Queens of Noise: "The Runaways"

One problem British audiences will have to overcome, confronted with The Runaways, is a degree of unfamiliarity with its true-life source material. The better known of its two lead characters, Joan Jett (née Larkin), remains a one-hit wonder in the UK, and even that one hit - "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" - will perhaps now be better known to the crucial teen demographic in the version popularised by Britney Spears. We could, then, choose to view Floria Sigismondi's film as a treatise on the origins of girl power - pinpointing exactly where today's female rockers borrowed some of their attitude(s) from - or alternatively a hellacious transatlantic equivalent of the Suzi Quatro story. It's certainly diverting, but I'm not wholly sure that's enough.

These were, of course, The Runaways, an all-girl group fronted by the 15-year-old Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and the scarcely older Jett (Kristen Stewart), and manufactured by raddled Svengali Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon, enjoying himself far more than in this week's Herzog film) - not specifically as a statement of female independence, rather as a reaction to the feyness of much contemporaneous boy rock, as personified by Bowie and the other androgynes Fowley accused of "leaving their lipstick over one another's cocks". For the group's manager, The Runaways' music wasn't women's lib, it was women's libido, and his instructions were clear: "I wanna hear you bitches growl."

From the attention Sigismondi pays to the trailer-park dogshit the band have to negotiate to rehearse, or the inclusion of a scene in which Fowley recruits Currie in a nightclub for her budding charms ("Jail-fucking-bait. Jack-fuckin'-pot!"), it's apparent The Runaways is intended as a coming-of-age movie with a few rougher edges than is the norm: its opening image is of a drop of menstrual blood hitting a Hollywood boulevard, the first of several cherrybombs here, and one that immediately situates the film both geographically and emotionally. In the main, though, the film is abstracted such that it might serve as a chronicle of the (mis)adventures of an entirely fictional all-girl supergroup.

Sigismondi, a former pop promo director, is plenty confident around this other band's rock 'n' roll, charting the upshift from illegal Californian house parties to the inevitable big-in-Japan stage, and its lead singer's personal progression from meek schoolgirl blanching at Fowley's fouler innuendo to corset-sporting sexbomb flaunting herself in top-shelf magazines. The script can therefore pay lip service to the credibility debate: when these raunchy photos of Currie emerge in the course of an especially fractious world tour, Jett instructs her bandmate firmly to "publicise the music, not your crotch" - advice certain young starlets might do well to take on board.

It's just a pity Sigismondi treats the sex and drugs that were an essential part of the Runaways' story as teasing, weren't-they-naughty? cutaways; among the clipreel highlights guaranteed to spark fevered Internet chatter without troubling the lawyers unduly, we get behind-the-shower-curtain masturbation, coke-snorting in airplane bathrooms, and a dope-fuelled, soft-focus Sapphic romp between Fanning and Stewart (set to the low growl of The Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog") intended to compensate for the coy treatment of the Jett-Currie relationship elsewhere in the film. Maybe that's had it how to be with these characters still touring the globe - or, indeed, with these performers involved.

It may be a comment on the unworldly nature of the current generation of actors, but even as press-ganged posethrowers stumbling over their own high heels, the two leads seem young in screen terms. Fanning is particularly glassy and unknowable, which may or may not have been part of Currie's appeal (and may or may not have had something to do with her drug use). Stewart, at least, lends Jett a strident, kick-ass attitude that should confound Bella Swan haters a while longer, but the rest of the band fade into the background: Alia Shawkat, so sparky in the recent Whip It, has nothing to do as a composite of all the Runaways' bassists. They were a here-today-gone-tomorrow act, it's true, so any film account would be striving to capture lightning in a bottle; The Runaways can't quite make the case this music needed outside the 45s, but Sigismondi at least has a certain fun trying.

The Runaways is on general release.

The war at home: "Cyrus"

The Fox Searchlight-backed Cyrus is further proof, after Universal's Greenberg, that mainstream Hollywood executives have discovered mumblecore, and only about three years after that ultra-low-budget movement could be considered cutting-edge. The directors are the Duplass brothers, who gave us one of mumblecore's archetypally trifling texts in The Puffy Chair, but the producers are no less than Ridley and Tony Scott, giving another pair of filmmaking brothers a leg up the career ladder. Narratively, the focus falls on not one but two of life's muttering misfits, but Cyrus betrays its commitment to upnotes and easy redemption in an early scene in which the kind of awkward social gathering that has become a staple of the mumblecore form is transformed into a swinging dance party through the liberal application of the Human League's "Don't You Want Me" - a song that would simply be beyond the means of a struggling off-indie filmmaker.

It's at this party that washed-up, just-divorced fortysomething John (John C. Reilly) meets Molly (Marisa Tomei) while under the influence of Red Bull and vodka, and peeing in the bushes. Molly is nurturing and remarkably tolerant - the ideal woman for a sad-sack such as John, you'd say, except she already has another male in her life: her son Cyrus (Jonah Hill), a 21-year-old stay-at-home and putative musician who does everything and goes everywhere with his dear mama. She, in turn, displays a similar concern for her boy, leaving the door between their adjacent bedrooms open, in order to let out Cyrus's purported night terrors.

The casting gestures in the direction of New American Comedy, leading to expectations of something not dissimilar to the Reilly-starring Step Brothers, with two rival boy-men duelling for a third party's affections. Except that a film in that tradition would have had some brute comic force behind it (no doubt with the side effect of violent slapstick and pratfalls), where the gag-like episodes in Cyrus involve either passive-aggressive scheming or overly intimate revelations intended to make the audience shift in their seats a little.

True, the film is less irksome than Greenberg. The Duplasses strike you as genial souls, and they have an easy way with their performers. (The pairing with the firebrand Scotts is presumably a prime example of creative opposites attracting.) Reilly is all rumpled sincerity, and Hill - heavier here than in other recent appearances; when Cyrus hugs Molly, he's like a human millstone around his mother's neck - is funny in a constipated sort of way, amply demonstrating the comic value of a fat man at a synthesizer. Tomei is her usual appealing self, albeit in a role that seems barely there, what little there is barely making sense. Everyone's dialling it down, though: with its words and ideas falling between any number of stools, it's finally a flimsy, never especially satisfying hybrid, one so low-key it has nothing really to say about relationships. Call it whispercore. Or worse, perhaps: mutecore.

Cyrus opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of August 27-29, 2010:

1 (new) Grown Ups (12A) [above]
2 (new) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (12A) **
3 (3) Toy Story 3 (U) ****
4 (1) The Expendables (15) **
5 (2) Salt (12A) **
6 (4) Piranha (15) ***
7 (6) Inception (12A) ***
8 (new) Diary of a Wimpy Kid (PG) ***
9 (new) Avatar: Special Edition (12A) ****
10 (5) Marmaduke (U) **

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. The Illusionist
2. The Leopard
3. Avatar: Special Edition
4. The Last Exorcism
5. Wah Do Dem


Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (2) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (18) ***
2 (1) Shutter Island (15) ***
3 (10) Dear John (12) **
4 (3) The Bounty Hunter (12) *
5 (new) Clash of the Titans (12) **
6 (5) Sherlock Holmes (12) *
7 (6) Valentine's Day (12)
8 (8) Invictus (12) **
9 (9) The Lovely Bones (12) **
10 (new) Cemetery Junction (15) ****

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. Cemetery Junction
2. Lebanon
3. I Am Love
4. Hot Tub Time Machine
5. Repo Men


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Casablanca (Thursday, C4, 1pm)
2. Earthquake (Friday, ITV1, 2.30am)
3. Emma (Sunday, BBC2, 5.05pm)
4. The Bourne Ultimatum (Saturday, ITV1, 8.45pm)
5. United 93 (Thursday, ITV1, 10.35pm)

A devilish business: "The Last Exorcism"

With the exception of negligible horror spoof Repossessed (and a similarly witless skit in the second Scary Movie), The Exorcist has always seemed to hold the last, Latinate word in casting out demons. Daniel Stamm's generally effective The Last Exorcism - written by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, with an ominous "Eli Roth presents" credit - addresses the issue of how any contemporary film might top it: by alluding to its predecessor (as only a movie) in its opening moments, then - like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity before it - playing everything that follows for real.

Stamm's film begins as a verite-style portrait of Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), a garrulous Bible Belt showman whose routines include magic tricks and shameless pandering to both the converted and any passing cameras. Cotton Marcus is a sham, and he knows it, and his conscience - troubled by the death of several young and vulnerable children at the over-zealous hands of colleagues performing so-called exorcisms - won't let him sleep at night. To this end, he and his box of props ("Get Daddy's candlesticks, OK?") will set out to a remote farm, two-person documentary crew in tow, to expose the exorcism business as an unholy hoax, and to demonstrate on tape that what he does can have no ameliorative effect whatsoever on "the possessed".

This he will eventually achieve, but - naturally - all does not go to plan in the meantime. In the sticks, the crew find alligators lying in wait in the fields, not to mention a cherub-faced boy who, when asked for directions, sweetly tells them to turn around and go back the way they came. The boy, in fact, turns out to be the sibling of the possessed, a 16-year-old girl suspected of slaughtering her father's livestock by night. The girl, Nell (Ashley Bell), looks to be suffering from nowt worse than low self-esteem - reacting effusively to each compliment and gift the crew toss her way - suggesting her "possession" is but a cry for attention; yet as the camera rolls, it becomes clear something else is very badly amiss.

The direction hews as closely to the mock-doc format as an average episode of The Office: there are cutaways to later interviews in which Marcus can reflect upon his failure to get Nell's name right ("I hate working with kids"), or show off the one hundred demon noises he's recorded (himself) on his iPod; the filmmakers-within-the-film think nothing to bolster their pre-determined thesis by cutting from the initial attempt at exorcism to Marcus enthusiastically counting up the cash Nell's father hands over. In Stamm's hands, the observational technique is also good for conveying eerie local flavour - boarded-up houses and chirruping cicadas - and registering, with some immediacy, the various shifts of mood as both insincere clergyman and sceptical, crucifix-chasing crew (and, I suppose, the audience) realise they're in too deep.

There's only one real lapse of patience or judgement - a splash of mid-film gore, requiring the misappropriation of the camera and the unfortunate demise of a family pet - and the screenplay is clever in setting up, then seeming to back away from, a potential twist (flagged by the father's unusual turn of phrase in an early interview) that will be familiar to followers of the Twin Peaks cosmology. Only in the finale - a full-blown, night-vision retreat into Blair Witch-ism - does Stamm threaten the conceit's credibility, asking us to believe that the Devil not only has all the best tunes, but that he's also, now, a demon in post-production.

The Last Exorcism opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

Closed books: "Certified Copy" (ST 05/09/10)

Certified Copy (12A) 106 mins **

Since his international breakthrough with 1990’s Close-Up – a meticulous recreation of an actual case in which a young man passed himself off as the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf – the Iranian formalist Abbas Kiarostami has explored in scholarly fashion the fine line between fiction and reality, and how we read the moving image. Kiarostami’s first feature outside his homeland, Certified Copy, preserves this thematic continuity even as it gestures – misleadingly, as it happens – in the direction of upscale romance.

Protagonist James Miller (William Shimell) is an English academic in Tuscany to promote a tome investigating the notion of fakery in art, and whether a good copy can be better than the real thing. On his travels, Miller encounters a woman billed simply as “She” (Juliette Binoche), who runs an antiquities shop in the area and clearly shares a professional interest. Yet it’s the pair’s personal interest that proves up for grabs. Have the two met before? Are they merely fan and
author? Or are they, as a waitress believes, an estranged couple seeking some kind of reconciliation?

Certified Copy’s big idea is clear enough: to do a sunkissed art movie aimed at those who wouldn’t dream of lowering themselves to see Letters to Juliet. It’s Before Sunrise on Pro Plus, a return Voyage in Italy, which did something similar with George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman amid the ruins of Pompeii. Except those films were open to new and unexpected stirrings, where Certified Copy is no more than a closed and rather fusty compendium of directorial tics, a game that never really requires an audience. Whatever drama there is here resides solely between the characters and their creator. As Miller instructs his companion at one crucial juncture: “Mum’s the word… They don’t need to know.” Well, pardon us for coming.

Even as an exercise in fostering heightened thespian chemistry, the film falters, due to a mismatch in performance styles. Where Binoche, this year’s Cannes Best Actress winner, ventures a well-rehearsed naturalism, her sudden flip-outs and self-contradictions only adding to the mystery – what, we start to wonder, is this woman playing at? – Shimell, an acclaimed baritone making his screen debut, reacts with the studied deliberation of a red-herring suspect in an episode of Midsomer Murders: it’s hardly his fault, but he’s trying too hard not to give the game away. His stiffness, alas, becomes Certified Copy’s keynote mode of address: where these themes may hold some currency in seminars and conference halls, elsewhere the film is likely to appear almost entirely academic.

Certified Copy is on selected release from Friday.

Not-so-hot property: "The Girl who Played With Fire"

The further adventures of Stieg Larsson's Gothy computer-hacker Lisbeth Salander arrive here - in the form of The Girl Who Played with Fire - with the distinct sheen of property porn, such as the BBC's English-language translation of Wallander, itself a sucker for Scandinavian design, was prone to in its earlier instalments. We rejoin Salander (Noomi Rapace) in a Caribbean retreat blessed with high ceilings and an expansive ocean view, but she's soon being recalled to Stockholm, where - in a brisk bit of business - she will give her apartment away to a fuckbuddy and install herself in a pad that boasts notable cupboard space, an unimpeded view of the Norrström, and (most crucially, given her stock-in-trade) uninterrupted wireless coverage.

What else is new? Oh yes, as she's been abroad, she's returned with an unlikely tan - not quite full-body, as the camera allows us to observe in the opening moments, but still, you can't help but feel she's letting the Goth side down somewhat. The upgrade process - a nice holiday, a palatial new residence - is typical of characters returning for sequels, of course; it's just at the rate dear Lisbeth is going, she's likely to end up with a diamond ring through her nose by the end of the trilogy. On the professional front, at least, things aren't going quite so well: for one, she's being framed for the murder of the abusive guardian upon whom she turned the tables in the first part, and that of a researcher working a big sex trafficking case involving several high-profile police and judges.

Proving her innocence will again require her hacking into the laptop of crusading journalist Micke Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) - firewalls, man, firewalls! - about which time the Millennium trilogy's central relationship reveals itself as so much authorial fantasy. "She reads every word I write," our journo-hero joshes, which must be reassuring in these uncertain times for print journalism; when the two characters are finally reunited in person, late on in TGWPWF, it feels motivated less by Micke's concern for Lisbeth's safety than by his fears his circulation may decrease by one: in this day and age, you have to fight for all the readers you can get.

This second film, directed by Daniel Alfredson from a screenplay by Jonas Frykberg, seems less like an event (as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo did) than a patchy TV movie, although that term may have less of a stigma attached in its native country, where episodes of the original Wallander are released theatrically for communal consumption, perhaps - you might argue - as part of the Mankell project of Swedish self-scrutiny. (The two franchises share a production company - Yellow Bird - and an actress: the rather wonderful Lena Endre, who shares much the same yearning relationship with Micke as she does with the redoubtable Inspector Kurt.)

While Lisbeth has evidently prospered between entries, elsewhere there's been a marked scaling-down of the material, borne out by the milder UK certificate. The original was a savvy revival of noir tropes - the offshore retreat, the journalist fighting to clear his name, the murky family history - boosted by Niels Arden Oplev's atmospheric selection of locations. Entrenched in the city, The Girl Who Played with Fire is domesticated, if not entirely grounded; the aspect ratio has withered accordingly. One informant is found in a retirement home; another pottering around first the garden centre, then the allotment. The denouement takes place in one character's front room, with Lisbeth installed on a grotty sofa and the remains of last night's supper on the table.

Alfredson has to work that much harder to fill even this reduced frame, and sometimes the strain shows in images that flirt with kitsch: consider the tableau that shows Rapace flaunting her underarm hair in bed beside an ashtray holding several days' worth of cigarette ends. There's nonsense of Larsson's own making, too, like the introduction of a former Soviet military operative built like the proverbial, who lacks only nerve endings and is thus unable to feel any pain - the kind of Bond villain who's probably more deserving of an undemanding read by the pool than a place on the big screen. It'll do as a commuter timekiller - and won't lose anything much downloaded to an iPhone - but remains mostly artless: you may emerge less inclined to see the final part than you are to pick out some hardwood laminate flooring.

The Girl Who Played with Fire is on selected release.

No lives remaining: "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"

Everything about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World feels rigorously cool-tested. It concerns the sexual and romantic foibles of a set of 17 to 22-year-olds, prime demographic-baiting material. The main characters - most of whom are in bands, which is pretty cool in itself - clad themselves in cool T-shirts and listen to the very coolest indie music. The director and co-writer is Edgar Wright, whose cult items Spaced and Shaun of the Dead turned nerdiness - a detailed knowledge of TV and movie conventions - into its own kind of cool. Whenever the characters in Scott Pilgrim hear a telephone ringing, or declare their affections for another, or even just plain go pee, Wright dots the screen with comic-book or computer graphics, which is perhaps a little too self-consciously cool, if typical of the whole grating exercise.

Michael Cera's eponymous hero shambles into battle on two fronts: first at an ongoing Battle of the Bands contest, where his raucous three-piece combo Sex-Bob-Omb are obliged to raise their game in the face of cooler competition, and then to defeat the seven (so-called) evil exes of his new love Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Literally so, in hand-to-hand combats styled after the Street Fighter/Final Fantasy school of console game (cool!); once bested, Scott's adversaries will explode in a shower of coins, a making literal of the disposable income a project like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World stakes its all on hoovering up. "Cool, coins!," Cera coos, the first time this happens; impossible, of course, to foresee the film's subsequent under-performance at the U.S. box office.

In Wright's defence, the film demonstrates more flickers of charm than the targeted conscience-rape of Kick-Ass. It's certainly cool around its gay characters: indeed, Scott's so cool about it he's frequently to be found sharing a bed with his gay flatmate Wallace (Kieran Culkin). Wright finds a neat use for The Other Chris Evans as a blank, posturing action star with a flunky to spray his knuckles every time he's obliged to throw a punch; and though his chief concern appears to be to get them to respray their hair any of the myriad shades on offer at the Camden Market branch of Boots, the director has an eye for interesting, sparky actresses - not just Winstead, but Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick, Alison Pill and newcomer Ellen Wong as Scott's teenage sweetheart Knives Chau.

No, the problem lies with Scott Pilgrim himself: a far less ingenuous character than the casting of Cera would imply, one whose two-timing risks breaking the heart of a vulnerable teenage schoolgirl, and who manipulates a first date to get himself into bed with the rather unfortunate object of his affections. He is, I think, a bit of a twerp, something the lead's one-trick, spooked-rabbit routine doesn't go much of the way towards correcting; I spent much of these two hours enthusiastically cheering on The World, which actually counts as the underdog in any film as generally unworldly as this is. As with last year's (500) Days of Summer, Scott Pilgrim displays an underlying defensiveness that niggles away at you, an inability to deal with any emotion without first putting brackets or quotation marks around it.

Just as weedy Scott is insecure about measuring up to his beloved's exes, so too Wright seems about catching our eyes - the fact this is his first American production raises the stakes, and only exacerbates the problem. To this end, he's adopted a tone of aggressive clever-cleverness that comes across as so much comic-store pedantry and results in a screenplay that over-explains just about every other joke. It's not enough to have Pill make a throwaway reference to a fictional "Vegan Academy" - we have to cut there, to show what the film means; Brandon Routh, as a posturing rock drummer, has a riff about turning Cera to dust that goes on for what seems like days.

It's there in the direction, too. In his earlier work, Wright's whip pans and doodlings were an amusingly efficient tic - a way of cutting to the funny quicker, or highlighting a particular footnote. Here, they're all but pathological, symptomatic of the supreme attention deficient disorder that has started to manifest itself in filmmakers and audiences who need their movies to resemble console games if they're ever going to rouse themselves from their X-Boxes. If you're one of these, well, judging by its opening-weekend figures, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World clearly needs you. But that's not cool. That's SADD.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is on general release.