AMERICAN FICTION****

Based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett, AMERICAN FICTION is being sold as a scabrous take-down of modern politically correct sensibilities. It is that, but also so much more.  

Jeffrey Wright (Westworld) stars as Thelonius "Monk" Ellison, a tenured academic railing against the sensitivities of his Gen Z students, and the moronity of a publishing industry that wants to cage all black authors in the prison of poverty porn, rather than accepting that they can write a variety of stories.  

Monk returns home to Boston and realises his outwardly wealthy and successful family is in crisis. His sister (Tracee Ellis Ross, Blackish) is divorced and weary of caring for their mother, his brother (Sterling K Brown, This Is Us) is manically embracing his new gay identity, and his mother is declining into dementia.  Desperate for money and outraged at the commercial success of a nakedly exploitative book by his rival (Issa Rae, Insecure), Monk pens an equally trashy novel that predictably becomes a wild success. For the first time in his life, his alter-ego is selling well, optioned for a movie, and appeasing the consciences of rich white people.  Monk hates it, hates himself, and hates all those being duped by his ruse, including his new girlfriend. The question is how this will resolve.

There is much to admire in Cord Jefferson's first directorial feature. It is genuinely, brilliantly, hilariously funny it taking down the sensitivities of the progressive Left, but also Monk's own delusions. This is a movie whose pre-credits sequence contains more belly-laughs than most soi-disant comedies have in their whole running time.  But what I love about this film is that it moves beyond that to deliver what Monk seeks: whole stories about contemporary black lives that are more than simply ghetto or slave stories. The Ellisons are a successful middle class family - highly educated and refined. Their emotional problems are fully described and beautifully acted by a fine cast, among whom Sterling K Brown steals every scene he is in.

My only criticism is that the movie doesn't quite stick the landing. This is partly by design. Neither Monk, nor the director, nor maybe the novelist who wrote the source material, are interested in easy answers and pat endings. Indeed, with their movie director character played by Adam Brody (The OC) they satirise the very concept.  But I did want some consequences, if not a resolution. We all know of real life novelists exposed as lying about their real lives. I wanted to see the literary as well as the personal consequences. But this isn't that film, and as such, I was left wanting more.

AMERICAN FICTION is rated R and has a running time of 117 minutes. It played Toronto 2023 where it won the People's Choice Award for Best Film. It will be released in the USA on December 15th (cinemas) and December 22nd (streaming).

THE FRENCH DISPATCH** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 5

 

Wes Anderson's THE FRENCH DISPATCH is all whimsy and stunning design but completely lacking in meaning or profundity for all bar about 3 minutes of its running time. This gives me no pleasure to say as a great fan of his work. But the genius of GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL was marrying his unique eye with a story that both made us life but also made us cry, and tackled the most profound and moving of subjects.  By contrast, Anderson's homage to literary magazines seems deeply unambitious and frivolous and thus uninvolving and dull. This is no doubt exacerbated by a portmanteau structure that prevents or plot character development. Indeed, this may be his worst film since THE DARJEELING LIMITED.  I wonder if he is too spoiled by being able to get every actor he wants for cameos that pile up into shagpile carpet of zanily dressed but pointless characters. He badly needs an editor and some focus.

So, the film is about a literary review editor played by Bill Murray and the magazine he created as demonstrated by three stories from the magazine brought to life. The first is a prison love story about an homicidal maniac artist (Benicio del Toro), his muse / guard (Lea Seydoux), his agent (Adrien Brody) and an art critic (Tilda Swinton).   The second is about a 1968 student demo led by Timothee Chalamet and reported on by Frances McDormand.  The third has a food critic (Jeffrey Wright) recall the kidnapping of the son of a police chief.  

There are some, but not enough, laughs in the film.  Anderson flicks from colour to black and white for no real reason.  The only scene of any power is where Jeffrey Wright's critic, clearly influenced by James Baldwin, recalls how he was once arrested for being gay and the editor saved him.  

Every mirror needs a dark backing so that we can see our reflection in it.  Anderson needs to bear that in mind.

THE FRENCH DISPATCH is rated R and has a running time of 108 minutes. It played Cannes, San Sebastian and the BFI London Film Festival 2021. It opens in the USA and UK on October 22nd.

THE GOOD DINOSAUR

THE GOOD DINOSAUR is a woeful entry into the Pixar animation catalogue, beset by differences of opinion and multiple directors, and emerging with no clear authorial voice.  The resulting film ends up as a deeply trite coming of age film with little humour or emotional pull. Indeed, it's only truly original or clever conceit is to have the hero dinosaur befriend a young Neanderthal kid called Spot as a human might befriend a puppy.  After an early Lion King inspired loss of a father, the dino, Arlo, has to journey home with his mute sidekick Spot, in order to prove his courage to his dead father.   The antagonist is nature itself, which seems clever, but really just creates a narrative void at the centre of the film.  The voice-work is lacklustre with the exception of a typically charismatic cameo by Sam Elliott as a gruff but lovely T-rex.  The animation of the landscape is photo-real and gorgeous but jars against the cheap-simplistic artistic choice to have Arlo be a green shiny kids toy.  One to avoid - even on DVD.

THE GOOD DINOSAUR is rated PG and has a running time of 93 minutes. The movie is on global release.

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE - LFF 2013 - Day Eleven - Super late review!

So here's a super-late review of the gloriously weirdly wonderful romantic-comedy ONLY LOVERS LEFT LIVE from art house director Jim Jarmusch (THE LIMITS OF CONTROL).  I originally saw this flick at the London Film Festival, and then watched it again on Valentine's Day at the BFI.  I resisted reviewing it because sometimes the movies you truly love are the hardest to write about. Somehow it's easier to pinpoint exactly why you hate hate hate hate hate a movie and far harder to articulate that nebulous feeling of unashamed joy when you luxuriate in a movie that's uniquely wondrous. But, as this flick is still on a few arthouse screens in the UK, here goes....

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE tells the story of two ancient vampires called, in biblical simplicity, Adam and Eve.  When we meet them, they're living apart. She's in the richly decorated decadent Tangier, hanging out with her friend Marlowe (wry jokes about ghosting Shakespeare), and generally looking effortlessly punk-rock-chic.  He's hanging out in decaying Detroit, writing awesome moody music on self-consciously old-school tech, procured by his cluelessly half-baked muggle friend Ian.  

Adam's in a funk, and Eve comes to rescue him. What's funny and sweet about their relationship is that after all those centuries it has matured into a kind of docile middle-aged marriage and yet we still feel they're passionately in love with each other, and utterly good people who make each other better, which is ultimately the aim, right?  He shows her his decrepit post industrial city by night, dodging fan-girls, and all seems wistfully melancholy until Eve's little sister Ava turns up and throws everything into chaos.  There's a lot of fun to be had at Adam's deadpan response to Ava's hell-raising antics, and the key plot point is that it forces our Lovers onto a plane to Tangier, leaving their ethically sourced blood supply behind them.

Throughout all of this, Jim Jarmusch seems to be engaging us in an elegy for high culture.  Adam is weary with superficial modern culture - the source of his depression - and longs for a greater more glorious past.  Eve might try to snap him out of this, mocking Byron as an old bore, but there's a feeling that the times of great dandy fashion and music and writing is over and they are not just the Only Lovers Left Alive as in the only truly passionate people left, but the only Lovers of Art left in a modern world denuded of taste. To that end, Eve's little sister with her insatiable immediate and unfiltered appetites might remind us of modern pop-culture - superficial, insatiable, undiscriminating.  If Eve's reading Marlowe, then Ava's reading TMZ. 

All of which makes this movie sound rather pedagogic but it's only after I watched it, and rewatched it, and pondered it, that I came to this awareness. When you're in the movie, you're enjoying the wonderfully attenuated, chiselled beauty of Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton, and utterly buying into their love story.  You're enjoying the wonderfully curated ramshackle houses that they live in.  You're glorying in the very British humour delivered in particular by Hiddleston and his interplay with Anton Yelchin as Ian. Plus, did I say that the music is just insanely wonderful?

Really, there's nothing not to like here.  And if you've found Jim Jarmusch inaccessible and wilfully obscure in the past (as I have) then please don't let that put you off this beautifully shot, deeply affecting film.

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language.  

ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE played Cannes, Toronto and London 2013.  It was released in 2013 in Russia, Croatia, Switzerland, Japan and Germany. It was released earlier this year in Greece, South Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, Turkey, Belgium, France, the UK, Ireland, Romania, Poland, Taiwan, Denmark and Finland. It will be released in the USA on April 11th, in Australia on April 17th, in New Zealand on May 1st, and in Spain on June 27th.

SUNDANCE LONDON 2013 - Day 2 - THE INEVITABLE DEFEAT OF MISTER AND PETE

The reason people like me go to festivals is for that occasional flash of wonder when a programmer selects a film that would ordinarily have slipped beneath your radar and it rocks your world. That's how I feel about George Tillman Junior's THE INEVITABLE DEFEAT OF MISTER & PETE - a movie that made me laugh, cry, despair and marvel in equal measure.

The premise is simple. The two young kids of the title are abandoned by their crack whore mothers during a hot summer in New York. Forced to forage and steal for food, to protect themselves from the cops who would put them into care and the neighbourhood thugs who would do them harm, they forge an unlikely if utterly credible friendship and alliance. The remarkably talented Skylan Brooks plays Mister, the older and more worldly wise of the two. A young kid who looks like he's never had a good night's sleep - a kid of such wisdom and strength and pride that he inspires the grudging respect of the local drug dealer (Anthony Mackie). A kid so fierce that when he finally breaks down it moved me to tears. Mister's sidekick is a young, guileless ridonkulously cute Korean kid called Pete (Ethan Dizon). A kid who desperately needs a protector and mediator.

I could happily spend another two hours in the company of Mister and Pete. I totally believed in their friendship, shared their occasional joys and felt their many setbacks deeply. Kudos to Tillman Jr for finding them and coaxing such wonderful performances out of them. Kudos as well for managing to stay just the right side of manipulative sentimentality. The film never descends into Poor Joe the Crossingsweeper territory, neither does it pile melodrama onto melodrama as PRECIOUS did. The result is a beautifully shot, intimate, high stakes drama that is genuinely felt and totally unforgettable. You need to see it.

THE INEVITABLE DEFEAT OF MISTER AND PETE has a running time of 118 minutes. The film played Sundance 2013 but does not yet have a commercial release date.

EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE

EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE is an offensive film based on a faithful adaptation of an offensive novel. To that end, the blame for this exploitative, incredible (literally) movie lies with Jonathan Safran Foer - the novelist who exploited 9-11 to further his narcissistic fictional stylings.  It's hard to see how screenwriter Eric Roth could've adapted the film while minimises the absurd central conceit that powers the film.  And as for Stephen Daldry - once again, is it his poor judgement or his inability to disentangle himself from the mawkishness and self-indulgence that pollutes the novel?

The Big Idea is that a kid called Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn), borderline autistic, is so traumatised by his father's death in 9-11 that he obsesses over the idea that his father might have left him one last puzzle - a key with the name "black".  So he roams Manhattan interviewing every black, looking for the lock that his key will fit - some of the time, accompanied by a mute old man call The Renter (Max von Sydow) who turns out to be his grandfather (no real spoiler there).  Eventually, he finds the lock, and we discover why his mother is being so apparently irresponsible, but none of it really feels credible.  And, as with all high concept films, the incredible nature of the premise truly undermines our empathy with the characters. That said, even without the ludicrous concept, EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE would stretch any viewers patience.  The characters either fall between the downright irritating (Oskar Schell and his mother) or the unbelievably good-hearted (Oskar's father - surely the most attentive screen dad in history).  One can only assume that it's the presence of Hanks and Bullocks - Oscar sweethearts - that got this film nominated.  Max von Sydow is sympathetic - sure - but his nomination looks like an end-of-career pat-on-the-back rather than a specific acclamation.   

All I can say is that this is hands down the most irritating, exploitative film I have seen in quite some time. I discard it.

EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE is already on release in the USA and Canada. It will play Berlin 2012. It opens on February 16th in Germany, Portugal, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, the UK and Japan. It opens on February 24th in Argentina, Australia, Chile and Finland. It opens on February 29th in Belgium, France, Singapore and Brazil. It opens on March 8th in the Czech Republic and the Netherlands; on March 16th in Italy, Spain and Turkey; and on March 22nd in Slovenia.  EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE has been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar and Max von Sydow has been nominated for Best Supporting Actor. 

London Film Fest 2011 Day 8 - THE IDES OF MARCH

THE IDES OF MARCH is a cheap thriller full of plot holes that wants us to believe that it's an insightful, intelligent political film.  It tries to mask poor writing and construction with an all-star cast, but I'm not buying it.  This is, for all its pretensions and earnest good intentions, a bad film.  Now, I haven't seen the play on which the movie was based - Beau Willimon's Farragut North (a road on Washington DC full of political consultants).  But my friends tell me that this movie makes a departure from the closed world of that play in the final forty minutes - in other words, the movie is not content to stick with the play's obsession with the mechanics of political campaigns - and "raises the stakes" in the jargon of Screenwriting 101.  The result feels amateur and undermines the momentum and spark of the opening half hour.

As the movie opens we feel we are in good hands. The movie has pace and wit and does what a lot of great political films do - it gives us the feeling we're peeking behind the curtain at a world we're fascinated by.  We love how Stephen and Paul (Ryan Gosling and Philip Seymour Hoffman) intricately plot and plan Governor Mike Morris; (George Clooney) Ohio Primary Campaign. We love the Machiavellian scheming of their opposite number, Tom (Paul Giamatti).  We love the whip-smart dialogue from the pushy intern (Evan Rachel Wood) that Stephen's sleeping with.  The dialogue is almost Aaron-Sorkin-esque and the action takes place in seedy hotel rooms and cheap offices and bleak parking lots.  It all seems to be going so right!  We care about whether Morris' will cheapen himself in order to get an endorsement from sleazy Senator Thompson (Jeffrey Wright).  We care about whether he will win.

The problem is that the movie then takes a turn into nonsense.  The event upon which the action turns is that Stephen will take a meeting with Tom. This is anathema during a campaign - the press will jump on it. So why would a guy so smart for for it? OK, I thought, I'll go with it. But then Stephen needs to get just $900 petty cash to propel another key plot point. Does he just draw it from an ATM thus involving no-one else? No! He asks his sidekick to get it out of petty cash leaving no receipt in an open plan office! Not so smart! And if you don't believe Stephen is smart, you don't believe he can rescue the mess he gets himself into, other than through the divine right of the hero in  mainstream movies.

And what about the politics? THE IDES OF MARCH is not telling us anything new by "revealing" that idealistic politicians can make low deals and do bad things. We are a decade after Clinton. We know about sex scandals. It all seems rather old hat. 

So we're left with a film whether the story is simply not credible and falls from grace into cheap thriller. The only things we can cling to are superb supporting performances from Evan Rachel Wood (who manages to make a stock character sympathetic and nuanced) and the always legendary Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Where's the elegance and sophistication that coloured Clooney's earlier directorial effort, GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK?

<< Philip Seymour Hoffman (Paul Zara); Evan Rachel Wood (Molly Stearns) and George Clooney (Governor Mike Morris and Director)  at the photocall for THE IDES OF MARCH at the BFI London Film Festival.


THE IDES OF MARCH played Toronto and Venice 2011. It opens in the US on October 7th; in the Netherlands on October 20th; on October 28th in France Portugal, Ireland and the UK; on November 4th in Sweden; on November 11th in Finland; on December 22nd in Germany; on January 5th 2012 in Hungary and on February 14th in Russia.

SOURCE CODE - a lot less clever than it thinks it is

Duncan Jones' directorial debut, MOON was a beautifully crafted, emotionally powerful, low-budget sci-fi flick that was arguably one of the best films of 2009. As a result, his new film SOURCE CODE has been met with a lot of good-will on the part of the critical fraternity and has led to what are, in my opinion, overly generous reviews. Because SOURCE CODE is, essentially, a rather simple-minded, emotionally uninvolving movie full of plot holes, featuring at least one awful acting performance and saddled with a piss-poor Hollywood ending. Overall, it's enjoyable enough as a sort of lo-rent thriller, but it's neither good sci-fi, nor a follow-up film worthy of MOON. I am deeply, deeply disappointed.

The set-up of the film, written by Ben Ripley, is half way between Quantum Leap and that Denzel Washington-Tony Scott time-travel/CSI thriller DEJA VU. Jake Gyllenhaal plays an army officer called Colter Stevens who is parlayed by some sci-fi gimcrack into the mind of a commuter called Sean on a morning train to Chicago. That train is about to be blown up by a terrorist as a warning shot before an even bigger dirty bomb goes off in the city. The army keeps sending Colter back into Sean's body for eight minute segments  to find the identity of the bomber so that he can be apprehended before the second attack. But it is made very clear to Colter that he can't change what's already happened - the people on that train must die - and just because Colter has the hots for Sean's girlfriend Christina (Michelle Monaghan), he can't save her life.

Duncan Jones deftly handles the first half of the film. The repeated eight minutes segments on the train, that repeat in variations, GROUNDHOG DAY style, are never dull. There are some wonderfully innovative tracking shots in the confined space and good use of editing. Kudos also to Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan for giving those segments a sense of urgency and intimacy. But I started to lose interest badly in the second half of the flick for a number of reasons. First up, the first big plot reveal - about how Colter ended up in the Source Code - could be spotted a mile off. Second, if Colter knows the bomber has to leave the train to set off the second bomb, why does he bother interrogating people on the train? Third, the introduction of Jeffrey Wright's Evil Scientist character was just thin two-dimensional writing, and his performance as hammy as hell. Fourth, the character of the army-officer-with-a-conscience was similarly thinly written. And poor Vera Farmiga was simply an age-appropriate delivery device. Fifth, the ending. I think even those who really love this film will agree that there is a natural place where this film should end, and yet it goes on for another five minutes in what I can only assume was a studio intervention.

The upshot - disappointment with what was basically a mediocre thriller with a ham-fisted ending and no real ingenuity in its handling of its sci-fi or emotional material.

SOURCE CODE is on release in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, the Philippines, Taiwan, the UK, the US, the Czech Republic, Kuwait, Serbia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Iceland, Turkey and Spain. It opens later in April in Portugal, France, Spain, Hong Kong, Hungary, Malaysia, Singapore, Greece, Italy and Norway. It opens in May in India, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Finland. It opens on June 2nd in Germany; on June 9th in the Netherlands; on June 16th in Denmark and on August 5th in Sweden.

Overlooked DVD of the month - CHICAGO 10

Brett Morgan has a knack for making funny, insightful documentaries about colourful historical figures. Half his genius is picking characters that have a finely tuned sense of theatrics: the other half of his genius is in bringing that to a modern audience with a sense of flair and energy. In his bio-doc of Robert Evans, legendary Hollywood producer and ladies man, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, Morgan used photo-montage and memoir. In CHICAGO 10, Morgan mixes vintage news-footage, animated court-room recreations, contemporary interviews and simulated stand-up. The sound-track mixes contemporary protest music with Eminem and the Beastie Boys. The resulting documentary is very funny, often surreal, and brings home the gravity and high stakes of the American civil rights and anti-war movement of the late 1960s.

The story is simple. In 1968, the American counter-culture movement is fuming about the escalation of the war in Vietnam. They plan to come to Chicago and lobby the Democratic National Convention. The movement coalesces around the Yippie movement led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and the Black Panthers led by Bobby Seale. Mayor/Boss Daley sets the pigs onto the protestors: Communist conspiracies "justify" disproportionate police brutality. The Chicago 8 are brought to trial. The documentary basically dramatises court records and puts them in context. The Chicago 7 come across as witty, intelligent and radical, but not unreasonable. The gagging of Bobby Seale, and the severance of his trial from the group trial seems like an act of pure and brutal racism. It's shocking to modern eyes. Hank Azaria is simply brilliant as Abbie Hoffman and Jeffrey Wright is powerful as Bobby Seale .(The final two members of the 10 are the two lawyers).

Watching the movie today I was shamed by how active and passionate these kids were and how bland and anaemic the anti Iraqi war protests were. But I was also massively entertained. It's just FUN to see Hoffman skewering the judge, or the defense attorney asking if an undercover cop was hurt by a jumper. And so Brett Morgan achieves the rarest of rare things: he makes a movie that is important and entertaining: and a documentary that actually deserves to be seen on the big screen.

CHICAGO 10 played Sundance 2007 and opened in the US and UK in Spring 2008.

CADILLAC RECORDS - fails to catch fire

Writer-director Darnell Martin has created a biopic, but not of a single figure in music history, as with RAY or WALK THE LINE, but of a record company - Chess Records. Founded by a pair of Polish immigrants (one of whom is excised from this story) who sold records from the back of a cadillac, the label was home to the best and most influential blues and early rock acts: Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Etta James, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry and Little Walter. With such a cast of icons, it's great that Martin manages to quickly essay their back stories, their characters, and to convince us of their musical talent. In this, she is helped by a tremendous score from Terence Blanchard. The movie also tackles head on the race issue: black musicians having their musical heritage appropriated by white people who could play to a larger audience and hence make more money. The acting is fine throughout, but Jeffrey Wright stands out as Muddy Waters and Beyonce Knowles is surprisingly good as Etta James - indeed the only truly dramatic scene is where James is high on heroin and having an emotional crisis with her record producer boss (Adrien Brody). And therein lies the problem, this movie never quite catches fire. Like the worst kind of reverential history, it's just one damn thing after another. Still, blues fans will luxuriate in the period music and the great musical set-pieces.

CADILLAC RECORDS was released in the USA in December 2008 and in the UK, Spain, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Italy earlier this year. It will be released in Japan on August 15th and is available on DVD.

London Film Fest Day 15 - QUANTUM OF SOLACE - the Bond that dare not speak its name

Health warnings up-front. I despise the Ian Fleming Bond novels. They are vulgar, misogynistic, sado-masochistic fantasy novels that miss the mark on international espionage as far as Michael Bay missed the mark with PEARL HARBOUR. Give me the grime of John Le Carre any day. As far as the movies go, I appreciated the pre-Daniel Craig franchise insofar as it was camp, ludicrous, gratuitously luxurious and balls-out ridiculous. To me, Bond was only good insofar as he was driving pretty cars and the villains were stroking a white cat. I can, however, see why many people didn't like the old Bond flicks. The boundary between being camp and just being bad is easily transgressed viz. DIE ANOTHER DAY.

I think a lot of people who hate typical Bond movies liked CASINO ROYALE because it was trying to be a BOURNE film. It had characters with real emotions, a decent plot, proper actors and some okay action scenes. I, on the other hand, hated CASINO ROYALE on the grounds that if I want to watch a decent spy thriller, I'll watch THE BOURNE IDENTITY. If I watch a Bond film I want a Bond film. I don't want Bond driving a fracking Ford Mondeo and playing Poker in the Hotel Splendide.

My view is that the Bond franchise has now boxed itself into a corner. It's too ashamed to do anything too Bond - random rumpy-pumpy, gratuitous violence - but feels that it has to nod to the genre-tropes. So, in QUANTUM OF SOLACE, Bond does have a random shag with Gemma Arterton but it's all very perfunctory and joyless. On the other hand, the movie wants to be both an emotional character drama AND an action film. So you find yourself in a very odd mish-mash of a film. In the case of QUANTUM OF SOLACE, it's directed by Marc Forster (THE KITE RUNNER, STRANGER THAN FICTION) who knows how to do drama. Problem is, he can't direct action movies for toffee. It's all hand-held close-ups and frenetic editing so you can't tell what's going on. I was just praying for him to pull back, keep the camera still and just let the action unwind.

All this is to delay the inevitable point where I attempt to tell you the plot of QUANTUM OF SOLACE. This is tricky because QoS is a really badly written, poorly assembled film, with a narrative (and indeed a title) that never quite make sense. It's a terrible waste of Daniel Craig and Mathieu Amalric as the baddie. Gemma Arterton barely gets a look-in and Olga Kurylenko is once again just a body. The basic idea is that Bond is on the warpath after the shadowy evil organisation that forced the suicide of his lover, Vesper Lynd. So Bond goes ga-ga, indulging in a plethora of chase scenes in the company of similarly vengeful Camille (Olga Kurylenko). They are chasing down Dominic Greene (Amalric), head of a Smersh like org called Quantum (a-ha!) We know he's a purveyor of evil because he's essentially a utilities trader! And that's it. Welcome to Bond does Enron.

Obviously, all the deeply annoying crap from CASINO holds over here. The shameless merchandising; the endless chases; the embarassment at being Bond at all. But even if you liked CASINO ROYALE I think you might be disappointed with QUANTUM OF SOLACE because it doesn't even have the compensation of tight plotting and emotional engagement.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE played London 2008. It goes on release in the UK, France and Sweden this weekend. It opens next weekend in Bahrain, Belgium, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Oman, the Philippines, Switzerland, Argentina, Bolivia,Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, Qatar, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Syria, Thailand, Ukraine, UAE, Italy and Norway. It opens on November 14th in Hungary, Austria, Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, Guatemala, Honduras, Iceland, India, Kenya, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Panama, Poland, Romania, Taiwan, Turkey and the USA. It opens in Australia on 19th November; in Spain on the 21st; in South Africa on the 28th; in New Zealand and Venezuela on the 4th December; in Uruguay on the 26th December and in Japan on January 10th 2009.

THE INVASION - more botch job than B-movie

THE INVASION is an embarassing remake of THE BODYSNATCHERS horror movies that so brilliantly captured the paranoia and moral decrepitude of the McCarthy witch-hunt and the Watergate disaster. This remake has the alien invasion take the form of a virus that is spread my vomit, turning its victims into pod-people. The German director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, created the outstanding Hitler bunker movie, DER UNTERGANG, so we can presume that the blame for this fiasco lies with newbie Dave Kajganich, who failed to translate this paranoia tale into a decade of rendition and starts of CCTV. (Seriously, what could have been easier?) The nearest this movie gets to a political sub-text is its weakly subversive proposition that a society of pod-people would be safer and more peaceful. It never gets sophisticated enough to examine whether it is worth sacrificing moral agency to secure safety. Blame also lies with the studio, who commissioned the guys behind the MATRIX and V for VENDETTA to re-shoot swathes of material. What we end up with is more botch-job that artistic whole. THE INVASION should have gone straight to video. Presumably it only got released because the strength of the big-name cast will partially recoup the costs of this fiasco. The public deserves better.

THE INVASION has already been released in the US, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, Greece, South Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Slovakia, Italy and the UK. It opens later in October in France, Germany, Brazil, Norway, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland and Spain. It opens in Portugal, Estonia, Egypt, Russia, Slovenia, Lithuania in November 2007 and in Australia on February 28th 2008.

CASINO ROYALE - Whatever happened to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?!

CASINO ROYALE has four good points: Daniel Craig (the new 007) is a good actor; the opening black-and-white assassination sequence is stylish, funny and hard-as-nails; the movie features a heart-stoppingly gorgeous cameo of an Astin Martin DBS; and the humour is genuinely witty rather than tongue-in-cheek.

Everything else sucks. Much as I hate formulaic movies, the Bond franchise is built on a bloody cast iron formula - hot chicks, fast cars, stuffy Whitehall bureaucrats, witty one-liners, evil megalomaniacs, oddball henchman and a handsome gentleman killer in a dinner jacket. CASINO ROYALE pisses on this heritage from a great height. There are no heart-stopping chase scenes, no random rumpy-pumpy, no cool gadgets, no Moneypenny, no "Q" at all. Craig's Bond is written as a man at odds with his Oxford education - the sort of man who doesn't give a damn if his martini is shaken or stirred and would have the audacity to dine on caviar in a restaurent without his tie. What "luxury" there is is distinctly second-class. We first see Bond driving a bloody Ford; the Casino is not in France but Montenegro and instead of playing Baccarat he plays poker. It's all a little pathetic. Even the sums of money seem inconsequential. £150million hardly seems like a sum on which the future of international terrorist finance hangs. In fact, the movie is downhill from about the fifth minute when the opening titles begin. This must be the most anonymous pathetic excuse for a Bond song and the most low-rent graphics ever seen in a Bond film - and that's saying something.

I can see perfectly well what the director and producers were trying to do. They wanted to inject a little grit and realism in the movie. Fine. It's rather nice to see Bond bleed and sweat, look exhausted and be the victim of an infamous homo-erotic sado-maschostic torture sequence (the nearest, by the way, that we get to sexual excitement in the movie.) But frankly, giving Bond a genuine love interest and some bruising will not turn the franchise into the Bourne Supremacy any more than giving Tom Cruise a wife in MI3 made Ethan Hunt an empathetic character. Instead, we get a half-way house - neither as popcorn-tastic as the usual Bond circus; nor as thrilling as Bourne and certainly not as emotionally affecting as your early John le Carre novel. CASINO ROYALE is actually rather dull.

I don't want post-modern touchy feely Bond. It's just not as entertaining. And actually, I don't think it's any closer to the novels: I always found Bond to be a callow, materialistic, whiny little sado-masochist who got into scrapes and had to be bailed out continuously by Felix Leiter. I wish movie reviewers would stop talking about "getting back to the novel" as being some kind of holy grail. Bond was only ever trashy materialistic entertainment - at its best it still is. I still remember the opening sequence of GOLDENEYE where Bond freefalls off a cliff and into the cockpit of a plane. Class! The audience applauded - here was the Bond we had missed during the sterile Dalton years. And to think it's the same director behind this damp squib! I fear we are headed for the desert once more.....

CASINO ROYALE is on global release from Friday. For a complete set of specific release date, click here.

For a video review of this movie from, Nikolai, click here.

LADY IN THE WATER - a deeply affecting fairy-tale for adults

I know I'm gonna catch all manner of crap for this, but I found THE LADY IN THE WATER to be an enchanting and deeply affecting movie. I wasn't even going to see it because the reviewers had universally panned it. But The Kid wanted someone to take her and, as I am also on vacation, I was roped in.

So, why have the critics panned this movie? I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that M. Night Shyamalan (the writer, director and supporting actor) comes across as an arrogant twat in most of his press coverage. "Night" as he styles himself, appparently sees himself as a visionary auteur who is misunderstood by an uncaring and insensitive world. In Night's personal mythology, mean studios and film critics embody all that is wrong with the world - cynicism, conformity, and (ironically) arrogance. Now, I am not for one minute arguing that film critics can't separate the work from the author - you can hate Wagner the man but love his music, after all. But it is very difficult to separate the two when Night creates a movie that really is just an elaborate representation of his personal mythology. To some extent, I have very little sympathy for Shyamalan. Would it really have been so difficult to cast an actor other than himself as the writer whose work will be so criticial to man's future that the sea-nymphs have sent one of their own to "awaken" him and ensure the work is completed, even at risk to her own life! Not content with casting himself as the saviour of the world, Night then goes on to depict as a film critic (played with suitable froideur by Bob Balaban) as an arrogant false-god who comes to a violent and deserved end! I was all ready to hate a film that seemed such an extension of ego but.....

Why did THE LADY IN THE WATER weave such a spell over me? Maybe because I am still just a six-year old kid at heart, wanting to believe in sea-nymphs. Maybe because I like the idea that ordinary people can come together to achieve a great good. (Hokey, I know.) I think it is because this movie, like THE SIXTH SENSE and UNBREAKABLE before it, touches on two subjects that have pre-occupied me over the past year: the difficulty of grieving and the difficulty of knowing what purpose life has for us. That Shyamalan chooses to tackle these subjects by using elaborate metaphors and child-like fantasy may seem odd or difficult, but I found it worked really well.

If I look at things objectively, THE LADY IN THE WATER worked for me because first and foremost it created a fantasy world that was internally consistent and so credible. Second, the cast was universally excellent, from Paul Giamatti as the world-weary Janitor/hero to the supporting cast that includes Jeffrey Wright. Maybe it's because the movie was shot by Christopher Doyle - a man who is known for capturing luminous, haunting images but who can also unsettle with his choice of what is in the frame and what isn't. So often in THE LADY IN THE WATER the camera focuses on the person reacting to dialogue rather than capturing both of the talking heads. Or we look through water, or around corners. There is a particularly stunning shot near the end of the movie where Paul Giamatti's janitor is saying goodbye to the sea-nymph as she is taken back to her world by the eagle. It would have been difficult to show such an event conventionally without breaking the magic. Doyle shoots it up through the swimming pool so that the action is just distorted shapes in the moonlight.

Like I said, THE LADY IN THE WATER has been much maligned by critics and I can see why. Despite being aimed at adults it's an out-and-out fairy-tale in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm (i.e. it includes a fair amount of sexual tension, some racial stereotyping and a lot of scary stuff.) But I have to tell it how I felt it, and for the second time this year, risk losing any shred of credibility I had as a reviewer. This movie appealed to the little girl who believed in fairy stories in me. As a simple story of faith and hope in a world filled with terror and disaster it affected me deeply. So I would urge you to give it a shot.

THE LADY IN THE WATER is already on release in Thailand, the US, Singapore, India, Chile and the UK. It goes on release in Hong Kong, Iceland, Mexico, Egypt, France, Argentina, Spain and Germany in August 2006. THE LADY IN THE WATER opens in Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Estonia, Australia, Hungary, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Portugal and Italy in September. It opens in Japan on October 21st 2006.

BROKEN FLOWERS - beautiful, bitter-sweet comedy

I have to say that I was pretty much guaranteed to love BROKEN FLOWERS. It is directed by one of my favourite film-makers, Jim Jarmusch, and stars one of my favourite actors, "Bill Groundhog-Day, Ghostbustin'-ass Murray!" Throw in some nice support work from Jeffrey Wright (last seen in the flaccid Syriana), Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, Chloe Sevigny and Tilda Swinton, and you have a recipe for an engaging, bittersweet comedy.

Bill Murray reprises his role as the professionally successful, world-weary, cynical romantic from the infinitely inferior flick, LOST IN TRANSLATION. His girlfriend leaves him on the grounds that he has commitment and emotional issues. He also receives a letter from an unidentified ex-girlfriend who claims to have fathered his child. Murray barely reacts to these events - his ennui prevents him from doing anything more positive than drifting to his neighbour's house for morning coffee. Indeed, Murray spends much of the film reacting obliquely to increasingly strange things happening to him. Therein lies the comedy. When a butt-naked teenage girl called Lolita walks past him, he wears a bemused smile. The "WTF?!" reaction we have is distilled into a slightly raised eyebrow. Brilliant.

Luckily for Murray, his neighbour Winston, played with great comic dash by Jeffrey Wright, is on hand to play amateur detective*, and sends Murray on a road-trip to visit all his ex-es and find his son. Wright's character, Winston, is the kind of stand-up family guy who reassures his kids that he isn't smoking tobacco but 'cheeba, and who always has a magnifying glass to hand. He genuinely cares that Murray should get ot of his funk. Anyhoo, Murray goes travelling; strange stuff happens. Maybe he meets his son, maybe he learns something about himself, maybe not. This is not the kind of film where you get trite answers. At the end of the movie, all that Murray's character can cobble together from his experience is that: "The past is gone, I know that. The future isn't here yet, whatever it's going to be. So, all there is, is this. The present. That's it."

What does Jim Jarmusch bring to his mix, apart from his genius in writing the part for Murray and the wry dialogue? Every single inch of every frame of this flick is wonderfully cosntructed. The production design, the positioning of the props, the camera angle - everything is just right. For instance, there is one scene where Murray is sitting alone looking mournful on a chi-chi designer couch in his well-appointed house. On the coffee table in front of him is a bottle of Moet and a full glass. Marvin Gaye is playing in the background. You don't get more tragic.

BROKEN FLOWERS may not be all bangs and whistles - and it may not have answers to all the key questions of life - but it does make you smile an awful lot. You can't say fairer than that.

BROKEN FLOWERS won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2005. It went on cinematic release in Autumn 2005 and is now available on DVD.

SYRIANA - pretentious, yawn-inducing and inaccurate

SYRIANA is an over-hyped alleged thriller that attempts to explore the politics of the oil business. Featuring a star-studded cast, and the kind of lush photography that you get in advertising, here is a movie that repackages politics for the HBO generation, and fails miserably. While the movie looks great and the acting performances are all fine, the real faults lie in the conception of the movie and the script by Stephen Gaghan. Gaghan is the man behind the infinitely better flick, TRAFFIC. Like TRAFFIC, SYRIANA has a script that inter-cuts three plot strands that are loosely related. This has led some critics to claim that the movie is complex and hard to understand. Actually I had no problem following the story here. Incomprehension was not my problem.

The first major problem is that the movie tells us nothing that we did not already know about US politics, the Middle East or big business. There are no flash-bulb moments, and in many ways, the issues here are "dumbed-down". I found it a really fantastically facile, trite script by someone who clearly has very little cultural or political feel for the material he is addressing. If you want an expose of US politics, check out John Sayles' SILVER CITY. If you want insight on the Middle East go read some history. If you want to see how "everything is connected" - the platitudionous tagline to the film - go see CRASH.

The second major problem is that the movie is just plain yawn-inducing. I LOVE cinema; I love Middle Eastern politics; I love Clooney, Damon and Cooper; but even I could barely keep my eyes open. I do not ask that movies educate me - although when they claim they are going to it is nice if they live up to that promise - but I do ask that they entertain me. I want my intellectual or emotional interest to be piqued. I want laughter, tears, or provocation. SYRIANA did not deliver.

So, now the broad-brush gripes are over, here are some minor geeky gripes. 1. Why do the Pakistani muslim terrorists speak in Hindi? Granted there are Muslims in India but they speak Urdu. And while many Pakistanis do not speak Urdu as a first language, they will most likely speak Pushto or Punjabi instead. It is frickin' ironic that a movie that attempts to get under the skin of Middle Eastern politics, and establish a credible stance on these issues, can mess up on something so basic. I was, frankly, insulted. 1b. What language is George Clooney speaking when in Beirut? He is complemented on his good Arabic, and claims to be speaking Farsi, but the accent is impenetrable and unless this is some dialect, sounds nothing like Farsi. 2. It is absolutely incredible that anyone would address the an Emir in the manner in which Matt Damon addresses the Prince just after the "Marbella incident".

SYRIANA is on limited release in the US, Germany, France, Austria and UK.