Leni Riefenstahl, Mad Max, and prawns - Reviews #208

A micro-update for your delectation, featuring all of the above, and not much more. Also, I went to see The Lion King, which was great fun. Here I am at it.

Incidentally, we crawled raced past 250,000 all-time hits this week, so thank you kindly for your continued support.



The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Ray Müller, 1993) - If you find yourself saying things like: “The reason I sent that telegram to Hitler was…” or “… Hitler hated it, ask anyone who was there”, it may be time to take a long, hard look at your life.

But since Leni Riefenstahl isn’t happy to do that, this absolutely extraordinary film does it for her.

The idea was actually Riefenstahl’s.

The greatest female film director of all time – and the only one to have filmed a Nuremberg Rally – had been shopping the project around for a while, and finding that more than 200 respected documentarians wouldn’t touch her with a barge pole, because of The Triumph of the Will, the fetishistically fascist Olympia, and that one where she borrowed extras from a concentration camp for the crowd scenes of gypsies. Plus all the telegrams to Hitler. And her close personal friendship with Josef Goebbels, whom she unconvincingly describes here as “my worst enemy”.

Enter Ray Müller (“the umlaut is a noble symbol and not to be mocked” – Herman Göring), who somehow manages to walk the trickiest, most perilous of tightropes: making a credible, even-handed and deeply insightful film about Leni Riefenstahl in which she is the only interviewee. His remarkable movie – which it’s still kind of difficult to believes genuinely exists – traces Riefenstahl’s journey from dancer to (gorgeously lit) actress to mountaineer to feature film director and finally documentary-maker of choice for the Third Reich. He wisely allows the 90-year-old Riefenstahl to tell her story, using the most perfectly chosen footage and allowing her to offer insights into her creative process, which – whatever you think of her as a person (and in my opinion, she was basically an utter, irredeemable shit) – usually resulted in the most staggering footage.

He also lets her mount the case for the defence, while occasionally and invigoratingly taking her to task for evasion, deceit and instances of appalling moral turpitude. The sequence in which she denies having anything to do with the creation of the 1934 rally itself, only for Müller to throw in a lantern-lit parade with undeniable echoes of the first scene Riefenstahl ever shot, is just one of the sublime, unaccented juxtapositions that pepper this unique film. There’s also the continuous disappearance of her gentle, perma-smiling façade when her carefully-navigated narrative of denial is questioned – or when she thinks the camera is off – and a prologue mixing footage of Nazis and tranquil, beguiling underwater footage that’s simply the best imaginable way of kicking us into this troubling story.

While the film does ultimately lose a little momentum when it follows Riefenstahl to Africa and to the bottom of the ocean, its decision to portray Riefenstahl’s whole life is almost certainly the right one, and the last couple of minutes are astounding, as Müller tries to pin Riefenstahl down once and for all, and her response is everything at once: full of regret, remorse, anger, confusion, self-delusion, and ultimately an attempt to manipulate the world again.

But I suppose this is simply what happens when you let a woman direct films.

Leni Riefenstahl really was a Feminazi. (4)

***



District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009) - This modern sci-fi marvel is about racism, corporate greed, media complicity in state-sponsored terrorism, aliens who look like prawns and a big robot that makes things go “pooosh” and explode when it shoots them. The story, set in Johannesburg and with clear echoes of Apartheid-era South Africa, unfolds initially as a documentary, telling the 20-year story of an alien craft that halts over the city and is prised open to reveal scared, malnourished creatures who end up being detained in a slum. After rioting, the government brings in a private contractor to shift the 1.5m “prawns” – the reductionist racist epithet of choice – transforming the life of the company owner’s sweet, callow, over-promoted son-in-law (Sharlto Copley).

Perhaps in its ultimate shift from a sci-fi movie with lashings of body horror to a sometimes sentimental action film it loses a touch of its novelty and clout – Alien to Aliens, if you will – but it is a fearsomely clever movie with a sense of swaggering self-confidence, a firm grasp of the unexpected and a tremendous amount to say about the world in which we live. It’s also brilliantly and often outrageously funny, whether saddling Copley with a hilarious media smear or giving full flight to scenes of metal-suited mayhem that make Iron Man look crap by comparison (it is crap, anyway). From its inspired evocation of the ‘other’ – a ghettoised, stomach-churning enemy, painted as sub-human – to the unexpectedly moving, poetic final image, it’s mostly very special indeed. (3.5)

***

I started rewatching 'all the Mad Max films, climaxing with Fury Road', but since I didn't like the first two, I'm revising that plan.



Mad Max (George Miller, 1979) - It's flashily directed in its trashy, B-movie-ish way, but this Australian actioner is so formulaic, derivative and simplistic that it's kind of boring. (2)



Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981) - Grumpy Max (Adolf Hitler) is back in this one-note sequel, scowling as things go boom. I genuinely don't understand why this is supposed to be good. The prologue is nattily done and the ending is a knockout, but what's in between is almost unremittingly crap, with awful characters, risible comedy and a whooping, moronic sensibility that's quite uniquely offputting. Miller certainly knows his way around a crane shot and a flash of kinetic action; if only he could do anything else. (2)

***

Thanks for reading.

The Hobbit: There and Back There Again - Reviews #141

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson, 2012)

First impressions: Thursday, December 13 (3D and 48fps).

Bilbo, Bilbo, Bilbo Baggins (the bravest little Hobbit of them all), gets a third of the way towards facing a big dragon, in Peter Jackson’s return to the Lord of the Rings universe.

The first thing to say is that it’s lovely to be back there, and that this isn’t the misfire various posturing critics would have you believe. The second is that Freeman is as perfect a Bilbo as you’d imagine: his impeccable comic timing and understated rendering of heavy emotion filling the film with charm and hobbidity (or whatever the hobbit equivalent of humanity is) whenever he’s on screen. And the third is that it all looks a bit weird. The 48fps innovation does rectify some of the problems that 3D has with fast-moving action, but it also gives the film a weirdly low-budget look, more like a prime-time Saturday night ITV serial than a film which might well be troubling box-office records in the coming weeks.

There’s also a feeling that this is LotR-lite, more episodic, with somewhat less memorable supporting characters (a legion of dwarfs doing some nice work under excessive prosthetics) and a greater accent on broad comedy and gross-out humour. But it’s also very entertaining, with a cracking final 45 that includes the welcome, perfectly-placed and marvellously executed appearance of Gollum. The scenes in which his pluralising, pointy-toothed little scamp – sporting a Bobby Charlton-ish combover – tangles with Bilbo through a series of complex riddles are just a joy to watch, effortlessly reclaiming Serkis’s creation from a decade of spoofery, and unleashing him into the action with barely disguised glee. I also greatly enjoyed McKellen’s twinkling performance as Gandalf the Grey, especially his line about drawing courage from Bilbo. And Jackson knows his way around an action set-piece, as evidenced by the very neat use of a ladder.

I’m not convinced the film will attain the classic status of the LotR trilogy, but last night’s rapturously-received screening (which included a queue out the door as people jostled for the best seats, and a lovely reaction to the film’s most obviously moving moment: awws, then applawws) suggests that Jackson hasn’t ballsed it up after all. Apparently we’re seeing it again next week, so I can report back further then. (3)

***

Actually, it wasn't a week I had to wait, it was three days, as Mrs Rick was rather excited.



The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson, 2012)

Second thoughts: Sunday, December 16 (3D and 48fps again).

There and back there again. After braving the intensity of a first-night screening (lovely audience; I do enjoy nerds), we went back for more of the same on Sunday. The 48fps still looks odd – if a little less so second time around – and Freeman and Gollum are still awesome. But my thoughts don't stop there. No. I had several more.

The Hobbit is a tonally uneven movie, the almost inevitable result of squeezing a children's book – lighter, less doom-laden and more knockabout – into the LotR template, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a problem, and I don't think the criticisms about overlength or padding ring true. People say that not much happens, but our heroes fight trolls, then goblins, and then orcs, almost get crushed to death by rock giants, and watch as an apparently ineffectual little bookworm becomes a stout and noble warrior. If that happened to me in the space of 166 minutes, I'd consider it quite an eventful couple of hours.

I barely touched on the dwarfs in my first review, largely because I wrote it in 10 minutes on my lunch break. On second viewing, I was able to distinguish a little better between them, and I do think that Jackson and his writers have done a reasonable – if flawed – job of sketching out these characters. Bombur's only real contribution is to break a chair by being fat, but Vengeful Dwarf, Old Dwarf, James Nesbitt Dwarf, Chiselled-Yet-Playful Dwarf and Right Up His Jacksy! Dwarf are all given moments to shine, or, in the latter case, look like a ginger Nicholas Lyndhurst shouting rubbish. The tearjerking pay-off between Vengeful Dwarf (Richard Armitage) and Bilbo is an obvious highpoint - I enjoyed Armitage's forthright performance throughout - but James Nesbitt Dwarf's exchange with the apparently departing hobbit is to be treasured just as much, and Old Dwarf's tale of woe ("... for their dead were beyond the count of grief") is very affecting.

The sequences in which the dwarfs pile into battle are also rousing, accompanied by a soaring motif from Howard Shore's triumphant score. The best of the action spectaculars is the encounter with the goblins, particularly the climax, in which second unit director Serkis and his crew have the baddies battered and throttled with a ladder – which is subsequently used to sprint over a crevasse – and then chase a runaway boulder (perhaps it was them behind Indy that time), which skittles their adversaries. I'm not sure that the hideously unattractive goblin king, or the cockney, mucus-filled trolls are the stuff of movie legend, but they're fairly entertaining, while harking back to Jackson's early horror movie Bad Taste (which I still think is dreadful). In fact, Jackson's first forays into film are an obvious touchstone here. There are a few cock-eyed camera angles (including one woozy, swooping shot in the dinner sequence at Bag End) that are more readily associated with ultra low-budget genre flicks than Hollywood blockbusters.

McKellen is excellent reprising his role as Gandalf: I particularly enjoyed his mischievousness - especially the sheepish look he gives Galadriel when she rumbles him (not a euphemism) - his line about Bilbo, and the interplay between wizard and hobbit. Freeman's performance as Bilbo is really lovely. I think most people nodded sagely when he was cast, and that confidence has been vindicated. He's equally good at being a bossy Baggins, a fish-out-of-water or an unexpected hero, and does some impressively childlike gawping when asked to hang, terrified, from a rockface. The only off-notes are a couple of minor technical errors in the way he has been forced to acclimatise to green screen work: firstly when he's looking a good foot away from Gandalf's head, and secondly when he's pointing a sword vaguely near Gollum.

The extraordinary Riddles in the Dark sequence is probably the best thing I've seen in a cinema this year. I was in absolute hysterics, again, at Gollum's delivery. His agitated yelp of "Give us a chance, precious! Give us a chance!" is almost indecently funny, though of course there's terror and menace circling under the surface. It all takes place in a dark, dank cave, lit only by Bilbo's lightsaber (that's what it was, right?), but exists on a higher plane than everything that surrounds it.

For while The Hobbit is an admirable, entertaining and often funny film (the goblin stenographer deserves a quick mention), packed with stunning landscapes, ailing hedgehogs and rabbit sledges, and lit by moments of considerable emotional catharsis, it's also a bit lumpy – and more than a touch erratic. The defiler looks like the action figure of Mum-Ra I had as a kid, the rock giants set-piece feels flat, uninteresting and unbelievable (it's the one instance where the HFR really takes you out of the action, as the integration of CGI and live-action is so transparently false) and a recourse to snot-based humour is rarely to be found in truly great films.

I thought Leonard Maltin's assertion that The Hobbit was "incredibly boring" was so far wide-of-the-mark that he'd been trying to make it with a green screen, but I'll admit that there are a few dips in interest. (Still, these shortcomings seem to have more to do with slack screenwriting than spinning out the story: Jackson has always struck me as someone whose passion is for movies, not money, so who cares why the studio green-lit a trilogy?).

It's that messiness, and those periodic dry spells, that detract from the film rather more than the collision between grown-up chatter and broader fare, like one of the film's greatest gambles, the broadly comedic introduction of Sylvester McCoy as that "foolish fellow", Radagast the Brown. It's a rare movie indeed that can house both an eloquently-scripted set-piece set at a diplomatic think-tank, and a frenetic attempt – by a wizard covered in bird poo – to resuscitate a hedgehog, but both work well, in themselves and as a part of the larger piece.

Many critics seemed to be competing to see who could appear the most discerning by being the most critical (credit to the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, who can be guilty of one-starring everything in sight, for his measured review), but I think they got this one badly wrong. It's not perfect, by any stretch – and not nearly so unexpected second time around – but it's largely enjoyable, with a trio of superb performances and a handful of truly special moments.

I don't understand why he's called the Neck Romancer, though. He didn't romance anyone's neck during the whole movie. (3) again.