From the archive: "Angels & Demons"

Ron Howard and Tom Hanks have been nothing if not vocal, these past few weeks, about the manner in which Vatican officials were less than helpful during the filming of Angels & Demons, the sequel to 2006's The Da Vinci Code, blocking access to key locations and generally making an episcopal nuisance of themselves. The Catholic Church can and have been accused of many things, but having endured Angels & Demons, I can report that their judgement on this matter at least is all but unimpeachable. In the future, indeed, I would encourage them to go further still. The College of Bishops should be stationed on rooftops with rifles and prepared to take down anybody who even thinks of greenlighting another Dan Brown adaptation. Altar boys could be orchestrated into a network of saboteurs, and sent out to cut the power of any cinema showing the film. And could not Pope Benedict be persuaded to revive the rack, in order to make all those involved in the production of this series recant their myriad mortal sins?

Let's start with Brown himself, the source of so much that is wrong with the film. Angels & Demons' opening ten minutes offer, in no particular order, the following splurge of incident: the death of an incumbent Pope, the murder of a priest inside the Large Hadron Collider, followed by the theft of antimatter by a group calling themselves the Illuminati, who then announce their plans to set off an explosion in St. Peter's Square. The general air of turmoil is compounded by the kidnap of a further four priests who - lawksalordy - just so happen to be the leading candidates in the race for the papacy. I'd argue no man could make sense of this nonsense, but Tom Hanks's Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is back to give it a go. Hanks has, thankfully, been shorn of the footballer's mullet he sported in the first film; gone, too, is his erstwhile sidekick Audrey Tautou, and her charming way of mangling the English language. In comes the remarkably dull Ayelet Zurer as the - it says here - "beautiful and enigmatic Italian scientist" Dr. Vittoria Vetra.

Together, this pair run around between statues and murals in the fashion established by Jerry Bruckheimer's brainlessly enjoyable National Treasure franchise, yet second time out, it's the influence of another Bruckheimer franchise that appears to hold the greatest sway. The script is clogged with what I can only call CSI dialogue, in which supposedly intelligent, highly trained professionals have to explain in painstaking detail to one another (and thereby to us) technical terminology of which the other party would surely be well aware. (In reality, every line in the typical CSI episode would be greeted with an exasperated "yes, but I know that.") Yet the average hour of CSI would also make room for character development, mordant wit, pauses for thought, Government-sponsored crime-doesn't-pay propaganda, and - and here's where it differs most from the Browniverse - science that rings true. Angels & Demons, by contrast, dashes ever onwards in a relentless, diarrhoeic flow of exposition.

There's no stopping it - one priest gabbles about the crucifixion of the first Pope even as the mark of a branding iron sizzles on his chest - and no digesting it; what we're left with are actors wearing the facial expression of trapped wind sufferers, playing characters we're not given time to care about, solving puzzles we couldn't give a toss about. The first film at least allowed actors of the calibre of Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina and Paul Bettany to chew the scenery; maybe it's the recession, but this time, the cast stretches only to cheaper Europeans, attempting sinister in a variety of accents. Sweden's Stellan Skarsgard is the grumpy head of Vatican police; Dane Nikolaj Lie Kaas offers lightweight glowering as a criminal mastermind who apparently bases all his decisions on which direction 16th century statues are pointing. On the side of the angels, we find Armin Mueller-Stahl as the exceptionally non-committal Cardinal Strauss, sighing "if it's God's will, it may as well be done" - Brown can't even be bothered to write his men of faith with any conviction - and, wait for it folks, Ewan McGregor as the Camerlengo, Patrick McKenna, an Ulsterman whose accent thickens noticeably at moments of crisis ("Der's been a develoipment!").

For the most part, McGregor manages to cloak his now-standard look of a man desperate to collect his paycheque, fill up his motorbike, and ride the furthest imaginable distance from the film he's signed up to appear in; and yet there can be no preparing the viewer for his participation in a final reel so ludicrous, nay risible - it involves McKenna literally parachuting himself into the vacant papacy - it can only be interpreted as an unholy hoax, designed to expose the sheeplike gullibility of summer-season cinemagoers. Nothing else could explain Hanks's continued participation in a franchise so painfully po-faced and humourless, nor Howard's sudden desire, so soon after the considered Frost/Nixon, to churn out a film so essentially sloppy in its storytelling, so flat-out contemptuous of its audience. Are they just goofing off? If so, the joke's on us. For make no mistake: Angels & Demons isn't guilty-pleasure bad. It's not amusingly bad. It's not even so-bad-it's-good bad. It's worse-than-The-Da-Vinci-Code- bad. It's they're-taking-the-piss bad. It's don't-give-them-your-money bad. Altar boys of the world: you know what to do.

(May 2009)

Angels & Demons is available on DVD through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment; a further sequel, Inferno, opens in cinemas nationwide on Friday, and is reviewed here.

From the archive: "The Da Vinci Code"

Hollywood executives must love it when precisely no brain power is required of them in their daily working. Few synapses would have been tested in greenlighting The Da Vinci Code, the film of the book everybody in the Western world bought just to see why everybody else was reading it. (Did we ever arrive at an explanation for that, by the way?) You can see the logic: if every person who picked up a copy of Dan Brown's novel in an airport departure lounge or WHSmith 3-for-2 offer was to buy a ticket for the movie, then the movie would be well on its way to becoming one of the biggest grossing blockbusters of all time. The fatal flaw in this reasoning concerns not how many people worldwide have bought and read The Da Vinci Code, but the number of people worldwide who've read The Da Vinci Code twice. Whether the book is supremely readable or unreadable claptrap - and I've heard strong arguments proposed on both sides - its mystery cannot surely deepen appreciably on a second, cinematic run through. Those who've read the book will already be aware of what happens in the movie. Those who haven't are unlikely to be converted by a very dull, occasionally silly and punishingly long film.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit - if you haven't already guessed - that I fall into the latter camp. (Hey, there are novels by Flaubert and Dostoyevsky I haven't read yet, all of which I intend to get round to once I've finished the latest Viz.) Still, friends tell me one of the book's strengths is its interactivity - that buzzword of the modern era. However shoddy Brown's plotting, however clunky his writing, the reader could nonetheless join in with working out the anagrams and riddles that sustain the writer's narrative. I cannot for the life of me see how a film or an audience would benefit from sending Forrest Gump and Amelie Poulain to do all this thinking for us. For, yes, we now have Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, an American cryptologist in Paris who's framed for the murder of a curator in the Louvre, although Batman & Robin scribe Akiva Goldsman's adaptation is so clumsy that, several days after watching the film, I still have no idea why Langdon is the chosen stooge. (Maybe it's just that he happened to be in town on a booksigning tour; had Opus Dei waited a week to bump the curator off, they would have had to frame Katie Price, say, or Alain de Botton.)

Anyway, Langdon is helped to evade police custody - and thereby granted time to work out the clues the curator left behind - by the gaminely unconvincing Parisian cop Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou, for it is elle). Over the course of the two-and-a-half hours of Ron Howard's film, our hero will bump up against a variety of dogma, not to mention a rogues' gallery of supporting performers. Paul Bettany - bless him - is the self-flagellating albino monk and part-time hitman Silas, who for some reason shoots the curator in the gut rather than head, thereby allowing him plenty of time to take one last tour of the gallery setting the entire plot up. Ian McKellen plays a temperamental chateau-owner referred to as Leigh Teabing. (That's Leigh Teabing.) Alfred Molina is the Catholic bishop Aringarosa - bless you - trying to keep a mortal secret from getting out. These characterisations are vivid in a lukewarm pulp sort of way, but they cannot conceal what's always bugged Brown sceptics: that the plot of The Da Vinci Code is pure bunkum (high-flown conspiracy) built on top of something that already demands a, let's say, heightened level of belief (organised religion).

With a smidgen more reality - if the cover-up had been engineered by a government, rather than the Church - the film might be borderline credible, as Hollywood runarounds go. If it had displayed any trace of humour, it could have been just as much infectious fun as the Nic Cage codebreaker National Treasure. As it is, we're left with a film where the big twist centres on a number of utterly spurious claims - whom Jesus once had over for dinner, and (somewhat more controversially) whether Leonardo da Vinci wasn't as good as Brian Sewell says, particularly in the matter of differentiating between male and female subjects. (The correct response, at every turn, is "oh, come on", if not "well, who cares?") And where the book apparently made a virtue of rollicking along, Goldsman supposes this is one of those plots that requires continual explanation, and so the film keeps sitting its characters down so someone can talk us through another section of the complex waffle that forms Brown's backstory. The location varies, but the stop-and-sit principle applies throughout: in the back of an armored van; on a bench at midnight in the Bois de Boulogne; on a plane; over tea and biscuits at Gandalf's - sorry, Leigh Teabing's - house.

Alternatively, we're offered flashbacks, endless, unnecessary flashbacks to illustrate some washed-out religious pageant or justify the present-day action. You get a feel for the imagination Howard and Goldsman credit their audience with in a scene that cuts from Langdon and Neveu escaping from an airport in a car to the flashback that picks apart how they got there: by, erm, getting out of a plane and then running across to the car. Star power, a flicker of chemistry, might have got us to overlook the monumental dumbness of it all, but Hanks, in his all-black outfit and extreme hairdo, has the look of an underemployed football pundit; he'd surely be more at home pontificating on England's World Cup chances than solving Sudoku puzzles pertaining to the Son of God. And even those of us with a weakness for French actresses speaking in English will have to concede that Tautou is beyond all hope here: as performances in a second language go, this is very nearly as awkward as Zhang Ziyi's turn in Memoirs of a Geisha; these words - not great words to begin with - just don't sit right in her mouth. One comes to The Da Vinci Code expecting revelation, perhaps some explanation of why the book was so damn popular, but Howard's film can offer nothing so exciting as that. Instead, after all those hours in the High Court, all the money spent by Sony on promotion, all those high-powered edicts delivered by senior representatives of the Church, what seemed like endless documentaries on Channels Four and Five, one comes to conclude this is one of those occasional cultural phenomena that lead one to look to the heavens and cry out in vain: come on, people, was it really worth this much fuss?

(May 2006)

The Da Vinci Code is available on DVD through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.  

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office   

for the weekend of September 30-October 2, 2016:
   

1 (1) Bridget Jones's Baby (15)
2 (new) Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (12A)
3 (new) Deepwater Horizon (15)
4 (2) The Magnificent Seven (12A) **
5 (new) Supersonic (15)
6 (4) Finding Dory (U) ***
7 (3) Kubo and the Two Strings (PG) ****
8 (6) Don't Breathe (15) ****
9 (9) Bad Moms (15) **
10 (new) M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (PG) *** 

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five:   

1. Driving with Selvi [above]
2. Tharlo
3. Under the Shadow 
4. My Scientology Movie
5. The Greasy Strangler
 

Top Ten DVD rentals:  

   

1 (1) Captain America: Civil War (12)
2 (new) The Nice Guys (15) ****
3 (2) The Jungle Book (PG) **
4 (new) Alice Through the Looking Glass (PG)
5 (3) Deadpool (15)
6 (9) Love & Friendship (U) ***
7 (7) Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (12)
8 (4) Eye in the Sky (15) ***
9 (5) Eddie the Eagle (PG) ***
10 (new) Mother's Day (12) 

(source: lovefilm.com)

                                   

My top five:  

1. When Marnie Was There
2. Jim: The James Foley Story
3. The Greasy Strangler

4. Race
5. Long Way North

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:   

1. Begin Again (Sunday, BBC2, 10pm)
2. Wonder Boys (Sunday, BBC2, 11.40pm)
3. American Pie 2 (Friday, ITV1, 10.40pm)
4. Safe (Sunday, five, 11.20pm)
5. Predators (Sunday, C4, 11.05pm)

"Still Loved" (Guardian 07/10/16)

Still Loved ****

Dir: Debbie Howard. Documentary with: Lou Evans, Juliette Gaunt, Matt Gaunt, Beth Morris. 77 mins. Cert: 12A
 
Released to coincide with Baby Loss Awareness Month, Debbie Howard’s documentary hears out bereaved parents across the North Midlands, talking with remarkable candour about their experiences of stillbirth. If the early crosscutting elides some of each case’s specificity, it succeeds in describing a more general arc, from horror and numbness to acceptance and a resolution to move forwards – either by trying to conceive again or investing creative energies in alternative projects. The process confronts us with undeniably tough material: the snapshots of the deceased sting as much as the pans across the box-fresh bibs and bootees bought in excited anticipation of the big day. (The whole film is a fleshing-out of the six-word story typically attributed to Hemingway.) Yet you can only be struck by the resilience the interviewees display, and the trust they place in Howard – a trust repaid several times over by a work of commemoration that will also surely provide considerable consolation.

Still Loved tours selected cinemas from today.

"War on Everyone" (Guardian 07/10/16)

War on Everyone *

Dir: John Michael McDonagh. With: Alexander Skarsgård, Michael Pena, Tessa Thompson, Stephanie Sigman. 98 mins. Cert: 15
 
When our culture is finally swallowed by snark, all movies will resemble this benumbing buddy-cop facsimile, a major misfire from The Guard’s John Michael McDonagh. Rather than a plot, McDonagh here offers a monotonous succession of low blows, pitting New Mexico detectives Michael Pena and Alexander Skarsgård against various minority punchbags and prompting them to gurgle insensitively – a careworn post-Gervaisian tactic that might only be excusable if these jabs were funny. That title’s fair warning at least, but it’s hard to engage in any rewarding way with a film in which not a single word is meant or felt – unless McDonagh really is the worst kind of reactionary. 

War on Everyone opens in cinemas nationwide today.

At the LFF: "Mirzya"

You can't say Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Mirzya doesn't offer value for money. This all-twirling, ever-shifting Hindi spectacular offers the passing spectator two or three films in one; if we were looking for a Western equivalent - and the bulk of its audience, we should remember, probably won't be - then it appears to hold to the same theory of interconnectivity proposed by 2012's Cloud Atlas, a film with which it shares its swoony ambition/overreach. It will take a while to get your bearings, so allow me to cut a few corners and venture that all its activity takes place around the one rocky outcrop, colloquially known as Blacksmith's Alley. Here, Mehra cuts freely between a classical narrative that finds warriors dodging arrows and fireballs, a retro childhood romance curtailed when the male contingent shoots dead the teacher who caned his beloved, and a contemporary high-society saga that draws a somehow familiar love triangle around the clientele of a latter-day polo club.

Though we're not initially certain how these strands weave together, there's a fluidity about Mehra's direction that makes for most pleasurable watching. An arrow in one timeline morphs into a dart in the next; tears turn into stars in the night sky; a horsebacked charger in the first narrative cedes the screen to the handsome polo club captain in the last. This is no happy accident. Both the screenplay and lyrics are credited to the revered poet Gulzar, and the poetry of his lyrics itself spills over into the dialogue. Art Malik's police chief is - naturally - a liberally quoting Shakespeare nut, while an exchange about hiccuping segues seamlessly into a song deploying hiccups as percussion. All this finessing will doubtless make Mirzya anathema to Hindi cinema's modernising faction, who've made great efforts these past few years to ensure their films come in on or under the two-hour mark (Mehra's is 2hrs12), with minimal songcraft and a greater emphasis on the issues facing today's India.

Mehra's aim, by contrast, looks to be to fashion a heightened version of the traditional romantic drama, adding a few traces of substance to the sap; he gives us the swooning and sighing, and a little more besides. Not least visually: no expense has been spared on accessorising these triangles, and it may be telling that the first behind-the-camera credit that appears on screen is for the production's financial advisor. This guy did his job; you can see exactly where every last rupee went. Thousands of costumed extras dance on to serve as a chorus; the camera lingers over the expensive trinkets - the rings and amulets - passed from one lover's hand to the next. "We are all links in a long chain," one character suggests, simultaneously framing the narrative strategy and justifying all the anklets and bracelets pulled from the wardrobe truck to make this chain literal and visible.

The big question is one pondered by those Western poets Lennon and McCartney: can money buy you love? The answer, in this instance, is yes, up to a point. Certainly Gulzar and Mehra are possessed of the sensibility to cultivate the kind of beauty that inspires love, even as they spot those forces that might conspire to despoil and destroy it, and understand the extreme measures we're driven to take in pursuit of it. One poor soul strives to distract himself from the pain of rejection by having a friend run a red hot poker along his spine - a touch de trop, perhaps, but we've all felt variations of that hurt. (I find alcohol usually does the trick.) Yet certain strands grab us far more than others. The warrior business, though striking, never quite comes into dramatic focus: it may not be coincidental that this strand features the least dialogue, obliging Mehra to compensate with lashings and lashings of slow-motion posethrowing, visual fireworks that fade all too quickly. 

Throughout Mirzya's second half, you feel the sap quotient rising beneath the surface sparkle: the film's real interest lies in the most conventional of its strands, the one that permits its starcrossed lovers to escape their families and ride a motorcycle through the desert, the wind mussing their hair just so - standard Bollywood operating procedure, in other words. The result is that I only liked a film one suspects we're intended to fall head-over-heels in love with - as I did fall head-over-heels for Bajirao Mastani, last December's altogether more pulsing and urgent renovation of the classical form. Still, even as the images succumb to mush, Gulzar's words continue to ring long and loud in our ears. "Togetherness is not closeness/Talking is so easy/Keeping an oath so difficult," proposes one song: wisdom, I dare say, it would be as wise for a headstrong warrior in the Thar Desert to heed as it would for anybody considering taking their first swipes on Tinder.

Mirzya screens tonight (Thu 6) and tomorrow (Fri 7) at the Embankment Cinema. 

At the LFF: "Wild"

The 60th BFI London Film Festival opens tomorrow night with the UK premiere of Amma Asante's A United Kingdom, and runs until the 16th October at various locations around the city. As ever, it's my intention to run selected longer reviews of featured titles on this blog, while dispatching daily capsule reviews (and other stray thoughts) via Twitter - you can find me here.

How to let off steam in our ever more stressful and demanding modern world? For some, the answer lies in reiki or spin class; others turn to alcohol, sex and drugs. For the heroine of the new German black comedy Wild, it appears to lie in a return to nature. Nicolette Krebitz's film introduces us to Ania (Lilith Stangenberg), a meek, lonely secretary who experiences a revelation on her work to work one morning when she comes eye-to-eye with a wolf lingering on an especially desolate scrap of wasteland. Between the call of the wild and the call of her desk, there seems barely a choice: Krebitz sets up a cold, hard, brusque universe - mostly drudgery, where you can't even step off the bus without some stranger barging his way past you - which might very well send a sane person running off into the woods, away from those brutes and control freaks who seek to crush us or tie us in knots.

Yet Wild never loses sight of the idea its heroine might be a pretty strange creature in her own right. Ania's a cross between the unworldly teacher of Maren Ade's The Forest for the Trees, Chris McCandless, alienated hero of Into the Wild, and Timothy Treadwell, subject of Herzog's Grizzly Man: far more comfortable around animals than humans, she comes to regard the wolf as a best friend, ideal flatmate or dream lover she must have, and is then seen going out of her way to get him. I use the masculine pronoun, as the bulk of what follows plays out as a live-action beauty-and-the-beast romance we're pretty certain can't end well, given Krebitz's realist tenor and the prevailing laws of nature. Even so, there's an undeniable fascination in watching our heroine buy the bait, set the traps, ready the tranquilisers and eventually get the wolf indoors, in one nocturnal stroke promoting herself up the food chain. Who's the predator now?

Stangenberg's spooky, obsessive presence carries the film a lot of the way: the actress does have the look of someone who'd consider kissing a dog with tongues, and all the scenes between her and the (non-CG) wolf carry an electric, quasi-erotic tension. (You don't know who's going to pounce on whom first.) Krebitz deserves this year's Johnny Morris Memorial Prize for Best Onscreen Animal Handling, if only for a talking-point dream sequence that coincides with Ania's time of the month. At which point, you'll just have to acknowledge there are elements here that border on the preposterous. That Ania recruits a full team of migrant workers to assist with her mission seems unlikely, given she initially seems capable of saying boo to a goose, let alone in Mandarin; and I hope it doesn't sound sexist when I say there are certain practical elements to her plan that would seem to be beyond this thin slip of a girl. (There are moments where Krebitz appears to ask Stangenberg to play Ray Mears and Ron Swanson simultaneously, which would be a stretch for anybody.)

Still, you cannot deny that this is a film of big, bold, cinematic ideas, not least when the captive wolf decides he needs some space and promptly elects to knock the walls of Ania's poky flat clean through. Somewhere in this picture is a portrayal of sexuality, and female sexuality in particular, as a banister-humping joke, a series of wholly irrational, uncontrollable urges; depending on where the viewer is in his or her own cycle, you may take unkindly to this, or warm to Krebitz as a more puckish Catherine Breillat, one possessed of a far greater sense of humour about matters of the heart and other organs. Granted, the film's wayward in places, and less immediately readable proposition than the Reece Witherspoon vehicle with which it shares its name - and yet I think it deserves that title all the more for it. Krebitz's film extends its claws, scratches at the veneer of civilised behaviour, and wonders just what it would take for us to make peace with that low-down, dirty, animalistic part of ourselves that is forever snarling and thrashing around.

Wild screens on Thursday 6 at the Vue West End, Friday 7 at the Curzon Mayfair, and Saturday 8 at the NFT.