas you have never seen before. Only its not, its just ok. The imagery is fine, but the action does not have the impact expected of spectacle at this high level. The later arctic battle becomes tedious within minutes. His Batman films suffer from the same problem, which is surely some sort of crime in a film about a character renowned for his combat acumen. Here, its a minor issue against the many other conversation points presented by the film. But it niggles at me, still.

How To Train Your Dragon (Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders) -
Dreamworks Animation, from the inauspicious beginning of Shrek, has become a Studio producing
absolute top quality Heroic fantasy films for pre-teens. Kung Fu Panda was a joyous entertainment, and this is even better, stuffed with wit, filled with brilliantly conceived and executed action sequences, and peopled with memorable characters. Few of the blockbusters aimed at "adults" in the last year worked as well at delivering thrills and laughs as part of a satisfying narrative. Plus, this - reflecting the role played by Roger Deakins as visual advisor - looks totally beautiful throughout.

Also of Note:

Shutter Island, Solomon Kane, Robin Hood, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Winters Bone, Down Terrace, Restrepo, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Buried, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, Sons of Cuba, Gentlemen Broncos, Four Lions, Lebanon, Splice, Black Dynamite, Police; Adjective, Secret of Kells, Repo Men, Revanche

Films I missed that might have figured in this list:

Certified Copy, Please Give, Our Beloved Month of August, A Single Man, Father of My Children, Scouting Book for Boys, Lourdes, Beeswax, Life During Wartime, 24 City, Vincere, Wild Grass, Gainsbourg, Mother, Cyrus

Keep On (Show) Running

2010-12-01T21:13:00.001Z

If you love Cinema or Movies or Film or whatever you want to call the artform in question, chances are you follow certain creative people. Directors, most likely, since Auteurism passed over from academia in the 50s and entered the subconscious of the mainstream (helped by the fact that Studios had always used certain "name" Directors to sell films, as far back as Griffith and Keaton, through Welles and Ford and DeMille) so that everybody with any basic film literacy knows who Peter Jackson, James Cameron or Quentin Tarantino is. If you're like me - and every other film-lover I know - you keep an eye on the Directors you admire, and make an effort to see their new work. Probably you also follow certain thespians, for this is how the star system functions. You like an actor or actress in one thing, and you'll be willing to see if you like them in anything else, is the thinking. And so you look out for them in trailers, on posters, in reviews. You liked J.J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot? You loved that cocky young man playing Captain Kirk? Well, here he is, with Denzel (you've liked him in loads of things, hes an old, reliable favourite) in a big action movie, playing the good guy! You wanna see that, dontcha?

On the level of the Film Blog, you have to go into more detail. I obviously follow lots of directors and actors and actresses, but I'm also interested in the work of dozens of screenwriters, cinematographers and even composers. If Ennio Morricone or David Holmes has scored a new film I've never heard of, I'm instantly interested. Probably there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who feel exactly the same way. There are even producers whose involvement will make me take notice; Scott Rudin, Art Linson, a few others. This is how I keep up. By tracing careers, following the progress of the individual whose work I find rewarding and/or exciting.

But television is different. Traditionally it has been seen as more of a writer's medium. Directors generally don't own their shows, instead they work as hired guns. In the UK, the work of TV writers like Dennis Potter, Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale have long been the main attraction of their own programmes. The American concept of the "Showrunner" is as close as you can get to an Auteur Theory for television. This is generally the creator of the show who oversees the writing, steers the direction of the show and is involved with decisions on most every level, including casting and direction (Kurt Sutter, who created Sons of Anarchy, gives a great account of just what the job involves here ). Often, this Showrunner will receive none of the recognised relevant credits. He has not directed the episode, nor written it, not edited or shot it. Nevertheless, the episode is more his than anybody elses, for the wider vision - and very often all of the tiniest details too - comes from him. And what does he get? An "Executive Producer" credit.

The rise of HBO to a position where it is widely regarded as producing some of the finest television drama ever made has helped in the recognition of the Showrunner as the creative lynchpin of much TV. For while the likes of Sam Peckinpah (on The Westerner) and Michael Mann (on Miami Vice and Crime Story) basically worked as Showrunners on high-quality, critically acclaimed programmes in other eras before transferring their talents to cinema, before the rise of HBO, many notable American Showrunners worked on more populist, less acclaimed shows. I mean the likes of David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, The Practice, Doogie Howser, M.D), Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick (thirtysomething, Once & Again) and Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, Murder One, L.A. Law). The Sopranos, and to a lesser extent, The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, changed everything. David Chase is seen as the author of The Sopranos, credited as Creator, responsible for writing numerous key episodes and directing a couple, and he gets most of the plaudits for the series' ambition, artfulness and complexity.

Joss Whedon has benefitted similarly from the success of Buffy and trailed that through a string of less successful Series, from Angel through Firefly to Dollhouse. So it seems obvious; in TV, I follow the Showrunners, the Creators. If David Chase ever gets around to making another Series, I'll be there. David Simon has won me for life with The Wire, The Corner and Generation Kill, and I will watch Treme (whenever it gets a UK DVD release) entirely on the promise of his name. David Milch, Alan Ball, Matthew Weiner, Vince Gilligan, Mitchell Hurwitz, Kurt Sutter, Aaron Sorkin; all names associated with exceptional series whose future work will be scrutinised as belonging to their own ouevres.
David Milch, for example, has a new series in production for HBO. Entitled Luck, it would be eagerly anticipated on the basis of its cast (Dustin Hoffman, Joan Allen and Nick Nolte among many others) and director (Michael Mann is directing the pilot), but for legions of Deadwood fans, its a David Milch piece, pure and simple. Mitchell Hurwitz's new show, Running Wilde, has been given a mixed reception due to the high expectations of fans of Arrested Development.

There are several recent US shows waiting to jump the Atlantic I'm looking forward to, and Showrunner issues make each interesting for different reasons. Boardwalk Empire is the most obviously appealing. A HBO-produced period gangster epic with an awesome cast, a massive budget, and Scorsese direction of the pilot seems almost too good to be true. But it has been created by Terence Winter, one of Chase's key writers on The Sopranos. The last Sopranos alumni to launch his own period epic about the making of America? Matthew Weiner with Mad Men. Instant pedigree.
Rubicon is an AMC show, which these days is a recommendation. AMC has given us the aforementioned Mad Men together with Breaking Bad, and here they have backed the creation of Jason Horwitch, whose only previous notable work was a short-lived mid-00s drama, Medical Investigation. Rubicon has proven short-lived too, with AMC cancelling it after the first season, and it is reportedly quiet and slow and baffling and subtle, which sounds great to me, despite mixed reviews and my ignorance of Horwitch's work.
The Walking Dead is also from AMC, Frank Darabont is the Showrunner, its based on a comic I know well and quite like, and I can see it working brilliantly as a Series. Aside from Darabont's obvious cinematic record (The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist, etc), I'm encouraged by the fact that his TV education came at the hands of Shawn Ryan on the Shield. Ryan is a one man Television Drama factory, his proteges and writers creating their own series regularly. The Unit and Sons of Anarchy both originate from within Ryan's stable, and I love both those shows (despite being lukewarm on The Shield itself).

Ryan is executive producer on the show I'm most excited about; Terriers. It is created by Ted Griffin, best known as a screenwriter on Oceans Eleven, Matchstick Men and Best Laid Plans. If those films suggest a taste for Neo-Noir, then the show looks like a vintage slice of Southern Californian dirty noir: all faded urban backdrops (actually San Diego) alcoholic ex-cops, struggling Private Investigators, black humour and one-liners. With a pilot directed by Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow), underused character actors Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James as suitably scruffily mismatched leads, and echoes of such California-Noir classics as The Long Goodbye and Harper evident in the promotional material, it looks like a tonally perfect piece of classy pulp. Almost finished its first Season on FX in the States, its been well-reviewed (75 on metacritic) but not massively successful in the ratings, but I've read too many good things from writers I trust to be put off.

Griffin as Showrunner also encourages me. When Screenwriters create tv shows, the results can be fascinating. Take Graham Yost, who wrote Speed, Broken Arrow and Hard Rain in the 1990s. He seemed a big budget, high concept writer. But then he created Boomtown, the underseen and short-lived cop drama which was always complex and more or less the opposite of Yost's movie work in its effect. His most recent creation is the superb Justified. Or Peter Berg, whose middling work as a director of films has been blown away by the impressive way he developed his best film, Friday Night Lights, into the TV drama of the same name. Or Ben Best and Jody Hill, whose brilliant series Eastbound & Down is on a different level from their mixed work in feature films on the likes of The Foot Fist Way and Observe & Report. Based upon these precedents, I have high hopes for Ted Griffin as a creator of good TV, and for Terriers.

A question all of this prompts is: if I was offered the choice right now between writing and directing a Movie, with all the grandeur and spectacle that implies, and creating and running a TV Series, which would I choose? Which would anybody choose? Cinema has a magic and an aura denied to television, in some ways it seems more important, the statelier artform. But then I think of the reach, the detail, the incredible nuance and variety of shows like The Wire and Mad Men, and I don't know. Series like The Pacific match any film in terms of spectacle and action, anyway. Watch them in a theatre and they would be just as viscerally powerful as most movies. And then they have the time and space to stretch out and investigate characters, to truly address thematic preoccupations, to follow whimsical ideas, to create worlds and populate them with people and have those people grow and develop as they would in life without any false structure forced upon them.
I really can't decide.
Which is probably why people who can do both, do both.

Tony Manero

2010-11-27T19:09:00.000Z

Pablo Larrain, 2008

DP: Sergio Armstrong

Vintage Trailer of the Week 52

2010-11-08T20:42:00.003Z

Alain Delon is 75 today. He was probably the first French actor I was aware of. I knew and loved him as a boy from his
appearance as the villain in Red Sun (Terence Young, 1971), which featured a samurai-gunslinger collision which blew my ten year old mind, but also from the rollicking French gangster film Borsalino (Jacques Deray, 1970), in which he stars alongside Jean-Paul Belmondo. What a treat to discover as I grew up that he had enjoyed a fine career, working with directors like Antonioni, Losey and Visconti. And Jean Pierre Melville, of course.
This is the trailer for one of my favourite films, and one of the greatest genre films ever made, Melville's superb Le Samourai (1967), in which Delon is brilliant. The trailer is entirely in French, but Melville's visuals, they're universal (the image above is from another Delon-Melville collaboration, the only slightly less brilliant Le Cercle Rouge (1970).

Where Did It All Go McConaughey?

2010-11-02T20:24:00.001Z

A George Best story: A Bellboy enters Best's hotel room with breakfast, one morning in the early 70s. He finds George in bed with Mary Stavin, the current Miss World, a bottle of champagne, and piles adding up to thousands of pounds worth of cash Best had won the previous night gambling.
The Bellboy surveys the scene, looks at Best and says, entirely without irony, and with an edge of regret, "Where did it all go wrong, George?"

So, the other night, in one of those occasional mindlessly-channel-hopping-for-an-eternity-if-I-dont-stop-I'll-go-insane moments, I found myself watching Failure to Launch. Its a rom-com starring Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker, with support from the not-quite-as-famous-then Zooey Deschanel and Bradley Cooper.
The premise involves McConaughey's parents hiring Parker to fake a relationship with their slacker son (still living at home in his mid-30s) in order to stimulate some maturity and enable him to move out. Only things get complicated, parker develops feelings for the son, he finds out about the ruse, etc etc, all the way to the inevitable happy ending.

Its not a good film. Setting aside the usual compromises and inane cliches that constitute much of the narrative tissue in any mainstream romantic comedy these days - and this film is stuffed with such moments - for one thing, the tired old plot reversals are interrupted by three instances of funny animal behaviour. Not that its actually amusing, just that it has been inserted into the story for some slapstick quality as opposed to the, in theory, at any rate, more nuanced character comedy of the rest of the film. So McConaughey finds himself attacked by a chipmunk, a dolphin, and a lizard at different points of the film. The lizard scene may just be the film's absolute nadir. McConaughey is rock-climbing with some friends when a lizard, concealed in a crack in a cliff-face, bites his finger, making him fall backwards. Hilarity ensues, but not before we are treated to a close-up of the lizard, either a puppet or CG, sniggering at his own anarchic behavior. Sniggering.

All this made me feel bad for Matthew McConaughey.
Oh, I know, he only has himself to blame.
And it is a waste of what little empathy I have, perhaps, to extend it towards a Millionaire Movie Star, famous for his good looks and relaxed attitude. But I looked at his blandly smiling face and questionable hairstyle, and I remembered how he was when he first emerged.
He was a big deal early on, McConaughey. That may be a part of his problem these days. He was on the cover of Vanity Fair and touted as a sort of saviour, and an old-fashioned American leading man. An actor instead of an Action Hero. Ridiculously handsome, but not a pretty-boy, and always masculine in a very polite, almost courtly, Texan way.
This was based on only a couple of performances, and in retrospect, it feels like McConaughey was promoted too quickly, like he might have benefitted from another few years scrabbling for small roles and adding some age and experience to those golden good looks.

He was first really noticed in Richard Linklater's sublime Dazed & Confused (1993), where his Wooderson is an ageing stoner-lothario, still hanging around highschool kids as he ages :"I get older, they stay the same age", wearing red jeans without quite looking ridiculous, stoned in a zen-like way, sensitive enough to notice a spark in the geeky girl ("I love those red-heads") hanging around with the school intellectuals, nicknamed Woodward & Bernstein. The thing about McConaughey's work then was how natural he seemed. He was entirely at ease and unforced, charismatic and sexy and with a sly wit which made him easy to like. His next notable appearance traded on that old-fashioned quality he possesses.
In John Sayles' Lone Star (1996) he was cast in flashback as a legendary Texan Sherriff named Buddy Deeds, famed for his bravery and having faced down Kris Kristofferson's fearsome, corrupt Lawman, Charlie Wade. McConaughey's good looks and macho poise sell the role early on, and he nicely suggests a hint of cold steel in his golden boy hero which reflects the discoveries and revelations of the modern-day portions of Sayles' film. This was McConaughey as character actor, playing to his strengths but plainly enjoying the work too.

These successes were noticed by Hollywood and he got his big break in Joel Schumacher's abysmal A Time to Kill (1996), perhaps the worst adaptation of any John Grisham novel. He plays Jake Tyler Brigance, the crusading lawyer (is there any other kind in Grisham's world?) working to free a father on trial for murdering the two racists who have raped his 10 year old daughter. McConaughey does as well as can be expected with a character formed entirely of cliches, and even makes his final summation and its insulting climactic race-reversal gambit ("Now imagine shes white!") work. He holds his own with a heavyweight cast (Samuel L Jackson, Sandra Bullock, Kevin Spacey etc) and teh film made lots and lots of money, and suddenly, McConaughey seemed to be a movie star.

Only he wasn't. Nobody went to that film because he was in it. Colin Farrell suffered from a similar over-promotion a few years later. Suddenly thrust into the stratosphere and expected to carry films on their backs, both Farrell and McConaughey were blamed when the films failed. McConaughy started off well, working with Major Directors and taking roles that weren't quite leads. In Robert Zemeckis' Contact (1997) he deferred to the star power of Jodie Foster, and in Spielberg's Amistad (1997) he hid his good looks and again played a lawyer in what was basically a fussy character role. Contact was a hit of sorts, but Amistad disappeared and McConaughey needed a success. He worked with Linklater again on The Newton Boys (1998), a flawed if interesting heist film, and with Ron Howard in EdTV (1999), which was swallowed whole by the thematically similar and entirely superior Truman Show. In retrospect that film marked the first real appearance of the McConaughey rom-com persona; the handsome slacker, the playboy on cruise control.

He tried again. He hadn't really done action yet, and when he did, it seemed an intelligent, unusual action film, Jonathan Mostow's WW2 submarine picture U-571 (2000). But nothing about that film made much of an impression, McConaughey included. By ironing out his own persona in order to play a generic hero type, he sabotaged his own appeal, it seemed. And he knew this, thats evident enough in his see-sawing choices over the next decade as he sought to stretch himself in occasional roles before retreating to more reliable vehicles.

The Wedding Planner (Adam Shankman, 2000) provided the blueprint for those vehicles. Jennifer Lopez was the lead, largely carrying the film, with McConaughey playing the eye candy, bland and handsome, "nice", sexy in a sexless way. As if in penance for that film's success, he played two interesting, meaty parts next, in Frailty (Bill Paxton, 2001) and tattooed and shaven-headed, manically chewing scenery in Reign of Fire (Rob Bowman, 2002).
This was a problem, however. McConaughey's choices were interesting in a way, but they were also uncommercial. He had to make How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (Donald Petrie, 2003) to retain any commercial clout. He went off-reservation again, pleasing himself, I assume, in Matthew Bright's bizarre Tiptoes (2003) before his big chance seemed to come along.

Sahara (Brent Eisner, 2005) was all set up to become McConaughey's very own franchise. Based on one of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt series of novels, it was a mega-budget comedy adventure, full of spectacle and stunts and bad jokes and special effects. And it flopped. Mainly because its a tired and mediocre piece of work, released about a decade too late. McConaughey plays a slight variation on his usual persona, tweaked by the presence of Steve Zahn's comic relief, and its evident that he really isn't right for this sort of role. Whatever it is that makes him interesting, this sort of material just blasts right through it, and all thats left are good looks and empty charm.
So he tried acting next, in Two For the Money (DJ Caruso, 2005), a slick gambling drama, in which he played alongside Al Pacino. He does fine, but again, the film is a middling, overly familiar affair, and his next project was the aforementioned Failure to Launch, a big hit.

Since then he has made another earnest drama - We Are Marshall (McG, 2006) - which flopped, obviously, and seemingly drove him to wholeheartedly embrace comedy. Or perhaps all of those poor choices have just persuaded him to stay away from straight roles entirely? Fools Gold ( Andy Tennant, 2008), Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008), Surfer, Dude (SR Bindler, 2008) and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (Mark Waters, 2009) suggest so. There are a few quirky projects on the horizon, but McConaughey needs the sort of career rejuvenation only a true artist could provide. A John Travolta in Pulp Fiction moment, really. Its all very well patterning your career after Burt Reynolds in the 80s, but at least Reynolds had attained Megastardom before he began appearing in bad romcoms and repetitive action films.
McConaughey could play any role Brad Pitt can - he could easily have played the Pitt role in Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), but his profile and choices make it unlikely he'll ever nab such parts, unless he does something radical.

I've gone this far without mentioning the often hilarious stories that emerge from McConaughey's private life - who else could possibly be arrested for playing the bongos naked? - or his string of famous girlfriends (Sandra Bullock, Penelope Cruz etc), because none of that really interests me. But I see something in him as an actor, or at least as a movie star, and I wish his career was in better shape than it is. I wish he saw in himself what I see in him. And I wish I'd never seen any of him in Failure to Launch.

Blow It Up & Start Again

2010-10-25T21:51:00.001Z

Olivier Assayas' superb Carlos is notable for numerous reasons, some of which I will hopefully tackle when I write about it in my end-of-year list, in which it will most probably feature.
But one of its most obvious strengths is its soundtrack, and that I want to write about now. Assayas has always placed a great deal of importance in his soundtrack choices; from the scores he has commissioned from Sonic Youth and John Cale to the terrific taste he displays in his selections of songs in his films, from the Incredible String Band through Brian Eno and Pere Ubu to Metric.

Instead of going for a contemporaneous collection of era-evocative pop and rock hits, he fills the Carlos soundtrack with post-punk songs, most of them out of step chronologically with the historical scenes they accompany. This suggests that Assayas wants us to pick up on the elements of Carlos' personality - or that of the film itself - captured by the songs in all their angular, jerky appeal.

Post-Punk is musically a far more diverse, complex and interesting sub-genre than Punk itself. Poppier, more intellectual, there is an undeniable chill to some of the music Assayas selects. It is all cold, scratchy guitars and mathematical rhythms, lead vocals in a bored monotone, impenetrable or vaguely Punkish nihilistic lyrics. Much of the film is set in wintry 70s Europe, in cities like the Hague, Paris, Vienna and Budapest, and this music is a perfect fit. He also cuts many songs off before they get going, so that all we hear are a series of extended guitar intros, taut basslines and feedback.
Its a brilliant soundtrack for a brilliant film, but as far as I can tell, no soundtrack album exists. While far from exhaustive, here is a selection of some of the music heard in the film, with some brief commentary:

New Order: Dreams Never End
Assayas uses the phenomenal intro from this, the opening track off the album Movement, twice in the film. Its shifts in tone and texture and those rapidly chopped chords clip along like the movie does; at an unforgiving exhilarating pace. Any film that uses early New Order is alright by me.

Feelies: Loveless Love
The horribly underappreciated the Feelies played a much larger role in the plans Assayas originally made for Carlos. He used several of their songs at key points as he cut the film, but when the band were approached they were reluctant to have their music associated with Terrorism in any way. They were finally convinced to give permission to use songs over scenes without any direct connection to Terrorist acts, and Loveless Love, from their excellent debut record, Crazy Rhythms, is used like the New Order song, for the extraordinary fluidity and power of its stripped down intro. He uses another Feelies song, Forces at Work, from the same record, at another point in the film.

Dead Boys: Sonic Reducer
The closest thing to actual punk on the Soundtrack - and a rare period fit, as characters listen to it on the radio at a key point - is this storming rocker, which soundtracks a moment of violent madness and perfectly captures the spirit of the character involved in all her messy, wild abandon. "I got my death machine, Got my electronic dream/ Sonic Reducer/Aint no loser/Sonic Reducer/Aint No Loser."

A Certain Ratio: All Night Party
I love A Certain Ratio in all their fascinating, difficult, unsung glory. I think Assayas does too, and the use of this herky-jerky, creepily off-key treasure from their (largely unavailable, these days) catalogue only proves that.

Wire: Dot Dash
When the Feelies proved reluctant to participate, Assayas more or less replaced them with their not dissimilar British contemporaries, Wire. There are three Wire songs in Carlos - that I noticed, at any rate. "Ahead" is used for its guitar intro and eerie, calm cool, "Drill" for its frenetic rhythm. And "Dot Dash" plays in its entirety. Its perhaps the band's most commercial song, a catchy, bouncy, fun singalong, which might make it sound wrong for a film about a murderous terrorist/assassin. But Assayas makes it work, somehow.

The Lightning Seeds: Pure
Another odd fit, you might say, but Ian Broudie's lovely slice of pop genius is utilized in a rare scene of domestic harmony and happiness, and in that context, it is a terrific choice.

Davy Graham: Jenra
The tonal changes of the third section of the film, mainly set in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, are reflected in the eclecticism which creeps into the soundtrack choices for that portion of the film. Most of them I did not recognise, but this I did. Davy Graham's hypnotic, Morocco-inspired raga becomes more and more hysterical and intense as it progresses, just as the bloated, paranoid Carlos does.

Cleo from 5 to 7

2010-10-10T21:19:00.000Z

Agnes Varda, 1961

DP: Jean Rabier

Pointless List: Modern Soundtrack Cues

2010-10-06T21:00:00.000Z

Like album tracks, only from movies:

1. Ping Island/Lightning strike Rescue Op - Mark Mothersbaugh from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Mark Mothersbaugh was one of the founding members and lead singer of Devo, the superb new wave band, and since they dissolved he has chiefly made his living scoring television shows. His work is prominent in many high-profile US Childrens shows, such as Rugrats and Clifford the Big Red Dog. That sort of CV - a bizarre mix of arty post-punk and witty but occasionally twee childrens music - might just explain exactly what Wes Anderson saw in him that made him more or less the writer-directors house composer, responsible for scoring Rushmore, the Royal Tenenbaums, and Bottle Rocket as well as The Life Aquatic.
He does seem to understand the Anderson sensibility and the tonal requirements it demands, and his music is always sympathetic. The Life Aquatic is his big chance to let rip, stretching away from Anderson's usual settings and tone as it does in places. Mothersbaugh proves more than up to the task.
This cue is his version of an action theme, scoring the beginnings of Zissou's teams assault on an Island, commando style. As such, it has to work for the action, but remain aware its a Wes Anderson action scene.
It starts off as a tinny electronic warble with a tight, simple little beat behind it: the sort of thing you could create on a rudimentary 1980s keyboard, which is obviously the intention, and makes the joke of the film's joke of the team listening to it in their scuba helmets work even better. That warble becomes a melody, and around the minute mark, some more instruments are introduced as the pace stirs: strings (a cello first), more drums, a flute, what sounds like a harp, before more strings cut in, then rolling bass drums and cymbals and horns and you can suddenly feel the vastness of an entire orchestra in the silences inbetween Mothersbaugh's jagged little melody runs. Its all frantic and exciting, horns and strings in interplay, the tension of the rhythm always driving it along. And yet, as befits any music written specifically for a Wes Anderson film (for he uses pop and rock songs chiefly for emotional effect, and he does it with great skill), it is funny too. So busy and exotic, so musically excited it teeters on the very brink of parody without ever quite committing.

2. Song for Jesse - Nick Cave & Warren Ellis from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Cave and Ellis had provided the score for John Hillcoat's brutal and atmospheric film of Cave's screenplay The Proposition, and its a charged, unusual piece of work, all throbs and groans and mysterious creaking, with a primitive sort of power all of its own.
Andrew Dominik obviously liked what he had heard, however, and their score for his film is more traditional while remaining unusual. It is mostly melancholy, and almost gentle. Cues such as Rather Lovely Thing and Counting the Stars are gossamer light, delicate confections of minor key piano and violin capturing the acutely sombre visual poetry of the film and the slow, agonised tragedy of its narrative. The more violent heart of the film is represented by the whirl of strings in What Happens Next and The Money Train or the crunching guitar in Cowgirl. Its a beautiful score, and Song for Jesse may just be its highlight.
So fragile its barely there, it sounds like a lullaby of delicate chimes and repeated piano chords and brushed bells, and yet it is hypnotic. On first listen it seems all mood, but that childlike melody is insistent, and there is an intensity to it which is haunting: the deliberate picking out of that melody, so hesitant and unsure, the way it whispers along and to an end.
Cave and Ellis are an exciting pair of composers and their next job, a subtle score for Hillcoat's The Road did a tremendous job with difficult material. But this fine score remains their best work.

3. Berlin Foot Chase - John Powell from The Bourne Supremacy
I think its almost impossible to exaggerate how important to the success of the Bourne films - each of which I love as the clever genre filmmaking they are - is the music of John Powell. When I think of Jason Bourne, I hear Powell's music in my head. The score for the first film, The Bourne Identity, is slightly more modern than what follows, all bleeps and beats and electronic ambience. It works tremendously well, and Powell evinced a great talent for scoring an action scene with the ponding cascades of drums mixed with electronic squelches of The Apartment, say. But it seems as if the experience of the first film helped him to perfect his approach, because the score for The Bourne Supremacy is an improvement in every sense. Here Powell cuts back on the modern flourishes and instead emphasises the mournful qualities which are crucial to that first score; so there is a more traditional approach to orchestration, the electronica better integrated into the textural design of the score.
Then there are the strings. This cue is all about Powell's relentless, repetitive strings building and building over his crackling rhythm, as Jason Bourne runs from Berlin Police and the CIA. If it evokes Bernard Herrmann - and I think it does - then Powell is putting that classic influence to good use. As the piece develops the rhythm breaks up and becomes an at-times chaotically fractured storm, and Powell's ambient noises intrude at crucial points. But the strings remain, building and building, jumping in pitch, cutting out, stuttering back to life: the strings are Jason Bourne, his tenacity and refusal to be beaten.

4. 7-29-04 the Day Of - David Holmes from Oceans Twelve
What canny judgement Steven Soderbergh showed when he hired David Holmes to score Oceans Eleven. He had first collaborated with Holmes on Out of Sight, presumably on the basis of Holmes' first two records, both basically "Soundtracks for Imaginary Films" with obvious influences from a host of soundtracks, but also traces of hip hop and r & b. Soderbergh, looking for a hip replacement for a standard orchestral score, employed Holmes to provide the music for his Elmore Leonard adaptation, and he filled Out of Sight with funky basslines and sleazy keyboards and even some quiet storm romance. His choice of pop music for some scenes was similarly inspired, with each cut, from Watermelon Man to the Isley brothers fitting seamlessly into the score. For the Oceans films, he was more confident. Oceans Eleven uses a couple of the strongest pieces from his third solo album, Bow Down to the Exit Sign, and the other songs are cool and funky in a swaggering, very Vegas manner. Oceans Twelve is a subtler, more interesting film, and Holmes took advantage of its European locations to fill the soundtrack with obscure Continental cuts from his colossal record collection, making it a wildly eclectic, thrilling listen. His own contributions are more accomplished and daring, featuring abundant horns and calypso drums. This cue rolls along on what sounds like bongos and hammond organ as the horns blast out a hyperactive melody over and over. Then the whole thing breaks down at the end and races, almost raga-like, towards its own end. That horn melody has been used since in a few trailers, since its musical shorthand for a sort of effortless movie cool, evocative of tequila and sunsets and beautiful people in sharp clothes, a mood which Holmes has proven himself the master of in his soundtrack work..

No Embed code, so here is the link...

5. Future Markets - Jonny Greenwood from There Will Be Blood
Jonny Greenwood is often painted as the mad genius in Radiohead. If you've ever seen the band live, you'll know that he seems almost to encourage such a perception. He spends much of each set huddled and hunched by his amp, fiddling with effects pedals and creating loops and generally acting like he barely knows anybody else is even on the stage. But hes a fabulous guitar player, has co-written some amazing songs, and he seems like a sort of visionary, and so he gets away with it all.
Greenwood's work on There Will Be Blood is startlingly good throughout - it sounds simultaneously like a traditional, almost classically gothic score in the Hermann or even (at times) Tiomkin vein, and at times like some modern, experimental orchestral piece. It is melodramatic and epic, moving and even a little creepy. It always works for the films narrative and themes in that it often sounds like Greenwood is trying to provide a score for the character of Daniel Plainview himself in all his complexity and frightening solitude. This is strange considering that sections of the soundtrack were composed by Greenwood for another film, the arty tone poem-cum-documentary, .
This cue is one of the more deliberate in the film, perhaps a scary reflection of Plainview's stubbom nature. Greenwood introduces some chopping, powerful strings and they thunder along for the first two minutes. When they die away, a warmer cloud of orchestration floats to the end of the piece, never losing its tense undercurrent.

Vintage Trailer of the Week 51

2010-09-30T00:17:00.003Z

Aside from his most famous work - the influential and justifiably acclaimed Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man, my favourite film by the recently-deceased Arthur Penn is Night Moves (1975).
Its a noir following an ex-football player turned PI (Gene Hackman) as he investigates a knotty missing persons case involving fading movie stars and a bunch of Hollywood stuntmen.
Penn will forever be remembered for the way Bonnie and Clyde imported the stylistic risks and innovations employed by the French Nouvelle Vague, and made them work within a defiantly American context, but his work maintained this odd European flavour right up into the 1980s. Night Moves is the best example, its downbeat tone and complex characterisation making for an impressively adult approach to this genre tale.
Writer Alan Sharp (also responsible for a stretch of minor classics such as The Hired Hand, Ulzana's Raid and Rob Roy) provides Hackman with a big, fascinating character to wrestle with, and he carries the whole thing impressively, aided by a very young James Woods and Melanie Griffith. Theres also a score by Michael Small, a bleak finale, and some great one-liners.

ARTHUR PENN 1922-2010

Shuffle: For Real

2010-09-19T21:12:00.001Z

Regular readers (insert mandatory "Hello, you two" type joke here) will know that I do a "Shuffle" piece every so often, all about one song I choose, sort of at random. But the point of an actual iTunes shuffle is the sequence, the juxtaposition of songs from different artists with different styles in different moods. So this is an actual shuffle, taken verbatim as it played, together with a few quick impressions and self-indulgent thoughts:

You and the Clouds Will Still Be Beautiful - XTC (From Wasp Star)
Ah, a good start - Andy Partridge combining a nervy, jerky pop-rock song with a lyric starry-eyed with ardent declarations of love and some nifty wordplay. Its chipper and bouncy the way some XTC is, and horns intrude late on - Partridge just couldn't help himself. Then the coda is different - a drift toward the end. Its all lovely. The record its on is the more traditional "rock" album of the two they released way back in the late 90s. Great title, I think.

Osalobua Rekpama - Sir Victor Uwaifo & His Melody Maestros
Off a Nigeria Special Compilation (the Afro-Beat and Nigerian Blues one) this has horns that sound like mariachi horns, wah wah guitar, a great singalong chorus, and shakes and swings throughout: it is awesome. Put it on anywhere, ever, and somebody would dance.

My Lover- Bert Jansch (from It Don't Bother Me)
It Don't Bother Me is the only Jansch record I own, but its pretty damn good, and this hypnotic raga-style folk-blues may well be the best thing on it. British folk isn't a favourite genre of mine, but this sounds like nothing else.

Washer - Slint (from Spiderland)
Slow brood. Guitars holding back, all the threat in the heavy, slow drums. What is a singer doing here?
The explosion, when it comes, is worthwhile..I got to this album late. Its a pivotal Post-Rock record, but by then I knew the next wave of that sub-genre (Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky etc) pretty well, so its originality and importance had been somewhat watered down. It is still powerful, however, and the songwriting is surprisingly classical in places.

Everybody Have Fun Tonight - Wang Chung
Any song that mentions the singer/band by name is a song for me. Wang Chung do that, turn it into a verb, and in teh chorus, no less. Proving to my mind that "Everybody Wang Chung tonight" is maybe the stupidest/cleverest lyric of the 80s. So it has that going for it. That and wall-loads of synths, which sound like strings. The 80s was full of odd sound combinations, which should be jarring but often work well. Here its hose synths with a sharp bass and spiky, plastic-sounding guitar. Anyway, its catchy and insistent and whenever it comes on I feel happy about it.

Boy With a Problem - Elvis Costello & the Attractions (from Imperial Bedroom)
My favourite Costello album, Imperial Bedroom is full of lush pop-songs and torch ballads, and this is a mixture of the two, with his usual great lyrics: "Came home drunk/Talking in circles/The spirit is willing/But I don't believe in miracles". Sometimes his oft-criticised voice is just perfect on his own songs because he understands his own range and even when to push it, and this is one such case - gentle and soft and flirty. The Attractions are always tight and sharp.

Boston Ball Game, 1967 - Jack Bruce (from Songs for a Tailor)
No surprise that this has such an amazing bassline, considering that Bruce is one of Rock's great bass players, but its the way it just builds and builds, riding that groove to nowhere: great song from a fantastic, and disappointingly little-known album. Cream aren't even all that listened to nowadays, are they? So what chance does Bruce solo have?

Blister In the Sun - Violent Femmes (from Violent Femmes)
You know this, right? Its a classic for a reason. Yet it still thrills, with that shuffle, the solos of the middle eight, the euphoric chorus. As classics should, it stays fresh. It was an every-week fixture at an Indie Club night I regularly attended back in the day and it always filled the dancefloor.

Pandora's Golden Heebie-Jeebies - The Association
Ah, the 60s. Much of the other Association material I own is dull and sickly-sweet as treacle. This is sublime, though. The delicate backing vocal harmonies alone would be enough, but the arrangement (Curt Boettcher?) is beautiful. The lyrics: a load of rubbish.

Mama Soul - Harold Alexander
From a David Holmes DJ compilation, so i must be good, and lo, it is. Pure vibe, a demonic bassline, doesn't linger any longer than necessary. I know nothing about Harold Alexander, though I've got another song of his off another compilation somewhere.

Radio King - Golden Smog (from Down By the Old Mainstream)
Golden Smog are an old-fashioned Super-Group, wherein members of other bands team up and donate the songs that weren't good enough for their day-jobs. Here its sort of an Americana collective, with members of Wilco and the Jayhawks, Soul Asylum and Big Star all together. Jeff Tweedy wrote and sings, so its basically a Wilco song with Gary Louris backng vocals. This is a good thing. Tweedy's songs for the next Golden Smog record, Weird Tales, are among the best he ever wrote, by the way.

Baby Its You - Smith (from Death Proof OST)
Best version of this very great song I've ever heard. Does what so few covers do: makes it sound fresh and exciting.

I Fell Back Alone - World Party (From Goodbye Jumbo)
Desolate, destroyed breakup ballad from Karl Wallinger. What happened to Karl Wallinger? He could write a Beatlesque popsong as well as anyone. Goodbye Jumbo and Bang, the second and third World Party records, are full of them, and enjoyed some chart success. This is beautiful, sparse for the most part - guitar, drums, piano, bass. Synths well up halfway, imitating a string section. But its his delivery of the lyrics that sell it. They sting with truth, with felt experience. The first lines say it all, after a sadly pretty little acoustic guitar figure: "If we walk through each other/As we leave the room/You don't have to tell me/Thats its over/Whoever you were then/I never really knew/And you've got no need to know me now." Altough these lines are worthy of Elvis Costello: "But how can two souls still eat together/When life has lost its taste/ How can we lie together/In bed and face to face/And not see anyone at all?"
Great song.

(You Caught Me) Smilin - Sly & the Family Stone
Effortless, with a chorus for a verse, an instrumental break for a chorus, seemingly improvised harmonies, amazing bass by Larry Graham, and yet it sounds like the smoothest piece of pop-soul imaginable. Sly Stone was a genius. I have this on an old Greatest Hits, which is, song-for-song, one of the best records I own.

Wear Your Seat Belt - Cliff Martinez (from Solaris OST)
One of my favourite modern soundtracks, this. Spooky and atmospheric, its been much-used in advertising and trailers in the years since: it supplies a mood in seconds; dislocation, angst, melancholy. It is lovely. Its what I want to hear walking through the dark streets on the way to the tube in the morning.

Wounded - The Cookies
The Cookies were a girl-group who eventually mutated into the Raelettes. They're probably best known for "Chains", later covered by the Beatles. But this song - which I've got on a Warner Vaults compilation - is two distinct songs stitched together, full of overlapping vocals, with about five hooks, a vaguely psychedelic backing track; and its great.

School - Nirvana (from From The Muddy Banks of the Wishkah)
"Wont you believe it/Just my luck/Wont you believe it/Just my luck/Wont you believe it/Just my luck/No Recess!No Recess! No Recess!/You were at school again/You were at school again/You were at school again/No Recess!No Recess!No Recess!"
...and thats it. But its the pulverising song beneath, squalls of feedback, a ridiculous guitar solo, caveman drums, Cobain screaming it all: this is rock music as primal therapy. My friends and I loved it in our teens - that version was on a 12" b-side, and if anything, it was even louder and rawer than this one. But live versions piss on the version on Bleach, which sounds insipid by comparison.

I Think I'm In Love - Spiritualized (from Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space)
Eight minutes of bliss: a slow fade in, instruments falling into the song around Pierce's numbed drawl until the beat kicks in around 2.33, and then its a rock song, its danceable, its a rhapsody. I've never loved anything Spiritualized have done as much as this album, which is epic and moving, rocking and funky, and often astonishing. Though I've tried, and I like much of Pierce's subsequent output. But this is monumental.

Love Is Strong - The Rolling Stones (from Voodoo Lounge)
Yeah, from Voodoo Lounge, thats right, Voodoo Lounge. Every Stones album has at least one great song on it. Mick & Keef demand that much. This is Voodoo Lounge's great song. Its only good song, actually. Lots of harmonica.

Sacred Heart Hotel - the Stars of Heaven (from Sacred Heart Hotel)
First line: "We conduct our affairs/Like the gentlemen we are". Strummy, americana-esque Irish indie band from the 80s, who were culty in the UK at their peak, and wrote some great songs. I found this album in London, actually, after drawing a complete blank in Dublin.

Hayfever - Trashcan Sinatras (from I've Seen Everthing)
Late 80s/early 90s Scots band habitually compared to the Smiths in their time, but, to my ears, they're far more emotional, and not as musically inventive. This 1993 single is fantastic, however.

Curls - Girls (from Album)
This is a gentle little instrumental, much more mature and measured than much of their debut, which I still don't know fully despite owning it since release.

Theme de Camille - Georges Delerue (from Le Mepris OST)
Just beautiful: a keening wall of strings throughout, rising to a crescendo of sound and emotion then subsiding once again.

Love and Affection - Joan Armatrading (from Love and Affection)
Ah, an 80s FM Radio Classic. I basically learned about music in a few places: My Dad loves music and he played it throughout my childhood. He was (is) into 50s rock & roll and Easy Listening. I watched MTV obsessively from around 1986 onwards, which obviously skews ones tastes in a certain direction. In mine towards hard rock, heavy metal, and ultimately grunge. But parallel to that I was listening to FM radio, classic rock stations and late night DJs who played nothing but 70s and 80s chart stuff, which I loved. So much of my iPod is filled with people like Tom Robinson, Joe Jackson, Scritti Politti and Joan Armatrading I could probably run such a show for a few months with no repeat plays. Anyway, this weird mix of singer-songwriter ballad and soul is awesome, and has a really ugly sax solo in the middle. In a good way.

More News from Nowhere - Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (from Dig! Lazarus! Dig!)
A casual but addictive, insistent low-slung blues beat and Cave just riffing verses over the top, tossing off amazing lyrics in every line ("I spent the next seven years between her legs/a pining for my wife") for seven minutes or so. And its absolutely ace. What a lyricist.

Katy Song - Red House Painters (from Rollercoaster)
One of my favourite songs ever.

Mojo Hannah - Tammi Lynn
Southern Soul funky goodness produced by Jerry Wexler, this has got a great vocal performance from Lynn and a real stomping band. Its on one of Warners excellent Right On! compilations.

Till I Get My Way - The Black Keys (from rubber Factory)
Still my favourite Black Keys song, due to that absolute beast of a riff which basically runs away with the song under its arm.
I love the clattering drums and Auerbach's vocals are always soulful, even when he has to holler to be heard over his own guitar.

Send In the Clowns - Judy Collins (from Judith)
This version of this song is devastating, I think. Perfectly judged production - the strings not too heavy, the piano weaving in and out in the right places. But above all theres Judy Collins, and her incredible voice. She caresses this song, never sells it too hard, allows it to breathe and lets it break our hearts. Beautiful.

Anton's Eye

2010-09-07T22:24:00.001Z

Most of the Directors I love are notable for their visuals.
That may sound obvious, even dumb. But it is strange quite how many film directors get by with a rudimentary grasp of visual storytelling and no distinctive visual style. Even fewer have what could be termed a great, or even good, eye. In the last decade or so the rise of the young director schooled in the world of advertising and the pop video means that your average action blockbuster is a visually bombastic experience. These are young directors with a great grasp of the technical side of filmmaking. They understand lighting and cutting, they use movement within the frame in concert with movement of the camera, they allow CGI to work the magic of which it is plainly capable (but all too rarely responsible). A much-maligned director such as Michael Bay, for example (and he is older and of a different generation, but something of an example and idol for some younger directors) is almost a great visual stylist. He possesses a good eye. He tosses off amazing shots in his films, scatters them like confetti - beautifully lit and composed into some sublime tableaux - but he never allows them to develop a rhythm, he snaps them off before their beauty can even really register or resonate. And so many younger directors, in Hollywood at any rate, drunk on huge budgets and new technologies and raised on MTV and Jerry Bruckheimer, do the same.
What is the point of having a good eye if you don't understand what to do with it?

Anton Corbijn was a photographer before he began directing. A big-name, big-time photographer. Which suggests that he had a pretty decent eye.
Well, not only that, Corbjin had an utterly individual style. High contrast black and white portraits were mainly his thing, stretching back to his early work shooting Joy Division when both he and they were unknown.

It was a natural step for Corbijn to move into pop videos. Always able to form close bonds with his subjects because of his access - he became U2's favourite photographer and shot the covers for The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby - and with the talent of making all of his subjects look darkly glamourous, what was remarkable about this new career was just how personal and identifiable his style remained throughout. He kept the high contrast on occasion, together with the ineffable ability to make his subjects look eternally cool, effortlessly iconic. Naturalism was never a feature of his video work, just as it had rarely been important in his photography. Instead he embraced a highly stylised aesthetic, making for some stunning and unforgettable work.
Always evident was that eye of his.

Nirvana's 1993 "Heart-Shaped Box" was given a visionary video set in a cartoon world of exaggeratedly blue and red skies, crucifixions and sinister crows. Cobain spent much of the song out of focus and frighteningly close to the camera when he and his bandmates weren't miming on what looked like a set from The Wizard of Oz or on death-watch in a hospital room. The look seen in the video would prove extremely influential, and now it instantly dates itself as a product of the early 90s, but it maintains a power through Corbijn's imagery and how well it fits the music, which is, of course, the key to success with any pop promo.

His video for Joy Division's extraordinary "Athmosphere" combines his own photography of the band and Ian Curtis in particular with eerie footage of hooded figures engaged in some act of ritual worship - a funeral is the suggestion -on a desolate beach, to great effect. Its the best connection between his work as a film maker and as a photographer, featuring as it does rudimentary animations of photo-sequences.

Aside from U2 and Joy Division, Corbijn has been most closely associated with Depeche Mode, contributing album covers as well as photography and video direction. His video for "Personal Jesus" cross-pollinates his sensibility with that of a spaghetti Western director, with almost surreal results. The band, in leathers and cowboy hats, wander Almerian locations, all colour and sunshine drained from them. The "Enjoy the Silence" video features Dave Gahan, wearing a crown and cape and carrying a deckchair, strolling across mountainside and cliff-top. The rest of the band feature in shots of them emerging from the blackness of a tunnel-mouth and staring directly at the camera. With these two videos and the rest of his work with them, Corbijn had given Depeche Mode a powerful and unique visual identity which they continue to use - and tweak - today.

As countless young directors have shown, however, the move from pop videos to feature films is a forbidding and difficult one. Perhaps it was to Corbijn's advantage that he is not a "young" director, for his feature debut, Control (2008) is confident, assured and seemingly effortless. A wrenching, intimate biopic of Ian Curtis, its a film with which I have many problems. Narratively, its far too generic and predictable in its adherence to the rock-biopic template which has resulted in some truly awful cinema, from Walk the Line to The Doors and La Bamba. It suffers from having been released in the same decade as Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People (2002), which covers the same ground far more fleetingly but is much more interesting, original and amusing (and represents a brilliant example of what a rock biopic can be in the right hands - Winterbottom's film is a post-modern comedy, an Epic social and cultural history of Manchester and a great piece of rock criticism all at once). But Control works. It understands the dark power of Joy Division and the Curtis myth. It combines rock biopic with something of a kitchen sink drama, all stained wallpaper and cups of tea, and makes that seem a natural fit. Sam Riley is hugely impressive in the lead and the music is given the proper weight within the story. In fact Corbijn summons good performances from his entire cast, suggesting that the charm he wielded on rock stars to get what he wanted works just as well on actors.

But most impressive is how the film looks. Corbijn and his cinematographer Martin Ruhe ensure that every frame is beautiful. The lighting, composition and movement are staggeringly accomplished, and never at the expense of narrative or spatial coherence. This suggests that Corbijn has manifest natural gifts as a visual storyteller. The film also maintains some continuity with his earlier career: it looks, just as many of his pop promos did, like one of his photographs, and that is definitely a very good thing. Indeed, the black and white photography seems to enhance the detail and attention he gives to the film's many competing textures. His eye is superb, finding the beauty in a Rochdale council estate or in a band sweating their way through a set in a provincial club.

Corbijn's new film, The American, is a drama about an assassin, on the run and awaiting his next target, who hides out in a small Italian village and becomes involved with some of the locals. Again shot by Ruhe, the rather second-hand premise is reportedly transcended by the quiet, subtle "European" style of the film. Based on Control and Corbijn's other work, this is eminently plausible. The below trailer, meanwhile, makes it look like The Limits of Control (2009) with a little Antonioni thrown in or Jason Bourne by way of Jacques Audiard. Either of which would be more than fine with me. I would go anyway, because its generally worth seeing the world through Anton's extraordinary eyes.

Pointless List: Keith Carradine

2010-08-27T21:16:00.001Z

Possibly the most underrated actor of his generation. Never a Movie Star or even really anywhere near. The bloke in a Madonna video*, at one point.
I always liked Keith Carradine. But recently, I've arrived at a new respect for him. His body of work in the 1970s and 80s is pretty incredible, and he was obviously a favourite of three Directors I love: Robert Altman, Walter Hill and Alan Rudolph.
So, a list. The best of the best Carradine.

1. Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)

Carradine first appeared in small parts in Westerns, most notably Altman's sublime McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971). There seems a certain synchronicity to this, given that his father, John Carradine, was perhaps best known for his work in that genre, and his half-brother David would become a star on tv in the martial arts Western hybrid Kung Fu. He appeared in Robert Aldrich's excellent but unsung Emperor of the North Pole (1973) and Altman used him again in Thieves Like Us (1974), but he only truly established himself with his role in Nashville. The character of Tom Frank seemed a perfect fit for Carradine to such an extent that he would struggle to break away from the expectations it laid upon him. Frank is a country-folk singer-songwriter, part of a trio called Bill, Mary & Tom. Only Tom - obviously the talent in the band, and more than aware of it - wants to go solo. Tom is also a womanizer and a bit of a self-loathing cad. He is sleeping with Mary behind Bill's back, and comes onto other women over the course of the film. His success is unsurprising; back then Carradine was whip-thin and dashing, with a flinty charisma that the camera picked up without him having to say anything. He seemed destined to be a far bigger star than he ever was. Tom Frank benefits from Carradine's persona, and the actor (and his director) complicates it, making Tom rude and arrogant, obviously made truculent by the emptiness his womanizing leads to. His dedicated, ruthless pursuit of Lily Tomlin's character is a great example of Altman's easy humanism, for she seems a lovely person, selfless, open and generous and yet she falls for Tom's determined attempts to woo her, which seem almost sincere at times. People do baffling, silly things in Nashville, as in life.
Carradine's standout moment is the scene in the folk club where he takes to the stage and serenades Tomlin with an acoustic love-song entitled "I'm Easy". Altman also excels here, since the club is packed and there are three other women in the audience who believe (at least at first) that the song is aimed at them, yet his camera moves and cuts unobtrusively as their feelings shift and they come to realise that the singer is singing to the silent, lone woman at the back of the room. By its last verse, the scene plays like a two-hander between Carradine's golden boy intensity as he sells the song and himself to this woman, and Tomlin's understated - and quite devastating - control. In that last shot she looks set to burst into tears and race at him and tear his clothes off.
Carradine wrote "I'm Easy" and it won the Oscar for Best Song in that year. This is that club scene in its entirety:

Nashville changed the way Carradine was seen. Romantic parts suddenly were open to him. Whereas before his lanky frame had seen him cast as slight oddballs and bit-part villains, now his sex appeal was the reason for using him. The film also gave him recognition as a musician and he made records on the back of the success of "I'm Easy". Just a year later, he would deal with similar territory in Alan Rudolph's Welcome To L.A. (1976), starring as another womanizing songwriter, Carroll Barber. Rudolph had been Altman's assistant Director, and Altman produced this film, which took an artier approach to storytelling than his own work. Carradine pushes this character even further: ruined by a distant relationship with his millionaire father, he is a near-blank, possibly unable to feel anything real, clinging to women for comfort in a world which doesn't interest him.

2. The Duellists (Ridley Scott, 1977)

Its interesting how a Director as iconoclastic as Stanley Kubrick has influenced other filmmakers over the years. Sometimes obliquely, sometimes plainly. The Duellists plays like Ridley Scott saw Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (1975), fell in love, and decided he had to do his own version (this year's Robin Hood reminded me of Scott's taste for Barry Lyndon when it used "Women of Ireland", which is the love theme in the Kubrick, in a similar manner). Scott has admitted the influence of Barry Lyndon, and In recent years, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006) suffered from a similar adoration of what is for me Kubrick's greatest film. But Scott's debut is interesting on its own terms.
A visually magnificent adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story, The Duellists follows the long emnity between two Soldiers in Napoleonic France. A misunderstanding leads to an argument which leads to a duel, which is unresolved. The soldiers - Hussar Officers both - are played by Carradine and Harvey Keitel, a great contrast physically and in terms of onscreen presence. The feud develops into an obsession over the years - particularly for Keitel's character, who seems more alive, more vital and involved whenever he catches sight of Carradine and realises that their battle can be joined once more - as their careers progress and they rise through the ranks of the French military, from Lieutenants to Generals. As such, the film is an Epic, maintaining its tight focus on the lives of these two men against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, including the bloody, awful retreat from Moscow in Winter.
Carradine's qualities might seem wholly contemporary, or at least entirely American, but Scott has identified that his dashing, romantic air, together with a certain stoned calm, could work when contrasted with Keitel's busy aggression, and their animal dislike is beautifully played by both actors. The duelling scenes are varied and thrilling - particularly the exhausting sabre fight in the barn - and Carradine is more than a match for Keitel as his character is torn between honour, fear and the need to be left alone to get on with his life. His final decision is given just the right amount of melancholy weight by the actor.
Indeed, he transmits the aging of his character with subtlety and empathy throughout, his initial cocksure callousness hardening with sadness into maturity and contentment.
Much as I like some of his recent work, latter-day Ridley Scott could never direct a film as finely tuned and understated as The Duellists, which is a real shame.

3.Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981)

Hill made Southern Comfort right in the middle of the golden period of his career which also encompassed The Warriors, The Driver, 48 Hours, and The Long Riders. His style was well established by 1981. He made lean, taut action thrillers which were boldly visual yet stripped down. His heroes were old-fashioned romantic existential loners. His action scenes were the best of the era.
Southern Comfort follows a platoon of US Reservist National Guardsmen on exercises in the Louisiana Bayou who stupidly antagonize some cajun hunters and then find themselves hunted down and killed one by one in classic Lost Patrol style.
The platoon are the usual assortment of idiots, cowards and assholes from a variety of backgrounds. Only Carradine and Powers Boothe are really given likable, vaguely three dimensional characters. Hill sees the Alpha Male in Carradine - the rangy, good-looking magnetism, the cool and self-possession. In The Long Riders he is the lothario of the James-Younger gang; charming and a smooth talker, but with no hesitation when violence is necessary. Here he is the droll survivor, ice to Boothe's slow-burn seethe, altough both sink into a sort of desperation near the film's climax. But they are a well-cast odd couple: Boothe dark and perpeually glowering, born to play villains (as indeed he would for Hill in Extreme Prejudice a few years later), Carradine fair-haired and relaxed.
Their ordeal tests both men's responses and as his cool melts, Carradine reveals a perhaps surprising facility with action.
He never really followed that facility, and instead the course of his career would the pattern he established with his next two projects. First, he took a starring role in "Chiefs", a television mini-series about Cops, alongside Charlton Heston. Then he reunited with his Greetings From L.A. director, Alan Rudolph, who would sporadically cast him in projects for the next decade or so.

4.The Moderns (Alan Rudolph, 1988)

Rudolph's The Moderns is, like much of his work, an odd film, utterly out of place in 80s Hollywood. Largely concerned with the period romance at its heart, it is also a dark comedy and a meditation on art and what it means to be an artist. Set in 1920s expatriate Paris, it follows Carradine's struggling artist once he becomes involved with a woman he knew in his younger days. Unfortunately for him, she is the wife of a wealthy and dangerous businessman who doesn't handle jealousy too well. Famous faces make up the supporting characters: the likes of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas feature. The Hemingway appearance (hes played nicely by a sweaty, intense Kevin J O'Connor, and is prone to making serious statements of personal truth: "Its easy to be hard-boiled in the daytime. But at night..." ) seems like a sort of tip that Carradine's Tom Hart is basically a Hemingway hero. Tall, handsome, flip yet passionate. he even solves some of his problems with his fists, likes a drink or ten, is serious about his art, and weak with women.
Carradine plays him by accessing all that easy charisma, then repressing it, for his Hart is uncomfortable in crowds, a watcher and observer rather than a doer until his hand is forced. He spends much of the film frowning, churning up the inner angst brought about by the reappearance of the love of his life, played by a luminous Linda Fiorentino.
The film is an uncomfortable mix between accessible crowd-pleaser, with its romance, its fight scene, its happy ending, and an art film, full of strange cutaways and oblique characterisation.
Carradine has enjoyed perhaps his most rewarding relationship with any director with Rudolph. As well as Welcome to LA and The Moderns, there is Choose Me (1984), in which he plays another ladies man, and Trouble In Mind (1985), a fascinating, culty cartoon neo-noir with a palette worthy of Streets of Fire in which he sports this hairstyle:

In some ways, Carradine seems the ideal leading man for Rudolph; obviously, proudly American, yet possessed of a complexity, melancholy and poetry that could almost be European. Masculine but quirky and interesting. Romantic in a subtle way. Walter Hill picked up on these elements to his persona, as well.

5.Deadwood (2004)

In Hill's 1995 Wild Bill, wherein Jeff Bridges proves to be a grumpy, complex Hickock, Carradine makes a fleeting appearance as Buffalo Bill Cody. The long hair, whiskers and tassles suited him well, and it seems Hill noticed that too, for it was Carradine who played Hickock himself in David Milch's Deadwood, the first episode of which he directed.
Carradine had aged well. That hungry youthful air had become a tired, worn wisdom. He could play men of experience, men who had seen the world and understood some of its many secrets. But he was still handsome, still lean and athletic. His Wild Bill is tired and ailing, but still dangerous, a man not to be roused to anger or trifled with. His violent history is writ in his face and eyes, in the weary way he approaches people and situations. His famed foul-mouthed monologue to the man who will eventually murder him across a poker table is relished by Carradine, who delivers it with a flat-eyed fury that is positively chilling.
And yet that melancholy is always there, a key note in his repertoire, deepening his performance as it had done throughout his career.
His part in Deadwood was short-lived, but it did lead to other television work, most notably in Dexter and Damages, and he nabs the odd role in a Hollywood movie still, Jon Favreau's upcoming Cowboys & Aliens an example, one which presumably hopes to utilise his ease in the Western genre.

* "Material Girl"

Down Underbelly

2010-08-06T21:32:00.002Z

I never saw any of Underbelly (2008), the Australian Crime drama Series from a few years back. But chances are I would have liked it. I'm well disposed towards the strange little sub-genre its a part of; the Australian Underworld film. The two most prominent examples of which jump straight to mind, each of them impressive and memorable: Rowan Woods' The Boys (1998) and Andrew Dominik's Chopper (2000). While Chopper is something of a genre of its own, The Boys is a more generic-seeming family drama with crime as the setting, machismo thickening the air in every scene, and ultra-violence as a sort of punctuation. But its brilliantly acted, terrifyingly tense, and it maintains an acute sense of place, together with a distinctively downbeat tone, throughout.

Due to its great trailer, a gushing reception at various film Festivals, and the impressive reviews from its American release, a film that has recently crept up on my anticipation-meter is another Australian crime film; David Michod's Animal Kingdom. It even sounds somewhat similar to The Boys
in its plot, and the charged downbeat tone of this terrific trailer only underlines that similarity:

But what really makes Animal Kingdom look worthwhile from this distance is Michod's track record. He is one of the filmmakers responsible for Blue-Tongue Films, an Australian production company made up of like-minded artists who contribute heavily to each other's work. Probably the most famous member of this crew is actor Joel Edgerton, who appears in Animal Kingdom and is best-known Internationally as Owen Lars in the Star Wars prequels. Edgerton also co-wrote and produced a neo-noir in 2008, The Square, directed by his brother Nash. One of Nash Edgerton's previous films was the short Spider, co-written by one David Michod. Michod's work in short film has been ambitious and exceptionally accomplished, and it is what makes me excited about Animal Kingdom. Take Crossbow, made in 2007, the same year as Spider, and a poetic, beautiful and disturbing mood piece, full of great imagery and suffused with unease throughout:

Or Netherland Dwarf, an unexpectedly moving little tragedy, finely observed and with pitch perfect acting and directing choices by Michod :

Animal Kingdom as yet has no UK release date and it doesn't seem to be available on DVD in any territory at present, so I can't get my greasy little mitts on it quite yet. But it looks worth the wait.

Vintage Trailer of the Week 50

2010-07-24T23:27:00.003Z

In a way, Sleep With Me (Rory Kelly, 1994), is the most 1990s film ever made. Just look at the cast. Front and centre is Craig Sheffer, a man who looked like he might be a contender in 1990 and 1991, when he made Nightbreed and A River Runs Through It. Turns out he wasn't a contender, and he's a fixture on sundry tv shows these days (One Tree Hill the most notable and regular). He had an odd, vaguely constipated presence, like he was trying reeeally hard to remember his lines, and it carried him few a few years worth of movies before his luck ran out around the turn of the Century.

The other leads are just as wedded to that decade: Eric Stoltz may have arrived in the 1980s with Mask and Some Kind of Wonderful, but he peaked between 1993 and 1995 with a run including era-defining indies like Pulp Fiction and Killing Zoe mixed with studio productions like Little Women and Rob Roy. There is something about him indelibly associated with that period, perhaps that whimsical stoner delivery he is so adept at, and he too is now a fixture on tv with Caprica.
Meg Tilly is an actress who never fulfilled her potential. Lovely, talented, perhaps too careful in her choice of projects - meaning that she worked too rarely - she is now retired from acting and writes, instead. Sleep With Me was her last film. Perhaps she found the 90s unpleasant by comparison to the 1980s, a decade in which she was Oscar-nominated.

As if that trio are not enough, this film is probably best known for Quentin Tarantino's "Top Gun" monolgue, delivered in that familiar machine gun manner to Todd Field (also now a celebrated Director, of both In the Bedroom and Little Children) in a corner at a party. Tarantino changes the ending of Top Gun to suit his thesis, but its still a hilarious riff, and at that time, with Tarantino riding high on the back of Pulp Fiction and its enormous critical and commercial success, his presence served as a welcome calling card for the movie. Then there are another pair of 90s icons, Parker Poesy and Joey-Lauren Adams, in smaller parts, Pere Ubu on the soundtrack, and the lo-fi, DIY ethos of 90sUS Independent cinema screamingly obvious in every shot and cut.
The film itself is an oddity - each of its six main passages written by a different screenwriter, making it an elliptical and tonally eclectic portrait of an eternal triangle. Some scenes work brilliantly, some not at all, as it flits between comedy and drama, becomes an elegy, then a sort of rom-com, then a social satire. Watching this trailer, however, makes the 1990s feel like a very long time ago...

Shuffle : Hearts and Bones

2010-07-19T21:54:00.010Z

Paul Simon has never been hip. Will never be hip. Paul Simon and hip just aren’t meant to be.
He isn’t hip now, as an establishment relic of the 1960s and the 1980s who releases the odd, little-heard record to a muted response and plays on tours to ageing fans. He wasn’t hip in the 80s, despite the approval of MTV, when he was seen by some as piggy-backing on African musicians to massive commercial success with his Graceland album. He wasn’t even hip in the 60s, when he and Art Garfunkel were the safe folk duo you could bring home to your mother, all angelic ballads, smooth, catchy melodies and soulful gazes on album covers.
Never hip, then.
But what a songwriter.

I will contend that Simon has written as many stone cold Classic pop songs as any American songwriter of his gilded generation. More than most, even. His Simon & Garfunkel legacy is a bewilderingly brilliant body of work, from the haunting, lovely folk of their early work to the often Epic folk-rock of the last two records.
The early material – easily available on one of the many Best Ofs and compilations the duo have generated over the years – is best known for songs like “The Sound of Silence”, “I Am a Rock” and “Scarborough Fair”. But there is also Simon as morose balladeer, as on “For Emily, Wherever I may find Her”, a rapturous dream of love lost and sought anew with Garfunkel stretched to the very outer limits of his range on the last lines, and “Homeward Bound”, his lovely, elegiac tale of loneliness and anticipation on the road in England. Both these songs, alongside “Kathy’s Song” are best appreciated in live versions. The early albums are somewhat ill-served by their production, as if Simon had not quite discovered how best to treat his music when given a full band and a studio to play with. But just him, Garfunkel and a guitar on stage show the beauty and simplicity of his writing at that point, and some of this music is breathtaking. By the time they came to make their later albums, Simon had firmer ideas about how to use these new tools, and he implemented them. Those last two records are both brilliant. Bookends, a sort-of concept album, is ambitious and eclectic and all founded on Simon’s gift for melody and ear for an evocative, casually poetic lyric.

Its highpoints are among the greatest forgotten songs of the 60s: “America”, a sad and epic romantic road-movie in three and a half minutes that culminates in a couple of verses, which go from conversational and inescapably real to devastating and puzzled, then expand to an almost universal concern:
“Toss me a cigarette/I think there’s one in my raincoat/We smoked the last one an hour ago/So I looked at the scenery/she read her magazine/And the moon rose over an open field./ Cathy I’m lost, I said/Though I knew she was sleeping/I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why/ Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike/ They’ve all come to look for America/All come to look for America.”
Musically, this song begins as a gentle folk stroll founded on guitar, a fluid bassline, what sounds like a Hammond organ and some drums that suggest nothing so much as the Beatles’ incomparable “A Day In the Life”. It expands as it progresses, however, with some jazzy horn during the second verse, and a fuller sound as the song reaches its climax. The extraordinary power and purity of Art Garfunkel’s voice is subtly deployed throughout, only really registering during the final lines. Then there is “A Hazy Shade of Winter”, most famously covered by The Bangles, who made it softer and lighter than the driving rocker Simon founded on a fantastic riff and a dark, ominous lyric which seems to foresee the death of the 60s. And “At the Zoo”, a silly, unexpectedly funky piece of psychedelia by way of Charles Burns. And “Mrs Robinson”, not a bad song in its own right.

Bridge Over Troubled Water contains the title track, one of those songs which has somehow transcended itself, despite the singular majesty of Garfunkel’s performance on it, and also the epic shaggy dog tale, “The Boxer” with its insistent, singalong chorus, and the joyous “Cecilia”, a stomping love song unlike anything else they had done.
Then there is the ghostly melancholy of “The Only Living Boy In New York”, where Simon’s slow sad smile of a melody and the vague existential crises of his lyrics bespeak a sort of cultural ennui: “I get the news I need on a weather report/ I can gather all the news I need on the weather report/ Hey, I‘ve got nothing to do all day but smile” “Half of the time we’re gone/But we don’t know where/And we don’t know where”.
Garfunkel is so seldom used on much of the record a split was inevitable, and when it came Simon continued with the high quality songs. His Paul Simon record contained both the cod-reggae of “Mother & Child Reunion” and the latino folk-pop of “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard”, alongside the darker “Paranoia Blues”.

Through the 1970s he grew less vital, tossing out a couple of great songs per album, his sound becoming more middle of the road and less assured with each release. Even so, there are a few classics from this decade: “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” and “Still Crazy After All These Years” (both from Still Crazy After All These Years) and “Something So Right” from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon.
He lost his way in the early 80s, when he wrote and starred in One Trick Pony (Robert M Young, 1980), a seemingly semi-autobiographical film about a washed-up folk rock star struggling with his label, his ex-wife and son. Simon, as his brief appearance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall had suggested, is no actor, and the film flopped. The accompanying album was also a disappointment.

Simon would surge back to critical and commercial success in 1986 with the release of Graceland, a sort of tour through World Music, which exposed Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Okyrerema Asante to an International audience and included a controversial collaboration with Los Lobos (who accused Simon of stealing one of their songs) alongside some roots American styles. All of it at the service of some of Simon’s best writing, from the nagging, disposable soul-pop of “You Can Call Me Al” to the state-of-the-world snapshots of “Boy In the Bubble” (“These are the days of miracles and wonder/This is a long distance call/The way the camera follows us in slo mo/The way we look to us all”). Then there is “Graceland” itself, which Simon has called the best song he has written, and is another personal tour of American culture which yokes the intimate together with the universal in the manner of much of his best music and does contain some of the greatest lines he ever wrote: “The Mississippi delta was shining like a national guitar”, “She comes back to tell me shes gone/As if I didn’t know that/ As if I didn’t know my own bed/As if I’d never noticed/The way she brushes her hair from her forehead”.

But my choice for the greatest song Paul Simon ever wrote is “Hearts and Bones” from the 1983 album of the same name. That record was originally conceived as a Simon & Garfunkel collaboration on the back of a successful reunion tour. But the duo had problems in the studio and when the project was scrapped, Simon transformed the sessions into a solo record. This suited the autobiographical nature of the songs, which dealt with his divorce from his first wife and his recent relationship with Carrie Fisher. The title track is one of Simon's most muted productions, but it is also perfectly judged and arranged.
Delicate guitar in Simon's trademark finger-picked style - always casual, hiding its virtuosity - picks out a melody over what sounds like bongos, the occasional quiet bleed of organ and humming. The melody is sad and beautiful, the arrangement haunting and elegiac, and Simon's lyric is poetic in his singular way: he makes a love song based on his own experiences a more general and universal enquiry into the condition of love, with moving results.

The general assumption is that the song is entirely about his relationship with Fisher. But since the song chronicles "the arc of a love affair", including its demise, and it was written in 1982 (Simon and Fisher married in 1983), it seems likely that he fictionalised a relationship with some aspects of several actual affairs, which may serve to give the song some of its final universality. The early verses certainly refer to Fisher, and are founded on some breathtakingly evocative imagery:
"One and one-half wandering Jews/Free to wander wherever they choose/Are travelling together/In the Sangre de Cristo/The Blood of Christ Mountains/Of New Mexico/On the last leg of the journey/They started a long time ago/The arc of a love affair/Rainbows in the high desert air/Mountain passes slipping into stones/Hearts and bones."
This is Simon returning to the travelogue mode that had served him so well on "America" (and which he would re-use for "Graceland"). His ease with a vivid phrase is evident in the picture he paints of landscape in a few lines, and he sketches the couple in more telling detail in the next verse:
"Thinking back to the season before/Looking back through the cracks in the door/Two people were married/The act was outrageous/The bride was contagious/She burned like a bride/These events may have had some effect/On the man with the girl by his side/The arc of a love affair/His hands rolling down her hair/Love like lightning shaking till it moans/Hearts and bones."

Simon is, as much as anything else, a great storyteller. But its one thing to tell a story in a song, and another thing to make anyone care. The crux of the song comes in the middle eight, where a tiff becomes something deeper in a matter of lines and the girl asks "And tell me why/Why won't you love me/For who I am/Where I am?"
And here Simon lets all of the arrangement drop away save for a single soft repeated guitar chord and the barest hiss of keyboard, as if to underline the centrality of the next lines, where his voice is lent a quiet echo in the mix, emphasising the finality of the sentiment: "He said/'Cause that's not the way the world is baby/This is how I love you, baby/This is how I love you, baby."

This seems a devastating and bleak view of love, as always conditional, always somehow compromised. And yet this is a song written by a jaded, divorced man of the world and it is refreshing to hear such honesty. Love is complex, Simon is saying, and not always enough. The final verse confirms that the couple has split to "speculate who had been damaged the most" on their "natural coasts". And then Simon widens his gaze to comment on love itself, and on its binding power. His couple love one another with a passion like "lightning", yes, but that is not enough to keep them together, altough there is some measure of ambiguity in his last lines. Does he believe that their love survives, or just that they have been marked by it, and will always be a part of one another? "You take two bodies and you twirl them into one/Their hearts and their bones/And they won't come undone/Hearts and bones." The fact that this passage is the most upbeat in the song and that Simon's vocal is at its most passionate here gives it an optimistic tone, even if the lyric does not wholly support that.
But then there is something optimistic about the beauty of the song itself, its sympathy and warmth, the loveliness of the melody. This is one of Simon's greatest gifts as a writer; even at his bleakest he seems somehow hopeful. It may even be key to his popular success.

As for hipness, he has come as close as he ever will in the last decade with some retrospective hipster approval for his extensive back catalogue. Wes Anderson used "Me & Julio Down By the Schoolyard" in The Royal Tenenbaums while Zach Braff put "The Only Living Boy In New York" in Garden State alongside The Shins and Frou Frou. Meanwhile, Simon's songs have been covered by Grizzly Bear, Hot Chip, Conor Oberst and the Kings of Convenience over the last few years. Still, nobody seems to recognise the sublime brilliance of "Hearts and Bones", and it remains one of the least loved records he released.
Carrie Fisher? She and Simon divorced in July 1984, dated again for a while after that, then split. They had been together on and off since 1977. Shes more famous for some movies shes in.

"Things Got Broken"

2010-07-07T20:15:00.001Z

I like John Hillcoat's feature work very much. The Road is one of the most impressive films released over the last twelve months, but his filmography is strikingly consistent - both The Proposition and Ghosts...Of the Civil Dead are violent, dark and muscular with a streak of black humour laced through them. He seems an individual, distinctive filmmaker with his own voice, visual style and thematic preoccupations. Which is why his work for Levis on a new advertising campaign is somewhat disappointing. Not that the spot is anything less than fantastic; its not. Its beautiful, finely edited, evocative and even moving in an understated way. But there is little of Hillcoat in it, as far as I can see. Instead, it feels like a blatant attempt to co-opt the spirit and style of Terrence Malick to a Levis commercial. So we have a young girls soft narration over wispy, langorous, stunning footage, some of it near-abstract (Days of Heaven, The New World). Her narration is epic, a little philosophical, questioning and almost biblical in its seriousness and mythic weight (The New World, The Thin Red Line). Wagner's Das Rheingold rises inexorably to a rapturous peak as the spot advances (The New World). Some of the images recall classic Americana (Badlands).

In fact, what much of the (admittedly sublime) imagery reminds me of is David Gordon Green's George Washington, a film produced by Malick and very much in the Malick style. It makes me wonder why Hillcoat couldn't have transformed his recent Red Dead Redemption short film into a Malick tribute. I\d watch that..Somebody should sue...

The rest of the "Go Forth" Levis adverts are similarly high in quality and visual beauty. They both utilise Walt Whitman's poetry to great effect, and push their brand in a relatively low-key fashion. The first is directed by Cary Fukunaga:

And the second by M Blash:

Antonio Das Mortes

2010-07-02T20:24:00.001Z

Glauber Rocha, 1969

DP: Affonso Beato

Tackling the Twelve: The War Lord

2010-06-27T13:58:00.001Z

The release on UK DVD last week of The War Lord (Franklin Schaffner, 1965) finally gave me the opportunity to see another in my list of Twelve.
Schaeffner's film comes from the last wave of Hollywood Epics in the mid-60s, before New Hollywood emerged and cinema began to reflect the culture of the decade. It follows Chrysagon (Charlton Heston), a Norman Knight who is charged with taking over a Castle in the marshlands of Normandy to serve the interests of his master, an unseen Duke. The area around the Tower is frequently attacked by Frisian raiders who arrive Viking-style from the sea. The leader of these Frisians was responsible for the death of Chrysagon's father, also a legendarily heroic Knight. As well as this, Chrysagon has to contend with the malign influence of his devious, sarcastic, jealous brother Draco (Guy Stockwell) and maintain good relations with the Druidic, pagan locals, who have their own agenda.

The War Lord is the first film where Schaffner displayed a talent for handling an Epic scale in his work. Afterwards, he would go on to direct some massively scaled films - Patton (1970), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) and Lionheart (1987) spring to mind - but the feel of Epic storytelling, a certain grandeur in his staging and shooting style, is evident even in "smaller" films, like Planet of the Apes (1968) and Papillon (1973). As this list indicates, in his time Schaffner was a major commercial director who made Big, Serious, Important, somewhat stodgy films. But he always had a good eye and confidently handled his large canvas storytelling. In the mid-60s when he made The War Lord, he was coming off the success of the political drama The Best Man (1964), which had been based on Gore Vidal's play. So it must have seemed a good fit to entrust him with another theatrical adaptation - The War Lord is based on Leslie Stevens' The Lovers. As it happens, the theatrical origins of the film lend it a schizophrenic quality: it is full of intense scenes of dialogue bearing much of the thematic load, mostly set within the Tower where all of the films big male egos bump up against one another. But it is also a battle Epic, and the last reel is focused almost entirely upon the siege of the tower by the Frisians, while there is a big set-piece battle inside the film's first fifteen minutes. Schaffner is great at action and these scenes are muscular, coherent and exciting.

The more theatrical elements are weaker, though they are fascinating. The story is concerned with religion and politics - oddly contemporary territory - as the Christian Normans find themselves flummoxed by and disdainful of the "pagan" locals, who follow Druids and seem to live by vaguely New Age principles involving worship of nature. The actual plot complicates this, as Heston's Chrystagon is exhausted by his years of War and a little sickened by what he has seen of the World to the extent that he seems unmoved by either religion. He then falls in love with a local girl, Bronwyn (Rosemary Forsyth) and his consequent meddling in local affairs leads inevitably to trouble.

Heston, so good in the action scenes, is probably the film's big weak point. The theatrical nature of much of the film doesn't suit him, however. In his other big Epics, Anthony Mann's magnificent El Cid (1961) and Ben Hur (William Wyler, 1959), the drama is heightened and more operatic, his character outsized, his speeches better suited to his hammy, somewhat fevered delivery. Here, everything is decidedly more intimate and more of an attempt is made at emotional realism. He doesn't have the skill as an actor to express Chrystagon's inner conflict, which should be the crux of the films emotional scheme. He grimaces and sweats and frowns, but he is inescapably wooden and seems as far from real emotion as anyone in the film. He is best in the early scenes where Chrystagon is tired and grumpy, something Schaffner seems to have picked up on, for he again utilizes that (arrogant, superior) Heston in Planet of the Apes, particularly in the long early monologue Heston has onboard the ship.

One of the most troubling aspects of his performance is his inability to express desire. The film is concerned, at least partly, with sex. Chrysagon is sexually frustrated - he admits it has been too long since he "embraced" a woman - after years of warfare, and he instantly wants Bronwyn when he first encounters her naked in a river. But he is awkward and clumsy with her, especially when she reveals her virginity to him. The problem is that when Heston gazes at her, he just looks angry. The suggestion may be that he is contemplating rape - his men certainly expect him to take what he needs from the girl, with or without her consent - but for me, it looks like Heston is simply incapable of the nuance required to show how he really feels. He glares huffily at her and she looks frankly terrified. Forsyth is beautiful but her character is barely existent, and when the pair do fall in love, it seems sudden and unconvincing. There is the possibility that she responds to the odd vulnerability in Chrysagon, and she also seems slightly discomfited by the expectations her Druidic tribe place upon her, but the film does not do enough to make a certainty of either of these possibilities.

So what does work? Well, with Russell Metty photography and music by Jerome Moross, the film always looks and sounds classy. The supporting cast is correspondingly strong; particularly Richard Boone putting that steel bear-trap face to great use as Bors, Chrysagon's brooding second, and Guy Stockwell as the Iago-like Draco. And the sidelines of the story are filled with interesting, colourful detail; from the pagan Wedding ceremony to the dwarf in Chrysagon's party who drags a captured Frisian child around with him on a rope. But it was unmistakeably shot in California and the stagey, overlit scenes in the Tower are perhaps even more claustrophobic than intended.
All of which makes it a slight disappointment for me. For Schaffner, the only way was up.

2000-10 In Westerns - The Missing

2010-06-19T20:36:00.001Z

Every single time a new Western gets released, I read a review or profile piece somewhere which contains this statement: The Western is Dead.
Well, to massively oversimplify, and speaking relatively and in purely commercial terms, this may be true. In the 1930s and 40s, the Western genre was Hollywood's staple diet, as the studios churned out a relentless stream of cheap and cheerful programmers, B-features and serials. By the 1950s, the industry had changed and Westerns were less popular. They had also gone more mainstream and attracted big budgets, big directors and big stars. Back then, a lot of Westerns still got made by Hollywood. This continued into the 1960s, when the revisionism of many of the Italian Westerns reinvigorated the genre. They also came close to burying it, them and the cultural change which gripped the Western world in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era. Who could buy the old black hat white hat conflicts of the Classical Western in a world of napalm and riot police killing students in campus protests? The Western survived by becoming even more revisionist and cynical. There was also the ubiquity of the genre in Western (more specifically American) culture throughout the 50s and 60s. Not just in cinema but on television, in Dime novels, in comic books - this was a played out genre, it seemed. By the end of the 1970s, the genre had become marginalised. One - or perhaps two - Hollywood Westerns were made a year, and they generally had little commercial impact unless they were made by and starring Clint Eastwood. This state of affairs has continued, more or less, to the present day, with the occasional nostalgic Western enjoying some success (Silverado or Tombstone, for instance), and the odd success for a romp in Western clothing (Maverick) or a stately, serious, Oscar-bait Western (Dances With Wolves). But Westerns, by and large, are no longer a major commercial genre.

But this is a genre which will not die. It is too rich, too flexible, too classically pleasurable. Any kind of story you want to tell, you can tell it as a Western. And Westerns are made for cinema - those landscapes, the spectacle, the simple drama of the conflicts and themes. The 00s were, against the odds, a great decade for Westerns. I say this without even considering the many sub-genres that thrived during the decade: the Modern Western (Brokeback Mountain, No Country For Old Men, even There Will Be Blood), the Asian Western (good, bad & Weird, django sugiaki) and the Tarantino Western-appropriation (Kill Bill I & II, Inglourious Basterds). No, the Western itself, about the American frontier and law and order, filled with unmistakable iconography - it too enjoyed a marvellous decade.
And so, the first of a series, hopefully:

The Missing
Ron Howard's best film (by far) is sort of a sidelong remake of The Searchers. Sometimes it feels like all movies are remakes of The Searchers. The premise of John Ford's adaptation of Alan LeMay's novel has acquired enough mythic weight - through repetition, perhaps, or just through the power of its purity and simplicity to have transformed into something of a generic staple - a base-myth, not unlike the gunfighter-cleans-up-town plot familiar from Shane and a hundred other films. The Movie Brat generation of the New American cinema of the 1970s certainly churned out multiple takes on the material, including Star Wars, Hardcore, and Taxi Driver. All of these films focus on a man in search of a young woman who he needs to rescue and/or redeem. Scorsese makes the reference most obvious by naming Harvey Keitel's villainous pimp "Scar" and giving him the long hair of an Indian Brave, but Lucas, too, steals some images and emotions outright from Ford. The most obvious is the scene where Luke Skywalker returns to his Tattooine farm to discover it raided and destroyed by Imperial Forces. Lucas returned to The Searchers with the Tattooine sequences of Attack of the Clones, where even the framing is taken directly from Ford.

Howard's film is a more literal remake, its plot following the fortunes of a Frontier widow who returns to her farm one day to find it raided by a band of Indians, who have abducted her teenage daughter and tortured and murdered her farmhand lover. She sets off in pursuit, joined by her recently arrived prodigal Father, who appears to have gone native as an Indian himself.
Thomas Eidson's source novel is a taut b-western written with a more modern sensibility and voice, which means it ascribes motivations, gestures towards themes and its prose aims at some poetic lyricism. But the characterisation and iconography are firmly rooted in the classic Western of the 40s and 50s.

Howard's adaptation of the novel is dark - so dark its hard to believe that Howard directed it - startlingly violent and features a strong, classy cast headed by Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones. Jones in particular is fabulous, and he was born to act in Westerns, seeming as at home in that world as any actor since Walter Brennan. He has something weathered and elemental about him, and that Texan presence seems to suit these landscapes. As does the air of melancholy he lends to his character, a man bowed by regret and struggling to make amends. The plot chiefly concerns the long pursuit of father and daughter of the missing girl and climaxes in the battle to reclaim and keep her. This allows Howard to give us a short tour of the West, and so we get to see Val Kilmer in a brief, somewhat distracting cameo as a Cavalry Officer, among other notable sights.

Like Eidson's book, The Missing is essentially a classical pulp piece, here a b-movie with the production values and gloss of a big modern studio picture, bearing the obvious influence of the revisionist Westerns of the last two decades. This means that while it sometimes feels a little slight, its a sensually pleasurable watch, due in part to Salvatore Totino's beautiful phtography. Some of its other virtues are a vivid portrayl of the frontier world it portrays, tough action sequences and an emotionally effecting character relationship at its centre. Howard, ever the competent craftsman, makes it as gripping as a modern thriller, and its pacing is never as deliberate as was once mandatory in the Western genre. What it brings to the genre are the strong female lead - Blanchett plays her heroine as a tough, calloused woman who hides her femininity from the tough world she exists in. It was made some years after the brief wave of Female Westerns which included the likes of Bad Girls, The Quick & the Dead and The Ballad of Little Jo, and it benefits from the distance. Here the feminist reading of the genre has been internalised and is significantly less didactic than in some of those films.

Another element which has developed during the revisionist era is the treatment of Indian Mysticism. While its often celebrated for its more New Age, Humanist qualities - this tendency unsurprisingly originating in the psychedelic era of the late 60s - here it is unequivocally a black magic. The villain is an Indian Witch Doctor with a Jonah Hex-style facial disfigurement and a way with powder, potion and rattlesnake, played by Eric Schweig (Uncas from Mann's The Last of the Mohicans). He is a great Western bad guy - terrifying, mysterious, unpredictable. He is also perhaps the most arresting and unusual part of Howard's film, which is a good if never spectacular modern Western. Its failure - both commercial and critical - was disappointing if unsurprising. It is a rare Western that makes a splash at the Box Office in today's cinematic climate, and The Missing is not such a film.

Credit Where Its Due

2010-06-09T23:14:00.002Z

Watching a new Cop show is always a risk for the viewer. Such well-trodden ground, so many gimmicky angles, such a weight of cliche bearing down. Are you going to get something revelatory and transcendent like The Wire, or a slight twist on a familiar formula, like the many CSI-inspired shows of the last decade (Bones, Numbers, Lie to Me, The Mentalist etc)?
When CSI premiered, nobody could have possibly predicted the impact it would have, though in retrospect its simplicity and the appeal of its formula seem obvious: a slick Bruckheimer gloss applied to an almost Holmesian procedural. The (generally imaginative) crimes and the style are the franchise's real stars.

Its success has meant that the majority of Cop shows that survive their first Season are in some way echoing it. The influence of more idiosyncratic and difficult shows like The Wire and The Shield is much harder to detect, perhaps because they are both so distinctive and accomplished. Quirkier and edgier treatments of the old genre tend to falter. The Unusuals, creator Noah Hawley's 2009 comedy-drama about the mordant wit of some New York Homicide detectives, was an interesting take, distinguished by some great writing and a fine cast including Jeremy Renner, Adam Goldberg and Amber Tamblyn. Of course ABC cancelled it after a single underwatched Season.

In this environment, a show like Southland seems resolutely old-fashioned, the kind of traditional product of the genre that the combination of CSI and The Wire seemed to have killed off sometime in the last decade. A multi character ensemble drama, following the experiences of several different police officers through different cases (which sometimes link up but often do not), Southland was created by Ann Biderman, a writer on Steven Bochco's NYPD Blue, perhaps the last such old-school Cop drama to achieve true popular success. It recalls lots of other shows from down the years - Hill Street Blues, most obviously, but also the exceptional Homicide: Life on the Street and the more recent Third Watch and BoomTown.
Southland spreads its gaze across a relatively wide range of Cops, following two patrolmen as they cruise the streets of LA, but also focusing on several detectives in the same department. We get glimpses of their personal lives as they deal with various cases. One has a troubled relationship with his young wife, another struggles with a rebellious teenage daughter, yet another cares alone for her aging mother and tries to deal with her own loneliness. Then there is the rookie beat cop - a Beverly Hills Lawyer's son who the others see as a tourist.

So far, so cliche, and Southland certainly does nothing that hasn't been seen before. Its strength lies in in the general high standard of its writing, performances and direction, and the fact that these days its old-fashioned ensemble storytelling seems almost radical. It is never really slick, trusting instead in the virtues that made Hill Street Blues so popular decades ago. If this makes it occasionally hamfistedly predictable, mawkish and derivative, it also works. These storylines feel authentic, and these cops are cynical and bowed by their job in a way that feels real but not utterly stereotypical. The criminal cases flit across the screen in a few scenes, their brevity - there are murders and abandoned children alongside petty drug use and traffic offenses - a sort of indictment of how the prolonged success of this genre has jaded generations of TV viewers. Only fiendishly complex crimes move us now.

The most impressive element of Southland, however, is its opening credit sequence, which is interesting both on its own terms and for its place in the evolution of the genre and, indeed, of the credit sequence. Realist cop dramas once featured credit sequences structured around their casts. Hill Street Blues is a classic example. It intersperses establishing shots of patrol cars in grim, wintry city streets with clips of characters and credits over headshots of the principals. It has an arresting opening - a garage door swings upwards and open and a police car appears under the first few bars of Mike Post's lovely, melancholy theme. This was perhaps the chief innovation of this particular sequence - it introduced melancholy, an ache and introspection into what had previously been a rather bombastic area. Hill Street Blues was many things as a television drama, but it always held that throb of pain, its characters troubled, its subject matter dark. That credit sequence acknowledge this and perhaps readied the viewer for it.

Miami Vice was far from a realist show. It was heightened in almost every respect - ultraviolent, decadent in its glamour, always cool, probably the single most stylish show ever seen on television to that point. In the world of 1980s TV, every episode of Miami Vice looked and played more like a movie than a television show. As such, its credits were unlike those of any other programme. It almost denied the importance of its cast, its narrative and genre. Instead these credits play out like an advert for Miami tourism. This sequence is all about place and atmosphere - a stream of shots of beautiful locations and local colour, such as girls in bikinis, flamingos flocking, pelota, sports cars, modernist architecture, speedboats. As a young boy when the show was at its peak, I loved the credits sequence as much as I loved the show itself. It seemed impossibly exciting. Jan Hammer's great theme was a big part of that. It was cool and modern, just like Miami seemed to be, is what those credits said, just like this show was.

Miami Vice changed TV and especially Cop shows. You can draw a link from it straight to CSI. Another highly influential show was NYPD Blue, which seemed stylistically radical when it premiered in 1993. All those handheld cameras, shaking and juddering around, characters falling out of frame, focus suddenly shifting - it was brand new on television, and it breathed new life into the genre. The credit sequence is influenced by Miami Vice - it wants to suggest the clamour of New York City, the mad rush and tumult of it, and so the first thirty seconds are a furious fast-cut montage of street scenes with abrupt focus pulls, cars and people flitting rapidly through the foreground, the cast interspersed through it as if they too have been caught on camera documentary-style. Then it softens - a muted keyboard replaces the thunderous drums of the first section, and we get a pretty standard selection of credits shots with the cast listed over clips. This lack of focus on the cast would allow it to turnover regularly over the next decade. The drum tattoo returns for the last ten seconds or so, to remind us that this show is different, its urban, its New York.

Homicide: Life on the Street premiered at around the same time as NYPD Blue to much less success, which is a shame, because it was much better. But it was also artier, a dry, witty, blackly funny - though sometimes caustically angry and serious - take on the genre. Its credit sequence, put together by Mark Pellington with music by Lynn F Kowal, is correspondingly arty - all tone, mood and place. The shots of Baltimore are all canted and elliptical, the camera moving in odd directions. The entire sequence is monochrome, the stark black and white of how the Homicide detectives saw their jobs - there are no grey areas with murder. The music never seems to really get started - there are ghosts of melody floating in it, odd ambient sounds. We see the cast, their faces lit in patches in a darkened room. Their names flash at us over shots of pinwheeling lights, a seeming nocturnal cityscape moving this way and that, in the last passage.

Homicide gave birth to The Wire, in a sense. The credits for The First Season of the Wire set out the shows stall instantly - Baltimore, ambiguity, surveillance. By now, credits served as a shorthand for viewers. You could tell how classy and intelligent a show was by the state of its credits. The Wire - muted, subtle and bluesy - was unmistakably something new, for all its formulaic elements.

The credits from the original CSI resembled nothing so much as a trailer. "Who Are You" by the Who plays over the top, as a bombastic series of images is thrown at the screen, colour filters prominent, everybody looking constantly annoyed. CSI is too impressively robotic to allow for anything as a soft as melancholy and so these credits are instead sleek and fast-moving, slick and brutally paced.

Southland seems to have taken its model for credits not from another TV show (though there are echoes of Law & Order here) but from a film - James Gray's 2007 We Own the Night. Gray's film opened with credits formed entirely from vintage police and crime scene photos by the likes of the legendary Weegee, and built up a strange power as its images played out, backed by a Jackie Gleason instrumental. The Southland sequence has learned this lesson brilliantly, taking an excerpt from "Cançao do Mar" by Dulce Pontes and covering it with powerful shots of LA police over the last century or so. it seems more stately and serious than the show itself, and it possesses a rare quality in TV credit sequences these days; beauty.

Vintage Trailer of the Week 49

2010-06-01T20:50:00.001Z

When I heard about Dennis Hopper's recent death, my first thought wasn't of Easy Rider or Blue Velvet, the obvious and most-mentioned references which dominated the many obituaries in the media.
Instead I thought first of his great scene with Christopher Walken in True Romance. And then, I thought of Out of the Blue (1980), his third film as director, and one of the great lost films of the 80s. Starring the eerily brilliant Linda Manz from Malick's Days of Heaven alongside Hopper, featuring Neil Young songs, its grim and moving and often hard to watch. But definitely worthwhile.

Screengrab - Red Minnelli

2010-05-28T20:45:00.001Z

There is nothing not to love about Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958). A meaty melodrama, based on a blockbusting James Jones novel, and stylishly directed by Minnelli at the height of his powers, starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley Maclaine, it rises to a beautiful, feverish climax at a crowded nocturnal carnival.
I love this scene: the way Minnelli strips everything away and leaves only the barest visual bones signalling that there may be something primal about this melodrama: a man against a violent red background. For this is a story of men and women, lust and jealousy, murder and regret. To say nothing of the casual brilliance of the storytelling - the pursued oblivious to the pursuit, the massed humanity all around - or the effortless evocation of place. The gliding of the camera after these figures in motion. No day for night here - you can feel the soft cold kiss of the coming night.
The rest of the film isn't bad, either.

Cannes of Worms

2010-05-23T16:33:00.001Z

I've done a Cannes trailers post the last two years, but this year, I've found that there seems to be relatively little I'm really interested in at the festival. Some controversy, some films that might be good, but little that stands out as obviously great to these eyes. Many of the In Competition films have no trailer, though there are excepts and clips available from all of them at the Festival's official website.
Some of these trailers don't have English subtitles, but if you speak the International language of Cinema, you should get by:

Carlos - Olivier Assayas

Carancho - Pablo Trapero

The Housemaid - Im Sang Soo

Les Amours Imaginaires - Xavier Dolan

Biutiful - Alajandro Gonzalez Inarittu

Socialisme - Jean Luc Godard

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The Empire Nikes Back

2010-05-21T22:28:00.004Z

Nike's new World Cup advert makes its TV debut during tomorrow night's Champions League final, and its as big and beautiful as all Nike's expensive flagship adverts tend to be. They hired a real proper Director - Alejandro González Iñárritu, whose Biutiful has been a divisive entrant at Cannes this week and whose last two films I loathed - and as such, this spot is vibrant and energetic and cinematic. Iñárritu, for all the trite pomposity of his work, is technically adept and capable of real style, and both those qualities are showcased here. He is also Mexican, and he seems to get football, a Mexican national obsession, and understand some of the beauty of a man dribbling past an opponent, at least.
The Wayne Rooney passage is hilarious, too.

To Hollywood & Back

2010-05-20T12:51:00.001Z

How the World changes.
Suppose, just for a moment, that a single soldier emerged from the messy conflict in which the United States of America finds itself and its allies currently embroiled. This soldier would be a remorselessly efficient killer, the kind of blithe super-warrior we know from a thousand fictions, the kind of man who thinks little of his own heroism, who comes from nowhere in particular, who is handsome in an almost boy-next-door kind of way, but the kind of man you would never look twice at. An everyman, unremarkable in every aspect apart from his proficiency in combat.
This soldier would establish himself as the greatest, most effective soldier the Allies have, continually winning citations and awards for heroism and courage, killing hundreds of enemy troops, playing a vital role in several battles.
After the War, he would write his memoir of the conflict, before becoming a Movie Star. His greatest starring role would be as himself in his own biopic, re-enacting some of the battles which still gave him sleepless nights as he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder. He would eventually settle down into life as an action star, making cheap and cheerfully generic programmers which demanded little of him yet always made a healthy profit.

This would never happen. Modern conflicts are too ideologically complex, and our relationship with them far too distant and filtered by the media and the Government to allow most people to have any real connection with the soldiers fighting in them. Also, our attitude to War itself has changed as War has changed. Post Vietnam, post-My Lai, after Abu Ghraib, some people distrust grunts, people suspect them of disrespecting occupied children, of laziness, of criminality.

In the 1940s and the Second World War, this was not the case. Still partly regarded as a "just" War by the Allies, the scale of conscription and the conflict meant that everybody knew men who fought and men who had died. Heroism was celebrated in a less self-conscious manner than it is in our modern age, where even bravery seems viewed ironically. Back then it was possible for a man to gain fame and fortune on the back of his exploits in the European theatre of the War, and even for that man to parlay that fame into a career in movies. Just ask Audie Murphy.

He was the most decorated soldier in the US Army during the Second World War, serving for twenty-seven months in Europe and in that time, destroying six tanks and killing over 240 German soldiers and wounding and capturing countless others. He received the Medal of Honor, two Silver Stars, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Legion of Merit, two Bronze Stars with Valor device, and three Purple Hearts. His exploits read like passages from WWII movies where the Heroic Super-Warrior decimates whole platoons of enemy soldiers on his own, shaking off wounds, improvising tactics, barely wasting a bullet. He had come from a background of terrible poverty - one of nine children of Texas sharecroppers, his father abandoning the family when he was a child, Audie having to work to support his mother and siblings, learning to shoot so well as he hunted for food to feed his family and afraid to miss because bullets cost money they did not have, turned down by the Marines when he first tried to enlist because he was underweight - and made himself a hero of the kind the modern world seldom presents.
And when he came home - the War's greatest hero, on the covers of magazines, respected and admired throughout his victorious nation - James Cagney persuaded him that he could make it as a Movie Star in Hollywood. He struggled awhile, until his 1949 autobiography, "To Hell And Back" was filmed by Jessie Hibbs in 1955. Who else could star as Audie Murphy but Audie Murphy?

Nobody could. And so Murphy played himself and the film was a huge success, and Murphy was, on top of everything else, a massive movie star. He never really capitalised on this stardom, mainly because he wasn't a particularly good actor. As David Thomson has written "his baby face seemed unconvincing in action and unhappy when called upon to speak". He only made a few major films, most notably John Huston's flawed adaptation of Stephen Crane's brilliant The Red Badge of Courage (1951), in which his seeming stagefright works for the character, and his naturally modest, simple presence is suited to the story. And yet, he is somehow still awkward in the role. In Lillian Ross' excellent behind-the-scenes account of the making of the film, "Picture", Murphy comes across as shy, reserved and obviously damaged by his experiences in the War (he did suffer from a serious and long term case of Post-Traumatic Stress, which he kept private). The charismatic, charming Huston, accustomed to ease and understanding in his dealings with even the most difficult actors, is baffled by Murphy's unresponsiveness and how difficult it is to read him. Murphy seems always to be gazing into the middle distance, his laughter hollow, his smiles forced. Something of this distance is evident in his screen roles, and he was sometimes cast sympathetically: he might have suited The Quiet American (Joseph Makiewicz, 1958) but in the event, the role is beyond his ability and he just seems wooden.

Instead, he became a solid action lead in b-Westerns, making a series of them over the twenty years between 1950 and 1969. A few are more substantial than the majority - he worked with directors like the great Budd Boetticher and Don Siegel - but in the main, Murphy was the 1950s/60s equivalent of Jean Claude Van Damme or another DTV action hero. He had a run in a short-lived Western TV show; Whispering Smith (1961) and Huston used him again in The Unforgiven (1960), but generally his career after his initial breakthrough was as one dimensional as his onscreen presence.

In later life, his facility with casual violence would encourage him in some vigilante episodes - he was charged (and acquitted) with attempted murder after severely beating a man in a bar over the man's poor treatment of a dog, he went on ridealongs with police officers and gave information to prosecutors in Mafia trials, but he was in debt and his career was on the wane, and he died in plane crash in 1971 on his way to settle a debt. For me, he is a fascinating figure. For what he says about the differences between the world in the years after the Second World War and the world now, for what he says about American cinema then and now, and for what he revealed about men and War. Its a shame he wasn't a better actor, and a shame he didn't make more great, or even interesting, films. He would perhaps be better remembered if he had done, and he deserves to be remembered.

Valhalla Rising

2010-05-15T00:16:00.007Z

Nicolas Winding Refn, 2009

DP: Morton Soborg

FRAZETTA

2010-05-10T23:19:00.007Z

He may have been something of a One-Trick Pony, but what a trick it was.

Frank Frazetta
1928 – 2010

Vintage Trailer of the Week 48

2010-04-25T23:23:00.002Z

Michael Winterbottom's superb Wonderland (1999) is quite possibly the greatest, most realistic portrayal of modern London I've seen, in all its sweaty intimacy, in its harshness and brutality, in its lonely crowds and cluttered streets and desolation, in its often stunning beauty, in its banality and dullness. Great cast and amazing Michael Nyman soundtrack, too. It needs watching if you haven't seen it:

Pointed List: Supergrass

2010-04-19T23:42:00.001Z

It always looked like it would be fun to be in Supergrass. Like they enjoyed it, like they never took it too seriously. They made derivative dadrock music, sure, but it was also, generally, joyous and fun. You felt that they believed in its validity, and that gave it a truth that more original and innovative bands can miss. And, crucially, they had scope and range - they rocked when they wanted to, but they could swing a bit, throw in a ballad and some folk. Over time I think they were the (unlikely) survivors of the Britpop era: Oasis grew rotten and pathetic, Blur imploded, Pulp fell away and only Gaz Coombes and his cheeky-chappy mateys were left, all growned up and serious. Still releasing great - or at least very good - records. Until last week, when they announced their split after 17 years.

Of course, they had good record collections. Thats obvious from what their music sounds like. The Beach Boys, the Stooges, the Beatles, CSNY, T-Rex, Bowie, Dylan - they listened to classic rock and they filtered it through their own songwriting to good effect. I love their second and third albums in particular, but all of the others contain sublime moments, too. Here are five such moments, and some thoughts about them, in memorium, I suppose:

Richard III

A friend of mine always insists that this riff - one of the best of an era admittedly light on great riffs - is a rip-off of one of Black Sabbath's. He may be right, but I doubt that the Sabbath song has the same energy that Richard III has, the same combination of belligerent rock and unabashed pop, the same surfeit of hookiness.
Taken off their second album, In It For The Money, where Supergrass easily surpassed their debut, broadening their scope emotionally and musically without losing sight of why they were popular in teh first place, this was a single. At first, it seems like a newly serious band, those opening bars of riff so deadpan and determined, so grimly fixed on something unseen, something adult, perhaps. Then Gaz goes "Woooo!" to kick it all off, and it gets louder, but its still Supergrass, willing to compromise the hardman rock (Made plain by the menacing lyric: "I know you wanna try and get away/But it's the hardest thing you'll ever know/Tryna get at you, tryna get at you") of such a song to include some lovely falsetto backing vocals.
So while its as heavy and driving a rock song as any they ever did, its always a pop single, too. Which makes it Supergrass, and makes it fantastic.

St Petersberg

Road to Rouen, the fifth album, marked a real and decisive change of style for the band. If their third, Supergrass, had messed with their formula and been a commercial and critical disappointment, they pacified their record company with the more predictable Life On Other Planets. But even that didn't halt their commercial slide. Britpop was over and even something of an embarrassment in the eclectic mp3 era, and its survivors were all in trouble.
So Supergrass changed tack entirely. The new record was folkier, largely acoustic, ruminative, mellow. Its also frequently beautiful and the band's songwriting has clearly benefitted from their new direction. Where Life on Other Planets sounded tired and almost self-parodic, Road to Rouen is fresh and dynamic, the product of a band re-energised and excited by their music.
"St. Petersberg" was the lead-off single for the album. But it doesn't sound remotely like a single. Its subtle and gentle, slowly strummed guitars over tinkling piano and hushed, muted, gorgeous strings towing the melody along. The lyrics are impressionistic, with no obvious narrative or meaning, just some phrases emerging from the mix. The opening lines are "Before the time of the morning sandman/I can find my way around" and it continues in that vein for three minutes or so, going nowhere in particular. This could not be by those lovable scamps who recorded "Alright", could it? Well yes it could, not that anybody wanted to know anymore.

Eon

Supergrass, the band's third album, is probably their most "Rock" record. It is jammy, and musically their most complex and interesting release. There are fewer of the numbers that most people would think of back then if asked to think of a typical Supergrass song, and more where they expand and stretch out and let a big, muscular groove build. In that vein, as well as the superb "Eon", there are the equally impressive "Born Again" and "Faraway". But there are also two of their greatest pop singles, in the exhilarating "Moving" and the sleazy stomp of "Mary", and the lovely doodle of "Mama & Papa" to end the album. In short, if In It For The Money is their most obviously accessible, crowd-pleasing record, Supergrass is their best.
This song builds up patiently on long winding lines of electric guitar and a rhythm section that seeps in like cloud, and after it all breaks up into a wash of chiming arpeggios, its almost two minutes before the vocal starts. Then its a blissed out nursery rhyme concerned with astral bodies (I know you're out there/We saw a shooting star/We don't know what you done/You're nearer for a star") composed of three verses and no choruses. It is casually epic and feels longer than it actually is, some sort of tribute to the mastery of dynamics the band display here. The moment at 1:24 when the tempo changes is just breathtaking.

Lenny

I Should Coco came out in 1995, when Gaz Coombes was 19 years old, Danny Goffey was 21 and Mick Quinn was a prehistoric 26. The chirpy pop single "Alright" - the song the band will be remembered for - was a massive smash, but the album sold 900,000 copies too, making Supergrass one of the biggest bands in the UK just a few months after they had released their first single. "Lenny" was another single off that record. Its a punk-pop gem, cocky and breathless and insistently catchy. I love the first 25 seconds or so - that simple, hesitant drum pattern, then the guitar hammering a dumb one note riff, and then the way Goffey definitively kicks in on the offbeat, his drum fill jumpstarting that elastic bass and the song is suddenly rolling forward. Its a young man's song, all forward momentum, full of the thrill of being alive and young and in a band, the lyrics disposable and so meaningless they're run through three times and you barely notice: "I've been around and around/But I've got nowhere to go now/But the funny thing is/That when I'm gone, I'll kill you/When I tell you/I don't want you-hoo-hoo". And thats it.
In a way, it perfectly encapsulated what Supergrass were then. All energy, brio, and a cocksure stupidity that made them seem invincible. Musically too, with its fuzzy guitar, its simple rhythm, its big harmonies, its soaring vocals on the middle eight, its commitment to being a pop single.
It still sounds great.

The Evening of the Day

This sounds like one of those odds and ends songs the Beatles used to do, combining bits of three separate scraps masterfully into one coherent whole. It comes from Life On Other Planets, a comeback album of sorts which is my least favourite of their records apart from Diamond Hoo Ha, their uninspired final outing. This album is a bit too Supergrass-by-numbers for my liking, but it does contain a handful of great songs, like "Za" and "Brecon Beacons". This is better though. Sung in the main by Quinn, who had handled lead vocals on several numbers on Supergrass, its first section is a folksy shuffle, all energetic strummed acoustics and drawled vocal. Around the one minute mark it shifts gears, electric guitars and organ cut in, and a chorus from a different song emerges, complete with a lyrical reference to Spinal Tap's "All the Way Home" ("If shes not on that 3:15/ Then I'm gonna know what sorrow means"). It reverts for the rest of the verses, accumulating instrumentation as it progresses - horns, piano, more guitars - while the chorus remains shouty and raucous, before a final collapse and a delicate little coda, complete with bongos, lounge piano and whistling.

Some Kick Ass Reflections

2010-04-15T18:17:00.006Z

This is Not a review:

- The best thing about Kick Ass the comic was always the art of John Romita JR, one of the greatest working artists in comics nowadays. When I read there was a movie coming, while I could see the obvious commercial potential in such blackly funny and outrageously violent material, without the visuals of JRJR, it seemed a little pointless. The comic is never quite as shocking or as funny as it seems to think it is, a common complaint with Writer Mark Millar's putatively "edgier" work. He is instead at his best when he sticks to straight Super Hero material (his very best work may be his run on DC's tie-in comic with the Superman the Animated Series cartoon from the late 90s) or inflects such material with just the slightest trace of his more sensationalist authorial personality (as in the brilliant The Ultimates). Unsurprisingly, the comic remains grittier and far more violent than the often slick excesses of the film. And it provides JRJR with a chance to depict lots of his putty-faced people being beaten to a pulp with his always beautiful and dynamic storytelling giving everything a fantastic, hyperbolic, almost sickening impact.

- Aaron Johnson, who does just fine, is wrong for the role. A valid comparison would be the casting of Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man. Maguire is geeky-looking, slightly bug-eyed, not too tall or pretty or athletic. He could have been the nerd Peter Parker is meant to be. Johnson, on the other hand, is obviously a handsome boy, and a geeky afro and pair of specs don't really change that. He's also too jocky - tall, broad-shouldered, fit. A young leading man, in other words. Anybody who is cast as a young John Lennon , which is a role requiring a brooding, charismatic, smouldering kind of teen, is wrong for Kick Ass.

- Nicolas Cage, on the other hand, finds just the right film for that chihuahua-on-acid energy of his. Here he doesn't feel like he's wandered in out of his bubble of celebrity where its ok to marry Elvis' daughter because hey, you're a big fan and where you should say yes to every film that goes over a certain figure for your salary. Here he feels like he's caught the tone of the film just right, like he even exemplifies it. His Adam West impression is funny for a few seconds, he has plenty of action scene experience, and he doesn't jolt us out of the film with any bizarre line-readings or twitches for once. Do this and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans constitute a comeback?

- There have been films before parodying the Super-Hero genre. It is eminently parody-worthy, and comics have been doing the job for decades. Special (2007) is probably the most obvious recent example of this sub-genre, and Mystery Men is probably the most famous. There are numerous problems with this approach: a Super-Hero film really has to deliver Super-Hero action to achieve any commercial success. But fulfilling that particular cliche doesn't really square with mocking the genre and all of its cliches. Hancock, for example, begins as a semi-parodic, or at least certainly extremely revisionist, Super-Hero film, before abandoning any attempt at wit or satire for its actioncentric, exposition-filled finale. Revisionism complicates the issue, having usurped parody in the comics medium in the 1980s. The key mainstream works of that decade, the influences of which can very definitely be felt in Kick Ass, are definitively revisionist texts. Last year's Watchmen, based on one such text, perhaps failed commercially due to its extreme revisionaism- general audiences didn't recognise the archetypes these characters played off, and more to the point, they didn't really care.
Kick Ass proves that audiences are ready, though. Years of watching Big Summer Blockbusters about Super-Heroes and absorbing formulas, identifying types and recognising narrative beats has made us all geek-literate. Everybody gets the joke. As long as its well told.

- Set in New York City, Kick Ass was mostly shot in London, and there are times when the difference between the two cites is all too apparent. London and New York look different, basically. The architecture is different, the street furniture, the shopfronts, the alleyways...Vaughn and his people do well dressing up locations, for the most part, but this New York just feels wrong. It never coalesces into something that feels like a real city, with all its vague locations - lumber warehouse, drug dealers pad in council estate, suburban high school - and for all is references to NYC, the attitude and spirit of the place are utterly absent. It feels plastic. It feels like the generic "Metropolis" which is home to Superman, and is an obvious analogue of New York without being tied to the actual New York in any way. It feels more comic book-influenced then the same city does in Raimi's Spider-Man films. But this is the film that purports to be a realistic view of Super-heroes. Here New York is full of knife-wielding muggers, and there are plenty of darkened alleyways, just like in my 70s Marvels. In some films, geographical uncertainty can work well. David Fincher's Seven, for instance, is set in an unnamed city which we assume is New York for the first two acts of the film. But at the end, as three characters drive out of the city and into the countryside, they drive through the sun-blasted scrub of what can only be California, and the city seems suddenly more likely to be Los Angeles. This small detail shakes an audience a little, rocks its preconceptions and expectations about what it is watching.
I generally hate when films are shot in one place and set in another, though the strange atmospherics of an everycity can be effective in the right hands. Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was famously shot in a London standing in for New York, while Vancouver finds itself repeatedly impersonating American cities, often badly. Lost is a treasure trove of city masquerades, as Honolulu impersonates everywhere from London to Seoul to LA. But Lost does it either very well or horrendously badly. Either way is somehow better than the just-slightly off attempt made by Kick Ass.

- The most interesting material in both comic and film is in the early scenes, before the arrival of Hit Girl and Big Daddy into the narrative. Here Millar and Vaughn take on the concept of the Super-Hero and its application in a cynical, frightened world, but also a scattershot approach to modern culture, from viral video to cash-in merchandising. Then Hit Girl and Big Daddy show up, and it all turns into a big ridiculous stupidly entertaining action scene. Betraying the influence of both Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Jason Pierson's Body Bags, their characters are hilarious and fun and yet they are a big part of some of the film's problems. In the first act, they are somewhat uncomfortably crowbarred in to a story which is not theirs. And then later Hit Girl's central role is undermined by the fact that she is entirely without an interior life - we see her kill and maim and flip and stab, we see her beaten and shot, but we never have the slightest idea what she is thinking or feeling. This reduces her to a pretty black sight-gag, a flash of Japanese anime in the film's DNA, or perhaps a slightly offensive reduction, a character created purely for fanboys, which is never a good thing. Kick Ass himself, by comparison, is all interior life, as his voiceover fills us in on his every thought and aspiration, rendering him without mystery or much nuance. A better actor than Johnson might have given him more shades of despair or horror, but he remains a two dimensional creation throughout.

- The film is the very epitome of the modern genre spectacle. In a post-Tarantino world, that means that it is broadly post-modern, casually fascist and directed with an efficiently anonymous "stylish" sheen. It is also more concerned with being fliply funny than with being an effective action film, sacrificing emotional impact on several occasions for a gag. It has a scene with a heavy video game (read: First Person Shooter) reference in Hit Girl's night vision POV massacre, lots of martial arts and insane gunplay, and a soundtrack littered with pop culture ephemera and rescued trash - Sparks, Joan Jett, the Dickies' version of the Banana Splits theme, the Prodigy's sampling of Manfred Mann and a very Tarantino usage of Morricone's "For A Few Dollars More". In other words, it feels like a DVD movie, the sort of film made for Chapter Selection where you can rewatch favourite scenes and moments.

- The worst material in the climactic scenes is not from the comic. The comic stays gritty and horrifying whereas the movie finally aims for purest fantasy in a sort of betrayal of its own earliest impulses. Its a shame.

- What Kick Ass is, unexpectedly, is a great portrayal of adolescent male friendship. The protagonist says of himself that he "just exists, like most teenagers". He and his two best friends seem like the film's most authentic element, to me. Their warm camaraderie, based on mutual geekiness and constant ribbing, reminded me of my relationship with my friends at that age. Comic shops, sexual frustration, continual teasing of one another, not belonging to any of the teen tribes - all evoked lightly and wittily. Even if the film has little use for this side of its character, its brilliantly done while it lasts, before the costumes and the fight scenes come out.

Vintage Trailer of the Week 47

2010-04-04T00:09:00.001Z

This stunningly unrepresentative trailer makes Pedro Costa's O Sangue look great.
Just not in the way it actually is great.

The Brave and the Jellyfish

2010-04-01T22:39:00.004Z

I love Jellyfish and its a source of great personal angst to me that they only released two albums in their time together. But those early 90s records are both minor classics and the band splintered into a series of equally high-quality ventures, as key members like Jason Falkner, Roger Manning and Eric Dover all released solo material or worked with other artists in a way which guaranteed the lasting influence of Jellyfish in modern indie and alternative rock.

Oddly, however, Jellyfish's main songwriter and singer Andy Sturmer has been the least visible of the band members since the band split. He has kept himself busy, writing and recording with other bands, and there are a slew of often great solo demos across the internet for fans to obsess over, but the writer of "Baby's Coming Back", "the King Is Half Undressed" and "New Mistake" would have been the favourite to go onto great things after his band broke up.

And in a way, he has. My son loves the cartoon Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Which features an opening theme by none other than Andy Sturmer. A little research has revealed a flourishing sideline in theme tunes for cartoons, most notably the theme for the phenomenon known as Ben 10.

It felt right for me to find Sturmer at the start of a Batman cartoon. Because I had liked his theme from the first time I had heard it. It captures the excitement, brightly camp sensibility and incredible pace of the show, and its got a hell of a hook and some brilliant details to its arrangement. Check it out, and then go buy everything you can by Jellyfish if you can:

"I'm drivin alone, sad about you"

2010-03-20T18:15:00.001Z

I saw Big Star live on their 2001 European Tour in Dublin. By Big Star, I mean the reconstituted modern version featuring two of the original members, Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens, alongside the two frontmen from modern power-pop underachievers the Posies, Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer . I was pumped for the gig. Big Star had long been one of my favourite bands. In fact, when I rank the bands I like, the only one I love more than Big Star are the Beatles. So, as you can imagine, I was excited. The crowd was a strange mix of Dublin hipsters and musos, but there was a good atmosphere, eager and enthusiastic.
The gig was alright.
You could tell Chilton’s heart wasn’t really in it. He did what he had to do, but without any great enthusiasm. He was this little, slightly grumpy middle-aged guy in denim, singing these songs his voice couldn’t quite reach anymore, playing guitar. He came most alive during a cover of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”. It was enough for most people there to hear those great Big Star songs sung by the man who had written them, played by a good, tight band. I was happy to have been there but somewhat disappointed, too. I’d read it in enough interviews, but seeing him live made me finally believe it – Alex Chilton hated Big Star. Go figure.

In the pre-download world of the early 90s, I started off with the wrong Big Star album. I’d read plenty about what kind of band they were, who they sounded like, who they had influenced etc. I found “3rd/Sister Lovers” in a second hand shop and bought it. On that first listen I was instantly surprised by the opening track (different editions feature different sequencing), in this case “Stroke It Noel”. It seemed improvised, with no evident structure, for all the beauty of its melodies and arrangements and the pin sharp crunch of the production. After that the remainder of the record was a long line of surprises – from the bizarre “Downs” to the instantly awesome “Thank You Friends”, “Big Black Car” and “For You” to the desolation of “Holocaust” and “Kanga Roo”. I wasn’t as blown away as I had expected to be. I knew “Kanga Roo” from Jeff Buckley’s cover version, but that version was cleaner and straighter (its rock out riffathon apart) than this tormented, fractured, even slightly disturbing rendition. But I stuck with it – I knew the Replacements’ “Alex Chilton” and a part of me reckoned that if it was alright for Paul Westerberg, then it was alright for me - and soon I loved the record in all its twisted, strange glory. Its moments of beauty, I could see, were incredible and hinted at another side to this band than the chaos much of the record seemed to have captured.
A little later, after a conversation about the band, a friend played me a few standout tracks off his copy of the twofer cd containing the other two Big Star albums – “Number 1 Record” and “Radio City”.

The songs he played were “The Ballad of El Goodo”, “Thirteen”, “September Gurls” and “I’m In Love With a Girl”. Right then, I was in love. Its one of the great musical memories of my life, being hit by the perfection and majesty of those songs in that little living room, knowing I had to have this cd as soon as possible.
I bought it, consumed it, and became a Big Star evangelist. Every compilation tape or cd I made after that had to feature a Big Star song. Because nobody seemed to know this band. Nobody I knew, at any rate.
I got the Chris Bell solo stuff, and a couple of Alex Chilton solo records. I got the ecords Chilton had made with the Box Tops before he and Bell had formed Big Star. I bought the two live cds, “Big Star Live” and “Nobody Can Dance” purely for the cover versions they contained (Loudon Wainwright’s “Motel Blues” and T-Rex’s “Baby Strange”). I was a fan of power-pop, the subgenre Big Star had helped to create and define, and I got into Badfinger and the Raspberries and Todd Rundgren and more modern acolytes like Teenage Fanclub and Jellyfish, all in an effort to recreate that thrilling feeling I got when I first heard that Big Star sound.

But heres what made Big Star and Alex Chilton special. For all that they were undeniably power-pop, with those Beatlesque melodies, and the Byrdsian harmonies and the punch of the Kinks all colliding in each song, they had an x factor. Badfinger, for all that they wrote and played some amazing songs, aren’t a patch on Big Star. There is a darkness floating somewhere under the surface in the music of Big Star, an ineffable quality that lifts it, enables it to transcend genre. Its almost queasy, this feeling, an edge to the bright and shining beauty of the songs. Maybe it is the anger in Chilton - the anger that made his solo career such a quixotic ramble of challenging records and self-destructive tendencies. Maybe it was Bell's struggle with his faith and his sexuality. I don't know, I just know its there, I can hear it in the music, and it is a big part of what makes Big Star a special band.

And they really are a special band. For my money, "Radio City" is their best record, and indeed one of the great rock albums, containing not a single weak song, brilliantly played and sequenced. From the surprisingly funky opener, "O My Soul", with its fluid structure, through the greatest Number One that never was, "September Gurls" to the moving simplicity of the closing "I'm In Love With a Girl", it covers a wide variety of moods and tempos but always sounds like this unique, distinctive band. They could play tough rock when it suited them, they could do soulful balladry, bright pop and - since they came from Memphis - a little bit of r'n'b is suggested, too. But Chilton always sounds like himself, like the young man he was, who had been a star in his teens but rejected it and gone to New York alone to be a singer-songwriter, sorta failed and retreated to Memphis where he had finally begun a band with a Beatles-obsessive that made music America wasn't quite ready for at that time. His later material is interesting, and sometimes even inspired, but its never great in the pure way Big Star was.

When I read that Alex Chilton had died a few nights ago - on Twitter, where I seem to hear all news these days -I felt a sharp sense of loss not really felt about a Musician since Elliott Smith died. But then I listened to some Big Star, and as usual, all I could feel was joy.

ALEX CHILTON
1950 - 2010

All three original records are must buys, as is the box set from last year, "Keep An Eye on the Sky", full of demos and covers and alternate takes and live numbers, and for a Big Star fan, absolutely orgasmic. Rob Jovanovic's book "Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop" is a great read for fans, too.

Below, "Daisy Glaze", my favourite Big Star song, with such a euphoric guitar moment at 1:54 it still catches my breath:

Kanga Roo:

O My Soul:

And the Replacements sublime "Alex Chilton":