Back up: "The Other Guys"

Just as all singers want to be actors, and all actors want to be rock stars, all comedians want to be action heroes, and all action heroes want to be comedians. Adam McKay's The Other Guys, a throwback to the buddy comedies of the 1980s from the director of Anchorman, opens with superstar detectives Danson and Highsmith (Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson) piloting their car into the side of a Manhattan tour bus whilst in hot pursuit of some unnamed ne'er-do-wells, then propelling said tour bus - and the villains' own chosen vehicle - into the atrium of a corporate HQ, somehow emerging from the resultant fireball intact, and to even greater acclaim than they were used to going in. When the pair's invincibility runs out in unexpected (and very amusing) fashion, the NYPD is obliged to turn to their colleagues, hardened desk jockeys more commonly to be found ploughing though paperwork than traffic.

Terry Holtz (Mark Wahlberg) was demoted to a desk job after shooting baseball star Derek Jeter in the leg, and has been itching to get back to active duty; Allen Gamble, another of Will Ferrell's weirdly-haired middle-aged misfits, is a transfer from forensic accounting with a investigative preference for minor scaffolding violations. The case that falls to them involves Sir David Ershon (Steve Coogan), a British businessman in town to speak to the American Society of Capitalists - and you instantly suspect this organisation is going to be providing Hollywood movies with stock villainy for the next five years. (The Other Guys' one overtly satirical jibe finds Ferrell assuring the head of the SEC he believes is "the best at this kind of investigation", before going on to mention a few exceptions: Enron, Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff...)

The subsequent affair encompasses many of the staples of the modern cop drama: the formative traumatic flashback (here, how Allen Gamble accidentally became a pimp during his college days), the Irish bar that also serves as a warriors' retreat (here, the patrons sing comically anti-English ditties), the obligatory handing over of gun and badge, the good-cop-bad-cop routine that here cues another of Ferrell's large-scale freakouts. None of these tropes urgently needed debunking, you have to say, and even if they did, there's no great urgency in the direction, McKay and Ferrell using the narrative framework as another opportunity - after their 2006 collaboration Talladega Nights - to film male one-upmanship and spectacular car crashes.

Certainly, The Other Guys does little to address the essential boysiness of the New American Comedy, although the roughhousing at least throws up the odd funny idea, like a brawl at a funeral conducted in whispers out of respect for the deceased, and it has one great, self-aware riff on the way schlubby guys tend up to end up with smoking-hot broads in these kinds of comedies, McKay simply training the camera on Wahlberg's incredulous face upon the revelation Ferrell is shacked up with none other than Eva Mendes. It's yet another sign of renewed confidence within mainstream comedy that everyone from The Rock on down (or up) wants to get on the bus: it's good to see Michael Keaton back to something like his quirky best as the department's beleaguered captain, and one casual cutaway cues the best unexpected, blink-and-you'll-miss-it Rosie Perez cameo since that Little Jackie video.

Ferrell remains an acquired taste - there was, one concludes, some basis for that recent survey that suggested the actor provided the least value-for-money of any major A-list performer, not least as his high-strung mania proves most effective in small, carefully prescribed doses - but his pairing with Wahlberg, effectively stretching his cherishable grumpy-cop routine from The Departed to feature length, generates more sparks and felicities than his previous, rather noisy and self-cancelling duels with John C. Reilly. As is the manner of these things, having spent an hour having fun at the expense of genre conventions, The Other Guys eventually turns into a medium-octane exploding-helicopter movie in the broadest quotation marks, with jokes looped in as afterthoughts, and a closing voiceover that doesn't even attempt to resolve the glaring plotholes left behind (and appears to let the chief villainess - played by an actress who really should know better - off the hook entirely), but it's done with just enough brio to put the silliness over.

The Other Guys opens nationwide from Friday.

On DVD: "Dogtooth"

A genuinely weird item from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, Dogtooth introduces us to a middle-aged couple who - fearful either of bad influences or domestic unrest - have managed to prevent their twentysomething sons and daughters from ever setting foot in the world outside, to the extent these offspring now skip and gambol around like pliant seven-year-olds on the very first day of the summer hols. This process has naturally required going to extremes. A female security guard from dad's workplace has been shipped in to (rather clinically) take care of the clueless son's burgeoning libido, and phoney language tapes have been recorded to narrow down the children's expectations of what lies beyond the garden fence.

In these tapes, "sea" becomes a comfy chair, "motorway" a strong wind, while you don't want to know - or perhaps you do? - what will be prosaically redefined as "a big light". A visit to the nearby kennels suggests this may just be an over-extended behavioural experiment, yet it's increasingly apparent that, despite father's best efforts, this seclusion can't last forever: the youngsters' games are getting deadlier, while the security guard - who has needs of her own to satisfy - is scattering the seeds of revolution, sexual and otherwise, by insisting you can do more in the bedroom than just the missionary position.

What's it all about? A parable of the nanny state, possibly, or - given that video tapes become a key tool in this power struggle - of the infantilising effects of technology and pop culture in particular (and in a film this fascinated by language, it's perhaps the case that "pop" is intended to mean "father" as well as the zeitgeist) - those phenomena that can so easily blind us to what is healthy or challenging. Lanthimos's execution is, I have to say, a little strained; the set-up occasions self-consciously childish thesping from the young (adult) performers.

It's also a bit too much the arthouse attention-grabber that all these characters (not just the children) should be defined primarily by a perverse sexuality - the sort of thing designed to send Dr. Freud into a flap, but at which a seasoned master of domestic satire such as Buñuel wouldn't have raised an eyebrow. (Last year's Swiss oddity Home handled the implosion of a family unit in altogether cooler, less sensational fashion.) Dogtooth is certainly bold and formally confident, though, and Lanthimos even sneaks something genuinely subversive into the mix from time to time: the sight of a grown man climbing into bed between his parents, say, or the sounds of "Fly Me To The Moon" being reinterpreted as an ode to staying resolutely at home.

Dogtooth is available on DVD from tomorrow.

Things to come: an Autumn preview

Winter’s Bone
Debra Granik’s none-more-indie drama, centring on a fracturing homestead in the remote Ozark Mountains, arrives on the back of rapturous U.S. notices. (Opens September 17)

Eat Pray Love/Enter the Void
Something for everyone here: Eat Pray Love, Glee creator Ryan Murphy’s take on Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling lifestyle guide, has Julia Roberts as a disillusioned fortysomething saying ready, steady, Goa to life (and Javier Bardem) while passing through India; meanwhile with Enter the Void, a very different account of Far Eastern tourism, French enfant terrible Gaspar Noe follows up the crushing Irreversible with a psychedelic plunge into the fleshpots of Tokyo – less eat, pray, love, perhaps, than tune in, turn on, drop out. (Both September 24)

The Town
Ben Affleck’s second directorial outing – casting himself as a bank robber burdened with regrets – should prove whether 2007’s Gone Baby Gone was merely beginner’s luck. (September 24)

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Über-yuppie Gordon Gekko returns in Oliver Stone’s high-finance sequel. Will greed be as dramatically profitable as it was in 1987? (October 6)

The Social Network
Hollywood’s latest attempt to draw our attention away from our consoles and laptops is – curiously enough – an apparently straight-faced account of the rise of Facebook, with Zombieland nerd du jour Jesse Eisenberg as the company’s youthful frontman Mark Zuckerberg and, er, Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster. David Fincher – whose Zodiac suggested a tremendous facility with meshes of information – directs, The West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin scripts; onlookers remain uncertain whether to throw sheep or rotten tomatoes. (October 15)

Carlos
Olivier Assayas’ biopic of Venezuelan revolutionary/terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal, stormed Cannes in May. This year’s Che? (October 22)

The Kids Are All Right
Artificial insemination comedies rarely offer much cause for cheer, but this U.S. sleeper hit – with Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as flustered civil partners – reportedly bucks the trend. (October 29)

Another Year
Mike Leigh’s latest charts twelve months of muddling through from Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen’s suburbanites; Cannes chatter indicates it’s Leigh on peak observational form. (November 5)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Part One, of course, with Part Two to follow (and conclude a truly wizard decade of box-office spell-casting) in July 2011. For those twelve of us who haven’t read the books, everything remains up for grabs: will Harry finally defeat Voldemort? Will David Yates’ sure touch continue behind the camera? And are there any Equity members who haven’t signed up for a bit-part? Team Hermione may now seem a quaint proposition set against the yearnings of Team Bella, but we can expect a cliffhanger or two to tide us over for winter. (November 19)

Machete [above]
The Rodriguez/Tarantino Grindhouse project didn’t offer much, all told, but this mocksploitation feature derived from one of its phony trailers – about a vengeance-seeking Mexican mobster – may just redeem it. (November 26)

(First published in The Sunday Telegraph, September 12, 2010)

On DVD: "Rapt"

The director Lucas Belvaux is possibly still best known for his Trilogy, a 2003-04 triptych that approached the same narrative from a variety of angles and didn't, ultimately, add up to much more than a skilful screenwriter's exercise. Rapt is more substantial: a slow-burn, deliberate kidnap thriller that plays out like one of the poker games its protagonist is apt to blow his personal fortune in. Yvan Attal plays the unlucky victim Stanislas Graff, a businessman bundled into a van by masked men keen to retrieve a major gambling debt.

The snag is that Graff - whose very name has the ring of brusqueness about it - is not the type of guy you might be prepared to hand over a ransom for; he admits to partying with Flavio Briatore, for a start, which instantly marks him as at least a bit of a dick. There follows an unusually involved process of negotiation over boardroom tables and in fancy restaurants, and the gradual unlocking of all those doors Stanislas Graff had carefully compartmentalised behind: it's revealed he's not just been profligate with his cash, leaving behind less money than anyone first thought, but with his affections too, the revelation of his serial adulteries leaving his wife and family in the peculiar situation of paying for someone they might not immediately want back in their lives.

Rapt might be viewed as a French Ransom, except Belvaux is less interested in using the kidnap for macho thrills than as the startpoint for a study in social and industrial relations. (The director's previous UK release, 2006's The Right of the Weakest, was a heist movie involving disenfranchised steelworkers, so it's a recurring concern.) "Maybe it's the times we're living in," shrugs Graff's closest advisor, and it's true the film preys upon our growing suspicions our captains of industry might be irresponsible playboys doing whatever the hell they want, no matter what the cost to others; the punchline here is that the businessman probably has less to fear from his captors than he does from his colleagues in the boardroom.

Either way, the hero couldn't be any less indomitable. Attal's been making a habit of these unsympathetic types (cf: the recent Leaving); here - passed around between kidnappers, and dishevelling to the point his exteriors come to resemble Graff's sad and shabby soul - the actor gives a performance commendable for its complete absence of vanity, and the ensemble working behind him are no less strong: the increasingly impressive Anne Consigny as Graff's self-deluding wife, coming to display hidden reserves of toughness; Françoise Fabian, recently revived as Rohmer's Maud, and as needling as ever as the businessman's mother, the real powerhouse of this family; and Claire Denis regular Alex Descas as the clan lawyer and fixer - its Tom Hagen equivalent - striving to stay several steps ahead of the police.

Rapt sometimes threatens to get a little too involved, as though plotted upon a chalkboard, with large arrows and pieces of string to connect the characters; the introduction of the no-nonsense Lieutenant Grazziani (Richard Sammut) with 45 minutes to go looks like a conscious effort to raise the narrative stakes somewhat higher. Yet Belvaux is very good at setting out communities and networks, at dramatising how people link up - and how they might try (and inevitably, in the modern age, fail) to shut themselves off. In an age where most young Francophile directors appear very much in thrall to the New Wave's auteurist sensibility, here perhaps is the inheritor of the (somewhat unfashionable) Jean-Pierre Melville tradition: genre with some depth and a twist.

Rapt is available on DVD from Monday.

On DVD: "Ivul"

An element of play is essential to Ivul, the latest fable from exiled Brit director Andrew Kötting. The Ivuls are a French family of Russian extraction who live in secluded bliss in the Pyrenean countryside. A little too secluded, it turns out, judging from the growing attraction between siblings Alex (Jacob Auzanneau) and Freya (Adélaïde Leroux). When the pair's overbearing papa (Jean-Luc Bideau) finds them in a compromising position - the consequence of a relatively innocent parlour game involving Alex blowing raspberries on Freya's stomach - the son is banished. "Get off my land," pop commands: words Alex takes quite literally, scaling the walls of the family home and vowing never to come down again, instead manoeuvring his way through the surrounding tree branches and rummaging through bins to find food and materials for shelter.

The film is thus an extension of that childhood game - referenced in the opening compilation of archived pastimes - in which players strive to keep themselves off the ground by whatever means for as long as they possibly can: the type of pursuit that can manifest itself in later life as a penchant for free running. It's certainly a fully physical performance from young Auzanneau, who uses Kötting's narrative framework as an opportunity for his own personal, eco-friendly high-wire act: part Philippe Petit, part Swampy. In a week without an obvious blockbuster, Ivul might be as close as the cinema gets to an action movie, the camera zooming in whenever it looks as though Alex's feet might touch la terre.

By inserting reversed and accelerated stock footage, Kötting teases out the thematic implications of such a game: the idea of a Fall, in particular, with Alex as the figure cast out from an earthly paradise for succumbing to his desires. (Lest we forget, Kötting's daughter - and co-star in his earlier film Gallivant - was christened Eden.) With his mane of white hair and bluff-to-commanding demeanour, Bideau could well pass for a God (or for the round-bellied financiers who've sent Kötting himself on the run) - though he, too, is eventually obliged to revert to an infantilised state, being spoonfed babyfood after falling victim of a stroke; the second half makes great play out of the fact the patriarch ends up locked in (inside his own body), where his heir has been locked out.

Kötting, of course, is not the only British filmmaker to have obliquely dramatised the state of exile they've found themselves in: the heroine of Peter Strickland's Katalin Varga, from last year, was driven from her community and harried and harassed across the Carpathian mountains, left in an untenable position. As avatars for directors out of favour go, however, Alex seems a sturdier and more resourceful sort; up until Ivul's last-reel inferno - Kötting turning the screen over to hellfire - this bizarro, highly textured effort makes going off the map appear really rather fun.

Ivul is available on DVD from Monday.

On DVD: "Date Night"

"This is all just a big, goofy misunderstanding," insists Steve Carell to the gun-toting goons who've mistaken him and his wife (Tina Fey) for blackmailers - and, in doing so, Carell rather reviews Date Night for us. The leads play suburban squares who, in a bid to pep up a complacent-growing relationship, swipe another couple's reservation at a swanky Manhattan restaurant; trouble is, the absent couple have made off with a laptop's flashdrive containing incriminating information, and thus incurred the wrath of Mob boss Ray Liotta.

The film has been assembled with the professionalism we've come to expect from Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum), the producer-director whose gifts (eyes on efficiency and profitability, access to all the best casting agents) belong firmly in the former camp: Date Night has been shot in the new digital-video format, not to venture a Collateral-style experiment in finding disorientating new textures in the night, rather to reduce costs and shooting schedules; the result, accordingly, looks cheaper and feels more dashed-off than its 1980s and 90s comedy antecedents.

It's the leads who rescue Date Night from its own disposability. If the suspicion again is that Carell and Fey have been cast for the normalcy of their looks rather than the funniness of their bones, and that only a handful of lines in Josh Klausner's workmanlike screenplay would make it onto an episode of 30 Rock or The Office, the stars are (at this stage in their movie careers) game indeed; their timing - honed by the annual recording of 13-24 episodes of the sharpest television around, which may be as close as we come these days to the cranked-out comedies of the studio era - is as impressive as ever, and they spark well off both one another, and the array of guest stars Levy assembles for them.

If we are going to have this kind of slick, high-concept multiplex filler, we conclude, better it should be populated by amiable funny people than by, say, Gerard Butler. Still, the best one might declare of Date Night is that it functions: while no substitute for an evening in on the sofa with access to a 30 Rock boxset and somebody you love, as an 85-minute part of the package for a first or second date, or alternatively an option for a night away from your own offspring, it might very well do the job.

Date Night is available on DVD from Monday.

For what it's worth...

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

1 (new) The Last Exorcism (15) ***
2 (new) Dinner for Schmucks (12A) **
3 (3) Toy Story 3 (U) ****
4 (1) Grown Ups (12A)
5 (2) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (12A) **
6 (new) The Switch (12A)
7 (4) The Expendables (15) **
8 (5) Salt (12A) **
9 (6) Piranha (15) ***
10 (7) Inception (12A) ***

(source: UK Film Council)

My top five:
1. Metropolis [above]
2. The Illusionist
3. The Leopard
4. Avatar: Special Edition
5. The Runaways


Top Ten DVD rentals:

1 (1) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (18) ***
2 (2) Shutter Island (15) ***
3 (10) Cemetery Junction (15) ****
4 (new) Four Lions (15) **
5 (new) From Paris with Love (15)
6 (4) The Bounty Hunter (12) *
7 (5) Clash of the Titans (12) **
8 (re) Hot Tub Time Machine (15) ***
9 (6) Sherlock Holmes (12) *
10 (7) Valentine's Day (12)

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:
1. Vincere
2. Rapt
3. Dogtooth
4. Ivul
5. Date Night


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Singin' in the Rain (Monday, C4, 12.20pm)
2. Duel in the Sun (Saturday, BBC2, 2.25pm)
3. Aliens (Thursday, C4, 11.20pm)
4. El Dorado (Saturday, five, 4.40pm)
5. Four Weddings & A Funeral (Sunday, C4, 10.15pm)