Amanda Knox, The Jinx and Bridget on Brexit – Reviews #246

A few things I've seen over the last couple of weeks.

FILM



I Married a Communist (Robert Stevenson, 1949) – If you’re interested in the history of Hollywood, then this is essential viewing: a movie released at the height of the communist witchhunt, which slips the commies seamlessly (and stupidly) into a standard crime melodrama template. And who else would have made it – at least like this – but red-baiting RKO studio chief Howard Hughes, his rationality thrown to the wind by three too many plane crashes.

Robert Ryan, whose presence is as dispiriting proof as any that prominent liberals were complicit in this dark chapter of American history, stars as the VP of a shipping line who’s targeted by his former comrades in the party, who like nothing better than seducing vulnerable young men and throwing older ones in the river.

It’s clear that the screenwriters either don’t want to expose the public to leftist ideas, don’t want to risk boring their audience with ideology or don’t know what communism is, as the sequences of indoctrinated worker John Agar making speeches at union meetings are done as a wordless montage (!), and the whole exercise is really extremely silly (compounded by Laraine Day’s terrible performance as Ryan’s concerned wife)… but there’s something about the movie that kept me enthralled.

Partly the rich characterisations from lovesick party whore Janis Carter and hired assassin William Talman – a womanising shooting gallery owner – partly the fact that it’s shot by Nick Musuraca and utilises RKO’s undeniable genre expertise, and partly the considerable curio value of seeing a film this vile, irresponsible and thick: Cold War paranoia writ large, if not very well. (2)

***

TV



The Jinx (Andrew Jarecki, 2015) – Capturing the Friedmans director Andrew Jarecki explores the life (and possible crimes) of real estate scion and suspected triple murderer Robert Durst, in this six-part HBO mini-series. It starts uncertainly, unnecessarily padding its run time and becoming frequently entangled in an unnecessarily complicated structure, but by the straightforward, utterly gripping Episode 4 (surely no coincidence) – based around a murder trial – it's really motoring, and the final two episodes are outstanding, some long-winded making-of elements compensated for by the sheer scale of the subsequent revelations.

I remember, when training as a journalist, my class being given reams of paperwork about an ongoing murder investigation. We spent a good half hour searching dedicatedly for the truth, before our trainer helpfully pointed out that we were journalists. "I'm not expecting you to solve the case," he said witheringly, "you just have to write a news piece about it."

We did, but it wasn't nearly as satisfying. And that's where The Jinx comes into its own. It's perhaps less effective as a creative exercise than either Serial or Making a Murderer, and yet unlike those retrospective pieces it actually moves the story along, and – incredibly – manages to solve the case. While there are serious questions to answer about the documentary's own timeline and its commitment to entertainment over, say, morality, the final 15 seconds are as extraordinary as anything I've ever seen on TV.

See if you can spot the almost imperceptible 'tell' that Robert Durst does when he might be telling an untruth. Lol. (3.5)

***



Amanda Knox (Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn, 2016) – The Amanda Knox story done Making a Murderer-style: though the teaser trailers and the opening monologue play with the idea of her possible guilt, this Netflix Original is a single-sided polemic aimed at clearing her name. Which has, of course, already been cleared by the Italian Supreme Court, so fair enough.

This film does a fine job of undermining the case against her and underlining the media feeding frenzy that assisted it, by letting tabloid sleazeball Nick Pisa and mad prosecutor Giuliano Mignini speak for themselves, and then elegantly slicing their testimony into finest fillets of unapologetically self-serving bullshit and dangerous, errant nonsense. Among Mignini's more outlandish pieces of deduction (and there are several) is that when he accused Knox of murder she put her hands over her ears because she was reliving the screams of her victim. Pisa is just an unmitigated arsehole, who either didn't know or didn't care what normal, empathetic people would make of his contributions. It takes something to be the most appalling person in a documentary about a murder, when you were just there to report on it, so well done to him. 'Nick Pisa-shit', am-I-right?!

Speaking about the case, and glimpsed in incredibly eerie home videos shot just before her trip to Italy, Knox is so appealing and so pretty that you can't help but hope that she's innocent (shallow, I know), and certainly there's no smoking gun included, though her decision to try to pin the murder of English student Meredith Kercher on her own boss was, at best, astonishingly selfish. Her then boyfriend and co-defendant Raffaele, meanwhile, is just an adorable bundle of cute, with his broken English and wide open face and, oh yeah, four years spent in prison for murder. Whoops.

This isn't the best true crime work you'll ever see, but it's professionally put together, and weirdly entertaining for a film that's about what it's about. It somewhat skids about on the surface rather than providing the depth of research or emotion that would blow you away, but for its multi-faceted approach and its access - if not its intimacy - it's well worth seeing.

So did Knox do it? Probably not. There definitely isn't enough credible evidence to say anything stronger against her: the most damaging piece is that Raffaele told the police that her alibi was false, but then he was under unfathomable pressure, the adorable bastard. (3)

***



Spiral: Season 4 (2012) – "Précédemment dans Engrenages..." This knockout fourth season of the French crime series is for the most part a return to realism after the silliness of the previous run, with Laure and co investigating both left-wing bombers and Kurdish paramilitaries. And while it never comes close to Season 2 – a devilishly intense, tightly-coiled beast of an eight-parter – it's the second-best series of shows that Spiral has offered, with Tintin given more to do than ever before, and a final episode that offers everything you could want, and then some. It's hard to recall a show with so many great recurring characters, the programme's nuanced view of its heroes and effortless way of manipulating our sympathies - either gradually or via short, sharp shocks - creating a litany of special moments that jar your emotions as they pull the rug out from under you. A dark, nauseatingly suspenseful joy. (3.5)

***

LIVE



Bridget Christie: Because You Demanded It (Leicester Square Theatre, 20 October 2016) – This new show from my absolute favourite stand-up is very good, but with a few obvious flaws. Christie's delivery is rarely utterly seamless, but at the Leicester Square Theatre on Thursday she stumbled over her words at least a dozen times and at others seemed to be almost reciting by rote: of course that's mostly what stand-up is, but the illusion of it just having occurred to the performer is central to its success. And while the material has some dizzying peaks (including one masterfully contextualised routine in which she argues that "A paedophile who voted for Remain is better than a non-paedophile who voted Leave"), it has just a handful of small additions to the show that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival a couple of months ago.

Since it's essentially a show about Brexit − set up with the premise that we all need a break, so the show will be about gardening, bringing her on to thoughts about foreign and indigenous plants − that's problematic. The news, particularly this news, is moving so fast that you could conceivably write five minutes of great new material every day, but then quantity was never Christie's strongpoint: while in her award-winning purple patch, she was essentially repurposing the same material across different mediums: radio, interviews, shows and even a (completely delightful) book. All of which makes it sounds like I didn't like enjoy the show, which I absolutely did.

My problem (well, one of my many problems) is that I wanted the things I like to be things I can love: I want Thea Gilmore to stop writing two songs an album about how you'll never be able to stop her from speaking out, and actually just speak out: as far as I'm aware, she's only ever written one real protest song, and that was 10 years ago. Christie can be staggeringly incisive, is superb at mining the humour from almost impossible sources (women's rights, feminism, FGM, an 80-year-old man falling down a lift shaft) and is better at building a routine than just about anyone I've ever seen, as evidenced by the brilliant (if familiar) story of the Daily Mail printing a photograph of her, believing it to be Charles II.

The material frequently spears the ludicrousness of racism, the decision to hold the EU referendum in the first place, and our decision to vote to punch ourselves in the face − and there's a brilliant bit about a short, fat, sweaty bald man propositioning her in a hotel lift − before a climactic piece of unexpected (and unexpectedly sublime) physical comedy, but the show doesn't quite deliver on the promise of the premise (Bridget Does Brexit), due to some uncertain delivery and the fact that, even in just two months, the story has rather moved on. (3)

***

Thanks for reading.

Ronald Reagan, a docfest and Dan Harmon's kids film - Reviews #134

In the first update for a little while, we're also talking documentaries, Ronald Reagan yelling about his legs and a really useless romantic comedy.



Reagan (Eugene Jarecki, 2011) – Simply one of the greatest documentaries I’ve ever seen, an endlessly illuminating, virtuosic study of one of the most fascinating American figures of the 20th Century – a B-movie star turned General Electric salesman turned President – that seeks to tear down Reagan’s constructed image, and explain who he was, what he stood for and whether he’s worth celebrating. The wealth of footage available from Reagan’s life means he’s eminently suited to this kind of profile, and the movie takes full advantage, using archive clips to exalting, chilling and hilarious effect. The sequence illustrating Ronnie’s faltering film career is amazing, including not only a scene with Reagan as a traffic cop that features the worst back projection of all time, but also a clip of him shouting: “Attaboy, Bonzo!” at a chimp, and hugging him. Through intelligent interviewing, sure-sighted polemic and staggeringly brilliant editing (a nuclear war montage cut to 99 Luftballons is a marriage of image and music worthy of Terence Davies at his best), Jarecki creates a dynamic, compelling portrait of a complex figure who made Americans feel good about themselves and their country, but whose simplistic and destructive “Reaganomics” resulted in a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthy that put millions out of work and destroyed entire towns. If your film is described on Twitter as both a “hatchet job” and a “glowing portrait”, then you’re probably doing something right. Really, it’s an incisive, insightful and even-handed documentary that speaks – and listens – to both sides. Reagan's son, Ron, offers an extremely interesting, thoughtful and balanced assessment of his father’s legacy, while Mark Hertsgaard may be the most handsome man in the world. It’s an astonishing, haunting movie - and a must for modern history buffs. (4)

***



Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008) - An impressive doc about an astonishing story: Philippe Petit’s unsanctioned tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. Marsh famously frames the story like a heist movie, cutting between time-frames, and mixing compelling interviews (Petit himself is a wonderful subject: poetic but straightforward) with unusually effective reconstructions, and idyllic archive footage, albeit none of the central stunt itself. The images of Petit in his element – hundreds of feet up, framed against the sky – are mesmerisingly beautiful, as if he were walking on air. (3.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
My Kid Could Paint That (Amir Bar-Lev, 2007) – Four-year-old Marla Oberman is an abstract artist whose paintings sell for thousands. But what starts as a treatise on the nature of modern art turns into a mystery movie midway through, when her family is accused of guiding – or actually just doing – her celebrated works. It’s a fascinating, gripping, sometimes eerie film, laced with moments of cringe comedy (watching Marla’s dad squirm after she tells him, “Your turn to do it”, may be the most uncomfortable I’ve felt in a film this year), that throws up some interesting questions about the skill and mindset required to create great – or successful – art, though perhaps not in the way it originally intended. (3.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald, 1999) – MacDonald’s Oscar-winning – and career-making – documentary tells the story of the group of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics taken hostage by Palestinian revolutionaries. It’s extraordinarily well-researched, securing an interview with the only surviving terrorist, forensically dismantling the Germans’ atrocious handling of the hostage situation and unearthing some remarkable new information, which should really be given greater prominence. But it isn’t particularly well put-together: it spends more time dealing with Nazism than the complexities of Israeli-Palestinian relations, places too much emphasis on certain hostages ahead of others – dictated largely by who agreed to be interviewed – and has montages that range from the daft (confusing race clips, and split-screen images with squashed heads) to the appallingly tasteless, climaxing with a horrific, unjustifiable sequence in which photos of bloodied corpses (partly smudged out) are cut to Child in Time by Deep Purple. It’s really handy if you can’t imagine what a dead body covered in blood looks like. (2.5)

***



Sideways (Alexander Payne, 2004) – Wine is probably the most boring subject on Earth, so how come Payne’s film about a lonely, bitter best man (Paul Giamatti) taking the soon-to-be-groom (Thomas Haden Church) on a week-long tour of vineyards is so bloody good? Perhaps because of Giamatti’s astonishing characterisation, which imbues an arrogant, self-destructive, self-hating pseud with a completely disarming humanity. Or perhaps because it’s not really about wine at all, but love and friendship and the choices that people make that end up deciding and defining their lives. It’s the antithesis of formula filmmaking: incredibly entertaining, but also about something, and featuring – quite unexpectedly – a handful of brilliant sight gags. (4)

***



*BIG SPOILERS*
Kings Row (Sam Wood, 1942) is like Our Town’s weird, moody little brother, an overwrought, attention-seeking movie that – much like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet – offers us a small-town idyll, only to immediately destroy it. While censorship restrictions put paid to the source novel’s interest in incest and necrophilia, there’s still melodrama and strangeness aplenty in this visit to the titular turn-of-the-century town, including a mysterious, over-protective father (Claude Rains), a surgeon who seems more than a bit crap (Charles Coburn) and a frustrated good girl who wants to have sex with Ronald Reagan. The film is best known today for featuring the 40th President of the United States’ finest performance (at least before he entered politics, LOL) and while “finest” is a relative term, both Reagan and fellow woodenite Robert Cummings – the nominal star of the piece – are uncharacteristically decent, carried along by a story so packed with incident, so full of vivid light and pitch-black shade, that you can’t help but be swept up by it too. Cummings is the superbly-named Parris Mitchell, a French-American pianist, trainee doctor and orphan who's beset by tragedy. His grandma dies, his mentor poisons his own daughter (and Parris’s girlfriend) before shooting himself, and his best friend (Reagan) has his legs sawn off by a psychopath – prompting his never-to-be-forgotten cry of “Where’s the rest of me?!”, unquestionably the best moment of the movie, and a rare example of Right Wing Ronnie doing something good on screen. Despite its cosy, distinctly Sam Wood-ish trappings, the film – and its emphasis on dark secrets – has far more in common with Douglas Sirk’s “women’s pictures” of the 1950s than with wartime Americana like One Foot in Heaven or The Human Comedy, gleefully embracing soapiness and Gothic melodrama, as well as stopping to rest, periodically, on mile-high corn. It’s not subtle, but it’s very entertaining, powered by a remarkable cast – including doomed child star Scotty Beckett, Betty Field as the last word in nervy young recluses, and Ann Sheridan playing a girl from the wrong-side-of-the-tracks – and an unshakeable commitment to its bowdlerised, batshit story. (3.5)

***



*SPOILERS*
American Madness (Frank Capra, 1932) – A minor classic from Capra and regular collaborator Robert Riskin, in which liberal bank president Walter Huston stands up for the little guy against corporate greed, only for a robbery to force a run on the bank (foreshadowing It’s a Wonderful Life), and his marriage to head for the rocks. It’s expertly directed – particularly in the expressionistic robbery set piece and the overhead shots of an increasingly frantic crowd demanding their deposits – features an atypically cool characterisation from Pat O’Brien, and has a progressive view of both capitalism and convicts, but suffers slightly from a familiar problem with Riskin’s work: he sees himself as a liberal, but he sees ordinary people as stupid and easily manipulated. It remains a fascinating film, great to look at (the art deco sets are sumptuous), but with a brain and a heart: lecturing, in a still-timely manner, that when financial institutions put profit before people, everything goes tits up. (3.5)

***



Away We Go (Sam Mendes, 2009) – After Maya Rudolph gets pregs, she and her boyfriend (Big Tuna from The Office) visit various friends and family – trying to decide where to set up home. The leads are both very good, but their memorable, attractive scenes together are really the film’s sole selling point, and their appealing relationship is the only thing about the whole enterprise that feels real. Aside from their old college pals (including Melanie Lynskey, who performs a stylised but nonetheless gutting "pole dance of grief"), the supporting characters range from the sitcom-ish (his parents) to the completely unrealistic (her former boss), with Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ludicrous caricature-of-an-almost-cousin, which belongs in the latter category, spectacularly tiresome: unbelievable, annoying and unfunny, as far away from entertaining as it’s possible to be, and such a cartoon that she’s ultimately meaningless. In all this, the film rather recalls Jim Jarmusch’s unsatisfying Broken Flowers – another downbeat road movie on the subject of family, populated by the sort of people who only exist in indie films. Away We Go is also saddled with a horribly overbearing song score that signposts emotion at every turn. A pity, as Rudolph and Tuna are really good together, and their conversations – treading an affecting line between grown-up decision-making and child-like concerns – frequently feel so genuine and unforced. (2.5)

***



Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006) – An incredibly inconsistent comedy-horror-for-kids, co-written by Community creator Dan Harmon. The characters are rather poorly conceived and most of it is surely far too intense for under-10s, but it’s fairly well-animated in that underwhelming motion-capture way, the story is quite original and it has its share of good jokes, as well as some completely incomprehensive ones, like a 12-year-old boy saying he feels like he’s having a stroke. (2.5)

***



The Accidental Husband (Griffin Dunne, 2008) - Absolutely pathetic. (I was going to watch Bring It On, but the disc was broken.) (1.5)

Next up: a Douglas Fairbanks special!