Review: Il Divo (5/5)

Il Divo
(Paolo Sorrentino):
Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto, Piera Degli Esposti, Paolo Graziosi, Giulio Bosetti
Running time: 110 minutes (15A)

The Italian director Paolo Sorrentino has arrived. His new film Il Divo is a pyroclastic surge of brilliance: a political biopic that spills hot all over the screen with a flaming, bravura audacity. It’s a film imbued with such mystery and wonder, you would think Pasolini had returned for a study, perhaps, of the Holy Ghost. Instead, Il Divo’s subject is about something even more mysterious and less tangible – the controversial seven-time Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti. Here’s a politician who would not just slip one over the Holy Spirit, but send Machiavelli sobbing into his goblet.
Andreotti, played here by Toni Servillo, is part Montgomery Burns, part Nosferatu: a hobbled, small man with heavy-lidded eyes and the deceptive hands-clasped demeanour of a saint. The film covers the period from his seventh election as prime minister in 1992 and takes us up to the trial where he fought allegations of Mafia connections. In between, it’s a stew of intrigue, suicides, murders and all manner of political dark arts. Andreotti has his hand in all of it and none of it. In one of the film’s many unexplained, tantalising sequences, the politician sits in a state car while the door handles won’t work. Torrential rain pours down. Police officers struggle to pry the door open, while the prime minister sits inside oblivious. In Il Divo, as in real life, Andreotti is a figure nobody can get at. Unlike the Hollywood biopic, Paolo Sorrentino has made a film about Andreotti’s very unknowableness.
The film’s title comes from an expression used to describe Julius Caesar – Divo Giulio, or divine Julius. And Sorrentino conjures something of the dissolute Roman empire among his modern-day Italian senators. It’s a gilded world of stately buildings and corrupt, balding, grey men. This is the kind of environment that would sink a lesser filmmaker with dead weight. But Sorrentino, who also wrote the screenplay, invests everything with such arresting vitality, playfulness and wit that the picture hums with life. He introduces Andreotti’s inner faction like they were Reservoir Dogs: the camera swoons over their slow-mo swagger while their nicknames such as The Lemon or The Shark slink onto the screen.
Sometimes you wonder if Sorrentino is the bastard child of Martin Scorsese and Federico Fellino. He marries Fellini’s unrestrained exuberance with Scorsese’s flair for gangster poetry and inspirational soundtrack. Certainly, this is the most exciting use of music since last year’s There Will Be Blood. Even the story’s inter-titles cannot sit still – they come at you in blood red from upside down (to accompany a hanging man) or slip out from the backs of buildings. (Sorrentino, meanwhile, is happy to acknowledge his debt to Scorsese with a recurring motif of Andreotti’s fizzing glass of painkillers; it’s a shot borrowed from Taxi Driver.) And yet, Sorrentino’s dynamic restlessness is very much his own.
Before we meet Andreotti, the film fires your adrenalin with a cross-cutting series of assassinations sliced together with an angular guitar track. Men are gunned down and a car falls slowly from the sky with strange poetry. The sequence make you want to dance. Later, you watch a man fall from a tall building all the way down onto the camera. The sequence makes you want to dive for cover.
And then there is a moment that is divine: a long take with a roaming camera that worms its way through a private party at the finance minister’s house. It enters a room, glides past tribal drummers and dancing women, glides into another room, where Andreotti sits like an emperor with his wife, a line of men queuing up to meet him, and a gallery of people standing in a sort of awe. Andreotti leaves swarmed by security, and the camera, still travelling, circles back into the other room, following the back of the finance minister who enters with his hands in the air, dancing. Wow. Everything about this world is contained within this one shot: the power, the secrecy, the decadence, and Andreotti’s almost saintly aloofness. He’s there and yet he’s not there.
Il Divo makes Sorrentino’s previous films look like a dry run. Those movies showed a fascination for men entombed in silence within a world of Mafia vice. Yet both The Consequences of Love (which starred Servillo) and The Family Friend were almost needlessly baroque. Here, form and content lock together in perfect unison. The camera swoops, sweeps and swirls through this ornate universe, soaking up the corridors of power. It travels towards Andreotti restlessly from a hundred different angles. It examines the pores in his face. Yet we come away knowing nothing about him while suspecting everything. It’s a remarkable performance from Toni Servillo. His face is a granite slab; his ears like something that went wrong in pottery class. He builds into his character a limitless fascination, a man whose body language evokes a kind of virtue yet whose inscrutable mind is as cunning as The Prince.
Like its subject, Il Divo is an elusive animal. It creates its own storytelling rules, and is imbued with something most great films have – the quality of strangeness.
A masterpiece.

Review: Duplicity (3.5/5); Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2/5); Lesbain Vampire Killders (1/5)

Duplicity
(Tony Gilroy):
Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Giamatti
Running time: 125 minutes (12A)

Julia Roberts is effervescent, sultry and fabulous in Tony Gilroy’s follow-up to Michael Clayton. With her big wide lips, she looks like she is going to snack on Clive Owen’s grizzled head. Thankfully, his prickly smooth demeanour proves a capable defence. After the corporate-is-evil tone of Michael Clayton, Gilroy’s second film seems positively light-hearted. It filters screwball comedy into espionage thriller into a satire of corporate culture that borders on being glib. Owen and Roberts play former spies and lovers now working for a corporate boss (Paul Giamatti) who wants to bring down his alpha male opposition, a multinational run by Tom Wilkinson. The plot is multilayered to keep you guessing who is spying on who and Roberts and Owen work up genuine heat. Are they deceiving each other? Or is it all play? Indeed, are they being played? The ending, which includes a mind-numbing explanation, keeps spilling like it’s a mess nobody knows how to clean up. Entertaining, though.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop
(Steve Carr):
Kevin James, Jayma Mays, Keir O’Donnell, Peter Gerety, Bobby Cannavale
Running time: 87 minutes (PG)


Comedian Kevin James is shaped like a beach ball. His schtick in Mall Cop is to get laughs from the unexpected slapstick he throws on screen for a man of his weight. He plays Paul Blart, a hypoglycaemic mall cop who takes his job much too seriously. He’s a classic schlub: stuffs his face full of pie due to low self-esteem and has a habit of making a fool of himself. He patrols the mall on a Segway and falls for a pixie-faced girl (Jayma Mays) who runs a hair-extensions store. When the mall is taken hostage by a gang of criminals, he goes from zero to hero and earns a chance to win the girl. James, who starred in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, is a genial presence – an overweight everyman. He holds our attention for the full 87 minutes. But the script, co-written by James, is barren and barely funny, and the plotting is ramshackle. It follows the recent trend of dove-tailing comedy into ironic ’80s action movie territory with lazy results.

Lesbian Vampire Killers
(Phil Claydon):
James Corden, Mathew Horne,
Paul McGann, Emer Kenny, Lucy
Gaskell
Running time: 88 minutes (16)

If I had a stake, I’d hammer it into the empty heads of the makers of this dire, hammier-than-a-hogfarm C-movie. It’s a sexploitation flick travelling under the mantle of a spoof horror and stars James Corden and Mathew Horne from BBC’s Gavin and Stacey. This hapless duo play a hapless pair who find themselves in a country town overrun by lesbian vampires. They get stuck into killing them with the sort of gusto that wouldn’t take a film academic to work out the male-frustration subtext. It represents the worst of British trash culture: Nuts magazine on screen. I’m sure director Phil Claydon tried his best, but he can’t get beyond a Girls Aloud video: women with fanned hair in hot pants, high heels and fangs. One scene offers us an up-skirt shot before the camera rides up to a pouting mouth that begins to suck a lollipop. Claydon makes ’60s sexploitation mogul Russ Meyer look like an arthouse genius.
The script mangles Shaun of the Dead and Hammer Horror with TV’s The League of Gentlemen and Peep Show without one moment of bite. I can guarantee genuine horror, though – a moment of skin-crawling dread about five minutes into the movie when you’ll realise you should have paid attention to this review.

Marley & Me
(David Frankel):
Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston, Eric Dane,
Alan Arkin, Kathleen Turner.
Running time: 110 minutes (PG)

Settling for less is more. That’s the message of Marley & Me, the new comedy-of-sorts and part-time tearjerker starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. Early on, a conversation takes place between two old buddies. There’s Owen Wilson’s John Grogan, a retired stoner-turned-journalist who married Jennifer (Jennifer Aniston), moved to Miami and is taking his first baby steps, in his late 20s, into adulthood. And there’s Sebastian (Eric Dane), a ladykiller who remains resolutely single. John worries about his wife’s ticking biological clock and her plans for the spare bedroom. But Sebastian has the right kind of advice. “Get her a dog,” he says. “You’ve got a kid, you’re a dad – you’re not you anymore. You get a dog, you’re the master.”
Marley & Me spends the rest of the time, in an insipid, mildly comic fashion, turning this advice on its head. John becomes a dad and the film goes to Defcon Four life-lessons alert. Meanwhile, Marley, the neurotic puppy, grows into a 100lb psychotic nightmare. He really is an arsehole. He is the kind of dog ordinary folk would happily, and I say happily, have put down. But John abides.
The film is an adaptation from John Grogan’s bestselling book and is directed with the anodyne hand of David Frankel, the director of The Devil Wears Prada. He gives us a film of two halves. The first is comic caper, where Marley earns his bad credentials. The soundtrack blares Ben Folds’ ‘We’re Rocking the Suburbs’ and John settles into married life. Marley, meanwhile, is eating the suburbs. He seems to possess the ability to chew through steel and concrete. He doesn’t do sit or rollover. He just tears the house apart, rips arms out of sockets and blinds off windows, barks the infant awake and knocks over the toddler.
John takes Marley to Ms Kornblut, an unforgiving dog trainer played by Kathleen Turner. Turner, who spent the 1980s growling at Michael Douglas, has now been reduced to growling at dogs. She no longer looks the svelte siren and has even lost some of that bark. Marley hasn’t a clue who she is. Clearly he has not watched The War of the Roses. We know this by the way he hungrily mounts her leg.
Dog slapstick gets tiring, although sometimes it breaks a smile on your face. Frankel offers us the clichéd image of a dog with his tongue flapping out a car window. Only for Marley then to climb out the window while the car drives down the freeway.
Owen Wilson, who can’t be rushed into anything, spends the film as a perennially chasing blur. He sprinkles the movie with that magnetic laconic charm. His eyes twinkle like he’s in on a joke. His lazy Texan drawl suggests a stoner who has just awoken to find himself starring in a movie. Perhaps that explains why he always seems to be on the back foot. This plays nicely here into a character who is busy catching up with his wife’s expectations.
In many respects, he reminds you of Seth Rogen’s Ben from Knocked Up, although he’s not quite as hopeless or, for that matter, as dramatically interesting. Indeed, Marley & Me plays like the dull younger brother of Knocked Up, and follows Judd Apatow’s template: it charms us with comedy and then, when it knows it has us, steers us into raw, real life.
Even Aniston, who up to this point showed little sign of interior life, begins to stir. The film comes awake. The couple has trouble conceiving. They experience a miscarriage. After child number two, Jennifer gets post-natal depression. John sits in his car in the driveway after work and wonders where it all went wrong.
By the end of it, John, as predicted by Sebastian, is not himself any more. He’s a more spiritual man. This is painfully demonstrated in a scene years later, where John bumps into Sebastian and the best friends no longer have anything to say. John evidently has been brainwashed by his wife, dog and three kids, while big-shot New York Times journalist Sebastian is a walking vacuum. (This scene will have singles ripping out the seats in front of them and smug marrieds beaming I-told-you-so’s.)
Like Knocked Up, Marley & Me wants to take the life lived ordinary and eulogise it. But while Apatow’s film injected a savage humour into the piquancy of real life, David Frankel churns through this material like he was making vanilla ice cream. And it’s lazy – when Marley grows old (by now we’re supposed to love him), Frankel presses the big red button marked ‘tearjerker’. It’s all terribly nice, by which I mean terribly bland. Settling for less is still settling for less.

Review: Bronson (3/5)

Bronson
(Nicolas Winding Refn):
Tom Hardy, Hugh Ross, Juliet Oldfield.
Running time: 92 minutes (18)

This biopic from Pusher trilogy director Nicolas Winding Refn is a study of Charles Bronson – not the Hollywood star of Death Wish, but the tabloid star famous for being Britain’s ‘most violent prisoner’. Bronson was sent down in 1974 for armed robbery and has spent virtually every year since in solitary confinement. So in a sense, Refn is working within a vacuum. He makes good with what he’s got but it’s not enough. The film thrives off a primal madness. Tom Hardy’s Bronson is a beefcake brawler and snarling menace. He takes hostages in prison and makes rooftop protests. But most of the time, he just pummels prison guards. The film develops an amusing motif of Bronson stripping naked in readiness for violence, a suggestion his aggression is perverse, almost sexual. Hardy is terrific. He threatens us to engage with him, switching between mock theatrical soliloquy and all-out nutter. The cinematographer is Larry Smith, who shot Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and he brings a Kubrickian sense of space with languorous and immaculate tracking shots. There is one aplomb sequence within an asylum that highlights just how close to sanity Bronson really is. Refn takes his cues from Andrew Dominik’s Chopper and makes another case for a charming sociopath. It’s packed with stylistic violence, but is devoid of dramatic conflict. Bronson seems to drift through time, as unknowable as a cipher.

Review: Hush (2/5)

Hush
(Mark Tonderai):
William Ash, Christine Bottomley, Andreas Wisniewski.
Running time: 91 minutes (16)

This low-budget British chiller plays like cat and mouse but in reverse: the mouse here is reluctantly chasing the cat. It opens with a moment of abject horror: we’re stuck in a car in the rain at night with a pair of rowing Mancunians and you realise there is no escape. Up ahead, the back door of an articulated truck momentarily lifts open and Zakes (William Ash) thinks he sees a woman tied up. The couple go to a petrol station where the domestic row spills out. It’s almost a relief, then, when Beth (Christine Bottomley) goes missing and the truck pulls away.
First-time writer/director Mark Tonderai opts for shaky, hand-held, kitchen-sink horror. The actors aren’t up to much and the plot is full of contrivances. It works up an unseen terror and then blows it with some silly, grisly gross-out. But it just about wriggles free, because you keep wondering what Zakes is going to do next. He gives chase, steals a car, gets arrested for murder, escapes and still goes after the demon truck driver. Said demon truck driver wears his hoodie up all the time so he must be anti-social. When out of the truck cab, he walks very, very slowly, as if he were weighing up in his mind the problems of bank securitisation and credit pyramids. This gives our hero time to escape various hairy predicaments.
It’s a good location for horror: the concrete soulless hinterland of Britain’s motorways and rest areas. Meanwhile, Tonderai gives a twist to the old madonna/whore genre expectation: it turns out Beth is cheating on Zakes but he doesn’t find out till much later when he reads a lewd phone text. Will he still do the honourable thing?

Review: Watchmen (1/5)

Watchmen
(Zack Snyder):
Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson
Running time: 161 minutes

A couple of moments into Watchmen, the much-anticipated Zack Snyder adaptation of the revered graphic novel, a US army general turns the hand of a doomsday clock a minute closer to Armageddon. It takes a while to notice, but the clock is slow. Doomsday actually started just a few minutes before and it lasts for exactly 161 minutes – not quite as long as the Book of Revelation would suggest, but long enough.
Snyder, a second-rate director with a third-rate mind, has lovingly recreated Watchmen’s neo-noir surface with a rich, glossy polish. And he has honoured the comic’s complex structure at the complete cost of his film. The graphic novel – set in 1985 in a parallel universe where America has lost its soul – has become a film without soul, as vapid as the world its writer, Alan Moore, was annihilating. It’s as if Daniel Plainview’s straw reached across the room and sucked all Watchmen’s milkshake.
The opening credits are a breeze: a smooth montage through an alternative history of America. We see Andy Warhol painting superheroes instead of Campbell’s soup; Vietnam ending in a US victory; a blue man (AKA Dr Manhattan) being the first person on the moon; while Nixon steers America ever closer to nuclear war with Russia. Poor Nixon can’t get a break. We’ve just seen David Frost twiddle his nose in Frost/Nixon and now he’s being blamed for having forced the Watchmen vigilantes into retirement. When one of them is murdered – the amoral Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) – Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a pathological private eye, sniffs out a scheme where costumed superheroes are being picked off to clear the way for a fiendish mass-murder plot.
Rorschach wears a mask that looks like a dirty dishcloth and growls deep in a voice like he eats Dark Knight DVDs for breakfast. There’s Daniel Dreiberg, or Night Owl II, a techno-geek caped crusader lonely in middle-age and played with blank eyes by Patrick Wilson; there’s Matthew Goode’s Ozymandias, a gymnastic billionaire who turned his hero into a corporate franchise; there’s Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who is technically the only superhero as he has genuine powers – he fizzes blue phosphorescence and can rearrange molecular matter at will after a lab accident in the 1950s. And then there’s Malin Akerman’s Laurie Jupitor, AKA Silk Spectre II, who looks like she’s been poured from a foaming alchemy beaker into a latex lingerie costume.
Akerman, an actress with a number of calamitous comedies under her belt, now sports a cleavered fringe and mahogany hair. She is indeed a beautiful woman, which is a useful distraction, because she can’t act for nuts. She has the cool possession of a small mammal caught unexpectedly in front of oncoming traffic.
But if you remember 300, you’ll know Snyder has never been much good with actors. Or feelings. Or anything remotely human. He just wants sexy carnage. In a flashback, the Comedian is asked about the American dream. “It came true; you’re looking at it,” he says. And the film plays into a loss of faith in American idealism where caped crusaders are amoral, perhaps even evil. We see the Comedian firing a shotgun into a crowd with his tongue hanging out, and Snyder, too, directs with his tongue wobbling. The camera indulges in excessive, grotesque violence that I don’t remember from the novel. The joint of an arm is snapped in two; a child murderer has his head chopped in half. It stinks of misogyny. In a flashback, we watch an attempted rape where moments before, the camera glides over the woman’s lingerie-clad body with slathering tongue. In cinematic terms, it’s as close to saying she was asking for it. A pregnant woman is shot dead. A woman is doused head to toe in blood. The camera looks on with manic glee. Where Alan Moore wrote a superhero book for adults, Snyder delivers a film for 14-year-old boys.
It seems no surprise the film can’t settle on tone. It strives for seriousness and then, in a Vietnam flashback, slips into a silly parody of Apocalypse Now with ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ and helicopters thumping the soundtrack. And what about that cringing sex scene where Night Owl II and Silk Spectre II get it off? It’s a constellation of cheese: a full moon beams into the bedroom while two other full moons shine on the bed; then Leonard Cohen, who would put anyone off their game, erupts into ‘Hallelujah’ when the couple reach their peak.
Snyder wants to observe the multi-layered novel to the point that he entombs his own film. Where the movie needs hurtling forward momentum and snap and swing in the rhythm section, it instead grinds to a halt, turning again and again to lumbering back-story to explain who’s who and how they got there.
To read Watchmen is to relive the Cold War anxieties of its age. It drips doom. Snyder slips in a reference to global warming but the film has no atmosphere, no sense of dread. It’s all surface tension. The grim finale of Moore’s deconstructive novel was an obituary for superheroes. Snyder tweaks his self-destructive film to slip in a suggestion for a superhero sequel. The shame.

Review: Wendy and Lucy (4/5)

Wendy and Lucy
(Kelly Reichard):
Michelle Williams
Running time: 80 minutes (15A)

Just 30 seconds into the long tracking shot that opens Wendy and Lucy, your racing brain begins to slow down. It’s a story of companionship set on the margins. With its clanking freight trains, hopeless townscapes and poverty, the story, written by Jon Raymond, evokes Depression-era writing. Wendy (a desperate, brooding and terrific Michelle Williams) is on her way to Alaska when her car breaks down. Her best friend is her dog Lucy. Low on cash, she shoplifts dog food but gets caught. Then Lucy disappears. What follows is a long night of the soul as Wendy stoically fights her mounting despair. Director Kelly Reichard works with hypnotic simplicity. Her intimate behavioural style allows characters to be built and story to be told from mere observation. She evokes a very rich sense of place. Her films catch characters as they slip between the cracks. There is one horrifying scene, in mute blackness, where Wendy sleeps rough and comes very close to danger. The moment moves expertly from one of terror to an awareness of human tragedy. Like Reichard’s wonderful 2006 film Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy is full of simple gestures that shine brightly. It’s very true, honest and compelling.

Reviews: Anvil: The Story of Anvil (4/5); American Teen (3/5)

Anvil! The Story of Anvil
(Sacha Gervasi):
Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow, Robb Reiner
Running time: 80 minutes (15A)

This touching documentary is a story of failure – the downward slump of Canadian heavy metal band Anvil. They pioneered thrash metal in the early 1980s, tasted brief fame, but dived soon after into obscurity. The band’s now middle-aged core, singer Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, however, refuse to die. The set-up is real-life Spinal Tap: the denial of reality, the child-man personalities and a redemption of sorts in Japan. Yet you watch Anvil and instead of laughing at them, you feel for them. They’re deluded men who refuse to grow up. But there is something admirable in their tenacity of spirit and the way they refuse to be ordinary. (They are terribly ordinary: ‘Lips’ delivers canteen food for a living.) Gervasi, who wrote Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, lovingly steers the story towards a bittersweet conclusion. The film won the audience award at its European premiere at last year’s Galway Film Fleadh, and another audience award at the Dublin International Film Festival. The sad irony is that it gives Anvil the fame they crave – they are now famous for not being famous.

American Teen
(Amanda Burstein):
Hannah Bailey, Colin Clemens, Mitch Reinholt, Megan Krizmanich
Running time: 100 minutes (15A)

Hollywood high-school movies are stocked with clichés: the bitchy blonde, the jackass jock and the wretched nerd. Amanda Burstein’s documentary American Teen finds their real-life equivalents at a redbelt Indiana high school and digs beneath the stereotypes. Over the course of their final school year, she roams the social maze of adolescence with a certain degree of fly-on-the-wall. It’s full of bitchiness, bullying and backstabbing. The nerd finally gets a girlfriend but she cheats on him on camera. One female student emails a photo of her breasts to a boy, only for it to find its way around school. Amusingly, the kids are self-aware: the nerd knows he’s a nerd to the point of self-fulfilling prophecy. The princess blonde has a laugh about “materialistic girls”. I don’t doubt the film is honest, though its claims as cine verité are at times suspect: One alienated student gets depressed and Burnstein films her staring forlornly into the distance from cinematic locations. The Maysles brothers would have had none of that.

Review: Surveillance (2/5)

Surveillance
(Jennifer Lynch):
Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman, Pell James, Ryan Simkins
Running time: 97 minutes (16)

Here’s a film to send your jaw crashing to the floor – a black-humoured, macabre piece of audience bait disguised as a horror-thriller. Surveillance takes Rashomon and plants it in creepy Americana. It becomes Blue Velvet meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Two FBI detectives (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) arrive into town to investigate some grisly murders. The local cops are bent and loopy, there’s a drug-addled woman (Pell James) and a small child (Ryan Simkins). All are witnesses to a scene of carnage but none of their stories fit. The director is Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David, and she borrows shamelessly her father’s weird, unsettling style. She is precise with her camera and works up a jaunty yet disturbing tone. She wants to dislocate the viewer and to shock the middle classes. It turns from sadomasochism into total nihilism. You watch a woman, blue in face, being strangled to death while another woman sticks her tongue in her mouth. It wants to be outrageous, to have no moral boundaries whatsoever. It shrinks from harming the child, which, of course, is a good thing. But it just shows that the film is constrained by the same values it wants to mock.