Cinésthesia

Friday, 12 October 2012

"Private Peaceful" (Metro 12/10/12)

Private Peaceful (12A) 100 mins **

It’s becoming apparent that writer Michael Morpurgo isn’t best served by the cinema. After the wearyingly sentimental War Horse comes this modest, makeshift teatime TV movie, which hasn’t the resources to do Spielbergian spectacle: its Great War is formed of two explosions in a field in Norfolk and John Lynch as an incessantly shouting sergeant-major. On the other end of Lynch’s ire: the fresh-faced Peaceful brothers (George Mackay and Jack O’Connell), fated by surname to become the nicest, humblest working-class lads ever packed off to the Front.

Veteran director Pat O’Connor must have been taking notes during the earlier film: all dappled sunlight, oaky interiors, horses and parades, it’s like a village-hall adaptation where Morpurgo’s class conflict has been toned down so as not to alarm the parson. Will the Peaceful boys shoot a nice doggy-woggy at the behest of scenery-chewing landowner Richard Griffiths? No spoilers here. Its destiny is matinee screenings quarter-full with napping nostalgics, dreaming of simpler times – even then, you don’t for a minute believe they were ever this simple.

Private Peaceful opens in selected cinemas from today.

Wednesday, 10 October 2012

At the LFF: "Grassroots"

Grassroots, cannily timed to emerge in the run-up to another Presidential election, concerns a group of young people trying to oversee a tangible change in the world. In 2001, Phil Campbell, a journalist recently fired from his post at a Seattle weekly, was recruited by his friend Grant Cogswell to oversee the latter's campaign for public office. Cogswell had generally been dismissed as a single-issue candidate, having sued the council for refusing to expand the monorail gifted to the city by the 1962 World's Fair as a vision of the future. His line, however, was that if he could get this one issue resolved, everything else would drop into place behind it: Seattle's richer and poorer districts would at long last be connected, traffic and pollution would be reduced, and the serene beauty of the monorail itself would cause people to start looking up again.

As Stephen Gyllenhaal's film - adapted from Campbell's memoir Zioncheck for President by Justin Rhodes and the director himself - sees it, Cogswell (Joel David Moore) was exactly the kind of righteous, militant leftie movies and sitcoms are all too prone to send up: a longhair who looks uncomfortable in a suit and - as a very skilfully handled sequence of humour and pathos around 9/11 makes clear - doesn't even own a television. On the stump, Cogswell's rhetoric didn't have the polish and sophistication of his political rivals - who'd had years of practising saying nothing with flair - but it contained passion, sincerity, a directness that connected, particularly with the young army of volunteers Campbell (a thoughtful Jason Biggs) set about assembling; Moore pronounces the "l" in "folks", which keeps us on side whenever the campaign, and the film, begins to flag and wobble.

Grassroots risks being casually dismissed as Sorkin-lite, and certainly the commercial and critical success of The Social Network can't have hurt in getting it into production. Yet it's alert to the particular appeal of grassroots politics: that it's easy to get involved with (you just have to show up), a great way of meeting people (and passionate people), a source of adventure (Campbell leads a team of speedfreaks distributing campaign paraphernalia), and a way of finding like-minded souls who believe in the same things you do. Gyllenhaal crafts two stirring sequences: the first in which Cogswell lays out his grand, naive masterplan while touring the Space Needle, the second finding the team retreating to a bar to watch the first poll numbers coming in, each percentage figure a tantalising smidge higher than the last.

Does the film romanticise politics? Yes, but with less of the screwball cutesiness Sorkin is given to. After rowing with his girlfriend Emily (Six Feet Under's Lauren Ambrose, reminding us what a vital screen presence she is), Campbell drunkenly sleeps with a co-worker; when he returns to Emily's doorstep to beg forgiveness, he finds he's been replaced by a puppy with a "submissive urination problem". (Everyone has their issues.) The film is strong on political nitty-gritty, the hard facts that make or break a campaign. Gyllenhaal and Rhodes do something interesting with the fact that Richard McIver, the incumbent Cogswell and Campbell were trying to unseat, was black, and the city's only black representative at that. Cedric the Entertainer, shrewd and effective in a rare dramatic role, makes McIver a genial sort you might actually consider voting for, particularly if the alternative was a scrawny, petulant kid. It's a low-blow when Cogswell refuses to shake this elder statesman's hand at the conclusion of a radio interview, even if McIver subsequently shrugs the incident off as "politics". "And that makes it right?," wonders Campbell, the next time the campaigns intersect. What we're watching here is a pair of guys - bros, in modern Hollywood parlance - getting turned on to the idea of reclaiming politics from the pros, as a means of doing the right thing; to making a difference, rather than merely affirming the status quo.

The problem with Campbell's narrative is that it doesn't have an ending - except in the real world, where it belatedly found a continuation of sorts. These are, perhaps, the first stirrings of the Occupy movement that sprang up towards the end of this decade to reclaim those communal areas where our politicians and public figures had begun to fail us: a movement that took these issues, ideas and kinds of campaigns and ran with them, bringing even greater numbers and energy to its task, and its message to a wider audience than Campbell and Cogswell, ensconced in their cosy independent coffeehouse, could ever have envisioned. What this story teaches us is that we citizens have nothing to lose from, say, turning up at city chambers in a polar bear outfit, as Cogswell once mooted: if nothing else, it forces those politicos who've become desperate to prove how much they're still in touch with the electorate to respond to your presence. With our mainstream parties now fussing and blustering to protect a rapidly dwindling set of interests, Gyllenhaal's quietly valuable film instead charts the process of reengagement, the reaching out and growing up, by which some small part of America sought to rebuild itself in the wake of September 2001. Anyone keen to make the world a better place might just go for it.

Grassroots screens at the Vue West End on Friday 12 at 9pm and again on Sun 14 at 3.15pm, then at Rich Mix on Mon 15 at 9pm.

Monster meh: "Hotel Transylvania"

Hotel Transylvania is Adam Sandler, the most needlessly hardworking man in showbiz, taking five minutes off from shooting Grown-Ups 2 (yes, it's a thing) to claim his share of the computer animation pie; anybody who remembers Sandler's less-than-happy animated-Hanukkah offering Eight Crazy Nights from 2002 will already doubtless be filling up with dread. Well, it's not that bad; persistently mediocre, maybe, with the odd lightning-flash of inspiration that throws the dross around it into further relief, and almost (but never quite) justifies the 3D ticket tax. It'll get a boost from being trailered before the superior ParaNorman, but Gothic-minded tweens would be best advised to hold out for next week's Frankenweenie, which offers a vision some way beyond Sandler's lazily generated dollar signs.

A large part of the annoyance here is that, in a crowded market, it doesn't even bother to go for a distinctive look. Jonathan (voiced by Andy Samberg), the goofy humanoid backpacker who stumbles into the foyer of the hotel Dracula (Sandler, with silly accent) has conceived as a monsters-only resort, has a resonant name in this context, but only the colour of his hair distinguishes him from Arthur Christmas, the young hero of Sony's previous animated release. Supporting monsters - a horned, light-furred monster; a French chef who communicates with a rat; a gelatinous blob - look like market stall knock-offs of characters originated in Pixar films and DreamWorks' zestier Monsters vs. Aliens.

As in much of Sandler's recent output, there are isolated pockets of amusement, wherein the business mind that now parses these scripts is momentarily overruled by surviving traces of a stand-up comic's nous: writers Peter Baynham and Robert Smigel have some fun with the hotel's itinerary, which takes in bingo games where carnivorous (and conspicuously Jewish) mom-monsters devour one another's cards before any claim can be validated, and there's a workable run of gags premised on the voice-casting of pop starlet Selena Gomez as Drac's 118-year-old offspring ("I'm not 83 any more...").

The songs, however, are almost unilaterally terrible: if it's not the greatest of ideas to make Cee Lo Green - purveyor of some of contemporary pop's most distinctive vocals, here giving life to an Egyptian mummy - sing through a Vocoder, I guess it beats having to listen to more LMFAO, who've rapidly come to replace the Black Eyed Peas as the house band of slovenly unambitious multiplex filler such as this. I'll grant that Hotel Transylvania's finale - which involves a vampire bat-vs.-commercial jetliner chase, and a neat Twilight put-down - is nicely done, but this was only ever intended as 3D product, so it generally prefers frenetic movement and so-so fart gags to wit and narrative ingenuity. Parents might want to offset the price of cinema tickets and snacks by buying shares in Ritalin.

Hotel Transylvania opens nationwide on Friday.

Saturday, 6 October 2012

At the LFF: "West of Memphis"

The opening fifteen minutes of Amy Berg's two-and-a-half-hour documentary West of Memphis present us with an apparently open-and-shut case. In May 1993, the mutilated bodies of three eight-year-old boys - Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch - were discovered hog-tied in a ditch in an impoverished region of West Memphis, Arkansas. Subsequently jailed for the crime were three 16-year-olds - Damien Echols, Jesse Misskelley and Jason Baldwin - whom the prosecution claimed were practising Satanists. As anyone who's seen Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's three Paradise Lost documentaries will already be aware, this wasn't the whole picture. Talk of a major miscarriage of justice was already circulating when, with the case deemed closed, court documents became publicly available, showing just how leading the initial police interrogation had been (particularly when questioning the mentally challenged Misskelley), how ineffectual the teenagers' defence had been, how crucial evidence had been manipulated to fit the allegations, and how each successive trial had striven not for full and fair justice, but to clean up earlier judicial failures.

The Satanic angle turned out to be no more than the latest incarnation of America's scarcely suppressed fear of difference, an update of that old witchcraft hysteria on a par with - but vastly more consequential than - the furore around Marilyn Manson's 1990s output. Echols, cited as the leader of those accused, dressed in black, had an interest in magic (by which I mean conjuring and card tricks) and listened to rock music, all of which made him an easy target: the kind of poor white trash nobody was meant to miss. And yet his outsider status is exactly what drew others to his cause: not just Berlinger (who went on to direct the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster), but the likes of Henry Rollins and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, both of whom played benefit gigs to help raise funds and attention for subsequent appeals.

Berg is, then, just the latest creative to have become fascinated with this case, but her retelling enjoys several advantages over Berlinger and Sinofsky's stop-start trilogy: a more complete emotional arc, a CSI-schooled audience alert to and interested in the rapid developments in forensic technology that came to cast doubt upon the initial verdict, and - behind the camera - the support of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, outsiders-turned-Hollywood-insiders after the success of Heavenly Creatures and the Lord of the Rings films, who were able to sponsor a comprehensive reexamination of this material and secure the participation of almost all the key figures in this case. The project's goals were twofold: to finally lift the burden of suspicion off the shoulders of "the West Memphis Three" (as Echols, Misskelley and Baldwin came to be known), and then to place it somewhere closer to home.

In the first of these, she's undeniably successful. Though Berg displays a weakness, increasingly common in even our smarter documentaries, for celebrity validation - as though we couldn't possibly find these three innocent without Cap'n Jack Sparrow coming on to read a poem first - the film's sheer, dogged comprehensiveness works in her favour: this is a documentary with the werewithal and resources to call up a snapping turtle expert to disprove the prosecution's Satanic angle in a comically hands-on manner. With regard to the second goal, West of Memphis is arguably a little shakier. Seasoned true-crime observers won't be too surprised where the finger of suspicion for the boys' deaths eventually lands, though Berg could be accused of pressing the point altogether heavily. There's something questionably intrusive and voyeuristic in her filming of a therapy session, inserted to underline a thesis already set out with coherence; in asking one witness to call her chief suspect and get their thoughts on tape, she risks accusations of entrapment that might just drown out the resulting conversation.

For all the horrific allegations her film unearths, Berg falls short in attributing motive to its likely killer - though the very fact it has you sifting and weighing the evidence in this way testifies to its undeniable dramatic effectiveness. In the end, the film may be most powerful as both a document and indictment of the damnably slow nature of a system that kept three innocent men behind bars for years while proving reliably incurious about the one individual who might just have committed the crime. This case began on NTSC videotape and lingers on in high-definition news broadcasts, encompassing Facebook and Google searches, while - even as the severest of doubts were cast on the initial convictions - the prisoners grew from boys flipping the bird to court cameras to men burnt and hardened by experience, in a way the children whose murders remain to this day unsolved will not and can not. From this painful asymmetry West of Memphis draws its considerable emotional kick.

West of Memphis screens on Saturday 13 at 2.45pm at the Vue West End, and again on Sun 14 at 12noon at the Odeon West End; it opens in the UK later this year.

At the LFF: "Sister"

From her first features, we might deduce that Swiss filmmaker Ursula Meier has a thing for unusual configurations of the family unit. Her eyecatching 2008 film Home saw a clan living in isolation at the side of an abandoned motorway project, while her latest Sister concentrates on a pair of kids who've apparently been abandoned by their parents and now eke out an existence in the foothills, literal and economic, of an Alpine ski resort. While Louise (Léa Seydoux) disappears off with a no-good boyfriend who beats her, her 12-year-old sibling Simon (Kacey Mottet-Klein) ventures up the mountain to steal and fence the skis and sandwiches of rich holidaymakers, anything to help the pair of them get by.

For a while, as in Home, we're offered no more than a study of a place and its routines. Simon befriends a Scottish chef (Martin Compston) working in the kitchens of one of the resort's restaurants, then begins to insinuate himself into the lives of a British family headed by Gillian Anderson. The actors draw you in. Mottet-Klein, crafty and supple, is afforded the run of these locations like a young Belmondo; Seydoux, after several years' worth of scarcely memorable waifs and ingenues, gives what's perhaps the first mature performance of her career. She has to, to make complete and emotionally satisfying sense of the one major narrative revelation here, which comes around the hour mark, casting everything that's come before in a new light.

In some ways, Sister is a, well, sister piece to Home. The family in Meier's earlier film were at the mercy of the world whizzing past their doorstep, eventually descending into a form of madness. The consequences here aren't quite as dramatic, but it's clear from the boyfriend's hopping from one car to the next, and from the schoolboy black market Simon operates within, that everybody's trading up, leaving the siblings - like their forerunners in the Meier filmography - far behind. At one point late on, Simon is scooped up by an irate chef and tossed in a cable car full of trash bags; we grasp immediately that this is pretty much all that trickles down the mountainside to the townsfolk below.

And still Simon and Louise persist, trying to get a foothold in the face of the universe's apparent indifference. Sister refuses sentimentality, with its Bressonian inserts of notes being counted out and handfuls of loose change, and through its supremely eloquent, almost graph-like Agnès Godard compositions, showing its central couple as dots dwarfed by one or more of the region's towering peaks, left to tramp through mud and dust while their peers and contemporaries cut a dash through virgin snow. Yet whatever their relationship within the frame, the bond between the two cannot quite be snapped or severed: all these children have in this world is each other.

Sister screens on Friday 12 at 9pm at the Curzon Mayfair, and again on Tue 16 at the Vue West End; it opens in the UK in November.

At the LFF: "Robot & Frank"

The 56th London Film Festival opens this Wednesday, and runs until October 21st. As has become the tradition, I'll be reviewing a few titles here and there over the next two weeks; for more immediate updates, check my Twitter feed at @mike_mccahill. For starters:

Ideas and issues of real substance are being floated beneath the toplayer of quirk applied to the oddly, winningly human sci-fi comedy Robot & Frank. Here, Frank Langella plays Frank, an ageing, increasingly befuddled catburglar farmed out to a leafy backwater in upstate New York, where he's been reduced to shoplifting tchotchkes from chintzy tourist traps. To combat his "periods of disorientation", as they're euphemistically referred to, Frank's mostly absent son (James Marsden) buys him a robot butler to give his life structure, and to ensure he holds to a healthier diet than the cereal and chocolate biscuits he's been subsisting on. When Frank learns the robot can be reprogrammed, however, one last, late-in-life masterplan begins to take form: to thwart two snarky big-city content developers, who've arrived in town with an eye to digitising the local library, and throwing out the librarians - including Frank's longtime sweetheart Jennifer (Susan Sarandon) - along with the books.

Writer Christopher Ford and director Jake Schreier aren't blind to the comedy potential inherent in robots - Jennifer's even renamed her workplace help Mr. Darcy ("it's a very reliable model") - but what's crucial is that Robot & Frank unfolds in a near-future reality that, mechanised underlings aside, really isn't that different from our own: its points, satirical and sincere, are allowed to land that much closer to home. Ford's interest here lies in the difference between men and the machines that have come to dominate our lives. (I'm assuming you're reading this review on a phone, or a laptop.) The automaton records memories as cold, hard data, compressed into rudimentary ones and zeroes, where Frank's recollections are more vivid, colourful and emotional - and slipping away from him all the while. While insisting on a distinction between the two, Schreier's film never drifts into Luddism: Frank and his robot, brought to quasi-life by Peter Sarsgaard's sterling voicework, are proposed as a model of old and new, working together. As Frank concludes, surveying his new-found resources and pondering the task ahead of him, "it would be a crime not to do it".

Post-Looper - and with budgets being slashed across the board - we may now be in for a run of SF films more interested in characters than concepts, which obviously benefits actors. Here, Langella gets to play out what's effectively the Alzheimer's arc, without omitting the notes of humour and vigour worthier Oscar bait would traditionally tamp down. After May's Jeff, Who Lives at Home, it's another indie that takes a particular care and pleasure in allowing Sarandon to blossom anew; we get a welcome comeback from Liv Tyler and her thousand-megawatt smile as Frank's travel-writer daughter; and a nice bit for Jeremy Sisto as the sheriff who can't see why anyone as old as Frank would be able to pull off a heist as meticulous as this one. Schreier offers a nod to the future over the end credits, with footage of the developments in robotics that have come to improve our quality of life (and late-life care, in particular), yet the preceding 89 minutes are nothing if not a respectful, very likable tribute to the values of old age and experience - while also quietly, persuasively pushing the centrality and importance of libraries to any properly functioning culture. Complimentary tickets for the Culture Secretary, perhaps?

Robot & Frank screens on Thursday 11 at 8.30pm and Fri 12 at 12.30pm at the Odeon West End, and again on Sun 14 at 9pm at Rich Mix; it opens in the UK in March 2013.