"Two Night Stand" (Guardian 13/02/15)

Two Night Stand **

Dir: Max Nichols. With: Miles Teller, Analeigh Tipton. 86 mins. Cert: 15

A medium-concept romcom, rushed out to capitalise on Miles Teller’s post-Whiplash visibility. Teller and Analeigh Tipton (from Damsels in Distress) at least bring mild freshness to this tale of a mismatched online hook-up extended by freak snowstorms; in some infernal variation, we’d be trapped overnight with Gerard Butler and Kate Hudson. Yet until the overcompensating finale, there’s scant internal tension – one minute they loathe one another, the next it’s all ping-pong and fairylights – and the pseudo-frank sex talk repeatedly hits the same one note. Very ordinary: a notch below “popping to Nando’s” on the list of Things to Do with a Significant Other this Valentine’s.

Two Night Stand opens in selected cinemas from today, 

Dopey: "Fairytale: Story of the Seven Dwarves"

It's half-term, which means distributors have been casting round for anything harassed parents might squander £20-30 on in the hope of earning themselves a couple of hours' peace and quiet. The cheap and cheerless German digimation Fairytale: Story of the Seven Dwarves, like last year's equally worthless Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return, is typical product, attempting the kind of bland retread through a known property that used to turn up as cut-price VHS spoilers in the week of a major Disney release. Its dwarves - two-sevenths of whom are suspiciously tall - bear cutesy-poo new names ("Cloudy", "Sunny", "Bobo", "Ralphie"), presumably in a bid to circumvent intellectual property laws; they're the cartoon equivalents of those Teenage Turtle Hero Warrior action figures sold on the less reputable market stalls.

As they plod through their thinly plotted quest to unite a prince and a princess, every drearily turned out musical number makes you long for the magic and craft Uncle Walt put into these things back when the industry considered these things special; the snarky po-mo touches - like having Red Riding Hood host her own TV show - aim for the knowing wit of the Shrek films, yet bottom out on the level of 2005's thoroughly enervating Hoodwinked!: the inevitable YouTube reference comes care of a rapping walrus and his afro-sporting sidekick. There's a bit with a dragon (named, in the script's sole flicker of wit, Bernie), as there has to be nowadays, but with Paddington, Big Hero 6 and Shaun the Sheep all still doing business, it's hard to see even exceptionally undemanding under-7s expressing a preference for anything this mercenary.

Fairytale: Story of the Seven Dwarves opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.

1,001 Films: "Five Easy Pieces" (1970)

In Bob Rafelson's 1970 drama Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson plays Robert "Bobby" Dupea, a charismatic upper-middle class drifter who once harbored hopes of becoming a concert pianist; with those ambitions having long since subsided, he's lost himself in the middle of nowhere, making do with a job in the Californian oilfields and a relationship with a dim cocktail waitress (the incomparable Karen Black). As a bowling game early on in the film makes patently obvious, he's carrying her, and the terrible truth is that he knows it - which nevertheless doesn't excuse his callous indifference towards her. Having established its protagonist as at something of a dead end, the film watches - patiently, observantly - as Bobby is obliged to try and move on in his life. When his sole ally on the rigs is arrested for skipping bail (one of several males here just passing through), he grabs his girl with some reluctance and sets off upstate, aiming to reconcile with his ailing father.

40 years on, what seems so radical is how Rafelson and screenwriter Carole Eastman give us a lead character who can never quite be. Bobby Dupea's middle name, not accidentally, is Eroica; he philanders in a Triumph T-shirt; Jack being Jack, he even has the grin of one of life's winners - but the truth is, for all the protagonist's restless, relentless movement, he simply cannot get anywhere. When a traffic jam snarls up his route home from work one afternoon - Rafelson turning the soundtrack over to blaring horns and barking dogs - Bobby leaves his stationary truck behind, climbs aboard an adjacent furniture removals wagon, and begins picking out notes on an old, out-of-tune piano - only for the vehicle to turn off at the nearest available exit, depositing its passenger right back where he began.

In seeing classical music as a civilising influence - and Five Easy Pieces is nothing if not the tragedy of an individual who once sought the permanency of Chopin, but now has to settle for Tammy Wynette - the film preempts James Toback's later Fingers, another feature about an angry young man faced with a simple existential dilemma that would take on greater resonance as the decade (and the Vietnam War) progressed: should I stay or should I go? It is, also, one of those American New Wave features to bear the marked influence of a nouvelle vague original: Godard's 1967 horror-show-on-wheels Week-End, as the overturned cars, rest-stop absurdism and psychotically boring hitchhikers of Rafelson's film suggest.

Like its forerunner, Easy is a comprehensive debunking of the myth of the road as somewhere one might go to find one's freedom - and, in so being, the film becomes either brethren or corrective to the endlessly celebrated Easy Rider. Rafelson's is the smarter, more critical film of the two, I think: where Captain America and chums are ultimately lionised for their martyrdom - to put it bluntly, the easy way out - Bobby Dupea is last seen heading towards a destination entirely befitting his emotional temperature. (Sometimes, the film tells us, there is such a thing as too cool.) The one time he attempts any real show of sincerity - driving off a ferry towards the conclusion, passing a prospective sister-in-law/lover (Susan Anspach) who's heading in the opposite direction, in every sense - he's told in no uncertain terms to keep moving, that he himself is holding up the road.

Staying put is no option, either, as the last of the film's near-classically structured three acts proves beyond all doubt. "He doesn't even know who the hell I am," Dupea rails, as his stroke-bound father sits mutely in front of him; with his past struck dumb, his rootlessness is very nearly complete. What Eastman grasped - and maybe it needed a woman to write this screenplay, to take one further step back from such a seductive central character - is that the A American movies had traditionally had down as for Adventure could also stand for Anomie; that the downside of living in a country where you're repeatedly told you can be anyone is that there's an equal, if not greater, likelihood you may end up being no-one, playing ping-pong in parking lots with absolute nitwits.

Even by the high standards of Nicholson's 70s output, Bobby Dupea sits among the actor's most rigorous performances, the wildness of the crazy Jack first showcased in Easy Rider here undercut by flickers of self-disgust and gentility, an understanding of the Robert Dupea who could have been, by the one who took a different road, and knows all his own failings in doing so. Well ahead of the curve of those landmark Vietnam-era features that sought to reassess the American dream in naturalistic fashion - and sporting a gallery of indelibly unconventional actresses through whom Rafelson holds off any notion of special pleading on his anti-hero's behalf - the film looks more than ever a founding countercultural myth.

Five Easy Pieces is available on DVD through UCA.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office   
for the weekend of January 30-February 1, 2015: 
   
1 (new) Big Hero 6 (PG)
2 (new) Kingsman: The Secret Service (15) *
3 (1) American Sniper (15) ***
4 (3) The Theory of Everything (12A) ***
5 (2) Taken 3 (12A)
6 (4) Into the Woods (12A) **
7 (6) Paddington (PG) ****
8 (5) Ex Machina (15) **
9 (new) Inherent Vice (15) ***
10 (new) Les Contes d'Hoffmann: Met Opera (12A)

(source: theguardian.com)
 
My top five:   
1. Selma [above]
2. Amour Fou
3. Au Revoir les Enfants
4. Still Life
5. Shaun the Sheep Movie


Top Ten DVD rentals:  
   
1 (1) What We Did on Our Holiday (12)
2 (2) A Walk Among the Tombstones (15) **
3 (3) Before I Go to Sleep (15) **
4 (4) Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (12) *** 
5 (6) Edge of Tomorrow (12) ***
6 (9) The Fault in Our Stars (12) **
7 (8) How to Train Your Dragon 2 (U) ***
8 (7) X-Men: Days of Future Past (12) ***
9 (re) 22 Jump Street (15) ***
10 (10) A Most Wanted Man (15) ****

(source: lovefilm.com)
                                   
My top five:  
1. Palo Alto
2. Maps to the Stars
3. Night Will Fall
4. The Face of Love
5. In Order of Disappearance


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:   
1. Earthquake (Saturday, C4, 1.20am)
2. Gosford Park (Friday, ITV1, 10.40pm)
3. Ice Age (Sunday, C4, 5.30pm)
4. Dawn of the Dead (Wednesday, BBC1, 12.45am)
5. Panic Room (Saturday, C4, 11.15pm)

"Shamitabh" (The Guardian 09/02/15)

Shamitabh **

Dir: R. Balki. With: Amitabh Bachchan, Dhanush, Akshara Haasan. 153 mins. Cert: 12A

The Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan has been universally recognised as a voice of authority for some time now: it’s why Baz Luhrmann cast him as Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim in his Gatsby redo. Back home, however, Bachchan has partnered with writer-director R. Balki for a trio of films examining the pitfalls of ageing. After 2007’s crowdpleasing May-to-December romance Cheeni Kum and 2009’s peculiar Benjamin Button variant Paa, the new release Shamitabh forms the pair’s most self-reflexive endeavour yet: a movieland tale that finds Bachchan playing a former performer whose voice soars over his drastically reduced circumstances.

The Frankensteinian title bolts together the names of both the lead characters, and the actors who play them. Danish (Dhanush) is a movie-obsessed mute who sets out from his small village to Mumbai in the hope of becoming a matinee idol. Discovered by ambitious assistant director Akshara (Akshara Haasan) while hiding out in a trailer, he’s soon whisked off to a Finnish laryngotomy clinic – you’ll just have to go with this – and fitted with an electronic device that allows others to speak in his place: where Bollywood stars have traditionally lip-synched to pre-recorded songs, our boy will do all that and the dialogue.

Danish and Akshaara stumble upon an unlikely candidate to provide these words: Amitabh (Bachchan), an alcoholic itinerant renting space in a graveyard – the symbolism is clear – who rather resembles erstwhile Doobie Brother Michael McDonald, if someone had thought to drag him through a hedge backwards. A failed leading man whose basso profondo was deemed more suitable for villains than heroes, Amitabh can’t resist the idea of getting one over on the industry that rejected him; a promise of 10% of all future profits seals the deal, and thus is the legend of Shamitabh – desirable face, voice of an undesirable – born.

The tone is affectionate enough for several prominent Bollywood directors to happily cameo as unwitting dupes, but there are glimpses of a far less forgiving satire on this industry’s credulousness – a satire engineered by a director-star pairing who’ve surely seen their fair share of phonies and fakers come and go. Here, producers incur “numerology issues” during casting, and one nice slowburn gag reveals just how Shamitabh’s more than faintly preposterous-looking action flick “Lifebuoy” got its title; the whole plot, indeed, relies on us buying that Bollywood could go gaga for a guy with a pretty face but nothing to say for himself.

The shame is that Shamitabh just can’t hold to a coherent line. Balki keeps muffling his most compelling ideas: the notion that the increasingly resentful Amitabh might eventually withdraw his consent by keeping schtum as the cameras roll is floated in one scene, and then forgotten about the next. Having recruited Bachchan with the apparent aim of making a statement, Balki instead settles for taking silly, scattershot snipes: spoof musical number “A Piddly Thing”, for example, extends beyond comic breaking point the idea a heroine might want to relieve herself while twirling around on a mountaintop.

“Too classy, not massy” is the post-production warning Haasan’s AD mouths at one point, and Shamitabh veers erratically towards the latter option, losing its thread repeatedly between hours two and three while in pursuit of some new, generally lower-brow effect. A tighter edit might have usefully redacted the demeaning scene in which Bachchan is obliged to provide coital grunts to soundtrack his vessel’s bedroom activity, and the incessant product-placement for a certain tax-intolerant online retailer; it might also have given Balki time to come up with a better ending than the flatly blunt one he arrives at here.

Bachchan remains a heavyweight presence when he’s allowed to be, and he sets about one scene, drunkenly berating a bus-side photo of Robert de Niro, as though this material were Shakespeare. It’s not, but the encounter does represent something else: a communion between screen legends whose recent choices have too often felt like cries for help. Somewhere in Shamitabh, there lurks a veteran performer’s fear of losing his voice in a marketplace where one has to shout ever louder to be noticed – and that’s fascinating; what’s frustrating is that the vehicle through which he’s chosen to express this fear should be such an unfocused, truly piddly thing.

Shamitabh is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

"Still Life" (DT 06/02/15)

Still Life ***

Director: Uberto Pasolini. Starring: Eddie Marsan, Joanne Froggatt, Karen Drury, Andrew Buchan, Neil D’Souza, Paul Anderson, Bronson Webb 12A cert, 92 min

There exists a species of supporting actor too humble, or busy, to subject themselves to the sustained big-screen consideration that is perhaps their due. You’ll have spotted the unmistakable Eddie Marsan beetling away in the background of films by everyone from Martin Scorsese (Gangs of New York) to Guy Ritchie (Sherlock Holmes) and lately US TV (the perceptively pungent male-crisis melodrama Ray Donovan), but no-one’s really thought to put him front and centre until the droll Still Life. It’s possible Uberto Pasolini picked up his Best Director gong at 2013’s Venice festival just for having that bright idea.

Certainly, the role of John May, dogged functionary for Kennington Borough Council, fits Marsan’s diligent character work to a tee: few performers could be so expressive about their pen-pushing. John, however, has a highly unusual vocation: it’s his job to process the admin left behind by those who’ve died alone, writing eulogies and spreading the ashes if no-one else is around to do it. John and his “clients” share an odd intimacy – he’s among the last to witness the deceased’s undies drying on the radiator – so his musty existence is understandably unsettled by a neighbour’s lonely demise: this case strikes far too close to home.

The spectre of tragic neglect hovering over the narrative suggests some kinship with Carol Morley’s indelibly downbeat Dreams of a Life, but Still Life’s middle act, in which John sets out to Whitby, then Truro, in pursuit of his client’s estranged relatives, expands our hero’s horizons in pleasingly idiosyncratic ways: a cup of hot chocolate cues a minor epiphany. We expect movement along conventional lines when bachelor John begins meeting with the deceased’s daughter (Joanne Froggatt) in railway cafes that seem more than ever a stop-off between worlds, but one or two further surprises await.

The last of these will likely split audiences, not least for the way it violates the unshowy realism Still Life has previously cultivated, but it’s been carefully set up to elicit a response: Pasolini, who produced The Full Monty back in 1997, knows how to play with our emotions without resorting to undue manipulation. He has a major ally in Marsan, whose sad eyes, gradually opening to the pleasures of connection, come to speak a thousand words more than his largely stilled tongue. While he’s on screen, steadily feeling out the material’s every nuance, Still Life remains the affectingly modest, quietly profound vehicle he deserves.

Still Life is now playing in selected cinemas.

1,001 Films: "The Colour of Pomegranates/Sayat Nova" (1969)

It's not just the shade but the taste and texture that bleed into The Colour of Pomegranates, Sergei Paradjanov's tart, zesty biopic of the 18th century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, which earns its classic status in part by being far livelier than any biopic of any 18th century Armenian poet ought to be. For those raised on Hollywood's linear approach to biography, it must have come as the shock of the century. The poet's life and work are here presented in a series of symbolic tableaux, some of which translate easier than others, most of which are open to interpretation: you can see why Paradjanov came to be hounded by the Soviet authorities for practising subversion. The shot of books being squirted with a milky liquid would have been the obvious, early tip-off to censors used to hearty peasants-on-tractors musicals, but we also get suggestive seashells, religious rituals, more quilts than even the Women's Institute would know what to do with, period pages and paintings, songs about windows, and lingering shots of grapes being crushed underfoot. (It's a rare non-dance film in which hands and feet become as eloquent as the faces.)

What each section means may be a matter for scholars to decipher, but the whole nevertheless feels oddly comprehensive, definitive even: it survives as an expansive form of poetry in itself, with Paradjanov using all the cinematic effects then available to him in an attempt to match the depth and range of his subject's vocabulary. Every image becomes the exact right choice of word to communicate multitudes about the essence of Sayat-Nova; even that small minority of us who've thus far been strangers to Armenian poetry should emerge from it convinced we know something of the limitations this poet transcended. (Astonishing to think Sayat-Nova spent much of his adult life sequestered in a monastery: just imagine the images Paradjanov would have dreamt up if his subject had given him cause to turn his camera to the outside world.)

Perhaps only Tarkovsky's contemperaneous Andrei Rublev rivals it in its evocation of a man and his aesthetic, but that film's beauty was of the reserved, austere kind cherished by its director; Paradjanov, for his part, favours fruit-bright hues, incessant motion, striking symmetries, and what look to be coded visual puns and gags. Certainly, there's nothing else in cinema that looks like it, perhaps because the aesthetic - the challenge - couldn't be sustained either commercially or physically: in and out of prison for the remainder of his career, Paradjanov himself struggled to replicate it. Instead, the film's poetics were slipped piecemeal into advertising, which seems a shame, but also pop promos, particularly those made during the 1980s, when The Colour of Pomegranates would have been doing the rounds on Channel 4 and the metropolitan rep circuit. For further reference, see New Order's "True Faith", Anton Corbijn's work with Joy Division, Derek Jarman's work with the Pet Shop Boys, and anything subsequently directed by Tarsem Singh - yes, even Immortals.

The Colour of Pomegranates is available on DVD through Second Sight.