Glenda Jackson, Trance, and flying daggers - Reviews #153

Of course the only thing anyone's really watching this week is Glenda Jackson's excoriating, yet deeply-moving takedown of Thatcher and her legacy. I've watched it four times already - speak for Britain, Glenda! - and never have the words "thousands" and "extra-ordinary" been bellowed over the sound of mewling right-wingers with such stentorian, earth-shaking intensity. I always did like her. I suppose I should review some films now.

***



*SPOILERS IN THE FINAL PARAGRAPH*
The Hired Hand (Peter Fonda, 1971) - The Hired Hand is a New Hollywood masterpiece from Peter Fonda, a reflective Western in which redemption comes not through revenge, but romance, in all its selfish, selfless glory. Its title comes from the stone of story at its centre, in which Fonda tries to atone for walking out on his wife (Verna Bloom, shorn of all vanity) by signing on as her hired hand, accompanied by his friend Warren Oates. That set-up suggests gender battles or sexual power-games, but what we get is something altogether quieter, subtler and more persuasive: a story about forgiveness, dependence and the healing of wounds, with an almighty kick in the tail that takes genre mythology and proceeds to do something unforgettable with it. The relationship between the reformed, gentle Fonda and his strong, unrepentant wife only accounts for perhaps a third of the running time, but gives the film such heart that it can justify the numerous asides and self-contained vignettes: a fatal shot from out of nowhere, an early-morning mission of vengeance and the shattering of a tranquil idyll as a young girl's dead body snags on a fishing line.

Fonda's Easy Rider is a great film, because it captures a feeling, epitomises an entire period and exploded an outmoded cinematic status quo, but it isn't a very good film. It's tacky, juvenile, boring and full of ridiculous visual quirks that make no narrative sense (there's a reason why no-one uses those juddering transitions it attempted to initiate, and it's that they're pointless and crap). The Hired Hand, however, is a film touched with that refined, adventurous brilliance that seemed to be in the air in '70s Hollywood. It's visually outstanding, but it's more than that: it's like Monte Walsh - William Fraker's film about the "last cowboy" - but loaded with longing and sexual angst, and equipped with some trippily avant garde imagery that still stays true to the genre, Fonda, photographer Vilmos Zsigmond and editor Frank Mazzola simply kicking Winton C Hoch's eye-popping compositions up a notch. The most remarkable has Fonda and Oates talking by a corral. As they turn gradually to silhouettes, close-ups of their faces illuminate the sky behind, tinted by the setting sun. It's a jaw-dropping trick that pitches them as Western icons, larger-than-life, greater than contemporary folk heroes and at one with the sprawling plains and vast skies that are - or were - America. Fonda isn't interested in a conventional narrative, more in evoking an atmosphere, and as he slips from one episode to the next, he layers one piece of footage - a body twisting in a river, horses stalking along the trail - over the next. It's odd, then, that some of the interior scenes in the early part of the film look flat and cheap, if not '50s-B-Western shoddy.

Fonda is superb, while Bloom, one of the best things about Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, gives a remarkable performance as a woman who refuses to repent after looking for sexual solace in his absence, but yearns to be loved - and not just wanted. It's only during her pivotal speech that I feel she falters, but perhaps subsequent viewings will be kinder. And Oates? Well, Oates is simply sensational. Perhaps only Jason Robards ever combined the scuzzy, the world-weary and the roguishly appealing as well as the toothy, grubby, bearded Oates, and as a good guy fighting the lust coursing through his body, he damn well walks away with the film. The Hired Hand is one of the great movies of the '70s: a unique, unsentimental vision that doesn't seek to dismantle the Western, as Altman would with McCabe and Mrs Miller, but to take its iconography and its stock characters somewhere new. The gunfighter still rides to the rescue. The showdown still happens. And his body still falls to the floor with that same sickening thud. But then a hired hand returns to a homestead and closes a door, and we realise that there was never a Western like it, and that none ever gave us an ending like this, in all its simple, beautiful and perfect ambiguity. (4)

***

A Zhang Yimou double-bill:



House of Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou, 2004) - A blind showgirl and the undercover agent sent to catch her run away together, pursued by scores of soldiers AND OH MY WORD, WILL YOU LOOK AT THOSE COLOURS, I THINK MY EYES HAVE AN ERECTION. Zhang Yimou's stunning, vivid, extremely green contribution to the wuxia genre is like opium for your optics: beautifully designed and filmed in colours both bold and gentle, vibrant but never garish, its vast widescreen frame filled with an abundance of detail: drums, trees and ribbons all seen as if seen for the first time.

There's also like a story. Zhang Ziyi stars as a blind, dancing prostitute and enthusiastic insurgent - allied to a revolutionary movement called the House of Flying Daggers - who's trying to bring down the authoritarian government. The government, however, has other ideas, as captain Andy Lau arrests her and then sends his pal Takeshi Kaneshiro to break her out of prison, inveigle his way into her confidence, and so trap the whole House. It's a great set-up, with something of It Happened One Night about it - though the stakes are higher -and for over an hour the film carries confidently along that path, its story of romantic awakening finding time for a song, two dances and a flurry of fights. Then five minutes of twists send it careering off in another direction. That change of tack looks unpromising at first, threatening to skew our sympathies, but boy does it ultimately deliver. (Just to confirm: yes it does.)

Wuxia movies are, of course, comparable to musicals in their construction, and if Fred and Ginger's first starring vehicle, The Gay Divorcee, was a sophisticated comedy with periodic concessions to superlative song and dance, then Flying Daggers isn't really a martial arts film, more a love story of epic proportions (it must be, look at that snow), with kung fu interludes. Those interludes are a mixed bunch: exhilarating to begin with - particularly during the rough-and-ready prison break sequence and Ziyi's flight through the woods - then too samey, too gimmicky and too overloaded with fantasy elements and baddies moving in Oompa-Loompa unity to really engage. By the time our heroes are trapped inside a prison of lusciously green bamboo that's just come at them from three dozen angles, you're marvelling at the look of the film, while wondering if perhaps we could just get back to Ziyi kicking people in the head.

The problem may be that the cast lacks many proper proponents of martial arts, meaning a lot of close-ups, quick cuts and some busy, CGI-led direction that follows the flight of objects: more 42nd Street (where the camera dances) than Top Hat (where Fred does). Having said that, the editing is absolutely virtuosic - a wonder to behold - with one notable exception: what kind of pervert puts jump cuts in a sword duel? In some ways the film reminds me of Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement, sharing that breathtaking visual originality, rich romantic sensibility and fondness for a nice field. Like that movie, while it offers countless entertaining diversions and a litany of quirks, it succeeds because of the strength of feeling generated by its central love story. In terms of obvious influences, Flying Daggers is enough of a one-off to escape easy categorisation, but I do wonder if the early scenes in the brothel were inspired by Satyajit Ray's bright, brilliant satire of colonialism, The Chess Players.

Yimou's film stutters a little at the beginning of the final third, as plot twists send the story juddering to a halt, and I wish certain action scenes didn't feel as synthetic, but its first 80 is brilliant, its ending is unforgettable and between that there's enough swordplay, sentiment and spellbinding cinematography to keep you nothing short of enraptured. Ziyi is in scintillating form, displaying that combination of the earthy and the ethereal that served her so well in Crouching Tiger - as well as that predilection for a) Dressing up as a boy, and b) Showing everybody her shoulders all the time - though while Kaneshiro makes a good fist of his cliched part, Lau has a rather lacklustre crack at a more interesting one. Flying Daggers is flawed, yes, but it's remarkable too: engaging, enthralling and simply extraordinary to look at. (3.5)



Hero (Zhang Yimou, 2002) - At last, a film extolling the virtues of a brutal, oppressive regime! I haven't seen one of those since Triumph of the Will. Do you know what that smell is? I'm not sure, but I think it might be fascism! Jet Li, exhibiting all the expressiveness of a Botoxed cyborg, is a minor government official who wins an audience with the king after crushing the state's three most notorious dissenters. But all may not be what it seems, prompting much Rashomon-ish remembrance, each vignette given a striking colour scheme and a directorial style all its own. Yimou's first martial arts movie is big on spectacle, with a cast of thousands, and its epic sweep is allied to stunning, distinctive photography: the scene in which the world turns red as Zhang Ziyi perishes is one of the most breathtaking bits of visual artistry ever to grace a cinema screen. At a more prosaic level, Hero is also notable for featuring only the second screen teaming of genre icons Li and Donnie Yen - whose previous film together was the greatest kung fu movie I've ever witnessed: Once Upon a Time in China II - and reuniting the leads of Wong Kar-wai's incredible In the Mood for Love, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung.

A shame then, that Hero - despite that uniquely arresting imagery and a hugely promising pedigree - is such a hollow, misguided venture: shallow and aloof, with a hideous totalitarian undercurrent that dominates both the tedious opening and a climax that would have had Stalin licking his lips. You know his line about one death being a tragedy, but a million deaths being a statistic? That's this film. Enjoy! It's also a movie where you see things happening, but you don't really feel them. Characters die, betray or are betrayed, but they seem distant and hard to relate to, while the story is fractured, convoluted and hard to understand. And while Yimou is a magnificent filmmaker, he's no action director. There are mesmerising shots throughout, which extends to the action sequences, but the fights themselves have little energy and no rhythm: choppy and feverishly edited in a way that's both distracting and pointless.

If you have Li and Yen, you don't need to cut endlessly, or have your camera flying through the air, you just hold steady and shoot. Yimou may be the superior stylist, but he could learn a thing or 10 from Tsui Hark about how to make a mythic martial arts film while establishing a visceral intensity in the fight scenes. Flying Daggers was certainly a step up in terms of choreography and spatial coherence, but once the fists start flying (or, indeed, the outsized pieces of bamboo), these films start floundering. There a couple of exciting moments during Li and Yen's monochrome fantasy duel, but this film just isn't a very good showcase for these talented martial artists.

There are virtues all over the place in Hero, but aside from the way the film looks - which is unequivocally fantastic - each one is met by a vice; y'know, like yin and yang. Periodically, the story latches on to some idea of clarity and wonder, the script matching the visual invention that drips from every frame, but these moments of incisiveness are scattered and disconnected, and not helped by characters dying and coming back to life with alarming regularity. The orchestral score is rousing and memorable, but it's also rather repetitive. And while Ziyi and Maggie Cheung are actresses of extraordinary emotional attractiveness, and both are excellent, they're ill-served by that confused, confusing, bitty and ultimately rather tiresome story, an oddly inconsistent performance from Tony Leung and uniformly lacklustre ones from the rest of the male cast (particularly Li, who has been replaced by a blank-faced automaton). Having said that, the king does make a noise like a motorbike when he runs around, which is hilarious. I had high hopes for Hero, but it didn't come close to matching them. Gobsmacking photography aside, it's a bit of a mess. And a dangerous one at that. (2.5)

***



Splash (Ron Howard, 1984) - This I liked. Produce trader Tom Hanks. who fears he may never fall in love, is reunited with the mermaid he met when he was eight (Daryl Hannah). She arrives at the Statue of Liberty, starkers, and while he doesn't know her secret, painfully unfunny scientist Eugene Levy does. According to a copy of Empire lying about in my front room, this movie filled Charlize Theron with lust, and you can see why. It's a headily romantic movie with lovely performances by the leads, an enjoyable one from John Candy as Hanks's wide boy brother and an abundance of dry, low-key comedy, which partly explains why Levy's endlessly shouty supporting turn feels so completely out of place. Perhaps the film goes a bit too gloomy for a bit too long during the customary "down time", but it's still one of the decade's best rom-coms. And while I laughed a lot, its greatest strengths are an old-fashioned sensibility that overrides its '80s trappings, and an unshakable conviction in its wonderfully appealing central romance. (3.5)

***



Kung Fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2005) - Kung Fu Hustle is like a martial arts movie as imagined by Frank Tashlin: a dizzying genre mash-up turned live-action cartoon that slings everything at the wall, from Tommy Guns to spoofery to sparring matches, and comes up smelling of bonkers. The story, if you can call it that, sees a slick urban gang of be-hatted, machine-gun sporting hoods trying to crush a poor rural district under its heel. Unfortunately for them, there are an improbable number of retired kung fu warriors working in a single village square. As the mobsters get their arses handed to them, reformed good guy (writer-director Stephen Chow) attempts to ingratiate himself with the gang, spurning the advances of the mute girl he once tried to save from bullies. With a film this frenzied, freewheeling and full of energy - something like wuxia's answer to Hellzapoppin', or Chuck Jones - of course not all of it hits the target, and Yuen Woo-Ping's purposefully OTT fight scenes work best when they at least pay lip-service to reality, but it's frequently funny, has a genuinely sweet romance at its centre and is impossible to second-guess, which is a welcome trait in any movie. (3)

***



CINEMA: Trance (Danny Boyle, 2013) - This reminds me of the time I shaved my pubes to impress James McAvoy. Mr Tumnus plays an auctioneer hospitalised during an art theft committed by Vincent Cassel and his gang. They think he knows what happened to a priceless Goya but, since he's now an amnesiac, they send him to a pouty hypnotist (Rosario Dawson), and from then on it's twist, twist, twist, naked Dawson, twist, naked Dawson again, another twist. The latest from one of Britain's most reliable - if not greatest - filmmakers is a flashy, well-directed thriller that's happy to give its audience a bit of credit, cutting between scenes from different timeframes, dropping tantalising clues as to its direction, and yet still keeping a couple of surprises up its sleeve. It does a reasonable job of shifting our sympathies as the back stories hove into view, and exhibits Boyle's handiness with an action set-piece, boasting a handful that throb with kinetic energy and dissolute discombobulation, soundtracked by a thumping score.

It's been called "Hitchcockian", but it's not quite. There's a little of Spellbound in there (art, amnesia and vivid dreams), but it has a whole lot more in common with the '60s thrillers Charade and particularly Mirage, both written by Peter Stone and said to bear the mark of the Master. Where those films are superior, though, isn't just in the crackling dialogue, it's in reeling you in with gimmicks and even gags, then giving you characters to empathise with and root for. Trance doesn't really do that. McAvoy and Cassel are passable and Dawson is quite good - while shot in that adoring, slobbering way that can only mean "this actress is my girlfriend" - but the film would rather give you another twist than a human feeling, and the effect is much like the way you pine for something savoury if you spend a day stuffing your face with cake. (Yes, I am quite greedy.) Trance is consistently entertaining, keeping you guessing much of the time, but it's more Shallow Grave than Slumdog: a malevolent rug-puller that just about delivers the goods as a mystery, but offers little that will linger after the credits have rolled. (2.5)

***

Thanks for reading. I'll do a bit more ClintFest in a little while.

Jagger, Judy and Jonah Hill - Reviews #137

Also, in this latest reviews update: Dragnet, drugs and lots of people in blackface. Just a short one this time.



Crossfire Hurricane (Brett Morgen, 1972) – Very watchable but shallow documentary about the Rolling Stones, executive-produced by the band, that begins (for no apparent reason) in 1972, flashes back (for no apparent reason) to 1965 and then provides the expected mix of anecdotes, rare clips and occasional insights across a couple of enjoyable hours. The Stones are my dad's favourite band, so I was brought up listening to them (and hearing that they were better than the Beatles), and their show at the Don Valley Stadium in 1995 was the first big gig I ever went to. But while I'm grounded in the music, and read a couple of biographies at an unsuitably young age, this is the first proper doc about them that I've seen. Beginning with a disingenuous disclaimer that "no cameras were alllowed in the room" while new interviews took place – true, but only because the director said so – the film overlays a wealth of archive footage (much of it culled from previous Stones films like Gimme Shelter) with voiceovers from the band. Charlie Watts proves as cool and dry as you'd expect and Richards is unexpectedly articulate (some of the time), offering the strong image of the Stones as a black-hatted Western baddie, while Mick Taylor explains why he quit the group, Wyman outlines their bluesical alchemy in technical terms, Ron Wood turns up briefly – accompanied by photos of him looking like a drug-crazed scarecrow – and Jagger, in the film's most moving moment, says he doesn't know "how many months" it was after Brian Jones was kicked out of the band that he turned up dead. "It was three weeks," says the interviewer. "Fuck," replies Jagger, as if someone has just kicked him in the ribs, his usual aloofness shattered for a fleeting moment. There are other telling details too: the rivers of piss flowing down the aisles as excitable teenage girls wet themselves in droves, Jagger describing his fear and abject helplessness at Altamont, and Watts revealing his embarrassment at being chased down the street by schoolgirls (them again). It's also interesting to hear how Jones would mercilessly mock the working man – the same sort of man you see claiming that the Stones are "like us; not like the Beatles, spending eight days in bed".

As with any film about '60s musicians, there are also lots of clips of clueless, middle-aged journalists asking these hip young upstarts completely idiotic questions (the only artist who ever came out of that situation badly was George Harrison, whose interrogation about his mystical beliefs, featured in the Scorsese doc, was hilariously incoherent). But while those parts are amusing, and do a fine job of articulating the yawning generation gap that the Stones understood, epitomised and exploited, watching a young Jagger being constantly if handsomely evasive palls after a while. The film is also oddly shapeless, with no clear dramatic narrative aside from an "everyone hated us, then everyone loved us" angle shoved in near the close, an over-reliance on unsatisfying musical montages (Morgen just isn't very good at them) and a rather slapdash approach to what should and shouldn't be included. Most disappointingly, the film fails to delve into the Jagger-Richards relationship, surely the most interesting thing about the band. I should add here that I find all the mythologising of Richards' life incredibly tiresome - so he took a load of drugs and didn't die, whoop-dee-fucking-doo - but the love-hate dynamic between the two, forged at a young age over a love of blues, and mutating and twisting ever since, while producing some glorious music, is fascinating. We're never really told who the Stones are, where they came from and how they came together, aside from Wyman's line that the others "met in jazz clubs". I'd also quibble with Morgen's idea that talking head interviews aren't worth seeing: seeing how someone says something, the range of emotion on their face, is often as intriguing and revealing as what they're saying. Sadly we'll never see Jagger's expression as he disclaims, "Fuck" (presumably one of dumbstruck horror), as, well, no cameras were allowed in the room.

There's no denying that Crossfire Hurricane is a fun watch. There are blistering versions of several key tracks, including the legendary take on Sympathy for the Devil from Rock and Roll Circus (which I have seen), Morgen does do a good job of finding film of events that at the time seemed minor, but echo through history (like Jones' last relevant contribution to the band), and with the volume of fine footage available - allied to a few interesting interviews - it would be hard not to make an entertaining film. But Crossfire Hurricane is also sanitised and slightly aimless, which isn't something you could say about the Stones themselves - or their best records. Still, I suppose you can't always get what you want. (3)

***



*SPOILERS FOR KILL LIST, BIZARRELY*

Dragnet (Tom Mankiewicz, 1987) - A flat, misguided homage to/spoof of the wildly popular '60s police procedural show, with Dan Aykroyd as Joe Friday, the uber-officious nephew of Jack Webb's character, and Tom Hanks playing his new partner, a relative loose cannon. Hanks is good, fans of the series may enjoy seeing Harry Morgan reprise his role, and a few of Aykroyd's lines - translating events into coldly and excessively factual police-speak - hit the target, but there are long, laughless stretches, an air of un-earned smugness pervades, and the intentionally far-fetched plot is unintentionally shit. I can't decide if Christopher Plummer's creepy, perma-laughing moral crusader is good or not. The funniest thing about the movie is that the encounter with the pagans and the subsequent tunnel escape - guns blazing - is virtually the same as the one in Kill List! Veteran character actress Kathleen Freeman also turns up to call Aykroyd a "jizzbucket", which is funny if you pretend that she's reprising her rosy-cheeked, butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-Scandinavian-mouth role from Annie Was a Wonder. Just me then?

Trivia note: Director Mankiewicz is the son of Joseph L., and had worked as a writer on several Bond films and the Superman series. (2)

***


This seems fine.


Not sure about this.

Babes on Broadway (Busby Berkeley, 1941) - No, it might not be strictly necessary for Mickey and Judy to do quite so many impressions of deceased theatrical greats. No, I don't know why he's doing a weak take-off of Carmen Miranda. Yes, the plot about sending inner-city orphans to the country is unbelievably corny. And no, perhaps everybody shouldn't be in blackface. But this was 1941. And America. So, yes, this decent putting-on-a-show musical leans on plotting that's almost self-parodical, and features a climax that is simply baffling to modern audiences – while it's worth adding that the blackface finale is in the theatrical tradition of minstrel shows, which were hardly out of the ordinary in 1941, and it's naively celebratory rather than mean-spirited, the image of a blacked-up Rooney impersonating an African-American pensioner and mugging as if his life depended on it whilst playing the banjo makes his performance in Breakfast at Tiffany's look like a model of PC restraint. But the flabbiness is part of the fun, Garland is in terrific form (compensating for Rooney, who's very talented but just too OTT here) and there are some wonderful numbers. Especially How About You?, which has long been a favourite, is beautifully staged in a tenement flat and features a brief flash of Rooney-doing-John-Barrymore. Elsewhere, Busby Berkeley's direction utilises his beloved crane shots to impressive if unnecessary effect, and there's a top supporting cast that includes tap dancer Ray McDonald, future director Richard Quine, Fay Bainter and the talented Virginia Weidler, who's largely just asked to cry and pout. A tiny Margaret O'Brien also makes her debut here, playing a wannabe actress who greets theatrical impresario James Gleason with the words: "Please don't send my brother to the chair, warden." If you ever want to see a Mickey and Judy film – and they are resolutely NOT FOR ALL TASTES – Girl Crazy remains the one to go for. (3)

***



Accepted (Steve Pink, 2006) – Lazy smartarse Justin Long fails to get into college, so he invents one of his own - which soon becomes horribly real. This campus comedy starts off very funnily, goes nasty and offensive (the college is a former psychiatric hospital, resulting in a slew of mental illness gags), then settles into mediocrity, before turning oddly pious at the close, as Long launches an impassioned defence of his establishment's non-conformist method of learning, which as far as I can tell involves listening to broad if agreeable anti-corporate sentiments, and watching people ride motorbikes into swimming pools. Still, Long and especially Jonah Hill make the most of it. "This is awesome," Hill says as they enter the abandoned hospital for the first time, "'cause now I can finally get hepatitis!" (2)

Coach Carter, Vince Papale, and people just walking around - Reviews #73

Three American sports films and a movie about the British pastime of empire-building:



For a good hour, Coach Carter (Thomas Carter, 2005) appears to be following a well-worn path, as high school basketball coach Samuel L. Jackson whips a discipline-free collection of inner-city individuals into a slick, unbeaten unit. Then it emerges that the players have reneged on a deal to attend class and secure C+ grades, and the authoritarian taskmaster locks them out of the gym, suspending all practices and matches until they up their game off the court. It's heartening to see a film so confident of its message: that the US treats young African-Americans abominably, almost willing them to fail, that sports stars are put on a pedestal in a way that damages society and that academic excellence is undervalued in comparison. (Intriguingly, the '40s baseball comedy It Happens Every Spring also addresses the two latter observations, in rather lighter fashion.)

The script is flawed - there's the odd poor line, an uninteresting subplot about a student who may be about to become a father that repeatedly brings the film to a juddering halt, and a tendency to reel off stats to cement its thesis - and there's something a little calculating about the way the music swells every time Jackson starts grandstanding. Which happens rather a lot. But this is still an extremely persuasive blend of inspirational true-life story, sports picture and social polemic. Jackson is extremely good in the central role, better than I've ever seen him, the plotting is extremely involving, the game sequences are very well choreographed (though the structural problem familiar from Rocky of each side dominating in turn persists) and the whole thing is surprisingly moving - even when its methods of manipulation are pretty transparent.

Every basketball film suffers from not being Hoop Dreams (well, except one), a human drama of singular power in which every frame is real, but this is an unexpectedly impressive and heartfelt film in which the laudable strengths - intriguing subject matter, a powerful central turn and a sense of conviction scarce in contemporary cinema - overpower its more grounded, trivial shortcomings. (3)

***



A League of Their Own (Penny Marshall, 1992) is a cracking piece of escapism that pays tribute to the female baseball players of the WWII period, who filled stadiums when the male superstars went off to fight. The central squabble between sisters Geena Davis and Tori Petty is of questionable value, the character development is sometimes lacking (or else duplicitous in the case of Megan Cavanagh) and Davis is transparently the worst baseball player of all time, but for all that it's just a tremendously entertaining film: fast-moving, stuffed with ace montages, faux-newsreels and enjoyable sequences, and boasting several excellent performances. Petty is fine in her role as the overlooked younger sibling and there are eye-catching supporting bits from David Strathairn - who played crooked pitcher Eddie Cicotte in John Sayles' Eight Men Out - as the league's publicity man and Jon Lovitz as a sleazy, tactless talent scout. But the best performance unquestionably comes from Tom Hanks. I was a Hanks agnostic, but this has won me round. He delivers a superb, tragi-comic turn as an ex-baseball pro turned "fall-down drunk" who finds a new lease of life doing, well, what still appears to be just about the bare minimum of coaching. Whether bickering with his benefactor, scratching his balls in the dugout or advising a young autograph hunter to "avoid the clap", Hanks treads the gossamer-thin line between perfection and caricature, while keeping the pathos in check. It's a shame, then, that Marshall somewhat botches the job with a pointless, painfully mawkish framing device set in the present day, which is completely at odds with the rest of the film. Seeing as several scenes and subplots had to be excised due to time constraints, this obtrusive monument to saccharin seems particularly misguided. The rest of it, though: lovely. (3)

***



*SOME SPOILERS*
Invincible (Ericson Core, 2006) - Philadelphia, 1975. Unemployment is soaring, the factory workers are on strike and NFL side The Eagles are in meltdown. Enter Vince Papale (Mark Wahlberg), an out-of-work substitute teacher, part-time barman and American Football fanatic, who pitches up at an open trial held by new coach Dick Vermeil (Greg Kinnear) and proceeds to run 40m in 4.5 seconds. He can't really make the team, can he? Well if he can't, we won't have much of a story. This is a textbook Disney drama, in the best sense of the phrase (and there are many other senses of the phrase): simple, sentimental and sanitised (I doubt very much that Papale's best pal shouted: "You're a freakin' Eagle!" upon him making the cut, and you will never see a sympathetic Disney character endorse a union), but hugely uplifting and extremely well-crafted.

Wahlberg, who no-one but the most fervent Funky Bunchers would have tipped to make it as a serious, important actor, is thoroughly excellent, as he always is these days, and Kinnear is perfect as the twinkly-eyed coach who's got a special feeling about his down-to-earth discovery. The film also excels in the on-field sequences, putting the viewer in the centre of the action to such a degree that I genuinely got a few pre-match butterflies. These critical encounters are effectively contrasted with a handful of late-night headlight-lit character-building amateur games.

Love interest Elizabeth Banks is completely unconvincing - she's too modern by at least 31 years - and the comic interludes seem ill-judged, but the central story is fantastic and it's superbly told, right down to the real-life footage at the close. (3.5)

There's an interesting comparison (well, I think it's interesting) between these three films in terms of how they see their sports stars. In Coach Carter, Jackson laments that society allows them to be unaccountable and arrogant. In Invincible, they can be a symbol of hope and inspiration, a famous touchdown by Steve Van Buren getting Papale's father - a fan - through 20 years of hard work and hardship. A League of Their Own argues that sport is important - if it's what you hold most dear - but that raising a family is equally heroic. I think Invincible will speak particularly strongly to anyone who was obsessed with sport as a child. The realisation that I wouldn't become a professional footballer was probably an important formative disappointment or something, but I'm not sure I've ever really got over it.

***



Burn! (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1969) is a hopeless, fascinating jumble, as English naval officer Marlon Brando instigates a slaves' revolt in a Portuguese colony, then returns 10 years later to quash the same rebel army. That superlative subject matter becomes an almost wilfully scatty melange. You get a wooden exchange, half of it dubbed, in the style of these international '60s epics, in some pokey set. Then a spellbinding image: perhaps a rebel twisting in the smoke of a forest fire. Then lots of footage of people walking... incessantly, intolerably walking... hundreds of them, just walking, for minutes at a time. Then a devastating solliloquy from Brando - doing his best George Sanders voice - on the subject of morality, civilisation or personal honour. Then more people walking, more dubbing, more walking. Burn! also features one of the most peculiar scores Ennio Morricone has ever submitted. If you can imagine the sound of an elephant sitting on Morricone as he tries to play a synthesiser, it's pretty much like that. Including the yelling. There's at least half an hour of footage missing from this English-language cut; whether the extra bits would make it seem less or more disjointed and long-winded remains to be seen. But it is worth catching for those passages of brilliance: its sporadically impressive imagery, the clear, then-timely overtones of Vietnam (Walker even goes to Indo-China between the film's two halves) and Brando's often amazing characterisation. There's just a lot of tedium amidst such timelessness. (2.5)

DVD note: The DVD I got from LoveFilm, produced by Cornerstone Media, was absolutely atrocious: fuzzy and drained of colour, panned-and-scanned, and with poor sound. The triple threat.

Toy Story 3 and the French Heat - Reviews #46

*SOME SPOILERS*
CINEMA: Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010) is perhaps the best of the series - and that's saying something. Andy is now 17, and heading for college. Clearing out his room, he earmarks cherished childhood toy Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) as a travelling companion, but consigns the rest of the gang to the attic, foolishly stashing them in a bin bag. One hair-raising encounter with a refuse lorry later and Buzz, Rex, Hamm, Mr Potato Head and the others decide they've had enough - turning themselves in to the nearest playgroup. There, they deal with obstacles both physical (terrifying toddlers, a psychotic bear) and intangible (love, mortality, the transience of being), as existential ruminations jostle for space with brilliant jokes and wildly-imaginative chase sequences. Benefiting from the leaps in digital animation over the past 12 years, this richly rewarding film adds further depth to this fully-realised world - not least in its subtle, sure-footed use of 3D - while the terrific scripting taps into both the mythology and the absurdity of toys. It's there from the spellbinding, ridiculous opening sequence, set in Monument Valley, to the masterfully-conceived running gag that sees Buzz (Tim Allen) turn Spanish - not the tired non-sequitur you'd get from any other studio, but an inspired riff on the peculiarity of mass-market electronics. That intelligence and invention is underscored by an effortless humanism that informs the whole piece, bursting through the surface during the terrifying landfill set-piece and the ending, which is just sublime. One could legitimately quibble with the excessive repetition in the earlier parts of the script or argue that the new characters can't quite match up to the returning favourites, but it really does feel like splitting hairs. This is a massively ambitious, remarkably successful third outing: mature, invigorating and deeply, deeply moving. (4)

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***



36 Quai des Orfevres (Oliver Marchal, 2004), named after the police headquarters in Paris, is an entertaining but flawed thriller, loosely based on real events. Jean de Florette co-stars Daniel Auteuil and Gerard Depardieu play rival officers - and former friends - striving to bring in a gang of ruthless bank robbers. It is a case that will define their careers and change their lives forever: one for better, one for worse. The characters, that is, not the actors. Former cop Marchal is good on the day-to-day details, but his forays into fiction are largely unsuccessful, striving for epic tragedy and finding only melodrama. The dovetailing of twin narratives, in the vein of Murder, My Sweet or Le Doulos (referenced overtly in the character of the informer Silien), is similarly disappointing, creating a resolution that's too pat, smug and downright predictable to satisfy. This has been described as the French Heat (it's about cops and robbers, it has two famous stars) and while it's not as infuriatingly self-important as that damp squib, its shortcomings are all too apparent. Auteuil's performance, the glossy cinematography and the fast pace are the main draws. (2.5)