I have drafted a review of The Master. In short I was beguiled.
You can read a version here at Total:Spec. Another version below.
I have to add two things which I didn't mention in the review. One: the design and costumes in this film are bewitching. It's like leafing through a vintage copy of Cosmo. Secondly, I am guilty of not writing about Amy Adams who plays the wife of Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). She is excellent as the slightly dowdy and oh so austere partner in the project. Sadly she is left to work in the shadow of Hoffman and Phoenix. In the final scene of the film however she is breathtakingly severe. Like an overly vexed headmistress.
I recommend you see this.
The Master (15) The Director's cut review
If I were to join a cult...
If I were to join a cult, if I wanted to throw in my lot with a magnetic and beguiling leader, I might just do it if it were Philip Seymour Hoffman. Now clearly one of cinema’s great actors, Hoffman’s latest performance as the leader of an enigmatic cult in The Master is matched only by the intensity and power of his co-star Joaquin Phoenix. Together the two combine to provide a gripping intellectual journey of rare potency.
Written and directed by There Will Be Blood (2007) maestro Paul Thomas Anderson, The Master charts the relationship between a charismatic cult leader and his protege in the US immediately after the war.
Freddie Quell (Phoenix) is a volatile and itinerant former naval serviceman attempting to overcome his wartime trauma. Unable to hold down a job, and self medicating with toxic homebrews, Freddie is thrown together with Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman) by chance after yet another night on the booze. Dodd, known by his disciples as the Master, takes a shine to Quell - and develops the profound determination to heal his “insanity” and “animal” behaviour using his own self invented “process” of hypnosis and regression.
In the heart of Buenos Aires is what should have become the largest single hospital in Latin American. A vast concrete and brick shell that was never finished, the building, (known as the Elefante Blanco - White Elephant) has become part of the local slum, surrounded by a shanty town, populated by drug dealers, the poor and the alienated, filled with filth and violence. It is the story of this urban anachronism that features in Pablo Trapero’s latest movie.
The picture’s action focuses on the work of a Catholic mission, led by Father Julian (Ricardo Darin) and its effort to complete a new housing project in the middle of the slum. His health failing Father Julian brings into this hell his friend Father Nicholas (Jeremie Renier) who is haunted by his inability to protect villagers while working in the Amazon jungle.
Writer-director Jacques Audiard has demonstrated the hold French film making has over arthouse cinema after his most recent movie Rust and Bone won the Official Prize this weekend at the 2012 London Film Festival.
The film goes on general release on 2 November but I was lucky enough to see a preview. Oddly, when I look back at my review, I don't seem as enthusiastic about it as the festival judges. At the risk of seeming like I'm leaping aboard a band wagon, it is undoubtedly a powerful film that taps into some big themes.
Marion Cotillard delivers a tremendous performance as Stephanie, a trainer of killer whales involved in an horrific accident. Her sparring partner is Ali, (Matthias Schoenaerts), a misfit, petty thief, bouncer and would-be boxer who builds a complex relationship with Stephanie during her recovery.
All its power though is captured in a climatic scene that will have your virtually unable to watch the screen.
Anyway, here's my review for TotalSpec. Click here. Let me know what you think.
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When I saw David Ayer's End of Watch I had to come home and listen to Public Enemy all day. Not sure why, it's not as if I am a fan. Somehow it captured the mood that the movie summons up.
If anything the track Harder than You Think echoes the theme and trajectory of this tale of two LA police officers trying to make it through patrol after patrol. It's gritty stuff and our involvement as the audience is total.
Here's the review for Total:Spec. The movie is on general release in the UK from 23 November.
To label this movie a drama is to hardly give the picture [a finalist in the London Film Festival’s Official Competition] the justice it deserves. By turns gripping, stomach churning, tension filled, joyful and touching, End of Watch is a roller coaster ride not unlike a shift in one of LAPD’s police interceptors.
Getting worried about the week beginning 2 November. Not only is The Shining receiving a re- release but there are least three compelling reasons to go to the cinema in the UK. I haven't seen these yet but the trailers alone have got me hooked. Excision looks like one of the oddest movies of the year and a rarity in cinema - a serious minded coming of age film for young women. Starring Annalyn McCord, an isolated teenager fascinated with road kill, surgery on strangers and sex, if that doesn't get you interested there's always the cast which includes movie luminaries Malcolm McDowell and John Waters. Watch the trailer. My first thought was Rosemar
Then there is The Masterwith Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Pheonix. Intense and brooding The Master tells the tale of a World War II veteran (Pheonix) who falls in with what seems like a philosophical cult under the control Hoffman.
Then there is a version of Shakespeare's Tempest. This is what the PR says: "TEMPEST is both a celebration of contemporary urban youth culture, and a 21st Century re-imagining of Shakespeare's last great play. "17 young actors from South London struggle to put on a production. Their story unfolds alongside Prospero's as The Oval is transformed into Shakespeare’s magical island and the outcast Duke conjures the spirits in his quest to regain his kingdom."
One striking feature of this year's London Film Festival is how many films figure dislocated young people or children struggling to make lives for themselves. My Brother the Devil (Sally El Hosaini) Spike Island (Mat Whitecross) and Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild all take as their subject youths either trying to forge new destinies or children forced to grow up fast. Childhood provides rich material for strong movie narratives.
Another such movie is Sister, a Swiss production directed by Ursula Meier. Swiss films don't usually catch much attention, not in the UK at least, but this is worth a viewing. A young boy is forced to take responsibility for his older sister, a burden he is struggling to carry. It's tough social realism revealing that Switzerland is not all ski slopes, muesli and cheap chocolate. Sometimes its colourless social housing, petty crime and a struggle to get by. Despite the tourists. Oh and it also stars Scully, sorry, Gillian Anderson, who lends the flick a little gravitas. As much as her presence might be interesting, it's hardly needed. Here's a review. Click here.
My Brother the Devil (15) Interestingly where Spike Island failed to include enough grit for my taste, instead relying on way too much light hearted humour, My Brother the Devil, a movie about teenage gangsters in East London has more grit than a Hackney pavement.
Mo (Fady Elsayed) and Rashid (James Floyd)
This is a film that always takes itself seriously, its humour dark and born out of the characters, their peculiarities and their circumstances. When it comes it has bite. Anyway, I've now seen Beasts of the Southern Wild. Both films in the running for the First Feature Award in the London Film Festival. My Brother impressed me, but I can't help feeling that Beasts will sneak the prize. Click here to read a review of My Brother for Total:Spec. It's not a film to be missed, especially the performances.
(Plays as part of the BFI London Film Festival on 13th and 14th October and is expected to go on general release next year)
I was lucky enough to get to the World Premier of the Stone Roses inspired movie Spike Island last week. It won't be out until Spring next year. Here's my review.
Music movies are mostly biographical, telling the life stories of the stars. Rarely do they attempt to show how music impacts upon the fans. Spike Island, suffused with the Stone Roses’ trippy acid rhythms and wah-wah guitars, is, however, such a movie.
Manchester, 1990, and five teenagers and members of a band, are trying to find tickets for the Stone Roses’ seminal gig in the shadow of a chemical plant at Spike Island, near Widness. The concert was to go down in British pop music history, the moment when an obstreperous group of Mancunians would lay claim to being the greatest band - ever. Even now to say you were at Spike Island is to say you were at the dawn of a new wave in UK popular culture.
And yet our band of teenage scallies - Tits, Dodge, Zippy, Little Gaz and Penfold - have only 72 hours to lay their hands on tickets.
For these baggies music is everything and they worship at the alter of Ian Brown, the Stone Roses front man who, for a short time, laid claim to being the popstar with more attitude than a summer rioter armed with a house brick. Indeed, there is one moment when Brown (no doubt to his own amusement) is described as so “punk” he’s “John Lydon times ten.”
But the boys fail to get their tickets and set off on a journey to force their way in. Along the way they must confront their dysfuntional homes lives, burgeoning love lives, friendships in crisis and, perhaps more than anything else, their hopes for the future.
In one sense Spike Island, directed by Mat Whitecross, plays a well-worn comic turn. It has the now very familiar ring of the it’s-grim-up-north-but-we’re-bearing-it-with-fortitude-and-humour style so well defined by movies like Brassed Off (1996) and Billy Elliott (2000). Only on this occassion its with acid.
We mustn’t forget the context of Spike Island and the Stone Roses. I990 was the beginning of a vicious UK recession that would put a tenth of the working age population out of work and wreak even further damage on industries across the north of England. What Spike Island the movie does is capture the disaffection of a working class youth who believed that everything was failing them - the economy, school, home. Indeed, our protagonists turn on their school, an institution apparently preoccupied with teaching them about the past rather than preparing them for a future. As Tits tells a teacher in a direct quote from Mr Brown himself: “The past was yours, the future’s mine.”
It’s that line that really sets the theme for this and nearly every other coming of age story - a youth attempting to define his own destiny against the run of events. Tits wants something more than the grim “red bricks” in which he lives. The symbol of that effort is Ian Brown and the Stone Roses. Tits and his band define themselves through the music and what they believe it stands for. In this instance Ian Brown’s moody insistence that he will determine his own future. And in displaying that Spike Island reveals that peculiarity in British culture - how a musical movement, or a band, can come to define a time, a place, its ambitions, frustrations even its tragedies. Coming from the south of England that may not have been so deeply felt. Coming from Manchester it must have been profoundly visceral.
Not least because the boys have a contradictory relationship with their home town. It’s both a source of pride and a place they need to escape. It was ever thus.
Spike Island works best when the band is moving. The soundtrack combines to make the movie dynamic. But after an uproarious start, with a school break-in, the movie slows while it attempts to set up its characters. It’s during these passages that it risks stalling. Once the boys are forced into getting on the road Spike Island’s energy and pace is recovered.
From the start, however, it captures the tone of the times. Not just the music but the clothes, the language and speech patterns, even that curious walk that Ian Brown and the Gallagher brothers would turn into something of a motif for their less than sunny dispositions and Manc attitude.
Spike Island’s undoubted star is Elliott Tittensor, as Tits, who cut his teeth on Channels 4’s Shameless. He captures the rancour of a troubled young man but retains enough subtlety to reveal sensitivity once his love life picks up.
In some ways this should become a cult movie. The subject matter is there to do it. But many of its jokes and set-ups are just a little too predictable to give it a biting edge. Indeed, you feel the director and writer’s urge to add humour softens the real grittiness of growing up at that time. What it perhaps needs is a little more of Ian Brown’s acidic authenticity.
That said Spike Island remains a celebration of great music and you will warm to a group of characters determined to rise above their circumstances. Ian Brown perhaps captured their conviction best when he said: “It’s not where you’re from, it’s where you’re at.”
After being swamped with plaudits from nearly every other film festival going, Beasts of the Southern Wild, the story of a six year-old girl battling an apocalyptic storm and the return of prehistoric creatures, saw its UK premier at the London Film Festival yesterday (Friday 12 October).
The star Quvenzhane Wallis and director/co-writer Benh Zeitlin were on hand to talk about the film. They appeared shyly uncomfortable at the attention their movie was generating.
Which is perhaps no surprise. This is Zeitlin’s first feature and the critics have raved about his production and its qualities.
When asked he simply said he had tried to capture the way a child sees the world and the character of the community in which his tale is based. His theme, he said, was how children connect apparently unrelated events and then, somehow, place themselves at the centre. He spent months writing in a coastal town getting to know its characters and their motivations before finalising his script. His film is even dedicated to one of those he got to know, the man lent his name to one of the film’s characters, Wink.
Intriguingly critics have struggled to identify his movie’s influences. Zeitlin, when asked virtually brain dumped all the films he had ever seen, though he did appear to place a stress on the films of John Cassavetes and I’m sure he also said Mike Leigh and his approach to getting the best out of actors. That said, he might also have name checked Spike Lee. I was a long way from the stage. Actually, as far as it’s possible to be at the Odeon West End.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is very difficult to pigeon hole, perhaps one of the reasons why it has been so widely praised. It has some unique qualities. Here's my review. Don't hesitate to comment.
Beasts of the Southern Wild (12A)
General UK release 19 October. Showing as part of the BFI London Film Festival on 13 and 14 October.
Director Benh Zeitlin should prepare for a big future. Not only will Hollywood deluge money on him after the praise heaped on his first feature Beasts of the Southern Wild, but if this isn’t the mainstay of film school studies for years to come it's difficult to imagine what will be.
It’s entirely possible that Beasts will end up representing a new moment for cinema, a watershed when disparate techniques came together to create an unexpected new form.
Hushpuppy and her father Wink live the wrong side of the levee on a Louisiana delta in the remote community of Bathtub. Populated with eccentrics, hippies, drunks and the alienated, the people here live on the margins. Unregulated and largely ignored by the state, they forge their own unstructured, unfettered lives. But they also live in fear of the next big storm, or the melting ice caps, that will so easily loosen their purchase on the tiny bit of land and Cyprus swamp they call home.
The storm comes, the world floods, prehistoric beasts rise and this becomes the story of Hushpuppy’s effort to come to terms with this new world, what it means and the failing health of her irascible father.
So much has already been written about Beasts, so much of it eulogising the film’s qualities, that it is difficult to find something new to say. But the facts are unavoidable. It is lyrical, heart breakingly beautiful, touching and affecting.
But as a film it has so much more. Beasts plays with notions of reality and style.
On the one hand it appears like documentary film with shaky hand-held cameras, grainy film and naturalistic settings and acting. And yet, just as in a child’s psyche, it toys with what is and isn’t real as it resurrects long-dead monsters and offers up a location that seems otherworldly, indeed quite literally at the end of the world. In conjuring up this fantastical place Beasts attains a folkloric quality and drops the shackles of the modern world and all its modern mores.
Zeitlin has cleverly allowed his protagonist to be the creator of this world. After hearing tales of a looming apocalypse Hushpuppy fears she herself may be responsible for the storm and her father’s illness. It is from this that the story flows. We see the world as she sees it, and we gradually fear what she fears. And strangely she is not overly concerned by the tempest and the flood. Hushpuppy stoically dreads what all small children fear - the loss of her parents. Her mother, long since gone, has become an imaginary friend that Hushpuppy confides in. All she has is Wink, her father, and her fear.
Zeitlin allows action and events to do the talking. Dialogue is sparse. When it comes it is often Hushpuppy’s own insights, which somehow achieve a level of honesty and profundity that could only come from a child.
Of course, it can be no accident that Hushpuppy’s challenge is a flood. In choosing a watery calamity Zeitlin and co writer Lucy Alibar not only draw on current ecological concern, and echo events in New Orleans, but offer a Biblical analogy of disaster. Just as man’s behaviour was the cause of the problem for Noah, it is man’s levee that is the problem for Hushpuppy and her friends. It assumes the role of oppression, one which Wink and his friends confront in a bid to save their home and freewheeling way of life.
That said, the environmental concerns never overshadow Hushpuppy’s story and her search for understanding. They remain in the background allowing the performances to dominate the narrative. And dominate they do. Quvenzhane Wallis, as Hushpuppy, appears to live her character with complete ease while Dwight Henry, a New Orleans cafe owner, is disturbingly convincing as her volatile father. When he blows it is explosive and surprising each time it happens. Both are in their first films and that Zeitlin should have coaxed these performances from them is testament to skills as a director that go way beyond his experience.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is that rarity in cinema, a movie that will have you wistfully pondering its meaning for long after the final frame has faded from the screen. Don’t miss it, you may be missing a significant bit of film history. /ends.
Well it's started - the 56th BFI London Film festival and I've managed to see some movies. One that sticks out so far is South Korean sci-fi flick Doomsday Book. As the name suggests it's all about the end of the world. To be precise this is actually three short films, each taking their own idiosyncratic view of the earth and mankind and how they might come to their untimely end.
What struck me about this is that it's really a very strange idea and not one that would possible get the green light in say the UK or the US. It is eccentric and does not compromise on quality - in fact it seems to have a decent special effects budget. For what would be an "indie" flick here in the west, it has high production values, however stomach churning some of it may be (one thing you have to appreciate is the Korean preoccupation with body fluids and viscera. Only in Korean films have I seen someone do a poo into the camera (The Isle, 2000), or eat a live octopus (Oldboy, 2003) Doomsday book has zombies, a robot who claims to be Buddha and a magic eight ball like no other. Even if you don't like it you have to admire the bravery of film makers and backers who would give this a go. Here's my review...click here to find the review at totalspecapps.co.uk
London based journalist who works from home procrastinating, fidgeting and generally worrying about his career options while trying to stay out of the kitchen
