Mstarz-99shaftesburyave

Elles

7:47 AM | Labels: Drama

Elles

Directed by: Malgorzata Szumowska

With: Juliette Binoche, Anaïs Demoustier and Joanna Kulig

2011

I would like to know how many women went home to check their husbands’ phones and laptops after watching Elles.

Anne (Juliette Binoche) is a journalist for Elle. We follow her through the day as she struggles with a due article, as well as with her private life. She is writing on a recent phenomenon of student prostitution in Paris. As she listens again to the interviews she has conducted with two girls, flashbacks illustrate their encounters, as well as the two girls’ stories, which slowly start to bear their weight on her life and principles.

Because of its journalistic framing and the documentary-like presence of the camera Elles believably portrays a real social phenomenon. Through the plausible stories of Alicja (Joanna Kulig) and Charlotte (Anaïs Demoustier) – the two girls interviewed by Anne – the film takes the viewer into a relatively unexplored side of the sex industry in affluent western countries. Sex is explicitly depicted. Director Malgorzata Szumowska, however, struck a perfect balance between description and suggestion, relying on a camera that knows exactly how much to show and when to shy away. Morality and principles are questioned not so much through sexuality, but rather through the context which surrounds this recent trend of prostitution in which selling one’s body becomes materially empowering and triggered by the necessity to study.

What appears at first as a jumbled editing of flashbacks is in reality a carefully thought through progression of situations from which emerges the profound ambiguity of Alicja and Charlotte’s position (At one point I mistook a client for Charlotte’s boyfriend…). The erratic use of the camera, the low-point perspective, the furtive angles from which certain scenes are shot keep the viewer in a constant voyeuristic position. Images are not used as illustrations to the girls’ words, rather they contradict and expand their stories calling the viewer to juggle facts and words according to his own morals and principles.

Quite soon, however, it becomes apparent that the real focus of the film is Anne herself. She is a woman who is trying to keep herself young and attractive. Among the difficulties of the day, we distractively see her weighting herself, struggle with some pilates and unwillingly eating some celery and natural yogurt. It is the kind of 'sacrifice' that will bring the results magazines like Elle make you believe men are after. What began as an impersonal article for Elle itself, however, will introduce Anne to a whole new ranges of men’s fantasies well beyond any fresh vegetables and yoga.

One of the best sequences of the film is a close-up of Juliette Binoche’s face interviewing an off-screen presence and struggling with the silence she receives for answer. Juliette Binoche gives an incredibly subtle performance, holding the reins of the film, while her character loses her own. Throughout the movie, we follow Anne’s inquisitive gaze as it progresses from the girls, to the men and finally to herself and her husband. We see her starting her interviews with a confrontational tone, only to realize she is entering a world she does not understand, but which is revealed as much closer to her life than what she had expected.

The questions ‘who is to blame?’, ‘who is the bad guy?’ seems to remain unanswered. Is the last scene a sort of capitulation or the peace of a new awareness?

fiamma

Read User's Comments0

Marley

5:27 AM | Labels: Documentary

Marley

Directed by Kevin Macdonald

2012

Emotional responses to reggae represent a large scale, large enough for weeping to happen at both ends. Some cannot listen to it, while others claim that it’s Biblically sanctioned. With the involvement of many of Bob Marley’s collaborators, the presence of Ziggy in the producer credits, and the telling fact that the project was taken away from Jonathon Demme over 'creative differences' a few years ago, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this bio-doc approaches the musician with an unquestioning acceptance of his supreme worth as an artist. Obviously this will immediately turn off anyone who has a particular dislike for the music. Equally obvious is the fact this doesn’t matter, and that it’s to be expected of any documentary on a musician to be benevolent, creative figures rarely being controversial enough to warrant an entire film criticising them. With someone like Bob Marley, however, there’s an extra political cachet that first requires you also to accept this worth at face value. If, like me, you merely think he’s quite good, then some of the adulation can be a bit hard to swallow. It’s easy to understand his status as a trailblazer of Jamaican culture on the international scene, because he indisputably was; the more idealistic view of him as messianic healer of nations seems to the moderate to be largely fan hysteria.

Fortunately, that side of his legend doesn’t completely dominate the film. Macdonald aims for the big picture, with the intention of covering Marley’s entire life and career as it revolved around the music, and the best bits are the ones dealing with the Trench Town culture he came from. (My favourite moment’s probably when a string of reggae elder statesmen attempt to define the form. Bunny Livingston: “With reggae you’ve got 3 out of 4 beats… then you imagine the last beat.” It sounds better when he says it.) We actually start centuries before Marley’s birth, in Ghana, at the last station before African slaves were taken over the Atlantic. This has no real continuation, but still feels an appropriate starting point for obvious reasons, the legacy of that process having so much bearing on Marley’s identity and creativity. It becomes pretty clear that for all his devotion to a united future, his past and position were of utmost importance to him. Something of an outcast due to his mixed background, his embracing of the Rastafarian movement likely addressed issues of personal displacement as much as racial ones. Images of him as a teenager are disconcerting, with his short hair and poverty-smart clothes, face still instantly recognisable; then when the film moves past his conversion and dreadlocks erupt from his head, you see the famous Rastaman look in a new light: an exaggerated, theatrical identity he chose for himself.

Like all true icons, it’s difficult to think of Bob Marley in any other way than the famous version, as if he sprang into the world fully formed singing ‘Get Up, Stand Up’. One of the most eye-opening parts of the film in regard to the man as an artist is a series of photographs depicting The Wailers before they settled into their roots-reggae form, in which you see a group of clean-cut teenagers influenced more, visually at least, by doo-wop and early rock and roll. It demolishes the perception of Marley as an instinctive, a priori reggae musician, and reveals a person who at first just wanted to make music and release records. This is borne out in the stubborn pragmatism he showed in getting the band noticed at the start of their career, a business-like approach that would take its toll on bandmates Pete Tosh and Bunny Livingston, and which also doesn’t quite gel with the what-will-be outlook and anti-materialistic attitude he would espouse once he had found success. That said, his generosity with his earnings later on seems undeniable, and so it’s perhaps unfair to suspect a more money-grabbing side to him based simply on the fact he wanted to be discovered and make a career out of music. The desire for success isn’t the same as greed.

There are some issues around the film’s treatment of the more negative aspects of Marley’s character. That he was unfaithful to his wife is too tame a term for his womanising, which became an almost institutionalised thing, and one he justified as a traditional way of life incomprehensible to “western values”. It’s all very well playing on guilty liberal open-mindedness like that, but you suspect the women didn’t have an equal footing when it came to their own relationships. Just enough anecdotal evidence is produced for you to register the pain he likely caused. While the non-judgmental tone here seems correct in principle – after all, we’re regarding him as a musician above all else – it ultimately stands as a slightly tokenistic piece of ‘balanced reporting’ in a sea of credulous adoration; a deliberately selected flaw that can be played as charmingly rakish and hedonistic as much as cruel. Taken as a whole, the film is not balanced. The information with which to form a negative opinion is offered with a hands-off, make-of-it-what-you-will attitude that would need to be matched in the approach to his beneficial qualities, but clearly isn’t. This reaches a discomfiting climax in the retelling of Marley’s free concert at the declaration of Zimbabwean independence, the inspirational performance tarnished by the newly elected Robert Mugabe wandering about. Obviously it would be stupid to retrospectively cast the concert as a bad thing just because of what Mugabe turned out to be… but at the same time, perhaps a little recognition that the free concert encapsulated a moment, rather than embodied a solution, would have been better.

That political prominence, while meaning Bob Marley merits documentary coverage more than the vast majority of artists, also means that a hagiography such as this just doesn’t quite cut it. I mean it as a compliment to his legacy when I say it requires and deserves more scrutiny than it is really given here; you’re given the impression that everything he did was just fantastic, when it was more complex than that. There’s a sequence covering the arrival in Jamaica of Emperor Haile Selassie I: we see crowds of people, a continuous joyful mass, and we’re presumably supposed to be inspired by this celebration in unity. I couldn’t dismiss the knowledge that a good number of that multitude genuinely believed the man was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which I guess is a blown-up version of my attitude towards the film as a whole. However, I’m a pathological skeptic about anything people are being too enthusiastic about, and it did occur to me that the most important detail of the film wasn’t what Marley was doing, or representing, or whatever, but rather the huge crowds cheering him on. As superficial as his involvement in deep-seated political problems might have been if we’re being honest, the people watching didn’t think so, and whatever you think of his music, politics, religion, and home life, his status as a cultural icon is totally indisputable. The man did grab people.

Tom

Read User's Comments0

Headhunters

3:51 AM | Labels: Thriller

Headhunters

Directed by Mortem Tyldum

Written by Lars Gudmestad and Ulf Ryberg

with Aksel Hennie, Synnøve Macody Lund, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

2011

Following the proud tradition of the genre thriller, Headhunters packs in enough entertainment at a sufficient clip to stop you noticing how much the story hinges on a hilarious set of coincidences. Roger Brown (Aksel Hennie) is a corporate headhunter who moonlights as an art thief in order to maintain a lifestyle that overstretches even his presumably high income. When he makes contact with a high-flying CEO (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) who claims to have a lost Rubens in his grandmother’s apartment, he seizes the chance to do away with his financial troubles for life. There is more going on than he realises, however, and through a sudden turn of events he finds that he is the one being headhunted, albeit in a more traditional sense than what he is used to.

On a fundamental level, the story is about male feelings of inadequacy and the lengths men go to in order to compensate. Just as the title refers to both corporate headhunting and actual hunting, it also nods towards a perpetual competition to remain on top of the pile and as desirable as possible. The notion of reputation is used to catalyse more than one nice little plot twist and to wrap up the ending in a way that may seem contrived to some, but which made me smile. As Roger points out in relation to a Julian Opie piece on his office wall: it’s the artist’s reputation that makes a simple line-and-colour drawing so valuable, nothing more. That idea of a high cost, eggshell-thin veneer over an empty centre can be seen as setting the tone for Roger’s entire existence. He’s insecure about his height and appearance, and his lavish, debit-ridden lifestyle stems from what he feels he needs to show in order to keep his towering blonde wife (Synnøve Macody Lund) by his side. The introduction of a cunning, ex-military dreamboat not only provides an opportunity to steal his painting but, as the film progresses, turns into a fight to prove himself against an exaggeratedly macho adversary.

Roger is a shallow, conniving prick. But he’s still the hero, and one of the most enjoyable aspects of the film is the sheer amount of crap (literally, at one point) it is necessary to put him through in order to get the audience on his side. The plot has him broken down and humiliated, in order for him to build himself up again as something more recognisably human and (self)respectable. Apart from one moment when he shoots a woman with his penis – symbolically, anyway – the macho-deconstructive element is well played and, along with the satire on the corporate world and a surprisingly sweet bit of character development, adds a bit of wit to what is otherwise just a fun thriller. The violence is graphic and imaginative, but never feels gratuitous, and the varied set pieces are given brief but efficient support so that nothing seems too silly. The fact that Roger is an art thief, for example, ultimately plays no massive part in events, but provides a background that puts him believably through any number of scrapes simply because you accord him a certain resourcefulness. There are one or two plot holes so cavernous they made me wonder if I’d missed a crucial subtitle while making notes, but they don’t ruin the film by any means, and although the subtext is hardly transcendental Headhunters is funnier, smarter, and more exciting than the vast majority of action thrillers.

Tom

Read User's Comments0

Le Havre

5:21 AM | Labels: Comedy-Drama

Le Havre

Directed by: Aki Kaurismäki

With: André Wilms, Blondin Miguel, Jean-Pierre Darroussin

2011

Something magic seems to settle into the folds of this seemingly prosaic suburban story.

Marcel (André Wilms) is a shoeshine, struggling with the advent and popularity of running shoes. Arletty (Kati Outinen) is his wife, she looks after the (meagre) economy of the house, cooks dinner and irons her husband’s trousers while he is asleep. Then, one day, hidden in a forgotten cargo, a group of immigrants is found in Le Havre’s harbour. As Marcel starts taking care of Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), an illegal immigrant boy sought-after by the police, his wife is diagnosed with a serious disease. We are told miracles sometimes happen, but not in this neighbourhood…

At first Le Havre calls to mind other French-language films such as Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis and Les Intouchables: heart-warming comedies, nevertheless breaking the prejudices and ostracisms of our society and advocating a sort of new humanism. AkiKaurismäki’s film, however, has a different allure. One of the most pressing and journalistic topics – clandestine immigration – gleams through characters, dialogues and events which more resemble to a tale, than a fictional movie plot. Sentences are short and memorable, each character has a clear social role and the plot is driven by a problem/solution logic. The sober, yet quirky spirit of Le Havre is perfectly accompanied by the soundtrack, eccentrically varied and nostalgically retro. The cinematography bathes the scenes in a terse and grey light, similar to that which precedes the rain, capturing the humid atmosphere of the harbour but also giving the colours a hypnotic quality.

Yet, if realism is lightly mocked it is never fully dismissed. The characters are what catalyse this tension the best: they seem to act mechanically, in the hands of a puppeteer, but a hint from their past is enough to let real blood flush their cheeks with life. Marcel and Arletty seem at first to make a peculiar couple, ceremoniously respectful of each other, but also comically formal in their exchange. With a few distracted lines, however, we learn that their union is based on a mutual rescue: she saved him from the street, while he saved her from a violent husband. Similarly, behind the strict and caricature-like image of the dark policeman Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) there is someone who has learnt from his past and is ready to risk his future. The only character unmistakably carrying the mask of the bad guy is a cameo with Jean-Pierre Léaud, interpreting a vicious whistleblower.

The collective quest Marcel and his neighbours embark on to save Idrissa happens instinctively, in absence of any discussion of morality or politics, almost as an inevitable consequence. But some of the scenes resonate quite strongly with the recent history of French politics: on TV we witness the forced removal of a camp of illegal immigrant by police forces and we follow Marcel in a detention centre for immigrants. Despite its engaged side, a sheen of naivety and simplicity is maintained in Le Havre, somehow acknowledging the complexity of the matter.

The film’s irony and self-consciously implausible moments successfully seduce the viewer from the very first scene and, by the end, one is ready to put realism and disillusionment aside to wholeheartedly embrace the film’s last sequence. Kaurismäki won his gamble over realism. But what he left us with is a double-edged blade: as you bite into this lightly told story of unconditioned fraternity in a small community you cannot but be reminded that this is not reality. Hence the miracle. Perhaps, it is a question of faith - in humanity -, rather than of belief.

fiamma

Read User's Comments0

This Is Not a Film

4:05 AM | Labels: Documentary

This Is Not a Film

Directed by: Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Jafar Panahi

2010

For most of it, you are not sure what you are looking at, but you surely know why. This Is Not a Film is one of the most eccentric and compelling documentaries out there at the moment - film credits included.

Everything starts with director Jafar Panahi having breakfast. In front of a camera. Then we see Panahi filmed by Mojtaba Mirtahmas. He decided that if he will not be able to make his movie – Panahi is currently condemned to six years of prison and banned from producing any movie or leaving Iran – he is going to read the script and try to convey its staging. Defeated by the impossibility of portraying a movie out of what does not make a movie - we see him painstakingly trying to make a house out of tape on the floor, a chair and a pillow - he goes back to the movies he did, playing them once again on DVD and telling us what he learned about their reality. At the end, maybe out of instinct or out of boredom, we finally see him embracing the camera, once again, to film the building’s janitor…

Shot in a day, This Is Not a Film documents Panahi’s struggle to overcome the inactivity imposed on him by the government. He is caught into a restless dance around a misused camera: firstly filming himself, then being filmed and finally filming. But the camera is not capturing a movie and this is the point. What the documentary points at is what is not there: a censored film. In its form – so unpredictable, so domestic and so loose – the documentary actually holds onto a strong message. While Panahi struggles to tell us how the film would have been, one cannot but wonder what we are missing by not being able to see it.

Quite ironically, Panahi’s situation in the documentary, turns out to be surprisingly close to that of the heroine in his censored film. Its plot tells the story of young Iranian girl who is accepted to an art school, but who is obstructed by her parents, who decide to lock her in her house. One wonders if, down the most surprising and unexpected path, This Is Not a Film ends up carrying a bit of that film in its essence.

This Is Not a Film is a documentary which affirms its genre while confronting the fictional genre. If part of its message is political, part of it is lyrical. Panahi offers us, in some distracted moments, some important reflections on film as an artistic reality bound to its own rules, its own mechanism and to its own irreplaceable dimension. In doing so, however, the power and beauty of documentary are affirmed. To the absence of a censured film, corresponds the tangible record of a subversive - one is temped to say despite the title - artistic act.

As soon as Panahi takes the camera we feel his emotion and excitement and, for a short moment, we see a director in action again… but not for long. The last words we hear are: ‘don’t come out, they could see you with the camera’…

fiamma

Read User's Comments0

This Must Be the Place

11:40 AM | Labels: Comedy-Drama

This Must Be the Place

Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Written by Paolo Sorrentino and Umberto Contarello

with Sean Penn, Frances McDormand, Eve Hewson

2011

“Funny, charming & stylish…unlike anything Penn’s done before.” He’s supposed to be difficult to deal with sometimes, but you wonder how Sean Penn pissed off the designers of this film’s poster for them to put such a double-edged quote along the top. Over the years he does seem to have generated quite a lot of bad feeling through his thudding political opinions and general self-importance, and I think that, creatively-edited comments aside, this role probably does represent a deliberate effort to create a less serious side to his public persona. As a retired rock star in late middle age, Penn gets to do the post-Ozzy doddery confusion, but with a dreaming world-weariness that presumably comes from being a 50-year-old Goth. He’s basically Robert Smith – although Penn’s face has a wrinkliness that the lipstick and eyeliner seem to age further, making him look like the frontman of an all-pensioner Cure tribute band. It’s a funny, creative performance nonetheless, and a reminder that for all his foibles, Sean Penn is still good at his day job.

The film is an adventure conducted at the speed of an ex-heavy drug user, so much so that when the vague threat of violence enters the story it doesn’t quite make sense: Cheyenne (Penn) is a retired rock star living in Dublin, who upon the death of his estranged father takes up his unfinished quest to hunt down an ex-Nazi camp guard now living discreetly somewhere in the United States. This element is perfunctorily dealt with, considering the film as a whole, as most of the running time is spent building the character of Cheyenne, his fears and regrets, mistakes and triumphs, and portraying a series of encounters, each of which bring out a new facet of his personality and history. The Talking Heads song that is the film’s namesake is a lurking presence throughout, topped with a cameo from David Byrne where he comes across as a sort of omniscient mad scientist of 80s alt-rock. The dialogue in each of these separate scenes is sweet and funny, but essentially the film is a hybrid of a mid-life crisis and a coming-of-age tale (arguably Cheyenne does both throughout the course of the picture), and occupies a weird middle ground in being at once predictable and a bit all over the place.

While it’s enjoyable, it doesn’t really hang together that well towards the end. The combined lack of direction and speed mean that some of the detail gets lost, as some ambiguous relationships aren’t explored enough for them to have any meaning, even though they feel significant when they are introduced. Maybe it’s because the Holocaust continues to have such an impact on the imagination, but the last part of the film made me feel a bit uncomfortable. The historical fact becomes rather absorbed into Cheyenne’s inner turmoil, turning into a slightly exploitative way of lending the tale a bit more intrigue. That said, director and co-writer Sorrentino shoots it with his swinging cameras slowed down to match the shambling pace of the star, and fulfils the road movie part of the film by at least making the journey fun.

Tom

Read User's Comments0

Into the Abyss

11:32 AM | Labels: Documentary

Into the Abyss

Directed by Werner Herzog

2011

As a documentary title, Into the Abyss sounds like it should be about deep-sea diving rather than the death penalty; it emphasises the metaphysical issues around execution when the expectation is for the film to take a moral standpoint for or against. I didn’t like it when I first heard it, thinking it sounded a bit dramatic and ominous; obviously the expectation was for it to be against the death penalty (can you imagine how grim a documentary with an enthusiasm for it would be?), but you want a certain level of restraint or objectivity even if it’s just so you don't feel like a sheep for agreeing with it. Having seen the film, however, the title seems far more appropriate. This is a Werner Herzog documentary, after all, and the usual standards don’t apply.

When I wrote about Girl Model, I mentioned how documentaries need to perform a balancing act in presenting a coherent argument without being overly manipulative with the material. Here we see Herzog dodge around that problem, as he approaches his subject not as an investigator or an activist, but as an artist. We don’t see him once during the film, but he is a constant presence behind the camera. Very early on he states his own views against execution, but in the grand scheme of the film this serves as a perfunctory statement; more to get an inevitable question out of the way than establish any intent. Beyond that, the film is a series of interviews, crime scene videos, and environmental footage, split into six chapters, each addressing a different aspect of the death row experience. Herzog focuses on a single crime – an awful mess of stolen cars and pointless killing – which took place in October 2001, and the people involved as they are today: the two convicts, one on death row, one serving a life sentence; the police officers who investigated the crime; the victims’ families; people who know or knew the felons. Although care is taken to describe what happened the night of the crime with as much detail as is available, as an interviewer Herzog is less interested in facts and statistics than bringing out people’s reactions to the murder and the impending punishment. His questions, genially probing and direct, sometimes speculate or focus on odd details in an interviewee’s story, like the hands of a father and son touching in a police van, in a way that sounds like he’s figuring out how to portray it in a movie, but which also coaxes out new levels of emotion and introspection on behalf of the subject.

While the overall tone is critical of capital punishment, this is a very philosophical and open-ended work. In looking at a specific case instead of bombarding us with statistics and social commentary, Herzog has made an unpoliticised, artistic study of loss and waiting for death. In doing so he’s also made a powerful condemnation of a system in which nobody really benefits. No punches are pulled in portraying the criminals and the crimes they committed: their actions were cruel, stupid, and they were still attempting to offload as much blame possible onto the other even during the documentary. But the emotional, arbitrary (although touching) way in which one’s life was spared while the other condemned, and the blank fact that nothing will be achieved through murdering them in turn except for a vague sense of justice for some tragically damaged people, is far more articulate a criticism than any amount of arguing. This film works not through rhetoric but through the sadness of an irreversible mistake. Herzog has succeeded where the makers of Girl Model stumbled, and captured a sequence of events that represent far more than the sum of their parts.

Tom

Read User's Comments0

Rampart

11:37 AM | Labels: Drama, Thriller

Rampart

Directed by Oren Moverman
Written by James Ellroy and Oren Moverman

with Woody Harrelson, Ned Beatty, Robin Wright

2011

Dragging on an endless supply of cigarettes, Woody Harrelson swaggers his way through Los Angeles as Dave Brown, a member of the heroically corrupt Rampart division of the LAPD. Formed to combat gang warfare and street crime, Rampart became entwined in the thing it was meant to be fighting before exploding in a shower of legal cases at the close of the 90s. We follow Harrelson’s character during the outbreak of the scandal, as he watches the fallout of a career spent in corruption, brutality, and behaving like an extrovert Travis Bickle finally catch up with him.

No real effort is made to allow the audience to identify or sympathise with Brown; he is screwed up, unattractive and immoral in almost every conceivable way. Rather than building up a robust character arc through which we learn about him and hopefully reach some level of understanding, Oren Moverman instead goes for the bigger picture, in which we see the cop as a small part of a larger culture of disaffection. At his heart, Dave Brown is a standard right-wing nut trapped in a cycle of impotent frustration, shamelessly exploitative of those around him on the one hand, while disgusted at any attempt to make him contribute on the other. His reaction to the investigation into his conduct is one of disdain and incredulity, and he remains incapable of engaging with it on its own terms, preferring to stick to his usual methods of behind-the-scenes haggling. In spite of this, we are kept more or less on his side because he is ultimately being made a scapegoat in the political maneuverings of the police department and the city. When he does confess, it is to an entire career of misdemeanor, and true; it is rejected because it’s not a confession for the more ambiguous crime that they need for political purposes.

I didn’t mention Travis Bickle solely as a convenient psycho reference point; Rampart really did remind me quite a lot of Taxi Driver. Obviously this partly stems from its rotten-to-the-core portrayal of the U.S. establishment, but that’s such a thoroughly covered concept now that it doesn’t really count. It’s more through the presentation of an environment entirely from the perspective of individuals who stand off-kilter to the mainstream, which they are trying to make their own sense of. As a filmmaking device, Brown functions in a similar manner to Bickle in that the moral chaos surrounding him is presented to us through his eyes, and, however much we may approve or disapprove of the character, it is through him we understand it. Both men are Vietnam veterans, both treat their jobs as identities rather than mere occupations (and, importantly, there are similar, voyeuristic, patrolling elements to those jobs), and both feel discarded, that society is moving on in a way that’s threatening their relevance.

I’d like to be able to say this film is as compelling as Taxi Driver, but unfortunately I'd be lying. Co-written by James Ellroy, of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential fame, the dialogue is sharp enough to carry through a series of set pieces that don’t really hang around in your head afterwards: a string of family scenes, shady meetings, bars and restaurants, street life, the usual movie-L.A. Quite a number of recognisable faces pop up out of nowhere and are gone. Woody Harrelson is the only figure we are with long enough for them to become established in the narrative, and while he’s good, for a mumbly-talky film such as this you need more to hang on to. Also, I’m definitely getting tired of club scenes being used as the nadir of a character arc. I know nightclubs can be grim sometimes, but oppressive noise, flashing lights and general debauchery are a pretty lazy and puritanical way of suggesting a low point. Here we get a red-lit Woody Harrelson face-smearingly gorging himself on burgers, like a demon feasting on the damned. Calm down!
Tom

Read User's Comments0

Mstarz-99shaftesburyave

Popular Posts

Blogger templates

Blogger news

Blogroll

Categories

Archives

Elles

Marley

Headhunters

Le Havre

This Is Not a Film

This Must Be the Place

Into the Abyss

Rampart