Film Review: Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

This review contains self-mutilation, apparently.

In the Guardian G2 supplement a few weeks ago, fashion writer Hadley Freeman spoke out in defence of Brüno. Freeman was responding to the criticism aimed at the film by vox-pop gobbers and journos alike claiming not to have seen the film but criticising it nonetheless. Freeman’s argument was succinct – if you ground your opinion in individual, first-hand experience you will see your lazy prejudices recede.

And, obviously heeding Freeman’s article, a writer for the Daily Mail has published a piece amongst deriding Lars von Trier’s Antichrist without actually seeing it. Consequentially, the quiff himself Dr. Mark Kermode reasoned on Radio Five Live recently that you can’t deride art you haven’t experienced for yourself. But with the Internet and advanced media technologies such as TV news and portable audio-visual gizmos, the ability to wet your toe with a plethora of pies is the gift of the age.

The initial reactions to Antichrist have been in lieu of the fact that it contains explicit self-mutilation and torture. I don’t know what makes this more barbaric-sounding than Eli Roth’s Hostel movies, or the Saw lot. You’ll find as many horrible though non-sexual scenes in Mesrine: Killer Instinct (Jean-François Richet, 2009), also more cruel, and racially motivated. Perhaps Antichrist has hurt so many feelings because it stars two very convincing actors, because it is as many parts beautiful as it is unwatchable and as boring as it is horrifically rivetting. Sounds like life, right?

Willem Dafoe is He, and Charlotte Gainsbourg She, the couple the film is based around. But you probably knew that. Their son falls to his death from the window of their home in the opening sequence, a scene von Trier presents in black and white, with Handel playing over the top. It’s uber slow-motion, and, if you’d come in late to the film, you might think it was a perfume advert but for the penetration shot and the child falling from a ledge.

Gainsbourg is braced with grief and Dafoe makes the decision to step away from his role as partner to play the therapist. He runs through little exercises that don’t work. Gradually there are signs of a severe and violent side to Gainsbourg’s character, one night she cracks her forehead repeatedly against the rim of the toilet bowl. Mostly, her behaviour flares up and culminates in her mounting Dafoe, as if in reaction to her suffering. Hence the claims of misogyny by some critics.

He discusses whether a change of scenery might help, a place that she’s afraid to visit. The story moves into the woodland, an horrendously glowering mass of pine and oak trees and face-high ferns that dress the forest floor. This is no refuge. In one quietly comical scene He is distracted by an agitated fern, upon closer inspection he finds Fantastic Mr. Fox eating his own innards, ‘Chaos will reign,’ sayeth the fox. And it showers.

The couple stay in a Tarkovskian dacha reminiscent of the summer house in Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1974), and perhaps that’s why von Trier dedicates the movie to the Russian. I don’t see how a film like Antichrist, with such fine cinematography and appreciation of the frame – barring the obvious use of handheld footage of the couple – can be dedicated to someone like Tarkovsky as a joke. If Three Colours: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowkski, 1994) is Amelie in hell, then Antichrist is in part Mirror’s antipode.

I don’t go along too much with Peter Bradshaw’s theory of Antichrist being a joke on the director’s part, though von Trier will enjoy the limelight shed by the mob. Gainsbourg’s manic sexual episodes are symbolic of a troubled woman, and von Trier hints that her trauma may not be entirely to do with her loss. She seems reactionary in her constant mounting of her partner. These acts of mindless indulgence on her part are reminiscent of modern men and women: ‘Let’s fill the aching void inherent with either alcohol, cocaine or a penis.’ One way or another.

The violence is nasty (had to cover my eyes) but it’s kind of necessary to make a point. It doesn’t make nice entertainment, but WTF, cinema isn’t entirely about entertainment. It’s a scientific medium in its construction – the lens as a glass to magnify – it can offer an insight that is entirely necessary in modern, post-Second World War society. While Antichrist isn’t Friday Night Fun at the multi-plex and goes against what the majority of cinemagoers desire (escape from the anxiety of real life) at least I can invest in it. It’s refreshing to see a movie in 2009 that a director stamps his authority on.

Film Review: Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi, 2009)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

This review contains stereotypes.

Snobbery is a difficult game. It’s much like ‘the game’ played out in the Wire, the superlative TV series about a police department struggling to overcome a drugs gang in Baltimore, Maryland. If you’re a music snob, you’re nice to the tax-payer (someone who likes music in itself, will listen to anything, without putting themselves on a pedestal because they like something) but if some m*****f***** steps to you telling you that Glasvegas’ debut record was superior to say Deerhunters’, then you pop that foo’. In this case, ‘pop’ means to either walk away from the antagonist or scythe them down with a pistol-esque glare (slowly, all night, every time they speak).

What about film snobbery? That shit ain’t easy. And in the case of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell it’s impossible. This movie is for anyone who goes to the cinema because they love the experience, sitting amidst strangers for an hour or two, whilst having their face ripped off by intense surround sound. Sarah Wharton is resident Horror-critic here, but for this layman of the genre it’s a nice place to start. What’s most attractive about this disgusting, loud movie is its wonderful sense of humour. All the scares are executed (loudly) with an appreciation of their stupidity. And at this particular screening each screech was followed with a chorus of laughter.

Stereotypes are abound here, a blonde damsel in distress battling a gypsy pensioner with the devil’s curse upon her. But blondie – Alison Lohman as Christine Brown, Drag Me to Hell’s battered protagonist – is made of steel, and this loans clerk (pining after the vacant Assistant Manager’s desk) takes something of a constant beating. This hiding is the product of a curse put upon her coat button by Lorna Raver (Mrs. Ganush). This after Christine reluctantly declines Mrs. Ganush a third extension on a mortgage loan that’s allowing her to keep her home. Christine’s attempts to impress her boss by standing up to Mrs. Ganush’s plea backfires, so cue a quite extraordinary 5pm brawl in Christine’s car between herself and a satanic Mrs. Ganush.

These mini-battles are numerous, and the appearance of a man-goat’s shadow at windows and beneath doorways is a constant fixture of poor Christine’s downtime. You sense Raimi hinting at suburban fears of breaking and entering, but also of racial boundaries, the horrors of Eastern European mystics (a more sinister, subverted fear of Slavs perhaps). Any film that has a billy-goat possessed at a seance and screaming ‘You fucking whore!’ has to be good. Even better in the way that Raimi carries the amusement of it all. If only hell was this much fun!

And for any deplorable elements of this movie (if taken seriously, which really it shouldn’t be) there’s a guilt-edged point about consumerism at the film’s close. Catherine sells all her electrical goods, her jewellery, attempting to raise cash for the goat-swearing seance to come. It looks like things might be ok for this girl, investing in something spiritual – rather than egotistical like a promotion at someone else’s expense – but damn girl just can’t help huh-self. Perhaps the moral of the story is that if you walk all over the little guys, the phlegmy old ladies, there’s a foul-mouthed CGI goat ready and waiting to barrage you for eternity. This film snob just took note.

Film Review: Synecdoche, New York (Charlie Kaufman, 2008)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

This review wants a new sub-genre in American cinema.

OK, let’s invent a new sub-genre, or at least give this type of film a name: ‘Hollyosophy’ (it’s that or else Phillywood, Sophwood, or Philosowood, the last of which sounds like the soon-to-be-leaked sex tape of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir). What is Hollyosophy? It’s a strain of philosophical Hollywood movies, it’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry, 2006), The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), Synecdoche, New York. It’s a cluster of films interested in the nature of reality, linked by director Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman as writer, or Jim Carrey as the baffled lead. These films are often silly but thoughtful Hollywood movies which, with the help of computer generated imagery, fit into a neat, Hollyosophical package. It’s Socrates in sneakers, Nietszche in négligé (which gives new meaning to the ‘Freudian slip’). But Synecdoche, New York is a Foucault fart.

What Gondry and Kaufman nailed, Hollyosophically, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was visually-compelling mainstream thought-house cinema with the pseudo-indie sexiness of Kate Winslet and Kirsten Dunst, along with mondo-protagonist Jim Carrey. It’s also rather heartfelt and pretty, it made many a man reach for the sugar paper and pritt-stick. There was a gorgeous tune from pre-Scientology Beck, too: ‘Everyone’s got to learn sometime,’ was the refrain.

Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theatre director convinced that he’s dying, so much so that Charlie Kaufman, director of Synecdoche, New York, allows us to inspect his hero’s poo. Subsequently, the murky shade of Caden’s poop is an aspect of Kaufman’s rather polluted mise-en-scene. Indeed, Kaufman exploits the physical unattractiveness of Caden (arguably a near-perfect rendition of himself, directorially) by filming in near constant close-up. A sense of claustrophobia comes through in admiring the new-to-Kafka Hazel (Samantha Morton), the vacant-to-starry-eyed Michelle Williams as Claire Keen, and Seymour Hoffman’s paunch.

Caden’s complaining is successful on two fronts: alienating Adele (Catherine Keener) and thus his darling daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) (all the way over to Berlin), and secondly in getting beautiful younger women interested in him, namely Claire and Hazel. Caden’s lamentable woes are less from his own loneliness (which he tirelessly, forever underlines) and more his struggles with women: romantically with Morton, artistically with Williams, and emotionally with Adele. Though most damning is Olive’s disappearance with her mother, and her ‘conversion’ to Lesbianism at the age of ten by Adele’s Nabokovian chum Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

Seymour Hoffman’s Caden never learns, though. Unlike Carrey’s non-diegetic interior muttering in Eternal Sunshine, Caden never shuts up, there’s no measure to his flagrantly self-absorbed moaning. This probably is intended, but it’s just such a drag. Kaufman and Seymour Hoffman have created a really irritating character, but can you criticise them for that? It’s not a rhetorical question because I don’t know. Do you know? It might be a brilliant performance from Seymour Hoffman, and, via The Savages, he’s fine-tuned the moaner, down from somewhat likeable to entirely annoying. But even if his performance as a douche-bag is convincing, there are real problems with the latter stages of Synecdoche, New York in terms of coherence.

One thing clear enough in reading Synecdoche, New York textually is the magnitude of narrative threads running through it, if not the film’s attempt to regurgitate minor events. Caden tries to reconstruct his life, his many loves and apparent losses, in a gigantic old hangar. The sprawling mess of a ‘play’ never meets its audience in the conventional sense. It remains a work in progress for over seventeen-years. This plot line will signal, for much of its audience, the movie’s descent into nonsense. Kaufman has created what some might call a masterpiece, whereas others might question the obstinate second half that completely belies the notion of film as mild entertainment.

The Russian director Andrei Tarkvosky claimed that Robert Bresson was his favourite filmmaker because he achieved simplicity in cinema. What would Tarkovsky (or indeed Bresson) make of a movie like Synechdoche, New York. The little Tarkovsky in my head would comment on the nationality of the filmmaker and its lead, and call this a very American style of filmmaking. Aspects of self-indulgence are what Tarkovsky disliked about cinema most of all and he didn’t even have to contend with sexy blockbusters, he didn’t live to see the nineties. Tarkovsky’s public writings on film advise budding filmmakers to let the images speak for themselves, rather than trying to make a point, or the director desperately expressing an opinion. He believed you should present an event as clearly and plainly as you can, just as short story writer Anton Chekhov once told his chum Gorky not to write that ‘the waves crashed against the beach as if in anger’, or ‘the rain fell like tear drops’. The idea is that images have connotations all on their lonesome. So, Chekhov or Tarkovsky would probably cuss Kaufman out. Though not really.

But what’s the point in bringing up dead artists and comparing them to Synecdoche, New York? It’s an attempt to get some sort of cultural or philosophical (rather than Hollyosophical) perspective on the clutter amassed by Charlie Kaufman towards the end of his film. It might just be that here is the sort of film which is a bi-product of a self-obsessed age. I’m talking about this age, the one we live in right now, where many of us are in constant, artificial self-reflection. The idea that the internet, for example, has improved the quality of our social or individual lives is, IMO, false. There are many Caden Cotards among us, inspecting a different kind of poop, the kind smeared over interfaces or ‘walls’ as they’re called. And in the event of this constant, meticulous self- and physical-examination – am I good enough, am I hairy enough, am I too quiet? – is that you become a mini-pervert who makes bubbling boils of bug-bites and a cavernous wound of a splinter. LOL.

Generally, Kaufman’s Hollyosophy provides laughs with Caden’s uber-self-awareness, but these chuckles aren’t enough come the 120 minute mark. And in Synecdoche, New York’s case, it was a point ushered in with a painstaking sigh.

Film Review: No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

This review eventually gets monetary.

The Coen brothers’ now infamous No Country for Old Men has perhaps the greatest opening forty-minutes in modern American cinema. It’s not unlike that of No Country’s Oscar competitor There Will be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007). Both movies begin out there on the carn-darn American frontier, the wilderness that Christopher Columbus parked his gosh-darn boat on back in the day. Each opening is slow and seductive, with Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will be Blood digging for oil, and No Country for Old Men’s Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, passing across the land to discover a scene of post-drugs-gang-carnage-warfare. [P.S. notice how only recently does the Western world care about Mexicans dying if it's in the form of a virus that might bother us over here, rather than the hundreds of grizzly, drugs-related killings that make up a far more serious epidemic]. The cinematography that constructs this sequence early in No Country is the spellbinding element. Instead of a constant shot-reverse-shot between Brolin’s stunned-expression!!!1! and the mutilated face of a corpse (Goonies-esque), the Coens allow their camera to linger, and the microphones pick up the buzzin’ flies milling around the feast of rotting flesh both human and canine.

The starkest of images here is Brolin’s Llewelyn happening upon a theoretical Garden of Eden away from the scene of the shoot-out. A solitary tree sits atop a barren knoll, a figure slumped against its stump. Upon closer inspection – and these opening scenes really are a case of closer inspection for both protagonist and spectator – the figure has bled to death, and at his feet is Llewelyn’s very own barrel of oil. Inside the briefcase is a stash of cash which he makes off with, but hidden amidst these dollars is a tracking device. This device directs none other than Satan himself, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, on Llewelyn’s trail. Bardem’s performance is a debut for many of us, an introduction to this quite brilliant actor. Here he’s a resigned but quietly deranged George Clooney, kind of handsome in that death is sexy style. But death ain’t sexy. It’s explicitly violent in this country minus old men and the killings are numerous.

Tommy Lee Jones is the sheriff of the frontier (Ed Tom Bell) having to clean up after these pests, and he’s altogether more resigned than Bardem the executioner. Indeed, Bell’s significance is his retrospective role in the film, not as a storyteller, but as the sigh that comes after the fact. Perhaps the film is titled after him, and in a land where violence reigns, what can an old man do but take off his hat and sit on down. The police here are useless, they’re brutalised by Bardem. The concept of police enforcement is undermined by the idea that the only way they could ever actually enforce law is by matching the brutality of the drugs cartels and rogue killers such as Bardem. But it’s also a matter of money, and in No Country for Old Men, money does more than talk – it gets every crazy mother after you – and in the end it gets you killed.

But what is money, really. For those among us who’ve had problems getting even basic employment in the past twelve-months, it’s something we’re not privy to, but are willed by our peers to discuss at length. In one painstaking and baffling advert for vodka that’s currently doing the rounds, its soundtrack claims that ‘money makes the world go round’, against images of cinema-goers kissing the cheeks of ticket sellers. Money, like the internet, is 24-hours. You can get it out at a cash point – if you have some – at 3am in the morning, you don’t have to wait for the bank manager to open his doors the next day. In fact, with a certain credit card conglomerate’s campaign to convince the public (with tongue-mildly-in-cheek) to forget about physical money altogether, finance has become a figment of my imagination. The job you work is worked only on the grounds that you have faith in your employer’s promise to buffer your invisible account with invisible monies witnessed, nowadays, as pithy digits through a smudged and smashed cash machine screen (thanks, Hard-Fi). But, if Joel and Ethan Coen teach us anything, it’s that the banker ain’t the wanker, I am. All the problems encountered with money are there because I choose to participate in an advanced-Capitalist society. Idiot. Though of course No Country for Old Men is far more entertaining and Oscar-worthy than the rant above.

Film Review: Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood
This review constains Idealism and spoilers.

During the final deluge of academic work belonging to my university degree, I bought two Mark Twain books. One was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the classic novel, and the other was Roughing It, written by Twain as he travelled around the southern United States. In the final days of essay writing and editing, these two books gleamed from their spot underneath my desk, I couldn’t wait to read something non-theoretical again. Huck Finn was very good, I ate it up quickly, but Roughing It was more of a slog, and in the final stages of the book, with Twain’s rather dull account of molten lava, I couldn’t wait for it to finish. Into the Wild has spoken to me more closely than Roughing It could.

I have never felt such an urge to leave the city behind, to do as Henry David Thoreau did, or as experimental folk-singer Justin Vernon did to record his debut as Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago. Thoreau is quoted by the protagonist of Into the Wild, Chris (Emile Hirsch), a 23-year-old post-grad (snap): ‘Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.’ It’s a line from Walden that’s also emblazoned on the cover of the Penguin Great Ideas mini-volume Where I Lived and What I Lived For. Thoreau’s beautiful idea, which he managed to achieve and describe so well is a tragic tale here for young Chris. But that’s only really a footnote, because Into the Wild is an exceptionally-shot movie that charters a vast trek across a beautiful country. That it’s a true story is a fact unknown until the end, and that it’s directed by Sean Penn is another example of his thirst for ideas, for the stories of tragic individuals. It doesn’t match The Assassination of Richard Nixon (Niels Mueller, 2004) for pain-value or grit, but it’s Penn musing on death again. He’s interested, and so am I.

Chris is fed up with ‘things’, with the burden his parents’ troubled marriage hands down to him and his sister Carine (Jena Malone). Chris burns his cash, gives his 24,000 dollar college fund to Oxfam and embarks on a Quixotic journey across America. The opening scenes of Into the Wild are of Alaska, how Chris got here is recounted in stylishly edited sequences that make sure the narration is never boring. Carine narrates, never questioning her brother’s reasoning, only recounting the violent quarrels of her parents, underlining why Chris’s disappearance into the world is more desirable than being stuck at home.

Perhaps Chris is similar to Timothy Treadwell, better known as a man eaten by bears in Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005). To be ‘happy’, it’s a belief in yourself that you need, an inner calm which can transform the world around you. Chris oversteps this mark. The moment that he’s assaulted by a police office, or border patrol, as he sits happily on the empty carriage of a freight train the fun is over. This is the harbinger, the prophecy. If only Chris had gone on home.

The problem is that he loses sight of his goal, and the desire to live alone and off the land in Alaska is his downfall. What Chris strives for is greatness, the greatness he reads about in Tolstoy’s novels, in Thoreau. Personally, it’s Thoreau’s pal Ralph Waldo Emerson who stands over this film: ‘The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him.’

Film Review: The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood
This review is unsure of itself.

Here is a dour though accurate portrayal of the strife between two adult siblings, underwritten by the decay of their demented father. Two fine actors compete here as brother and sister - Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jon Savage, Laura Linney as Wendy Savage - a simmering feud that amounts to a tally of who is the more selfish. Jon is a lecturer in the midst of writing a book about Bertolt Brecht, the great dramatist, while Wendy ‘temps for money’ and is a ‘theatre person’ in her spare time. Their father Lenny (Philip Bosco) is left in their care after the death of his girlfriend, and the painful procedure of selecting a home for him to effectively die in haunts The Savages. Both Wendy and Jon are middle-aged and single, though they each flirt with marital commitment: Jon with a Polish intellectual whose visa runs out, and Wendy with a married theatre director who arrives on her doorstep in search of sex. ‘Why don’t you marry her?’ Wendy asks of Jon’s departing lover, but Jon’s perhaps too much a cynic, or too much the purist to marry tactically.

This is a well-shot film, and with Seymour Hoffman and Linney on screen it’s very watchable. But it’s terribly unhappy, too. The inner-city scenes are akin to those of Michel Gondry’s American romantic movies such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though lacking the childlike innocence of a woolgathering Jim Carrey. Arizona is where Mr. Savage - Lenny - has to be collected from and it’s presented as a sunburnt suburb where elderlies drive golf carts in the streets, where the glare of the sun is mind-numbing. On the other hand you have Boston where much of the story takes place, and where Jon and Wendy find a new home for their father. Boston is a dark, wintry place, and drained of all colour there’s not a speck of sunlight let alone an Arizonian glare.

It’s ok to make a film depressing, I’m totally OK with that but there has to be a release. I’m not talking about a camp-as-Christmas Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997) comedy-holocaust release. Just brief moments to lighten the gloom. I believe there is a basic, if not fundamental sense of humour in a person, if not in me. And that’s what costs The Savages some of the richness it tries to achieve. It’s that these characters are building up so much stress but things never really boil over. If things fail to explode it’s because of intermittent moments of comedy, but they ain’t here! Perhaps The Savages doesn’t lack a sense of humour but wit instead. In Laura Linney you have an actress who deals in self-deprecating comedy, The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005) for example. But in parts this self-deprecation becomes unsavoury wretchedness (I suppose that’s pretty rich coming from me, Interiors is a current favourite of mine). It just feels like what Tamara Jenkins has tried to do with these characters comes off a bit sulky, unrealistic in Wendy’s case. It may even lack the beauty of real tragedy, you know.

What troubles me after watching The Savages is that I don’t know what’s wrong with it, there just is something wrong with it. That’s the ultimate failure of a review of any kind, never mind the film: there’s something you don’t like about it, but, er, dunno what that is. Perhaps this cold film suffers because it has such a monstrous, actorly-duo in Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney. These siblings are savages, and they star-the-hell-out-of this savagely glum movie.

Film Review: Mr. Woodcock (Craig Gillespie, 2007)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood
This review contains nostalgia.

Being fifteen was tough. I had no luck with girls, no money, lots of time and a constant fear of having my Nokia 3210 stolen by people bigger than me. Wait, things haven’t cha–look, if there was one little joy in my life it was Seann William Scott. I saw American Pie (Paul Weitz, 1999) on the last day of school before our Easter holiday. I’d tried to catch it, or sneak it, in the local cinema but couldn’t get in. It was a 15, dude. But American Pie wasn’t really about Seann William Scott, it was more to do with that pie mutilated by Jim (Jason Biggs), while his mum and dad were out. Indeed, that movie was more about a lonely young dude (played by a twenty-something Briggs), and not about Steve Stiffler, the Stiffmeister (William Scott) getting all the chicks.

Though that’s not really why I looked up to Stiffler, it was his confidence that made him a sort of demi-God, his arrogance. How could teenagers be so confident? It was unthinkable. I recall riding home on the bus having just seen American Pie 2 (James B. Rogers, 2001) and devising a plan with friends, trying to think of a way to throw a Stiffler-esque party on a beach somewhere. We never had a party as glamorous as American Pie 2’s sandy soiree, but we entertained the idea for long enough for it to be satisfying. Watching Role Models the other week, it dawned on me what an idol that man was to us fifteen-year-olds who were there at the right time, pubescence, to appreciate the greatness of this actor.

Sitting down to watch Mr. Woodcock, it didn’t matter who was in this film or what it was about, it had the Stiffmeister. Who knew how many people he’d tell to ‘fuck off’, or how embarrassed he’d be by having some kid urinate on him and mistake it for champagne. Stiffler always comes out on top, he was a soldier. But I’ve grown up (a bit) now, and Seann William Scott is (a bit of) a changed man. He isn’t alongside characters like Shit-break anymore, instead he’s kickin’ it with Susan Sarandon as his mother, Beverly, and the stoney-faced Billy-Bob Thornton as Jasper Woodcock. The film begins in a gymnasium, and it’s already clear that Mr. Woodcock is a dick. He gives a line of pre-pubescent pupils a lecture on the greatness of the basketball, before hurling it at them.

It turns out that John Farley (Seann William Scott) was one of those kids, but now he’s grown up and has published a self-help book entitled ‘Let Go’. John’s a bestselling author, and in receipt of a homegrown award, he returns to stay with his mother Beverly. Mr. Farley died some years ago, and Beverly seems to have found a patriarch to fill the fatherly role - Jasper frickin’ Woodcock. John is still a nobody to Woodcock, and though the teacher doesn’t remember the pupil, John is painfully aware of the beast that Woodcock is. In fact, much of this film is ugly jokes about Woodcock sleeping with John’s widowed mother. But, give the man credit, there are no misplaced ‘boobies’ ala Role Models, or the rest of William Scott’s generally flatulent body of work.

John and Woodcock reignite their feud, John’s self-help ego dissolves amidst his rage. ‘Don’t meddle in other people’s lives’, he says to himself, like a mantra, before meddling in his mother’s love life. It’s a pretty cute take on the concept - everyone’s fallible to the kind of behaviour on show here - jealousy, lying, breaking and entering. But that’s about it in the way of cuteness, bar a few laughs, Mr. Woodcock turns on its own hinge and musters a change of heart, tying things up around the 90-minute mark. It’s strange to see that Seann William Scott is growing up, and though he’s in a film with a sexually-connotive title, he’s toned things down somewhat, and I suppose it’s about time I did the same.

Film Review: Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007)

By Daniel Greenwood
This review contains spoilers.
via Atlas Film

Technology today - the Internet, television, DAB radio, mobile phones, mp3 players, electric shavers, curling tongs, satnavs, super hoovers - it’s everywhere. But you can turn it off. It’s also at the heart of this really rather fine film from director Tony Gilroy, a dude who had his hand in all the Bourne pies, and in Michael Clayton you can tell. The same murky throbbing that follows Matt Damon around foreign cities accompanies George Clooney (Clayton), as he deals well-enough with a gambling habit, huge debts, and worst of all an evil corporation - U-North. The face of these evil scum who hate human life and love money is Tilda Swinton, one of the film’s main roles performed by Brits pretending to be Americans. They pretend well-enough, Oscar well-enough for Swinton and Oscar near-enough for the other Brit, Tom Wilkinson, as madman Arthur Edens. But as ever it’s Clooney who steals the show with his espresso chugging jaw-line and exceptional deviation between witty and damaged.

Michael Clayton’s car is blown up early in the film, but in a Memento-esque (Christopher Nolan, 2000) manoeuvre, Gilroy gives us the ending first and then backtracks four days to witness the run-up to this fiery event. The bomb has been planted by two men who span the whole film techonologically f***ing with people who are close the to U-North’s uber-law suit. The equipment they have is a real threat to personal privacy and to human rights - this has to be a message from Michael Clayton. But there is a superlative twist at the movie’s death that underlines the premise that there’s a balance in the universe which also applies to technological advances. They can be used for good and evil. Whether Michael Clayton as a film tells us of whether it’s of use at all, is something entirely up to you or I. It works against Clayton, but then he uses it with the right people (police) in tow for it to be seen as positive.

Clayton has pissed some people off, big time. Know why? He plays it straight, brother’s a janitor. If Clayton taught me a lesson it’s that you got to use what you can to do good. You got to get your hands dirty. But Clayton’s not the primary school janitor or caretaker, he doesn’t have a dog called Blue who accompanies him in the corridors he steps proudly down with keys jangling on his belt. No, Clayton’s got Jason Bourne-syndrome - people want to blow him up. God, it’s hard being handsome.

As with any film about law or court cases there’s a lot of talk about stipulations and, well, laws. Gilroy does well to keep the film bubbling along, there are enough horrible individuals here to breed ire and thus interest. Swinton is Queen of my hatred as Karen Crowder, a character who everyone loves to hate and then feel a slight tinge of sympathy for. She’s terribly unhappy. Gilroy gives his audience the pleasure of witnessing Karen ready herself for public facades by intersplicing these images of her lonely preparation with the events she’s rehearsing for. What you have are rather scathing interpretations of public speaking in this kind of corporate arena - are these people serious? Karen says in a video interview that she loves what she does, but she also has to conjure this up as she dresses alone before hand (in another of the interspliced scenes). She has to convince herself of something she doesn’t herself believe. She’s as clueless about her life as Arthur is deranged in his underpants at a board meeting. No wonder Swinton won an award, she’s more even more convincing for appearing so painfully unconvincing.

Unlike Memento - *increases firewall protection* - Michael Clayton succeeds with the backwards storytelling routine. The film would have stood-up without the early, though only partial, revelation but it certainly gives it a sense of novelty. What you have in George Clooney is a serious actor who will get improve through his autumnal years. He’s got enough money now to experiment, just like the evil corporations.

Film Review: Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood
This review is depressing (and contains spoilers).

The fun thing about watching a Woody Allen film is digesting it afterwards, chewing it over with the teeth in your head. But many people won’t get to the ‘afterwards’ part of Interiors, a film that is completely overcast. In three years - 1977, 1978 and 1979 - Woody Allen came up with Annie Hall, Interiors, and Manhattan. Holy carp, that’s three films better than any of the trillion some Hollywood directors make. In between Annie Hall and Manhattan, two little charmers, is one great big stinking misery fest. And you know what? I think it’s my favourite.

It’s a film about three sisters - Renata (Diane frickin’ Keaton), Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) and Flyn (Kristin Griffith). These sisters are torn apart by the protracted, messy divorce of their parents. Their mother Eve (Geraldine Page) takes the separation badly. She’s clinically depressed, introduced in a scene early on in the film where she obsesses about the positioning of a table lamp against a certain shade of wallpaper in Joey’s apartment. It’s unnerving to see someone so fragile to the colour palette of furniture. These small incidents are impressed against the harsh truth that her husband Arthur (E.G. Marshall) doesn’t want to get back together with his wife, he wants to marry another woman. Indeed, he does, and this wedding is the grand climax to Interiors, played out beneath the roaring waves of a bitter, Bergman-esque bay.

Renata is a successful poet. Her husband Frederick (Richard Jordan) is jealous of her, claiming her praise of his own work (which the critics ravage) to be lying on her part. The man’s a fool. He’s a drunk and an adulterer, typified by a scene where he pretty much attempts to rape Flyn, the youngest of the sisters, a beautiful and successful actress. But she ain’t happy, furtively snorting cocaine in the garage late into the wedding night. Renata toils with her lifestyle, what does she care if she has some poems left over when she’s dead for other people to enjoy. She’s unhappy with her life, almost oblivious to the small shape of her daughter that seems to flit on the fringes of Interiors.

Allen’s deftest manoeuvre here is his use of sound, the film’s complete lack of music. The only music that’s heard is from a record put on by Arthur’s newly wedded wife Pearl (Maureen Stapleton) - so it’s within the film. It’s quite clever, all the sound is interior. The crashing, early morning waves are terrifying, it’s as if Allen’s layered them over one another, and it gives the effect of fearing the water might come crashing through the screen. The action on screen is unclear and I found myself squirming, edging closer and closer attempting to see what was going on.

You could write a billion-word dissertation on these sisters, every performance is bang-on, every little thing about Interiors is aching and creaking, built on shambolic foundations. In the real world, people can’t get jobs, but here are people with a choice about their lifestyles - people who can make a living from art - forsooth! But man Allen has conjured some desperately unhappy characters in this elegaic, unrelenting piece of cinema.

Film Review: Scoop (Woody Allen, 2006)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

Scarlett Johansson is Sondra Pranksy, a bubbly, inquisitive student attempting to unravel the mystery of the 'tarot card killer'. Sondra attends a magic show starring Sid Waterman (Woody Allen) and, invited onto the stage, she partakes in a vanishing trick. Subsequently, she's visited by the ghost of Lovejoy (Ian McShane). Lovejoy appears and gives Sondra the scoop of the decade. He informs The Other Boleyn Girl that it is in fact Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who is the 'tarot card killer'. So, The Girl with the Pearl Earring goes in search of this, 'the scoop of the decade', and in finding Wolverine she falls in love with him. Hugh Jackman's character is buff, so it doesn't matter if it's obvious that he's the killer. In the mean time, magician Sid Waterman is doing card tricks and sometimes he's left alone to joke with himself. He isn't making cutesy attempts at breaching the fourth-wall or anything. In fact, it's not quite clear what he's doing. Thus does that very same confusion seep into this review.

In The Guardian's G2 supplement last May critic Joe Queenan wrote an article entitled 'Europe, please stop funding this man'. This man is Woody Allen. Queenan was pleading with European film companies to stop falling for Allen's ploys. The article gives the sense of Allen as a criminal on the run from the American intellectual hegemony, a bit like Roman Polanski steering clear of U.S. borders. It's like Allen is an infection, and Europe now has an itchy rash:

The ex cathedra pronouncement that Woody Allen comedies were no longer in vogue came as no great shock to most regular moviegoers, and certainly not to people under the age of 30 (sticklers who prefer comedies that are actually funny), as it had been widely reported in other outlets that the once-revered actor/ writer/director hadn't made a film worth seeing in years, and nothing vaguely approaching the quality of Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, or even Bullets Over Broadway. People didn't talk about Woody Allen movies any more, not even people who had been breathlessly waiting for his latest release since their university days.

By watching Scoop you can see Queenan's point. It's peculiar to think that Woody Allen directed Manhattan, a paean to that part of New York, shot in glorious black and white film stock and underwritten with a Gershwin score. It's peculiar that Allen is that same director because Scoop is so bad. The quality of the camera work is dire, not that the movement of the camera was ever the most important part of an Allen film, the script or witty improvisation always was a greater pull. It's also to do with the acting too, which is diabolical. Scarlett Johansson has one mood - inquisitive - and it doesn't matter if she's pretty, she's not worth watching. Her character is supposed to be annoying and is thus even more annoying. Her closest friend Vivian (Romola Garai) is a young woman who talks simply of 'fit blokes', prancing around like the secondary school drama student that she is. Sorry, but middle class, posh London girls don't act like this. They're irritating, yes, but never wooden.

Scoop plays like a poor Three Men and a Little Lady (Emile Ardolini, 1990), at least that has some humour in it, at least something is at stake (classic altar chasing stuff). Allen is annoying here, it's sad to watch, in that it's embarrassing. Indeed, the obligatory middle-to-upper-class English country house scene is awful, and Wolverine has never looked so relaxed. He's better with mutton chops on his face, cutting people. It remains to be seen whether Allen has 'returned to form' with Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2009), but any upward curvature is no excuse for this bore-fest.

Film Review: Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)

via Atlas Film
By Daniel Greenwood

It’s strange to call Andrei Rublev an epic, a term modern cinema will attribute to vast landscapes clogged with soldiers, usually seen as specks from a computer enhanced birds-eye-view. And Andrei Rublev’s first scene has something of the sort, but here the figures are real, as are the wild horses seen by a man escaping in a hot air balloon. The modern epic is the Lord of the Rings Trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003), a gargantuan trio of films released across the space of three years. Perhaps where Lord of the Rings is epic in its visual grandeur, Andrei Rublev is epic in its spirit. Like all of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, it feels like there are unfathomable depths to the characters and also the plot that doesn’t ever really surface.

Little is known about Andrei Rublev, the fifteenth-century Russian painter, and so Tarkovsky’s Rublev (Anatoli Solonitsyn) is a vision of the painter as imagined by the director. In many ways Tarkovsky sees himself in the character of Rublev, another Russian with a great artistic talent, however many centuries and legends apart. Tarkovsky is one of the great autobiographical filmmakers, he says himself that it’s impossible for a director to make a film that is not about himself, and not from the perspective of how he sees the world. He felt that a director should maintain control of his film, and put all his honesty into it. Perhaps Andrei Rublev is as good because it feels genuine, brimming with wit.

Rublev struggles with the notion of God. He is drawn into his orthodoxy, underpinning the theme of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. Tarkovsky envisions Rublev as a monk called upon by Theophanes the Greek to paint the religious icons that are the concrete evidences of his existence to date. But Rublev’s talents are the cause of envy from factions of his brotherhood, particularly Kirill (Ivan Lapikov), an aspiring painter himself, and older than Rublev, who is gravely disappointed when Theophanes calls for Rublev instead. Kirill loses it, venturing out into the world, banished by his master under the charge of blasphemy as he wildly accosts Rublev, sullying his own nurtured faith.

Another important idea in Andrei Rublev is the severe existential angst of the protagonist. Rublev is drawn into the maelstrom of a pagan celebration, tied-up by a gang of men and accosted by a naked woman. She kisses him, and it’s unclear whether Rublev is disgusted by her flesh or his sexual desire inhibited for so long by his Orthodox beliefs. If Andrei Rublev is epic in its spirit, in its dealing with unanswerable, existential dilemmas, it is remarkable that it feels as compact and focused upon its story. There are no certified heroes here, barely villains - the rampant Tartars are seen as murderers with a great sense of humour, and their looting is portrayed as the actions of men keenly picking the fruits of a Godless earth. In this case the fruits are torture and gold, violence and rape.

Much of the film concerns Rublev vying with the weight and expectation his talent brings. Ultimately, he is a man of few words, taking a vow of silence in his darkest moments. As an artist his burden mirrors Tarkovsky’s, who in his day was hailed as a visionary by the Russian people, but was equally damned by those disbelieving of (or misunderstanding) his talents. Tarkovsky battled the Soviet film authorities, and it was years later than 1966 that Andrei Rublev was screened to an audience outside of the Soviet Union. Tarkovsky suffered claims of mysticism from the ruling film authority Goskino, and pivotally it was they who had the say of whether his film could be shown or not - they were paying for it.

It’s stunning to consider this is only Tarkovsky’s second film and his first with Solonitsyn, an actor who went on to be his stapled lead. It’s stunning also in the light of Andrei Rublev’s depth of ideas. It’s a success because Tarkovsky has come close to matching Rublev, though in very different eras and through completely separate means, Tarkovsky has created something timeless and true that can be fed upon for years to come.