London Film Festival: Part 4 − Xavier Dolan, Don't Think Twice and a really, really bad film

The last of the fest, and what a joy it was. Well, with a couple of exceptions, for the greatest of which: read on...



SATURDAY 15th



Film 14: It's Only the End of the World (Xavier Dolan, 2016) − A hell of a film, in that I imagine this is probably what Hell is like: a loud, stressful and apparently endless family argument.

Shot almost entirely in close-ups with fuzzy backgrounds (or vice versa), it's intense talkiness - fragments of fractious dialogue murmured or yelled - and awkward silences, as dying playwright Gaspard Ulliel returns to the family home to engage in stilted, vague but excessive dialogue with his unhappy mother (Nathalie Baye), troubled sister (Lea Seydoux), nervy sister-in-law (Marion Cotillard) and brutal, hotheaded brother (Vincent Cassel).

The performances are strong (especially Ulliel's), there are two flashback montages of rare potency, and Dolan's use of sound and music is superb − a song as bad as Numa Numa has never whacked me in the solar plexus before − but the material is so hackneyed that I didn't respond to enough of it, and the film so noisily miserable that I was glad when it was over. (2.5)



Film 15: The Salesman (Asghar Farhadi, 2016) − An utterly compelling moral thriller from the writer-director of A Separation, Asghar Farhadi, about a couple (Shahab Hosseini and Taranah Alidoosti) whose marriage is thrown into turmoil by the hand of fate, as they prepare to appear together in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

Like A Separation, it's a consistently surprising drama that - when you sit back and consider it at the end - could only ever have been heading for one place, and it's blessed with the same incisive writing and skilful direction, which sees Farhadi apparently effortlessly manufacturing suspense from thin air (a quality I find myself looking for, and understanding far better, since reading Hitchcock/Truffaut). It also seems to offer real insight into Iranian society and the Iranian psyche, in which women are property and slights against them are slights against their husbands.

I don't want to give away even a little of the story, as it's a film that really benefits from going in blind, but I will say that although its allusions to Miller are too loose and then too literal, that thread ends in heartrending style, and the film features both Iran's long-awaited answer to Jonathan Lipnicki and a late shock so well-executed that it made the person next to me in the cinema do a little fart. Now that's movie-making. (3.5)

SUNDAY 16th



Film 16a (SHORT): What's the World Coming To? (Richard Wallace and F. Richard Jones, 1926) − Profoundly unfunny Hal Roach 'two-reeler' (20-minute comedy) that takes a reasonable premise - men are becoming more like women and vice versa, let's skip 100 years into the future - and kills it stone-dead.

Stan Laurel co-wrote and L&H regular James Finlayson appears as the father of a decidedly emasculated bride-groom, but there are only a couple of small laughs and the rest is so dated it's almost incomprehensible: mirthless mugging, non-sequitur slapstick and people being kicked up the arse.

A mention, though, for Laura De Cardi, in proto-Dietrich garb as a wolfish woman preying on the poor, defenceless husband. The only nod to the future setting, incidentally - the heightened premise aside - is that the cars and pie-stands now fly.

It's the kind of silent comedy that makes being a silent comedy evangelist such exhausting work. (1.5)



Film 16b (FEATURE): A Woman of the World (Malcolm St. Clair, 1925) − A bit of silent comedy froth, with an anti-hypocrisy message, about a tattooed Italian countess (Pola Negri) who scandalises a small American town while fleeing a break-up, and catches the eye of fanatical moralist Holmes Herbert. The supporting comedy is too broad for my taste, but the opening scene is a cracker, the ending is agreeably mad, and when the round-faced, bob-haired, overtly sensual Negri is on screen the rest of it mostly works. (2.5)



Film 17: Spaceship (Alex Taylor, 2016) − Spaceshit, more like: a film so amateurish and pointless that it shouldn't ever have been backed by the BFI, let alone included in this country's flagship film festival. There are some decent visuals (the element that piqued my interest), but the script is so pretentious, empty and intellectually bankrupt that it makes Gosling's Lost River look like Chinatown. It's like a 90-minute bus journey with the most unbearable, self-satisfied teenagers on Earth, and a waste of money, cameras, my time and a festival spot.

The worst film I've seen since Mamma Mia. And then some. Absolute fucking shit.

On the plus side, they were doing surveys in the foyer, so I got a free biro. (1)



Film 18 (my last of a glorious fest): Don’t Think Twice (Mike Birbiglia, 2016) − A very funny, unexpectedly deep film about a New York improv troupe which goes into meltdown when one of its cast is signed for a Saturday Night Live-style TV sketch show.

Most of the comedy comes from on-stage routines or the improv-ish flourishes that these characters use to get through the day, and that dynamic takes a little getting used to (probably the closest comparison I can think of is to The Trip), but there's no arguing with the number or volume of the belly laughs echoing around the Prince Charles Cinema, and I liked the way that humour is shown as a release, and as a bond that grows and tightens when hardship and tragedy bites.

From the press around the film, I wasn't expecting the melancholic undertow that comes with the comedy, as it deals with the 30-something experience: with heavy break-ups, the dropping or re-shaping of dreams, and our reasons for living, and though the film ultimately becomes too miserable for too long and occasionally deals in cliché (particularly regarding the vacuousness of mainstream culture and how, to paraphrase Morrissey, "we hate it when our friends become successful"), at its best it is unusually honest, perceptive and insightful.

The performances are really well-balanced too, with a specificity and maturity to which I really responded. Gillian Jacobs, who played Britta in Community, is particularly good as a thoughtful woman blossoming into her true self, and Chris Gethard plays Bill with fine, subtle inflections that take you to heart of his character: unassuming and apparently ordinary, but alive in the comfort of the stage, where his quicksilver wit can shine.

It's an imperfect but winning and distinctive film, and you can see why it became a big sleeper hit in the States. It reminded me a little of Renoir's French Cancan, another hymn to creative people, though he was all about giving everything you have in exchange for art; the message of Don't Think Twice is more nuanced and achievable: that you find what inspires you, and keep it in your life. (3)

***

Thanks for reading. Roll on next year.

Mesrine and why Robert Mitchum was in the dark - Reviews #51

Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985) is an appealing, unconventional film about a shy, put-upon young married woman (Rosanna Arquette) who swaps places with a free-spirited man-eater (Madonna) after a bump on the head. A dated dramatic device, perhaps, but it's such a sweet, sassy and otherwise well-plotted affair we'll let it slide. The film inhabits a similar universe - and employs the same neon aesthetic - as Scorsese's ever-underrated comedy After Hours, but this is an altogether gentler affair. Sure it plunges its heroine into a seedy world dominated by shady, peroxide hitmen and amorous conjurors, but it's in many ways preferable to the yuppie nightmare she's been living with all-time wanker Mark Blum. At least here she's got love on her side, courtesy of kind-hearted Aidan Quinn (the psychotic drug-addled baddie in the Richard Dreyfuss-Emilio Estevez buddy movie Stakeout). Arquette, who played the lead in the classic John Sayles romcom Baby, It's You, is perfect as the doormat desperately seeking excitement, and while Madonna isn't a great actress, she's both hugely charismatic and ideally cast as the manipulative, posing, sex-obsessed Susan. Also look out for John Turturro in an early role as a nightclub compere. A little gem from out of left-field, this one, with an engaging storyline, memorable characters and a disarmingly peculiar sense of humour. (3)

Trivia note: The new Madonna song on the soundtrack is Into the Groove. Not one of her best singles of the period, but still pretty damn decent.

***



MGM's scoring supremo of the '50s Andre Previn said producer Joe Pasternak had "the gift of mediocrity", fashioning unchallenging musicals that satisfied a mass audience. That's underselling the films Pasternak created around Canadian singing sensation Deanna Durbin at Universal in the late-'30s, and his finer pictures after pitching up at MGM, but the words do have a certain resonance when you watch something like Hit the Deck (Roy Rowland, 1955). Employing the "sailors on leave" template familiar from Follow the Fleet, Anchors Aweigh (that's the one where Gene Kelly dances with Jerry Mouse) and On the Town, the film sees Tony Martin, Vic Damone and Russ Tamblyn finding love with Ann Miller, Jane Powell (another Pasternak protégée) and Debbie Reynolds. It's rarely exceptional, as Pasternak's rival Arthur Freed's films so often were, but the plot is easy to take and there are a handful of enjoyable numbers, headed by Miller's sizzling 'Lady from Bayou' and Tamblyn and Reynolds' number in the scary fun house, which offers a spin on the celebrated routine in RKO's Damsel in Distress. The male leads are far less interesting than their female counterparts (Martin is no Sinatra and for all his talent Tamblyn is no Gene Kelly, though Danone may be preferable to Jules Munshin), but the support cast is particularly strong, with Walter Pidgeon excellent as Tamblyn and Powell's father - his near-arrest is very amusing - and an unrecognisable J. Carrol Naish playing an Italian flower shop owner. Gene Raymond, a minor leading man in the '30s (see him in Flying Down to Rio, the first Astaire-Rogers teaming, or The Smartest Girl in Town), has a thankless role as a cad. (2.5)

***


This is getting really boring now.

Federico Fellini delighted in the fact that his name had "become an adjective". It was a myth he bought into, but the more Fellini-esque he became though - creating dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness films that were freewheeling, freeform and fatally flawed - the less interesting the result. 8 1/2 has some stunning moments, but every time it starts to get good the director seemingly tires of an idea and curtails it. Don't worry if the next diversion isn't to your taste, though, there'll be another along in a minute. Fellini's Roma (Federico Fellini, 1972) has the same (lack of) structure, but the opposite problem, with several weak sequences that go on forever. A portrait of the capital shown through the imagination of a young boy, the wide eyes of an adolescent and the jaded viewpoint of a 50-year-old, it promises much but delivers relatively little. The scenes of the younger Fellini are mostly very good, particularly the richly-evocative music hall sequence, while the "fading frescos" set-piece - set in the modern day - is an absolute knockout, loaded with symbolism. But the unbearably tedious traffic jam is a sign that it's not all going to hit the mark, an impression hammered home by the artless scenes of exposition utilising the film crew (a terrible stock device), the never-ending prostitute conveyor belt and a final half-hour that's almost exclusively rubbish. It's difficult to know if the misfiring sequences are simply too personal to make sense, or just self-indulgent rubbish (perhaps those two things are the same), but the film reaches a particular nadir with the clergy-on-the-catwalk fiasco. Is it supposed to be a comment on the wealth of the church? If so, it's simultaneously vague and heavy-handed. If it's a hark back to the gleeful subversion of Bunuel's L'age d'Or, shouldn't it be funnier, or in some way satirical? And does it really have to take 15 leaden-paced minutes? I admire Fellini's originality, his vision and his unconformity, but not his speechifying, self-satisfaction and pointless post-modernism. It's the latter traits that take precedence here. If Fellini-esque refers to Nights of Cabiria, it's high praise indeed. But if it's Roma, then perhaps not. (2)

***


I know it's small, but I'm afraid I have to use this picture.

Topkapi (Jules Dassin, 1964) is among the highlights of the '60s caper-comedy boom, which also produced Charade, Gambit, Arabesque and How to Steal a Million. Helmed by Jules Dassin, the French filmmaker behind heist movie blueprint Rififi (with its legendary silent central set-piece - all 20 minutes of it), it's clever, stylistically showy and deliciously tongue-in-cheek. Maximillian Schell is the criminal mastermind who recruits a team of amateurs as he plots to steal a priceless emerald-studded dagger from an Istanbul museum. He's nicking it for Melina Mercouri, his nymphomaniac former lover, whose fondness for men is exceeded only by that passion for jewels. Schell's protegees include alarms expert Robert Morley, strongman Jess Hahn and human fly Gilles Segal, while whimpering, half-Egyptian tour guide Peter Ustinov and drunken servant Akim Tamiroff (one of the great character actors of the Golden Age, whose fans included Orson Welles) also buzz around. Ustinov's an unwilling plant for the cops, who thinks the group are terrorists. Tamiroff comes with the villa where they're staying; he's convinced they're "Russische spies". It takes a little while for the film's disparate pieces to slot into place, and the variety of European accents can be a struggle, but the second half is utterly superb, with a heist sequence that's tense, funny and mirth-inducingly ingenious, and a gem of an ending. Ustinov got an Oscar for his hilarious turn as the incompetent Arthur Simpson, but the whole ensemble does a neat job, and Tamiroff is very amusing as the bitter, suspicious, misguided, constantly slurring would-be informant. Particularly when he starts talking about fish. (3.5)

***



Mesrine: L'instinct de mort (Jean-François Richet, 2008) aka Mesrine: Killer Instinct is a fast-paced, stylised biopic charting the rise of Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), the murderer and media manipulator who became France's most wanted man. It begins with a methodical, initially cryptic sequence set in 1979, then flashes back, tracing Mesrine's service in the Algerian War and his relationship with his father, whom he derides as a collaborator, before enquiring: "Do balls skip a generation in this family?" Mesrine is hard to root for, beating women, spouting racist epithets and sticking a loaded revolver in his wife's mouth, while the movie's mid-section follows the crime/punishment film template too rigidly to be truly gripping, but the piece builds to a truly gobsmacking, nerve-shredding climax with a lo-fi prison escape that consists simply of the hero attempting to snip through surrounding fences with wire-cutters. Cassel is absolutely excellent in the lead, carrying the film on his shoulders and compensating for a script that sometimes skimps on its characters' motivations. Gerard Depardieu, as Mesrine's mentor, is a little underused, but adds weight to the supporting cast, his first meeting with Cassel being particularly memorable. (3)

***



Mesrine: L'ennemi public n°1 (Jean-François Richet, 2008) aka Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 goes one better, with deeper characterisation and an incisive narrative laced with pitch-black humour that examines Mesrine's escalating egomania, fuelled by a troubling relationship with the press. The suspense sequences are expertly mounted and seamlessly incorporated, while Cassel's vivid central performance builds on his impressive showing in the first film, fairly twinkling with danger. Sleight him and he'll either josh with you or whack you - frankly there's no guessing which. The first movie was exciting and well made without always displaying a coherent viewpoint. This second part is altogether more satisfying: an impressive evocation of spiralling malevolence that's also largely honourable in its presentation of Mesrine - necessary when you're accusing the media of complicity in his crimes. Richet looks like one to watch; Cassel has been for years. (3.5)

For a review of Cassel's breakthrough 1995 film La Haine, go here.

***



The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1945) isn't blessed with the neatest mystery or the strongest script, but it contains one unforgettable performance and several scenes of mounting terror that are among the most intoxicatingly frightening ever filmed. Dorothy McGuire is a mute house servant who starts to believe that a serial killer is living in the place. Offing B movie favourite and future creator of the autograph fair Myrna Dell in the opening credits, the murderer targets women with disabilities (Dell had a limp), making the silent, traumatised McGuire a likely target. At first just the killer's Lugosi-ish eyes are shown, eerily made up in the silent movie manner. That's no accident - Siodmak expertly exploits the possibilities of having a heroine who can't speak, particularly in the film's greatest sequence, where McGuire runs to the top of the house, smashes the windows and screams, only for no sound to come out. The systematic removal of her character's safety net - her doctor boyfriend goes out on a call, her ailing guardian is asleep, the maid is passed out drunk - is skilful, leaving just McGuire, the killer and the director's boundless imagination. The film isn't as well-scripted as Val Lewton's '40s horrors, but there's an obvious parallel in the way it reaches a dizzyingly zenith during the brilliantly-constructed set-pieces. The erratic Siodmak, who did great work on The Killers, Criss Cross and Cry of the City, while also lending his talents to misfires like Christmas Holiday and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, is probably more closely associated with film noir than any other director. He certainly brings a noirish sensibility to this fusion of crime picture, horror film and gothic melodrama, aided by Out of the Past cinematographer Nicolas Musuraca, who Robert Mitchum famously said "lit by matches" ("The fact was that the high-priced stars back at the studio like Cary Grant, they got all the lights, so ours were lit by cigarettes," he said later, by means of sardonic elaboration). There are a pair of backwards tracking shots that follow Rhonda Fleming and later McGuire through a cellar that are just incredible. It's not the technical proficiency itself that's impressive, but the cranking up of the viewer's unease through a really smart, unobtrusive little trick. Indeed, the whole film is stuffed with imaginative ideas, like the shocking moment where we see a mouthless McGuire through the killer's warped gaze. But even Siodmak's considerable magic wouldn't count for much were it not for her remarkable central performance, as good a turn as you're ever likely to see. She's touching, ethereal and utterly heartbreaking, lending the inspired ending an emotional wallop. Stage legend Ethel Barrymore, who went on to play a similar part to her one here in the Frank Borzage noir Moonrise, is excellent in her key role, and Elsa Lanchester provides slightly unsuitable comic support (her patter worked better in The Big Clock), while George Brent - an actor I struggle to like - Kent Smith and Gordon Oliver round out the cast. It's a shame Siodmak and McGuire weren't handed a mystery quite befitting their talents - you can solve this one about 20 minutes in - but the results are still frequently astounding. (3)

For a review of the extraordinary Elia Kazan film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, featuring Dorothy McGuire as the mother, please go here.

***



SHORT: Field and Scream (Tex Avery, 1955) is a hunting-themed cartoon made near the end of Avery's stint at MGM, with a very high hit-to-miss gag ratio. As a wooly, lentil-eating pinko, I found the subject matter a bit uncomfortable, but there's no questioning the quality of the jokes. (3.5)

***


That is not what this is.

SHORT: The Fall Guy (Pete Smith, 1955) - No Smith short has really ever lived up to the first one I ever saw, Sports Oddities, but this collection of clips culled from earlier shorts and featuring his stuntman of choice, Dave O'Brien, is diverting enough. It was A Smith Named Pete's last Specialty film. (2.5)

Slumdog, Bond and the finest wines available to humanity - Reviews #28

"If someone asks me a question, I answer it."
*A FEW SPOILERS - SORRY*
Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008) - "The feelgood film of 2008" is really a harrowing portrait of slum life, a la Pixote (see #59) or City of God, with some Pather Panchali-style passages of euphoria, a timeless romance and an episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire thrown into the mix. Dev Patel is Jamal, a call-centre tea boy who's just a question away from scooping 20 million rupees when he's accused of cheating by host and old-fashioned villain Anil Kapoor. Recounting his story to cop Irrfan Khan, we learn how Jamal's life - characterised by terrible hardship but fired by an unwavering love for childhood sweetheart Freida Pinto - gave him the answers to those nine testing posers. Though it could come across as improbable or contrived, the film's steadfast belief in fate and its unflinching conviction about the story it's telling mean it works superbly, with an engrossing, touching narrative where everything slots into place. My favourite scene is Jamal's autograph hunt - mixing pathos, childish excitement and the sight of a small boy coming out of the distance, entirely covered in slurry. The excellent writing and plotting are matched by Boyle's stylish direction, Anthony Dod Mantle's spectacular cinematography and some great performances, particularly from the kids and Madhur Mittal - playing the grown-up brother of Jamal's brother, Salim, apparently lost to gangsterism. Though eventually uplifting, Slumdog is categorically not the slice of escapism its canny marketers would have you believe. It is a fine movie, though, and one of the strongest Best Picture winners of recent decades. (4)

***



"You have the ask to wish for me your pleasure?"
I Met Him in Paris (Wesley Ruggles, 1937) is a pleasant little romantic comedy that keeps threatening to turn into a more interesting, adult film, but never really explains its central tenet: why sourpuss Melvyn Douglas must chaperone young lovers Claudette Colbert and Robert Young on their sojourn from Gay Paree to snowy Switzerland. In addition, the Paris setting isn't effectively utilised - presumably it was just a suitably exotic spot for Colbert to be romanced as well as a nice hook for the title - while the Swiss one brings largely slapstick peril. But the leads were consummate performers capable of lifting the most unpromising material and they make a good fist of it here. Lee Bowman is fun in support as Colbert's "trusting" suitor, in a David Niven-like turn. The snowbound scenes were shot at Sun Valley, Idaho, the setting for Fox's hit musical Sun Valley Serenade. The ending, with three men squabbling over the lead, was later borrowed for the Jean Arthur film The Lady Takes a Chance. (2.5)

***


The martians look very funny, I just wish the script was better.

*SOME SPOILERS*
"Ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak ak."
Mars Attacks! (Tim Burton, 1996) - Wow, this is a mixed bag: a movie based on a series of trading cards that satirises the piousness of '50s sci-fi movies, wastes - in both senses - an immensely promising cast and treats us to several teeth-grindingly pointless interludes spoofing films as irrelevant to its thesis as Apocalypse Now, Duel in the Sun and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Its overarching premise is unquestionably hilarious. Whereas The Day the Earth Stood Still told us that humans were the real savages - irrational warmongers who needed to be taught a lesson by their advanced galactic neighbours - here we're back on less preachy ground, with big-brained martian invaders who only pretend to come in peace so they can wipe out all of Congress in one go.

Usually spotty films are rescued by the incidental pleasures, but here it's the subplots that are often found wanting. Give Burton '30s star Sylvia Sidney and cult character actor Joe Don Baker and what does he do with them? Turns Baker into a stereotypical TV-loving trailer park hick, and Sidney into a one-joke sideshow. The joke? She's got dementia! Chortle. In her last film, Sidney has just a single funny line ("They blew up Congress, ahahahaha!"), though there is one absolutely lovely moment between the veteran former leading lady and screen grandson Lukas Haas that utilises the memory loss gag in a worthwhile way. The put-upon teenage misfit tells her that he is the kid she's just been chuntering on about. "I know, Thomas," she says. "Richie always was the best one." It's an unexpectedly affecting bit of Wes Anderson-esque sentiment amidst much offensive tedium - a contrast that just about sums up the film's maddeningly uneven tone.

The production design is inspired, but the (admittedly very amusing) martians would have been better in stop-motion as originally planned. The Congress set-piece, including cautionary signs intended to prevent causing further offence to the visitors that read "no applause" and "no birds", is quite well-handled and the film has a nice subplot featuring Jim Brown and Pam Grier, but then there's all that rubbish with Jack Nicholson's casino promoter and his hippie wife (Annette Bening, who's given nothing to work with), and a dozen other diversions designed to eat up the running time, or satisfy Burton's penchant for self-indulgence. Mars Attacks! also has the distinction of being perhaps the first film I've seen that's avowedly in favour of nuclear war, even if the weapons are ultimately replaced by Slim Whitman. In the end it's not a bad film, just wildly inconsistent. (2.5)

***



Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006) - I don't really get Bond. I always want these spy yarns to be like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and of course they never are - and never could be. So, having been duped time and again by promises of a back-to-basics approach (back to which basics - Dr. No?!), with earthy combat and psychological complexity (that was the sell for For Your Eyes Only and countless others), I decided to sit at home and count my gold, rather than spanking it on Daniel Craig's debut outing as 007. That says something about my judgement, as this belated viewing marks it out as the best Bond I've seen: intriguing and visceral, with the welcome stain of realism marking its more impressive moments.

A great, tough opening scene in monochrome sets the tone, with footage of Craig staking out an MI6 office intercut with snippets of a grisly kill in a public toilet. It's then offset by a largely idiotic credits sequence that looks like a spoof - and you wonder which of these two polar opposites is going to set the tone for the film. Actually, it's both, with bracing action sequences and fragments of fascinating characterisation spliced with superficial villainy and the usual tiresome fetishising of cars and planes. The first full action sequence is an absolute wow: gritty and exhilarating, as Bond pursues a bombmaker through the Ugandan bush (not a euphemism), past an industrial estate, up a crane and then into an embassy packed with gun-toting militia men. It ends with our hero completely losing the plot, prompting this pithy exchange with M (Judi Dench). Her: "You're supposed to display some kind of judgement." Him: "I did. I thought that one less bombmaker in the world was a good thing." Then we're into the story proper, with 007 being pitched against middle management criminal and blood-weeping card sharp Le Chiffre in a high-stakes poker game. Also along for the ride is treasury accountant Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) - who's surely so-named so he can do jokes about riding her, which doesn't happen.

Happily, while the film is essentially about cards, it knows that card games don't work on screen, so brief clips of the contest are alternated with punchy action and suspense sequences, each with a twist in the telling. There's also some sensitive interplay between Craig and Green that recalls the series' (few) emotional highpoints, but is undermined by slack writing, since the relationship isn't really explained by the action we see, the character development happening in jumps. Despite that, and the fact he runs like Forrest Gump, I think Craig is the best Bond we've seen - without the objectionable smugness of most other 007s. That self-satisfaction is replaced by an ambiguity that make the character much more interesting, even if such complexity isn't ramped up quite enough. His is also the first (J)A(ME)S BO(ND) to get an electronic tag, a sign of just how naughty he is in this film. A deft, intelligent score by David Arnold adds to the feel of this worthwhile, welcome reinvention of Bond which - for all its flaws - is hopefully a sign of things to come. So how come everyone says Quantum of Solace is rubbish? (2.5)

Trivia note: The 1967 "comedy" loosely based on Ian Fleming's Casino Royale is one of the worst films of all time.

Linky goodness: For a write-up of Craig's finest moment, the 1996 mini-series Our Friends in the North, please go here.

***



"It's not the fall that matters, it's the landing."
*A FEW BIG SPOILERS, INCLUDING ONE FOR THE LAST 10 SECONDS OF THE FILM*
La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) was one of the movies that got me into movies - along with Star Wars, On the Waterfront (see #63) and Les quatre cents coups - but I hadn't seen it for a good 10 years until the weekend, when it emerged as the only film my girlfriend's family all wanted to watch. The film, often startlingly directed by Mathieu Kassovitz, traces the lives of three working class kids from a Parisian estate whose lives seem to be heading inexorably towards tragedy as they pose, bicker and pontificate across 24 hours in the big city. Vincent Cassel is the obvious standout in a showy part as a combustible would-be hood who vows to kill a cop if his friend dies following a hospitalising encounter with the law.

But just as his Vinz effectively mirrors The Godfather's hotheaded Sonny - albeit with a buzzcut and a mouthiness borne of insecurity - so Hubert Koundé's reluctant rebel follows Michael Corleone's path from model son (of a sort) to law-flouting tough guy - a transition that's shortened from three hours to 10 seconds. And what a 10 seconds it is, as the film's themes dovetail into a hiply-shot but existentially terrifying portrait of a society breeding its own criminals. Co-scripter Saïd Taghmaoui, the nominal lead, rounds out our central trio as an inquisitive, cheery Maghrebin apparently untainted by his inauspicious surroundings or the impossible hand that life has dealt him - at least until the closing minutes. In fact, though La Haine is dominated in hindsight by where it ends up - and an interrogation sequence that's almost unwatchable - for much of its duration it's a fun ride, with an off-kilter sense of humour that gets its laughs through observation, repetition ("how did they get the car in here?"), surrealism (the cow) and a single, profane anecdote about the difficulties of having a poo whilst being exiled to Siberia.

There's a post-Tarantino pop culture conversation about American cartoons that seems forced and out of character for the film, but for the most part the script is bang on, acknowledging that while our (anti-)heroes may be heading for an explosive landing, their journey there is likely to be filled with tragicomic, satiric detail - only some of it apparent to the characters. Kassovitz's directorial ticks and masterful grasp of visual composition drag us through the story, with a sense of timing and an eye for a telling image that augment the compelling story. And the three stars are so perfect in their roles that every time I've seen them since, my first reaction has been to marvel at how they've dragged themselves up from the streets and - oh yeah, they're actors. Seen through the eyes of a young man (I'm now 25), rather than an impressionable teenager, La Haine appears every bit as brilliant, but even more tragic: its protagonists just damaged kids, their minds poisoned by a culture that glamorises the very path they should be avoiding. (4)

***



"We've gone on holiday - by mistake."
Withnail & I (Bruce Robinson, 1987) has one of the great scripts, with skies that are "beginning to bruise", a landlord "who was coming over all bald" and a pair of heroes who "are drifting into the arena of the unwell". Paul McGann is "I" (the script calls him Marwood), a mild-mannered actor who decamps to the country for the weekend with boozing, carousing flatmate Withnail (Richard E. Grant) - an eternally inebriated bullshit artist and wannabe thespian - and the unwelcome Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths). There they battle against supposed starvation, fear grown of disorientation and alcohol, and the advances of predatory homosexual Monty, who has his eye on I.

The plotting is virtually non-existent, but the dialogue is sensational and Grant's theatrics as the gaunt, wild-eyed Withnail are the stuff of legend - culminating in a heartbreaking spot of Hamlet in the pouring rain. McGann, in his more restrained part, is also superb, while Griffiths oscillates between being affectingly vulnerable and hilariously irritating and weird with admirable regularity. Though there are moments of conventionality that jar with the brilliance frequently dripping from Robinson's pen - including some "fish out of water" stuff that could have come straight from The Egg & I - and Ralph Brown is a bit one-note (and a bit much) as a frazzled drug dealer, there isn't a half-minute that passes without some moment of borderline genius or a disarmingly hysterical joke. Though superficially dealing with excess and the foreign nation that is the English countryside, Withnail & I is really a film about self-destruction, self-delusion and friendship, as one young man heads for the big-time and another for the alcoholics' ward. As a comedy, it's virtually matchless - as a tale of lost dreams, heartbreaking. (4)

Trivia notes: Robinson boiled down three years' of experiences in a shared flat in London to a narrative spanning two weeks. Withnail is based on Vivian MacKerrell, a friend who talked about how he was the best at everything, "but never did anything" - in Robinson's words. Uncle Monty was famously inspired by the writer-director's experience of working for Italian filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli, who supposedly pursued the boyish Robinson after casting him in Romeo and Juliet. The line: "Are you a sponge or a stone?", is apparently ripped from that encounter.