Ang Lee / Life of Pi by Yann Martel / Review

Life of Pi – review

The versatile Ang Lee brings Yann Martel's tale of shipwreck and spirituality to the big screen in magnificent fashion

Philip French
Sunday 23 December 2012

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he Taiwan-born Ang Lee rapidly established himself in the 1990s as one of the world's most versatile film-makers, moving on from the trilogy of movies about Chinese families that made his name to Jane Austen's England (Sense and Sensibility) and Richard Nixon's America (The Ice Storm). If he revisits a place or genre it's to tell a very different story – a martial arts movie in medieval China (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is followed by a spy thriller in wartime Shanghai (Lust, Caution), and a western with a US civil war background (Ride With the Devil) is succeeded by a western about a gay relationship in present-day Wyoming (Brokeback Mountain).

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami / review

 

Norwegian Wood: 'languorous, visually striking movie about love and loss'.

Norwegian Wood – review

Philip French

Sunday 13 March 2011

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n Haruki Murakami's bestselling novel of 1987, the 37-year-old narrator, Toru Watanabe, is transported back to his student days in late 1960s Tokyo by hearing the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" on the loudspeaker system of an airliner as he flies into Hamburg. It is a time of student unrest and strident demonstrations, but in the lengthy novel and the film carved out of it, this is merely the background to a delicate love story, or series of love stories. The central tale concerns the reserved Watanabe's devotion to the mentally disturbed Naoko, the former girlfriend of Watanabe's only close friend, Kizuki, who committed suicide at the age of 17. It is a doomed affair that after a single night of love is conducted during visits to an asylum outside Kobe where Naoko is being cared for by an older woman, Reiko, a musician who's also recovering from a breakdown. It is Reiko who sings, in English, a rather beautiful version of "Norwegian Wood" which is later sung by Lennon and McCartney over the final credits. Meanwhile, Watanabe is given a dubious sentimental education at the hands of Nagasawa, a suave, promiscuous fellow student bound for the diplomatic corps, and a more beneficial one from the pretty, witty, intelligent Midori, who attempts to draw him out of his solipsistic shell.

 

After Earth – review

Philip French

Sunday 9 June 2013

Little is expected now from the once fashionable director of such movies as The Sixth Sense and Signs, and this dystopian SF movie is his most conventional to date.

Will Smith plays a general living in a gleaming new city created in outer space after Earth became uninhabitable. Ordered by his beautiful wife (an ill-served Sophie Okonedo) to bond with their depressed son ("He doesn't need a commanding officer, he needs a father"), Smith takes the lad on a flight to another planet. On the way they run into an interstellar storm, crash-land on the abandoned Earth, and the boy (played by Smith's real-life son, Jaden) must make a hazardous journey to find a beacon that will bring assistance to his injured dad. It's dull stuff, indifferently staged, with heavy-handed references to Moby-Dick.

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Fellini´s Casanova

Donald Sutherland and Chesty Morgan in Fellini's 1976 film Casanova. 

Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Universal Allstar/Cinetext/UNIVERSAL/Public Domain

FELLINI´S CASANOVA

Philip French
Sunday 16 May 2010 00.08 BST

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aving helped shape neorealism as a screenwriter in the 1940s, Federico Fellini took Italian movies into a new form of bitter, romantic realism in the 1950s before transforming world cinema with the extravagant, semi-autobiographical La dolce vita (1960) and 8½ (1963).

He was well into the decadent stage of this third phase of his career when he cast Donald Sutherland as a charismatic, increasingly cadaverous Casanova making a circular journey through the great cities of 18th-century Europe, starting during a Venetian festival and ending on a frozen Grand Canal.

Vainly seeking wealthy patrons for his scholarly pursuits, Casanova is seen as both an intellectual figure of the Enlightenment and a licentious voluptuary of a corrupt society about to be swept away by the French Revolution. He's inexorably drawn by his inclinations and reputation into a succession of chilly, unfulfilling sexual encounters, culminating in making love to a mechanical doll.

The semi-coherent, death-obsessed narrative reeks of self-disgust and has the clammy atmosphere of an undertaker's embalming room. Made entirely on fabulous Cinecittà sets, it's superbly photographed and magnificently staged and Sutherland (who hated the experience) is a compelling presence.

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Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell star in this musical comedy which lacks the wit of the original novel

The 100 best novels / No 49 / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925)

Philip French
Sunday 28 February 2010


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his 1953 musical comedy, among the last of its kind to be made before the coming of the widescreen, features a golddigging Monroe and a man-eating Russell as busty girls en route by sea from the States to Paris, France. There are a couple of well-staged numbers but less wit and style than are to be found in Anita Loos's demotic classic on which it's based. Released the year Playboy was launched, it features much characteristic 50s coarseness and leering. Gentleman Prefer Blondes is among the weaker works of a great filmmaker, whose two finest comedies (Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday) were made before the war and whose greatest film (Rio Bravo) was yet to come.

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Chinatown / The best crime film of all time

Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson by keizle
Chinatown, 1974

Chinatown: the best crime film of all time

Roman Polanski, 1974

Philip French
Sunday 17 October 2010 11.55 BST

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he near perfection of Roman Polanski's Chinatown starts with Diener/Hauser/Bates's haunting art nouveau poster for the film: an emblematic Hokusai wave breaks against Jack Nicholson's silhouette as the smoke from his cigarette floats up to merge with Faye Dunaway's medusa-like hair. The movie ends equally unforgettably with the line "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown!", as lapidary a pay-off as Scarlett O'Hara's "After all, tomorrow is another day."

Behind the angst-ridden film noirs of the 40s and 50s lie the social and political tensions of the second world war and the postwar decade. Similarly, Chinatown was conceived, written, produced and released in the troubled period that included the last years of the Vietnam war, Watergate and Nixon's fraught second term in the White House. But it retained its freshness, vitality and timelessness by being set so immaculately in an earlier period – Los Angeles in the long, hot summer of 1937 – and it deals with the scandals of that era, those touching on the complex politics of water in the arid West.

While gathering divorce evidence on behalf of a suspicious wife, Gittes (Nicholson) is sucked into a world beyond his comprehension involving municipal corruption, sexual transgression and the power of old money. He encounters the rich, ruthless capitalist Noah Cross (John Huston) and his estranged daughter, the beautiful Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), whose husband, head of the Los Angeles Water and Power Board, dies under mysterious circumstances.

Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway
Chinatown

In his screenplay, Robert Towne develops two dominant metaphors; the first centres on water. During a period of drought someone is dumping water from local reservoirs, and it becomes clear that this most precious of human resources is being manipulated by land speculators in their own interests. The name of Evelyn's husband, Hollis Mulwray, evokes William Mullholland, the Los Angeles engineer responsible in the 20s for the deals that, in the old Western phrase, "made water flow uphill in search of the money". The name Noah Cross suggests the loveable Old Testament patriarch, played in the 1966 blockbuster The Bible by John Huston, but here reprised in a less benevolent mode as a self-righteous plutocrat who has harnessed the flood in his own interests.

Roman Polanski
Chinatown

The other metaphor is that of Chinatown, an inscrutable place which outsiders either stand back from or misread in a way that demonstrates the futility of good intentions. Jake worked in Chinatown during his days in the LAPD and, at the end of the picture, returns there in a bid for redemption that turns out to be an act of tragic pointlessness. He's in every scene, frequently with the camera just behind him. We see and experience everything from his point of view, with Polanski composing every frame, dictating each camera movement.

Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway
Chinatown

The movie captures the city in a summer heatwave: the blinding exteriors dazzle the eye and blur the judgment; shafts of light create a sinister atmosphere as they penetrate the dark interiors through venetian blinds. Jerry Goldsmith's superb score uses strings and percussion during moments of suspense and a distant, bluesy trumpet for elegiac, contemplative scenes. Above all there is Nicholson's Gittes, a cocky, confident man losing his social moorings and ending up as the proverbial drowning man reaching out for straws.

THE GUARDIAN

Chinatown / The best crime film of all time

Touch of Evil / No 2 best crime film of all time

Vertigo / No 3 best crime film of all time

Badlands / No 4 best crime film of all time

Rashomon / No 5 best crime film of all time

Double Indemnity / No 6 best crime film of all time

Get Carter / No 7 best crime film of all time

Pulp Fiction / No 8 best crime film of all time

Hidden / No 9 best crime film of all time

Goodfellas / No 10 best crime film of all time

Bonnie and Clyde / No 11 best crime film of all time

The Conversation / No 12 best crime film of all time

James Bond / Goldfinger / Review by Philip French

James Bond

Goldfinger

Philip French

Sunday 29 July 2007

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ade in 1964 and now back on the big screen, Goldfinger is a crucial work in the development of the Bond legend. For the first time Connery was truly relaxed and drove the Aston Martin DB5, that year's must-have toy for every boy in the land. Ken Adam came from creating one iconic American set (the War Room in Dr Strangelove) to another (the interior of Fort Knox), and established himself as co-auteur of the Bond movies. Screenwriter and ex-movie critic Paul Dehn (who the following year co-scripted The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) helped to establish the franchise's special combination of suspense and tongue-in-cheek schoolboy sophistication, though it was Fleming, of course, who came up with the name Pussy Galore. The name Goldfinger led to a threatened libel action by architect Erno Goldfinger (he of the controversial high-rise council house block), and the film was briefly banned in Israel because of Gert Frobe's one-time membership of the Nazi party. And of course Shirley Bassey belted out the title song, the first of her three 007 assignments.

THE GUARDIAN

Film / The Painted Veil

The Painted Veil

Philip French

Sunday 29 April 2007

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omerset Maugham's 1925 novel The Painted Veil, previously filmed rather beautifully in 1934 starring Greta Garbo and indifferently in 1957 as The Seventh Sin, is the tale of Kitty (Naomi Watts), the errant wife of Walter (Edward Norton), a strait-laced English doctor in China.

As a form of punishment, he takes her into a remote, cholera-stricken province where she experiences redemption and comes to love her husband. The novel was inspired by an incident in Dante's 'Purgatorio' which Maugham had read as a medical student in the late 19th century, and much influenced by his terminally troubled marriage.

This version is tougher than the previous ones and convincingly in period. The three principal actors (two Americans and an Australian) affect acceptable British accents, and there are admirable performances from Diana Rigg as the acerbic mother superior of an orphanage for Chinese children and Toby Jones as dodgy colonial official. The film is inevitably more critical of Europeans in Asia than is the novel and, for no good reason, Kitty's child has been changed from a daughter to a son, but Ron Nyswaner has generally made a decent adaptation.

I admire Alexandre Desplat greatly but found his score here a trifle excessive. On the other hand, I can't praise too highly the cinematography by New Zealander Stuart Dryburgh, whose interiors, shot in a Beijing studio, are as beautifully lit as the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby.

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