Steve James, Cry Danger and the burning of books - Reviews #228

My last post was about Alfred Hitchcock. Here's an 11th fact about him: the worst silent movie inter-title he ever wrote (according to Hitchcock himself) was in Easy Virtue, in which Isabel Jeans's Larita is deluged by photographers outside a courthouse. Spreading her arms, she cries: "Shoot, there's nothing left to kill!" The other 10 things I learnt about Hitchcock are here.

I don't spend many weekends nowadays just watching films, but I did this past weekend. Some reviews for you, ranging from a heartbreaking documentary to a rip-roaring ride.

***



Cry Danger (Robert Parrish, 1951) - One of my favourite noirs: a trim, cynical and brutal film, with insanely good dialogue, an unmatchable LA atmosphere and a great low-key ending.

In the best of his many fine excursions into the genre, Dick Powell (who also directed most of the film uncredited) is Rocky Malloy, who comes out of prison and tries to find out who just cost him five years of his life.

The scenes where he spars one-sidedly with Wiliam Conrad − banging his head on the floor; playing Russian Roulette with him − are superbly nasty, Rhonda Fleming is a fine female lead, and Richard Erdman (Community's Leonard) brings the pathos as Powell's Marine buddy.

A short, sharp shock, and a brilliant one at that, but not without a dark vein of wit leading to its beating heart.

In the whole of film noir, I think there's only one movie I prefer, and that's Out of the Past. (4)

Incidentally, I wrote to Rhonda Fleming about this film in 2011 and she sent me surely the loveliest letter I've ever had from anyone in the movies.

***


Yes, he is basically Dwight Schrute.

*SOME SPOILERS*
Stevie (Steve James, 2002) - Steve James's first documentary since Hoop Dreams (my favourite of all time) wasn't supposed to turn out like this.

After embarking on a piece about his estranged "little brother" − the damaged kid to whom he'd acted as a mentor while at college − his subject, Stevie Fielding, was charged with raping his own eight-year-old cousin.

This harrowing profile examines the circumstances that shaped Stevie: how he was beaten by his mother, raped by people at his foster home, and then successively abandoned by anybody to whom he forged close ties.

As a portrait of a thick, poor, rural guy charged with a horrific crime, filmed across several years, it reminded me a lot of Making a Murderer, and it's just as upsetting and compelling, though in this case there's no ghoulishness yet little doubt that he's guilty, so the point of the movie is not to weigh up the evidence (or to dwell endlessly on it), but to try to understand what went so very, very badly wrong.

Atypically, James inserts himself into this story (something he didn't do in Hoop Dreams or The Interrupters), but that makes perfect sense in the context, and his balancing of different viewpoints, integration of expert testimony (via Stevie's mental health case files) and completely unsensational treatment make it a tough but extremely valuable watch, full of insights but without trite or simplistic psychology.

Incidentally, Patricia, the old schoolfriend of Stevie's fiancée whom they stay with in Chicago, is my absolute hero. (3.5)

***



Rush (Ron Howard, 2013) - An astonishingly entertaining movie about the rivalry between playboy English F1 driver James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and his ruthless, driven Austrian counterpart, Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl), as their rivalry sparks, mounts and then spins completely out of control.

Howard’s film occasionally stalls when allowing bit part players to utter stock platitudes, hurling us out of the story, but for the most part it’s a dizzying combination of thrill ride and compelling character drama, that makes you care – really care – about a pair of toffs who drive too fast for a living.

Writer Peter Morgan offers us that strong if formulaic adversarial narrative he does so well, the visual tics take you to the heart of the action in exhilarating style, and there’s some absolutely exquisite lip-pursing from Brühl. It's also nice to see Christian McKay on cinema screens again: his last scene of note is a little gem.

It's as much fun as any film of the past few years. It almost made me like cars. (3.5)

***



Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune (Kenneth Bowser, 2011) - A heartfelt, brilliantly edited documentary about the magnificent '60s protest singer Phil Ochs, who helped give a voice to a generation, while suffering the innumerable setbacks of his generation, flirting periodically with performance art, and wrestling with the manic depression that ultimately killed him at 35.

I first heard him when I was a teenager, after Thea Gilmore covered his signature song, When I'm Gone, at the Manchester Academy, and I've been a fan ever since, even if the ripped-from-the-headlines nature of much of his music makes it a lot more dated than Dylan's (his contemporary, friend and rival).

In this tender but by no means rose-tinted portrait, he comes across a mass of contradictions: a socialist patriot who went to military school and idolised Kennedy, an egomaniac who wrote the definitive song of the anti-Vietnam movement, appeared at every left-leaning benefit he was ever asked to, and spent his free time in foreign bordellos.

Seen on stage or heard in voiceover, he's an extraordinarily clear-eyed and intelligent commentator on his times, brilliantly lampooning the absurdity of government policy, bitterly acknowledging the canniness of his opposition and displaying a greater understanding of how to connect with the working man than almost any of his contemporaries.

By the end, having fall in love with him, you watch him fall to pieces, a bloated, alcoholic wreck in rectangular shades, babbling about conspiracies on a street corner.

It's impossible to do justice to a life as full (and as full of triumphs and sorrows) as his in just an hour and 36 minutes, whilst mapping out the social and political changes that shaped Ochs and allowed him to flourish, but this impressive film gives it a good go, with insightful contributions from his family and friends (plus Jello Biafra and Christopher Hitchens!), perfectly chosen clips and a near-constant soundtrack of remarkable music. (3)

See also: I reviewed Martin Scorsese's astonishing Bob Dylan documentary, No Direction Home, here.

***



Limitless (Neil Burger, 2011) - What would you do if you had unlimited brainpower? "I would get a haircut and becomes a stockbroker, then maybe a politician" − Bradley Cooper in this film. What a staggeringly limited amount of ambition.

This was quite fun while I was watching it, but it didn't amount to much. The trick photography with the continuous zoom was fucking ace, though. (2.5)

***


You can stand there until you stop shrugging.

Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008) - Errol Morris's documentary takes you vividly inside the hellhole that was Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison − through interviews, reconstruction and those unfortunately iconic pictures of detainees being tortured by US soldiers − but it has almost no answers, or even suggestions.

Maybe it's just too big and difficult a topic to tackle, even for one of cinema's great documentarians. He underlines the almost arbitrary definitions of torture used by the US military, but fails to hold anyone to account. The result is a very sad, frustrating film; its 'highlight' − if there is such a thing − the testimony of the apparently gentle, sweet-natured Sabrina Harman, whose complicity in the abuse, whether partial or otherwise, is chilling to comprehend.

Morris's brilliant command of that narrative shows that his powers have merely come up against something insurmountable, not deserted him entirely. (2.5)

***



The Ladykillers (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2004) - The Coens' worst film by some considerable distance − the main problem: it's not funny. I'm not a big fan of the Ealing original, but it's a fair bit better than this childish, cartoonish Southern misfire, in which loquacious 'professor' Tom Hanks moves his gang of misfits into the basement of an old house so they can knock off the casino next door. The catch: his new landlady is a slightly batty old woman (Irma P. Hall), who keeps getting in the way. I only laughed twice. Marlon Wayans shouts endlessly. The gospel soundtrack and a neat PoV American Football game are among its few virtues. (1.5)

***

BOOK:



Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1954) - Bradbury’s vision of a dystopian world in which books are banned feels a little clichéd now, and never quite lives up to the literary promise of its opening (his economical, gently experimental prose style quickly becoming repetitive), but it offers a solid story with a strong anti-conformity message, a selection of breakneck twists and a simply perfect final page. And as much as it’s a heavyhanded book, with a hero whose job as a “fireman” is to burn books, houses and the people inside them, the atmosphere surrounding that lifestyle is immaculately rendered, while there are also moments of deft, deceptively astute satire, including the stat’s claim that the first “fireman” was Benjamin Franklin. It’s curious how much of a fool Bradbury decided to make his hero, Guy Montag, his erratic, childish behaviour frequently commented on by other characters: perhaps the author’s point is simply that a world this stifling would create men ill-equipped to offer resistance; perhaps it was merely the demands of plotting. I don’t read much sci-fi – aside from Vonnegut – but this stark, admirably unsentimental book didn’t seem big or bold or ultimately coherent enough to justify its exalted reputation, while its equation of nature with moral purity had been done to death, even then. Its treatment of the printed word is alternately pretentious and profound. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

The Elephant Man at Theatre Royal Haymarket

Wednesday 27 May



The Elephant Man (Theatre Royal Haymarket) - This adaptation of Bernard Pomerance's play (also the basis for the exceptional 1980 film) is fantastic as far as it goes, but it doesn't go quite far enough.

The production feels too short by a good 20 minutes and has no real dramatic climax, though it's illuminated by a superlative, all-American cast, particularly screen star Bradley Cooper, who made it big in that abhorrent, detestable slice of Fratwank, The Hangover, before revealing he could actually act the pants of most people in Hollywood, and makes for a simply sublime John Merrick. Eschewing prosthetics, he instead walks on stage as the pin-up he is, before responding to a doctor's coldly clinical analysis of his character's physique by contorting his award-winning body (People Magazine's Sexiest Man of 2011) into the curious curves of the Elephant Man, just as his voice then leans on gasps and gulps, and his personality bends to draw out Merrick's good humour, irony and inherent tortured melancholia.

In what is more of an ensemble piece than you may expect, veteran indie darling Patricia Clarkson goes for some big American moments, angling for the loudest kind of quiet pathos imaginable, as she wields the silence between words like a sledgehammer, but she's certainly commanding playing a world-weary diva shaken to sentiment by her encounter with true goodness. The other really notable performance here, though - indeed, the only person on the Theatre Royal stage who can live with Cooper in this kind of form, in this kind of scene-nabbing role - is Alessandro Nivola, absolutely excellent as doctor Frederick Treves, a character whose descent from arrogant, ambitious physician to largely broken man wielding a few choice observations about the human race is chilling, if not dramatically complete.

The acting is complemented by inventive though not groundbreaking stagecraft, into which so much thought has clearly gone that at times the production slightly undermines itself (the odd if arresting scene in which Cooper contrasts the standard human form with Merrick's distorted body requires that he act from behind a curtain prior to that). It's a hot ticket, though, and it deserves to be, not just for the big names from the big screen - which have brought a crackling excitement to Haymarket - but for the quality of the acting, Pomerance's familiar, erratic but sometimes beautifully modulated observations, and a basic story that retains its ability to appal, amuse, confound and move.

If it has a problem, it's that it never quite comes to the boil. The problem, perhaps is that Pomerance's thesis - that Merrick was as damaged by his embedment in high society as by his experiences as a ritually abused freakshow attraction - doesn't really seem to ring true, at least not in this version of the story.

There's a huge amount to be drawn from it, though, and even a bit of gratuitous nudity for us all to enjoy. No, not Patricia Clarkson's waps (though those are also on show), I'm talking about that glimpse we get of the real John Merrick's penis, which is perfectly in proportion. Cool. (3.5)

Silver Linings Playbook, Paul Rudd, and the beta Zeta - Reviews #138

The best film I've seen at the cinema this year! My favourite sitcom! A really underwhelming, disappointing David Wain comedy that lacks a coherent structure or characters you can truly root for! All in this latest update, which contains more swearing than it strictly should, possibly because I'm sleepy. Or showing off, I forget which.

MOVIES:



*VERY MINOR SPOILERS*
CINEMA: Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012) – At last! I’ve been waiting all my life for a film about a character who’s a bit like me. And now it’s here. Because Bradley Cooper’s bruised, bipolar protagonist really fucking hates Stevie Wonder’s Ma Cherie Amour. Just like me! And that’s not the only reason to celebrate, since Russell’s original, screwball-y film of two lost, damaged souls connecting, is the best film I’ve seen at the cinema this year.

Cooper is a psychiatric patient released after eight months in a hospital, following an explosive episode brought on by his wife’s infidelity. Invited to dinner by his best friend, he meets a bereaved, "slutty" depressive (Jennifer Lawrence) who offers him a deal: she can get a message to his estranged wife, if he helps her compete in a dance contest. Its rom-com framework may appear conventional, but the film consistently surprises. It’s true that most depictions of mental illness ring false, because a realistic work would usually be really fucking boring, but this is a film that manages to entertain without trivialising its characters or their problems. While angling on the humour of their situation, spotlighting the obsessiveness and lack of social skills that are often a symptom or by-product of mental illness, it takes the subject seriously, an admirably honest approach in a genre often beset by duplicity. Simply put, it’s nice to see these kinds of characters – and specifically these characters – on a movie screen. And like Tom McCarthy or Alexander Payne, Russell can offer escapism while making you think, and feel, a welcome trick on a Friday night, when the temptation can be to immerse oneself in froth.

Cooper, who was just unbearable in The Hangover (a film I loathe), is nothing short of a revelation, and his chemistry with Lawrence – one of the finest actresses working today – is really beautiful. There’s also a nice performance from De Niro, his most interesting in years, as Cooper’s father, who may be trying to build bridges with his son – or may just be using him as a good-luck charm to win money betting on football. His sequences seem distracting early on, taking us away from a beguiling burgeoning friendship, but the film’s apparently disparate elements slot together perfectly as it progresses, leading to a wonderfully satisfying finale. I loved it to pieces. (4)

***



Mostly Martha (Sandra Nettelback, 2001) – When the Catherine Zeta-Jones romcom, No Reservations, was on telly recently, I sought advice from the internet as to whether I should watch it. Almost without exception, everybody in the world told me to avoid it like the plague (or Spice-World), but to track down the German-language original immediately. So I did. Martha (Martina Gedeck) is a lonely, workaholic chef whose solitary existence is transformed forever by the arrival of her niece (Maxime Foerste), whose mother – Martha’s sister – has died in an accident. At the same time, Martha's job as head honcho in the kitchen appears threatened by the arrival of a charming Italian cook (Sergio Castellitto). What I most enjoyed about this grown-up film film was how its happy moments were so well earned, and its downtime so true to its story, a lesson most American rom-coms could do with learning about 30 years ago. Really it’s a well-observed human drama, with flashes of welcome levity, that isn’t afraid of the emotional messiness that’s a part of real-life, or the mistakes, grudges or fuzzy reconciliations that go with it. The film has some minor shortcomings in that its score leans towards cheese (complete with light jazz sax), its cinematography is too glossy and clean for the material and its "blind tasting" scene is a bit tired, but Gedeck is stunning in the lead, and the story really sucks you in, as well as making you terrifically hungry. (4)

***



The Decoy Bride (Sheree Folkson, 2011) – A sassy Scotswoman (Kelly Macdonald) returns to the Isle of Man the Hebrides after getting her heart broken, where fate casts her into the life of a ridiculous twitching caricature (David Tennant) – an author and all-time phony who’s about to wed a big-jawed American movie star. This rehash of I Know Where I’m Going! – via Leap Year – doesn’t really deserve to share a sentence with either, as it doesn’t occupy the same realm as P&P’s transcendent romance, nor plumb the depths of that recent, insultingly lazy slab of shite. Any charm it does have rests on the superhuman efforts of Macdonald – whose appealing performance weathers all manner of ridiculous developments – and the lovely Isle of Man locales. As with almost any British production that tries to include some Americans, chunks of it are rather embarrassing (ex pony-smacker Sally Phillips, who co-wrote this one, bizarrely forces herself to play a supporting part with an unstintingly terrible US accent), and this would doubtless have worked better had the leading man approximated the behaviour of a human being – even if his sentimental sequence with the bagpipes is rather sweet. Thanks to Macdonald, though, it turns out alright, her comic timing, periodic underplaying and attractive fieriness breathing life into a story that’s been told too many times. (2.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
Wanderlust (David Wain, 2012) – A woman wearing too much make-up (Jennifer Aniston) and Paul Rudd (Paul Rudd) chance upon a hippy commune and, after first bidding it goodbye forever, resolve that it’s where they should spend the rest of their lives – pending a two-week trial. It’s his decision to go back there, but it’s she who blossoms, by which the film means that she flashes her tits, wipes her arse with some leaves and shags Justin Theroux’s pretentious slimeball. This mystifyingly misfiring comedy from the people who brought you Wet Hot American Summer (muted applause), The Baxter (exuberant applause) and Role Models (sheepish cheering) has a couple of massive laughs at the start, benefits from Rudd’s typically amusing performance (spotlighting his deadpan, very English sensibility) and boasts a strong cast on paper, but is pointlessly confrontational, emotionally vapid and ultimately nothing more than a string of barely-connected, clichéd set-pieces, each more desperate than the last. If you find yourself watching a film, thinking, “I could probably have written this”, that’s usually a bad sign. Especially if your next thought is: “I’m fucking glad I didn’t.” (2)

***

TV:



"Behind every successful man is... me, smiling and taking partial credit."
Parks and Recreation: Season 4 (2011-12) - I'm something of a novice when it comes to TV, but this may be the greatest season of small screen comedy I've ever seen. Tracing Leslie's election campaign from genesis to polling day, with a few inspired diversions, it expertly refines her central character, uses the show's supporting heroes – Ron, Andy, April, Ben and Tom – in the best possible way, breathes real life into previously uninvolving figures like Chris and "Ann Perkins!" and finds room for enjoyable guest spots from Paul Rudd (as idiotic election rival Bobby Newport) and Kathryn Hann. There are a handful of lesser episodes along the way (I'm Leslie Knope, Pawnee Rangers, Bowling for Votes), but it's very much relative, and the overwhelming majority are astonishingly good: like End of the World, Smallest Park, The Trial of Leslie Knope, Campaign Ad and Win, Lose or Draw. This fourth season is smart, sharp and satirical (particularly in the nerve-shredding episode, The Debate, which is a complete triumph and may just be the best thing Parks and Rec has ever done), but retains its cheeringly, often exaltingly soft centre. It's also breathtakingly funny. "First of all, you did the right thing by hiding under this table." (4)

See also: There are brief reviews of Season 2 and Season 3 elsewhere on the blog.