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Sundance 2012: Ninth And Finally Final Report!

2012-02-19T10:01:00.000-08:00

It's only taken three weeks, but here'sthe final batch of mini-reviews, bunched together with the randomtheme of comedy, which to varying and sometimes harrowing ends, iswhat most of these films were. We'll get to John Dies At The End at the end.

In the meantime, Two Days In New York was the last oneI saw at Sundance this year; the latest from Julie Delpy – who is pretty prolific thisdays, following last year's Le Skylab in a mere matter of months –it is another rude, noisy farce drawing heavily on elements on herown life. A sequel of sorts to 2007's Two Days In Paris, it seesDelpy returning as Marion, having split from Jack (Adam Goldberg) andnow working as a conceptual artist in New York with herAfrican-American partner Mingus (Chris Rock). Marion is expecting avisit from her family – her eccentric father, sluttish sister andidiot boyfriend – and Delpy's bold choice of co-star suggests thatthis is going to be a schmaltzy race-clash parable. To her credit,though, she doesn't really go there. Instead, she has way more funwith tacky French stereotypes, painting her father – played by herreal father, Albert – as a randy widower obsessed with cheese andsausages, and her almost always nude or underdressed sister Rose (thegorgeous Alexia Landeau) as an earth-goddess-slash-siren to heruptight neighbours.

I liked the detail and the energy thatDelpy puts into all this, but, like Le Skylab, it too often tips intochaos to be truly memorable. Having said that, there is one awesomescene very near the end, in which Marion finds out who the anonymousbenefactor is who has successfully bid for her latest pretentiousartwork (a contract for her soul). I won't spoil the surprise (whichyou can guess from the Imdb credits), but as cameos go, it's right upthere with you-know-who in Zombieland.

Goats, by Christopher Neil, was a muchmore traditional Sundance comedy, being a rites-of-passage movie thatreminded me at various times of Thumbsucker, Squid And The Whale andRocket Science, all of which launched to various degrees of indiesuccess in Park City. Relative newcomer Graham Phillips stars asEllis, a teenage boy who is being sent to prep school by hisestranged father. Ellis faces the news with a mixture of anticipationand regret; anticipation because life with his New Age hippy mother(Vera Farmiga) is dragging him down, regret because the family'sbearded retainer, known only as “Goat Man” (David Duchovny), hasa regular supply of high-quality homegrown weed of a kind he will nowsurely find impossible to come by.

As a feature debut goes, Goats is solidand entertaining enough, but I didn't really find the source material– Mark Poirier's novel of the same name – to be all thatsubstantial. Duchovny, nude and bearded, is certainly a sight tobehold, but this kind of casting is actually a distraction inSundance, a place where, over the years, we've been asked to believein the likes of Kevin Costner as a carpenter in The Company Men,Jennifer Aniston as a supermarket cashier in The Good Girl and TobeyMaguire, of all people, as an obstetrician in The Details.

Credibility lies as the base of CraigZobel's Compliance, which isn't strictly a comedy since it is basedon a true-life crime, although there is definitely an undertow ofblack humour running all the way through it. Whether you choose tosee it is up to you; this was the only truly controversial movie ofthe festival, with a very small section of the audience turning onthe filmmakers at its premiere, accusing them of glorifying thefelony it recreates. I don't think the film is sexist in that way,but I do think it is a slightly disingenuous piece of work. For it towork, Compliance needs the viewer to engage with its – verydeliberate – pace and tension, which I can only compare to Borat interms of setting up a situation that is almost unbearablyuncomfortable to watch.

It helps that there are a fewrecognisable faces here. It starts at a backwater burger bar, wherethe boss, Sandra (Ann Dowd) gets a call from the police. It seems theditzy but otherwise harmless employee Becky (the perfectly namedDreama Walker) has stolen money from a customer, but the police aretoo busy to come, and so Sandra must do the awkward detective workthat follows. Just from the set-up, you can tell something's off.Becky is accused of stealing from a customer's purse at the till sheis manning, and even if that were likely, it would be easy to checkvia CCTV, which the burger bar certainly has. But Sandra doesn'tcheck. Instead, with a strangely sentimental and motherly tone, shegoes along with the voice on the end of the telephone, far beyond thepoint where it ceases to be a prank and well into the zone where thecaller's requests lead to molestation and rape. I liked Compliance upto that very point. It's certainly well done, and it's hard to denythe film's power, but although the very aim is to disturb, I felt itwas just a little too hard on its smalltown victims; this is not thekind of trap that the more worldly of us would so easily fall into.

Wrong would be a good alternative titlefor Compliance, although it's not a particularly great title forQuentin Dupieux's follow-up to the surreal, wonderful Rubber. Nothingis especially “wrong” here; in fact, it's actually a nice, sweetfilm, driven by a wonderful performance by Jack Plotnick. Plotnick –who has a familiar face and lot of credits but, as far as I can, nobreakout roles until now – is just great as Dolph Springer, asuburban travel agent (at least, I think that's what he does) whowakes one morning to find that his dog has disappeared. Since nothingelse in his life is going to plan – he has been fired from his job,where it rains indoors, and his gardener has stole his identity inorder to bed a local pizza waitress – Dolph hires a privatedetective to find the missing mutt.

Where Rubber was a one-note joke thatonly really worked if you wanted to see a serial killer movie about arubber tyre (I did), Wrong is much more character-based, withdigressions and mini-sketches that drive the story to its feelgoodhappy ending. Dupieux's approach is hard to quantify; on one level itcertainly mines the same seams of absurdity that runs through thescripts of Charlie Kaufman (in particular his masterpiece,Synecdoche, New York). But it also has a dreamlike air that Kaufman'sstories don't have; like the films of David Lynch, both Wrong andRubber frequently drift into pure, lyrical surrealism that works moreoften than it doesn't. I still find myself laughing at WilliamFichtner's Master Chang, the disfigured self-help guru who isimplicated in the kidnapping of Dolph's dog and who speaks – forreasons we'll never understand – with a slight oriental burr.

I still have next to no idea whathappened in Don Coscarelli's John Dies At The End. Did John die atthe end? I don't know, since the film is partly about a strange newdrug – called Soy Sauce – that enables users to exist in thepast, present and future simultaneously. Some reviews out of Sundancepanned it, but this is a film to be seen with a drunken midnightaudience not in a roomful of sober critics. As an indication, itplays like a meth-driven Bill And Ted movie, with Chase Williamson asDavid Wong and Rob Mayes as his best friend John, a pair ofghostbusters who get roped into solving supernatural occurrences intheir local area. Or are they? Coscarelli's supremely hallucinogenichorror-comedy changes tack so many times it's hard to get a handle onit.

The bad reviews all seem to makereference to Jason Pargin's novel of the same name, which I haven'tread. But I didn't mind the film's at times mind-blowingincomprehensibility, since Williamson and Mayes make such likeableleads and the twists and turns come at an astonishingly recklessrate. A lot of comparisons have been made to Coscarelli's 2002 opusBubba Ho-Tep, but it reminded me more of 1979's Phantasm, a film Ihave seen plenty of times but always have to watch again, just tocheck that it really is about a funeral home that crushes dead bodiesinto slave dwarves and sends them off to mine for minerals in aparallel world (it is). If it were a better film, by which I meanslicker, John Dies At The End would be terrible, since its loose endsand psychotic episodes are what keeps it so tantalisingly incompleteand fresh. And although the ending itself perhaps is a littledisappointing after all the madness, it still wraps up like nothingI've ever seen before, a truly dizzying WTF cult movie that nevertries to apologise and, best of all, definitely never explains.

Sundance 2012: Eighth Report

2012-02-14T05:54:00.000-08:00

Only two more posts to go! And so: a page on documentaries, the films I tend to see the least of during Sundance. This isn't a matter of taste, simply that docs have a different shelf life to features, especially those geared to contemporary hot-button topics. I did, however, make time for Fredrik Gertten's Big Boys Gone Bananas*, which offers a sobering lesson to filmmakers who believe that all they need is the moral high ground and a just cause.

Though I would say it struggles to exist as a feature in its own right, since it relies an awful lot on the fallout from the issues raised in Gertten's 2009 film, Bananas!* (I've no idea why the asterisk is there), Big Boys… does have a lot to say about the way multinationals try to control their public image. In a nutshell, Gertten's first film dealt with the plight of Nicaraguan plantation workers who (successfully) sued food conglomerate Dole for use of life-threatening chemicals. Though the workers were vindicated, and the company subsequently changed its farming methods, this didn't stop Dole pursuing Gertten through the courts, and the media, to get his film stopped by any means necessary. If they'd won, there clearly wouldn't be a movie here, but although its payoff is easily seen coming, Big Boys... is a refreshing affirmation of people power in an age of globalisation and a reminder that a seemingly mechanical company is often the creation of an internal herd mentality.

Two docs especially stayed with me, one being the amazing Room 237, which, assuming the Kubrick estate sees the humour and importance of this absolutely brilliant film, ought to become a late-night DVD and rep cinema classic. Rodney Ascher's engrossing doc takes as its subject Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror milestone The Shining, and, without recourse to talking heads, uses the film itself to illustrate a series of theses ever more strange than the last. One critic decides that the film is about the extermination of the Native American, another thinks it is an allegory for the Holocaust, which is 'supported' by the regular appearance of the number 42, the year that the Final Solution was first said to have been discussed by Adolf Hitler's government. My favourite dissection, though, is by the guy who believes Kubrick made the film as a mea culpa after faking the 1969 moon-landing footage and struggling to keep this a secret from his wife.

Although, by rights, it should be a crackpot special, the selling point of Room 237 is that it doesn't disdain these interpretations. Many go too far, especially in the over-analysis of some very minor plot points, but the fact remains that Kubrick *was* fastidious and all-consuming when it came to research. What Ascher does quite brilliantly is to set up the film's space in a way that reflects the weird, Mobius-strip thinking that went into designing the film's Overlook Hotel, a building that constantly defies logic with rooms and windows that really shouldn't be there. But perhaps more than that, the film plays mesmerising mind games with Kubrick's reputation as a perfectionist. Just as the moon landing theory seems played out, we see a clip from the film in which Jack Torrance's son Danny, an ESP-gifted child, stands up to reveal that he is wearing… a handmade Apollo 11 jumper! Why? We may never know. But the genius of this film is that it forces us into the role of assessors, trying to fathom just how far ahead this visionary director really was away from us.

I very much liked Matthew Akers' Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, a potted bio of the Belgrade-born artist that focuses on her 2010 exhibition at the Museum Of Modern Art. Abramovic is a young-seeming woman of (now) 65 whose entire life's work consists of challenging physical work that almost inevitably involves nudity. For her big NY retrospective she entrusts that to a hand-picked punch of art students who recreate several of her key works; one, rather superbly, consists of nothing more than a narrow doorway with naked people on either side whom gallery-goers must squeeze past. The masterwork, however, she keeps for herself: every day, for a total of nearly 736 hours, she will make herself available at a tale and chair for individual members of the audience to sit with, for however long they like. (Mercifully few seem to want to make a day of it.)

It sounds like pretentious artbore nonsense, but Abramovic's hardcore, flinty but always rational personality is what drives this film, and even those with no capacity for performance art should be able to at least comprehend its appeal. Abramovic gives a ridiculous amount of herself to each sitting – each performance – the bulk of it never to be seen again, and the impact is quite moving. Isn't that what every artist claims to do but never physically does? In this respect, the film says a lot in a post-Occupy Wall Street world: personal gestures are meaningful and not to be underestimated.

Being your own art statement formed the subject of one of the most commercial docs, Malik Bendjelloul's crowd-pleasing Searching For Sugar Man, about the quest by two white South Africans to find Rodriguez, a musician who once soundtracked their country's struggle for liberty. The film's success depends rather a lot on whether one buys into the Detroit-born singer's music, which sounds like a mix of the equally tragic Arthur Lee and Jackson C Frank (albeit with a hint of post-those-two Prince), but there is a lot to enjoy in the sleuthing, especially when the presumed-cold trail – Rodriguez is presumed to have committed suicide onstage – suddenly warms up.

British director Bart Layton's The Imposter, however, is the other film that most affected me, a jaw-dropping story that continues to wrongfoot right until its spine-chilling end. It begins in 1994, when a 13-year-old boy goes missing from his home in San Antonio, Texas. Three years later, he seems to reappear – in Linares, Spain. As the film very quickly establishes, this is not the same boy at all. It's not even a boy. A 23-year-old man, for reasons we'll never understand, has begun adopting the personas of underage boys, with the perceived intent of passing through children's homes. Here, though, he sees a bigger scam, and when given the opportunity by Interpol decides to pose as the adolescent, blond American, despite being almost ten years older, swarthy and, er, French.

Layton's film works mostly because it sets a trap that snaps quite perfectly. The tension – why is he revealing so much so soon? – goes up a gear when we learn a little more about the family who accepted this interloper, refusing to denounce him even after immigration started having second thoughts. The result is a taut, economic piece of storytelling that, though it never hits the chilling paydirt it threatens to, definitely taunts us with a rich, lurid American Gothic mystery.

Sundance 2012: Seventh Report

2012-02-11T09:00:00.000-08:00

Mark Duplass continues to be a Sundancefixture, this year starring in two very unlikely romantic comedies. The first, Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister, is technically a Toronto movie,since it premiered there, and, although I enjoyed the performances, Iwas hoping for a little more from it. Very much in the style of herlast film, the excellent Humpday, this is a film about three peopleand an awkward situation. Duplass plays Jack, who is packed off byhis best friend Iris (Emily Blunt) to stay in her father's vacationhouse, unaware that her lesbian sister Hannah (Rosemarie Dewitt) isstaying there too, having broken up with her partner. Jack and Hannahhave a drunken fling, which not only results in red faces in themorning but causes more embarrassment when Iris makes a surprisevisit.

Though the performances are excellent,the material isn't quite as rich as Humpday, in which two straightbest friends resolve to make a gay porn film together. Your Sister'sSister looks at a similar bond, this time between two sisters, buteven at a brisk 90 minutes it feels a little stretched and whatstarts as an intimate drama quickly runs out of places to go. Moresatisfying was Colin Trevorrow's Safety Not Guaranteed,in which Duplass plays Kenneth, a mysterious supermarket worker whoplaces an ad in a Seattle newspaper's lonely hearts column, lookingfor a partner to go time-travelling with. The paper commissions astory about it, so flaky reporterJeff (Jake Johnson) ropes in two interns – including acerbichipster Darius(Aubrey Plaza) – to go with him on the assignment.

Dariusis what might have happened to Thora Birch's character in GhostWorld, and the oddball relationship that develops between her andKenneth is surprisingly fresh. The central conceit – has Kennethmade a time machine or not? – is kept wonderfully vague until theend, and screenwriter Derek Connolly sidewinds into some very darkterritory along the way, as Kenneth reveals his reasons for hisobsession and Darius explains why she'd like to join him. It's not afeelgood movie as such, but this a very likeable film, especially inthe way it brings together two uncommon characters and gives them thekeys to a happy ending they seem to want to deny themselves.

I'veseen James Marsh's BBC Films production Shadow Dancer described as “moving”, which isabsolutely something it is not. Some words they can definitely havefor the poster are “powerful”, “tense” and “mesmerising”,but its absence of sentiment is what keeps it ticking. And that is noidle remark; after a 70s prologue in which a young boy is shot deadon the streets of Belfast, the film literally begins with a bomb,some 20 years later, as Irish girl Colette (Andrea Riseborough), themurdered boy's big sister, rides the London tube with a leather bagon her lap. Nothing is said, but Marsh creates an ominous tension asColette first drops the bag then makes her escape through thelabyrinthine tunnels of the station. Her mission aborted, Colette ispulled up by MI5, who inform her that he brother was killed by an IRAbullet, not a British one as her family believes. Her handler, Mac(Clive Owen), convinces her that there is a way out for her if shewants to leave, as he believes she does. All she has to do is informon her elder brother, who is bitterly opposed to the ongoing peaceprocess.

Interestingly,Marsh keeps things bleached out and simple; there's little dialogueand even less in the way of exposition. The only character we reallyunderstand is Mac, caught in a no man's land between two amoralsubcultures and trying to play by the rules when the game is beingchanged all around him. It's also, unusually for this kind of story,a film about women, whether it's the scared, unhappy Colette, or thefilm's confident, composed M figure (Gillian Anderson), who makesharsh life or death decisions while leading a normal family-orientedlife in the suburbs. Marsh's entry in the Red Riding trilogy easilyproved he could handle fiction, but what stands out here is just howseparate the director keeps his equally excellent documentary work.There's nothing arch or tricksy here, and hopefully there'll berewards for this movie at the end of the year. It is, in everycategory, exceptional, with an edge-of-the-seat ending thatpractically demands a second viewing. (Which I gave it two days later...)

MyBrother The Devil was another gritty British film about familyloyalties, this time from Sally El-Hosaini. The film won a deservedcinematography award for DoP David Raedeker, who creates anastonishing sense of space and grace in some unexpected parts of EastLondon. The seeds of urban drama may seem grimly familiar – theyoung Mo (Fady Elsayed) desperately wants to follow hisbadass brother Rashid (James Floyd) into a life of crime – but theUSP here as the boys are second-generation Arab-British. I wanted tolike this more than I did, but to explain why would rob the film ofone it big surprises, which in some ways separates it from thecountless ’hood movies that have proliferated in the UK over theyears. It takes the film in an interesting direction, but, for me itseemed a little jarring. Still, there are some excellent moments andinsights here, especially in the young supporting cast playing streetthugs and vicious, pint-sized gangsters.

Comingsoon: Searching For Sugar Man, Room 237, Big Boys GoBananas, The Imposter, Two Days In New York, Compliance, Goats, Wrong– and John Dies At The End.

Sundance 2012: Sixth Report

2012-02-02T02:59:00.000-08:00

By chance, one particular day brought together two very different movies on the theme of inebriation. The first, Smashed, is the sort of movie that often screens at Sundance, starring an actress better known for more glamorous roles in a part that requires a lot of crying and looking ugly. In the past we've had the likes of Sherrybaby (Maggie Gyllenhaal, good) and Come Early Morning (Ashley Judd, not so good), so I was perhaps a little cynical when I read that Mary Elizabeth Winstead was now giving the whole serious thing a go, with a starring role in a film about a woman wrestling with sobriety. It is, for certain, not the most lavish film to screen at the festival, and wait-line gossip suggested that it had been readied in superfast time since shooting as late as October last year. But for all that, it's a well-written and nicely observed comedy-drama, with a really good central performance that will hopefully win Winstead some better roles in the new year.

She plays Kate, a first-grade teacher whose drinking is getting out of control, specifically when, after a late-night bender, she throws up in front of her startled class. She tells the headmistress she's pregnant, a lie that will come back to haunt her, and it seems no lessons have been learned when almost immediately she's out on the razz again, smoking crack with some random stranger she meets in the local bar. The crack incident, a scary loss of time and memory, serves as a wake-up call, and, aided by an AA-attending fellow teacher, she embarks on a quest for sobriety, which doesn't prove to be quite as easy as she expects it to be.

Aside from Winstead's performance – which is pretty amazing considering how hard it is for anyone to play a convincing drunk, let alone an actor with a CV that includes the dance movie Make It Happen – James Ponsoldt's second feature is remarkable also for the route it takes in charting Kate's journey. Although the lows are pretty low (pissing in the corner shop is a boozy non-no by anyone's standards), Smashed wryly suggests that getting sober is not just the end of one set of problems but the beginning of yet another, which Kate starts to realise when she sees her partner with new eyes. It isn't always convincing – Kate's frumpy skirts alone seem to be trying too hard to persuade us that this is a real woman, not a glamourpuss acting – but there's a lot of range (and especially humour) in the nuanced script (by Ponsoldt and Susan Burke) that make this well worth catching.

Jon Wright's Grabbers has a slightly more irreverent take on the drink issue, being a romantic but surprisingly scary monster movie that feels like a lost Amblin flick, shaken and stirred with a dash of The Guard. Richard Coyle stars as the dishevelled Ciaran O'Shea, chief of police on the remote Erin Island, which lies some way off the coast of Ireland. Ciaran is something of a shambles and a lazy one at that, so when his partner takes a vacation he is more than dismayed to find that his replacement, Garda Lisa Nolan (Ruth Bradley), is a teetotal workaholic, ready to fight crime in a town where there really isn't any. O'Shea and Nolan bump heads from the off, but when a series of creepy incidents occur, culminating in the violent death of a local man, the pair begin to investigate, discovering a slippery new type of space alien that feasts on the blood of humans.

What has this to do with drinking? Well, the novelty here is that the creatures – named “grabbers”, much to the annoyance of scientist Adam Smith (Russell Tovey), who rather fancies something long and Latin – are allergic to massive levels of alcohol, thus creating something of a problem for our shambolic hero. To save the locals, he must, albeit reluctantly, remain sober, while to protect the actually-rather-lovely Lisa, he must persuade this most uptight of women to drink ridiculous levels of beer and whiskey and God knows what. With this plan in mind, O'Shea summons the villagers to the local pub, where they drink themselves into a stupor, unaware of the danger lurking outside.

From that brief description, you could be forgiven for thinking of Grabbers as a one-note sketch comedy, but the surprise is just how beautifully Wright's film works. Scripted by first-timer Kevin Lehane, it aims for genre seriousness first and foremost, so just as important to the burgeoning romance between O'Shea and Nolan is the extraterrestrial threat. There are several stages to the menace, starting with a series of Alien-like eggs that become pint-sized, not-exactly-threatening “jumpers”, and Wright has a lot of fun with them, squeezing in an affectionate nod to Gremlins while making sure that the fully grown creatures – a seething mass of tentacles that swarm around a vicious, fanged maw – are far from cute. Paddy Eason's VFX are excellent in this respect, and what could so easily have been a Comic Strip knock-off punches way above its weight, thanks also to a big, atmospheric score by Christian Henson.

I'm not sure yet when Grabbers will be making its UK debut, but the film deserves to find an audience both here and overseas. Like Gareth Evans' The Raid, it's not only a finely crafted tribute to a long-lost style of filmmaking but it stands up in its own right too. Like Super 8 laced with Special Brew – but with nothing to sleep off in the morning.

Sundance 2012: Fifth Report

2012-02-02T00:58:00.000-08:00

Beasts Of The Southern Wild, by Benh Zeitlin, was an amazing discovery, a film that certainly swelled to fit the confines of Park City but may struggle when it crosses into the wider market. Fox Searchlight picked it up, which was certainly brave of them, since it's not likely even to make a fraction of the figures that The Tree Of Life did for them. Terrence Malick is in some way a good starting point here, since its fractured voiceover and opening, montage-like scenes of an anarchic rural idyll in some ways recall his 1978 film Days Of Heaven. But that film is like Citizen Kane in comparison; where Malick's film saw a very complicated story from a rather simple girl's point of view, Beasts Of the Southern Wild shows a much younger girl wrestling with her immediate circumstances in the aftermath of a huge and devastating Katrina-like weather event.

It promises to be a slice of fashionable poverty-row rural porn, more in the vein of Le Quattro Volte than Winter's Bone, with six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) living in fanciful disarray with her harsh but paradoxically libertarian father Wink (Dwight Henry). Like the 2010 Russian film Silent Souls, a film with certain similarities, it presents a small town with strange customs, mostly involving booze and fireworks. It is called The Bathtub, and we soon find out why: in the course of a massive storm, The Bathtub fills up, leaving Hushpuppy and Wink without a home. What follows is an episodic trek in which the two reconnect with their fellow townspeople and decide on a dangerous plan of action to reclaim their roots. In some ways, it resembles an arthouse Mad Max 2, but with the crucial difference being that this world is ours, it isn't some apocalyptic future. The message, though, is a refreshing change from the kind of Sting-saves-the-rainforest stuff you might be expecting. From her father, Hushpuppy inherits a precocious militancy that, despite the interference of do-good white liberals, literally prepares her for the end of the world.

Ry Russo-Young's Nobody Walks talks place in our world too, not that you'd know it. I liked this, with reservations; it's a kind of Nicole Holofcener-lite (and that's saying something) ensemble piece about a young, early-twenties avant-garde film director from the east coast named Martine (Olivia Thirlby) who moves in with LA soundman Peter (John Krasinski) and his family. She's pretty, he's not slow to notice, and an affair ensues, with the usual disastrous consequences. If the film had been a more impressionistic slice-of-life piece – Peter's counsellor wife is being courted by a patient she is clearly attracted to – it might have worked, especially because of a subplot involving their thorny teenage daughter, who is dealing with a lecherous Italian teacher. But the focus on Martine as a rootless femme fatale creates a vacuum at the heart of the film that calls to mind Mike Nichols' (to me) horrific Closer, and that can only be A Bad Thing. Still, the performances are all good; Thirlby carries off a hard part, and it's good to see Krasinski play against his usual goofy, loveable type.

Just as loveable as John Krasinski is Josh Radnor, of How I Met Your Mother fame. I must admit I knew nothing about him before his last film, Happythankyoumoreplease, which I thought I hated but later remembered I liked – but only the bits with writer/director Radnor in. On those terms, Liberal Arts (pictured) is an improvement of one thousand per cent. It flounders in the final stages, but until then it is a really sweet, funny and sometimes surprisingly acerbic comedy, in which Radnor stars as Jesse, a thirtysomething college admin worker who is invited back to his old alma mater for his former tutor's retirement party. There he meets Zibby, (Elizabeth Olsen) a 19-year-old student with whom he has an immediate rapport, and what starts as a crush develops into something deeper. Or can it? The great thing about Liberal Arts is that it wrestles with the question that Woody Allen has ignored for the greater part of his career – does age matter? Like Woody, Jesse decides that it may not, but, unlike Woody, he finds it really, really uncomfortable dating a girl 15 years his junior.

I was half dreading this film, because Happythankyoumoreplease suggested two things: a writer who was very talented and a director who needed more discipline. Liberal Arts, however, is very much the work of a writer-director who has reached equilibrium, and, thinking about it now, I'd forgotten how much it made me laugh. Radnor is a natural and gifted comedian, while Olsen, for whom so much is resting on this, makes an effortless transition from drama in a role for which she is quite ridiculously perfect. A guest spot from Richard Jenkins is enjoyable enough, but special mention must be made of Allison Janney, whose Mrs Krabappel-like Romantics professor brought the house down, and Zac Efron, whose stoner-dude cameo is a genuine delight.

Disappointments? There were surprisingly few this year, although the tin-hatted, copper-bottom bruiser of the bunch was undoubtedly Spike Lee's Red Hook Summer. Ostensibly one of his lighter pieces, like Crooklyn or She Hate Me, this starts in a gaudy one-hot-summer style, with an Atlanta boy being left to stay with his preacher grandfather (Clarke Peters). At about two hours ten, this was looking not to be an easy watch, with lots of musical interludes, bad comedy and even worse acting from its younger cast, who seemed to have to shout to be heard over the layers of deafening music. However, after an excruciating 90 minutes, the film managed an astonishing turnabout, with a sudden burst of drama that almost – almost – made the preceding slog worthwhile. It would be a massive spoiler to explain what happens then, but, suffice to say, Peters' performance becomes a powerhouse, matched only by the superb Nate Parker as a previously little-seen gang member. The film itself should be filed under Minor Spike, but this sequence is one of the best he's ever filmed.

Sundance 2012: Fourth Report

2012-02-02T00:48:00.000-08:00

With its strangely chipper demeanour and wry view of the near future, Jake Schreier's Robot And Frank plays a little bit like a throwback Disney TV movie, from the days when the studio made oddball curios like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. It stars Frank Langella as Frank, a man of retirement age who is starting to lose his marbles, much to his family's dismay. Frank doesn't see what all the fuss is about; his memory may be fading but his instincts are still sharp – when he shoplifts, it's deliberate, not an act of befuddlement – so he is outraged when his son (James Marsden) presents him with an an android careworker. The robot, who never gets a name (and is voiced by Peter Sarsgaard), tries to set a daily regime for Frank, but Frank has other ideas. Frank, we soon learn, is a former cat burglar, and in the guileless robot he sees the perfect partner in crime. Together, they plan a series of heists, culminating in a daring raid on the home of local yuppie.

Although it has nothing else in common with Red Lights (see Third Report), there is an extraordinary overlap between the two films, since both deal with the human mind and how it can be manipulated. Langella is simply perfect as Frank, the grizzled ex-con who always believes himself to be one step ahead of the law and his family, leading to some great twists and revelations as we find out, by turn, that sometimes he's right and less often he's wrong. The film's handling of Alzheimer's is certainly unique, but I'm still ambivalent about it, since it brings the story to a disappointingly tidy climax. However, Langella is just great, and there's a lot to be said for a film that allows us (and not just Frank) to invest in a mechanical man with, as it tells us repeatedly, no personality or feelings.

I approached Arbitrage with a degree of caution, since America appears to be incapable of telling stories about the financial crisis without adding layers of heavily inked moral shading. For example, I am still baffled by the rapturous reception afforded the dreadful Margin Call, which presented the traders of 2008 as being somehow like those (literally) poor fishermen in The Perfect Storm. However, director Nicholas Jarecki being the brother of Andrew and Eugene, I knew it wouldn't be a total write-off, and, indeed, it wasn't. Rather than dwelling entirely on rich people's problems, Abitrage is at its best when suggesting that the whole of human existence is subject to arbitration on every level. But even while doing that, yet again, it puts an unconvincing, glossy sheen on the lives of the privileged.

Richard Gere, extremely well-cast, plays Robert Miller, a Manhattan businessman known for his acumen and predictive skills when playing the market. As his sixtieth birthday looms, he begins to think about retiring and selling the family business, but an untypically disastrous investment has drained the company coffers. To cover the shortfall, Miller has arranged an illegal bridging loan from a friend, but the financiers who are supposed to be taking over are dragging their heels, and Miller's now-impatient friend is demanding his money back. This, of course, is not a good time to be involved in a driving felony, but one duly occurs when Miller falls asleep at the wheel, accidentally killing his annoying French artist mistress (played by Letitia Casta, whose part is cut mercifully short).

What follows ought to be gripping but simply ticks over like a superior airport novel, as Miller ropes in the African-American son of his former chauffeur to help him escape the scene and cover his tracks, adding some much-needed variety to a so-far one-track story. Tim Rothsubsequently turns up to throw a spanner in the works, playing the most suspicious yet somehow worst cop in the world, but by this time it's quite hard to know what angle the film is coming from. Personally, I'm a bit tired of moral ambiguity in these kinds of stories, and the film's constant reference to Miller's ongoing dilemma – if he fesses up, the deal will go south, making hundreds of people redundant – gets very tiresome, when, after all, a woman lies dead and her rich lover has deliberately and callously washed his hands of her.

Lay The Favorite (pictured) was, ironically, one of the least lauded films at the festival, but I rather liked it, not least because this is the film that will likely send Rebecca Hall off on the career that Gemma Arterton was pencilled in to have. On Twitter I called it a “bubblegum Grifters”, since it presents a similar band of outsiders in a similar milieu, only this time no one gets hurt and there's a touch more toplessness. DV DeVincentis, writer of Grosse Point Blank (as no one seemed to notice) scripted it, and Stephen Frears directed it, which seems like an odd match and is doubtless the reason that it got the reviews it did.

But I thought it worked. Not only is Hall fantastic as the clueless Beth Raymer – a ditzy girl who not only craves a job with “stability, excitement and glamour” but whose father thinks that her becoming a cocktail waitress is actually a career progression – Lay The Favorite is an above-average Vegas comedy with an unusual, restless structure and some very funny lines. Much of the disdain that fell on this movie may be due to Bruce Willis's light but not exactly prominent performance as Dink, the bookie who inducts Beth into the world of gambling. I think, though, that the film will play better to female audiences, since Hall turns Beth from a clueless cutie into a woman with smarts if not brains, and that transformation alone was enough to make me smile.

Sundance 2012: Third Report

2012-02-02T00:41:00.000-08:00

Watching I Am Not A Hipster, (left) screening as part of the Next strand, I came to realise that neither am I. Although Destin Cretton's film was well-made and performed, I found it hard to relate to the central character, Brook Hyde (Dominic Bogart) an indie musician who returns to his San Diego roots after the death of his mother and the minor success of his debut album. Hyde is a talented but cynical multi-instrumentalist who finds himself sickened by the shallowness of the world that worships him, populated mainly by men with pencil moustaches, skinny jeans, woofly hair and black-rimmed Real-D nerd glasses. Hyde's plight isn't so sympathetic to anyone who already finds the hipster scene beyond parody, but for those open to Hyde's surprisingly unselfconsious music, of which there is a lot, this is a sweet, offbeat comedy that will surely find underground favour.

Cult status certainly beckons to Rodrigo Cortes's Red Lights, his follow-up to the claustrophobic man-in-a-box thriller Buried, which premiered in Sundance two years ago. There was laughter at the beginning – after a massively loud bang in an ostensibly haunted house, a character asks, “Did you hear that?” – and lots of WTFs at the end, but in between there was an interesting, if uneven supernatural detective story that would be much improved by a brutal re-edit of the second half.

The film stars Sigourney Weaver and Cillian Murphy as a kind of a gender-swap Mulder and Scully, a pair of academic ghostbusters who the travel across the country investigating psychic phenomena. Margaret Matheson (Weaver) is a hard-nosed sceptic whose search for proof of a higher level of existence is fuelled by her devotion to her comatose son, while Tom Buckley (Murphy) is her brilliant if somewhat underachieving assistant. Usually, the two are in agreement on everything, but when reclusive, blind stage psychic Simon Silver (Robert De Niro) emerges from retirement, they start to fall out. Buckley wants to test Silver's abilities, ranging from spoon-bending to telepathy and... well, that's about it, but Matheson prefers to leave him well alone. Could it possibly be that that Silver is the real deal? A creepy campaign of harassment suggests that he might not be faking.

Daft it may be but when Red Lights finally gets off the blocks, the mid-section is entertaining and really quite smart. Weaver, who is so very good in Rampart, makes the most of a meaty role that allows her to be ballsy, professorial and motherly – all at the same time – while Murphy makes the transition from sidekick to hero with deceptive subtlety. What, then, prompted all the head-scratching? For some reason, Cortes blessed (or cursed) his verbose script with a number of lengthy speeches, especially Silver, who bores the pants off his audience with rambling monologues that cause one paying punter to grouse, “I didn't pay to hear Hamlet.” De Niro is very much comme-ci comme-ça as Silver, with a performance that is marginally better than usual (which isn't hard) and misleadingly suggests an Angel Heart-style reveal (which doesn't exactly help). But the real problem is the ending, or rather endings plural, which muddy a very clever twist. A few judicious snips, as those who saw the original cut of Southland Tales will attest, could make all the difference.

Sundance 2012: Second Report

2012-02-02T00:27:00.000-08:00

The Raid (above) isn't technically a Sundance movie,since it premiered last autumn in Toronto, but it certainly found the right audience here. As all the pre-publicity suggests, it is indeed a powerhouse of an action thriller: brutal, super-violent and, despite an ominous 100-minute running time, a surprisingly fast-paced thriller that never drags. The director is Gareth Evans, an Indonesia-based Welshman, and the most thrilling aspect of The Raid is not how stunningly it captures its Asian fight-movie set-pieces but just how beautifully it sites them in a grindhouse context. Which means that just as it recalls such 70s cult items as Streetfighter and Enter The Dragon, it also captures the early pulp-indie spirit of George Romero and John Carpenter. Indeed, The Raid not only gives the latter a run for his money, thanks a neat midway twist it also combines Assault On Precinct 13 and Escape From New York into one breathless two-for-one bloodbath.

The plot concerns a police raid on a huge, crumbling tower block in Jakarta, where crime boss Tama has built up his drug-dealing operation. The building is a vertical slum, mostly populated by lowlifes and criminals who live in lawless, rent-conrolled squalor. The cops go in, most of them rookies, but it appears Tama is waiting for them, and what begins as an attack soon turns into a rout. If you've always wanted to like martial arts movies but never quite come to grips with the work of, say, Ringo Lam, The Raid is the film you've been waiting for. It doesn't just drift from fight to fight, there's an Infernal Affairs-style intrigue to drive things along, and the combat scenes vary greatly, from gunfights to handfights via explosions and all sorts of gravity-defying martial ballet. Momentum are releasing this film in the spring, and fans of genre films will not be disappointed.

Next up was Simon Killer (right), from the creative team behind Martha Marcy May Marlene. I first heard about this film in Cannes from Brady Corbet, who talked about it while promoting the Lars Von Trier movie Melancholia there. It came as no surprise, then, that Von Trier was thanked in the closing credits of this gripping, dreamlike sort-of-thriller, as is Michael Haneke, since its blank spaces and emotional distance owes more to European cinema than American. But if it sounds like an icy art movie, it isn't – this is only the framing style, and the film wouldn't work without the brave central performance from Corbet as Simon, a recent college graduate who has arrived in Paris after a traumatic break-up with his girlfriend. At first we feel sympathy for Simon as he stumbles through his new city, awkwardly trying to make friends and masturbating forlornly in his borrowed apartment. But slowly we reveal that our sympathy is the currency that feeds Simon's hidden animus, and over the course of the next 105 minutes we see the mask of mundanity start to drop.

The film takes a while to reveal itself, and its frank sexuality suggests a Shame-style character study. But as it progressed I was put in mind of the news story about the Japanese student who murdered his English teacher and left her in a bath of sand before going on the run for months (if not years). This has nothing to do with Simon's story per se, but the ending reveals that Simon is capable of something equally inexplicable and evil, beneath a veneer of banality and fecklessness. My good friend Jeff Goldsmith noted comparisons with Taxi Driver – notably in the parallel affairs Simon conducts with a seedy hooker and a well-to-do French girl – but Simon Killer is its own thing. Director Antonio Campos touched on the pressurised male American psyche in his last film, After School, and it struck me that Simon Killer is maybe After-After School. It's not an easy ride, but admirers of cutting-edge American-indie drama should start tracking this film now.

Sundance 2012: First Report

2012-02-02T00:02:00.000-08:00

Sundance 2012 began with a rare audience at the Bing Bar on Main Street with the man himself, Mr Robert Redford, true Hollywood superstar, festival founder and self-confessed documentary nut. Though something of a will o’ the wisp at Sundance, Redford still definitely has a firm grasp on the event, which he took pains to explain is simply one aspect of the Sundance Institute. Much of his work in Park City, he explained, takes place behind the scenes, notably at a filmmakers lunch on the opening weekend, at which he gets to meet the directors and discuss their movies. Far from being a Meet The Queen kind of thing, it’s a chance for Redford to share his own experiences – which, he told me, aren't quite so removed from the trials and tribulations of the average independent director.

He said, “I tell them, ‘You don't know me, but, believe me, when I started to make films, I went though a lot of what you're going through.’ No one knows that. Because a lot of the films I wanted to make were not ones to be accepted. So I was told, ‘We don't think this is commercial,’ and I would say, ‘Please, this is a story I want to tell.’ They would say, ‘Well, we’ll let you tell it if you do a bigger film for us and do this for under $2m. So I would do The Great Gatsby, The Way We Were – films I was happy to do. But those were big-budget films, and they would then let me make my movie. And some of those films were not easy to come by, I’d make them and they wouldn't release them, because they didn't think they were commercial. Or they took four years to make. Or I had to go out of the mainstream to find somebody to support it. Or I had to have somebody in the mainstream tell me the truth about what I was going through and warn me, ‘By the way, you're wasting your time. This project is already gone. I don't want to see you wasting your time.’ These were heartbreaking things for me to hear. So I've had some hardships too. And I try to share that with them, so they don't think I just parachuted in from somewhere.”

I put it to Redford that the irony there is that films like The Way We Were – obviously The Great Gatsby is currently getting the Baz Luhrmann 3D treatment – are no longer being made in Hollywood, at least not as mainstream studio fare. “They’re making big films,” he nodded, “but not those kinds of films. They’re films that are related to special effects. And they're not so much story-related as they effects-related. And that's OK. It's a broad industry. But it seems like the industry is more focused on what is gonna guarantee a bottom line on a return. Not that I think it I necessarily will. When we start spending $100m-plus dollars... That’s not a business I want to be in.”

The first film I saw was Wish You Were Here (pictured) by Australian director Kieran Darcy-Smith, starring Joel Edgerton as suburban Sydney boatmaker and family man Dave Flannery (although, unlike his equally homely physics teacher in Warrior, he doesn't have a martial arts sideline here). The film started very well for me, with a crisply edited montage of a group of tourists – Dave, his wife, his sister-in-law and her boyfriend – on holiday in Cambodia. Sightseeing turns to partying, drugs are involved – and with a crash, the image cuts to a bloodied Edgerton staggering through a bleak morning landscape. Back in Sydney, we learn that the sister's boyfriend has gone missing, and Darcy-Smith's film reveals the disturbing truth behind his disappearance in a series of flashbacks.

I was with this film for quite a while, despite its digressions. Although Cinema Of Unease is, I think, a Kiwi term, it applies here, and I liked the way Wish You Were Here fused genre elements with domestic drama (as deployed to great effect in David Michod's Animal Kingdom). The performances were very good too, especially Felicity Price as the wife and Teresa Palmer as the sister – but when the film played its hand I felt very short-changed. Just when it should be becoming leaner and tighter, Darcy-Smith introduces key plot elements that we cannot hope to see reconciled in a trim 90-minute movie. Which is a shame, since, when it is good, Wish You Were Here is very good, creating a mood of mystery and tension that, sadly, also sets it up for a fall.

Set report: Sherlock Holmes – A Game Of Shadows

2012-01-01T04:39:00.000-08:00

PART I

The difference could be in Robert Downey Jr’s shoes. The last time I was on a Sherlock Holmes set, though the costumes were wonderful enough, there was a feeling that the clothes were a little less than bespoke. If you’ve ever lined up with extras to be kitted out for a period movie, you’ll know that, unless you’re the star, the clothes being handed to you are likely to fit just approximately, and if you’re lucky enough to be a featured player only then do you get that little extra attention.

On the first Sherlock Holmes movie, the shoes seemed scuffed and battered, which suited the way Guy Ritchie was bringing Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective back to life. Rather than the airy, debonair Victorian gent popularised by the pipe-puffing Basil Rathbone, this new Sherlock Holmes was to be a rumpled debauched genius with an inquiring mind that solved the most exquisite mysteries and sought excitement in the most dangerous places. Gin joints and opium dens. Illegal bare-knuckle boxing clubs. This was not exactly a black-tie-and-tails world.

On set, though, in London’s East End, Downey is wearing a discreet but distinctly killer pair of black leather boots. These boots suggest several things. The first thing is perhaps a slightly bigger budget. After all, the first Holmes movie, made for $90m, was a gamble for the suits at Warner Bros. Though Ritchie, Downey and co-star Jude Law, as the long-suffering, patrician Dr John Watson, all hoped the story would extend to a trilogy, only the box office gods would say whether that might happen. They were in luck. The film made over $200m in the US and £25m in the UK.

The next thing the shoes seem to say is that Holmes has pleased his taskmasters. Downey and his wife Susan, also a producer on the film, seem to be slightly more in charge this time round, poring over a shooting schedule that contains convenient rest days to allow the star to attend to 2011 Golden Globes show. But more than anything else the shoes send a signal that Holmes has evolved. Sherlock Holmes 2 – the day Empire visits the set, it has yet to acquire its grandiose subtitle A Game Of Shadows (numerals are so pre-Pirates) – will not be resting on its laurels.

“Last time,” Downey muses, “we were, I think, treated very kindly, considering that the movie had enough really good, bright, sweet parts, and it kinda held up. However, it wasn’t exactly the most innovative or clever act three of any movie. But we’re all confident that, this time, for the bones of the story, we couldn’t work it out any better than we have.”

Today, what we’re seeing is something called The Shush Club. Or it may be something called a shush club, since nobody seems to know. Because the first thing you need to know is that nobody talks about shush clubs. A sort of late-19th century private drinking establishment, it is a rather louche place that attracts decadent dandies. Holmes, therefore, makes a beeline for it, convincing John Watson, who has been engaged to Mary Morstan (Kelly Reilly) for over a year now, that this would be the perfect place for his bachelor party, whether he wants one or not.

Wilton’s Music Hall, down Graces Alley, Shadwell, has been transformed for the night, which is to say not actually very much, since it is, by day, a period throwback anyway. But things have been added. A bar has been installed, and a stage for acrobats to perform on. But these physical flourishes aren’t what’s grabbing everyone’s attention. So that Ritchie and his crew can block out a fight scene, a gymnast in full Russian assassin costume runs, jumps and cannonballs high above our heads. It seems ridiculously dangerous. Until someone produces an iPhone and shows us the gymnast’s showreel, in which the performer gets dressed and undressed while performing cartwheels.

This scene will be notable for a couple of reasons. The first, obviously, is that Holmes’s plans for a nightcap will be somewhat interrupted. But this is also the first time the detective will meet one of the film’s three new guest stars. The first, Stephen Fry, who plays Holmes’s brother Mycroft, has popped off to film his terribly clever TV show QI. But upstairs, in a makeshift dressing room is Noomi Rapace, better known as The Girl who, with her trademark dragon tattoo, played with fire and kicked the hornet’s nest in the hit Swedish adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s crime novels. Rapace, now back to her normal bodyweight, has few of Lisbeth Salander’s angles and a surprising number of curves. Which is just as well, since she’s playing a traveller who seduces Holmes into her world.

“Her name is Asima,” she reveals. “She’s a traveller, she’s a survivor – she’s used to taking care of her self – and she’s used to taking care of herself. I think that Holmes and she have some kind of connection. They’re both... on the go. Restless. Looking. Heading somewhere. Trying to find some deeper purpose in life. I think they have some similarities. He’s almost like a gypsy himself. He doesnt have a proper home, really. He’s always travelling, he’s always looking for new ideas, he’s really passionate about people, about the human psyche, about science.”

So how did Rapace end up here? “I met Robert and Susan when I was in LA at the end of August,” she recalls. “I was there for four or five days. So many meetings! I only sat down with them for about half an hour, but we had a really good chat. And not about this movie – we talked about acting, about dreams, about the future, the kind of movies we wanted to make. And I felt really from the first second that I liked the energy around them, I liked the way they think and the way they want to work. And Robert, he’s really something – he’s really passionate about his work. They called my agent a couple of weeks later and wanted me to go to London and meet Guy Ritchie. So I did, and a week later they said they wanted me to do this part. So it happened very quickly.”

Indeed, more quickly than you might imagine. “I only had about three weeks to prepare,” she smiles, “but I knew what to expect because one of the producers had told me about the character. And he told me about this gypsy woman – what kind of background she had – and for me that was amazing. Because I had a Spanish father, and he had gypsy roots, and I have always wanted to look into that side of me. So it felt like a gift. My father was a flamenco singer, and the flamenco tradition is very close to the gypsies in Spain. And from that moment I started to think about this woman.”

This might come as a shock to fans of The Girl movies, but Rapace, in the flesh, is far from the character she played in those movies. She smiles quite a lot, and doesn’t quite fit the standard Scandinavian archetype. “My mom is Swedish,” she says, “but I lived in Iceland for a couple of years, and I think the way I am, and my temperament and my energy is pretty far away from the Swedish people. I didn’t know my father. In fact, I only met him a couple of times – he’s dead now – but I always wanted to dig into that part of me. Although I didn’t really have much time, because everything happened so quickly. So I’m having to do all that research, all that kind of stuff now, finding out as much as I can about gypsies, about their culture, and how they lived 100 years ago.” She laughs. “I guess I’m not so typical Swedish!”

PART II

“Dandelion and burdock?!” asks Robert Downey Jr.

“We tried that yesterday,” says Jude Law. “It’s kind of, er, medicinal.”

“No,” says Downey. “It’s like drinking a flower.”

“Yeah,” says Law, “but it’s got that really medicinal aroma, the kind where you think, ‘This has gotta be good for you.’”

We’re now in an Airmaster, which is like a Winnebago but made of metal and cooler looking. This in itself shows some progress, since the last time Empire met these two it was in a steel container, the kind you see on the news with the remains of dead immigrants inside them. Lunch is about to be served, by an American chap named James.

“Oh my God,” says Downey, “this looks fucking righteous. What’s it called today, James?”

“Shit...” says James. “I don’t know.”

“Simple English country food,” roars Law. “English COUNTRY food!

“English food,” agrees Guy Ritchie.

“How apt,” notes Downey.

As the chaps dig into the parsnip purée and horse radish, it seems a good time to mention that Sherlock Holmes – the movie – seems a little more confident second time around. There’s a reeeeeeallly long pause. Then Guy speaks.

“Yeah,” he says. Then he laughs. “But I think we’re more confident than we were on the last one too. I certainly feel that. I feel certainly more confident that these two can act, which I was fucking dubious about the first time round!” The others laugh. “Errrrrrrm..... I think we hit the ground running on this one. But we knew what we were doing. Well, I feel like that.”

Law agrees. “Although we immediately got on, there was still a certain amount of dancing around, working each other out. This time, it was, ‘Great, let’s go.’”

“We had a brutal schedule last time,” adds Downey, “but it was so much fun, and we were so kind of wondering if we could catch this thing on fire and make it work. And pretty early on we figured we were onto something. That it was an ass-kicker. And this time around, we only really started the action last week, which had me a little grumpy for a minute.

“It’s been completely the other way round this time,” says Law. “The first time, we got into the action from the get-go, and at the end we were in New York shooting all the interiors. This time we were in Baker Street from day one.”

“We shot a lot of waffle straight away,” says Guy. “There was a lot of wafflage.”

So what’s the starting point, is there a case to be solved?

“We’re joining dots,” says Law. “Well, he’s joining dots, and I’m getting worried that everyone’s not taking him seriously.”

“Everybody knows Moriarty’s in this one, don’t they?” interrupts Guy.

Yes. It’s even on the Imdb.

“And everybody knows that John and Mary are off doing their thing,” says Downey. “Watson doesn’t live there right now. So the first thing we wanna talk about is this: what is the state of Baker Street next time Watson sees it? What happens there without his presence? And it’s pretty off the wall. But sometimes someone just looks like they’re a little batty. But in fact they’re really just concentrated on something that no one else quite believes yet, but they’re certain of it.”

So what brings them back together again?

Law: “I was going to say...”

Downey: “A bachelor party!”

Law: “Well, a self-made bachelor party, But it was interesting to come up with an idea that would force Watson out of retirement believably. It couldn’t just be for the craic. It had to be for a real reason.”

Downey: “Even last time there was a certain amount of Holmes really never telling Watson what he was up to and taking the piss out of him all the time. So this time around they kind of meet more on equal footing. Watson doesn’t have to come, he winds up being embroiled in it, but his status is really different this time. He’s honestly more central in the story, because you won’t feel the emotional impact of what the stakes are in this unless you’re seeing it through the eyes of the storyteller. So that was the biggest shift this time.”

Well, perhaps not quite. The biggest shift is arguably the introduction of Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Glimpsed briefly in the final moments of the first Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty’s identity gripped the internet for months.

“There were rumours about it even while we making the first one,” remembers Law.

“And they went on and on and on,” says Guy.

“At some point,” says Law, “someone stopped me in the street and told me a woman was gonna play him! I can’t remember who they said it was...”

“Well,” sniffs Downey, “you know what castings are like.”

Was it distracting?

“I dunno,” shrugs Guy. “It probably was. We all liked Brad Pitt and we all like Daniel Day-Lewis. They were spoken about at some point, I know.”

And Christoph Waltz, who was whisked off sushi by Ritchie after winning the Best Actor award, for his performance in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, at the 2010 Empire awards?

“I was slightly nervous about using Christoph,” says Guy, “because Tarantino used him so well previously. I didn’t want to be the director who fucked it all up. I mean, that’s responsibility of the director. If the film’s fucking shit, then who do you look to? You don’t look to the producers, you don’t really look to the actors, you have to look at the geezer who’s supposedly stringing the thing together. But, in the end, we liked the idea of going with Jared Harris, because we felt it was alternative, and it wasn’t a cliché.”

“And it definitely didn’t feel like event casting,” says Downey. “And the funny thing is, we got a better response from that than we would’ve gotten from any other choice we might’ve made. Anyway, the cool thing is, he came in and definitely started asking all the right questions. And he really demonstrated quickly that he was happy to come in and have things be very, very uncertain and watch them start to percolate and develop in front of his eyes. I mean, we don’t prefer to work that way. But we don’t just go out there and start shooting just ’cos we have a schedule either.”

Does Moriarty have a backstory?

“If you do a Marvel movie,” says Downey, speaking as someone who often does, “and somebody steps in and goes, ‘I have Captain America’s shield,’ and you don’t pay it off in the next one, the fans take that super-seriously. I think with the last movie we threw up a lot of pixie dust and some cool ideas, so now it’s going to go wherever it’s going. It’s not like we’re strapping a gun to Moriarty’s arm, or having him walk around with a remote control thing, setting bombs off. As a matter of fact, just like having Holmes not wear a deerstalker hat or smoke a long, swirly pipe, it’s almost like those are the two thing he shouldn’t do. But he’s up to some nasty stuff.”

“He’s in the foreground of the story,” says Law, “but not necessarily in our faces.”

“To me,” decides Downey, “what solved the bad-guy plot was casting Jared Harris. Because we realised, when we were developing this film, that once you say, ‘What’s the bad-guy plot?’ 430 times, you’re like, I don’t wanna make this movie any more. But once Jared was on board, it solved the issue. In the same way that casting solved the issue of, ‘Well, who’s my co-star in this movie – how’s this thing gonna work?’ Because once Jude and I met, everything took care of itself. And I think...

“…Once you’ve met Jared,” says Guy, “you’ll also think he’s evil.”

PART III

Somewhat fittingly, I don’t get to meet Jared Harris in the flesh; instead, he calls from his home in Los Angeles. The son of hellraiser Richard, Harris, 50, has had an interesting career, popping up in films as diverse as Todd Solondz’s Happiness, M Night Shyamalan’s Lady In The Water and Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, in which he played a very convincing Andy Warhol.

“The balloon got floated on this role fairly early on,” he says, “because there were two possible ways they were gonna do it. One was the very highly publicised Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Penn, Big Movie Star route. But the other option was just to get a character actor to do it, and there was an internal debate going on about which way to go. So the job was on the table, off the table, on the table, off the table for quite a long time and I stopped paying attention to it, to be honest. And one of the camps, I don’t know whose it was, wanted an actor who wouldn’t bring a lot of baggage with them, so that the audience would experience the character on its own terms. And that argument won out a week before they started, so I jumped on a plane and went to see Guy.”

Was it dispiriting to see the part offered and withdrawn? “No,” he insists. “They’re all fantastic actors, so, from an acting point of view – how wonderful to be mentioned in the same sentence as those guys? But the reality is that those guys are in a completely different league, in terms of their international celebrity. And that’s a whole different set of arithmetic, one that has nothing to do with acting at all. So when the conversation is being had on those terms, you can’t whack your head against the wall about it because you’re a non-starter on that level. You can’t worry about it. because if that is the bottom line, move on and look for something else. There’s nothing you can do.”

In truth, Harris is a much better bet than any of those actors, since Moriarty – only glimpsed twice in the novels, is not a star role – he’s more of a presence. “He’s the ringmaster,” says Harris. “He casts his shadow over the whole film. He’s the motivator of the plot. He has the plan that Holmes is trying to foil. I did a little bit of research into Moraiarty and I discovered that he was created by Arthur Conan Doyle as a match and a foil for Sherlock Holmes, so in that sense he was the first arch-villain, arch-nemesis, whatever you want to call them. And since then, those characters have become grander and grander and grander in terms of their ambition, so you can’t have a plot where he wants to take over the postal service. It’s got to be bigger than that.”

So he was created as kind of an “evil mirror” to Sherlock Holmes? Harris pauses, and thinks carefully. “I’m sure you’ve noticed that people,” he says, “who don’t really give a fuck what anybody else thinks, and don’t care what the consequences of their actions are as long as they’re OK, and don’t believe in any kind of divine retribution at all, they’re at license to do absolutely anything they want. And that makes them very dangerous. And people who operate within a moral compass, like Sherlock Holmes, their hands are tied. So I’d so say Moriarty is very dangerous.”

And as for any more detail, Harris clams up. He has, he says, been watching a lot of “bad-guy” movies, and reached some interesting conclusions. “I realised that once you know what your bad guy’s up to, you kind of lose interest in him. So to maintain the audience’s interest in the character you have to keep the audience guessing, With Alan Rickman in Die Hard, you only find out right at the very end that he’s trying to rob the place. And in Mission Impossible 3, you never find out what the Rabbit’s Foot is!”

“So…” he laughs, possibly twirling an invisible moustache.

“The longer you keep them guessing…”

“...The better off you are.”

* A version of this article appeared in the October 2011 issue of Empire magazine…

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Review

2011-12-12T09:00:00.001-08:00

“Fuck You You Fucking Fucker.” The T-shirt (briefly) worn by Rooney Mara's Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher's adaptation of Steig Larsson's best-selling novel speaks volumes. First of all, it addresses the nay-sayers who thought Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 original should be left alone – not because it was any kind of cinematic masterpiece, but because the previously unknown Noomi Rapace's centrepiece performance was deemed definitive. But it also deftly represents The Social Network director's personality. While aspects of the media disparaged his awards-season chances against The King's Speech last year, Fincher was already disengaged from the beauty contest and hard at work on this excellent, often pitch-dark but almost otherwise almost note-perfect thriller.

It was, it must be said, a weird thing to want to do: remake a European hit so soon after its original release. But Fincher's film is perhaps the film Larsson’s book deserved all along; it may follow the main story religiously, but Steven Zaillian’s economic, witty script compacts and tidies up the minor details that make the difference between a very good literary adaptation and a gripping cinematic thriller. And while Blomkvist's labyrinthine travails reappear in the last half hour, Fincher's film sensibly concentrates on the whodunnit element – most smartly of all, dispensing with the strange quirk of Swedish justice that allowed Blomkvist to go to jail at the very end of the original.

Instead, Blomkvist is a ruined man, and Craig is the perfect foil to the eventual, explosive arrival of The Girl. Even though everyone else seems to have a Swedish accent, however slight, Craig plays it with his own, but surprisingly the effect doesn’t jar. Bleary-eyed, stubbled and often seen in disturbingly unfashionable winceyette pyjama bottoms, Blomkvist is a low-key, effective everyman in what could easily be an overplayed, hokey story. The wonderful Plummer – excellent in Mike Mills’ Beginners too, and looking at an Oscar nomination either way – is especially delicious in this regard, inviting this writer into a story that involves “thieves, misers, bullies – the most detestable collection of people you will ever meet”. Then he adds the clincher: “My family.”

The Girl herself takes her time, and Lisbeth’s story takes a good while to bed down as Blomkvist gets to grips with the dysfunctional Vangers. And without wishing to get too caught up in comparisons with the other movie, Mara's performance completely holds its own here. Where Rapace was aloof and flinty, Mara is more childlike and mercurial. Her actual age (withheld, for good reason, for most of the film's running time) is hard to fathom; when she flips her hoodie she could be a 14-year-old boy, when being raped (rather graphically) by her parole officer, she could be any underage girl, But when she’s in control – which is much more satisfyingly shown here, given the age gap between herself and Blomkvist – she is most definitely a woman.

The main thing, however, is perhaps how much Fincher has grown into the role of auteur, without apparently trying or even wanting to (although he has to be aware of the irony of giving an interview saying as much to a website called FincherFanatic.com). While it appears to be another one of Fincher’s five-finger exercises – like Panic Room or The Game – this is a film that could prove to be a key work when the big study book is written. The oily, exhilarating credit sequence suggests a knowing, Fight Club-style subversion of Craig's 007 persona; the awkward parental bond between Blomkvist and his daughter recalls the wistful poetry of Benjamin Button; Vanger’s need for closure echoes that of Robert Graysmith in Zodiac; and the film's casual, slyly funny cyberpunk heroism makes a great counterpoint to the dry, sceptical satire of The Social Network.

Are there flaws? Well, arguably, in the decompressing final stretch, which relate back to the book and open the door to the possibility/inevitability of a trilogy. But that also enables an ostensibly hard film to wind down to a surprisingly tender climax. Though Fincher professes to be a hard-ass both professionally and aesthetically – and with its not-to-be-underestimated moments of anal rape and torture, his film is not for the faint-hearted –The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo says more about broken hearts than broken people. Which, to address the nay-sayers, is where Fincher went right.

The Artist

2011-12-11T08:48:00.001-08:00

The Artist is the one film that Harvey Weinstein ever bought that caused his brother and business partner Bob to question his sanity. It is in black and white, silent, was made by the French, and its biggest American star is John Goodman. Michel Hazanavicius' wonderful film, however, should instead go down in history as the proof of Weinstein’s humanity not a sign of any advancing senility; it's a film that not only communicates a profound and sincere love of the very idea of cinema, it deals with universal emotions of love and remorse and it does so with a clarity that leaves no room for ambiguity. It will play to grandparents who queued to see Singin’ In the Rain when it came out over 50 years ago just as surely as it will to kids who haven't developed the good sense to turn off Mr Bean yet. It may be premature to call it a masterpiece, but if that's the technical term for a film that moves and inspires us while at the same time evoking a childlike sense of delight, then, for the first time since Steve Spielberg’s ET in 1982, that's exactly what it might turn out to be.

Already, the alarm bells must be ringing: how could this possibly be the case, with a film shot in the 1:33 aspect ratio, with intertitles, rinky-dink piano and slavish use of such bygone trickery as irises, wipes and fades? The reality is that Hazanavicius hasn't quite gone fully native; The Artist is a worthy homage but not an exact replica, and its chief departure from the 20s is in its perfectly judged score, which acts as a fully supporting character to the two charming leads. The film also somewhat breaks its own rules; though it is almost entirely silent, it continues through the period after the silent heyday, when Peppy becomes a singing star and Valentin a hasbeen, clinging to his mute stardom and producing soundless follies that make him a laughing stock in his former kingdom.

Much of the reason for the film's success can be ascribed to star Dujardin, who simply becomes George Valentin. A small but important scene shows Valentin getting into character, one moment relaxed, smiling and gracious, the next raising his arm, hunching his shoulders and hoisting his nose into the air with the imperial, smouldering haughtiness of a John Gilbert or a Fredric March. It may even be the key scene in the movie, since this is what Valentin thinks acting is, and, by extension, who he is: this is all he can do, and when the industry changes, he finds it impossible to adapt to a new world, in which his former floosie is now the boss. The parallels with A Star Is Born are obvious and amusingly relevant; though made three times, in 1937, 1954 and 1976, that film was never made in the silent era, and now, in this most modern of cover versions, that box is ticked too.

But this is by not a one-man show: the core trio here worked together once before on the 2006 comedy OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of Spies, a very funny spoof on the OSS 117 spy films – based on the novels of Jean Bruce – that became popular in France after the global success of the first 007 movie in 1963. And as with OSS, there is a level of playfulness and respect here that transcends mockery; where Austin Powers was essentially a comic character who creates the chaos around him, OSS 117 (aka Hubert Bonisseur De La Bath) – was a human foil to the genre conventions that were thrown at him. His one remit: to emerge smiling. Between, them Hazanavicius and Dujardin have the smarts to make that happen in The Artist too, but the killer ingredient is Béjo, not just as Valentin's love interest but as his peer. The chemistry is palpable, and Béjo radiates beauty, grace and intelligence: the killer combination that proves Valentin's undoing and also, unexpectedly, his salvation.

There are those that sneer at The Artist's simplicities, its unfortunate inability to be a real long-lost silver-nitrate classic, and point to the richness of the era it borrows from, a golden age of ambition that gave us such giants as FW Murnau, DW Griffith and Erich Von Stroheim. That's not the endeavour here. The point of The Artist is to reconnect with the human spirit, see what our ancestors saw in a single close-up and find emotions in the human face that no amount of CGI can render. And at a time when the market is split to extremes between billion-dollar blockbusters and micro-budget miseries, it's heartening to find, somewhere in now vast, almost infinite middle-ground, a film that revisits the basics, finding invisible fictions in a gesture, a profile, a longing look, a tear, an arched eyebrow, an embrace. The Artist may not be for snobs, but it's not just for buffs, it's for anyone who ever sat rapt in front of a movie screen. And let's face it, that's most of us.

London Film Festival 2011: Wrap (Part Two)

2011-10-30T07:31:00.000-07:00

On second thoughts, I just realised my LFF2011 experience actually began at 6pm on the first Thursday of the festival with a reception for Drake Doremus and Felicity Jones, who arrived, sadly minus co-star Anton Yelchin, to promote their semi-improvised drama Like Crazy. I saw the film – a beautifully low-key two-hander about two students navigating a transatlantic relationship after college – in Sundance and liked it very much; it won the Grand Jury prize there but reviewers here weren't quite so kind, which is a shame. I'd spoken to Doremus earlier in the day (in fact, first thing) and I was really taken with his intelligence. It would be a shame if his work didn't take root here since, in some ways, the UK is his spiritual home – Doremus's working methods owe more to the likes of Mike Leigh and, more relevantly, Michael Winterbottom – and I'm looking forward to his new (untitled) film, which stars Guy Pearce and will hopefully be ready for Cannes. That film will also star Jones, who set me on the back foot by assuring me that we'd met before. I didn't think we had but, by Jove she was right: we met fleetingly on the set of of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's Cemetery Junction (which I've still never seen). I might check it out if only to see her no doubt small part; this 27-year-old should definitely be on everyone's actors-to-watch-out-for list.

There are also plenty of new faces to watch out for in Alexandra McGuinness's Lotus Eaters (above), which had the misfortune to premiere down at the BFI Southbank at the same time as George Clooney's Ides Of March. Lotus Eaters is a strange film, and its definitely Marmite reputation preceded it (the film made its world premiere at Tribeca in the spring and the vapour trail of good and bad reviews make interesting reading). I must admit that it isn't wholly successful, not least because the episodic nature of the story – and the collage-like approach to scenes and character – often conspire to pull the viewer out of what, after all, is just an 80-minute movie. But there are plenty of scenes and moments in Lotus Eaters that will stay with me; the music choices are especially good (notably the use of Je Suis Bien by Los Super Elegantes) and the young cast is very, very promising.

The film tells the story of rich-girl Alice (Antonia Campbell-Hughes) and her social set. Alice is dating a junkie, and her life is a mad swirl of hipster parties. That's pretty much it for narrative, since this is the story of a girl in a bubble, and the harshest reviews have come from those who feel the film is overly sympathetic to such self-absorbed and selfish creatures. It is, however, to McGuinness's credit that there's little or no moralising about these people; some audience members at the second Q&A noted parallels with Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, and McGuinness responded well to that (perhaps having expected people to be asking, ‘Is this you?’ ‘Are these awful people your friends?’). An obvious point of reference would be Sofia Coppola, and the film's crisp monochrome does reflect a similar aesthetic, but, weirdly, I think the film has a quaint, olde-worlde quality, which impressed me. I liked the idea that, at times, it looked like an undiscovered Warhol film from the late 60s, and I think there's a certain (deliberate) suggestion that this floundering generation of the young, directionless and privileged has been with us throughout time.

The next day was incredible; I missed the Harry Belafonte documentary Sing Your Song in Sundance and was looking forward to seeing it. I thought the film would be great on archive footage and end with the 84-year-old padding around the house and reminiscing. How wrong I was; Belafonte's story just doesn't stop. It begins with the roots of the Civil Rights movement as far back as the 40s, and it is truly mind-blowing not only to see what Belonte achieved then and was prepared to stand up for in those dark times but to realise just how much respect and power he had at the height of his fame. In the 60s he was actively courted by JFK, and the footage shown in Susanne Rostock's film suggests that not only was Belafonte no pushover, he definitely had the President's ear. Belafonte's career in activism just spirals from that point, and he remains tireless; not only did he campaign for the release of Nelson Mandela, he was also a kingpin in the We Are The World charity single. Today, he remains focused on the plight of Africans, is an ambassador for UNICEF and spends a lot of his spare time visiting prisons, where he gives talks to the inmates.

I was expecting to be a little intimidated by this amazing man but I wasn't at all. Belafonte has a great sense of humour and a wonderful, approachable manner, best represented when he slyly asked, “Are there any cameras around?” before closing his eyes for a second. (Mrs Belafonte has the best take on Harrygate: when we discussed the obviously exaggerated reports that her husband had managed to “fall asleep” on live TV in the US, she sighed, “He doesn't sleep like that...”) The Q&A was to be cut short, but Belafonte had heard that there was a group of international students in the audience and asked if we could carry on. So an empty cinema in the Vue was found, and for the next hour I moderated a fascinating conversation between Belafonte and these incredibly attentive youngsters. Belafonte's passion knocked me for six, especially when he told the audience that the starting point for any would-be activist is not to be a victim: whether it be a victim of society or, more importantly, a victim of a lack of information. In the bar afterwards I asked Belafonte why he hadn't made more movies and he replied, candidly, that he didn't care for an industry that wanted to neuter and censor him. If you haven't seen it, check out his 1959 Harbel production Odds Against Tomorrow and see what Hollywood could have had but missed out on.

The Friday screening of Dexter Fletcher's Wild Bill was fantastically well received, with stars Charlie Creed-Miles, Jaime Winstone, Olivia Williams, Will Poulter, Charlotte Spencer, Sammy Williams and a cravat-wearing Jason Flemyng (left, red carpet only) on hand to support the director. I bailed on the premiere party afterwards, following a great catch-up with Kill List's Neil Maskell, and missed the evening morphing into the afterparty for the Eddie Marsan vehicle Junkhearts, which I wasn't too wild about. The following night I chaired an interesting debate with Frightfest's Alan Jones, the BFI's Jane Giles and Cine-Excess's Xavier Mendik, who was promoting his book 100 Cult Movies. We all showed clips of our favourite cult films in a bit to determine what the term “cult” really means: Jones chose Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, Giles had Haxan and Cafe Flesh, while Mendik went for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. My choice was a clip from Mario Bava's Bay Of Blood, which, in retrospect suggested a slight horror bias, a fact the audience was quick to pick up on.

If you were there, I can only apologise for the sudden ending of the debate, which was due to the space only being booked for an hour and my having to be at Bafta for 9pm for a post-Take Shelter Q&A with its star, Michael Shannon. I'd met Shannon in Sundance last year at a junket for The Runaways, so I thought I knew what to expect. But, spending a little more time with him, I was surprised to find him a much more thoughtful and humorous man than I'd imagined; very humble, very modest and especially good on the curious details of low-budget filmmaking (on his first film with Take Shelter director Jeff Nichols he found himself staying in the bedroom of a charity worker, who had given pride of place to a giant plastic sculpture of the human colon). We ended by talking about his role as General Zod in Man Of Steel, for which he was recommended by Watchmen's Billy Crudup. I have to say, it's the main thing about the new Superman movie that excites me.

The following Tuesday was the press conference for Anonymous, which was held at Claridge's. I was coming from an interview with David Cronenberg for A Dangerous Method and jumped in a cab, hoping for some quiet time before being thrown to the wolves (Vanessa Redgrave had just been added to the line-up). In a cab ride lasting less than ten minutes I was assailed by a cab driver who thought Redgrave was “at least 80” (she's 74), told me she'd been in the paper that day (it was Vanessa Feltz), showed me a picture of Robin Gibb looking very ill and then went on to discuss a TV programme about mummification. I arrived in a state of nervous distress, especially thinking that Roland Emmerich's film had been targeted for an RSC fatwa, but the director and cast – Rafe Spall, Rhys Ifans, Joely Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, David Thewlis and Jamie Campbell Bower – could not have handled it better. Ifans and Richardson were especially good when it came to defending Emmerich's film, but Thewlis and Spall were funny too, as you'll see from this taster.

Tuesday night was spent avoiding the filmmakers at a reception for The Awakening, which I wasn't too fond of, and Wednesday saw a surprise invitation to join producer Jeremy Thomas and David Cronenberg for a (fully clothed) lunch to promote A Dangerous Method. Thomas was whisked away before I could grill him about his upcoming projects – he's just finished a film about Thor Heyerdahl, is planning a Kim Jong-Il movie and an as-yet-untitled film with Jim Jarmusch, has hopes for more films with Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano, and also has a production of JG Ballard's long-gestating High Rise in the works – but his replacement, Cronenberg, was a great conversationalist too, mostly when talking about the practicalities of finance. He also revealed that he has never been approached about the remake rights for his 1983 film Videodrome (“They'd have to deal with the internet,” he noted dryly), which enabled me to sleep safely that night.

The festival ended on Thursday night; I missed Terence Davies's hypnotic and moving film The Deep Blue Sea, having seen (and liked) it in London several weeks ago, so instead I chaired a Bafta Q&A at the Empire with Source Code director Duncan Jones and his producer Stuart Fenegan. Excitingly, Jones revealed that he had just sent out a new script; he wouldn't be drawn on details but said that a) it was another sci-fi, b) wasn't his long-planned project Mute and c) was a futuristic “city movie” in the vein of Blade Runner. After the Q&A we hopped in a cab and went over to the closing-night party, where things began to get a little sketchy. Festivities came to an end at a very early 1am-ish, at which point I made my excuses and left, having had a very enjoyable couple of weeks. This year, it was especially sad to say goodbye to outgoing festival director Sandra Hebron, who leaves on a high after 15 years with the LFF, a period that has seen the festival somewhat transformed from a small, Southbank-based affair to a world-class event. But I'm happy to report that Hebron's successor, Australian import Clare Stewart, has a reputation to match, coming from the similarly revitalised Sydney Film Festival. The LFF is in safe hands, and all I can say is that I'm already looking forward to next year, whether I'm involved with it or not.

London Film Festival 2011: Wrap (Part One)

2011-10-30T04:26:00.000-07:00

My association with for this year's LFF began with a pleasant surprise: hosting two screenings of Terraferma, the new film by Emanuele Crialese, the Italian director of Nuovomondo (Golden Door, 2006). I saw the film in Venice, and, though it's incredibly atmospheric and beautiful, I wasn't altogether wild about the rather earnest story, in which a family on a small Sicilian island are confronted with the ugly realities of illegal immigration. In fact, personally, I thought the theme was somewhat more successfully handled by Aki Kaurismaki's offbeat Cannes hit Le Havre, which, for reasons I'm not quite sure of, managed to bypass the LFF. However, since he was unable to come, Crialese sent in his place two of his cast – Donatella Finocchiaro and Martina Codecasa. As you'll see from this clip here, this was a good move; both of these smart, funny women proved to be fantastic ambassadors for the film.

Finocchiaro plays Giulietta, the mother in Terraferma; in the film, it is revealed that her family have traditionally fished for survival, but Giulietta argues that tourism is the way forward. She rents their house out to some travelling mainlanders, the Milanese Maura (Codecasa) and her two male friends, and pushes her naïve son Filippo (Crialese regular Filippo Pucillo) into their orbit. Filippo asks Maura out on a date, and to say it doesn't go well is an understatement: they sail to sea in a glass-bottomed boat and are besieged by African immigrants swimming to shore. Filippo panics and, fearing the boat will capsize (which it certainly will) batters them with whatever is to hand. Filippo, who has helped his grandfather to rescue a handful of illegals just a few days earlier, is stricken with guilt. The police insist that no one is to be taken ashore, but the reality is that people are drowning by the dozen, transported in tiny boats that barely, and rarely, make the distance.

The politics of the film are timely and admirable, and Terraferma recently made the cut as Italy's official entry for the foreign-language Oscar stakes. But after feeling a little hit over the head by the film's seriousness and moralism, I was interested to hear Finocchiaro and Codecasa discuss the shooting of the movie, in particular the work that was done to set up the distinction between the provincial locals and the worldly Maura. Even in its smaller moments, the film is about insiders and outsiders, and I began to see that Crialese had a wider net to cast than I first realised. Also, Crialese had used non-professionals who had survived such journeys, and both actresses were sobering and humble with their recollections of scenes that skewed scarily close to the reality experienced by their colleagues.

The next morning I moderated a press conference for Shame, from which you can watch selected highlights here. I've run into Michael Fassbender a few times on my recent, never-ending festival tour, and it's been great to see that his loyalty to director Steve McQueen, and the film, hasn't faded or caused him to become glib and jaded. What you won't see from this clip is McQueen's famous bluntness, which erupted twice; first, he refused to answer a question he didn't understand (until it was politely rephrased for him), and secondly, when asked about the politics of male nudity, he snapped, “I don’t want to get into this conversation. It doesn’t make sense and I don’t want to give too much of my brain to it. Talking about nonsense doesn’t help me.” I think that's where I got a laugh by saying (something deadpan, like), “And that seems like a good place to end,” rather than the robotic, “...And thank you for attending,” that you'll see on the video. Offstage, Fassbender was his usual polite self, and perhaps I can start an internet rumour here now by saying that when I asked if we might be seeing him in Quentin Tarantino's forthcoming Django Unchained, well, he certainly didn't say yes, but it wasn't a big emphatic no either. So let's wait and see.

After that, my next port of call, on the first Saturday of the festival, was Oren Moverman's cop drama Rampart, which I like very much and wrote about here. That day I went to speak to Woody Harrelson at Claridge's, and it's no understatement to say that we got on famously. I use that word advisedly since famousness became a theme of the festival; I didn't get to meet Madonna at the next week's screening of WE, but I can say that, at the party for Rampart, at the Soho House, after a great chat with The Guard director John McDonagh and his partner Lizzie, I seemed to make a new best friend in REM's Michael Stipe. I say “seemed to” because. although Stipe was very modest, amiable and polite, I can't remember anything we talked about. I wish I could say similar, modest things about myself: the day's conversation with Harrelson had gone very well, and I still have flashbacks to the horrified looks on my friends' faces as I tried to pluck them from their comfy conversations, exhorting, in all star-struck seriousness, “COME AND TALK TO WOODY!!!!!” Still, he didn't mind*.

As always happens at the LFF I had my Nordics, which this year came down to two films: Árni Ásgeirsson's Undercurrent (Brim), from Iceland, and Morten Tyldum's Headhunters (Hodejegerne), from Norway. Undercurrent is the underdog of the two, but that doesn't mean it's the lesser film, just that it won't get any thing like the same push here that Headhunters is getting. Ásgeirsson's film (below) is actually a very good character piece about the crew of a fishing boat whose lives are thrown into turmoil by the suicide of a fellow sailor. It begins with his death, and very little comment is originally made on it, but slowly Ásgeirsson's film reveals itself as a very clever ghost story – not that there's anything at all supernatural about it, it's just that, in the way that Ingmar Bergman's films used to unwind, the spectre of the past continues to impact on the present. I liked it a lot, in part because its performances are very real and subtle – mostly by members of the Vesturport theatre group – but also because Ásgeirsson creates an incredibly tactile sense of the danger that's faced by the kind of people who are willing to take on such tough, low-paid, desperately lonely work. He told me that some of the more extreme scenes were cheated with wind and rain machines, but there's still a breathtaking authenticity to the rolling waves and an astonishing commitment from the cast.

Headhunters (above), though, is a much more obviously entertaining film. It's based on Jo Nesbo's novel of the same name, and the time is definitely right for its garish sense of high adventure. Thankfully, Tyldum's film does not follow in the slipstream of the increasingly stuffy Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest And Played With Fire (But Digressed In Lots Of Rambling Subplots In The Course Of Three Films And Seven Hours). Instead, it is a flashy, funny and not altogether serious action thriller that in some ways resembles Martin Scorsese's After Hours, since it depicts a professional man's unravelling in a very short space of time. This (equally short) man is Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie), a professional headhunter – as in job recruitment – who doubles as an art thief. Brown has a beautiful artist wife whom he thinks is only with him because of his money, and so he is forced into finding bigger heists in order to fund his lifestyle. This is why his interest is piqued by a chance encounter with Danish businessman Clas Greve (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who claims to own a rare painting by Rubens. Brown goes after it, but the hunter soon becomes the hunted in this well-made, far-fetched and endearingly light-hearted romp, built around a wildly committed performance from Hennie, the most tortured leading man since Laurent Lucas in 2004's Calvaire.

That pretty much summed up the first seven days of LFF2011. Coming next: dinner with Harry Belafonte, lunch (not naked) with David Cronenberg… and Michael Shannon's colon.

* I hope.

London Film Festival 2011: 360

2011-10-15T04:05:00.000-07:00

I'd hoped to tick off 360 in Toronto, but that plan was kaiboshed by the fact the preceding screening (of Alexander Payne's The Descendants) started 75 minutes late and completely scuppered the day's schedule for me. In retrospect, I cannot believe how patiently everyone sat there. A screening of Take This Waltz about a week afterwards began less than ten minutes late in San Sebastian, prompting the crowd to slow-handclap the jury for keeping them waiting. Now, the reason I mention this is because both those events made me wonder about London audiences. I think a ten-minute delay wouldn't even be noticed, but 75? There'd be uproar. But, funnily enough, London audiences are reserved in other ways. If it had screened in Cannes or Venice, there's a high chance that Fernando Meirelles' latest feature would have been booed. At the Odeon Leicester Square, it merely generated a strong ripple of applause, and quite a bit of disappointed muttering in the queues for the exits.

The damning one-star reviews that appeared out of Toronto weren't really merited, but it must be said that 360 isn't a very good film, partly because of the platitudinous script but mostly because it is what it is: a collage. Set in various locations across the world – London, Vienna, Paris, Bratislava, Denver airport and Phoenix – it purports to be a reflection of the way our lives interconnect and how such things as chance, fate, luck and coincidence affect our destiny. This is rather heavily laid out in an opening voiceover (“A wise man once said, if there's a fork on the road take it. He failed to mention which way to turn.”), and throughout the movie much is made of the consequences that taking that fork will have. But there are a couple of problems with this idea. We face a million or more “forks” in the road every day. And all of them have consequences, from major to minor. So where to start?

Peter Morgans earnest script deals with this moral swamp by creating situations for his characters that border on caricature. In the opening scene a Slovakian woman gets a job with an escort agency, and her first client is a nervous businessman, Michael (Jude Law), whose tryst is spotted by a business associate who uses the information to blackmail him into handing over a lucrative contract. Back home, his wife Rose (Rachel Weisz), is having an affair with a Brazilian photographer, whose girlfriend has decided to leave him and is on her way home to Rio. On the way, she encounters two men. One is a grieving father (Anthony Hopkins), who is searching for his daughter, and another is a freshly released sex offender (Ben Foster), who is on his way to a halfway house. And so on...

There are a couple more storylines, but you get this gist. This is one of those we-are-the-world storylines that, rather counter-intuitively, boils down to cause and effect. By that I mean the film simply paddles along on the assumption that what we do determines where we go – but I wanted to see more character, because, surely, it's who we are that determines where we go? In 360 everyone is driven by logic. Michael accedes to blackmail after the flimsiest of threats (along the lines of “Hello, Michael's wife, I'm a complete stranger but I'm sure you'll trust me when I'll tell you that your husband once tried to hire a hooker one night but didn't actually go through with it because I accidentally busted him”). In this respect, it doesn't even feel like a successive series of short films, since almost none of these stories would pass muster on their own.

The one exception involves Russian actor Vladimir Vdovichenkov, who plays Sergei, the right-hand man to a sleazy gangster. He is his boss's bitch, carrying his guns, hiring his hookers, and he's getting tired of it. This was the only sequence that, for me, carried any real emotion or drama, and the bear-like Vdovichenkov gives the part a really charming subtlety and pathos. It was the one spark of what-might-have-been in a film that doesn't really have much to say except that one thing leads to another. For Peter Morgan it's certainly a step up from the dreadful Hereafter, but for Meirelles it's a huge disappointment. His last film, Blindness, was nowhere near as bad as the reviews suggested, but that's film's weaknesses (trite sentimentality, too-literal voiceover, clumsy plotting) are carried over into 360. It sounds like a back-handed compliment, but this overly serious Richard Curtis-style patchwork is the kind of thing Hugh Grant might make if he ever took up directing: it's heart's in the right place, but it comes from another world that isn't recognisably ours.

San Sebastian Film Festival 2011: Wild Bill

2011-09-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

Dexter Fletcher's Wild Bill just had its world premiere in San Sebastian, and, quite understandably, the audience went for it in a big way. The Spanish have an incredible appetite for films that embrace dark themes and subjects – as long as there is a genuine heart and emotion there too. I once saw a film here called Savages, about neo-Nazi drug dealers who beat up their aunt (Marisa Paredes), but although the film was really about the scourge of racism in modern Spain, the audience responded more to Paredes's fragile performance and gave the film a standing ovation. Now, Wild Bill is by no means as gritty as Savages, but it is set in the crummier recesses of East London, where crack dealing/smoking is a way of life and the local community has adapted to accommodate that.

It begins with Bill (Charlie Creed-Miles) coming out of prison in the Isle Of Wight. He makes his way to what used to be home, only to find that his partner has abandoned not only him but his two boys, Dean (Will Poulter) and Jimmy (Attack The Block's Sammy Williams). Teenager Dean, 15, having lied about his age, has a job on a nearby building site where the Olympic site is being constructed, and tries to keep little Jimmy on the straight and narrow. He is not impressed, then, when his old man is delivered, blotto, to the flat – on his first day of freedom – by his old drug-dealing cronies, who have given him a sample of their wares in order to lure him back into the game. So Dean takes the drugs and gives Bill an ultimatum: either he goes, or Dean will shop him to the police.

This is pretty much the main set-up of Fetcher's debut and it sets things up pretty nicely for the two dramas that are about to unfold simultaneously. Both involve Bill's destiny. Will he fall back into his old ways? And more importantly, can he accept his role as father, especially when one of his boys hates him and the other doesn't even know who he is?

As you'd expect from a film directed by an actor with 35 years experience, the performances are uniformly excellent and there are some enjoyable cameos too, from old friends and workmates (Jamie Winston and Jason Flemyng pop up as social workers; Andy Serkis is the film's shadowy Mr Big). And central to it is Charlie Creed-Miles as Bill, who appears to have been hiding his brilliance in plain sight for quite some years now. Creed-Miles gives this character an unexpected pathos; he's a bad guy struggling with his conscience, and though the film doesn't sugarcoat his prison record (dealing and attempted murder, which he refutes as GBH), Bill does emerge an unlikely hero, especially when the local gang, led by the leering T (Leo Gregory), recruits Jimmy to be a drug mule.

There are plenty of British films out there trying to sell/tell similar stories, but Wild Bill works not only because its characters are so deftly sketched but because Fletcher has worked so hard to make his film cinematic. Shot by George Richmond, whose most recent work involved a stint on Steve Spielberg's War Horse, and crisply edited by Stuart Gazzard, the film has a fluidity and subtlety that keeps several balls in the air. While Bill is facing his moral dilemma, we see Dean falling for local single-mum hairdresser Steph (Charlotte Spencer), and this very sweet storyline is arguably what snaps Bill out of his post-prison concussion. A big fan of PT Anderson, Fletcher has appropriated some of that director's kinetic style too, with some interesting tracking and dolly shots that keep the film moving. Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller is a big influence also, with the Olympic village rising in the background just as the frontier town does in Altman's film, although here it works not quite as a metaphor for society but for Bill's growing maturity as a man and a father.

I don't want to make too many claims for Will Bill. It won't bring world peace or cure the common cold but it's a very lovely and intelligent piece of British filmmaking, putting a human spin on the crime genre with some great acting by old faces and new (in particular Poulter and Spencer). Fletcher and Creed-Miles pull the whole thing together, however, and it's hard to single one out over the other. So I won't; all I'll say is see for yourself when the film has its UK premiere on October 21 at the London Film Festival (Vue 7). Believe me, it's worth seeing.

San Sebastian Film Festival 2011: Le Skylab and Extraterrestre

2011-09-22T18:03:00.000-07:00

Two films loosely on a space theme premiered in San Sebastian this week. The first was Le Skylab by Julie Delpy, whose obviously autobiographical film features one of the largest casts in the festival, so big that the first 15 minutes seems to consist of little more than people saying hello, kissing each other and shaking hands. It begins with a family of four crowding onto a packed Eurostar and finding that there's no room for them to sit together. Having been relegated to, er, the seats they actually booked and paid for, having not thought to make sure they were sitting together (I had a hard time summoning any sympathy for this), the mother tries unsuccessfully to get some strangers to move then, settles grumpily into her window seat. As she fumes in a very French way about people not bending to her petulant will, the woman has a flashback that spirits us all the way back to to 1979.

We're on another busy train now, and the 11-year-old Albertine (Lou Avarez) is going to visit her paternal grandmother at the seaside with her bohemian parents Anna (Delpy herself) and Jean (Gainsbourg's Eric Olmosnino), a pair of street theatre performers. It's hard to say in a narrative sense what happens next since, strictly speaking, nothing does, and this is both the film's strength and weakness. On the debit side, it frequently meanders and has an episodic quality that makes it feel like a stream of reminiscences rather than an actual story that Delpy has been aching to tell. However, on the plus side, Le Skylab does frequently hit some really engaging highs, with some very touching observational comedy.

The summer of 1979 is very beautifully evoked, with Albertine's fussing, feminist mother fretting over the fall of debris from the crumbling NASA space station that is rumoured to be crashing down on southern France. Against this backdrop, Delpy beautifully captures the closeness and tensions of large families, frequently diverting to the activities of the children (a village disco scene provides the best adolescent comedy since Son Of Rambow) and pitching the hippy Jean/Anna combo against his military brother Roger (Inglourious Basterds' fantastic Denis Menochet), who gives the film some much-needed political relevance in a raw, drunken and, somewhat alarmingly, semi-naked confession scene.

Because it has nowhere to go, the ending can only be disappointing and simply seems to be the visual equivalent of Jefferson Airplane's Let's Get Together. But Delpy does seem to understand people, what makes them tick, and, unlike the horrible Little White Lies, which featured a sterling French cast in a smug maelstrom of self-indulgence that had me applying for NRA membership, Le Skylab does have a universality that will help it find a UK audience.

So too does Nacho Vigalondo's super-charming Extraterrestre (pictured), which I must admit I need to see again, having caught it at the film's late-night world premiere at a time when my faculties were failing me. Vigalondo's breakout feature was the lo-fi 2007 Sundance hit Timecrimes, which I have yet to see, and this is another micro-budget science fiction project with a similarly ingenious twist. Here, Vigalondo has embarked on a genre mash-up that I don't think I've seen before: alien invasion movie meets slacker romcom.

It begins in familiar style, with the hungover Julio (Julián Villagrán) waking up in the apartment of a woman he doesn't recognise and trying to piece together the night before. The woman, Julia (Michelle Jenner), is similarly shellshocked, and for a time the comedy comes from the embarrassment of this awkward situation. Noticing that the streets are strangely empty and that the TV channels have gone blank, Julio sees an enormous spaceship out of the window and realises, not without some incredulity, that the two have drunkenly slept through a real-life War Of The Worlds. The introduction of an overattentive neighbour, Angel (Carlos Areces), who has a fanatical crush on Julia introduces an extra element: the aliens are apparently shape-shifters who can adopt new, human identities at will. Who can be trusted? And what will happen when Julia's boyfriend appears out of the blue?

Thinking about Extratrerrestre now makes me laugh more than it did at the time, because there's a lot of dialogue in this movie and I kept thinking I wasn't enjoying it as much as the rapt Spanish audience seemed to be. However, I'll be seeing it again for sure, simply to catch up with some of the subtleties I missed the first time. I spoke to Vigalondo briefly beforehand and I'm impressed by his vision; I suspect he will soon make a great deal of impact in Hollywood with films that cost much more and look much better than Extraterrestre, but he seems to be the kind of guy who can't resist the urge to express himself on a shoestring. If this is one of those inbetween films, I look forward to many more – fans of Edgar Wright will definitely see a kindred spirit at work here, and this may well be Spain's Shaun Of The Dead.

San Sebastian Film Festival 2011: Albert Nobbs, Take This Waltz, Silver Tongues and Texas Killing Fields

2011-09-21T12:43:00.000-07:00

Albert Nobbs arrived in San Sebastian more as an appendage to Glenn Close, who came to pick up her lifetime achievement award, than as a film event in its own right. Rodrigo Garcia's film debuted in Telluride – always a prestigious place to start – and went on to Toronto, but, although it features a very game lead performance from Close, the film hasn't really gathered much momentum or awards buzz over the past few weeks. I can see why, because it's really quite conventional, but although tries a bit too hard with its mash-up of styles – Cranford-like period soap opera meets Boys Don't Cry-style indie – it does tell an interesting story and is way better than Get Low, another passion project driven by a Hollywood star (Robert Duvall) that premiered here a few years ago.

Albert Nobbs (Close) is a buttoned up waiter working at the upscale Morrison's hotel in 1900s Dublin; he is liked and respected but keeps himself to himself. This is because Nobbs is actually a woman, a fact that seems abundantly clear to us but not to anyone around him. One night the hotel manager insists that Nobbs share his bed with a visiting workman, Hubert Page (Janet McTeer), and Nobb's secret is exposed when a flea gets into his/her corset (“I'm a martyr to fleas,” he/she laments). But, wouldn't you just know it, Hubert Page is a woman too, and so begins a curious friendship between the two, as Nobbs begins to explore both his real and adopted identities.

The period element of the movie is well handled, although the roundelay of well-known faces tends to overwhelm what is effectively a three-hander. Mia Wasikowska plays Helen, the maid that Nobbs takes a shine to; Aaron Johnson is the violent skivvy Helen falls for; Brendan Gleason is the hotel's resident doctor; and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is, well, just a guest. But there is an interesting seed at the centre of all this; Albert Nobbs is not a film about sexuality (and thankfully so, since Close looks uncomfortably like Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man). Rather, Albert Nobbs is about someone who doesn't fit, and in a wonderful scene with McTeer Nobbs decides to give being his/her true self a go, trying on a bonnet and dress made by Page's wife. The funny thing is, though neither woman looks convincingly like a man, each looks even more absurd in a woman's finery.

I liked Albert Nobbs if just for this scene alone, because it did articulate something very reasonable about the character, and Close's performance is very well-judged, as it is throughout. There is a very fine line between passion project and vanity project, however, and while Close's star vehicle succeeds on a very mainstream level, there's not much I'd say to recommend Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz. Maybe it's a guy thing, but I couldn't buy into this story of a young married woman (Michelle Williams) who, after five years of marriage to a loveable lump (Seth Rogen) decides to have a fling with a man she meets on a plane (Luke Kirby). It's effectively the same story as The Deep Blue Sea but with less emotion and more cod intellectualism, stretched to breaking point at just under two hours and with a final reel that just seems to go on forever. It will probably go down in history as the film in which Sara Silverman a) appears naked and b) plays a serious role, but, sadly, neither of those things will be enough to sell the film to a male audience.

Silver Tongues is an American film by way of Glasgow; directed by Scotsman Simon Arthur, who won the audience award at this year's Slamdance, it's a slow burn and something of a genre mash-up too, since it uses several styles before revealing its hand in a clever final act. The beginning is especially good, in which a young honeymooning couple meet an older couple at dinner; the conversation soon becomes sexual and there are plans made for a foursome.

It doesn't quite come together though, and the film ingeniously switches focus to Gerry (Lee Tergesen) and Joan (Enid Graham), a sort of existential Bonnie and Clyde who move through New York State causing role-play havoc wherever they go. They accuse a preacher of stealing, then visit an old people's home, where they pose as relatives. And in between they have a suffocating, violent relationship in which Gerry seems to have the controlling hand. Nothing is what it seems, however, and though the film lacks a certain narrative drive in successfully moving us from each stand-alone scene to the next, Arthur's film has atmosphere and intelligence that are both far in excess of Silver Tongues' modest budget.

A more straightforward genre piece was provided, perhaps unsurprisingly, by Ami Canaan Mann – daughter of director Michael Mann – whose debut film Texas Killing Fields skipped Toronto and came directly to San Sebastian from Venice. Word from that festival wasn't great, but, although it doesn't add much to the field (no pun intended) of modern policier/neo noir movies, I did find Mann's film to be gripping, with lots of tension and some great performances. The key actors here are Sam Worthington and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Detectives Souder and Heigh respectively. Souder is the local Texan cop, Heigh the big gun brought from New York, and when a series of woman are murdered in the outlying area, Heigh is drafted in by Souder's volatile, outspoken ex-wife (Jessica Chastain), who is also on the force, to help find the perpetrator.

There are few surprises here, and the red herrings aren't especially red or herringy. But Texas Killing Fields does work as a cop story, with Worthington and especially Morgan on good form as the mismatched partners. The supporting roles are interesting too, with Twin Peaks' Sheryl Lee as the town prostitute, Chloe Moretz as her neglected daughter, and, best of all, Stephen Graham as a weirdo scuzzball from the nearby power plant. The music adds a whole extra dimension, with a great, bluesy score by Tindersticks' Dickon Hinchliffe that reminded me of Wild Things. Perhaps the script needed another pass, but some of the film's loopholes work to its advantage, positing the bayous of Texas as ongoing dumping ground for victims past and future.

San Sebastian Film Festival 2011: Intruders

2011-09-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

Intruders kicked off the 59th San Sebastian Film Festival in a bold way. It's unusual enough for a major festival to start with a genre film, but then Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's third feature is not the usual genre film. For one thing, it stars Clive Owen, who, until recently was not to be associated with matters of a pulpy nature (his co-lead in the upcoming Killer Elite with Jason Statham suggests a thawing of principles on that front). For another, it isn't really a horror film in the accepted sense. Unlike Guillermo Del Toro, Fresnadillo is not on a mission to frighten us and explore the subconscious cave of primal childhood fears. Rather, the director is using the classic ghost story as the framework for a human and even rather sentimental story about a less literal kind of ghost – the metaphorical skeleton in the cupboard.

Owen plays John Farrow, a construction worker on one of London's major new skyscrapers. His job takes him away from his family a lot, and he especially misses his daughter Mia (Ella Purnell, who played the young Keira in Never Let Me Go), with whom he has an especially close bond. An accident at work distracts him even further, but Farrow is snapped out of his melancholia when Mia starts complaining of an evil presence in her room. Significantly, Mia is not the only person to be tormented by visions of a shape-shifting, faceless monster. Over in Spain, a young boy is visited nightly by a similar creature, a wet, dripping humanoid blur that tries to yank him his bed. His terrified mother consults a local priest (Daniel Bruhl), but his kind assurance are not enough.

In terms of atmosphere, Intruders is pretty light, and should not be approached as a continuation of the same wave of Spanish horrors that yielded The Orphanage, Hierro, Julia´s Eyes and The Devil's Backbone. The performances, from Owen and Carice Van Houten as his wife, are also low-key and strong, with a special mention for the young Purnell. I wasn't too convinced by the editing at times – the jerky, jagged, neurotic style that worked so well in 28 Weeks Later, didn't sit so well here and obscured many of Hollowface´s early appearances. But what I did like was the overall style and assembly, particularly in the early, almost Hitchcockian scenes of Farrow at work, high above London's skyline.

Annoyingly, I'd been on set for this movie and knew a little too much about it, both in terms of what the film would look like (the interiors of Farrow´s London house were filmed on a sound stage in Madrid), and where it would go (Fresnadillo assured me the film was not really about the supernatural, even though, in a way, that's not strictly true). So I was on tenterhooks for the twist, and when it came I was surprised to note that there was more than one.

Intruders might be a tough sell in the UK, since it is too emotional and plenty bloodless for the horror crowd, while the title and premise aren't exactly going to sell it to a non-genre audience. I enjoyed it, though, and its final reel does explore some interesting ideas about ancestry and secrets. It's also recognisably the work of the same man who made Intacto, another smart film about destiny and the way people's lives unexpectedly entwine.

TIFF 2011: The Lady, Machine Gun Preacher, Trishna, The Deep Blue Sea

2011-09-15T13:30:00.000-07:00

Certain directors simply belong at film festivals and two Brits in particular were no-brainers for TIFF: one was Terence Davies, who brought his Terence Rattigan adaptation The Deep Blue Sea, and the other was Michael Winterbottom, director of the Thomas Hardy-inspired, India-set Trishna. More on these two later. But there were two other directors whose work you would think would also sit well within an international film festival forum. The first was America's Marc Forster, who arrived with Machine Gun Preacher, a biopic of born-again relief worker Sam Childers; the second was France's Luc Besson, who came with The Lady, a biopic of Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi (played by Michelle Yeoh).

I'll start with The Lady and work up to the best of these four. The Lady I really didn't like much at all, most due to its insanely long running time (145 minutes) and a script that didn't merit such indulgence. All the reviews of Besson's film were crushing, mostly pointing out that the film lacked any sense of tension even though the last 20 years of Suu's life have been incredibly dramatic. The filmmakers may wish to turn this around, in which case you may see The Lady being marketed as a love story. But the truth is, it doesn't work either way. It begins in the late 90s with Suu's husband, Michael Aris (David Thewlis), being given less than five years to live by his doctor, and in flashback he recalls the fateful day in the late 80s when his wife received a phonecall telling her of her mother's illness. Though never an exile, Suu (as her friends call her throughout the film) has nevertheless spent much of her adult life outside Burma, and her return there is an eye-opener: a brutal government is in control, the people are rioting, and the military are cracking down on civil liberties.

Suu doesn't think of going into politics straight away, instead she is invited to by local scholars on account of her heritage: her father was Aung San, was a popular leader assassinated by political rivals in 1947. She decides to go through with it, Aris supports her decision, and together they help found the National League Of Democracy. This, however, is not popular with the ruling party, who, fearing her martyrdom, decide not to kill her but to marginalise her, and as a result, Suu spends the next 11 years under house arrest. As you can imagine, there's nothing very exciting about house arrest, mostly because the film is so damn literal. With a better script, The Lady could have been about all sorts of things: destiny, responsibility, family… As it is, it's a ponderous mish-mash, with average performances and scenes that qualify as epic only because there's a lot of people in them.

Machine Gun Preacher (pictured) was a more successful but still slightly conflicted biopic, this one telling the story of how the vicious, heroin-addicted, American biker criminal Sam Childers found God and became a hero in war-torn Sudan. Gerard Butler stars as Childers, who, at the beginning of the movie, is coming out of prison and returning to his trailer park home. His wife Lynn (Michelle Monaghan) has discovered religion and quit her job as a stripper; this infuriates Childers, who goes out on the lash, drinking and scoring heroin. For a time, Childers continues on this wayward path, robbing a crackhouse and brutally stabbing a Native American hitchhiker who pulls a knife on his best friend (Michael Shannon). But while washing the blood from his clothes, however, Childers gets a newsflash from above and accompanies Lynn to church, where he is baptised.

Childers gives up crime, takes up construction and starts wearing short-sleeve shirts instead of biker leathers. In church one day, he is alerted to the plight of orphans in Sudan by a visiting pastor, and so he decides to visit the area as part of a relief mission. But what he sees there haunts him. Young orphans are everywhere, and none are safe from the rebel leaders who burn their villages, kill their parents and force their siblings into armed slavery. So Childers becomes a righteous avenger, building an orphanage for the kids and declaring open war on the rebels… and if you think Machine Gun Preacher sounds like it might sending out a bit of a mixed message, you'd be right. Forster's film suffers a strange tonal schizophrenia: on the one hand, it is a moving, sensitive film about the plight of children in war-torn Sudan. And on the other, it is a violent, all-guns-blazing, Boy's Own action movie. Forster handles the former better than the latter, and Butler captures the raging contradictions in Childers, but though I ended up admiring his charity, I can't honestly say I'd ever like to meet this man.

Also shot in exotic places and examining, on one level, the gulf between rich and poor in Third World countries was Michael Winterbottom's Trishna, a loose reimagining of Thomas Hardy's Tess Of The D'Urbevilles. On the flight over to Toronto I'd watched The Trip, with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, and had been reminded of what a national treasure Winterbottom is. Trishna will not be one of those crossover movies, and will doubtless divide critics with its alarming ending, but for most of its two-hour running time Winterbottom's film is an enthralling allegory for a certain kind of male-female relationship. Riz Ahmed stars as Jay, the rich son of a hotelier who is on holiday in Rajasthan with his friends. By chance, he meets Trishna (Freida Pinto), the beautiful daughter of a crippled rickshaw driver and sole breadwinner for her poor family. To please everybody, but mostly himself, Jay offers Trishna a job at one of his father's hotels, where he aims to seduce her.

Like Hardy's novel, and Roman Polanski's film version, this is a sometimes frustrating story of a passive woman who seems to let her life wash over her. In another director's hands, this could have been catastrophic, but Trishna is one of Winterbottom's most cinematic movies yet, making terrific use of the Indian landscape as his heroine travels from Rajasthan to Mumbai and back again. Regular collaborator Marcel Zyskind's cinematography could not be better and it finds the perfect median between fiction and documentary. Especially good are the scenes in Mumbai, where Trishna dreams of being a Bollywood dancer; the film set she visits, though invented by Winterbottom, seems thoroughly authentic. And as well as India, the camera clearly loves Pinto too, and so she overshadows Ahmed, in a somewhat thankless role. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but Trishna raises some interesting points, just as Hardy did, about equality, economic freedom and injustice.

The last one I'll come to is also a literary adaptation. Terence Davies' Deep Blue Sea is the director's take on Terence Rattigan's 1952 play of the same name. Unlike Winterbottom's film, this is not the story of a passive heroine – by contrast, his leading lady, Hester (Rachel Weisz), is a definite go-getter who has left her older, wealthy husband (Simon Russell Beale) for a dashing young fighter pilot (Tom Hiddleston). It begins with Hester trying to commit suicide in a dowdy boarding house, her life flashing before her eyes in a woozy, fragmented delirium. Her deathwish, however, is foiled by the landlady, and Hester is forced to face up to the situation she has created for herself.

Deep Blue Sea hasn't been terribly well received (at the time writing this it was rated an unfair one out of ten on the Imdb), but that's possibly because of its often challenging style. The opening salvo, which lasts a full nine or ten minutes, is an impressionistic overture, heavily scored with classical music (Samuel Barber's Concerto For Violin And Orchestra), and once the story beds in, it becomes clear that Davies has done away with much of Rattigan's original story. He has, however, kept the main bones of it, and, though the film contains many of Davies's signature tropes – singsongs, long takes, peeling wallpaper – this isn't such a rigourous auteur experience as you might imagine. The chief reason for this is a luminous turn by Rachel Weisz, who really ought to be looking at a Bafta nomination for her work here. But I was more surprised by Hiddleston, who, at first sight, seems to have the least interesting role of the three. However, he definitely won me over; he has the hardest job of the main players, and by the end of this sad and affecting film, his character is as empathetic as the others.

That pretty much brings my coverage of Toronto to an end. In passing, I liked the documentary Paul Williams: Still Alive, but wished it said more about the musician/movie star than simply what it's like to be around him. I wasn't too gone on Eduardo Sanchez's Lovely Molly, a new horror from one half of the Blair Witch duo that, though atmospheric, became less coherent throughout its 99 minutes. And The Loneliest Planet I didn't get at all, an opaque travelogue starring Gael Garcia Bernal as half of a couple on a hiking holiday in Eastern Europe. It was a tie between that and Killer Elite as my least favourite movie here. Though it starts promisingly, with Robert De Niro, lots of gunfire, and an assassination attempt gone wrong, this needlessly complex Jason Statham vehicle degenerated into shouty, shooty spectacle in which a mercenary is hired by an Arab sheikh to bump off the SAS men who killed his sons. Enter Clive Owen as the former SAS man who rumbles the plot, and you have a clumsy action-drama hybrid that isn't good enough to be great or bad enough to be brilliant. It's somewhere in the middle, a sort of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for Zoo readers.

There were so many others I wanted to see but just couldn't find the time to, like Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister, Bennett Miller's Moneyball, Rodrigo Garcia's Albert Nobbs and Werner Herzog's Into The Abyss. I also wished I'd been at the now-legendary screening of Francis Ford Coppola's derided Twixt, which is alleged to have prompted 300 walkouts (from the public screening!). But it's a testament to TIFF's programming that there is always something good showing somewhere. This is an excellent festival where films and filmmakers are accessible to the public and life is never ever dull. I can't wait for next year.

TIFF 2011: Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, God Bless America and Killer Joe

2011-09-14T23:20:00.000-07:00

There were several films at this year's TIFF that really captured something of the zeitgeist. One was a documentary, two were black comedies, and all three are not likely to become mainstream hits in the short term, simply because they tell the truth about the times we live in. I'll start with Nick Broomfield's Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, mostly because it had the best title of the festival and I never tire of repeating it. Anyone familiar with Broomfield's work to date will know what to expect from this film: as per usual, Broomfield tries to go through the official channels to interview a celebrity, and then, on failing, he gets there in his own bumbling fashion. In this case the subject is the Alaskan Republican politician who ran for vice-presidency in the 2008 elections, making history in the short term as the first female to do so. In the long term, however, Palin became more famous for her hunting skills, dysfunctional family and pathetic grasp of history, geography and syntax.

Like many docs these days, Broomfield's film relies a lot on the shocking grain of blown-up video library footage (which will doubtless look better on TV). Add this to the handheld camera of his usual style and the first half hour or so of this film doesn't really seem to be going anywhere at all. I don't remember the exact tipping point, though, but midway through there comes a moment when the director starts to reveal an impressive agenda. This isn't really a film about Palin the woman at all but a film about Palin the media phenomenon; Broomfield soon understands that Palin will never talk to him, not because she's scared but simply because she doesn't need to. Broomfield, in the film's vernacular, is not “a Palinbot” and therefore not open to her cheerful stupidity, which is brazenly marketed to her supporters as a kind of lower middle-class street smarts. I won't spoil the “Attica!” moment, but just when you think the film has nowhere to go, Broomfield literally rises to the occasion. Unlike any of his other films, this really is a film with a specific aim, and it sidesteps tabloid tattle to address the fundamental scariness of Palin's logic and that of her insane Tea Party followers. It's like the beer garden scene in Cabaret, with Broomfield in Michael York's shoes asking us, “Do you really think you can control them?” Seeing this, I'm not so sure we can.

The film that made me laugh more than anything I've seen this whole year was Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America (pictured). I'm a big Bobcat fan/apologist, and, though it's somewhat flawed (more on that later), this is his most fully realised film since Shakes The Clown. It stars Joel Murray – an actor who I'd never heard of but whose CV is brilliant, including Mad Men, two Hatchet films and The Cable Guy – and this could be the film that brings an unexpected bloom to his already prolific career. He plays Frank, a schlubby office worker who is laid off from work at pretty much the same time he discovers he has a brain tumour. Modern life his getting him down. His next-door neighbours and workmates are cretins, the TV pimps energy drinks and shitty reality shows, and his own, estranged pre-teen daughter – a pampered, nasty little princess – hates him. So in a fit of pique, Frank decided to vent his spleen: he gets his gun, steals the neighbour's car and goes postal.

Produced by Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly's Darko Entertainment, God Bless America is the very definition of a cult film. It's strong, both in violence and language, and it will NOT appeal to everyone. Goldthwait, though, has a unique voice in black comedy, in that he has a rare ability to juggle extreme situations with very human drama. Here, that function is fulfilled by Tara Lynne Barr as Roxy, who becomes Frank's teenage accomplice on the road. Roxy thinks they're the new Bonnie and Clyde, but the truth is closer to Paper Moon, with a side dish of Natural Born Killers. Some debits are that the film is a bit over-talky in places, and the look of the film isn't always especially special. But when it's working, God Bless America really pushes all the right buttons, like an acidic, R-rated companion piece (or prequel) to Mike Judge's underrated Idiocracy (2006).

The third of these films is William Friedkin's Killer Joe, a follow-up of sorts to his 2006 film Bug, in that it's also written by playwright Tracy Letts. I didn't see Bug, and I don't recall why, but I'll certainly seek it out now after this pitch-black, definition-of-edgy movie. The stage roots show, but there's a delicious dark humour here that makes up for some of its shortfalls. In essence, it's about a white-trash-Flintstones-like family, and what the film lacks in scope – it's a Fargo thing, with a band of even more stupid conspirators – it makes up for with character and performances. The nominal lead is Emile Hirsch as Chris, a smalltown drug dealer who finds himself in debt to the local Mr Big, so, to raise the cash, he decides to have his mother murdered for the insurance money, hiring the services of cop and part-time assassin Joe (Matthew McConaughey) and cajoling his fucked-up family – estranged father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), stepmom Sharla (Gina Gershon) and little sister Dottie (Juno Temple) – into the deal. In Toronto I overheard the film being favourably compared to Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, which slightly overstates the case, even if the film does share a certain claustrophobic sensibility and a similarly wonderful concept of bad taste. But the clincher for me was Britain's Juno Temple as the deranged but somehow innocent Dottie; while all this grimy trailer-park horror is unfolding around her, Dottie's berserk golly-gee attitude keeps the film grounded.

I didn't love Killer Joe, partly because I was exhausted, but it's definitely fun, and I think I'll return to it because, like the original stage play, it's a film about characters and morality rather than story (even Friedkin copped to some weird plot holes at the post-screening Q&A I attended). And that in itself is important, since that's a perfect reflection of the times we live in. Personality as threat: that's what we're up against.

TIFF 2011: The Descendants, Anonymous, Rampart and 50/50

2011-09-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

The 2011 Toronto International Film Festival began on Thursday, and it's a measure of how busy this place has been that I've only now had time to sit and blog, on the fourth night of being here. I've always thought of myself as being a European festival guy, preferring the hustle of Cannes and Venice to what I imagined to be a somewhat cold and joyless festival, but how wrong I was. TIFF deserves its place as one of the top-tier festivals on the circuit: as well as the superb programming, which gathers up previously seen hits from Cannes, Venice and Sundance and adds several dozen significant world premieres of its own, the festival runs like clockwork with an easy-to-follow programme, spacious cinemas and a band of amazing volunteers. The effect is like a big-budget Sundance with the added glamour of Cannes. Unlike Venice, which is becoming more and more like a revolving door for Hollywood celebrities, filmmakers do mingle with the mortals; and unlike Cannes and Venice there is respect for every attendee, no matter what size website or publication.

But the main thing about TIFF is its ability to kick-start major awards season movies. Last year it was The King's Speech, and this year's great white hope is undoubtedly Alexander Payne's The Descendants, which arrived with great reviews out of the festival at Telluride. At first I wasn't sure how this was going to go, since the start is slow and there's lots of unnecessary (and somewhat unconvincing) voiceover. The star of the show is George Clooney, who plays Hawaiian lawyer Matt King. His wife is in hospital, having suffered a severe head injury after a motorboat crash, and so King is forced to come to terms with his family life, which involves two daughters that he hasn't connected with much and a marriage that has fallen even further into neglect. On top of that, King is involved in a massive property deal that will make millions for him and his cousins if he accepts one of many bids to transform the family plot from a rural idyll into a commercial holiday resort.

There are shades of About Schmidt in this bittersweet comedy, as King finds himself thrown, blinking, out into the headlights of the world. But this is a much warmer and human movie, thanks to some touching supporting performances from the two girls playing his daughters. It would be a spoiler to reveal what brings them together, but the gradual thawing of ice is exceptionally well handled, and what starts out as quite a mannered performance by Clooney just gets better and better and better. The ending is beautiful and moving for all sorts of reasons, and it's a safe bet to suggest that Payne's film will feature prominently at next year's Oscar ceremony. So much is good here that several nominations – for Payne, film and Clooney – seem inevitable and deserved.

A less expected awards contender appeared in the form of (don't laugh) Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, a lush period thriller about the true identity of the man who wrote the plays attributed to one William Shakespeare of Stratford. I went under duress, but Anonymous proved to be a surprise pleasure. Yes, it's complicated and confusingly plotted, with flashbacks within flashbacks that I have yet to comprehend. But there's a genuinely gripping story here, some lovely ideas about art and politics, and the best use of CG that Emmerich has ever put his name to. But the reason this film will have a life is because of several superb performances, notably Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth I, whose passion for plays and poetry is really at the crux of the story. Redgrave's Virgin Queen is astonishing to watch, an old lady partial to all the giddy distractions that would waylay a girl sixty years her junior, but whose iron will snaps into cruel relief whenever her life is threatened. It won't be a box office smash, but the production design and some key cast are outstanding.

Two more awards outsiders followed. At the moment, Oren Moverman's Rampart (pictured) has no US distributor, but that must surely change soon. Set in 1999, it is a hardboiled LA noir that features a career-best performance by Woody Harrelson, one so committed and fearless that it gives even Michael Fassbender's efforts in Shame a very close run. Harrelson plays LAPD cop Dave Brown, aka Date-Rape Dave, who lives, in a very strange set-up, with his two ex-wives and two daughters. Brown is a single guy, a smartass and a skirt-chaser; he's also an old-fashioned cop who believes in the law of the nightstick and the gun. When his car is rammed by a hit-and-run driver, Brown gives chase and delivers some of his famous rough justice to the perp involved. Coincidentally, his brutality is videotaped by a passer-by, and Brown is hauled before Internal Affairs. Is there more to this this meets the eye? Brown thinks so. The LAPD is in the thick of a massive corruption scandal, and Brown begins to believe that he is being scapegoated to distract the media from the bigger story.

Like Fassbender, Harrelson is simply amazing in this tough, gritty drama. There's no handholding – what do you expect from a script co-written by Demon Dog James Ellroy and finessed by the co-writer of Todd Haynes's I'm Not There? – and redemption just seems to get further and further away with each new explosion of violence. And though the focus is primarily on Brown and his dysfunctional relationship with his family, the film really comes alive in scenes of the investigation into his bad behaviour. Sigourney Weaver is especially good as the HR woman trying to cut a deal with him, and her scenes with Harrelson simply crackle with old-school chemistry. This, though, is Harrelson's film, and if the Academy see fit to ignore it, that would be nothing short of criminal.

Finally, today I saw a very touching, funny and sincere comedy called 50/50, which used to be called I'm With Cancer, and if you still don't rate Joseph Gordon-Levitt, this should seal the deal. He plays Adam Lerner, a public radio worker whose life is turned upside down when he is diagnosed with cancer. His pretty but non-committal girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) is mortified. His cloying mother (Anjelica Huston) threatens to move in with him. And his unsentimental best friend (Seth Rogen) seems to see this as little more than excuse to get drunk and score a few sympathy fucks. It's a simple enough story but it's also deceptively effective. Gordon-Levitt plays the part with empathy and subtlety, and Rogen reaches previously unseen new heights in a role that helps sweeten the bitter pill of its morbid theme. And Jonathan Levine, director of The Wackness, corrals the whole thing with such understatement that it's sometimes easy to forget the gravity of the situation, until some final, truly heart-wrenching hospital scenes in which Adam comes to terms with his mortality, knowing that his chances of survival could go either way. Maybe this is an Independent Spirit awards piece rather than Oscar material, but it's very, very good, tackling a taboo and upsetting subject with originality and – with one particular joke about Patrick Swayze – balls.

Venice Film Festival 2011: 4.44 Last Day On Earth

2011-09-07T11:37:00.000-07:00

Fittingly, my last film of Venice 68 was Abel Ferrara's 4.44 Last Day On Earth, a two-hander starring Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh, aka Mrs Ferrara, as Cisco and Skye, a couple living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who are dealing with the news of an impending apocalypse. This being an Abel Ferrara movie, they greet it by having a big argument, after which Cisco pops out to score a nice bit of heroin. However, the Driller Killer director must have mellowed in his old age, since the film then takes a turn for the spiritual. Clips of the Dalai Lama speaking are littered throughout the movie, along with footage of a kind of motivational Buddhist speaker and snippets of Al Gore, and Ferrara's point seems to be that the end is something to be embraced not feared.

It doesn't rank with his best films, which are looking further and further away these days (The Funeral of 15 years ago marked the end of an interesting couple of decades), but there are a few good moments here. The nicest thing is perhaps the extremity of its low budget: outside their flat, life is going on as normal. Nobody is looting, there are cars on the streets, and at one point a Chinese delivery boy brings round a takeaway, which Cisco seems to pay 300 bucks for. And towards the end there's some creepy, atmospheric CG, as the skies over New York are whipped into a forbidding green storm that knocks out all the city's lights in an especially chilling moment. To get there, though, you have to endure an awful lot of talking and emoting, most of which left me cold.

So that was that. My visit this year was cut short, which means I'll miss William Friedkin's Killer Joe and Ami Canaan Mann's Texas Killing Fields, both of which I'm hoping to catch up with at my next two festivals (Toronto first, then San Sebastian). But in retrospect, this wasn't quite the vintage festival that Venice 68 looked to be on paper. It was a strong line-up in principle but not everything delivered (“Fool's gold,” as one critic put it). And while it struggles to do something with the massive Ground Zero hole out front, which has been there for several years now, Venice really seems to have lost its footing as a place for filmmakers. Celebrities are boated in and boated out, but there's no heart to the festival: nowhere to mingle, no watering hole or relaxed meeting place.

It's impressive enough to think that, in the last seven days, the festival has welcomed George Clooney, Madonna, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Monica Bellucci, Jet Li, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightley, Al Pacino and James Franco. But outside of that razzle-dazzle, the selection of non-competition films has been uninspiring to say the least. And even within it, the obsession with celebrity – all over the world – has had a devastating impact on press coverage here. Press conferences are bland and boring. The interviews, when we can get them, are almost as bad. And while the festival will have time to change and improve, that's the one thing that can only get worse…

Venice Film Festival 2011: The Moth Diaries and Wuthering Heights

2011-09-06T19:31:00.000-07:00

This morning kicked off with The Moth Diaries (pictured), the latest film by Mary Harron, whose work I have always liked and looked forward to. On paper, it looked to be a kind of light tween horror, and I had some trepidation about that. The reality is thankfully more sophisticated, but I wasn't quite sure whether the film met its own goals, which were, admittedly, quite lofty. Unlike the Twilight series, this is a film in which the vampire is a metaphor for the horrors that teenage girls experience, and not some dangerous, sexualised 'other'. Quite literally, it drains the life out of its victims, not simply by drinking their blood but by preying on them mentally, starving and then isolating them.

It begins in an upbeat fashion with Rebecca (Sarah Bolger) returning to boarding school for her second year there. She's 16 or 17 and just beginning to rediscover her youth after a harrowing experience with death (her father, a famous poet, slashed his wrists when she was a child). Thanks to her closest friend Lucie (Sarah Gadon), Rebecca is starting to enjoy life again, and things couldn't be better – that is, until the arrival of a mysterious new girl named Ernessa (Lily Cole). Ernessa is pale and reserved but certainly intelligent, and within weeks she is buddying up to Rebecca's bestie. At the same time, however, Lucie starts to become ill and wasted, causing Rebecca to consider the unthinkable: that Ernessa is some kind of vampire, enslaving Lucie and sucking away her life force.

The body horror elements are what work best in this; I spoke to Harron afterwards, and she talked about the way the experiences of young teenage girls are usually parlayed into screwy comedies, when in actual fact those years can be anything but fun. Under the cover of genre, Harron's film covers such topics as bullying, girl crushes, anorexia, jealousy and peer pressure, not to mention the physical changes that come with adolescence. And for a while it promises to be highbrow addition to the vampire-movie canon too, throwing in references to Le Fanu's Carmilla and Bram Stoker's Dracula while striving for an authentically gothic atmosphere. Somehow, though, it just didn't gel: several people commented to me about the amount of exposition crammed into an 85-minute movie, the girls never seemed to be quite in mortal danger (always fatal to a horror movie), and Cole doesn't quite nail the double-headed coin of being nasty/nice that the film needs in order to work. Still, although it's my least favourite of Harron's films, it's nevertheless intelligent and at times quite subtle, with ideas you'd be hard-pressed to find in the awful Fright Night.

I'd pretty much say the same thing about Andrea Arnold's new film Wuthering Heights, which I was really, really looking forward to, having loved Wasp (her short-film debut), Red Road and Fish Tank. I left, however, feeling more than a bit crestfallen. I've never been tempted to read Emily Bronte's novel but I may do now, if only to see how such a spare, minimal and frustrating film can be made from such a well-thumbed classic. The film begins with a young black boy being adopted by a Yorkshire farmer and brought back to meet his new family, the Earnshaws, who don't welcome the addition at all. Renamed Heathcliff, the boy has a love-hate relationship with the Earnshaws' daughter, Catherine, and when he overhears her saying that she loves him but could never marry him, Heathcliff storms off into the rain, across the wily, windy moor (© Kate Bush). Years later, an older Heathcliff reappears, vowing to take back the woman he loves. But Cathy is now married, to a respectable neighbour, and the obsessive Heathcliff's intervention is doomed to cause chaos.

Now, although I'm not familiar with the book, I know where Arnold is coming from and I see her angle. But her Wuthering Heights is a slog where her other films have flown so easily. In scope, it tilts at There Will Be Blood in terms of its remorseless depiction of a cruel rural world, and the film's visual confidence almost gets it there (albeit in Academy ratio). But what should be tight and atmospheric is disjointed and rambling, especially in the second half. It's an ambitious third film for sure, but Arnold's forte is character, which is in short supply here. It is also quite monstrously long; for a film in which so little happens, Wuthering Heights drags on for a relentless 2hrs 8, padded out with the unnecessary tics you often see in films by first-timers (shots of beetles, rain, cobwebs, etc). Maybe I'll revisit it someday, but I'm in no hurry. Which is annoying, since this is, for me, the last big film of the festival: after tomorrow's screening of Abel Ferrara's 4.44 Last Day On Earth, I'll be leaving Venice for Toronto, which will hopefully be more polite, better organised, much, much cheaper, and won't have a big fucking hole in the centre of the festival area. All I can say is, bring it on!

Venice Film Festival 2011: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Dark Horse

2011-09-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

Empire's official five-star review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is online, and it reflects the opinion of pretty much every British critic on the Lido. I may have to see it again but I'm afraid I'm not quite in the blown-away camp; many aspects of the film are indeed excellent but I don't think it's a film I could or would ever say I loved. The performances and set dressing are immaculate, the latter especially in the recurring scenes of MI5's Christmas party, a cheap and cheerful affair in what looks like a working men's club. The whole film appears to be stained with Woodbines and dipped in Double Diamond, and if there's one thing Swedish director Tomas Alfredson can certainly do, it's period – especially Cold War period, which added an extra layer of chilly atmosphere to his breakout film Let The Right One In.

But though it created a plausible world, this was not a story I could immerse myself in. I found the exposition heavy going, made more difficult by Alfredson's use of flashback and dummy flashback, by which means dead characters reappear and vice-versa (that's meant to be cryptic, by the way). This in itself is no bad thing, but the story is also so dense with characters as well as intrigue that the film doesn't give you much time to ponder. I suppose my main point is that the hunting of a long-established Russian mole in the British secret service should take a bit longer than two hours. As retired spymaster George Smiley (Gary Oldman) mounts his investigation, the film never really explores the characters of the suspects in any detail, presenting instead, at various points in the film, a montage of their faces filmed in POV as Smiley remembers them. Is it the smirking Colin Firth? The shifty Ciarán Hinds? That bloke who played Truman Capote in the one that wasn't Capote? Or the other one?

I must confess that I didn't have much invested in any of them, not even Smiley, by the end, so the big reveal didn't really come with any great impact or surprise. Still, Tinker Tailor… at least engaged me, which is more than Todd Solondz's Dark Horse (pictured) did. Solondz is to cinema what Kevin Smith is also to cinema: by no means a great filmmaker (and that's being charitable) but an often funny writer who can sometimes get it together to pull off a great, if uncinematic black comedy. Dark Horse is a product of one of those other times, despite some wonderful but underused character parts and Christopher Walken wearing the best wig of his twilight years.

The entirety of Dark Horse is like a vignette from one of Solondz's earlier films, which could have covered all of the material here in a few lines of dialogue. Jordan Gelber stars as Abe, a mid-30s loser who works for the family business and lives at home with his mum and dad (Walken and Mia Farrow). As the film begins, Abe meets Miranda (Selma Blair), decides she is the girl for him and sets out to marry her. Which is about all story we get. From here, as Abe pops the question and the sullen Miranda mulls it over, the film becomes a dog's dinner of dream scenes and fantasies, mostly involving his father's mousey secretary Marie (Donna Murphy), who Abe imagines as a secret cougar, living a fabulous house and driving a gleaming red Ferrari.

There are some good lines and details. At work, Abe's idiot cousin asks him sincerely if he's going to see Tron Legacy, because the trailer “looks good”; instead of filling out spread sheets, Abe uses his computer to buy old Power Rangers from E-Bay, and his room is a shrine to Simpsons and Gremlins memorabilia. Murphy, too, is excellent in her transformation from catatonic dogsbody to power-dressing man-eater. But there's not really any heart in the film, an accusation made of pretty much every Solondz film since Welcome To the Dollhouse. I've disagreed with that reading in the past but here I can't. This is quite a cynical film about a boy who grows up thinking he's going to be the “dark horse” of the family but realises, too late, that this is just the spin his family have put on his loserdom. And that's all. I came out of this downbeat, pointless film feeling pretty cheated.

Venice Film Festival 2011: Shame

2011-09-04T15:20:00.000-07:00

Michael Fassbender is the actor who came from nowhere and, in three short years, seems to have gone everywhere. I first met him in San Sebastian after the screening there of Hunger in 2008, just days before he arrived on the set of Inglourious Basterds; I had no idea, having met many similarly promising actors who do years of penance in unseen and unreleased indie movies, that his time would come so swiftly, if indeed it would ever come at all. But this year has seen a trifecta of movies that perfectly showcase his talent. In X-Men: First Class, his ease in a big-budget blockbuster immediately led to whispers of Bond, should Daniel Craig ever put away the Walther PPK. Then at this festival alone there were two that couldn't have been more different. In David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method he proved he could do period, playing the buttoned-up, rather square Carl Jung, who, even though he sees himself as a bohemian, secretly knows that he's just a middle-class dropout who's rebelling against type. But in Steve McQueen's Shame he shows very definitely he can do 'now', playing a modern man whose lurid sex life masks a set of very deep and painful neuroses.

After the clipped English of Magneto and Jung, it's quite a shock to hear Fassbender speaking in his American accent, playing Brendan, a young businessman living alone in New York. Brendan is obsessed with sex and all aspects of it – the opening scenes show his pursuit of a married woman he spots on the subway. At first she is embarrassed, then flatttered, then awkward, then nervous. Brendan maintains his blank, seductive smile, and McQueen keeps his camera trained on the poor girl. For Brendan, these four seasons of emotion are part of the thrill of the hunt, and he closes in to seal the deal long after the girl's brief reciprocal interest has turned to mild panic. At home, Brendan romps with hookers and watches porn on the internet, but when he goes out with his brash, boorish boss David (the excellent James Badge Dale, from 24), he turns into a wallflower in the bigger man's shadow.

Brendan's routine is upset when his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) comes to stay. Sissy is a club singer and a vintage clotheshorse who first appears leaving a string of increasingly irate phone messages for her brother. Brendan ignores them and one day comes home to find Sissy in his bathtub. She's an emotionally dysfunctional wreck, much like Brendan, but where Brendan keeps his outward appearance professional, Sissy lets it all show. We never get to see the partner who has apparently kicked her out, but it's clear from a phonecall that we and Brendan overhear that she's attracted to the wrong men, or, at a push, attracted to the right men but for all the wrong reasons.

In the run-up to Venice there was a sudden bit of back-pedalling from the makers of Shame to reposition it slightly, after the early publicity revealed that it would be about sex addiction. That particular tanker will be hard to turn round – Shame most definitely IS a film about sex addiction, with full-frontal nudity and explicit sex that will earn it a big fat 18 certificate when the BBFC claps eyes on it (although I seriously doubt that it will be cut). But I know what they're trying to say; McQueen's film is more about the desperate impulses that push Brendan to do what he does. By the end of the film, the sex scenes become more and more detached and impressionistic, an orgy of flesh without context that also becomes quite eye-poppingly graphic in the last act.

The film resolves itself in a surprisingly conventional way, one that slightly sells out the arty promise of the first hour but, commercially, this can only help sell the movie as a latter-day Alfie. Mulligan is convincingly tragic as the flakey Sissy, and her scenes with Fassbender do have an edge. Just what is it about Sissy that so gets to Brendan? It's a question that sits at the very heart of the film, and McQueen creates a disturbing mystery about it that transcends mere exposition. Metaphorically, Sissy holds up a mirror to Brendan and he hates what he sees there, but it's to McQueen's credit that he never really tells us why. In fact, the whole film is a triumph for McQueen. His use of music is a little self-important at times, but the performances, pacing and cinematography – especially on the streets and subways of Manhattan – are first rate. Expect this film to figure in a multitude of year-end best lists. And, more importantly, it is only a matter of time before Fassbender adds Oscar-winner, Bafta-winner and ruler of the world to his already impeccable CV. In Shame, he's literally showing us everything he's got. The future will show us what he can do with it...

Venice Film Festival 2011: Alps, Hail and Chicken With Plums

2011-09-03T14:10:00.000-07:00

Alps is the second feature from Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek director whose first feature, Dogtooth, won the Un Certain Regard award in Cannes a couple of years ago. I wish I'd seen it at the time; when I finally caught up with it, I'd seen, in the interim, Mexican director Arturo Ripstein's unforgettable 70s black comedy The Castle Of Purity, which, too, was about a family being sheltered from the outside world, so the novelty was somewhat lost. I didn't have especially high hopes for Alps, then, but what I saw has persuaded me to give Dogtooth another go. It's hard work for sure, and delivers only two obvious clues in the first 45 minutes. But once the premise is made (sort of) clear, what seems like a very fuzzy, meandering movie suddenly snaps sharply into focus.

Whether this is even the real world, let lone the modern day is left abundantly vague when the film opens, and a scrawny ribbon dancer is shown performing a breathless dance to the blaring strains of Wagner's Ride Of The Valkyries. She's phoning in her performance because she'd rather be dancing to pop music, but when she says as much, her coach turns sour, threatening physical harm if she speaks so insolently to him again. These two people – from memory, I don't recall any real names being used, but that could just be the disorientating nature of the film – are part of a mysterious quartet who operate out of a rundown gym. We meet the other two soon enough; the group has a meeting, in which their leader announces that he has decided on a name. They are to be called Alps: for many reasons, but the primary one being that it gives no indication of what it is they do.

So what do they do? Well, it's shown to us in tantalising fragments that come together so slowly the film will test the patience of the casual viewer. But if you stick with it, Alps becomes a brilliant, baffling puzzle that, though it looks superficially like one of the suburban grotesques cooked up by Austria's Ulrich Seidl, is actually more of a Lynchian mood-piece. Though dream-like in tone, it never becomes nightmarish, and the climax is even somewhat moving. Made with a brutally assured style that at times borders on anti-cinema, Alps is a provocative story about people and relationships that constantly undercuts our needs and expectations. Above all, it's about individuality – how much pride we have in it of ourselves but, more poignantly, how we demand it of other people.

Saturday morning's film Hail was certainly about individuality too. I must have slipped up somewhere but I decided to see this instead of Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, which I skipped because a) it's out on Friday in the US and b) even afterwards, the kindest thing anyone had to say about it was that it was “quite good”. That said, Hail wasn't the hardboiled Australia crime movie I was hoping for it. It's stylish, bold and definitely not for the squeamish, but the struggling non-professional cast were pushed too hard for my liking.

Inspired by the real-life experiences of its star, the weather-worn Daniel P Jones, it tells the story of a criminal named Danny (Jones), who gets out of jail and goes back to the home he shares with his patient, loving partner Lauren. Danny gets a job but breaks his arm in a fall, so, to help him get back on his feet, an old flame of Lauren's comes by with a proposition that has disastrous consequences for all. There are good moments in this overlong and, visually, slightly self-regarding film, but they mostly don't involve the genre elements. Hail works best when its leading man is trying to articulate his troubles, and the look in his eyes in certain scenes certainly does open a window on a very dark psyche. Ultimately, though, I didn't buy what it was about and left feeling rather soiled by my stay in Hail's world. The music choices, however, made that time tolerable.

I can't pass comment on James Franco's Sal yet because the security at this festival is a farce and I couldn't get in. But I didn't mind too much because it meant that I got to see all of Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's wonderful Chicken With Plums, an Iran-set love story with echoes of Amelie but with a much punchier sense of humour and an elegant sense of tragedy and loss. Mathieu Almaric stars as Nassir-Ali, a violinist who is in despair because his favourite instrument has been smashed and no other will do. At his wits end, he decides to die, and after rejecting all the options in a hilariously bleak montage of potential suicides he opts to stay in bed and simply waste away. Will he die? The film answers that question very early on (I won't spoil it), but the film continues to surprise us, using an ingenious mix of flashbacks and flash-forwards, explaining how Nassir-Ali came to give up on life and why he can create such beautiful music.

After the animated Persepolis, which also mixed gallows humour with sweetness and sadness, Chicken With Plums is a startlingly accomplished live-action follow-up. Its zaniness has less of a Jeunet quality and resembles more the the wackiness of the early Coens, if they had a bit more heart. The ending is a bit elongated and undermines the power of the film's simplicity, but this film completely won me over with its eccentricity, confidence and pure, unsentimental emotion.

Venice Film Festival 2011: A Dangerous Method

2011-09-02T10:06:00.000-07:00

David Cronenberg, like John Waters, is a once-pioneering director whose taste, style and ideas have been co-opted so much by the mainstream you can see his influence everywhere – and yet, like Waters, he can rarely get the budgets he needs to make the films he should be making. I recall being on the set of Spider (2002), which was being filmed on an allotment just outside London, on the day that a significant chunk of the modest $8 million budget was suddenly withdrawn, Now, clearly that money was replaced because filming continued, but there was a very real possibility that the plug would be pulled. That was an eye-opener for me. Cronenberg was calm considering the circumstances, but I couldn't believe that the director of Videodrome, The Fly and Dead Ringers was in this situation.

Since then, Cronenberg has proven himself as a mainstream contender again with two successful, accessible thrillers – A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises – but both, to a degree, have been slight compromises. Of the two, I much prefer A History Of Violence, since although, outwardly, it is a pulpy, violent B-movie, under the skin it is about one of Cronenberg's key obsessions: change in the human mind and body. In that movie, violence itself is a virulent infection, like the parasites in Shivers, or the TV signal in Videodrome, and once exposed to it, no one is safe. Coming in the wake of A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method will definitely be seen as a throwback and one of David Cronenberg's more divisive films. For a start, it's period. Secondly, it's a kind of chamber piece. And third, it's based on a stage play, which makes it an instant companion piece with 1993's underrated M Butterfly.

It begins in the early 20th century, with hysterical patient Sabina S (Keira Knightley) being driven to a sanatorium in Venice. There she is put under the care of Dr Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), a leading proponent, after Dr Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), of psychoanalysis, aka “the talking cure”. Jung breaks through Sabina's screaming fits and outbursts to get to the root of her neuroses: she is a sexual masochist, the victim of bizarre abuse by her domineering father. At this point, Jung is happily following the party line, seeing Freud as a father figure. But when Otto Gross (Vincent Cassell), a psychotherapist who has somewhat fallen off the wagon so to speak, is placed in his care, Jung begins to wonder. Is sex really the root of everything, as Freud maintains without debate? And what is normality? Should the human mind do what it wants, what others want, or what it is capable of? Gross thinks the latter, and his chilling but logical amorality turns Jung's head. Before long, Jung and Sabina – who has worked her way up to be his assistant – are having a reckless affair, one that will drive a permanent wedge between himself and his mentor.

Now, the people that don't like this movie will be two camps: people who will be, er, overwhelmed by Keira Knightley's alarmingly physical performance and people who have not been following Cronenberg's entire career. To address the former, it's not that Knightley is so powerful, rather that she is extreme from the very offset. Gurning, screaming and doubled up in all sorts of bony contortions, Sabina is like a wild animal, and though she mellows, this really throws us in at the deep end. I'm not sure having such a recognisable actress in this role was the very best idea (such is the reality of modern film financing), but Knightley gives it her best shot, and if you can see past the surface trimmings, she does a pretty good job once the hysteria subsides. And as for the latter point, this really is a very pure Cronenberg movie. Imagine Videodrome with no special effects and you're halfway there. Carl Jung is like a man who's just dropped acid – in this case, the acid is Otto Gross's reasoned provocations – and the bulk of the film is him letting the the drug take hold, coursing through his body and brain.

Fassbender is very good as Jung, cementing his reputation as a major new talent; Cassell steals all his scenes as the psychotic Gross; and the only disappointment is Viggo Mortensen – not because he's bad but because the part is so small, coming in like the Young Mr Grace of psychoanalysis to tell everyone they've all been doing very well. The film's stage roots and budgetary constraints show, especially in a trip to New York, and the ensuing professional gulf between Jung and Freud is not really explored. But Cronenberg completists will enjoy the film's perversity, its richness of ideas and defiantly uncommercial outlook. And it will certainly tide them over until Cosmopolis.

Venice Film Festival 2011: Ides Of March, Carnage and WE

2011-09-01T18:43:00.000-07:00

“You know what they say about expectations? Expectations lead to disappointments.” So speaks the other Wallis in Madonna's second directorial outing WE. She might easily have been talking about the festival as the film she was in, which, though far from Terrence Malick, was really not the car crash that many were predicting. Venice 68, on paper, promised to be one of those magical years that come along very rarely; a festival packed full with long-awaited auteur efforts, from directors who have long since lacked much use for their first names. Polanski, Cronenberg Soderbergh and Ferrara were all bringing their new films, with very exciting offers from smaller filmmakers like Andrea Arnold, Steve McQueen and, most anticipated by me, Mary Harron. It couldn't possibly be that good, could it? Quite a lot of people – I think some of them are even journalists – coughed up 60€ to buy press accreditation and find out whether the 2011 edition could survive the hype.

The festival kicked off with George Clooney's Ides Of March, a very, very decent political thriller starring man of the hour Ryan Gosling as Stephen, a spin doctor who works for one man and one man only – the ultra-liberal Governor Morris (Clooney), a handsome, Clinton-esque Democrat running in the early rounds of the Presidential race. Stephen is meticulous and idealistic; if it were not for Morris, he says, he wouldn't be in such a dirty game. As you might imagine, though, from one one of the world's most recognisable and intelligent movie stars, appearances are only skin deep. As the election shifts into gear, Stephen falls for a pretty young intern named Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), but what starts with innocent flirting ends up as something far more complex, when Stephen uncovers a shocking secret. The twist, such as it is, has been blurted out in several reviews online, but the best way to approach Ides Of March is cold.

The supporting performances by Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman are each a masterclass in themselves, but just when you think he's taking a back seat, Clooney himself rises to the occasion with some very dark and even rather chilling scenes. Wood is good, too, as the vulnerable Molly, and though it doesn't quite deliver the Sidney Lumet-style intrigue it promises, Ides Of March is a confident, satisfying look at American politics that reveals the system there as a war game, to be fought by any means necessary.

So, things are looking good after the Clooney. And what of Roman Polanski's Carnage, adapted from the stage play God Of Carnage when the fugitive director was under house arrest? Well, the good news is that it's really great, light fun, perhaps a little too flimsy in story but very rich in performances. The cast were given a standing ovation at the press conference, which is usually a good sign for awards success (Colin Firth and Mickey Rourke both received one, for A Single Man and The Wrestler respectively), so place your bets now for Oscar nominations. How they will carve up the categories, however, is anyone's guess. Is it a film with four leads or four supporting actors? My hunch is that the men will be downgraded to supporting and the women bumped up to leads.

It takes place in the course of one night when the Longstreets (Jodie Foster and John C Reilly) invite the Cowans (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz) into their Manhattan apartment to discuss a recent spat between their two 11-year-old boys, which has left the Longstreets' boy with broken teeth and a cut face. The comedy, which teeters very close to farce at times, comes almost solely from the characters, with Reilly and Waltz being especially delicious as the husbands, Alan and Michael, alternately fighting and bonding while their wives Pen (Foster) and Nancy (Winslet) become drunk, self-righteous and hysterical. There may be a touch of the Bunuels about it (why, exactly, can't the Cowans ever seem to leave?), but this is one of Polanski's most successful and original black comedies.

Thumbs up for Polanski, then. And on to WE, Madonna's follow-up to the little-seen Filth And Wisdom and one of the hottest tickets of the festival, probably for all the wrong reasons. I have to report, though, that, although the film does have some jarringly ill-judged moments, this is not the vanity-project gibberish that many were expecting. Having said that, though, it's far too long, messy in its storytelling and, above all, simply too hectic to hang together.

I wondered if Madonna might do what Tom Ford did, which was to – very reasonably – look at the movies he liked and steal from them. A Single Man was a deftly researched and very visual film that created an aesthetic palette and stuck with it. Madonna, though, is not as disciplined. The film races though timescales and styles that cohere, just about, for the first hour and then plummet in the last 50 minutes. Which is a shame, since the film has some lovely touches. It begins in the early 20th century, where Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), an American socialite, is living in Shanghai with her abusive husband.

As the film, in flashback, proceeds to document Simpson's rise through the society ranks to become the King's mistress, at her second husband's expense, Madonna introduces a more modern character – Wally (Abbie Cornish), a young Manhattan woman with fertility issues, who, in 1998, is coming to terms with her own marriage issues. It's the standard framing device – using the present, or near-present – to contextualise the past, but it simply doesn't work here. Imagine how long and boring Titanic would be if James Cameron kept cutting back to Rose and you have an idea of how tedious this becomes. However, Madonna does get good performances out of her leads, especially Riseborough as the determined Simpson, and the period scenes do come alive in a way that the arty, glibly written New York scenes do not.

There are some very poor choices. Simpson dances a demented charleston with what looks like Josephine Baker to the sounds of the Sex Pistols – and is that really David Suchet as Mohamed Al-Fayed*? But the sad thing is that a much better film is lurking in here, about the most romantic romance of possibly all time, how it affected the players and how it imprisoned them in an ivory tower of the public's making. I wanted to see that film, not the two ill-fitting semi-films bolted together here.

(* No, it is Haluk Bilginer.)

An interview with Ben Wheatley, director of Kill List

2011-08-28T04:54:00.000-07:00

This piece first appeared in the Guardian Guide, issued dated 27 August 2011…

In major towns, a strange pagan symbol has begun appearing on walls and bus shelters. It looks a little like a tent in the crosshairs of a gun, and if that sounds a bit weird, that's only the half of it. The image is the key selling point of a new British movie called Kill List (reviewed here), a genre mash-up that is frustrating to write about simply because its mysteries really must be preserved in order for it to maintain its power. At the outset, it seems to be a post-Iraq gangster movie, with lots of Pinter-esque punch as an ex-soldier named Jay (Neil Maskell) teams up with an old army buddy, Gal (Michael Smiley), and carries out a series of ever more violent contract killings in order to support his wife and son. By the end, though, it has become something quite different.

Strange. Bizarre. Nightmarish. Three words that can not be used to describe its director, Ben Wheatley, who wrote the film over Christmas 2009 and then knocked it into shape with his creative partner and wife Amy Jump. We meet at Brighton station and head for lunch at the seafront Regency fish and chip shop, where snaps of Gordon Ramsay, Lee Evans and Suggs out of Madness grace the Wall Of Fame. "You can't come to Brighton without seeing the sea," smiles Wheatley (no relation to seminal occult novelist, Dennis). A stout, kindly chap of 39, with his beard, shoulder-length hair and loose-fitting cotton combo, he's something of mash-up himself: half 1960s San Francisco hippy, half 17th-century cavalier.

Kill List is Wheatley's second feature, but since the film needs to hold back its secrets, the most you're likely to see of it, aside from a very coy trailer, is that logo, which is its marketing team's main piece of ammo. "I don't envy them, really," laughs the director, who, funnily enough, got his own career going through viral marketing with short films on his website (mrandmrswheatley.blogspot.com) that brought him into television, courtesy of Armando Iannucci and his BBC2 show Time Trumpet (Wheatley also worked on Channel 4's Modern Toss and BBC3's The Wrong Door).

"The funny thing is," Wheatley recalls, "when I first drew the logo out, I thought, 'Yeah, that's brilliant!' And then I thought, 'God, it really looks like something …' And when we finished the movie I realised: it's like the Blair Witch logo! So I thought we were were going to get slaughtered by people saying, 'Oh they've just ripped off Blair Witch.' Now everyone's saying it's like the Deathly Hallows logo, which is a triangle with a circle and a line down the middle." He sighs: "But I've no idea about that! I'm too old to be reading about wizards, y'know?"

And despite the Blair Witch comparisons, Wheatley refuses to play up any cross-genre appeal. "I see Kill List more as a horror film than I do a crime film," he reasons. "People are saying, 'Oh, it's got hitmen in it, therefore it's a crime film.' But I never saw these people as existing in the same world as Danny Dyer. Or even the Get Carter world. It's not in that world. I suppose it's a war movie, really. They're veterans. They're not thieving, have-a-go cockney criminals; they're professional people who do a job."

And like all good horror films, Kill List is really about something else. At its base, it's about money, what we do to get it and how we've come to worship it. "My favourite horror movies from the 70s, like Dawn Of The Dead, are reacting to their times," says Wheatley. "Whether they knew it or not. What's the point of making anything unless it's a reaction to the time you live in? Otherwise you're just going through the motions, copying something that's happened before just because you liked it. But that's not enough for me. You've got to look at the reality of what's going on. We've just had two major wars going on that nobody seemed to be that bothered about. They were just rolling along. Even though a million people marched and said, 'Stop it,' they just went ahead."

"So we're in the middle of this Vietnam experience," he continues, "and no one's really saying anything. And then there's the recession. So I wanted to make a film about a family that was living with that. They're a kind of 'stock' family, but they're under a lot of contemporary pressure because they're in a lot of debt. And once you're in that world of debt, there's no way to turn the boat around, is there? You can't do it fast enough. You're locked in. And that's the same for everyone."

Something that also seems very relevant is that Kill List is about people with no moral compass, including Jay's wife, who is complicit in his crimes. "I think the problem with genre films is that often you're rooting for people who are essentially evil," says Wheatley, "so to a degree there was a certain amount of us rubbing the audience's noses in these evil people. Hitmen are not good people. They're … fuckers!!! But I've always liked the idea in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 that, because he's been lied to, the computer goes insane, because he's essentially an honest creature and he can't deal with the human idea of mistruth; they won't tell him what the mission is. And that's kind of what I was thinking about these two guys. They've been to Afghanistan, and a lot of these places, but they know, in the backs of their minds, that, even though they're doing a job, what they're doing is not necessarily justified. They'd rather have been in the second world war, which, in retrospect, was a clean, understandable war. But this stuff isn't. In that way, the film's about the whole erosion of the social contract – as we've just seen with the riots as well."

Wheatley's thoughts about these issues are reflected in the film's abrasive visual style. Though Jump doesn't physically get involved in the actual shooting of the scripts ("It's all a bit high-pressure and shouty"), Wheatley says she was very involved with all the staccato tics that were added in the edit suite. Neither are interested in the rules of proper film-making. "If you break them consistently, it doesn't matter," he laughs. "It drives my editor to distraction! But I guess what I'm trying to do is use realist camerawork and realist performances to give more weight to the drama within the piece, using a psychology that people understand."

Which all makes the film sound somewhat worthy. By the end, though, Kill List is anything but a socio-realist polemic. "Some people say, 'I could see the ending coming,'" says the director, more than a little testily. "And I'm like, 'Well, what do you want? Did you see the ending of Jaws coming? Did you know the shark would die? Do you get a special badge for that?'" He laughs. "You're not better than the film-makers just because you could 'read' it. That's not the point."

Instead, Wheatley insists that the film should be open to interpretation. "With all the interviews I've done, I've tried not to pin it down to anything," he says. "You can read it as a straight B-movie where a guy does get tangled up with a cult and it all goes too far. Or you can read it that he's just fucking nuts. Which isn't really satisfying, I know! But we decided to leave it open. Not everything has to be explained. Some things are inexplicable, and the mystery is much more interesting than the reality. I think that's the case with this."

Fittingly, the experience will end, for those brave enough to see it, with that peculiar symbol. "We put the logo at the start," says Wheatley, "because we needed to state where the movie might go, and it's quite scary when see you it. And the fact that you see it again at the end, for me, makes the movie into kind of like a curse. That's why there's no happy music at the end, there's no closure."

He grins: "You're supposed to be suffering."

Frightfest 2011: The Devil's Business and Kill List

2011-08-28T04:44:00.001-07:00

Typical: you wait for a Pinter-esque, character-driven, genre-crunching horror movie and two come at once. Screening in the tiny Discovery Screen, Sean Hogan's The Devil's Business could have easily weathered an upgrade to the main room, where it would have been interesting to see how patient the Frightfest lot really are when it comes to films that build tension through storytelling and imagination. A super-low-budget production – when the producer (Jennifer Handorf) reveals that the location was actually her in-laws' house, you know you're not in Hollywood any more – Hogan's film is a terrific example of what can be done with very little money and a lot of genre smarts.

The story starts with two hitmen, Pinner (Billy Clarke) and Cully (Jack Gordon), in the home of a man they've been despatched to kill by crime boss Bruno (Harry Miller). While they're waiting, the two begin to talk. “I bet you've got some stories,” says Cully, and Pinner does – in a nicely written sequence, he relates Bruno's obsession with a dancer – an affair that ended violently, with a creepy, supernatural twist. Exploring the house, they find evidence of devil worship – it is, after all, quite difficult to miss – and when their target, the urbane Kist (Jonathan Hansler), arrives home from the opera, the two hitmen discover that this is not going to be an ordinary job.

With a running time of 75 minutes, The Devil's Business is aware of its limits and keeps a level of mystery and intrigue throughout. The performances are incredibly strong for this kind of genre piece; Clarke and Gordon spark as the chalk-and-cheese duo – Pinner is the jaded old hand, Clarke the naïve jack-the-lad new boy – and Hansler takes things up a notch with a part that's best left to be discovered, a decadent, Dorian Grey-like character whom he plays like a shady Colin Firth. There are a few sags; some scenes last a little too long and a major plot device is explained with a clumsy, throwaway line of exposition. But the film has a fullness to it, and it punches well above its weight.

And so to Ben Wheatley's Kill List (pictured above), inarguably the year's most talked-about genre offering. Like The Devil's Business, this is a film that was designed to suit its constraints, following Wheatley's little-seen debut, Down Terrace, with a much more aggressive use of its elements. For a start, there's that title. From Down Terrace you might not gather that this was a gangster movie, albeit a gangster movie with a twist, in that it's about the mundane, suburban life of a Brighton crime family. But with Kill List there is no such subtlety: there is a kill list and the people on it do die. Horribly.

There are several elements that conspire to make Kill List one of the most fascinating movies of the year. Firstly, there's its realism. Neil Maskell stars as Jay, an Afghanistan war veteran who's living in suburbia with his wife Shel (MyAnna Buring) and their young son. Jay is unemployed and facing bankruptcy, and after a hideous dinner party with his friend Gal (Michael Smiley) and his new girlfriend, he accepts the offer of the proverbial one last job, teaming up with Gal to carry out a series of contract killings for a mysterious client (Soho landmark Struan Rodger). This could could all come from a Ken Loach movie, since the film's style owes more to British kitchen-sink drama than horror. But then the fantasy element comes into play, slyly and slowly at first, but building to a mad crescendo in the final reel.

Enough of plot spoilers. The third and most successful element of Kill List is perhaps its wonderful sense of gallows humour. Jay's face-off with a bunch of Christians in a hotel restaurant is both hilarious and, in retrospect, actually quite chilling, and Maskell and Smiley create a dorky chemistry together that keeps us perversely charmed even when, in a self-righteous rage, Jay ill-advisedly goes “off-list”. Finally, though, I think what seals the deal is the film's perfect sense of mystery. Some love the ending, others hate it, but what's quite telling is that few people seem to hate the whole thing. Personally, I love the ambition of an ending that doesn't just jump the rails – it jumps a whole dimension.

It'll be interesting to see how Kill List fares at the box office; my fear is that it may be too heavy for mainstream audiences, who'll need a few years to catch up with its intelligent subtext about the modern world and its skewed morality. Likewise, The Devil's Business might be considered too small for a theatrical release, which would be a shame, since it, too, has substance and style. In an ideal world, these two films would play back to back, the way movies like Skyjacked and Juggernaut did in the 70s. I can see the poster now. Ah, those really were the days...

* Read an interview with Kill List director Ben Wheatley here…

Frightfest 2011: The Wicker Tree

2011-08-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

As the lights went down on The Wicker Tree I wondered how many people in the room had ever had the luxury of seeing its precursor without knowing what The Wicker Man actually was. I must have seen the film's first TV screening in the late 70s, and it blew my mind. I can't say I was ever scared by Robin Hardy's 1973 original but I responded very much to its eerieness in a way that I hadn't ever before with a genre film. To be honest, I never took to Edward Woodward's uptight cop and even thought Summerisle might be a great place to visit. My favourite scene remains Sergeant Howie's visit to the lord of the manor, Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), on a day when naked teenage girls are performing a fertility ritual in the grounds outside. “Good afternoon, Sergeant Howie,” Summerisle beams. “I trust the sight of the young people refreshes you.” Sgt Howie cannot contain his rage. “No, sir,” he foams, “it does NOT refresh me.” I've always loved that scene because it is the heart of the movie; the more Howie rages against the pagan habits of the place, the more delighted Summerisle becomes: Sgt Howie is almost literally digging his own grave.

To me, The Wicker Man has always been a brilliant black comedy – brilliant because, like Psycho, it plays so beautifully with audience sympathies. Sgt Howie is a force for goodness and justice – but he's also a self-righteous cock. And, going in to The Wicker Tree, I had a horrible feeling that Hardy, returning to his own material after nearly 40 years, might have been blinkered by the film's transformation from an intelligent B-movie shocker into a highbrow, culturally accepted classic. I'm going out on a limb here (no pun intended) but I think The Wicker Tree is a decent, if far from perfect, sequel of sorts to the original. Some of the jokes aren't too funny, some of the scares aren't too scary, but I do think Hardy has some beautifully mischievous points to make about religion, even if he doesn't make them quite so eloquently without the help of the late Anthony Shaffer.

It starts in the present day (I think), with country star Beth Boothby (Britannia Nicol) taking a break from her Miley Cyrus-style stardom to drag her cowboy boyfriend Steve (Henry Garrett) on a Bible-bashing tour of God-forsaken Scotland. Edinburgh literally slams its doors in their faces, so the two, at the invitation of the suave, Lord Summerisle-esque Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish), decamp to the village of Tressock, where Beth is to be made May Queen and Steve, nice but dim, is to join her as “the Laddie”, a symbol of masculinity and virility. But while in Tressock the two face up to their disreputable pasts: both are reborn Christians and both are close to lapsing.

Just as you don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind's blowing, you don't really need to be told what kind of thing happens next (yet another creaky pagan trap springs). But what I liked about the movie is that Hardy embraces the obvious: it's a film with a very good sense of humour about itself. There are budgetary issues for sure – a pop video for Beth's pre-religion hit Trailer Trash Love (I think) looks like anything but – and the attempts to create the atmosphere of a fully inhabited town never hit the same heights as The Wicker Man. But the comedy is knowing, the cast is game, and my neighbour in the cinema made the same observation that I did, which is that would have it played rather well as part of the very cinematic 1980s Hammer House Of Horror TV series.

The music could have been a lot better integrated, especially in a party scene that comes with a very MOR soft-muzak score (from the director that hated having to have an electric guitar riff in the original!). But this was to be – for me – very much a not-so-guilty pleasure. Like Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, it could never hope to match the ending of the original, but there's something off-the-wall and bespoke about all three of Hardy's films that really appeals to me. You'll see faces, performances and scenes that you'll never see in any other movie (usually for good reason). But perhaps it's a good thing that he's never made more than those three. Like The Wicker Man and the little-seen follow-up The Fantasist (1989), this is another uneven renegade production that throws up images, moods, lines, ideas and jokes that are sure to stay longer in the mind than many more professional, refined and meticulous productions have faded into the movie mist.

Frightfest 2011: Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark

2011-08-26T04:12:00.000-07:00

Frightfest seems to get bigger and better every year, and the 2011 edition kicked off with a full house for the Guillermo Del Toro-produced chiller Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark. Being Frightfest, however, it wasn't quite as simple as that. With no warning, the festival launched straight into one of its latest innovations – the first in a series of shorts, called Carpenter Revisited, in which a bunch of horror luminaries direct their take on a John Carpenter classic. The opener, suitably enough, was Jake West's Escape From London, a riff on… go on, have a guess, in which Snake Plissken's sister has to break into a walled-in Westminster to get a weekend pass for a future Frightfest. Gory and funny, with cameos by festival regulars, it set the perfect tone for what was (and is) to follow.

Before the main feature, the Frightfest team took to the stage for the usual speeches and formalities, an event made somewhat notable by the fact that host Alan Jones seemed to be voicing a not-so-subconscious urge to murder two of his fellow co-founders, Paul McEvoy and Ian Rattray (Greg Day, Frightfest's PR guru, appears to be safe). And although there were no special guests in the room to support the film (no Katie Holmes, no Guy Pearce), any disappointments were soon assuaged by a taped introduction from Del Toro, who's in Canada at work on his new monster movie Pacific Rim. As usual, Del Toro railed against the censor, claiming to have been aiming for a PG-13 on Don't Be Afraid… but getting slapped instead with an R for “pervasive scariness”. Now, he's a lovely man, but I fear somewhat for Del Toro's sanity if he thinks a film that opens with set-piece involving a woman with a chisel in her mouth would ever get the same MPAA rating as Miss Congeniality 2.

Though the film started brilliantly, and played well to a largely mixed and usually quite demanding audience, I came away a little disappointed by Troy Nixey's feature debut. Del Toro's fingerprints are all over it, and I think that was the problem; it felt in some ways like a well-intentioned remake of Pan's Labyrinth with its lavish gothic fantasy and child's-eye-view, but with a rather more laboured sense of wonder and surprise.

It begins at the airport, where interior designer Alex (Pearce) is meeting his new girlfriend Kim (Holmes) and his estranged daughter Sally (Bailee Madison), who is being bundled off by her worried mother, who clearly thinks a few weeks in a remote Munsters'-style mansion will do wonders for a girl who's already shy and introverted. We know, thanks to a creepy prologue, that there are some rum creatures in the house, and before long they are calling to Sally from their hiding place-slash-prison in the bricked-up cellar.

A mounting sense of dread is nicely handled, and Madison is especially well cast, giving a performance that never once rests on cuteness. But when the creatures appeared, I started zoning out. Well, to be brutally honest, I started thinking about the 70s adverts for Unigate dairies, in which offscreen creatures called Humphreys used giant straws to steal milk (see one here). Something I do appreciate in Del Toro's work is his constant quest to recreate the primal fears of childhood – indeed, Don't Be Afraid… is a remake of a TV movie that “scared the shit” out of him and his brother as a boy. But personally I prefer the nightmarish mood-visions of David Lynch, and although this carries with it a few genuine scares, I honestly couldn't say I ever felt frightened.

I didn't stay for Warner Bros' Final Destination 5, in which terrible injuries befall perfectly innocent people, but I decided to hang around for footage from Matthias Hoene's upcoming genre mash-up Cockneys Vs Zombies. Now, every British horror aims to be the new Shaun Of The Dead but, astonishingly, this one might actually be it. Starring Harry Treadaway and Jack Doolan, it features a supporting cast that includes the great Dudley Sutton, Snatch's Alan Ford and, unbelievably, an 83-year-old Honor Blackman. The clip that was shown to us brought the house down, mostly for a hilariously slow-moving zombie chase involving a pensioner and a zimmer frame but specifically for a scene involving Richard Briers (oh yes) and an Uzi. It really was one of those unforgettable Frightfest moments.

The festival continues through to Monday, with some great movies in the form of Ben Wheatley's cracking Kill List, Lucky McKee's disturbing The Woman and Eli Craig's hilarious Tucker & Dale Vs Evil. However, there are some interesting movies lurking in the afternoon slots and in the Discovery Screen too. I'm hearing good things about the Paul Naschy documentary The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry and the British chill-thriller The Devil's Business, while the festival is especially proud of the Swiss film Sennentuntschi: Curse Of The Alps, a cult rarity personally tracked down by Alan Jones himself. Me, I'm curious to see The Wicker Tree, Robin Hardy's sequel of sorts to his legendary 1973 film The Wicker Man. I'm pretty sure I'll be disappointed, but if I am, I'll be in the best place for it; I'll probably see you in the Phoenix bar afterwards, crying into my Red Stripe.

For more details go to www.frightfest.co.uk. If you're not too chicken, that is.

2011 Autumn Festival Preview Part 2: Highlights from Toronto

2011-08-06T07:22:00.000-07:00

In previous years the Venice/Toronto line-ups have almost perfectly matched, but in 2011 there is a whole world of difference. As well as such Venice titles as WE, Ides Of March, Dangerous Method – and so on and so forth – plus a sprinkling of Cannes and Sundance titles – Drive and The Artist among the good grabs from the former, Like Crazy and Martha Marcy May Marlene from the latter – there are literally dozens of films that will be stand-alone debuting there. So without further ado, here are some my picks from the TIFF, reminding you that what premieres there often follows up swiftly with a UK bow, either at the London Film Festival or at the Leeds International Film Festival and others…

FEATURE PREMIERES

Twixt (Francis Ford Coppola, USA)
Coppola's latest (pictured) will be an interesting one. The trailer is already dividing critics on the internet, starting out as an interesting-looking thriller before morphing into something a little more credulity-testing, like Lucio Fulci's late-period straight-to-video shockers. Val Kilmer, who appears to have eaten a house, stars as a Stephen King-style mystery writer who visits a small town and becomes involved in the murder of a young girl (played by Elle Fanning).

The Lady (Luc Besson, France/UK)
A change of pace here for France's action king Luc Besson – The Lady is a biopic of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, played, equally untypically, by Malaysian-born Hong Kong action star Michelle Yeoh. Despite the backdrop of political unrest, this is essentially a love story, detailing the robust and often sorely tested relationship between Aung San Suu Kyi and her husband Michael Aris, played by – I can't believe I'm writing this – David Thewlis.

Moneyball (Bennett Miller, USA)
Originally to be directed by Steven Soderbergh and now in the hands of Capote writer/director Miller, this true-life sports drama stars Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, manager of baseball club the Oakland As, who decides to throw baseball wisdom to the wind and use logic to compile his teams. Jonah Hill plays the Ivy League grad who helps him with the scheme by recruiting from the pool of players out there with form but not profile (“like an island of misfit toys”).

Take This Waltz (Sarah Polley, Canada)
Polley's last film, Away From Her, was an awards-season sleeper, chiefly getting traction for its lead performance by Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer's. This less obvious production stars Michelle Williams – whose My Week With Marilyn is curiously absent, opting instead to open the New York Film Festival later in the year – as a married woman who is shocked when her new crush moves into an apartment across the street. Seth Rogen and Luke Kirby co-star.

50/50 (Jonathan Levine, USA)
AKA I'm With Cancer, this bittersweet comedy is tipped (finally) to bring some awards buzz for Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young man struggling to beat a rare form of spinal cancer. A great supporting cast includes Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard and Anjelica Huston, and the whole shebang comes to you courtesy of Jonathan Levine, the man behind the underrated 2008 stoner comedy The Wackness.

360 (Fernando Meirelles, UK/Austria/France/Brazil)
Thankfully the undeserved beasting that his last film, Blindness, endured hasn't put Meirelles off a) directing and b) taking those films to festivals. Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's novel La Ronde and scripted by Peter Morgan, it's a melange of stories with episodes in Vienna, Paris, London, Bratislava, Rio, Denver and Phoenix, starring heavy-hitters Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins and Rachel Weisz. Look out for David (No, Not THE David Frost) Frost as Well Dressed Passenger.

Anonymous (Roland Emmerich, Germany)
Another change of pace for a European director – this period drama sees Emmerich not trying to destroy the world for once, instead trying the ruin the reputation of a once-promising playwright called William Shakespeare. Starring David Thewlis and Vanessa Redgrave, Anonymous suggests that the Bard's classic works were actually written by someone else, against a torrid backdrop of courtly intrigue, snooty in-fighting and lots and lots of candles.

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, UK)
Davies' latest has to be the UK's most prestigious entry at TIFF, skipping Venice to make its world premiere here. Based on Terence Rattigan's 1952 play, it stars Rachel Weisz as a middle-class woman, estranged from her rich husband and shacked up with a young lover, who wakes up from a failed suicide attempt and tries to take stock of her life. Weisz's Best Actress campaign surely starts here.

The Descendants (Alexander Payne, USA)
Tipped for Cannes but finally swerving a European premiere altogether comes Payne's first feature since, astonishingly, Sideways in 2004. A clear front-runner for awards buzz given that it's getting the same positioning that the wine-tasting comedy received back then, it stars George Clooney – and, oh, the Academy hate him, don't they – as a father of two girls whose life is thrown into turmoil after the death of his wife. Loss. Grief. Payne. Clooney. Put some money on it right now.

Friends With Kids (Jennifer Westfeldt, USA)
Director Westfeldt directed the well-received indie Kissing Jessica Stein in 2001, but you probably know her better as the woman who's going out with Mad Men's Jon Hamm. Friends With Kids is another indie with a low-key premise – two friends agree to have a child together – but with half the cast of Bridesmaids showing their faces (Hamm, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph and Chris O'Dowd), plus a certain Megan Fox, this is likely to punch way above its weight in terms of press coverage.

Hick (Derick Martini, USA)
Martini's last film, Lymelife, was a word-of-mouth hit, so there'll be a lot of interest in this road movie about a girl who runs away from her boozy mother with a fantasy of becoming a star. A great cast includes Blake Lively, Chloe Moretz, Alec Baldwin, Juliette Lewis and Rory Culkin.

Jeff, Who Lives At Home (Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass, USA)
Wow, if even this is in the TIFF, what's going to be left for Sundance to programme? The follow-up to the lovely Cyrus is another “sell-out” movie from the indie brothers, starring “proper” stars like Jason Segel, Ed Helms, Judy Greer and Susan Sarandon. Another pensive comedy, it stars Segel as a mother's boy who has an epiphany while going to the hardware store to buy some wood glue.

Machine Gun Preacher (Marc Forster, USA)
On paper, this is an Oscar dark horse: the latest from Monster's Ball and Quantum Of Solace director Forster is the “inspirational” true story of a former drug-dealing biker who finds religion and ends up in the Sudan helping former child soldiers. Gerard Butler plays the lead.

Rampart (Oren Moverman, USA)
The co-writer of I'm Not There and director of The Messenger re-teams with the latter's Woody Harrelson for an LAPD drama set in the 1990s. Harrelson plays a cop with a complicated private life who gets caught up in allegations of corruption. An eclectic cast is rounded out by Anne Heche, Cnythia Nixon. Ice Cube, Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty and Robin Wright.

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen (Lasse Hallstrom, UK)
Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt team up for the first time in the latest quality-lit adaptation from, well, the king of 'em. Adapted from Paul Torday's acclaimed comic novel, it stars McGregor as a fisheries scientist recruited by a wealthy Middle Eastern Sheik to bring salmon farming to the region. Blunt, currently the go-to girl for credible love interest, plays the Sheik's assistant in a film that, with the presence of Kristin Scott Thomas in the supporting cast, practically screams “superior upscale fluff”.

Trishna (Michael Winterbottom, UK)
Good grief, he's made another one. While TV series/US-only feature film The Trip is still finding audiences, one-man British film industry Winterbottom returns not with the Gaza Strip drama he seemed to be working on but an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess Of The D'Urbevilles. This is not a straight period piece, however. Set in modern-day India, it stars Riz Ahmed as the son of a rich property developer and Freida Pinto as the daughter of a poor rickshaw driver.

MIDNIGHT MOVIES

God Bless America (Bobcat Goldthwait, USA)
Goldthwait's great black comedies don't really find an audience in the UK, which is a shame since he's a very capable and unusual director, whose films deal with some jet-black issues in a surprisingly charming way. This one features a terminally ill man who declares war on the privileged youth of America, grabs a gun and sets off on a killing rampage. What's not to like?

Lovely Molly (Eduardo Sanchez, USA)
One half of the Blair Witch Project team returns with what seems to be his ghost story The Possession but with a new title. It stars newcomer Gretchen Lodge as a newlywed who returns to her family home after the death of her father. General scariness ensues – hopefully enough to bring Sanchez back into the genre fold after ten years in the wilderness.

DOCUMENTARIES

Comic-Con: Episode IV – A Fan’s Hope (Morgan Spurlock, USA)
Spurlock's documentaries have lost their edge lately, and it may just be that his good-natured exploration of the San Diego fan convention is coming a little late in the day. Still, it will be interesting to see what he makes of the event, following seven attendees as they descend upon what I'm reliably informed is “the ultimate geek Mecca”. Somewhat inevitably, it includes interviews with Stan Lee, Joss Whedon, Frank Miller and Matt Groening.

Into The Abyss (Werner Herzog, USA)
As he edges close to 70, Herzog has never been more high-profile (he was recently on The Simpsons) or, arguably, commercial (as he would put it, “I am the secret mainstream”). His new film, another of his documentaries or “feature films in disguise", is about killers on Death Row in Texas, including a 28-year-old man who is only eight days away from execution.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, USA)
Staying on a grim prison theme, the latest in the Paradise Lost series continues to explore the ongoing story of “the West Memphis Three”, three teenage boys who were locked up in 1993 for the murder of three local boys in what was said to be a Satanic ritualistic murder. Again, the facts are re-examined, new evidence is revealed, and new suspects are scrutinised.

Paul Williams: Still Alive (Stephen Kessler, USA)
Edgar Wright will probably want to keep an eye out for this Grammy and Oscar award-winning actor/singer/songwriter who starred in Brian De Palma's little-seen rock horror Phantom Of The Paradise and was pretty much everywhere in US culture throughout the 70s. In the 80s, though, he disappeared, and this film sets out to find him. With appearances by Robert Blake, The Carpenters. Telly Savalas, Kermit The Frog and Jack Klugman, this is a must-see.

Sarah Palin – You Betcha! (Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill, UK)
This one is sure to light the blue touchpaper in a way that Broomfield hasn't since Kurt And Courtney. With his trusty boom and earphones, Broomfield makes his way to the icy reserves of Alaska to speak to school friends, relatives and colleagues of the batty Republican. Clearly, nothing goes quite according to plan, but it wouldn't be a Broomfield movie if it did, would it?

* Go here for 2011 Autumn Festival Preview Part One: Highlights from Venice...

2011 Autumn Festival Preview Part 1: Highlights from Venice

2011-07-30T14:10:00.001-07:00

This year the jockeying between Venice and Toronto moved up a notch: though Venice has recently become a clear launching pad for acting talent (Mickey Rourke, Colin Firth and Natalie Portman all began their Oscar/Bafta journey there), Toronto is where the Best Picture nominees tend to debut (The King's Speech skipped the Lido to premiere there). And in 2011 the films that were fought over have really proven to be quite extraordinary. Below is my initial reaction to the Venice selection, to be followed shortly by my thoughts on the Toronto line-up, which, though overlapping in certain places, features some very, very interesting titles that won't be taking their first tentative steps in Europe...

THE MUST-SEES...

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Tomas Alfredson, UK)
A lot is riding on this remake: not only must it bear comparison with the BBC's legendary 1979 TV series, it must also cement Alfredson's future as an international-appeal director after Let The Right One In. Its incredible British cast – Gary Oldman (pictured), John Hurt and Colin Firth plus the very able whippersnappers Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch – as well as the sturdy storycraft of author John Le Carré made Tinker, Tailor a formidable thoroughbred even before the cameras rolled.

The Ides Of March (George Clooney, US) *OPENING NIGHT
Venice wouldn't be Venice without an appearance by George Clooney, whose latest film as director, after the little-seen Leatherheads is another handsome 70s throwback in the Michael Clayton vein. Ryan Gosling leads a heavyweight cast – alongside Clooney, Paul Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright, Marisa Tomei and Philip Seymour Hoffman – in this story of a presidential candidate's press attaché who gets caught up in a political war between his boss's supporters and rivals.

Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, UK)
Secrecy, as they always say, surrounds the third film by Andrea Arnold, director of two great films (Red Road, Fish Tank) and an Oscar-winning short (Wasp). So little is known about this project that only the poster offers any suggestion that Emily Brontë's classic novel will be given the period treatment. In other areas, all bets are off, as Arnold has brought her usual streetwise eye to casting and there are rumours that at least one key part of the film differs substantially from the text.

Shame (Steve McQueen, UK)
British artist Steve McQueen debuted in Cannes with the harrowing Hunger, which launched Michael Fassbender with his portrayal of the IRA's Bobby Sands. Co-written by McQueen with Abi Morgan, whose credits include Brick Lane and The Iron Lady, Shame again stars Fassbender, this time as a philandering 30-something, possibly a sex addict, whose life changes when his younger sister (Drive star Carey Mulligan) comes to stay with him.

Carnage (Roman Polanski, France/Germany/Spain/Poland)
The Ghost proved that Polanski's international fan club did not desert him during his time in chokey, and there are high hopes for this single-setting black comedy, starring Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, John C Reilly and Jodie Foster as the parents of two schoolchildren who have been suspended for fighting. Based on a play called The Gods Of Carnage, the film takes place, Rope-style, at a dinner party where the two sets of parents convene to discuss their problem.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, Germany/Canada)
Much to our dismay, Cronenberg's latest drama whizzed past the Berlin and Cannes festivals, but thankfully it has found a berth at Venice, where it may be better positioned as a high-end awards-season release. Although Keira Knightley will doubtless get the lion's share of press attention, the film is ostensibly a two-hander, with Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the two men whose intellectual feuding gave birth to modern psychoanalysis.

THE DARK HORSES…

Dark Horse (Todd Solondz, US)
Solondz's last film – Life During Wartime, a warped sequel to his signature film Happiness – was an unexpected delight, showing unexpected signs of humanity and warmth. The director himself, while revealing nothing about Dark Horse except that it is an odd-couple love story, freely admits that there are none of his usual trademarks (“[There's] no rape, there's no child molestation, there's no masturbation”). There is, however, Christopher Walken with a fantastically creepy side-parting.

Texas Killing Fields (Ami Canaan Mann, US)
Produced by the director's father – one Michael Mann – this is definitely on my radar. Once considered by Danny Boyle, who loved the script but felt it was too dark to get made, this stars Sam Worthington as a homicide detective on the trail of a smalltown serial killer along with his partner (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a cop from NYC. Kick-Ass' s Chloe Grace Moretz plays a girl who goes missing, pitting the police in a race against time before the taunting murderer strikes again.

Killer Joe (William Friedkin, US)
After teaming with US playwright Tracy Letts on the little-seen Bug, Friedkin, once known for big-budget genre pictures, sticks with his new indie direction for an adaptation of Lett's breakout play. Even Letts's own mother says, “Everybody in Tracy's stories gets naked or dead,” so it's no surprise to hear that this is a story about a deadbeat drug dealer (Emile Hirsch) who employs a hitman (Matthew McConaughey) to kill his mom for insurance money after losing his cash, and stash, in a robbery.

Chicken With Plums (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, France/Belgium/Germany)
Satrapi's autobiographical Persepolis is one of the great animated features of the last ten years, recounting the artist's youth in ideology-torn Iran. The follow-up is her live-action debut and, based on the life of her great-uncle, tells of the last days of life of a musician who is devastated when his violin gets broken. Isabella Rossellini and Mathieu Amalric head the cast, but the real star is likely to be Satrapi, whose charm, as a spinner of yarns both poignant and hilarious is infectious.

The Moth Diaries (Mary Harron, Canada/Ireland)
Dear Mary Harron, where have you been!? TV doesn't count: we need more movies like American Psycho, The Notorious Betty Page and I Shot Andy Warhol. The Moth Diaries will hopefully slide seamlessly into Harron's canon, starring Lily Cole as a mysterious stranger in a school-set horror where the a teenage girl becomes convinced that her new roommate is a vampire. It sounds like Mean Girls meets Twilight, but Harron is not a director to be so blandly, first-base underestimated.

THE CURIOSITIES…

Damsels In Distress (Whit Stillman, US) *CLOSING NIGHT
Someone must have put Stillman's face on a milk carton to lure him out of hiding; Damsels In Distress is only his fourth film in a 21-year career – his last, the wonderful Last Days Of Disco, emerged in 1998. Damsels stars Mumblecore It Girl Greta Herwig in a comedy – well, it would seem to be – about a trio of college girls who set out to cheer up a grungey university. Knowing Stillman's work, this will doubtless touch on issues of American class and politics.

4:44 Last Day On Earth (Abel Ferrara, US)
Ferrara's latest isn't even listed on his Imdb page – perhaps they'll only believe it when they see it. Ferrara's form has not been good in the last decade, starting with the scrappy R-Xmas (2001). Still, we should never write the Driller Killer off, not least when he has convinced Willem Dafoe to take the lead in this apocalyptic romance in which a famous movie star (guess who) and his painter lover (possibly Go Go Tales' Shanyn Leigh) prepare for the end of the world at, of course, 4.44 in the morning.

WE (Madonna, UK)
Well, what could this be? Madonna's debut, Filth And Wisdom, remains an unknown quantity in the UK that, perhaps fittingly, can only be acquired on DVD via import only. WE, however, may take things up a league, with known actors (Abbie Cornish, James Fox), rising stars (Andrea Riseborough, Richard Coyle) and a story that overlaps with that of The King's Speech. Set in two time zones, it stars Cornish as a 1990s New Yorker obsessed with the scandalous affair between King Edward and the American divorcee Mrs Simpson.

Wilde Salome (Al Pacino, US)
In town to receive the annual filmmaker's award, Al Pacino follows his experimental Shakespeare adaptation Looking For Richard with an equally ambitious staging of Oscar Wilde's Salome. Ever the triple threat, Pacino writes, directs and stars – as he did in a groundbreaking New York stage version in the 80s – with star-of-the-moment Jessica Chastain as Wilde's infamous heroine.

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, US)
Advance word is a little muted on Soderbergh's latest, which may explain why it's in an out of competition slot in Venice. The title and premise suggests one of the director's experimental movies (Full Frontal, Bubble), the story and cast suggest one of his serious ensemble studio movies (Traffic and... well perhaps just Traffic), while the spoilery trailer* features Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow as a couple affected by bird flu.
(*Don't watch it unless you really want to know who dies.)

THE ONE PERHAPS THE MOST IS RIDING ON...

Sal (James Franco, US)
Finally, the oddest movie of them all. A year ago, James Franco was the go-to guy for everything; 12 months later he seems to be just the punchline. This, hopefully, will be his saving grace, a drama, shot in a whirlwind nine days (if rumours are to be believed) about the last days of Sal Mineo, James Dean's soon-to-be outed-as-gay co-star in Rebel Without A Cause. As well as directing, Franco will appear as the director of the play Mineo was working on when he was stabbed to death by a pizza delivery boy in, it must be said, somewhat bizarre circumstances.

An interview with Drive star Ryan Gosling

2011-07-30T05:03:00.000-07:00

This interview appears in the September 2011 issue of Empire magazine...

Ryan Gosling, wearing a grey, striped wife-beater in the full glare of the Cannes sun, traces some of the myriad inky blobs on his left arm. “That's my mother and my sister,” he drawls, “that's a werewolf dropping a bloody heart and that's a ghost lady visiting her own skeleton.” It's hard to believe that almost 20 years ago, this pumped, tattooed, very much in-demand Canadian-born actor was a wholesome Mouseketeer, singing and dancing for the Disney show that once featured soon-to-be-teen idols Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, JC Chasez (whoever that is) and Justin Timberlake. He still has that innocent spark, but, as his performance in the blood-soaked LA noir Drive so vividly shows, Gosling has a dark side; darker than anything he's chosen to show us so far.

Which is certainly saying something. In his ten-year reign as an indie superstar, the 30-year-old has played a Jewish neo-Nazi (The Believer, 2001), a crack-addicted high-school teacher (Half Nelson, 2005) and a man in love with a blow-up sex doll (Lars And The Real Girl, 2006). But in Nicolas Winding Refn's brutal, brilliant pulp thriller, he plays a taciturn avenger – stuntman by day and getaway driver by night – who falls for his pretty neighbour (Carey Mulligan) and is moved to protect her when her jailbird husband gets out of chokey, bringing trouble with him. Shotguns blast into torsos and faces; hammers, knives (and forks) make mincemeat of quivering flesh; and, in one virtuoso sequence, a human head is kicked to a bloody, squishy pulp, making this perhaps one that certain fans of Gosling's from the 2004 chick-flick The Notebook may prefer to sit out.

It's an interesting choice for an actor who, until now, has tended to alternate intimate, auteur pieces with more commercial genre fare. “But after making Drive,” he says, “I realise they're not mutually exclusive.” Originally planned as a vehicle for Hugh Jackman, to be directed by Britain's Neil Marshall, the script for Drive, based on James Sallis' taut novel, landed in his lap with an assurance from producer Marc Platt that he had carte blanche to recruit his helmer. “This is the first time I was ever given a script and told, 'You can pick your director,'” Gosling marvels. And his somewhat leftfield choice was Denmark's Refn, whose violent, tripnotic Viking saga Valhalla Rising the actor had recently seen. “So I met him in a restaurant – and he ignored me for two hours.”

What Gosling didn't then know was that Refn had the flu. “He was acting bored and disinterested. Just making noises – y'know, like, 'Ummm' – which is not an answer. He didn't eat, he didn't drink, he didn't wanna talk, he just wanted to go home. So I said, 'I'll take you home.' Which was another hour and a half out of my day. I'm thinking, How could I have been so wrong?! It was quiet in the car, so I turned up the radio to kill the silence. Suddenly REO Speedwagon comes on – Can't Fight This Feeling – and Nicolas... I look over and he's crying. And he's singing along, he's banging his knees. And he looks at me and says, 'This is the movie. It's about a man who drives around, listening to pop music at night because it's the only way he can feel.'”

Gosling laughs. “And so the movie became about driving. Not about stunts and not about crashes. It became about the spell that being in a car puts you in. You start somewhere, and then you get to your destination and you don't remember how you got there.”

Intermission.

Drive is a very different beast to the film that had everyone talking about Gosling last year: the intense, talky end-of-a-marriage drama Blue Valentine, directed by Gosling doppelganger Derek Cianfrance and co-starring Michelle Williams. Though it was shot in a month, Blue Valentine took up over ten years of Gosling's life and, much as he loved it, he needed a change of pace, asking Refn if there was any way he could have less to say. “So we took out a lot of the dialogue,” he says, “and it was such a relief. I basically had to put my trust in Nic; I had to trust that he was going to tell the story and I wouldn't have to. All I had to do was drive.”

Gosling was asked to choose his wheels, and, knowing nothing about cars, picked a '73 Chevy Malibu that cost $2,000 from a junkyard. “And I rebuilt it.” he grins. “I did everything on the car except the transmission.” Then there was the stunt training. “That was the best time ever. You show up at a church parking lot that's abandoned and there's a brand new Camara and a brand-new Mustang sitting there. And you get in your car and you drive it until it won't drive any more – till it's smoking or it's on fire. Then you get out and a tow-truck takes it away.”

Stunt training started with learning how to do a 90, which involves slamming on the brakes, locking the back wheels and swinging the steering wheel so that the car swings to a dramatic halt at 90 degrees to its original trajectory. “The driving part was so much fun,” he recalls, somewhat wistfully, “and such a a bad habit to get into – because you can't do it anywhere!!!”

Is this kind of attention to detail important? Did he really need to rebuild a car from scratch? Or, in the case of Blue Valentine, spend ten years waiting to be a drunken blue-collar husband?

“It is,” he replies, “but it depends on the film. For instance, I don't know how much preparation actually makes its ways in obvious ways into a film. Fuck, I mean, someone else could have built a '73 Chevy Malibu and you'd never know the difference. My character never has to talk about cars or do anything underneath a car, so it doesn't really matter. But it felt important to me. And with every character you play, you have to find a way in. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes you can't really find the thing you need. But it's important to me.”

Does that explain the toothpick that the driver always has in the corner of his mouth as he drives through the neon-drenched streets of LA? “It was an amalgamation of things, really. He felt to me like a guy who'd seen too many movies and done stunts for all these action heroes. In reality, he's the hero, he's the one doing the stunts, so he's a product of all the movies he's seen.”

Gosling delivers this with a smile, in a bass-rich growl that barely raises itself about the sound of the sea lapping on the sand nearby. He's certainly serious but nowhere near as intimidating as his reputation might suggest, leading Empire to ask him if he's found that directors are scared of him. “I have encountered that,” he nods. “But I think that's why I'm interested in working with some of the same people, working with Derek and working with Nic. We get each other. It's hard when you don't know a director. You spend half the movie just trying to develop a dialogue with them, and you lose a lot of opportunities to make something great because there's a miscommunication between you, or something's off. I'd be happy just to make movies with Nic and Derek.”

The next planned collaboration with Refn is on a Warner Bros-backed remake of kitsch 70s sci-fi classic Logan's Run, a dystopian-future thriller in which human life must end at 30. “Yeah,” says Gosling, “we're working on it. It's like the reverse of Drive in many ways.” He smiles enigmatically. “He has a vision of it. I'd never seen the film when he first mentioned it, but we were talking about some of the ideas and... Well, I don't know how it's gonna work out, because it's still so early in the process. But it will be interesting to see him working with a big studio.”

Logan's Run isn't likely to materialise much before 2014, since Refn, almost exactly ten years Gosling's senior, is about to head to Thailand to make the crime drama Only God Forgives. But, after a period of working very sparingly, Gosling has a whole slew of different movies in the pipeline. Does he like to work a lot? Or does prefer to take his time? “I used to,” he muses, “but then I made a lot of movies recently. I guess I hit 30. I did a comedy with Steve Carell called Crazy Stupid Love and The Ides Of March, with George Clooney, Phil Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright – lots of great actors. I'm going to do A Place Behind The Pines, which is with Derek, and that's a movie about a bank robbery... And after that I'm going to do a gangster picture called The Gangster Squad, in which Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen.”

Though he has no immediate plans to do so, Gosling says that directing a film himself is definitely on the cards (“For me, it just feels like it's the right time”), so does he set himself goals? “Not really. I think now that I'm 30 I'm more comfortable. Maybe it's because I'm playing characters that are older, so it's easier to find good material. But I also have more control, I think.”

And how about becoming an action star? “It's funny, the first thing Nicolas ever said to me is, 'Violence is art,'” he says. “At the time, I wasn't really watching a lot of violent films, but I've started now.” He laughs. “I've realised that I like blood.”

The Making Of Donnie Darko (2001)

2011-07-02T05:17:00.000-07:00

* A version of this article first appeared in the July 2011 issue of Empire magazine...

In 1988, a boy wakes up on a golf course with the secrets of an impending apocalypse written on his arm, shepherded to safety by the siren call of a man-sized rabbit just moments before a jet engine crashes through the roof of his family's suburban home… Most people reading this will get the reference straight away; since its modest release ten years ago this autumn, Donnie Darko has become one of the most iconic and original films of the early 21^st century. Rubbished at the time, almost sold for scrap by its financiers and rapidly pulled by nervous cinema chains, Richard Kelly's rich, philosophical coming-of-age movie is now (rightly) respected as a key film of the 2000s, not only launching Jake Gyllenhaal as an unconventional teen idol but creating a new template for science fiction, rich in character, emotion and, most unexpected of all in the genre, nostalgia.

The sons of Donnie Darko are all around us. Duncan Jones's Source Code, for example, aside from sharing its star, owes a lot to Kelly's film, off-setting a complex and potentially stuffy time-travel plot with a lot of pop-culture humour and a bittersweet romance. Whatever you may think of it, Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch is borne of the the same passion to create something fantastical, post-modern and new. Mike Cahill's upcoming Another Earth, about a woman haunted by the arrival of a doppelganger planet, breathes the same melancholic air, while Rian Johnson's just-wrapped Looper, starring Inception's Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a hitman ordered to kill his future self, went into production with the security of knowing that there is a market for this kind of thing out there.

But Donnie Darko's journey from its creator's mind to the hearts of its cult followers did not, like its tortured hero's, follow a straight line. It began in a post-production house in Los Angeles, where Kelly, 24 and fresh out of UCLA's film school, was a runner, fetching coffee and making cheese and biscuits for Puff Daddy, J.Lo and Madonna. “I was sort of just moonlighting,” he recalls, “trying to get access to the visual effects and editing equipment for my graduate film, which I was still trying to finish.” Times were hard, and Kelly needed to get some work, badly. “I just said to myself, 'I need a screenplay.' So I sat down to write, and I finished it in about six weeks.”

You might assume it began with the image of Frank, the rabbit who guides Donnie through his narcoleptic adventures, but Kelly says otherwise. “It was the jet engine,” he says. “It all started with this story from my hometown in Richmond, Virginia, where I grew up, about a big piece of ice that fell from the wing of a jet plane and smashed through this kid's roof and landed on his bed. He wasn't there at the time, but if he had been it would have killed him. I read about in the newspaper, growing up, and it just stuck with me. It felt like this interesting anomaly. And so the ice became a jet engine, and then it became a mystery, because there was no flight: they can't find the plane.”

Frank came later, as the entity that summons Donnie – “a herald”, says Kelly, who has clearly been boning up on his mythological studies. “I came up with the idea of a kid in a Halloween costume, and it just became a rabbit, for some reason. It might have had something to do with Watership Down, which Drew Barrymore's character teaches in Donnie's English classes. That's very autobiographical – my English teacher in eight grade taught us that book and it had a really lasting effect on me. So now it became a science fiction mystery melded with a lot of autobiographical components from my childhood, as well as a coming-of-age story and a hero's myth.”

The first draft was long, he remembers: an almost Tarantino-esque 150 pages (“It was one of those classic first screenplays where you end up pouring everything you've got into it”). Nevertheless, it was a hit. CAA took him on as a client and started setting up meetings. “It was definitely a hot script,” he says. “People wanted to meet me, but the consensus was that, although it was a great writing sample, it was risky and bizarre and would be difficult to get made with a first-time director.” Were there offers to make the film without Kelly? “Yes. Now, I was only 24 years old but I knew that if I ever sold that script it would never see the light of day. Or they would make changes: they wouldn't set it in 1988, they'd make it present day, or they'd make it a horror film...”

Kelly fended off the offers for about a year. “I was just this belligerent, stubborn, foolish young writer whose movie was never gonna get made,” he laughs. “And then, lo and behold, Jason Schwartzman read it. He was just coming off Rushmore, so he had a lot of heat. I met with him and he really wanted to do it. And that's when it got to Nancy Juvonen, who's Drew Barrymore's partner at Flower Films. She read it and flipped out for it, so I went to meet them both on the set of the first Charlie's Angels in downtown LA. I asked Drew if she'd play the teacher too, and she said yes.”

All of a sudden, the project was alive again, with Kelly back on board to direct. “It validated me to have those two actors say they were cool with me directing it. So we were able to raise $4.5m to make the film – as long as we shot it that summer, right after Drew wrapped Charlie's Angels and before she was gonna go do this Penny Marshall film called Riding In Cars With Boys.”

Everything was in place, but there was just one problem: Schwartzman was committed to another movie and had to back out. “It was a terrifying weekend,” admits Kelly. “I thought the whole thing was going to fall apart. And then Drew left this wonderful message on my answering machine, saying, 'You know what? It's all gonna work out. Jason's amazing, but, hey, the timing didn't work out so we'll have to find someone else. I'm in this for you, so don't worry – we're partners in this.'”

“So we met a few different actors,” he continues, “and I was in Drew's office one day when in walks this kid called Jake Gyllenhaal. And right away, I knew he had the part. He was right out of Columbia University, he was 19 years old and he showed up looking like a hipster college kid, with the spiky hair and the baggy jeans. Right away he was Donnie. The financiers were cool with him – as long as we had Drew, they were fine with anything – and we were shooting by July 2000.”

The 28-day shoot in late summer of 2000 was, says kelly, a “crazy whirlwind”. He was now 25, but he knew in the first week – shooting Donnie's opening-credit cycle ride – that he could do it. “Once you get through the first shooting day, and then the first week, you know in your head and your heart if you're a filmmaker. And if you're not a filmmaker, everyone has figured it out too, and they're freaking out, thinking of ways to come in and either replace you or find someone to cover for you. I've seen it happen. Luckily for me, I was able to take the pressure.”

It was indeed lucky, because Kelly was fighting more battles than one. There were fights over the 80s setting, which he claims was “a metaphor for the end of the Reagan era”; the rabbit mask, which was deemed too weird (“It's supposed to freak you the fuck out!”); and even technical choices, such as Kelly's decision to use anamorphic lenses. Then there was the scene where they dropped the jet engine on Donnie's house, which could only be done once, using four cameras.

“It was an exhilarating, terrifying 28 days. Everything Donnie goes through, I was going through. It was a trial by fire. I was barely making each day. Literally, there were days on the film when my first AD nearly had a heart attack because he didn't think we'd be able to pull it off. I'm very used to that now – having people look at me like I'm crazy! – but we always figured out how to finish it.”

Against the odds, Donnie Darko was now in the can, exactly as its maker had intended. Excited, Kelly premiered his brainchild at the Sundance film festival in January 2001, where it received instant hype as the first competition entry ever to use CG. Everyone was on tenterhooks. Harvey Weinstein was in the crowd, wearing a Donnie Darko hat. It was the buzz title of the festival.

And it tanked.

“There was polite applause,” grins Kelly, “but people were confused. They were very disturbed, and it did not make them feel good – it made them feel confused, and freaked out, and alienated. This was still in the shadow of the Columbine massacre, remember, and here you've got a teenage kid with a gun who shoots someone... It was not seen to be a responsible film, and all the distributors turned us down. Harvey Weinstein had been a big cheerleader, but right afterwards he took the hat off, got a big megaphone and shouted, “I AM PASSING ON THIS MOVIE!!” Kelly laughs. “Well, not literally, but in 2000 Harvey was very much in his buying prime, and when he passed, other buyers passed too. We were the movie that everyone built up, and then immediately tore down.”

The next five months were miserable. “It almost went straight to cable. The financier was ready to dump it; they were sick of it. It was like we had the Ebola virus. Nobody wanted anything to do with us. And then this company called Newmarket, came to us. They had just released Christopher Nolan's Memento, which was also kind of an orphan at Sundance that year. Nobody wanted to release it; Newmarket had to release it themselves.” He laughs. “It's funny, everyone talks about the tastemakers at Sundance, and how they know what the zeitgeist is, but nobody wanted to buy Memento and Donnie Darko at Sundance 2001! But sometimes there are those years when the tastemakers get it wrong. And sure enough, Memento became a big hit. So they bought Donnie Darko and planned a very modest Halloween-themed release for it.”

Suddenly, things were looking up. And then just as Kelly was getting ready for his big moment, two planes slammed into the World Trade Centre. Six weeks later, the film about the troubled boy and the falling jet engine quietly disappeared from the few cinemas that were brave enough to book it.

At Sundance, critics said that Richard Kelly's career was over, and he started to believe it. But then a few small miracles began to occur. First, in March of 2002, he noticed that sales of the DVD were more than just respectable. And then one night, while we was walking the streets of New York wondering what to do with his life, he passed the Pioneer Two Boots cinema on East 3^rd Street. “The poster was in the window,” he recalls. “So I knocked on the door and I said to the manager, 'Why do you have my poster in your window?' And he was like 'That's you?! We're playing your movie every Friday night at midnight and it's selling out! Do you wanna come by?'”Kelly did, at 2am, and the place was packed. “It was, like, Woah. Maybe this movie has a second chance...”

It was here that Kelly realised that audiences had finally bought into the “rich mythology” of the world he created. “People most often ask me,” he says, “'Is Donnie going into a parallel universe or is it all just this dream that he has? Both are very valid interpretations. You can talk about schizophrenia and mental illness, or you can talk about a kid who has legitimate superpowers, who's actually travelling through time. I'm actually of the opinion that the superpowers and the time travel and the parallel universe – all that great science-fiction stuff – is much more interesting to me.

“I mean, we know so little about the human brain, why don't we use science fiction, the parallel universes and the wormholes as a way to explore mental illness? They can kind of work in tandem. Right? But I always thought of it as a superhero story. There's that line where [his girlfriend] says, 'Donnie Darko? What the hell kind of name is that? It's like some sort of superhero or something...' And Donnie's like, 'How do you know I'm not?' That, to me, is the whole movie.”

It hasn't made him rich – he doesn't live in a mansion, he doesn't even have a pool – but Kelly has a lot of affection for his debut, all its trials and heartaches nothwithstanding. “If anything,” he says, “Donnie Darko has taught me that movies that really have great ambition, a lot of detail and a lot of ideas, if they don't connect in cinemas, they will eventually connect on DVD. They'll find a way. I've gotten to make films” – Southand Tales, The Box – “that are trying to follow in the mythology I created with Darko, in terms of science fiction, physics and metaphysics. And it's been very challenging, very emotional, and at times very stressful.

“But I'm that kind of guy,” he grins. “Ambition is the only thing I know how to do, I guess.”

An interview with Idris Elba for RockNRolla (2009)

2011-06-30T02:48:00.000-07:00

* A version of this interview first appeared in the now-defunct Arena magazine in 2009...

After 37 episodes of The Wire, Russell 'Stringer' Bell, the educated, money-laundering drug dealer who rose from the west Baltimore projects to become second-in-command of the city's biggest crime syndicate, was blown away by a gay gangster with a shotgun. He was 35 when the crime occurred in 2004, and at 35 Stringer was just three years older than the man playing him. But like Stringer Bell, that actor wasn't quite all he appeared to be to outsiders. In fact, when Idris Elba was introduced to the press, they had quite a surprise in store: instead of the tough-ass gangster dude, they'd meet the mild-mannered chap who created him, a funny, self-deprecating Londoner from the borough of Hackney with a preference for reggae and R&B over Class-A narcotics.

“I'd fuck with them,” grins Elba, now based in the States. “Because I'd be terribly polite. I'd turn up to interviews and go, 'Er, hello...' – he does a passable impression of a black Hugh Grant – “And they'd be horrified.” He guffaws, slipping effortlessly into slang. “They couldn't believe it. They'd be like, 'Nah, dog, what the fuck, man, you buggin'? Why you talkin' like that – you preparin' for another role?' They were like, 'Who the fuck is this guy? He's not even from here!'”

Now, though, the guy from over there is back where he started, in a manner of speaking. Put forward for the role by super-producer Joel Silver, who cast him in the little-seen horror thriller The Reaping, Elba will next be seen walking the streets of London, playing another gangster – this one a little less hardcore – in Guy Ritchie's latest gangster romp RockNRolla, playing Mumbles, sidekick to the slick but not so quick One-Two, as played by Gerard Butler, in a tale of stolen paintings, dodgy investments and ruthless Russian oligarchs. “Mumbles is an 80s baby,” says Elba. “He's a guy that's decided not to go the nine-to-five route and he's figured a way to make money semi-illegally. Or very illegally – either way. He and One-Two are like the ringleaders of this little motley crew, and they get shit done. They need to make an earner here and there.”

After the unfathomable Revolver, RockNRolla marks a welcome return from the Lock, Stock director to the seedy, picaresque capital underworld that he paints so vividly, and with an almost old-fashioned sense of the eccentric. “It's got a lot of energy,” confirms Elba. “There are moments in it that are classic Guy Ritchie moments, lots of comedy slapstick and lots of interesting violence. I think working with Guy is like working with the Mafia. Everyone knows him, and his people are Guy Ritchie die-hard crew members. You kinda get signed in. Well, you kind of get sworn in . If Guy says you're all right, you're all right! He's a very nice guy though, man. Very personable. Gives you a hug in the morning. Loves to sit down and have a chat. He asks, 'What are you reading right now, Idris? What are you listening to, Idris?' Really interested. I like him a lot.”

That interest meant a lot to Elba. He's a thoughtful, witty guy, with a dry sense of humour, born in Hackney in 1972 to a Ghanaian mother and father from Sierra Leone. He discovered acting during his school days, and though one gets the impression he could do anything he turns his hand to – he's recently launched a management company and has a neat sideline in music that we'll come to later – Elba chose the stage very early on in his career. So what was the lure? Was it the greasepaint? Was it the crowd? Was it an early infatuation with Al Pacino? In fact, it was none of these things. “I fancied my drama teacher,” he says bluntly. “It's well documented, I've said it a few times, and I'm trying to be consistent. She was... er... a very large-breasted woman, and that was my main draw. But that said, she was very nurturing. She'd say, 'You're very good at what you do.'”

Her name was Ms McPhee, and she helped Elba write little scenarios that would cause her to ask, possibly jokingly but perhaps not, “What's going on in your life, Idris?! Is there some trauma we should know about???” Elba laughs about it now. “They were just highly dramatic situations where we, the actors, got to either scream and shout or pretend to fight,” he recalls. “I went to a boys' school, so fight scenes always went down well. There were a lot of father figures coming home, screaming at the the son, and the son screaming, 'FUCK YOU!!!' There were never any mum and dad scenes, because of course it was a boys' school, so no one ever wanted to play mum. But that was what led me into wanting to do drama; my roots lie in theatre.”

After a stint in a regional tour of Of Mice And Men, which may be the only time John Steinbeck's Lenny was ever played with dreadlocks, Elba soon settled into the first stages of career that moved pretty fluidly. You might think that a 6ft 2in Black Briton might soon encounter prejudice and stereotyping, but his earliest TV roles were in comedies, such as 2Point4 Children and, incredibly, Absolutely Fabulous. “I learned pretty early in my game that I was good at auditions. I'd walk in the room and my accent would change, but it would change depending on who I was talking to. So if I walked in and there was some posh, beautiful casting director, my accent would change somewhat.” He adopts a soft, distinguished but not too smarmy purr. “'Hiii therrrree...' But if I walked in and there was some fat sweaty dude from East London, my accent would change accordingly. And one day I realised that I was bagging these jobs not because of my acting but because I was really good at auditioning. I could react very quickly to what was going on in the room.”

At the same time, Elba was working on a whole other career that, had it got going, might not have seen him make the fateful move to America. “I really wanted to be a radio DJ for a long time. I wanted to be on the radio. And while I was doing all this acting, I kept a steady rotation on the DJ circuit. I was on pirate radio quite a bit, with my partner, Quincy D. He's actually a comedian in England. He's very funny, in fact, he's going to the Edinburgh Festival now. But he and I were The Goodfellas, and I loved it. It was my bread and butter money when I wasn't acting.”

Elba had a regular slot at Fresh And Funky at the Hanover Grand, as one of the rotation DJs in the downstairs room. If you ever went, you may recall his DJ name. “It started off as Mr Kipling,” he chuckles. “I kid you not! I was kind of friendly with the ladies, and my friend Boogie – who's one of my oldest friends, I've know him since I was ten years old – says to me, 'Fuckin' 'ell, Idris, you got more tarts than Mr Kipling!' So the name stuck. Mr Kipling was my name. DJ Kippers. But I've moved on since then. I've been through various DJ names. Right now I'm using the, er, monicker Dris: King Dris. I was Big Dris for a while, but I'm too old for Big Dris. King's a bit more fitting with the grey hairs and beard, know what I mean?”

Elba didn't know it, but he was now a double threat. “Some chick said to me, 'You're a DJ and an actor??? Oh fucking hell! Have you never heard the saying, 'Never date a DJ or an actor?' An then she walked off. With the drink that I'd bought her...” Nevertheless, he was about to have the last laugh. An Egyptian director, filming in Paris, had seen Elba in AbFab and contacted his agent in Richmond. “He sees this episode of Absolutely Fabulous, and he says, 'Zat's se guy I want!' So he tracks me down, my agent gives me a call, and she says, 'Can you speak French?' I was like, 'No.' And she said, 'Well, you've just been offered a part playing Catherine Deneuve's boyfriend.'”

The film was Belle Maman (1999) and was shot in Paris and Martinique, where Deneuve would summon Elba to her trailer – more of a beach hut – and go through his lines in phonetic French.

“I don't wanna kiss and tell,” he recalls, “but... Yeah, mate! I'd be sitting on the beach, the sand in my feet, the sea rolling back and Catherine Deneuve speaking French to me. I remember thinking, 'This can't be real!' I guess that's when I realised that life on EastEnders was not gonna be for me. No thanks, I don't wanna do The Bill. I just want to do scenes on the beach with Catherine Deneuve. I wanna do films.' So I ended up moving to America.”

The move to the US, which took some five years in all, was not an immediate success. “It cost a fucking arm and leg,” he sighs, “then I got here... and I didn't work. I'd made such an effort for two years. I was working, making money, the BBC were offering me stuff, it was a nice time. Then I got to New York, and one of the stipulations of my visa was that I wasn't allowed to do any other work but acting – and I couldn't catch a cold! I'd walk into auditions and they'd say, 'You're great! You're good-looking, you're this, you're that – can you do an American accent?' And I say, 'Errrrr... No, not technically.'” He roars with laughter. “DUHH!!!! DIDN'T THINK ABOUT THAT!!! You'd have thought I'd have spent some of that time and money working on my accent!”

It was three years before he got his first job, CSI: Miami, then after that came The Wire. “I didn't know much about HBO at the time, cos I couldn't afford cable, he says. “I just knew that the producers of show produced Homicide, and Andre Braugher, who was and remains one of my favourite actors, was in that, and I was like, 'Yeah!' So I auditioned for about four or five weeks, I was constantly going back. By that stage I had mastered my American accent – in fact, the producer didn't know I was English. I told the casting director not to tell him, cos I wanted the job so badly.”

Though he's not talking in a US accent today, it's something he's clearly come to master, and he drops into it on more than one occasion. The accent isn't the hardest thing,” he explains, “it's the culture. Really and truly, if you slur your words a little bit, you sound American. But the bottom line is, it's learning the culture that makes you American. I lived here a long, long time before I got my first job, so by that time I was damn near American anyway. The other key thing is, if you try to speak with an American accent but you think with an English accent, it's never gonna come out right. You've gotta think with an American accent. And practise a lot. My mum rings me, and I'm like...” He adopts lazy bro-speak... “'Hey mom, what's good?' And she's like... He adopts what must be irate Ghanaian. “'Why are you TALKING like that??? You are NOT American!!!' But I have to do it. I feel like a pillock of course. My mates call me and say, 'Alright geezer, see the game last night?' I'll say, 'Aw, nah, mahhn...' They're like, 'Fack off, you cunt!'”

After tireless lobbying, Elba landed Stringer Bell, and the consequences were tremendous. “The character changed my life,” he says softly. “It gave me a lot of kudos. The Americans were bowled over by it because it depicted a world they didn't know about: Baltimore. It's a bit like Birmingham, and under Birmingham there's a sort of underground scene that's full of characters, and Baltimore's the same. And I guess when people realised I wasn't from Baltimore, it catapulted my exposure.”

Not, however, in terms of Hollywood. “Hollywood pretty much ignored The Wire, even though it's so critically acclaimed and everyone loves it. It's been called The Best Show On TV a thousand times. So it didn't give me a Hollywood profile, and I'm still building one now. The industry knows who the people on The Wire are, but I'm not a household name at this point at all.”

This, though, may soon change – indeed, Elba notes himself that “I was a supporting actor in The Wire, and now I'm getting leading roles. My career has always been varied. I don't play just drug dealers: I get lawyers, cops, all of it. Which is great. I can do it all. And now they realise I can do English too – well, duh! – so it's an interesting position to be in.” And after a string of thankless supporting roles in films as diverse as American Gangster, Prom Night and 28 Weeks Later, the first fruit of this new phase in his career sounds very promising too. “I just finished this film, called Obsessed, in which I play a married man, Beyonce Knowles plays my wife, and Ali Larter plays this girl who works for me temporarily in my office and falls for me. They're beautiful women. Beautiful women. I remember doing this scene one time, where Beyonce and Ali were fighting over me. We were rehearsing the scene, and they were going back and forth, cat-fighting. And then there was a long silence.” Even now, the scene amuses him. “Everyone looked at me, and a voice said, 'Idris, it's your line.' And everyone in the room, all the fellas, started laughing. Cos it was just so funny: I'm standing there thinking, 'Am I dreaming? This is Ali Larter and Beyonce, fighting over Idris.”

His voice trails off, then he laughs a last, big, dirty but contented laugh, perhaps thinking back to Deneuve, with whom this whole adventure started. Or even Mr Kipling, for that matter.

“Lovely...!”