Abort, retry, epic fail: "Tron: Legacy" (ST 19/12/10)

Tron: Legacy (PG) 125 mins *

You remember 1982’s Tron, don’t you? One of the first Hollywood films to engage with virtual realities, it boasted what were then state-of-the-art effects, the young Jeff Bridges, and not all that much else besides. At best, the film perhaps merited a five-minute retrospective on an I Love the 80s clipshow; instead, a decision has been taken to update its source code – at great expense – in the hope of tapping any false nostalgia still lingering after July’s A-Team movie. The result is almost unbelievably soulless product – a sapping series of deceptions and disappointments packaged as a top-of-the-range 3D Christmas gift. Sorry folks, no refunds.

Tron 2.0 feigns sticking it to The Man, even as its other hand sets about crushing anybody who even thinks of streaming it online. Hero Sam Flynn (walking, smirking haircut Garrett Hedlund) is striving to keep in the public domain software first designed by his father – Bridges’ Kevin – and since co-opted by an Evil Corporation that, you know, cares more about stock prices than it does about what the kids want. (Unlike backers Disney, of course.) To do this, he must pass into the cyberworld itself, where he undergoes several Rollerball-like challenges to earn his freedom and (yawn) his pappy’s respect, virtual or otherwise.

Director Joseph Kosinski hails from advertising, and it shows: he tires of narrative coherence within ninety seconds, and thereafter prefers posing models to actual actors. Michael Sheen’s lively hamming as a cane-swishing nightclub owner merely underlines how impersonal – how inhuman – much else here is. One of the in-game Bridges is rendered as his twentysomething self from the first movie, and given the choice between a creaseless, computer-generated Bridges and a grizzled, lived-in Bridges, I know where I’d put my money: True Grit opens in cinemas next month.

These effects, supposedly game-changing, instead conspire to sink Legacy something rotten. Avatar, with its liberated depth of field and rapturous responses to nature, felt like a world worth escaping into, whichever story was told therein. Tron’s 3D has been spent on something grey and dreary, heavy on vectors and algorithms, light on romance, humour and adventure. It’s an enterprise designed by committee, built by robots, and watching it feels like being stuck in a boardroom for the holidays, with only a relentless PowerPoint presentation to make up for being denied fresh air, good company, or indeed a life.

Tron: Legacy opens nationwide today.

Hobo heaven: "Boudu Saved From Drowning"

Competing with The Shop Around the Corner and the upcoming The Big Sleep for the title of most welcome seasonal revival is a restored print of Jean Renoir's 1932 comedy Boudu Saved From Drowning. The set-up is as simple as that of any early sound picture. A well-to-do Parisian bookseller, Lestingois (Charles Granval), dives into the Seine to rescue Boudu (Michel Simon), a hobo driven to attempt self-sacrifice after the loss of his beloved canine companion. Lestingois brings him back to his apartment, dries him off, and - in a show of the best liberal intentions - invites him to make himself at home, without realising that a free spirit with little grasp of social mores isn't the ideal houseguest when you're trying to hide your affair with one of the friskier domestics from your dear darling wife. (The plot was updated by the farceur Paul Mazursky for 1986's Down and Out in Beverly Hills, which had the foresight to cast Nick Nolte as the dishevelled interloper.)

Though the restoration is first rate - these are as sharp as I can remember seeing these particular images - the film itself might now seem a little antiquated to newcomers, all too evidently based on a stage play (by René Fauchois) designed to épater le bourgeois without unduly alienating that audience that went to the theatre or picture palace of the time. (The humanist Renoir - steering his camera towards genteel recreation in parks - likes his characters too much to go too savagely for their throats; the cinema would have to wait a few decades for Buñuel's late 1960s output to truly tear into the middle-classes.) Boudu's reputation thus more or less rests entirely on Simon's towering performance as one of the movies' very greatest tramps: scratchy and bearded and crotchety, giving the impression of someone who's genuinely turned up on set half-cut, while never once suggesting a major star of stage and screen - as he was at this moment - slumming it. He's having a ball, treating his new home in much the same way Belmondo (surely the actor's rightful heir) did the South of France in Pierrot le Fou - as his own personal playground, which is perhaps why the film remains such good, solid, mildly naughty fun.

Boudu Saved From Drowning opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

From the archive: "The Gigolos"

The best new movies presently on release weren't even made in the past twelve months. Last week we had Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, completed in 2002 and remaining remarkably fresh despite sitting on the shelf for all that time; this week, we have The Gigolos, a disarming debut from co-writer/director Richard Bracewell, completed in 2004. This comedy-drama centres on a small business operating out of the Park Lane/Mayfair area. Male escort Sacha (Sacha Tarter) and his pimp Trevor (Trevor Sather) spend their days and nights arranging dinner, dancing, drinks and other after-dark activities for high-class women like the Duchess of Cirencester, but Bracewell keeps subverting the viewer's expectations, steering matters away from the lurid details of these paid-for couplings ("it's not really to do with 'downstairs'", as Sacha puts it) - though Anna Massey, Susannah York and Sian Phillips come through with vivid characterisations in what amount to cameos.

No, the emphasis rests on a well-written and well-played male relationship that is amusingly and touchingly dependent, never more so than when the well-groomed, garrulous Sacha breaks his foot in a workplace accident and has to coach the dowdy Trevor in the ways of the man-whore. The Gigolos is interested in the admin that goes into being a gigolo, in the same way The Good Shepherd concerned itself with the deskwork necessary for a spy: there's a more than faintly pedantic quibble over the time a bottle of sherry should be brought to table. Yet Bracewell forever does interesting things with London as a melancholy, faded, past-its-prime location, and among several musical gags, there's an inspired use of Ian Dury's "Clever Trever" as both a commentary on the action and exactly the type of track an unprepossessing pimp might put onto his iPod to psych himself up.

(March 2007)

The Gigolos screens on BBC2 this Friday at 12.05am.

From the archive: "Isolation"

Isolation is one of the first horror films to tackle the controversy surrounding GM/Frankenfoods without becoming completely hysterical or risible - some feat, given that its subject is genetically mutated cows. On a remote Irish farm, farmer John Lynch has hired out his prize heifer to a Government scientific program intended to increase fertility in cattle. The problem is that the mutation is "too quick", as chief scientist Marcel Iures puts it, something that becomes all too apparent when the cow spawns a creature with a deadly bite that is itself pregnant with foetuses whose entire genetic structures have been altered. Sensitive viewers should look away now.

Writer-director Billy O'Brien is careful in his approach - aware, perhaps, that his raw materials could easily tip over into bovine, Orca the Killer Whale nonsense - keeping his gristly, scuttling backbone monsters offscreen for almost half the film, and letting some heavyweight performers carry the film. Vet Essie Davis gets the toughest gig, having to put her hand up a cow's backside twice within the first twenty minutes (close-ups suggest she wasn't faking, either), but the middle section has some convincing interplay between traveller Sean Harris and his runaway bride Ruth Negga, and Lynch is nicely agonised as a decent, struggling working man who's only just realised what he's allowed to happen.

Only in the final half-hour does it give way to the generic, with one or two scenes too many cribbed from Alien, and a coda you can see coming a (country) mile off; altogether more distinctive is a terrific/horrific set-piece that finds Lynch stuck on a tractor in a pit of slurry, just as we've learnt the mutants have developed major sub-aquatic skills. Quite the least of the film's achievements is that it can make a herd of lowing cattle seem ineffably spooky, and O'Brien mines unexpected tensions from such relatively routine agricultural activity as the business of calving, autopsies, and putting an animal down.

(June 2007)

Isolation screens on Channel 4 this Wednesday at 12.50am.

Give me a break: "The Tourist"

In The Tourist, what sometimes seems like the twenty-seventh post-Bourne hare around Europe, an outrageously overdressed Angelina Jolie, exercising Anglicised consonants last heard emerging from the mouth of Madonna circa 2001, plays a woman being pursued by the authorities through Paris and Venice for what she knows about an elusive masterthief. Your initial thoughts are: if you were trying to cross the continent undetected, it would probably be a boon if you didn't so closely resemble the Sphinx of our age, and if you weren't so inclined to strut about everywhere in heels like Naomi Campbell modelling the Balenciaga winter collection.

But that's the nature of this especially daft beast, which similarly asks us to buy Johnny Depp - warming up for Jack Sparrow in straggly hair and grungy beard - as the maths teacher from Wisconsin Jolie's Elise Clifton-Ward (!) comes to hook up with on her travels, and to accept that the director behind 2007's The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, might be remotely interested in any of the above for any reason other than a super-large American paycheque. Depp is first introduced leafing through a tattered paperback, and the plot of The Tourist - which the credits assure me was cooked up by von Donnersmarck with Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) and Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park) - might as well have been cribbed directly from its pages.

Except this isn't straight pulp, but knowing, postmodern pulp - because, with the exception of her appearance in Michael Winterbottom's underseen A Mighty Heart, Jolie has proven herself incapable of turning up anywhere without putting smirking quotation marks as wide and as fulsome as her celebrated lips around the whole. The Tourist is a marked improvement on Jolie's own Mr. & Mrs. Smith, because it's pastiche Hitchcock rather than pastiche Michael Bay, and because von Donnersmarck, turning it in at a leanish 107 minutes, doesn't stick around to take a crap in your head. It may even be mildly preferable to the summer's starry flop Knight & Day, because there's a kind of amused chemistry between the leads. If Jolie comes across as as unknowable as ever, we at least get the minor privilege of the first Depp performance for some years not to descend completely into lazy, hyper-accessorised pantomime.

By anybody's reckoning, however, The Tourist is a mediocre effort from a filmmaker whose first feature promised so much; even as glossy escapism, it functions only up to a point. You can see why A-listers keep being drawn to these sorts of surveillance charades - films in which they're watched everywhere they go, as must so often be the case in their off-screen lives: it's telling that Elise, like Jason Bourne and Tom Cruise's Roy Miller before her, only checks into those cities and resorts where film folk go to festivals and premieres. The occasion affords the now-standard fetishising of international hotel suites (see also: Somewhere): Jolie undoes a lace bow on her closet to reveal an apparently complimentary rack of designer dresses, and a safe fair spilling over with jewellery. ("They think of everything, don't they?," she coos, and it's true this beats the minikettle and shortbread rounds on offer at the Venetian Travelodge.)

Yet the script defaults entirely when it comes to romance. The idea is that Elise, despite her controlling demeanour, invariably falls in love "with any man she spends longer than a train ride with" - a characteristic that might understandably have appealed to a director whose previous film posited that the affection shared by a writer and an actress might warm the heart of even the chilliest Stasi operative. Jolie's alpha side is having none of this, of course. Her Elise fell for the mastermind only after he demonstrated the nous to keep her in high heels and tchotchkes for life, while Depp's Frank - clad for long stretches in the squarest pyjamas seen outside those old R. Whites commercials - only begins to turn his companion on after he drives a motorboat over one assailant's head. The movies used to prescribe a little high peril as something to take us out of ourselves, a bumpy detour on the road to becoming better people. The Tourist, by contrast, stands as a monument to the notion love will make something grasping and brutal of us all.

The Tourist is in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of December 3-5, 2010:

1 (1) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (12A) **
2 (new) Megamind (PG) ***
3 (2) Unstoppable (12A) ***
4 (4) Due Date (15)
5 (new) Monsters (12A) ****
6 (5) The American (15) ***
7 (3) London Boulevard (18) ***
8 (6) Despicable Me (U)
9 (7) The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (15) **
10 (new) The Warrior's Way (15)

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. Monsters
2. The Shop Around the Corner
3. Of Gods and Men
4. Somewhere
5. Enemies of the People


Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (4) The Karate Kid (PG) ***
2 (new) Toy Story 3 (U) ****
3 (9) How to Train Your Dragon (PG) ****
4 (1) Iron Man 2 (12) ***
5 (2) Disney's A Christmas Carol (PG) **
6 (3) Heartbreaker (PG) **
7 (5) The Blind Side (12) **
8 (6) The Ghost (15) **
9 (8) Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (12) **
10 (re) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (18) ***

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. White Material
2. Inception
3. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
4. Erasing David
5. Eclipse

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Falling Down (Wednesday, ITV1, 10.35pm)
2. The Gigolos (Friday, BBC2, 12.05am)
3. Gilda [above] (Saturday, BBC2, 1.20am)
4. Liar Liar (Saturday, ITV1, 4pm)
5. Isolation (Wednesday, C4, 12.50am)

Are you being served?: "The Shop Around the Corner"

There remains something intriguingly tremulous and hesitant about Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 piece The Shop Around the Corner, this year's festive treat re-release from the BFI. In a Budapest department store where the fittings and newspapers are in Magyar but everybody speaks fluent English, we find Jimmy Stewart - his voice cracking as ever, his screen persona not yet set in stone - employed as a lovelorn clerk exchanging letters with the thus far anonymous girl of his dreams, oblivious to the fact she is in fact his new colleague Klara (Margaret Sullavan), with whom he's already had several run-ins in person.

The tremulousness perhaps filters down from the leading man: Stewart's Kralik is a gentle, upstanding, yet mildly bland romantic hero - the kind of role the actor might well have found himself stuck with for life had he been handed average contract-player material around this particular moment in his career. He speaks the lines with no great feeling for what makes them funny, and though Kralik assumes the reins in the central relationship - he learns Klara's his secret Santa long before she does - for much of the film, the character remains a doleful, melancholy presence, a man very much at the mercy of market forces.

Don't go expecting another His Girl Friday or The Philadelphia Story (a better showcase for Stewart the comedian), far frothier confections from the same year; this one was made to sit heavier on the stomach, and you're struck by how grown-up - how thoroughly serious - its two lovers are. What they're involved in, however, is exactly the sort of (contrived) mistaken identity plot that would have all or most of its charm, elegance, its innocence beaten out of it today - you'd only need to look at the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan remake You've Got Mail to see that, or any of the dozen or so romcoms since that that haven't cared to acknowledge their inspiration.

These latter films have generally treated their backdrops - the coffee shops, flower shops and pet shops - as (pardon the pun) window-dressing. Lubitsch, on the other hand - as you'd expect of any studio director who went to the trouble and expense of getting these sets built - displays a genuine interest in the department store as a living, breathing working environment, an ideal of both customer service and romantic comportment (by the end, Kralik is literally pulling his garters up), albeit one frequently undermined by office politics and personality clashes. Consider the poignancy directed into Kralik's firing - his handing over of his clerk's notebook and pencils afforded the same cosmic seriousness as all those later scenes in police procedurals where good detectives are obliged to part with their gun and shield - or indeed that of the insert in which Klara, for once, fails to find a billet doux in her postbox.

All this is not to say The Shop Around the Corner isn't funny, but its humour is all the more memorable for being so damn bittersweet, coming as it does in dispatches, like the deft cutaways to the flunky who disappears upstairs whenever his boss, the fearsome Mr. Matuschek (Frank Morgan, a year after Oz), demands an honest opinion of his employees. Lubitsch preserves the original setting of Nikolaus Laszlo's play enough so that it - ahem - registers, but the film wears its (Eastern) Europeanness lightly, in the form of a beardy psychoanalyist, drafted in for one scene, and a couple of instances of good Jewish humour, such as the employee worried he'll have to pay a call-out charge to the doctor on the one day of the year his hypochondriac wife doesn't feel unwell. In truth, everyone's nerves are on edge here, anyhow. To mark the Yuletide setting, there's a decorated tree in the store window and the promise of more snow to come, but the threat of personal and professional redundancy lingers over these characters - making it an inspired revival at the present moment - and they're all a hair's breadth away from a breakdown or a fainting fit. (Unlike in screwball, the film sees absolutely nothing funny in this.)

I think there's something else in the air beyond the scent of pine needles. After a spell in the forces, Stewart would end WW2 making It's a Wonderful Life and those bleak Hitchcock and Anthony Mann vehicles that similarly saw the depths to which humanity can sometimes sink. The Shop Around the Corner was clearly intended as propaganda for love and Christmas, not American military involvement in a mounting global conflict. Yet in its portrait of a small community whose individuals are eminently worth saving, whose values are worth buying into, is it not possible to glimpse something else around the corner for Budapest, and the Klaras and Kraliks of this world - something far worse than two star-crossed lovers not realising their destiny, something that would knock all the jollity and romance out of Eastern Europe as a movie location until Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy took up temporary residence there in Before Sunrise some half a century later?

The Shop Around the Corner returns to selected cinemas today.