Review: Wall-E (5/5)

A dumb robot has outclassed every Hollywood blockbuster this summer

Wall-E
(Andrew Stanton):
Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard.
Running time: 97 minutes.


Wheeling myself out of the new robot cartoon Wall-E, my rusted eyelids
re-oiled with glee and my enthusiasm for Hollywood recharged to optimum power, I was struck by a thought: Harrison Ford, Will Smith, Edward Norton, Robert Downey Jr and James McAvoy have been out-classed this summer by a robot that can’t even talk, let alone preen, pout or pull a face.
Wall-E is the new animation from those clever clogs at Pixar and it is a film for the ages – a masterwork of visual, almost silent, poetry and a gentle love story between two robots set on earth and in space. It sets out to restore faith in reckless humans from the clutches of eco-disaster and technology but it had the unlikely effect of restoring my faith in machines. For Wall-E does something not one of Hollywood’s live-action blockbusters has done this summer: it moves us. Not that low rumble you feel in your backside from the sonic assault of the cinema, but that rare thing nowadays: a tug of the emotions. Those A-listers look like unfeeling androids beside Wall-E, whose eyes are shaped like metal teardrops and who has but a few metal prongs for hands.
None of this would come as a surprise to Wall-E. In his world, humans have long lost the ability to look after their own planet, let alone manufacture heart-rending entertainment.
Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) is the last robot on earth. He was built 700 years ago as a trash compactor when the planet was being consumed by rubbish and the last humans jetted into space. He has a boxy torso, but is resiliently quick on his tracks, and his wide-spaced eyes are not unlike that other great flat-head of the cinema, ET. He is just as wholesome: this character is so unfettered by anything other than a desire to do good, it is impossible not to take him into your heart. Here is a robot whose curiosity unknowingly keeps alive the last vestiges of humanity. Yet if he could talk, instead of beep, he would tell you all he wants is a heap of junk to squash in his chest cavity and for someone to squeeze his little robot heart.
This comes in due time, with a white droid called Eve, sent to earth by space-shipped humans to rummage for plant life. And Wall-E, in the kind of reckless but gallant bravery beknown to love-lorn men throughout the ages, follows her into space. Their love affair develops in a flurry of electronic beeps and a magical pas de deux in space involving the use of a fire extinguisher that would make Nijinsky look like he had flat feet. And amid the techno hair-chase that ensues, one can detect a gentle homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the real nod here is to Charlie Chaplin: were it not for snippets of human talk, Wall-E could be a great silent film. This is not something you see at the movies very much (though recently Paul Thomas Anderson had a long silent opening sequence in There Will Be Blood). There are few films where you could turn the sound down and understand what is going on: telling a story visually without the crutch of dialogue is the calling card of cinematic greatness. But to do it with robots? Wow.
Director Andrew Stanton, who made Finding Nemo, achieves in Wall-E something of the pathos of Chaplin’s tramp, a hapless yet poetic physicality and that low-slung dignity. How poignant is the sight of this lone robot caterpillaring through the rust and dust of toppled cities, collecting rubbish which he compacts into giant trash skyscrapers, like monuments to mankind’s once towering status? Or the sight of him rocking himself to sleep?
During the day, he collects human trash, searching them for signs of what made us human: an old bra, an engagement ring, a Rubik’s cube. He watches a clip from an aged VCR recording of the 1969 musical Hello, Dolly! and Wall-E learns something he can’t get from human objects – to touch and to feel. He sees how humans used to love and Stanton later uses this to stunning effect.
The director insists he had nothing in mind other than a love story. I wonder who he’s trying to kid? His space-trapped humans are fat and indolent: space has crippled them with bone-loss, and they travel strapped into hovering armchairs, with mini TVs wired inches from their face. Their lives are controlled by a dystopian corporation. And underneath all the whizz and bop is the tone of an elegy: that we are destroying our planet and destroying ourselves. (The irony, of course, is Stanton’s film is more likely to be watched on micro-screen iPods, with the complete loss of awe and scale you can only find in the cinema).
With Ratatouille, Pixar set the bar very high. Here, they take the limitations of the family animation and kick them into space. In 700 years’ time, when the remnants of our culture are being excavated, I hope a little piece of it survives.

Review: City of Men (2/5)

City of Men
(Paulo Morelli):
Douglas Silva, Darlan Cunha, Jonathan Haagensen, Rodrigo Dos Santos.
Running time: 111 minutes.

This companion piece to 2002’s Brazilian firecracker City of God is a slum gangster movie cooked up in similar fashion. Fernando Meirilles’ film was about boys forced to be men; here it is about men who only know how to be boys. It’s set in another favela controlled by gun-toting youngsters, with a couple of innocents, turning 18, caught in the melee. The heroes are lifelong friends, Wallace (Darlan Cunha) and Ace (Douglas Silva) both of whom are fatherless; indeed, the film is keen to illustrate the problems caused by so many absent dads. Director Paulo Morelli shows how easy it is for Ace to slip into neglect, forgetting his infant on the beach as he heads off on a distraction. Everyone needs a father, which is fair enough, but it is only one piece of Brazil’s complex problems. Director Morelli guides us through the story with fluid steadycam, though he can’t make up his mind whether to damn the affair or make it look sexy. Neither can he muster the kinetic spark of Meirilles’ classic: he sets the pace at langourous, like the heat. But it soon sags. And the drama limps: the pulse of City of God was how those youngsters navigated from childhood to crime or escape. By the time we meet the heroes here, they’ve made their moral choices. The film tries to draw them in, but I wasn’t convinced.

Summer Hours (3/5)

Summer Hours
(Olivier Assayas):
Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jérémie Renier, Edith Scob, Dominique Reymond.
Running time: 102 minutes.

You’d want a safe pair of eyes watching this graceful family drama from director Olivier Assayas, a film so delicate it could crack under your gaze. Here is a thoughtful film, ruminating gently on the nature of memory and how it ties to art. It was produced in part to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Musee d’Orsay and benefits from very swish art nouveau props that would look great in your livingroom. Edith Scob, looking like the kind of cool granny you only find in France, plays a 75-year-old fighting the shadows of late life. She has spent her time guarding the heritage of her uncle, a great artist. The scenic estate she lives on is a treasure trove of early 20th century gems. When she dies, her two sons tangle over what to do with the house. Juliette Binoche as the daughter gives a very subtle, naturalistic performance as the sister who herself designs objets d’art but is emotionally detached from their sentiment. When the collection is donated to a museum, you do sense how something intangible has been lost. One of Summer Hours’ joys is its manner of gentle revelation though its delicate over-refinement comes at a price — I began to wish for something to coarsen the finesse. Assayas leaves us with the uncomfortable yet hopeful image of a hoard of student partygoers entering the old house. The real sentimental value of objects, it seems, lasts only as long as there is somebody to remember it.

Review: The Aerial (3/5)

The Aerial (La Antena)
(Esteban Sapir):
Valeria Bertuccelli, Alejandro Urdapilleta, Julieta Cardinali, Rafael Ferro, Florencia Raggi.
Running time: 90 minutes.

In 1927, when Fritz Lang’s Metropolis hit the screen, the world was shaping into totalitarian nightmare. His dystopian futurism looks eerie today knowing the trauma that followed. Argentine director Esteban Sapir’s The Aerial is a post-modern silent movie in thrall to Lang’s great film, the mood of film noir Lang helped to inspire and later shape, and the fantasy of George Méliès’ 1902 short A Trip To The Moon. The story is about a city without a voice, under the thumb of a TV corporation. People eat TV food and the only person who doesn’t talk with intertitles is the mysterious Voice (Florencia Raggi) who is kidnapped. It’s a world full of classic cars, fantastic machines and melodramatic violins. Esteban is in thrall to his visual delights. And so he should, but the story is not as rich as the sumptuous set designs. His is a cautionary fable about the amnesia of television, but it is strangely toothless: unlike Guy Maddin’s recent cinepoetry which finds something new out of something old, The Aerial is beautiful but pretentious retro-ism. More of a curiosity.

Review: My Winnipeg (4./5)

Guy Maddin, an elusive poet of dreams, is frustratingly brilliant with ‘My Winnipeg’ – probably the most unique cinematic experience this year

My Winnipeg
(Guy Maddin):
Darcy Fehr, Ann Savage, Amy Stewart, Louis Negin.
Running time: 80 minutes.

There comes a point in My Winnipeg, the new film from Guy Maddin, when your brain taps your arm in the dark and whispers politely into your ear: what is this you’re making me watch? This takes some explaining. Is My Winnipeg a documentary? I think so. But it seems made up? Indeed. Is it a dream? Probably. Is it autobiography? I’ll come back to you on that. If there’s one certainty, it’s that it is the work of Maddin, Canada’s ambassador of the eccentric and kindred spirit of David Lynch. If Maddin turned his weird alchemy to food, he would, perhaps, be a Heston Blumenthal: his films are an optical à la carte of snail porridge or bacon and egg ice cream.
They are yucky-delicious. They dangle you upside down and work parts of the brain you never knew you had.
My Winnipeg is what Maddin calls a ‘docu-fantasia’, and it revels in quirk and whim. Ostensibly, it is an homage to the city where he grew up. But it doesn’t unspool like conventional drama, teased out of a great city, like Woody Allen’s panegyric Manhattan. This is the Winnipeg that exists in the memory of its narrator, a kind of psycho-geography where a city and its ancient ghosts mingle with Maddin’s past and whatever else he throws into the pot – frozen horses’ heads atop a frosted lake anyone?
The tone of the film is established like a somnambulist’s dream. A man (played by Darcy Fehr) sleeps fitfully on a train and the film floats out of his agitation, a jittery fantasy set in black and white. This Winnipeg, he tells us, is so sleepy, and the soundtrack, rattling with train clackety-clack, lulls you into hypnosis. The screen washes with snow, like ectoplasm conjuring ghosts from the narrator’s past: family incidents, old news reels, and events (recreated or imagined?) by Maddin which look like moments from an old Buñuel surrealist film, or a Louis Feuillade segment. (He shoots on digital yet captures the feel of 1920s avant-garde cinema; his faux-documentary style comes in the tradition too of Buñuel’s Land Without Bread.)
Sitting on top of the noirish images is the voice of Maddin himself, a hardboiled unreliable narrator, a pulp poet of the night. We are at the whim of this strange personality. “I’ve often wondered what effect growing up in a hair salon had on me,” he says, in a mock revisit of his mother’s hair salon. The camera captures hairspray like sensual mist and it made me think: perhaps all film students should spend at least a term in hairdressing school.
Winnipeg must be the coldest city in the world. It is easily the strangest. His spectral tour includes a graveyard of signs – a municipal order forbids the scrapping of city signage; he tells us of two taxi companies, one for the main streets, the other for Winnipeg’s ‘black arteries’, roads not on maps and only known by word of mouth. And then there’s those horses’ heads, like “eleven knights on a great white chessboard.” Race-track tragedy or surrealist prank?
Everything here is frosted with death: Winnipeg’s famed ice hockey stadium is being demolished. Maddin’s father worked there and our narrator tells us he was born in the locker-room. You can sense genuine anger from Maddin at the tearing down of history to be met by bland corporatism. But moments that are more personal feel less heartfelt: he rents his childhood house and re-stages family scenes with a mound under a rug representing “his exhumed father.”
The nightly ritual of straightening the hall mat, with his mother issuing instructions from the side, has a wacky comic surreality. But these family scenes are never poignant, perhaps because something seems amiss: the woman he tells us is his mother is really Ann Savage, a film noir actress from the 1940s. She stalks proceedings with a hawk-eyed matriarchal glare. Savage has a moment where she lies talking to Cameron (Brendan Cade), Maddin’s long-dead 16-year-old brother. But the moment doesn’t reach you, and the film, despite its verve, tickles rather than floors.
There is a coldness here that has nothing to do with Winnipeg’s northern chill. It comes from Maddin’s arch playfulness. He plays cheeky mythmaker with both Winnipeg and his own biography. Is any of it real? The question jumbles the mind. Does it matter? Probably not. Maddin is frustratingly brilliant, an elusive poet of dreams, and My Winnipeg is probably the most unique cinematic experience this year.

Review: Mamma Mia! The Movie (2/5)

Mamma Mia! The Movie
(Phyllida Lloyd):
Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgård, Julie Walters, Dominic Cooper, Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski.
Running time: 108 minutes

Curmudgeon-baiting films don’t come any shinier than Mamma Mia! The Movie, an all-star Abba musical so bright, I found my eyeballs reaching for factor 60 sun cream. This musical approaches you with the plastered-on smile of a demented party organiser: Everything is going to be fun, OK? No long faces up there in the back! Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had something similar: I think you call it totalitarian happiness.
Meryl Streep stars as Donna, a dungareed hotel owner and single mum marooned in middle-age on a Greek island. The sea sparkles with gold and the sky is honeymoon azure. The place looks like it has been rented from Greek deities, speed-boated off the island for the duration of filming.
Donna enjoys a man-free life and now worries about her daughter Sophie’s wedding. But Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) needs a man to give her away, and she needs to know who her father is. Mammy’s diary reveals she used to be a bit of a slapper, sleeping with three different men on three consecutive nights in the early 1980s. Super trouper! (Oh weren’t we naughty liberals back then.)
So who could her father be? Is it Pierce Brosnan, a man who sings like he gargles daily with sulphuric acid? Is it Colin Firth, wheeling out that upper-class bumbling routine again, or Stellan Skarsgård, who plays a rugged, intrepid explorer?
After a while, you realise nobody really cares. They just want to sing Abba songs.
Streep, out to prove that great actresses don’t always take themselves seriously, leads a congo of dancing queens through village streets, ignoring the peasants and the linen washing, while Julie Walters and Christine Baranski sing into hairdryers.
Mamma Mia is directed by Phyllida Lloyd, who masterminded the stage musical in both the West End and on Broadway. But it’s her first film, and she shows she doesn’t have the Busby Berkeley touch: she does little with the camera to choreograph the anarchy. In one sequence, she applies slow motion, to keep that stiff middle-aged cast hanging balletically in the air.
It made me think of the late Cyd Charisse, who in her heyday, could stay in the air without slow motion, smoke a cigarette, have lunch, ring her agent and touch base again ready for the next take. That was back when musicals had singers and dancers as opposed to A-list actors handpicked for box office draw.
The Abba songs are sung with varying degrees of competence – with the squealy exuberance of a karaoke hen party. And the lyrics lend a whiff of nostalgia and regret. But only a whiff. Phyllida Lloyd has no intention of letting any genuine feeling cast a cloud over her island idyll. The name of the game is happiness! Smile, goddammit!
Thank you for the music, Abba, but I prefer films that earn their feel-good factor, as opposed to having it shoved down my throat.