For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office   

for the weekend of April 7-9, 2017:
   

1 (new) The Boss Baby (U)
2 (1) Beauty and the Beast (PG) ***
3 (new) Peppa Pig: My First Cinema Experience (U)
4 (2) Ghost in the Shell (12A) ***
5 (4) Get Out (15) ****
6 (new) Going in Style (12A)
7 (3) Smurfs: The Lost Village (U)
8 (5) Power Rangers (12A) **
9 (6) Kong: Skull Island (12A)
10 (8) Logan (15) ***

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five:   

1. Mulholland Dr. [above]
2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
3. Neruda
4. The Lost City of Z
5. The Salesman


Top Ten DVD rentals:  

1 (new) Rogue One (12) **
2 (1) Moana (PG) ****
3 (2) Arrival (12) ***
4 (3) Doctor Strange (12) **
5 (new) Trolls (U)
6 (4) Bridget Jones's Baby (15) *
7 (5) Inferno (15) *
8 (re) The Magnificent Seven (12) **
9 (7) Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (12)
10 (8) A Street Cat Named Bob (12) **
 
(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:  

1. Moana
2. Tanna
3. Adult Life Skills
4. The Birth of a Nation
5. Revolution: New Art for a New World

On DVD: "The Birth of a Nation"

Rarely can a film's stock have fallen quite so sharply in the course of a single calendar year. The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker's thumping biopic of the rebellious slave Nat Turner, left audiences and critics reeling at its Sundance premiere last January, and sent Fox rummaging for a record sum to acquire global distribution rights, convinced they had the next 12 Years a Slave on their hands. If ever you needed more reason to distrust the glowing reviews and reactions routinely bounced back from the festival circuit, this would be it. First, there came the critical backlash, as sober, better-slept observers spotted the crudeness of the film's technique; there then emerged details of a troubling case from 1999 in which Parker and his co-writer Jean McGianni Celestin, at that time college sophomores, were accused of (and, in the latter's case, convicted of) sexual assault. Celestin's conviction was overturned in 2005, only for the new trial convened to rehear the charges to be cancelled due to the absence of witnesses; his accuser would commit suicide in 2012, a tragedy too great for anything so flimsy as a mere movie to bear. A century on from the contentious D.W. Griffith epic from which Parker has co-opted his title, it's almost as though the practitioners of cinema haven't got anywhere or learnt anything - although I suppose you could say the rest of us are getting much more efficient about applying the hashtag #problematic.

The film itself, for what it's worth, turns out to be a markedly different beast from 12 Years, which was ultimately the work of an outsider-artist alert to the gruelling rituals of slavery and the power structures that sustained it. An actor-turned-director, Parker has grown up within the business, and his film is couched very much along the lines of conventional Hollywood biopic fare, existing somewhere between Hallmark Channel history lesson and Mel Gibson's Braveheart, a comparison Parker has happily received. In short, Birth was clearly made to be sold for a high price (where the McQueen film, stars aside, was in theory a tough sell), and we should probably note in passing the irony of Parker citing the deeply problematic Gibson as an influence. That influence is most strongly seen and felt in Parker's liberal application of blood. The first time the young Turner (Nat Espinosa) is taken out into the cotton fields, he pricks his finger; corncobs ooze crimson in a dream. Slavery here equals perversion of nature. Parker's older Turner is, much like that cotton, notable for his absorbency: the film is structured as a series of vile abuses its hero must soak up before his rage spills over in the head-smashing, throat-slitting finale. These include: witnessing the beating of a puppy; seeing one slave owner chiselling out the teeth of servants who've gone on hunger strike; seeing his own owner (Armie Hammer) selling his services to a less scrupulous honky; and, finally, a gang rape that ensures everyone in the auditorium is hollering for payback.

This gives Birth undeniable punch and momentum, but equally leaves it feeling predetermined where 12 Years felt genuinely shocking, prone to montages that ease us past the humiliating rituals and repetitions of the McQueen movie. Everything feels very carefully controlled and packaged: the framing of the hero's swelling anger as righteous (justified three times over, by first a Biblical quote, then a Godly solar eclipse, and finally his good lady wife's approval), the elaborately choreographed wedding party song-and-dance by which a ragtag bunch of field workers are momentarily transformed into the cast of Hamilton, the romance that develops between Nat and the new girl (Aja Naomi King), with her unerring knack of sitting exactly where the most brilliant rays of the Sun hit the Earth. (On the couple's wedding night, their bodies are positioned in such a way as to rhyme symmetrically with a pair of candles leaning into one another on the windowsill, an especially chintzy touch.) Where McQueen evoked slavery in scenes that were angry, ragged or sad, Parker seems to sense his position within the system all too well: his film has many of the trappings of those A-pictures that seek to tell Important Stories and thereby win awards, but it gets there via the methods of those B-movies that grab our attention with dollops of gore, setting us to endure and then cheer sights we would surely run or look away from in the real world.

Birth has just enough social-historical heft to cover its ass against charges of exploitation - charges that damned such films as Mandingo and Drum on their first release: it does look like an expensive (therefore respectable) studio release, making Fox's financial investment seem like a no-brainer at the time. Yet within that framework, Parker insistently selects the most obvious tactic with which to drive his points home: casting rent-a-hick Jackie Earle Haley and the ever-dissolute Mark Boone Jr. as landed locals, having Turner attacked by a white dog, putting the slo-mo on the lash such that it extends the agonies for an extra second or two, or simply just organising all the characters in such a way that they're entirely subservient to Turner - and thus the actors to Parker, the first-time multihyphenate striving to make an impression within a ruthlessly competitive (and - Moonlight schmoonlight - minority-blind) industry. The result can't help but have some impact - as Griffith's film, "history written with lightning" etc., did way back when - and particularly so among viewers desperate to see a greater number of black stories up on screen. Yet there are surely more artful and sensitive ways of telling these stories: even as Hacksaw Ridge muscles its director and prime mover back onto the fringes of awards consideration - and Hollywood redemption - we might ponder the wisdom of Parker adopting "Mad" Mel Gibson as a career role model.

The Birth of a Nation is available on DVD and Blu-Ray through 20th Century Fox from Monday.

Period pains: "The Sense of an Ending"

Perhaps this was inevitable, but here we are: Liberal Elite - The Movie, a film commissioned in Bloomsbury from a book that set a few square miles in Islington chattering, about a Jeremy Corbyn-alike dithering towards the realisation that he was wrong to raise his voice against representatives of the landed gentry. By rights, The Sense of an Ending should play matinee screenings at the Hampstead Everyman until the end of time, and precisely nowhere else. A sense of irrelevancy spirals out from protagonist Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent), a physically spry yet curmudgeonly old cove who spends his afternoons in semi-retirement, repairing Leica cameras. It isn't just that Corbynesque facefuzz that gives him the air of a man out of time and touch: a habitual letter writer - taking particular delight whenever one of his missives graces the pages of his beloved Guardian - he has to be handed an iPhone by his heavily pregnant daughter (Michelle Dockery) in case of a birthing emergency. Still, life has a way of coming out of the blue at you, be you seventy or seventeen.

Those who've read Julian Barnes' Booker-winning novel will already have some indication of the blasts from the past heading this codger's way. Yet the film, adapted by emergent theatrical star Nick Payne (Constellations) and directed by Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox), treats them more like mildly awkward interventions: a series of lawyers' letters promising to bequeath Tony odds and sods from his younger days (never delivered), dozy memories of his time as a lovestruck teenager, prompted by leisurely lunch conversations with an altogether too patient and forgiving ex-wife (Harriet Walter). Very quickly, we get a sense of a bungee-cord structure that would serve readers rather better than it does cinemagoers: every time Tony seems to be heading towards some realisation about the events of his past, we're tugged back to the present day, a withholding technique that notionally underlines Barnes's theorem that we can never fully grasp the whole truth of another person's life.

Batra has ways of finessing Payne's approach in the editing suite. As one door in the present closes, another opens in the past; a cut unites the older and younger Tonies shaving at the bathroom mirror. Yet for at least an hour, the film is tryingly underdramatic: a petty administrative squabble that sets its characters to waffling whenever they're not going round and round in judiciously furnished circles. Here, Batra is no help whatsoever. The restraint he displayed in his first feature - thereby distinguishing it from the ranks of blood-and-thunder Bollywood melodrama - now feels like nothing more than placidity or timidity, born of the desire to impress his new BBC Films paymasters: he's getting everybody to hit their marks without once threatening to frighten the horses. You might give him credit for having developed a stiff upper lip in record time, but it gets in the way of the character revelations here. A suicide barely puts a ripple in the film's haut-bourgeois surface; a scene of confrontation - in Foyles' cafe, natch - peters out with a cutesy punchline involving the pregnant lesbians at the next table; a pursuit along the Bank branch of the Northern Line is shot with all the urgency of an afternoon TV spot for incontinence pads. 

Maybe that's all the Silver Screen crowd require: something genteel to nod off in front of before Escape to the Country comes back on. Yet the approach entirely shortsells Broadbent's willingness to play less than sympathetic: he gives great resting sourpuss face here, and has a way of delivering a banal line like "whenever suits" that is almost perfectly pushy and passive-aggressive. Barnes was writing to expose a particular, emotionally frozen kind of Englishness - one happier around inanimate objects than people, and perhaps not uncommon in certain literary circles - yet that inquiry surely demanded a far tougher film than this effete middlebrow construction, one that was prepared to get its hands dirty and mix it up a little (rather as, say, 2006's Judi Dench psychodrama Notes on a Scandal did). Whatever knotty intellectual life and raw human truth the author first put on the page - elements the inquiring Payne would have been well placed to extract, were he too not looking to make friends and influence people - it's been comprehensively flattened out to provide the basis of yet another fustily pretty, inertly functional, stiflingly well-made British picture. 

The Sense of an Ending opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

At the BFI: "Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921)"

Despite the nod to tradition in its title, Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) forms an eminent example of New Bollywood: a dysfunctional family affair, now played out without a single sulphurous whiff of that thunderous melodrama enacted in the likes of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. Two brothers - the straight-laced Rahul (Fawad Khan) and the wilder Arjun (Sidharth Malhotra) - are recalled from overseas by news their grandfather has succumbed to a heart attack; upon returning to the family home, however, they find the stout old rogue (veteran Rishi Kapoor, having a whale of a time) more or less fine and the household beset by a different kind of cardiac crisis - the apparent foundering of their parents' marriage. What follows risks becoming Sundance-schematic, but writer-director Shakun Batra ensures that everything up to the shouting fits develops organically: pleasingly low-key location shooting helps, while the musical numbers tend more often than not to be treated as tipsy singalongs. Just as these are the squabbles real families might get into from time to time, these are the moves you and I might bust several glasses of prosecco into any other fraught reunion.

A major character revelation (and source of minor controversy upon the film's Indian release) comes to be granted no more fuss on screen than, for example, gramps' potsmoking and porno habit - because, as the underlying assumption would have it, it's not the sort of thing any truly enlightened and forward-thinking people should be making a fuss about in the first years of the 21st century. Trying to get the Kapoors to assemble for a family photo turns out to be a far bigger deal, and when a rainstorm hits, just as these blood relatives are starting to look at one another as though they were complete strangers, you can sense a certain conventionality creeping into the film's thinking: we're headed towards another affirmation of the family unit as profoundly flawed yet still the best social model we've got. The relaxed air and lightness of touch Batra demonstrates in socking home this message really do feel new, however, and he's found strong allies in Malhotra and Khan, capable young actors who make the disparate siblings' relationship both recognisable and finally very touching.

Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921) screens in NFT3 on Fri 14 at 8.20pm, and again on Mon 17 at 2.15pm.

At the BFI: "Shahid"

The Anurag Kashyap revolution - nudging Indian cinema towards a consideration of trickier-than-usual subject matter - continues unabated. The shaded biopic Shahid, produced by Kashyap for writer-director Hansal Mehta, serves as a memorial for Shahid Azmi, the skilled human rights lawyer who emerged from the Mumbai slums only to be shot dead in February 2010, reportedly in retaliation for his work on behalf of those Muslims left to languish in the motherland's prison system. As incarnated by the boyish Rajkumar Rao, Azmi is presented as a figure motivated by his own early brushes with the law: he's shown being jailed midway through his studies as a result of having briefly attended a jihadist training camp. Briefly is perhaps the operative word here - it's a knotty biographical detail, skimped over during a song in the opening credits - but we do come over time to gain a sense of a man who was gentrified (rather than radicalised) by his time behind bars, learning to channel his burning sense of injustice into other, more socially beneficial activity.

If Azmi's progress through the legal ranks at first appears a touch too steady and straightforward, destiny carries him into several flashpoints in recent Indian history, not least the aftermath of the 2008 Mumbai bombings: here, our hero will find that in this altogether fraught age of terror (and draconian responses to terror), simply hearing out a Muslim's story leaves one at risk of being labelled a traitor, a terrorist sympathiser or an enemy of the state. Mehta's theme is the haphazard modernisation India is undergoing in the first decades of the 21st century, a process evident as much in the form of the country's cinema as in the altogether more adult and challenging content of these films: the fresh-faced Shahid strides into the dusty, darkened, cluttered corridors of power (not unlike those navigated in the recent indie success Court), raises his voice, and - case by case - begins to make a difference, pushing back against decades, if not centuries, of hidebound prejudice.

The Kashyap influence means Mehta is allowed newish ways of showing this: immediately evocative location shooting that captures something of the push and the pull of modern India, and a properly sophisticated dramatic technique that, while allowing room for genuine dissent (as one of Shahid's fellow prisoners bluntly puts it, "this country doesn't give a shit about us"), doesn't just bash the viewer over the head with the issues under discussion. That much can be parsed from the trial sequences, conceived as credibly petty squabbles rather than the series of grandstanding speeches courtroom cinema traditionally reaches for. Much about it remains low-key, as modest as its protagonist; Shahid's romance with Mariam (Prableen Sandhu), the client who became his wife, is a neat means of marrying the personal and political, even if it leads to a few slightly rote scenes in the second half as the lawyer becomes consumed by his task. Still, Mehta finds an effective focus in Rao, an actor capable of suggesting the vulnerable human being behind the hero - a man with an increasingly heavy burden, trying to do the job that will ultimately do for him.

Shahid screens in NFT2 tomorrow at 8.30pm, and again on Sun 16 at 5.30pm.

At the BFI: "Queen"

A crowdpleaser that posits new directions for the Bollywood romcom, Vikas Bahl's Queen opens with codependent small-town girl Rani (Kangana Ranaut) being dumped by no-good fiance Vijay (Rajkumar Rao) on the very eve of her wedding. After retreating into bittersweet memories of how these two got so close (and yet so far), the film begins to propose ways of moving its heroine forward - chiefly by dispatching her, alone, on the European honeymoon she was meant to share with the man of her dreams. On the streets of Paris - and under the sisterly influence of freewheeling single mum Vijayalakshmi (a vivacious Lisa Haydon), who Rani's grandma, looking on via Skype, takes for an adult movie star - she'll undergo the first stage in a much-needed process of liberation; degrees of fish-out-of-water comedy ensue, as Rani discovers European mores are very different from how things are done back home, where a girl is simply supposed to shut up and settle down.

In the guiding hands of screenwriter Anvika Dutt, it is, however, very much about a girl, and watching Rani throw off her dowdy cardies, let down her hair and learn to stand on her own two feet makes this a more than useful platform for the approachable, empathetic Ranaut. Some of its material comes by the yard, as romcom standard - so, yes, there's a makeover sequence, and some very broad knockabout around the sex shops of Amsterdam with the multicultural buddies Rani makes in a hostel - yet Dutt and Bahl remain capable of narrative and visual sophistication: it's an effective move to deploy the Eiffel Tower not as touristy marker but psychological signifier, looming over Rani as surely as the shadow of megaprick Vijay - and heartening that our heroine ultimately gets to make a decision of a kind that only a truly progressive and open-minded film industry would permit.

Queen screens in NFT2 on Tue 11 at 5.50pm, and in NFT3 on Fri 28 at 8.20pm.  

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office   

for the weekend of March 31-April 2, 2017:
   

1 (1) Beauty and the Beast (PG) ***
2 (new) Ghost in the Shell (12A) ***
3 (new) Smurfs: The Lost Village (U)
4 (3) Get Out (15) ****
5 (2) Power Rangers (12A) **
6 (4) Kong: Skull Island (12A)
7 (new) Free Fire (15)
8 (5) Logan (15) ***
9 (6) Life (15) **
10 (new) Peter Kay's Car Share: A Second Season Celebration (15)

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five:   

1. Neruda
2. The Lost City of Z
3. The Salesman
4. Get Out 
5. Raw


Top Ten DVD rentals:  

1 (new) Moana (PG) ****
2 (1) Arrival (12) ***
3 (2) Doctor Strange (12) **
4 (3) Bridget Jones's Baby (15) *
5 (5) Inferno (15) *
6 (4) The Girl on the Train (15) *
7 (new) Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (12)
8 (6) A Street Cat Named Bob (12) **
9 (7) I, Daniel Blake (15) ****
10 (9) Storks (U)

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five:  

1. Moana
2. The Young Offenders
3. Endless Poetry
4. Revolution: New Art for a New World
5. Paterson


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:   
1. King Kong [above] (Saturday, ITV1, 9.35pm)
2. Ben-Hur (Good Friday, five, 1.05pm)
3. Ilo Ilo (Saturday, BBC2, 12midnight)
4. Crank (Good Friday, ITV1, 10.45pm)
5. Goldfinger (Sunday, ITV1, 1.45pm)