Film review - The Artist

So I’ve finally seen The Artist, after all the hype and the Oscar wins, and I wasn’t blown away. Sure, it is nice and well made, and obviously has a central gimmick that makes it stand out from the crowd, but this is a feather-weight confection.

The film opens in 1927, and George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a silent movie star at the top of his game. He helps ingénue dancer Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) get noticed by the studios. As silence gives way to the talkies, their careers take different paths.

Two things surprised me. Firstly, although this is a French-made film it is set in Hollywood and the silent lines are all spoken in English. This seems slightly strange considering every country had a silent film industry that had to adjust to sound, but I suppose it does make financial sense to set it in America. And you get to have people like John Goodman in it without making them mouth French lines. Secondly, it wasn’t as funny as I thought it would be. The dog was cute, and it was mildly amusing at times, but I was expecting more slapstick or something. There weren’t many laughs.

Having said that, Dujardin is excellent in the role. Bearing a more than passing resemblance to William Powell (who interestingly was one of the few silent film actors to have a successful career after the introduction of sound) he looks very much of the time and has such a hammy, expressive face. Bejo is all eyes and smile, and is adorable.

Basically, it could be 20 minutes shorter and a bit funnier. If you buy into the romance of the silent era, I’m sure you will love this. I, on the other hand, was a little bored, and really if I’m going to be a bit bored watching a silent film, I’d rather take my medicine and watch an actual old one. Obviously I don’t want to sit through Battleship Potemkin, but I know I ought to.

Film review - The Muppets

This new Muppets film is quite different from the Christmas Carol or Treasure Island adaptations we became used to in the nineties, wonderful though those were. It’s a post-modern take on the children’s film that also manages to go back to the group’s roots.

As the film opens, the Muppets have been largely forgotten by the public and have gone their separate ways – in this reality it seems as if The Muppets Show was their only success, and that finished in 1981. When an evil oil baron (Chris Cooper) threatens to take over their old theatre, they must put on a benefit show to stop him. Their biggest fans, Gary (Jason Segal, who also wrote the script), Mary (the wonderful Amy Adams) and Walter (a Fabricated American, to use the Greg the Bunny terminology), are ready to help.

This uber-hackneyed storyline – used in everything from The Blues Brothers to Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo – is played openly as a cliche. It’s just a McGuffin for all the fun, and there is a lot of fun to be had. Movie tropes are skewered in surreal fashion, there are great cameos at every turn, and the songs are weird, joyous creations (from The Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie).

Adults who can remember The Muppets Show will be happy to see all the old gang back together again. And I mean “all”, as some quite minor characters are featured heavily. Sadly my first Muppet experience was Muppet Babies during Going Live (I know, weep for those in their late twenties), so a lot of this went over my head. My only other minor gripe is that there isn’t enough Kermit and Miss Piggy, who seem to be slightly on the sidelines while Gary, Walter and Mary take centre stage. You can’t keep a good frog or pig down, though, and their charisma shines through.

Muppets make people smile, and when combined with comedy talent like this, they make people smile from ear to ear.

Film review - The Iron Lady

When I was between the ages of approximately five and seven, I idolised Mrs Thatcher. I’m not exactly sure why or how this happened. While my parents were not anti-Thatcher like everyone else’s seem to have been, I think it was mostly to do with my love of Spitting Image (she was the main character back then, you see). It certainly wasn’t based on a thorough examination of her policies – she was strong and had a distinctive voice and hair do. And I thought it was great that a woman was in charge.

Well, it seems that the makers of The Iron Lady share my seven-year-old’s view of Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep). Wasn’t she awesome? She didn’t give in, did she? She always stuck to her guns, whatever anybody said. And she was a woman living in a man’s world.

It’s a pity that the absolutely amazing performance by Streep has been somewhat wasted – this could have been the definitive Thatcher film, but it only scrapes the surface.

The film focuses mainly on Thatcher now, suffering from dementia. She remembers scenes from her past – working in her dad’s shop, becoming an MP, becoming PM – and talks to her dead husband (Jim Broadbent).

We see how her difficult early years in charge of the country (with soaring unemployment, riots and even an attempt on her life by the IRA) are all forgotten when she sticks to her guns and successfully takes back the Falklands from the Argentineans. After that, the 80s was all yuppies drinking Bollinger until she was rudely ousted by her own party in 1990.

Except, of course, that the Brighton Hotel bombing happened in 1984, two years after the Falklands War.

Trying to make a linear narrative out of a period in office (any Prime Minister’s period in office) can only result in gross oversimplification or confusion as we have here. I suppose you could say that the film sees events through her eyes, but as well as glossing over a lot of the bad stuff, the film completely misses out her success in the Cold War. Ronald Reagan isn’t even in it! Surely Maggie would think about Ronnie?

If the film isn’t good history, it is entertaining to a degree. Though a bit long, the performances make it worth seeing. Streep really transforms into Mrs Thatcher, so much so that it is slightly disturbing. The voice is absolutely perfect with no vowel out of place (something I have never heard from an American doing an English accent – it’s always a clanging vowel which gives them away). Broadbent plays Dennis extremely cuddly-y, Alexandra Roach is a wonderfully focused young Maggie, and Olivia Colman is a scream as Carol Thatcher.

The Iron Lady is a quite depressing look at ageing and a quite fun look at a very determined woman. But I think most people would feel there was more to say about Maggie than that she was determined and got old.

Film review - We Need To Talk About Kevin

What with me not being very well read (particularly when it comes to contemporary fiction), I am rarely in the position of already knowing the source material when seeing a film. So it was a novelty for me to go into this screening with my own preconceived ideas about the story. It was also a blessing, as I don’t think I would have understood what was going on if I hadn’t already read the novel.

This adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s chilling bestseller follows Eva (Tilda Swinton) in the aftermath of a terrible event involving her teenage son Kevin (Ezra Miller). As Eva remembers her life since Kevin’s birth, it becomes clear that there was always something different about the boy which her husband (John C. Reilly) just refuses to see.

The film is dream-like to the point of meaninglessness. Whereas in the book, Eva (as narrator) explains everything in immense detail, here we are given only disjointed snapshots of events as we flit back and forth in the story. The resonance of each small moment – of all the insidious things Kevin does – is completely lost. The opening half an hour in particular is a mess, and barely held my attention. If I didn’t have previous experience of the story, I doubt it would have made any sense.

The film cuts out all of the background information about Eva and her husband, leaving them as blank characters with unclear motivations, going through a much simpler and less ambiguous story. Although Eva comes across as very cold in the book, she is extremely frosty here. Having Swinton (not the warm and fuzziest of actresses we can all agree) really adds to this.

British director Lynne Ramsey has taken an intelligent novel with mass appeal and turned it into the arty-est of art house films. While certainly a 'quality' picture with style, a creepy aesthetic and powerful performances, it is not a patch on the book.

Like Shame, I note that this is another British film set in America, again part-funded by the UK Film Council. I do find it strange that tax payers’ money is being spent on adaptations of American bestsellers, but there you go.

London Film Festival Review – Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place

The Merry Pranksters’ journey across America in 1964 is the stuff of legend. Led by Ken Kesey, the respected author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and advocate for LSD, the group painted a school bus in rainbow colours, named it ‘Further’ and headed for New York. They aimed to change the world, and amazingly these misfits managed to. The counter culture of the 60s had begun.

Sure that what they were doing was seminal, they decided to film themselves. Unfortunately, they were tripping so much during their trip that they didn’t bother to learn how to use the camera or sound equipment, leaving the resulting footage unusable. This documentary is the result of years of painstaking work to correct their mistakes, sync up the sound and edit together something coherent. It’s a strange documentary – not quite the film they wanted to make at the time and not quite a full retrospective analysis of why the events were important.

Certainly it is very interesting to see the journey in colour, and hear from the people involved, even if most of it isn’t exactly riveting. The group were an odd bunch, the oddest by far being Neal Cassady, otherwise known as Dean Moriarty from On The Road. The whole enterprise was a homage to Kerouac, and having Neal on board was a living link to that past. As anyone who has read On The Road will testify, Cassady was never the most stable of souls. That the Pranksters let this speed freak drive the bus shows that they weren’t exactly in their right minds.

The film cuts back and forth across time, showing how the clean-cut college boy Kesey ended up leading the acid movement. In one of the most fascinating sequences, we hear the actual recording of his first ever acid trip, part of the CIA’s LSD experiments. We also see snapshots of life after the bus trip and his eventual disillusion with the movement he kick-started.

For those interested in the period, this is essential viewing. For those who are not in the know, this is likely to be a confusing watch.

N.B. A little niggle I had watching the film – why did they use the font Comic Sans for the subtitles? I’m sure it’s because they wanted to keep the film non-serious to match up with the footage, but it just looks very unprofessional.

London Film Festival Review - Sarah Palin: You Betcha!

Nick Broomfield has explored the lives of many interesting people through his documentaries, most famously Eugene Terre’Blanche and Aileen Wuornos. In his latest film, he turns his camera towards Sarah Palin, the hockey mom that stormed onto the world stage in 2008 as John McCain’s running mate.  

The documentary follows Bromfield as he explores Sarah’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, in the dead of winter, hoping to interview the lady herself. Although he spends much of his time slipping on the ice while holding a boom mike, he manages to meet lots of interesting people and finds out about her childhood and rise to power – first as Wasilla’s mayor, then as Alaskan Governor. As it turns out, few of the people who will talk to him are still on speaking terms with Palin. He does, however, meet her parents, who seem very nice. They are a little concerned that he might be making a “hit piece”, though.

They are right to be concerned, because of course Broomfield is not a supporter of Sarah. The film paints a picture of a vindictive, two-faced woman with bizarre religious views who uses people only to drop them like a hot potato once they’ve outlived their usefulness. Unsurprisingly, he never gets his interview with Palin.  

While it is very interesting to see the people that have been left in the wake of the Palin Express, the point of this documentary may have been lost on me. I suppose the original idea was to expose her shortcomings so that her bid for the Republican nomination would be discredited. Unfortunately for the filmmakers (but fortunately for the world) she pulled out of the race shortly after the film was made, making this null and void. But even if she was still running it’s not like the crusading Nick Broomfield would have been a lone dissenting voice, or that anyone who supported her would have given two hoots about some British documentary.

What’s left is a portrait of Palin – a fascinating sociological phenomenon if ever there was one – and in that regard the film falls pretty short. For example, although it goes through her high school sports career in some detail, her relationship with her husband Todd is hardly mentioned. You don’t even find out when they got married, never mind the role he has played in her career (which is hinted at but never directly addressed). The most shocking omission, however, is that the strangest turn of events in Palin’s life isn’t explored – the sudden Republican Vice Presidential nomination in 2008. That error in judgement meant that what was Alaska’s problem became everyone’s problem. The only mention of it in the film reveals something very telling – that the usually long vetting process was cut down to just a few days by the GOP. Why on earth did they pick her?

The answer to that question is also the reason she is so fascinating, and therefore why Broomfield has made a documentary about her – because she is a woman, and a reasonably attractive one at that. The whole affair speaks volumes about America’s political climate, and her genuine popularity in some circles speaks volumes about America.

In hindsight, there was the opportunity here to film for slightly longer and do a real “rise and fall” piece, including all the good footage from Wasilla we see here. As it is, this is an out of date campaigning film, not detailed enough to give a deep exploration of the issues but jokey enough to be entertaining – even if it does take a lot of cheap shots to get a laugh.  

London Film Festival review - Shame

Steve McQueen’s second feature (following the critically acclaimed Hunger) is another bleak film. Shame follows Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a yuppie living in New York with a pristine, minimalist apartment and the world at his feet. Unfortunately, Brandon is a sex addict, and spends every spare moment watching porn on the internet, engaging prostitutes or pleasuring himself in his office toilet. You see, underneath the cool exterior, he isn’t a very happy bunny.  

Into this cloud of self-loathing walks his little sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan), a fragile and slightly zany singer. Brandon is extremely shaken by her presence and the cracks in his carefully carved persona begin to show.

McQueen has crafted a film which completely complements its protagonist – beautiful to look at but sordid and ultimately empty inside. This is a mood piece rather than about story. Not very much happens, it’s not clear what that is, and it takes a long time to get there.

What you get on the way is some absolutely beautiful photography of a gritty and glamorous city. Shots are long, lingering and often not contextualised. The film is very “provocative”, but not dirty. Yes you do see a lot of Michael Fassbender naked, but the sex here is not about audience titillation – it’s about the emotional mess inside Brandon. The score by Harry Escott is wonderfully, sadly dark, and complemented by some great disco tracks which punctuate the story.

However exquisitely crafted, Shame does begin to drag by the end. The trouble is that the characters do not hold your attention. Brandon is a blank slate and Sissy is just annoying. Fassbender and Mulligan do give convincing performances, but there is little in the script to make you care about either of them.

Another concern I have with the film is that it is set in New York. The director is British, the screenwriters are British, the lead actress is British, and the funding is British (it was even partly financed by the UK Film Council).  Why isn’t it set in London? Michael Fassbender could surely have played an Englishman as convincingly as he played an American (and they had to give Brandon an Irish back story to explain his slightly odd accent). Is it just to reach a wider audience? Perhaps our class system limits us to only accepting middle class versions of London through the eyes of Richard Curtis. Can “gritty” British films only be set on council estates? It would have been interesting to see London portrayed in a new way on screen, but that opportunity has been lost.

As it is, set in New York, Shame is a dark art film which asks few questions and gives even fewer answers. Depressing but not satisfyingly so.