Lost Classics #1

The Changeling - genuinely disturbing, this dread-heavy, slow-burning horror film has George C Scott's grieving father renting an old mansion, only to discover that there's something pretty scary already there. Builds the kind of spine-twisting unease that modern horror films don't even bother aiming for. Mind you, flying limbs are that much less difficult to get onscreen than genuine terror.

The Baby - a grown man dressed in a nappy is coveted by a social worker. And then you find out why. Utterly bizarre, but so twisted and peculiar that you have to watch, open-mouthed more often than not, as this freaky 'love story' reaches its ODD finale. Some call it touching. THAT is also ODD.

The Hidden - The criminally under-used Michael Nouri and the ever-ace Kyle Maclachlan do erstwhile battle with an alien that likes to 'hide-out' inside various unsuspecting hosts, not unlike Carpenter's 'Thing'. Said rogue being also has a penchant for fast cars, loud music and blowing shit up. Even more fun than that sounds.

Fright Night - Teenage horror-fan catches on that his neighbour is, in fact, a vampire responsible for offing several local girls. With the help of old telly horror-hack Roddy McDowall, he attempts to kill said vampire, a wonderfully seedy, debonair Chris Sarandon. Surprisingly decent effects for 1985, and mixes comedy and horror as well as Sam Raimi: high praise!

Miracle Mile - Anthony Edwards discovers by a chance phone call (don't you hate it...etc...) the rather unfortunate news that the world will end in 70 minutes, by nuclear assault. What would YOU do? Not what he does in this film, but it's still ace.

Polyester - spectacularly OTT (but still on the money) middle-finger to suburban America, Waters breaks yet more ground (clearly not content with merely having Divine chew on fresh dog shit) with this screeching, gaudy satire by including a 'scratch 'n' sniff' element (a bit weird when you're watching it on Beeb 2 sans 'odor card') to proceedings. You don't need the card - it's still completely mad and wonderful without it.

Deep Cover - Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum have rarely been better than in this cop drama, in which Fishburne infiltrates Goldblum's drug cartel only for the lines between by-the-book good guy and drug-dealing wrong 'un become perilously blurred. Great script by Michael Tolkin.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space - Aliens masquerading as clowns go on a murderous rampage in a small town, with only a small band of local teenagers (driving an ice cream van, obviously) to stop them...that simple, but creepy and hilarious in equal measure.

They Live! - The legendary John Carpenter's least appreciated great film, They Live! has wrestler 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper finding sunglasses that expose seemingly normal folk as aliens running a campaign of sloganeering subjugation that will stupefy the population and make them 'Submit To Authority', 'Watch Television', 'Consume' et al. Like a funhouse Orwell, and containing the longest punch-up in cinema.

Zazie Dans Le Metro - Whimsical tale of a young girl who evades the custody of her uncle to go on a freewheeling jaunt around Paris, which has never seemed more absurdly magical than here. Inventively funny, deliriously edited and terribly French, the whole thing is a bizarrre but entertaining escapade.

Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Dr Hunter S. Thompson

"America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

Hunter S. Thompson was many things: dangerous both in person and in print, hilarious, unhinged, a brilliant, scathing journalist. He was also gun-obsessed and in constant possession of a teeming glass of Wild Turkey, if not volatile drugs by the stashload or both. The Alex Gibney documentary in question attempts to distil the great man's potency into 92 minutes of measured mayhem, and whilst it couldn't really begin to chart his excoriating journey in any great detail, it does a decent job of providing us with a glimpse of the turbulent savagery Hunter S Thompson both gleefully perpetuated and bore bemused witness to.

We start with the first real 'in' for Thompson - his catalogue of the brutal and rampantly iconic Hell's Angels. Spending a year with these vicious, unbridled wanderers no doubt had the pull of sick infamy about it at the outset, but it's re-emphasised here that the trouncing ('stomping', as the Hell's Angels themselves rejoiced) he got at the culmination of this period for 'misrepresentation' crystallised his ill-feeling about the whole project. The book, though, hit the bestseller lists (Thompson considered it a failure) and things were rolling in earnest for the man that would normally yammer out his copy whilst tonked on all manner of illegal substances.

He would go on to write disdainfully of the hippie culture, which he considered to be an indolently selfish and artificial means to an end, and ran for Sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado (narrowly losing), at one point turning up at the Rolling Stone headquarters with a six-pack of beer and a demand that the magazine publisher, Jann Wenner, put out Thompson's account of the election. Wenner would later commission the hallucinogenic, American Dream battering Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas on the basis of '20 jangled pages' of drug-fuelled madness and paranoia. The same benevolence would fund a trip to the 'Rumble In The Jungle' which Thompson missed, choosing instead to swim around naked save for a Nixon mask, out of his mind on a ridiculous combination of narcotics, and the brilliant, splenetic burst of horrified invective that is Fear And Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72. (That masterful political tome brought, amongst other things, the little-known drug Ibogaine into the mass-consciousness, as part of one of Thompson's many character assassinations had Hubert Humphrey's running mate, Ed Muskie, zonked on the drug from dusk 'til dawn. Not true of course, but the damage was done and Muskie's demise was accelerated.) Nixon was reviled to the point of seething inability to talk about the man beyond the printed page, although we do get a brief recollection of a lengthy car journey during which all that was discussed was American Football. Probably for the best.

The documentary can only do so many things with such scant time, and as a big Thompson fan I would've appreciated a bit more of a 'delve'; why did he drink such a prodigious quantity of booze and take drugs in the kind of quantities that could've killed a herd of buffalo? Was it, as I might suggest, due to a crippling deficit in his social-skills and a surprising lack of confidence (Terry Gilliam, director of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, wasn't particularly enamoured of Thompson, at one point saying, 'As soon as he gets out in public he seems to be determined to act like an idiot.')? Why did it take so long for the great 'Rum Diary' to see the light of day? The film instead fizzes along in scattershot fashion, going for broad sweeps as opposed to searing insight, and whilst it's fun enough, it's no home run.

So, we get a brief look at the man in hurtling 'career' rundown, narrated by a clearly smitten Johnny Depp, and we end with the fitting blast of Thompson's ashes into the Aspen night sky. What might Thompson make of now? I'd suggest that he jumped ship at exactly the right point: as he knew himself, these were times too savage even for him.

Freeway

These days, it’s hard to see Kiefer Sutherland as anyone but Jack Bauer: counter-terrorist hero agent and indestructible badass. 24 began in 2001 and shows no signs of letting up, with the eighth season set for early 2010. It’s undoubtedly the role Sutherland will be remembered for when he’s gone, and likely one he’ll find hard to shake off once Jack’s days are up.

Before 24, however, Sutherland had played a veritable rogue’s gallery of characters. Things kicked off (a few early cameos notwithstanding) with gang leader Ace Merrill in Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me, Sutherland’s first film made in the US and a true coming-of-age classic. But it wasn’t until The Lost Boys, and vampire David (‘they’re only noodles, Michael’), that Sutherland hit paydirt, and, more by default than by choice, found himself among the Brat Pack, the gaggle of rich, good-looking, party-loving teen actors making waves in 1980s Hollywood. The roles kept on coming…Doc Scurlock (Young Guns), Buster McHenry (Renegades), Nelson (Flatliners), Athos (The Three Musketeers), Lt Jonathan Kendrick (A Few Good Men)…even William Burroughs (Beat).

In 1996, there was Freeway, Matthew Bright’s very loose and lurid retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. (‘Her life is no fairytale’, says the poster.) Sutherland plays Bob Wolverton (Wolverton, wolf, geddit?), a serial killer and rapist plying his trade on a stretch of interstate in LA. The ‘her’ on the poster is Vanessa Lutz (Reece Witherspoon), a white-trash, illiterate teen with a whore for a mother and a crack-smoking pervert for a stepfather. Vanessa was Witherspoon’s first major role, and one which marked her out as a rising star. She plays the part with relish, no holding back, cutting loose as a cute, blonde bundle of violence.

The lascivious tone of the film is established from the get-go; the credit sequence a sordid cartoon tapestry of salivating wolves preying on big-breasted babydolls. Within ten minutes, we’ve seen Vanessa’s homelife, and it isn’t pretty. Her mother (Amanda Plummer) turns tricks yards from her doorstep, while her meatheaded stepfather (Michael T Weiss) smokes the proceeds and struggles to keep his dick in his pants. A prostitute sting later, and the couple are carted off to jail, leaving Vanessa with no choice but to return to the care system, a future she’d do anything to avoid. She eludes her social worker, takes off in the woman’s car, breaks down on the freeway. Cue Bob Wolverton.

Now you don’t need a heads-up to know that Bob is going to be a big, bad wolf, despite his initial generosity in helping Vanessa out with a ride. It’s all there, the stereotypical sex killer: oversized glasses, slicked-back hair, a calm, hypnotic hum of a voice that you sense can erupt at any moment. (Sutherland’s always been great at playing villains, effortlessly able to flick that switch between all-round good guy and complete bastard.) Bob claims to be a therapist of some sort, and manipulates Vanessa into discussing personal details about herself and her ordeal with her stepfather (as well as giving up information about her final destination; her grandmother’s). When she finally cottons on to what Bob is doing – getting his kicks, rather than playing confidante – Vanessa makes him pull over, then shoots him, leaving him for dead.

Vanessa is soon arrested, interrogated by detectives (one of whom is Dan Hedaya, who always seems to be in the neighbourhood when a film like this comes around), charged and put on trial. At her hearing, she sees Bob, or what he’s been reduced to; a severely disfigured, half-blind shell of a man with a face permanently shaped into a maniacal, drooling grin. She is sent to prison, but escapes with the help of a murderous Hispanic gang leader she has befriended. The detectives continue to investigate her case, find that Wolverton isn’t the victim he’s made himself out to be, and track him down to his house. He’s not there, however, he's already well on his way to Vanessa’s grandmother’s place, the scene of the film’s manic denouement.

An earlier blog on the Jennifer Lynch film, Surveillance, talked about the B-movie, and its apparent scarcity in modern-day cinema. Freeway is very much that kind of film; sinful, berserk, grotesque, sanguinary. The entire cast plays it note-perfect, with obvious praise reserved for the two leads. Given his almost untouchable TV star status today, it’s unlikely we’ll see Sutherland immerse himself in this type of role for a long time, if ever. Which is a shame, as these larger-than-life villains are his to own. By the same token, Witherspoon has blossomed into the talented actress the critics were envisaging back in 1996, yet hasn’t played a character since who’s anywhere nearly as interesting as Vanessa Lutz (no, June Carter Cash doesn’t count). The world can live without another Legally Blonde sequel, what we want to see is Hollywood A-listers taking risks, throwing caution to the wind, growing balls, having FUN.

Antichrist

By now, you’ll have probably heard of Antichrist, the new film from Danish director Lars von Trier, much hyped in the media of late for its sadistic violence, graphic sex and wilful aim to piss off as many people as possible. Many critics have questioned von Trier’s motives for making this film, and most have concluded that it’s a wind-up; that he’s no more than a provocateur, a mischief-maker. It’s hard not to agree.

The story itself isn't particularly controversial. Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a couple, credited only as He and She, whose young son dies after falling out of an open window while they’re making love in the room next door. This first section of the film, the prologue, is stunning: presented in soft monochrome, unravelled in super slow motion, underscored with a beautiful Handel aria. It’s the prettiest thing von Trier has committed to film (well, in this case, digital video), marred only by the brief yet needless shot of a phallus about to hit home. (An aside: despite most things being considered OK for inclusion in films these days, the erection essentially remains persona non grata, and is still somewhat surprising, and slightly off-putting, to see on the big screen. Von Trier certainly has previous in this regard – see his 1998 film, The Idiots – and you feel he’s throwing in all his favourites here.)

While Gainsbourg’s character, the wife, is completely traumatised by her grief, fainting among the funeral cortege and being admitted to hospital and prescribed medication, Dafoe, the husband, remains strangely calm, inscrutable and dispassionate. He’s a psychotherapist by trade, and sees this as an opportunity to persuade his wife to face her darkest fears. He asks her which place she is most frightened of, she tells him Eden; their secluded hideaway in the woods, a place she once went with their son to finish her thesis on gynocide, the killing of the female sex.

The couple return to Eden and the husband begins his attempts at therapy and healing, with varying degrees of success. The film gets stranger and stranger as von Trier slowly reveals what happened when the wife first came to the cabin, and her terror at the possibility of her husband leaving her. Eden seems to have driven her almost to madness; she talks of listening to falling acorns crying, and hearing their son screaming from somewhere deep in the forest (despite him being sat only metres from her). The husband finds her study materials, sees the gradual deterioration of her handwriting, proof that her mind was, and still is, fuelled by her terror and obsession.

Having been caught up in the hype before the film was released, I couldn’t help but sit in anticipation of the moments that already seem to have gained their own infamy. One such scene features a bloodied, computer-generated fox turning to Dafoe and slowly uttering the words ‘Chaos reigns’, its voice gruff and demonic. The idea of the fox, von Trier has claimed, stems from a vision he had while meditating – which may be true – but it’s something of a bizarre distraction in what is, up until then, a bleak, solemn and intense film (albeit one with frustratingly terrible dialogue and, at times, drama-school-level acting chops). But, despite its darkness, what this film doesn’t need is comic relief, so you can’t help feeling von Trier’s thrown the fox in for laughs: his own. (I have to admit, though, it is quite funny.)
The fox is one of a number of creatures that makes an appearance: there’s a doe with its young hanging out of her in its amniotic sac; a crow that survives a pretty savage beating (yes, a beating) from Dafoe; all of whom lend some significance, albeit esoterically, to von Trier’s frankly bewildering backstory. Yet the most animalistic behaviour is reserved for Gainsbourg, who mutilates herself and her husband in pretty sickening and unbridled fashion: legs pierced with iron bars, balls bludgeoned with two-by-fours, and a clitoris scissored off altogether. Although Antichrist has been marketed as a straight horror film (despite the antagonistic poster), I’d wager that it’d turn the stomachs of some of the Saw/Hostel/Midnight Meat Train goremongers, something that von Trier is likely to have aimed for all along.

But is that wrong? Is it acceptable for von Trier to take us all for a ride in this, his vehicle for pouring forth his misanthropy and disappointment in the human race, a film that, due to his depression, he wasn’t too enthusiastic about making? How should we feel about it? One thing’s for sure: the uproar’s misguided, the brouhaha from the likes of the Daily Mail is sensationalist, the hype is OTT and unwarranted. Antichrist isn’t pure evil, isn’t overly controversial, nor is it going to drive our children to copycat behaviour, playground shootings or acts of terrorism. No, it’s a film made by a known firebrand, a rabble-rouser, a guy whose last three films passed by with little more than a whimper (despite being among his best work) and who was always going to get our attention this time round. Whether that should be a filmmaker's primary concern is another question entirely.

Rachel Getting Married

Strangely not included in the half-year round-up (an oversight!), Rachel Getting Married is none other than Jonathan Demme's best film, and would curry favour with me in any case as it is, Magnolia aside, the best Robert Altman film not directed by the great man himself.

The idea, such as it is, is often considered a lazy way of developing character: the social gathering. Voila, you have all kinds of interplay, bonhomie, discord, dialogue that is automatically on tap. People clash, spark, engage, and drama evolves - things happen. And we've all been to a wedding. We've all avoided our familial equivalent of the black sheep, the uncle at the bar swilling shots at noon, the over-garrulous aunt, the irritating leech.

The Rachel in question isn't our main protagonist and focal point; that's Anne Hathaway's dissolute Kim, unleashed from rehab to join her sis' for her big day. She is dropped off at the parental home (dad being the eternally affable Bill Irwin, who is brilliant throughout - teetering but stoic in the face of ever-near catastrophe, inhabiting whatever face he deems is appropriate for each fraught face-off) to no fanfare and palpable unease; she is the bad apple, we're led to accept, and we feel the beautifully cajoled disquiet the rest of the cast grapple with whenever she's in their proximity as she wanders through the wedding pre-amble and back into a life she, as we will discover, has long been tragically cast out of. Her sister Rachel's embrace as they reunite betrays the anxiety and animus between them, and we're waiting for everything to erupt as Hathaway's kinetic disaster-zone hangs on to tolerability and sanity throughout proceedings. Dad is the pained, dignified, hapless interlocutor as all kinds of family hell slowly, expertly become apparent at the roomy hands of Demme, who skilfully leads a superb ensemble without getting in the way.

Amongst many other fine performances, the return of Debra Winger, as Kym's estranged mother, deserves a brief mention. She perfectly captures an askew, distraught woman scarcely retaining a semblance of normality (which memorably slips towards the end of the film) and seems poisoned but reluctant to admit the fact. And, let's be honest, she's terrifying without uttering a word or casting a glance. It's a wonderfully nuanced effort that deserves at the very least a bit of a career reprisal.

Hathaway, though, is magnificent and it's her film. She is seriously damaged, obnoxious, devil's advocate at the drop of a hat and totally without pretension. It's the latter factor that lies behind her fashioning a likeably bruised portrait of a victim of youthful circumstance and self-hate, someone who has made a mistake and been left behind, and yet survives as a contortion of regret and ebullience. The film is a total triumph from start to finish, a rare bird in cinema that takes its time and refuses to budge or conform and simply unfolds, brilliantly. Oh, and it contains the greatest scene involving a dishwasher. Ever.

The International

It must be tricky being Clive Owen. You're not Matt Damon: you don't look hard enough, and you've got too much of the date-rapist look about you. You're not Daniel Craig: you're too unsubtly intense and dumb-looking. So you're this half-decent, chiseled, fairly forgettable bloke with the smell of a juvenile public schoolboy who hasn't bothered to shave. You're not even a square peg amidst round holes; more of a trapezoid.

So what do you do? How do you carve out a career in film with such an unpromising array of whateverness? You were suitably aggrieved in Closer, far too untroublesome in Inside Man and actually pretty good in a long-forgotten film called Croupier. Answer: you become a slick, insubstantial lead in actioners like Shoot-Em Up and this, The International.

Director Tom Tykwer knows how to do an action sequence or two. Run Lola Run, which was spectacularly over-rated, looked and sounded great and gave good frenetic. Here he's choreographing a daft run-around conspiracy-type romp that attempts to foster a bit of zeitgeisty-gravitas by being about banks funding terrorism and so on. You can guess most of the rest. Naomi Watts, probably the best actress of her generation, is under-used but even half-arsed acts Owen not only off the screen but into another postcode. Ulrich Thomsen, a personal fave, is superb as the bank figurehead.

It all moves along at a swift enough clip but it's a rum business this film-making: everything can seem calibrated and well-orchestrated but with The International, whilst it's ostensibly smart and well shot and edited, there's simply nothing there, other than a fair array of swanky steel and glass. And there's far too much overhead shooting, leaving it all feeling like the goings-on in an elaborate, blue-tinted, pointless ant-farm. On too many occasions you're at too much of a remove from the unfolding events, and the whole thing is too sterile and uninvolving. The buildings and cityscapes seem to draw Tykwer's attention far more than the actual plot, and he seems far happier with establishing shots, like an unbridled film student framing everything to precise death. With Owen running about looking poised but delivering very little, who can blame him for cutting the emotional cord and accepting that this is a great-looking nothing?

For All Mankind

Space lends itself very well to storytelling. We know precious little about it – despite it holding the key to our origins – and it’s this mystery that fuels the imaginings and ideas of writers, filmmakers, scientists, artists…just about anybody. A fascination with the extraterrestrial, for instance, led the great Stanley Kubrick to make 2001: A Space Odyssey, cinema’s greatest piece of science-fiction, a true masterwork that somehow succeeded in harnessing everything that is awe-inspiring about space: its grandeur, its beauty, its power, its mystique, its possibilities.
When 2001 was released in 1968, the Space Race was nearing its end, with the first moon landing little more than a year away. Russia had become the first ‘space power’ in 1957, launching the first artificial satellites into orbit, an achievement that caused embarrassment for the US and led to the creation of NASA. Not long after becoming President in 1961, John F Kennedy looked for a project that would capture the American public’s imagination, as well as benefit him politically – a lunar landing was seen as the only way to overtake Russia in the race to dominate space exploration. JFK gave a famous speech at Rice University in 1962, in which he talked of a lunar mission being ‘one of the great adventures of all time’.

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

It is this speech that begins For All Mankind, Al Reinert’s magnificent documentary on the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s.

Reinert chose to make his film when he discovered that the Apollo astronauts had shot countless hours of footage documenting their missions. (Up until that point, the footage had been held in NASA’s archives without being made available for public viewing.) The images Reinert selected from this treasure trove are simply breathtaking, and seamlessly melded together into a fascinating retelling of one of history's great moments. (Watching For All Mankind, I was reminded of something German director Werner Herzog had suggested in a DVD commentary for one of his own documentaries, Fata Morgana: he said that mankind only has embarrassed images of the world and that we need to find new images with which to define ourselves. What place could be more likely to offer this opportunity than space, a vast and endless world very few of us will get to witness with our own eyes?) Their sheer beauty is further augmented by the narration, which, thankfully, Reinert leaves to the astronauts themselves. Many a documentary has been soured by a lazy celebrity voiceover or a lifeless faux-philosophical reading passed off as genuine insight, so the astronauts’ sharing of their ‘once in a lifetime’ experiences carries particular potency.

A film like this would almost be neglecting its duties if it failed to capture the palpable excitement these missions must have elicited in everyone involved – the astronauts, CAPCOM, the NASA flight controllers – and Reinert's choice of footage contains some truly special moments. These men, the astronauts, were embarking upon adventures that, for them, fulfilled a lifelong dream: they were a culmination of years of training in preparation for an opportunity afforded to very few people, so it’s little wonder that this experience reduced them to an almost childlike state. There are several marvellous sequences to document this: the astronauts’ first encounters with weightlessness; their down time in the shuttle spent listening to tapes of R&B and Merle Haggard; their first steps on the moon where, despite their cumbersome spacesuits, they hop, skip and tumble like marionettes.

Reinert’s film is elegant and glacial, underscored with a haunting soundtrack by Brian Eno (who else?). With the NASA archives at his disposal, Reinert had the finest raw materials with which to work: what he then needed to do was use them to turn out an impeccable product. For All Mankind is certainly that, a great celebration of space, the dreams of men, and a nation dogged in its determination to witness a new world in all its glory.

Surveillance

Everyone likes a good B-movie. Even if we don’t, in the strictest sense, get them any more, ie cheap, more often than not unambitious and uncomplicated genre films that accompany a more illustrious main feature. Films are longer, trailers are awful, ubiquitous, far too much part of the contemporary multiplex furniture, attention-spans can no longer take in two films in one sitting. This is a shame if you ask me. Imagine Marley & Me pre-ambled with a truncated version of Saw? Or Wallace and Gromit easing you into someone getting their clit snipped off?

The modern day version of the B-movie is normally shot in grainy digital and bypasses every cinema on its scuzzy way to Blockbuster or worse. This is normally a good thing: most films, let alone B-movies, are not very good, and we wouldn’t want to see too many diluted siblings of film stars jostling for no-frills attention. We want to see their indignant, talentless faces on cheesy plastic DVD cases, yearning for attention as you mercilessly walk past on your way to the talent. But: some B-movies were meant to be born that way; they may outgrow their humble beginnings to terrify millions of people (Texas Chainsaw) or create crazes in pottery. Ultimately, some films are there to catch you unawares, no fanfare, and get you a bit mucky and slash you with a rusty flick-knife while you’re not really paying attention. Transformers is a B-movie, but it, and its sequel, forgot about the low-key, unawares bit. It’s a B-movie dressed up in garish getup masquerading as something a bit more uppity. John Carpenter knows what a proper latter-day B-movie is – a brilliant punch in the mouth. A scruffy but stylish grenade thrown into your viscera.

Surveillance is correctly attired and knows exactly what it is: it’s a nasty police-procedural set in two colour-bled locations (shot through a gunmetal filter), with an inexpensive cast and a determination to thoroughly displease you. And for that, you’ve got to admire it. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a strange girl wandering up to you at a party and asking you to slap her – disturbing but darkly intriguing. But not particularly good (cue Marc...).

Brief rundown: Bill Pullman (once the slightly poisoned face of middle America, now a stick-on weirdo) and Julia Ormond (once of glossy rom-coms and quaintly ridiculous swashbucklers, now clearly prepared to get her hands dirty to salvage her career) are two FBI agents investigating something dodgy that happened (revealed as the film gathers pace) on a remote stretch of sunboiled highway. A Village People-esque cop, a grungy bit of slattern and a dauntingly quiet young girl are all interviewed, the stories don’t exactly merge, Pullman twitches a lot and has a sleazeface you’d expect to be found loitering on the perimeter of the local meat-market dancefloor. Nothing, of course, is as it seems. Michael Ironside cheers you up just by being involved, even on autopilot, and it’s like catching sight of a vague uncle at a dull, menacing party. Ultimately, there’s a fair bit of bloodshed, the grim prospect of rape, a pretty ace death-by-van, a predictable ending and a residue not of disquiet but that it could have been so much more (depraved). The cop-humour isn’t funny or dark enough, the characters not imperilled-enough, the sickfest you were waiting for scarcely happens and you end the film with all kinds of neat, disgusting ways it might otherwise have panned-out flitting through your under-nourished brain. I wanted to embrace a film uninterested in placating anyone or withholding sheer hell, but it’s all too underwhelming and runs out of steam. Only Ormond retains a disturbing semblance of controlled freakishness – Pullman blows his load with twenty minutes left and then seems to have half an eye on the wrap party.

The weirdness isn’t that weird and the Lynchfactor is barely noticeable. Since that was what drew me (and how many others?) to the film, Jennifer, no chip off the old block, must surely give up the ghost after this. If Surveillance were a CCTV camera it would watch itself whilst we all got away with tedious murder.

Public Enemies

There is a scene not long into Michael Mann’s new film, Public Enemies, that pretty much embodies his entire output. Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum) is hotfooting it through woodland as Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) closes in. Floyd reaches a bluff and drops over and beyond, unseen into the trees. So: a murderous pursuit of a serious felon is, rather than merely a sweaty, grim, fraught scramble for survival, an indelibly beautiful snapshot of a gilded moment in American folklore. The past is cool? This is how we think of our icons, nostalgically, so why not film them that way?
Mann shares such proclivities with Terrence Malick; both seem deeply concerned with inexorable forces shaping man and the fight between the two. The environment is always a protagonist and things never just happen: they happen within a frame of reference, in front of a backdrop that is never irrelevant and is more likely to be the telling element of the scene in question. The world is as complicit as humans. He’s observing opposites and equals living out their lives in the way they see fit in an unforgiving landscape, an inevitable but endlessly intriguing sequence of choices and behaviour that ultimately mean what exactly? That you can’t escape yourself, the world, death, history all the time-honoured stuff. But he organises it all in a way that is palatable, attractive, calibrated and uniformly strange. He sees things from the outlaw point of view, as a Darwinist. Suits mean nothing more to him than as the attire of the epoch. He sees us as barely out of monkey suits. But he knows which look better. He seems suspicious of the superficial but he can’t help being drawn to it, a paradox that has led to a series of intensely cool, dry, neon-lit exchanges.

With Public Enemies there is nothing new from Mann, and it is hardly a revolutionary volte-face nor a risky venture. There are big, gruelling, brilliantly orchestrated, ear-blasting, breathlessly authentic gunfights aplenty for the Mann groupie, plus the usual incredible attention to period detail, dazzling camerawork and faultless ensemble performances. This is no genre-twisting surprise, nor a romantic drama with added testosterone. Is that really what you wanted anyway?

Here, Mann plays to his strengths. Indeed, resounding similarities to Heat are inarguable. Once again, we have a breakneck but hardly careening take on a bank-robber and the pursuit in his wake. This time, though, the emphasis is firmly on the ‘villain’ and, unlike with Heat, there’s little of the yin-and-yang and mutual respect implicit with the De Niro/Pacino two-handed epic. Here, we’re with Depp and Dillinger. Indeed, if the film has a flaw, it’s the uneven nature of the contrast. The ‘good’ Bale/Purvis is driven but uncharismatic, a man determined but, ultimately, out of his depth and all too aware of the fact. He’s the right side of the law but the wrong side of our empathy. (As the credits roll, we are reminded that Purvis took his own life a year beyond the events the film capture. But we never really have enough of an inkling why. Bale plays him (and Mann projects him) as a man that ultimately succeeds but with little obvious psychological impact. We’re never too worried about his fate during the film, and subsequently we’re far from unsettled to learn of his untimely demise. We didn’t see it coming and it means very little in the context of the characterisation.)

Depp’s Dillinger is part of the problem, then. He’s eminently likeable, be it as Captain Jack or here, as an indeniably benign Robin Hood-esque vault filcher. He’s content, compelled to live life spontaneously, wrecklessly, as the alternative is unthinkable – a life akin to that of Purvis, Hoover, a self-important minion, unloved and ill-remembered. He is not concerned about the future, as he’s ‘having too much fun today’. He is idolised. Those attempting to curtail their quarry are rendered bumbling, officious, grey, and the film wants us to buy this gun-toting poster boy as an understandable antidote to the machine. It’s all seductive enough to totally convince, and you won’t have time to wrestle with moral ambiguities or ethical ponderings – you’ll be too busy egging a coterie of killers and thieves on and you may wonder, during 140 minutes of unrelenting shoot-outs, break-outs and restless intermissions, how Mann has managed to make it all hang together. Even Stephen Dorff jumps on the bandwagon without stinking the place up. It works for several reasons, but the main two are these: it’s performed uniformly brilliantly (special mentions to the ever-excellent Billy Crudup as a preening paroxysm of J. Edgar Hoover and to the effervescent, mesmerising Marion Cotillard as Billie Frechette) and it’s pure story. Any characterisation is done on the hop, without digression, and the result is a pint of bourbon with no hangover. Gulp it down.

My Blueberry Nights

My Blueberry Nights is a film of two notable firsts. One: Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai's first feature to be entirely in English, rather than his native Cantonese. Two: An acting debut for velvet-voiced chanteuse Norah Jones, five-time Grammy winner and purveyor of background music for many a local coffee shop. Sadly, neither are compelling enough reasons to make this film worthwhile: it's an ill-conceived, often ridiculous spongecake of a movie, and a needless blemish on Wong's otherwise flawless canon.

Jones plays Elizabeth, who turns up at a Manhattan café one evening asking after her boyfriend. The café's owner, Jeremy (Jude Law), a Mancunian emigré who, we later learn, came to NYC to run marathons rather than eateries, recalls that the boyfriend was in the previous evening with another female, dining on pork chops. A break-up phone call later (and an unseen subway mugging which seems very easily shrugged off), and Elizabeth is ensconced at the cafe counter, wolfing down Jeremy's vastly unpopular blueberry pie and laying the tales of woe on thick. It's enough for Jez to make a telling observation: something about pies and cakes being like love and relationships...and...doors closing but not being shut forever...and...sorry, you’ve lost me. Soon, Elizabeth's off on a soul-searching jaunt through Memphis, Nevada and Las Vegas, mailing Jeremy postcards (without giving much of an indication of her whereabouts, leaving him to have to track her down by long-distance phone) and encountering a ragtag bunch of misfits along the way. As the film nears its end, she returns to the cafe for more blueberry pie (there's plenty left), more chatter and a forthright declaration that it’s all been worth it –- she’s a changed woman and she's ready for love. With belly a-full, she nods off on the counter top, Jeremy leans in for an upside-down kiss, and there's an hour and a half of your time you can't have back.

It's hard to be positive about this film. As you'd expect from Wong Kar-Wai, it's beautifully shot and it retains many of the stylistic flourishes the director's best known for. Yet if it wasn't for the gorgeous blue tint DP Darius Khondji lends to the cafe scenes, they'd almost be unwatchable, thanks to the cringeworthy cod philosophy Jeremy sees fit to peddle at many an opportunity. It's dialogue that Wong's normally able to carry off, given the mystique and stolid restraint Asian actors seem to boast in abundance -- by that, I mean you tend to believe it, whatever they're saying (well, I know I do) -- but here, with Jude Law, it's just, well, silly. Law does an OK job of the Manchester accent but he's miscast, plain and simple.
And he isn't the only one. Norah Jones, despite her best efforts, doesn't have the star quality to carry off such an indefinable role, although you could argue that she wasn't given a great deal to play with in the first place. As a character, Elizabeth -- or Beth or Lizzie, as she is called alternately with each change of setting -- lacks the sort of hook needed to engage the audience. She's given little opportunity to display feeling, emotion, ambition or any other fundamental aspect of her personality, and when she has it's all done with propriety, as if she'd be scolded for letting go. It could be down to the screenplay -- written by Wong and American crime writer Lawrence Block -- but you imagine a more established actress might have been able to tease out something that we, as the audience, could sympathise with. You don't much care what Elizabeth’s doing, where she's going or why -- as a protagonist, she’s unlikely to linger long in the memory.
David Strathairn and Rachel Weisz both make appearances in Memphis, where Elizabeth is working two jobs: waitress and barmaid. Strathairn plays Arnie, a cop by day and boozehound by night, trying unsuccessfully both to sober up and win back ex-wife Sue Lynne, a Southern floozy played by Weisz. Again, the casting feels off-kilter (we know Weisz is talented, but couldn’t they find an American to play Sue Lynne?), although both actors do decent enough turns. Strathairn almost channels Dustin Hoffman with some of Arnie's tics and quirks, while Weisz has the film’s weightiest emotional scene and delivers as you'd expect.
But it’s Natalie Portman, as high-rolling poker player Leslie, who brings some much-needed sass and colour to what is, at this point, a fairly dreary affair. She’s not a particularly well-imagined character, but she's sharp, snappy and fun and it’s a welcome relief -- although, by introducing the suspense and adventure of a high-stakes card game and subsequent road trip to Vegas, you can’t help thinking Wong’s seen it himself: that there’s been very little carrying the film and even less to take it to a natural and satisfying conclusion.

It’s frustrating that Wong Kar-Wai’s first excursion into English-speaking movies was something of a wasted journey. (Indeed, his following feature was a re-edited version of his 1994 wuxia film, Ashes of Time.) Arguably an attempt to crack the Western market, and to resonate with the scores of moviegoers averse to ‘anything with subtitles’, My Blueberry Nights can be marked down as a blip, a failed experiment, the doughy mess left over from a recipe that, deep down, just wasn’t going to work.

Anvil! The Story Of Anvil

Rock is surely no place for a 50-year-old school-dinner delivery guy. Even a 50-year-old school-dinner delivery guy whose band have evolved not a jot since they were on the same bill as Bon Jovi in a frenzy of adulation in Japan 25 years ago.
Anvil were ‘on the cusp of greatness’ and ‘destined for success’ at one point, idolised by their peers (particularly the drummer, Robb Reiner, who was, at one time, apparently considered the best metal drummer in the world by Lars Ulrich amongst others) and riding a metal wave that launched a whole slew of bands. Everyone, it seems, but them. What went wrong?
The film doesn’t really answer that, and it’s not something you’ll be too worried about discovering whilst watching: you will, assuredly, simply want them to have any kind of recognition, if only for the 30-year slog of a career that has left singer ‘Lipps’ looking like a 60-year-old crack bum and mooching drummer Reiner in therapy, trudging after his frontman to whatever’s next, if anything.
We get the lowdown on Lipps’ job (‘some days we get pizza then the next day shepherds pie, then maybe they’ll flip it and we’ll get shepherds pie then pizza’) and we get the point: this sucks compared to mugging away to an endless throng of mad Japanese metalheads. PATHOS, DUDE! We get Reiner, wearing the kind of expression you might otherwise find on the face of an orphan peering through an archetypal family window on Christmas Day, showing us his ‘hideaway’ and his Hopper-mimicking paintings. DEEP, DUDE! Both are extremely likeable guys, remarkably sane considering their misfortune and admirably bereft of the kind of bitterness and regret that would surely be considered fair.
We get the mad girlfriend-of-the-bassist promoter, who doesn’t do the best job leading them across Europe to various sticky-floored, ill-populated shitholes - on one hilarious occasion to play for an enormous headbanger on an armchair. We get the skint reality of them trying, with zilch capital, to pay for the new album with the producer of their only well-recorded stuff, a nostalgic, chubby opportunist who has an amp that goes up to 11 and is strangely redolent of Jonathan King (big sis’ stumps up the cash. FAMILY, DUDE!).
In the end, we’re with this pretty hopeless band of crazies trying to revisit past glories all the way. And it all ends up fairly awesome.