Film Review: The Counselor

"Drink up man, it's delicious. Surely you're not doubting my taste?"

Preview at Curzon Mayfair - 7/11/2013

Cormack McCarthy, Pulitzer Prize winning author, follows success with adaptations of his novels The Road and No Country For Old Men by scripting The Counselor. Ridley Scott directs a heavyweight cast of Hollywood's finest. Unfortunately The Counselor ends up as less than the sum of its parts.

The unnamed counselor[sic] (Michael Fassbender) is seduced by the promise of riches and a glamorous lifestyle into getting involved in a drug smuggling ring, together with his dealer buddy Reiner (Javier Bardem). The other parties in the deal are the largely unseen Mexican cartels and Westway (Brad Pitt). The details of the deal and the roles of these players are unimportant, to the extent of not being explained beyond the most indistinct sketch. Women loom large in the background, with Penelope Cruz as Laura, the Counselor's fiancée and Cameron Diaz as Malkina, Reiner's girlfriend. Needless to say, the drug deal goes wrong and as the result of a series of apparent coincidences the Counselor gets into trouble with those nasty Mexican gangs. 

Unfortunately the film feels indecisive and in not focusing on either the counselor's undoing or the criminal underworld it fails to illuminate either satisfactorily. A film like Carlito's Way, for instance, is more satisfying in may respects from a similar starting point. The counselor's partners repeatedly advise him to not get involved, and there is little evidence of why he would want to given his seemingly very comfortable position. Dialogue is often restricted to a series of near-monologues that are oblique to the story. Many scenes are superfluous, for instance the diamond dealer, the bizarre car humping scene and the phone call with the counselor's oddly verbose philosophical friend. One tokenistic surreal scene has the counselor wandering through a nocturnal demonstration by grieving families of drug cartel victims. Fassbender's performance is vague, though this could reflect his character being outside his comfort zone throughout the film. Bardem is amusing but stilted and Cruz is criminally underused, reduced to being a muse for the Counselor even though her ethical position seems entirely opposed to his activities. Diaz's woozy performance suits the role - Malkina's character is inscrutable though her intelligence is hinted at in Reiner's lines but never demonstrated in any way until the unconvincing non sequitir ending. Brad Pitt is a comedy cowboy in a bad suit and performs much like he did in Burn After Reading, good in a comedy but inappropriate here.

Every shot of the film is beautifully composed, and shows the cars, bikes, apartments, villas, furniture and actors at their best. The director's background in advertising shows and everything looks beautifully seductive. The desert landscapes are stunning, like a less saturated Breaking Bad - but clearly geographically distinct - and evoke some of the atmosphere of McCarthy's novels. However given the writer's very visual prose style, it is surprising that the drama hasn't transposed effectively to the big screen. In the end we have a film that although enjoyable, doesn't begin to do justice to the considerable talents involved. 2.5/5

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ML50I0mVHY

Film/Immersive Theatre Review - Strange Factories

Serving suggestion.

Cinema Museum, London - 5/11/2013
Strange Factories as staged at the Cinema Museum is a hybrid film/immersive theatre experience that addresses the nature of the creative process and how the artist's creation possesses an existence independently of the artist. The experience begins in the queue outside, where actors in masks instruct audience members to be silent during the performance, and inspect and tease them, priming them for what happens inside. The audience is then split into two groups which once inside are introduced to a number of characters in immersive theatre style, invited to consider their role in the performance, plied with (sham) drinks at a bar and participate in a seance-like ceremony. There was plenty of personal interaction in the viewing I attended, with an audience of nine, though I expect this will vary considerably with the size of the audience. Much of the action takes place in the dark, and the spooky atmosphere throughout is skilfully maintained.

The audience is then invited to sit down to watch the film. This to me is where the serious problems I had with the production begin. The film follows Victor Stronheim and a cast of largely forgettable and interchangeable characters around as he agonises over a play he has written. Boundaries between the worlds of Stronheim, his characters, the audience in the film and the actual audience are blurred, and Stronheim is forced to stage his play to get out of a predicament whose nature is obfuscated by the frankly tedious goings-on. In some scenes the film appears to taunt the audience with dialogue such as (I'm paraphrasing, from memory) 'How much longer can this possibly go on?' and 'The audience is desperate for this to end'. The film's final scene is played out simultaneously on screen and onstage with the same actors. This is followed by a dance and final theatrical scene, after which the audience is led out of the building.

I found the production as a whole unengaging, shallow and the film section overlong. My feeling is that Strange Factories could work as an immersive theatre piece, or as a ten minute art film playing in a gallery, but is too insubstantial for its near three hour running time. My immediate impression was of a company that has become insular and immersed itself too completely in a work. John Harrigan writes, directs and stars, and perhaps this singular vision needs some editorial oversight. An artist creates and has no obligation to cater for a particular, or indeed any audience. However, when the medium is film or theatre, the production is made to be witnessed. To be fair, Strange Factories doesn't appear to be widely publicised and I only heard about it as an existing fan of the Facebook page of Foolish people's previous production, the very enjoyable A Virulent Experience. Perhaps if the film had attempted to develop its characters or had adhered to a more conventional narrative style it might have engaged sufficiently for me to give a fair consideration of its themes. I am sure I was not alone in not getting it, as two other audience members walked out shortly into the film. The immersive theatre was somewhat enjoyable, but it is dragged down by the ponderous film and as a spectacle I give it 1/5.

Website (with trailer): http://www.strangefactories.com/

Film Review: How I Live Now

Cineworld Fulham Road (Preview) - 22/9/2013
Kevin Macdonald, who directed Last King of Scotland, directs this adaptation of the teenage novel by Meg Rosoff. Snappy American teen Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) arrives in the English countryside to spend the summer with her young cousins, who are left to a largely self-sufficient existence by their busy peace activist mum. Teen love blossoms and the kids have a fine time together, but all is interrupted as war breaks out and Britain is invaded while Mum is away. The children are taken away and separated, and Daisy is left to make good on her promise to reunite the family in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
The first act sets up the cousins' carefree bohemian home life like a cross between Joanna Hogg's Archipelago and the Weasley family in the Harry Potter films, and there are plenty of lighthearted scenes as Daisy adjusts to the laid back rural lifestyle. War begins suddenly, and is depicted without pulling any punches. There are plenty of harrowing and violent scenes, but the war is very much a plot device and little attempt is made to fill in details about the identity of the invaders and the nature of the disagreement. The bulk of the film is a road movie as Daisy attempts to reunite the cousins and see her lover again. Needless to say, it doesn't all go to plan.
How I Live Now is very grown up for a teenage film, with themes that are reflected in the 15 rating. It is pretty to look at, and comes across as a serious and mature version of a Famous Five adventure. All the children give good performances, and Saorsie Ronan really stands out. Given the storyline, it is difficult to avoid comparisons with last year's Lore, in which a teenage girl escorts her sister through Germany at the end of WWII. Lore is undoubtedly more substantial, helped by the filled-out background due to its factual premise, but HILN still packs a great deal of emotional impact. While Daisy's motivation doesn't entirely convince to begin with, it is to the film's credit that by the end the teenage romanticism and sentimentality for the family bond endure and satisfy teen and adult viewer alike. 3.5/5.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSaxm68PPT4

Film Review - Solaris (1972)

Kelvin stops to smell the roses

Renoir - 13/6/2013. Introduced by Will Self

This was a special 35 mm screening of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, with an amusing and very personal introduction by Will Self, organised by A Nos Amours, a cinema enthusiast collective fronted by Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts.
The film is an adaptation of the Stanislav Lem's 1961 SF novel of the same name. Set in the near future, it opens with a shot of reeds under water, a motif familiar from Tarkovsky's Stalker, and the first act is played out in a dacha in the countryside where the psychologist Kelvin is visited at his father's house by the cosmonaut Burton, who has returned from the planet Solaris. They discuss what Burton saw on Solaris and the future of the exploration programme. Kelvin himself is shortly to be on his way to Solaris. There is a strange but potent long scene where Burton and his son travel back from the dacha through heavy traffic - no attempt is made to conceal what is quite clearly a Japanese city. Though this film is supposed to be largely apolitical, I wonder if this scene is a vision of a future wider USSR empire?
Kelvin arrives at the station on Solaris to find one of the three occupants dead by his own hand, and the other two oddly evasive. It doesn't take long for Kelvin to discover why. Solaris, or something on it is alive and as the humans are probing it for information, the alien intelligence probes them by materialising as characters from the astronauts' memories or psyche. Kelvin's dead wife Hari appears to him, but only to the extent that he remembers her. Thus she cannot remember what she looks like, or any of her own past, except Kevin is directly involved. Initially resistant to this alien psychic neutrino being, Kelvin is haunted by his role in the original Hari's suicide and grows to love the proxy. What follows is a very Russian meditation on love, loss and the nature of reality and illusion. The cosmonauts however, though they are absorbed by their relationships with these manifestations, realise that having them around isn't healthy, and hatch a plan to bombard the surface of the planet with an x-ray transmission of Kelvin's brainwaves, which will provide the alien with the information it wants and make it leave them alone. The film ends with a chilling scene with Kelvin back at the dacha with his father.
The set design is basic, almost theatrical, but this isn't a pristine minimalist intergalactic vessel like those on Star Trek or 2001, it has a messier, almost steampunk or Jules Verne feel. The acting performances are quite remarkable, especially given the many long takes and the fact that many scenes were reportedly single takes due to the shortage of film. The film stock changes throughout, with different colour grading and abrupt shifts to black and white, probably by necessity unless there is some artistic intent I am missing completely. There is much to explore in this film - the imagery, literary (Tolstoy and Cervantes are quoted), philosophy of love and the human condition - and the slow pace encourages the viewer to slow down and take a look around. I am sure I will be watching it many times over on DVD. 5/5

Film Review - Beware of Mr Baker

High times for Mr Baker

Riverside Studios - 11/6/2013
Ginger Baker is best known for being the drummer and driving force behind the 1960s English rock power trio Cream, in which Eric Clapton did his best work, supported by Bassist Jack Bruce. Clapton and Bruce feature prominently in this biopic, which is compiled from stock footage of Baker and his various bands through the years, interviews with Baker and others, and animated sequences.
Though Baker comes across as a cantankerous, unconventional and irresponsible old man, the film is sympathetic enough to try to develop an understanding for his seemingly constant need to up sticks and start again from scratch, whether it be with his bands, marriages, or various countries around the world. This is a man who has three passions in life: music, his polo horses, and drugs. Everything else is by-the-by.
We see his life from his childhood, the early jazz drumming days, rock superstardom with Cream and Blind Faith, jazz fusion in the early 70s, living in Nigeria, Hollywood, Colorado, Italy, and finally back to South Africa.
The snappy editing and music clips, underpinned by Bakers rollicking drumming keep things moving along at a brisk pace, and given the subject, there is no way this could turn into a turgid hagiography, as music docs sometimes do. Remarkably, given the diverse nature of the source material, there is a strong visual style running through the film, helped by the editing and subtle manipulation of the older material. Baker is strident, forceful, selfish, and not always a cooperative subject, but all this is handled with understanding and humour, and I for one came out with renewed respect for the old man, despite what I have read about his behaviour elsewhere.
I saw this as the second part of a double bill with Not Dead Yet, the Jason Becker biopic, and it made for a nice companion piece, given the contrasting familial themes, and the more upbeat mood of the Baker film. Sitting directly behind me in the cinema was none other than Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, who laughed hard and often throughout the film, except when Ginger and Eric compared Ginger's drumming to John Bonham's. Now there's an exclusive you won't find in any other review. 5/5


Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5seWMYG9kk

Film Review - Not Dead Yet

Jason Becker speaks through eye movements

Riverside Studios, 11/6/2013 (+ Q&A with director Jessie Vile)

Avid readers of 1980s guitar magazines will be aware of Jason Becker, the electric guitar prodigy from Mike Varney's seemingly endless stable of shredders, which included Yngwie Malmsteen, Vinnie Moore, Greg Howe, Shawn Lane, Marty Friedman, and Paul Gibert. Nostalgia aside, I have to admit not being a fan of Becker at the time, as (perhaps unfairly) I had him down at the Friedman/Yngwie end of the spectrum, whereas I was more of a Howe/Vai fanboy. Imagine a wasp humming Bach at 240 bpm, or Paganini, you get the picture. Becker had just got the gig as David Lee Roth's guitar player and was recording the A Little Ain't Enough album for Roth when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease), a debilitating neurodegenerative condition. Not Dead Yet documents Becker's life and his continuing career as a composer.
Given that Becker was on the point of going stratospheric when the diagnosis and rapid deterioration came, most of the first two acts are pieced together from amateur footage, whether 8 mm film shot by his uncle, or VHS video from various sources. Aside from this we have interviews with various figures who knew him at the time, and many musicians who were aware of his work. He appears to led a charmed life until the diagnosis, and his personality and humour come across very clearly. Oddly, there are only two pictures in existence of Becker with David Lee Roth, who refused to appear in the film.
ALS hits Becker hard and he is given three years to live. He deteriorates very quickly, culminating in an strange moment in the film where we are seemingly led to believe he has died. The director even goes as far as to imply that his childhood friend thought he was dead and was shocked to receive a message from him. This seems to be an unnecessary cheap trick that the film doesn't need.
Following this mysterious near death experience, although almost completely paralyzed and able to communicate only through eye movements, Becker regains his spirit and humour and continues to compose music through some ingenious devices and with the help of his father and various musical folk.
Ultimately the film is about one man, his fierce spirit and will to live, and his family without whose incredible love and support he would be nowhere. Jason Becker would almost certainly have faded away and died had he not been the willful character that he is with the humour and personality that he has. Despite the absence of a narrator, the film maintains its momentum, and everything comes across through the clever editing of the mostly found footage, reinforced through interviews and snippets of Becker's own memoirs, read by his father. Apart from the cheap shot death scene, this film is a moving and inspiring testament to the human spirit, and you don't even have to like the music to enjoy it. 4/5

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGFDWTC8B8g

Film Review - Thérèse Desqueyroux

Thérèse: I wish I was in The Place Beyond The Pines

Curzon Richmond 8/6/2013

Thérèse Desqueyroux is the last film from Claude Miller who died last year at the age of 70. It’s based on a novel by François Mauriac set in the 1920s about a bright young woman (Thérèse, played by Audrey Tatou) who marries her slightly dull neighbour Bernard, played by Gilles Lelouche so that their estates can be united and they will have thousands of acres of pines.

It is established early on that though Thérèse is intelligent, she ‘thinks too much’ and ‘has too many ideas’, she has a dissonant desire to unite the families – ‘I'll marry you for your pines’, she says to her fiancée, straight-faced. Her childhood friend Anne (Anaïs Demoustier) becomes her sister in law, and though Thérèse, frustratedly, finds her ‘simple’, for a while she is a proxy through which Thérèse discovers the possibilities of a life lived with passion through Anne’s dalliance with another neighbour. Thérèse’s loyalties to the family are tested when she is assigned the task of speaking to the Jewish neighbour to put him off. Boorish Bernard and the marriage are insufferable and stifling and something has to give way. The stress of dealing with forest fires on the estate one summer is the trigger for Thérèse to hit out, and the illusive equilibrium is blown apart.

In a way it is a strange performance from Tatou. Gone is the cutesy doe-eyed gamine from Amelie and even the straight-laced Sophie from the execrable Da Vinci Code. She plays Thérèse with a determinedly sullen, blank expression throughout and an uninflected voice through which she aims her pointed asides at the dullards around her, which suits the role but makes it hard to empathise with her. Gilles Lelouche for once does not play himself and does a pretty solid job playing the macho, yet weak husband. I’m not convinced the director does a great job of convincing the viewer of Thérèse’s sharp mind (she is shown reading books and writing letters), but on the other hand I think that not spelling out her competing motivations really makes the film. These things are never simple and if Thérèse isn’t fully aware of the reasons behind her actions, why should we be?

The film also steers clear of making easy judgements – though Thérèse is trapped in this unsatisfactory situation, it is almost entirely of her own doing, and her actions as she hits out against the suffocating regime show she is unbalanced, we are led to sympathise more with Thérèse than Bernard. The cinematography does full justice to the beautiful châteaux and country estates, whose bright pastel tones contrast with the oppressive interiors and Thérèse’s sombre appearance. Aside from the jarring change when the adult Thérèse suddenly looks 15 years older than her still adolescent childhood friend, there is plenty to like about this film, and plenty of food for thought and scope for interpretation, but ultimately I’m not sure it hangs together as well as it could have. 3.5/5

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En2OZWquQzY

Film Review - What Richard Did

Riverside Studios 26/4/2013
Set in Ireland, this is a tale of the eponymous late teen Richard, sports jock, popular, ambitious and clever, and seemingly with the world at his feet. Richard's world comes undone as a result of a drunken altercation that gets out of hand. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the film goes some towards exploring the implications of the attempted cover up, which weighs heavily on the parties involved, and the issue of his culpability is somewhat glossed over.
The first act takes an awfully long time to set the scene for 'what Richard does', or perhaps it just felt that way because the trailer gives so much away. Unfortunately, charming as he is, Richard does not elicit a great degree of sympathy precisely because his charm and obvious intelligence suggest that he should be above these actions and smart enough to know better. In the end it is his father Peter, played by Lars Mikkelsen, looking much older than in his role as Troels in The Killing, who steals the show and the sympathy of the audience. 3/5

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXTcSCp8R6E

Film review - Easy Money

"You should have seen me when I had finished adjusting my cufflinks" - Joel Kinnaman (middle), Matias Varela (L) and Dragomir Mrsic (R).

Preview at Odeon Covent Garden, 25/4/2013

Joel Kinnaman, previously seen in the US version of The Killing, shines in this hard edged and gritty Swedish crime thriller based on a novel by Jens Lapidus. Kinnaman plays JW, a poor business student who yearns to live like his wealthy classmates in a Stockholm business school and maintains his outwardly glamourous lifestyle on the cheap by living a secret double life as a taxi driver. In the meantime he is on the lookout for a rich girlfriend or business opportunity to provide him with the means to lead the life he craves. He appears to get his big break, but things soon unravel.

He is drawn into the Swedish drug trade by Jorge, played by Matias Varela, and Mrado, played by the bank robber turned actor Vladimir Mrsic. Soon enough the strain of leading a double life begins to tell, and JW begins to realise that he is no longer in control of his own fate. Loyalties are tested to breaking point.

Although it doesn’t entirely resist the melodrama and moralising that blights Nordic noir, the film excels in developing the characters of Jorge and Mrado so that we sympathise with both even as we appreciate their criminal intent. Kinnaman’s performance in particular is superb, his gradual transformation from insecure student to criminal mastermind and down is subtly and masterfully played. Mrado is convincing too, oscillating between sensitive father and menacing heavy. Director Daniel Espinosa never lets the tension slip and the shocking violence, thrills and drama add up to a very good film indeed. 5/5 

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Ms770WTe0