The Kids Are All Right

"Shut the front door"

The Kids Are All Right is the story of Jules and Nic, a lesbian couple with two kids from the same sperm donor, the affable Paul (the truly wonderful Mark Ruffalo).  On turning 18 their oldest child, Joni, is encouraged by her younger brother to look Paul up and so starts a strange new chapter in their family life.

In her post-screening Q&A Lisa Cholodenko recounted a conversation with friend Stuart Blumberg on how to make his films more personal and her own more commercial.  This lead to them sharing the writing credit on this film and I think they've hit the spot; The Kids Are All Right is a bright, witty tale infused with subtle performances and great situation comedy.

Mark Ruffalo pushes his natural ability to play ruffled, amiable and layed back to a new level and makes Paul on the one hand completely loveable and on the other frustratingly unfathomable.  As the film progresses it becomes more and more clear just how intrusive his presence has become simply because he doesn't understand that it is or why it would be.  Julianne Moore is impressive as the wayward Jules.  One of life's 'tryers', Jules has had a go at many things and not stuck at any of them and Moore plays her with a relaxed spirit that cuts beautifully against Annette Bening's more uptight Nic.  Nic is the breadwinner of the family, the committed doctor with a strong idea of where her family life should be headed, but this strength does not lend itself to much genuine empathy.  She tries her best to be a strong and understanding mother but it almost works against her.  The kids are in fact, more that all right - Mia Wasikowska is one of those actresses who, filmed from any angle, throws up a striking image on screen.  Her face is wonderfully expressive and I thought she was absolutely terrific.  Josh Hutcherson also makes the most of his part, fully exploring Laser's bemusement at his reaction to Paul and the impact that it has on his life.

Cholodenko has put together a well-polished film but I would have preferred it to be a little rougher around the edges.  It is all terribly clean but I think that comes from the aim to be slightly more commercial.  That being said, I loved the fact that there was no neat tying up at the end.  Each character continues to do their own thing and go their own way.  The script has enough confidence to let the characters stay themselves, to maintain their flaws, and this is the real strength of the picture.

Not quite as smart as it thinks it is but damn funny - 8/10

Brighton Rock

"I know what you want me to say.”

I start with a warning:

You may very well hate this film. This film may leave you feeling nonplussed, bored, frustrated. This film may disappoint you as a remake; you may consider it over-the-top and some of the acting hammy.

However, you may, like me, think that this is a very well put together thriller with a real star-making performance and all the unflinching tension one could wish for without leaving the cinema a complete wreck.

Reading the response to Brighton Rock when it debuted as the Surprise Film at the London Film Festival it was immediately clear that I was almost on my own when it came to a positive reaction. Most people seemed to have been fairly bored by it and considered it to be ‘very BBC’. I would assume that many of these people have seen the original film or read the book, neither of which I have done, and it would only seem right that they found the film less surprising and indeed shocking than I did. It has since struck me that some people may have watched Rowan Joffe’s adaptation in much the same way I endured There Will Be Blood.

Now there was a marmite film.  I know a great many people who thought it was a masterpiece but, while I could see that the technical aspects of the film were excellent, it just didn’t work as a whole for me. Spending nigh on 3 hours in the company of Daniel Plainview was not something I ever want to repeat and the film bored me to distraction. The soundtrack was intrusive and droning, the screenplay stark and stilted and I never felt truly involved. But some people were gripped. Some people applauded at the end while I wanted to get out as soon as possible. I think Brighton Rock may have the same effect on people and I am very interested to see how it is received by the critics.

To me, Joffe’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel (and he is very clear that it is an adaptation and not a remake of the 1947 film) is an intense, frightening look at internal mob rule. Transplanting the action to the youth riots of the 60s, Joffe presents a bleak look at the lives of Pinkie Brown, Rose Wilson, Ida and the rival gang members of Brighton. Sam Riley plays Pinkie, youngster of one of these gangs who decides to claim leadership when his previous chief is murdered. He is pretty much an unblinking psychopath and Riley imbues him with a tension that is hard to bear. It’s an open wound of a performance. You don’t really want to look but for reasons best explained by psychologists, your eyes keep getting dragged back.

Andrea Riseborough as Rose Wilson, Pinkie’s girlfriend, plays the part beautifully. Rose is an innocent; a very young girl absolutely taken with her first encounter with anything resembling love, and Riseborough is heartbreakingly good. Award-worthy, even. Helen Mirren is also outstanding as Ida, Rose’s employer, trying to save the girl from herself, and the supporting cast is strong. 

The film is very stark, with a violent orchestral score only emphasising the constant threat within the piece, and there is virtually no attempt to lighten the tone.  There are very few humorous moments and any that do crop up are usually immediately undercut with another rise in tension. The cinematography is clean and dark and the 60s seaside town is well realised with excellent detail. 

A film that will split opinion but that will stay with me for a long time - 9/10 

Submarine

"Do you often feel like this?"

Richard Ayoade's perhaps not quite coming of age directorial debut is rich with schoolday humour, teenage awkwardness and familial drama.  Oliver Tate (a tremendous Craig Roberts) is a self-important, daydreaming 15 year old with concerns about the state of his parent's marriage and the potential for romance with wild-card Jordana (Yasmin Paige).  His school environment is depressingly familiar and his days are filled with paranoia, self-delusion, home-cinema daydreams and mild arson.

Ayoade has crafted a beautiful, witty and moving film littered with excellent technical touches (the use of super 8 footage, cinematography, lighting and editing are all outstanding) which make the film as much a visual treat as it is a comic one.  His script is laugh-out-loud funny and touching in equal measures, taking the perspective of the fascinating teenage protagonist and painting a picture of each of his relationships – with his father, his mother, Jordana, and his image of himself.  The relationship with his father is particularly moving – the apple clearly hasn’t fallen too far from the tree in some aspects of Oliver’s character and Noah Taylor gives a very sympathetic performance as a man judged harshly by his wife simply for being who he has always been.

Yasmin Paige is a beautiful actress with an ability to say so much with a sideways glance that it negates the need for language.  Her Jordana is intense and a little bit frightening but with enough depth to make her vulnerable moments genuinely moving.  Paddy Considine is clearly having a whale of a time as Graham, the mystic ex-boyfriend of Oliver’s mother, played by a rather too fresh faced Sally Hawkins.  Sally is a little too young for the role of the disillusioned mother and this combined with the costuming and hair makes her look a little like a young woman playing dress-up.

Craig Roberts puts in a remarkable turn as the self-important Oliver.  His dead-pan voice-over is hilarious and, like his young co-star, Yasmin, he can say so much with simply a look.  He fills the screen with a lonely, melancholic air, while his character battles against himself to be the person he wants to be.  It is a truly wonderful performance full of contradictions, sympathy and pathos.

Where Submarine really succeeds is in how well the picture presents its story through Oliver’s eyes.  Jordana is fascinating and beautiful because that is how he sees her, his father is noble but weak, his mother a harsh critic trying too hard to seem fair and kind and Graham an absolute tosser because that is how Oliver has cast them.  At many points he returns to the idea of his life being a film – super 8 home-movie memories, epic crane shots and cinematic endings – and these people around him are his own supporting cast.  It is wonderful to watch him floundering as reality comes crashing into his world in such a way that even he can’t cast himself as the hero.

A wonderful journey into the sometimes scary mind of an awkward teenager – 8/10

Super Brother

"I don't know inside my head"

Anton has an older brother he wishes were different in this charming tale of wish fulfilment and sibling relationships.  Anton's older brother, Buller, has autism and cannot fulfil the requirements of a 'normal' older brother for Anton; someone to protect him from bullies and show him the way when it comes to girls.  Instead, Buller worries about ways to make Anton happy and draws him picture after picture of outer space.  And it's outer space which provides a potential answer to the brothers' dilemmas, with Anton discovering an extra-terrestrial toy that can turn his brother into a super hero.
Birger Larsen's coming-of-age comedy is a lovely look at a difficult relationship and he draws very good performances from all of the young cast (Andrea Reimer is particularly memorable as the young girl after Anton's hear).  Ake Sandgren's screenplay is true to the youth on screen and adds real feeling to a fairly fantastic plot.
The special effects are not the best you will see but the film has real heart and it is almost impossible to stop smiling at Anton and Buller's antics.  These scenes are truly fun and really bring home the point when dealing with the frustration and disappointment that Buller feels at his 'normal' life.

A charming coming-of-age story with a wonderful fantasy twist - 7/10

Surprise Film

The Surprise Film ended about 45 minutes ago and my heart is still in my throat and my insides have yet to untangle themselves.
The Surprise Film was tense and unflinching.  From the opening booming sounds over the brief credits to the final moments before the screen faded to black it never let up.
The Surprise Film was about people: innocent people, caring people, uncompromising people, soulless people and bloody scary people.
The Surprise Film had a violent, string-laden score with period touches that were perfect.
The Surprise Film did not let me recover; any moments of humour (and there weren't many) were immediately followed by a shocking orchestral chord or act of violence.
The Surprise Film left me shaken.
The Surprise Film was Brighton Rock.

Oki's Movie

"Keep making films."

Oki's Movie is only 20 minutes long.  This is because Oki's Movie is actually the last of four short films revolving around her affairs with two very different men during her time at university.  A Day for Incantation, King of Kissing and After the Snowstorm complete the brief snapshots of the lives of Oki and her lovers, Song and Jingu.
Not a great deal happens in any of these shorts and it is easy to lose touch with the timeline.  It doesn't help that at times (including one entire scene very early on in the film) the subtitles are completely obscured; white against white.
The performances are enjoyable - Lee Sunkyun is particularly strong as the pompous, bragging fool of a man developing from a needy, clingy boy - but the brief glimpses into the lives and thoughts of the protagonists do not allow you to become attached enough to care for them and the film felt largely forgettable.

A film where nothing happens, four times - 5/10

Everything Must Go

“You should get some curtains”

 

Dan Rush's film based on the very-short short story 'Why Don't You Dance?' by Raymond Carver is a languid, minimalist piece of work.  Will Ferrell plays Nick Halsey, a sales executive who, after falling off the wagon, loses his job and returns home to find all of his possessions on his front lawn, his wife gone and the locks changed.

 

Reading the LFF programme notes and seeing the accompanying picture I had expected a rather different film.  Sharper, less melancholy perhaps.  But the depiction of Nick's rejection and attempted recovery is very like the character himself.  Nick is no belligerent drunk; he is peaceful and patient with an internal sadness that says more than his words ever could.  His burgeoning friendships with a new neighbour and a lonely kid are beautifully realized; awkward and tender in equal measures.

Rebecca Hall is radiant as the sympathetic (to a point) neighbour.  Rush claims that she was the cast member they chased the hardest and you can see why.  She is the character with the most in common with Nick; both of them leading lives they didn’t exactly expect, and I was impressed with the dignity of her portrayal.  Laura Dern is also excellent in her brief appearance.  The only real weak spot for me was the performance of Michael Pena.  He seems entirely miscast as Nick’s AA sponsor and I found his storyline to be intrusive to the feeling of the piece as a whole.

The script is sparse, Rush preferring to engage the audience with silent reactions and long moments of quiet reflection.  He explained in the Q&A that he is not keen to give his audience much in the way of spoken explanation so that they can interpret the picture through their own experiences and I think it works in the film’s favour.  It draws you into Nick’s world and makes it strangely familiar, maybe even comfortable.  David Torn’s beautiful (I’ll admit it – I’m a huge fan) but not over-used score and Michael Barrett’s intimate and warm cinematography adds to this.

 

Essentially Rush has made my kind of film.  As with the likes of Lars and the Real Girl, Everything Must Go moves at a pace which allows the audience time to empathise with its characters and therefore get more of an emotional connection with the events on screen.  It is intimate, warm and minimal and I hope it gets a good audience – it deserves one.

 

8/10

The Social Network

"Did I adequately answer your condescending question?"

The Social Network is David Fincher's look at the events that unfolded around the creation of Facebook and the subsequent fallout.  It is a film about the  Social Media generation - that schizophrenic demographic that TV schedulers constantly fear will change the channel if they don't fully engage their imagination every nanosecond - and it is the perfect picture for this collective.  Gripping, entertaining and mildly schizophrenic itself, The Social Network is exactly what you'll have already seen it called by a number of more eloquent speakers for our time than I - zeitgeisty!
Flicking through its own timeline like a TV scheduler's nightmare, Fincher's latest classic hits its stride early on.  Its opening scene presents Mark Zuckerberg (a perfectly cast Jesse Eisenberg) as a socially inept genius, failing to get to grips with a real conversation with his girlfriend, firing off unknowing insults left, right and centre, and clearly with a way of reading the world on a completely different level to anyone else he knows.  Zuckerberg isn't intentionally cruel or evil, his brain is just working faster than yours and it isn't his fault if you can't keep up. 
This is a film that doesn't stop.  Three different periods of Facebook's creation and development keep interrupting, arguing with and illuminating one another.  It is brilliantly handled with dexterity and energy.  Aaron Sorkin's script lands hit after hit after speedy, quotable hit ("I'm 6'5", 220 pounds, and there are two of me.").  If someone were to write a film based on a not-necessarily-entirely-true account of my life I'd like to nominate this guy.  He keeps the protagonists snarky and cool but sympathetic enough to save a character like Zuckerberg from entirely alienating the audience.
Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake are all excellent.  Garfield is the perfect fit for a character who has to show strength even while getting left further and further behind by something that he helped to get started.  He does a very good line in vulnerable and his performance is heartbreaking to watch at times.  Timberlake's Sean Parker is charismatic and energetic.  You can see why Zuckerberg would be taken with him.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I preferred his performance in Alpha Dog (maybe because it was a revelation to see just how good he was or perhaps because he was playing slightly more against type) but his performance in this film underlines the fact that he could happily consider giving up the day job.  Eisenberg is absolutely wonderful as the 'low-functioning' geek with the need to succeed.  There are shades of The Big Bang's Sheldon towards the start of the film but as the script takes Mark to darker places, Eisenberg's performance just gets stronger.  His pattern of speech, social awkwardness and internal focus and drive are absolutely consistent and flawless.
A final mention must be made of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' driving score.  Underlining the action without drawing attention to itself - I just loved it.

Fincher has delivered a fast-paced, entertaining and gripping film with strong performances across the board - 9/10

Circo

"I'm telling you..."

In his introduction prior to the screening of his engaging documentary 'Circo', director Aaron Schock hoped that, on this rainy grey London day, his Mexican examination of familial relationships in an extraordinary environment would help to warm us up.
It is more than just a warming view of beautiful Mexican scenery and a fascinating cultural institution, delving into the life of a struggling rural circus and coming across a family straining at the seams.  Schock explained in his Q&A that his reason for travelling to rural Mexico to, originally, make a documentary about corn farmers was that he felt that American documentaries about Mexicans "always start at the border and work up".  On his journey he came across the Ponce family and their Circo Mexico and decided that these were the people to film: "A family trying to make a go of it in Mexico".

Filmed over a period of 21 months involving eight visits to the family Schock was granted real Access All Areas taking in, not only the main protagonists - ringmaster Tino, his wife Ivonne and their four children - but in all 13 "named characters", mainly from the Ponce clan.  Ivonne, not from a circus background, worries about the life that her children are leading and we are witness to a number of husband-wife discussions about this subject as well as Ivonne's financial concerns.  In an early tense exchange she brings up how much money her father-in-law makes from her husband and children - and on a number of following occasions we are treated to footage of Don Gilberto counting the day's takings.
Schock discussed his editorial choices in his Q&A and his realisation during filming that he "couldn't see this as just a child labour thing" which he'd clearly considered would most likely be one of the major themes of the documentary.  Instead he utilises sub-plots from the lives of Tino's niece and brother - Naydelin heading off to kindergarten illuminating the lack of traditional education for Tino's own children and Tacho's attempted relationship with a 'settled' woman which ends in the pair of them returning to the circus - to reflect on Tino's immediate family.
The film is rife with tenderness which Schock captures with a beautiful intimacy.  The participants are open and honest and the children provide many moments of wonderful humour (Cascaras' many girlfriends and a shot of all the young girls of the extended family practising contortions in the yard at their great grandmother's house raised more than a few titters).  The circus itself, although more than a little worn around the edges, is a bleakly beautiful setting and Schock's camera work does justice to both the big top and the rolling Mexican scenery.

An engaging, intimate and scenic examination of familial relationships in an extraordinary environment - 8/10

Chongqing Blues

"Don't get me wrong...."

The London Film Festival had a fairly downbeat start for me.  Following the 'Let Me In' cast and director into the Vue West End any celebrity pretensions I may have had were quickly lost with security telling us 'Chongqing Blues' folks not to stand on the red carpet.  I clearly couldn't be less famous if I tried.
 

This sense of the outsider was reflected back to me in Wang Xiaoshuai's sparsely scored film in which an estranged father returns to his past haunts in order to understand the events that lead to his son's death.  Lin Quanhai (Wang Xueqi) wanders the streets, blocked by almost everyone he encounters in his quest to answer questions and find some peace with the loss of his son.  But the fact is he lost his son long before his death and Lin knows this only too well.

 

Chongqing Blues is slow; at times painfully so, and I wasn't entirely convinced that this needed to be the case.  Even at just shy of 2 hours it feels like it could lose a good 10-15 minutes.  It moved from contemplative to ponderous to dragging in the 110 minutes and although the acting deserved the time and attention that it got some parts could have done with moving up a gear - a sequence where Lin follows his son's friend on a night out, for instance, could do with some tightening up.

For a film named after a city it is surprising and intriguing just how little of it we actually see.  We certainly cover a lot of ground; Lin trawling the city of his past as the camera stalks behind him but it is not a film to romanticise the area.  The camera's focus is almost solely Xueqi - his face, hands, and even his back for large periods.  It is a truly claustrophobic film with extended close-ups and shots that present a very limited field of vision around the protagonist.

Wang Xueqi's melancholic almost one-note performance is haunting to watch and he is backed up by some excellent work by Fan Bingbing as the off duty doctor caught up in events and Li Feier as his son's girlfriend.  I particularly appreciated the bravery of scenes in which Lin finally receives some of the answers he desperately wants and the camera is kept away from his face, focusing on the other character or Lin’s back.  Having spent so much of the film studying Xueqi's face Xiaoshuai finally makes us outsiders when it comes to Lin’s breakthroughs.

 

So, all in all, an interesting if downbeat opener for my London Film Festival 2010 experience.  I feel that it was aiming for haunting but dragged a little too much to get there.

6/10

Too long for Twitter

StrangerThanFlicktion is too long a name for Twitter so instead I have simply signed myself up as @Flicktion
http://twitter.com/flicktion
There will be the usual 140 character reviews up there.

How often is too often?

I went to the cinema three times this weekend.  Three different cinemas on three different days.  It has never really occurred to me that this is out of the ordinary but at work on Monday I was asked by someone why I had been to the cinema so often and came to the conclusion that any genuine answer I might be able to give would be deemed insufficient.

The simple fact is this:
I love films.

And even more I love the cinematic viewing experience.

I've always enjoyed watching films and loved going to the cinema with friends and family but since Uni and moving to London it has become a real passion of mine.  The London Film Festival is my most anticipated event of the year (followed closely by Oscar nominations) and I scour the programme and create ridiculously complicated spreadsheets based upon favourite choices, likelihood of getting tickets, friend availability and too many other things to list....

So yes, I'm a keen cinema goer.  An enthusiast even.  And it has suddenly occurred to me that for many, going to the cinema is something to do on the occasion that there's something on that you heard is good or to while away the time in the summer when the weather is bad.

So I have decided to record (for posterity I'm sure, rather than anything else) my cinematic experiences and my general love of all aspects of film.  I'll be heading to the LFF for the first of 9 films tomorrow and will be trying to put my thoughts into reviews longer than 140 characters for the first time.

Wish me luck!