Steve McQueen directs Sheyi Cole, Robbie Gee and Johann Myers in this biopic of the early life of a black British youth who endured care homes, the Brixton riots and prison before finding his voice to become a Young Adult author.
The least focussed of the Small Axe so far. In moments it mimics McQueen’s Hunger or Shame as we witness Alex suffer under the white authorities. At other times it feels like a spoof sketch called “Black Harry Potter Goes Brixton”. Despite an overriding bleakness, this is the first of the films that made me laugh out loud with its sense of humour and period. It is hard to tally the occasional broad lightness with an interlude studying the aftermath of the New Cross arson attack with poetry and photography though. Likewise the riots themselves feel like an underwhelming skirmish. The best scenes are between a broken Wheatle and Simeon, an imposing dread with a good book collection, in a prison cell. They have best lines and, in Robbie Gee, the finest performance.
David Fincher directs Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried and Lily Collins in this Hollywood biopic following drunk cynical idealist screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz hobnobbing with the elite, framed by the writing of his first draft of Citizen Kane which lampooned those he witnessed.
Maybe we should have been warned this was going to be two hours of a souse in bed, making bad bets, rather than the Second Coming… A minor curio that cannot hold up to the weight of critical adulation (slim pickings for Oscar-fare this year) and personal expectations. Sue me: I was overly excited for Fincher’s first film in 6 years. What we get is a muddled bunch of gossipy half truths that anyone who has read more than one article on the inspiration behind Citizen Kane knows isn’t the big picture. Orson Welles barely plays a part (pointedly) and the battles Mank belligerently lines up for himself to win are resolved quicker than he has a chance to put his drunken dukes up for. Some of the glib fast solves for the dilemmas churned up are galling in their efficient tieing off.
This, like pretty much every film Fincher has directed since Alien3, is the study of an outsider assimilating into a flawed microcosm with disruptive emotions and philosophies. Whether Detective Somerset or Ripley, Tyler Durden or Zuckerberg… Fincher likes a protagonist trying to maintain order in a world even if it means burning the complacent belief system or corpulent structure that exists down. They are heralds of a better method of living, who feel apart from the current ways. Tellingly they nearly always persevere to the credits in a draw rather than a win. The alien is defeated but the cost is martyrdom. The killer is revealed but not caught, countless lives are ruined not just by his violence but by the grinding lonely obsession needed to crack the case. The accused husband is innocent but now trapped in an abusive marriage. The system wins, the best you can do is stay true to your values. Mank ends with a similar no sum game. It warps history to make it seem like a Pyrrhic victory but who am I to say that’s a negative. I love Braveheart and JFK even if they swerve into fantasy for the sake of narrative slickness.
We are left with a film where in the first half we are introduced to a menagerie of real life figures… some of whom we get no chance to invest in. Some of whom we shouldn’t bother to, as they make so little impact on the proceeding. Fincher’s father wrote this pet project, Forrest Gump and Benjamin Button’s screenwriter Eric Roth is a producer (and I’d wager uncredited script doctor). Like Roth’s other big Oscar projects I’d say he is responsible for the race around the museum nature of the experience. Here’s a bunch of famous names! Did you do your homework? Watch Kane in advance? Scout relevant Wikipedia stubs? Good… you still won’t care.
Mank looks sumptuous but doesn’t convince as a visual homage to the era. The monochrome focus is too crisp, modern in all but the absence of colour… Janusz Kamiński’s grainier yet rich work on Schindler’s List or Stefan Czapsky’s vibrant Ed Wood are more convincing period cinematography pastiches. Fincher should have known film over digital was the essential ingredient for what he is attempting to achieve. There are mannered touches that take you out of the story… cigarette burns to signal the end of a chapter rather than the messy unpredictable changing of a reel. The time hopping structure stops you from settling into one persuasive story arc. Fincher here is too OCD to match the script’s messy randomness.
Mank isn’t a terrible film, it just cannot reach its prestigious ambitions. Oldman tries to hammer some consistency into his character’s schizophrenic action and inaction. You couldn’t say he makes the old soak loveable. Arilss Howard does fine work as Louis B Mayer but again the movie struggles to tally the powerful man with the toadying scenes between him and Hearst. Was he a puppet? ‘Cause he really feels like a puppet master whenever we aren’t being told as such? And then there is the one true glimmer of stardom. Amanda Seyfried is luminescent as Marion Davies. Whenever she is on screen the project becomes an entertainment. I’d be surprised if Mank does much better than a lot of obligatory nominations at the Academy Awards, Seyfried though has to be the clever money bet for actually holding a statue at close of play. She probably won’t need to thank the credited (and uncredited) screenwriter though. Just make a note to praise Trish Summerville’s top costume design and you are golden, Amanda.
Henri-Georges Clouzot directs Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot and Paul Meurisse in this French classic about a wife and her husband’s mistress who plan the perfect murder.
This moves at a leisurely pace but still waters run deep and treacherous. It is probably the most Hitchcockian film Alfred never made. And because it was made on the continent it is a decade franker about sex, violence and immorality than the Master of Suspense could be in Hollywood. The set pieces on paper are quite mundane: an unwanted hitch-hiker clambering into the back of a van, a set of keys needing fished out of the water, a walk down a long dark corridor to investigate a noise. Clouzot rings them for every drop of tension… even though with modern eyes you can see the big heart stopping reveal moving from under its sheet very early on.
Susan Lacy directs Steven Spielberg, Richard Dreyfus and George Lucas in this documentary following the career and life of the director of Jaws, Indiana Jones, Schindler’s List and Munich.
A 130 minute celebration of the blockbuster wizard that only gives his expert team of collaborators the spotlight in the final moments. Offers very little new insight to those of us who already cherish every release from the undisputed weaver of big screen dreams. Also the order it covers the productions in is chronologically nonsensical. We rush right into Jaws and then backtrack and as his oeuvre unfolds the order takes matching regressive loops. Strange? An above average DVD extra.
Cameron Crowe directs Bridget Fonda, Campbell Scott and Kyra Sedgwick in this romantic comedy that follows an apartment block of twenty-somethings as they fall in and out of love in Seattle.
Sitting slightly underwhelmingly between the Five Star Classics Say Anything… and Jerry Maguire, Singles is a gentler, less focussed Cameron Crowe release. The witty dialogue is still in full effect and we all know Crowe can lurch unexpectedly into drama without ever getting too saccharine. The film is noteworthy now for its wider influence… allegedly Warner Brothers’ impetus to develop the sitcom Friends. That evergreen hit wouldn’t want to contest a paternity test in court with what is fathered here… but neither would novelist Nick Hornby if we are being brutally honest. While some elements do get lost in the busy shuffle Fonda finesses a couple of lovely moments, there is a keen snapshot of the Seattle grunge boom, a wonderful Paul Westerberg score and Matt Dillon’s first forays into broad comedy. While Dillon is aiming for a different sound than the more solid work by the leads, he steals every scene he is in as the self-obsessed Citizen Dick frontman.
Éric Rohmer directs Pascale Ogier, Tchéky Karyo and Fabrice Luchini in this comedy of errors where an interior designer spends Friday nights away from her suburban boyfriend in her Parisian pied-á-terre and everyone assumes she is doing it to have affairs.
OK Éric… I get it… sometimes women just want “a room of one’s own”…. and romance…. stability… and freedom… It is an irony they can’t have both boths. All your men are saps.
Gerard Damiano directs Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems and Carol Connors in this notorious porno about a woman who can only be sexually gratified by swallowing big dicks to the back of her throat.
The hardcore flick that almost straddled into respectability. Famous names and the upper classes crossed over to seedy adult theatres to watch this in ‘72, the name recognition and veil of zeitgeist meant this was the skin flick it was acceptable to buy a ticket for. It made unheard of millions for a release of its ilk… almost billions, if you believe the legends… certainly still laundered a ton of mafia cash, if you don’t. With such a unique place in cinema history came the eventual harsh light of historical attention. A decade away from its success and Lovelace (real name: Linda Boreman) had written an expose, Ordeal. Her story rewrote the production notes. Her boyfriend / pimp Chuck Traynor had violently coerced her to be in adult movies… some far more appalling than Deep Throat. Watching the movie critically, it is difficult not to discount that backstory. Her skin often bruised and her face grimacing, this is not a woman enjoying the sexual acts she is performing. And the sex in the movie is 90% Lovelace, dead-eyed and passively being penetrated by ugly men. The flesh is white and mottled, an unkempt hairiness pervades every shot. The angles are strangely unflattering and there is little variety beyond the initial orgy to seek what she enjoys and Harry Reem’s jovial doctor’s quick oral assessment of her. After these more plot framed sequences, we just get unconnected footage of a sad woman working as a “therapist” for a succession of identikit creeps, while her doctor gives dictation to his more “professional” nurse. There are attempts at humour but it is constant, bludgeoning sub-Carry On. Was “bubbles” a slang for cunnilingus or orgasm that has been lost in the trashcan of the last century? How did the shitty parody music that grates along side the grim sex cost half the productions $47,500 budget? Dated innuendo in a miserable film that shows you everything. What point innuendo? The whole thing looks like a nasty stain and is about as erotic as scrubbing such a stain out. Compared to its peer Debbie Does Dallas, this film has none of the bonhomie or healthiness that makes that stablemate kinda quaint and charming to modern eyes. It is just irredeemably awful. I felt genuinely unclean after watching this.
Dominik Moll directs Vincent Cassel, Déborah François and Josephine Japy in this adaptation of 18th century gothic thriller where a monk is unwittingly corrupted by the devil.
Moll made his name making tight European Hitchcock homages. This dials back the taut thrills and replaces them with a sexual unease and admittedly spectacular period location work. He conjures up effectively creepy imagery including a character hidden behind an impassive wooden mask and a graveyard leading to hell. We rush through a lot of plot but that pace is there to retain the mystery. One that works better on page than the screen. It all boils down to the sexiness of the stars and while the leads are all very attractive, Moll seems a little coy and shy of fully exploiting their simmering lusts and inevitable downfalls. The Monk is just a touch too chaste given its core currency.
Roy Andersson directs Elisabeth Helander, Jörgen Nohall and Jessika Lundberg in this Swedish arthouse comedy where we witness the population of Lethe go about their futile existences.
A series of deadpan, desolate sketches. The League of Gentlemen slowed down to a painful pace and bleached clean of all primary colour. Ashen faced tableaux that mocks the ironies of existence. Everyone lives in a Kafka-esque waking nightmare where the punchline is apocalyptic. I’m not saying I didn’t like it but another ten minute would have killed me.
Nancy Meyers directs Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz and Eli Wallach in this festive romantic comedy where a Hollywood business woman and a London society journalist swap homes for the Christmas break hoping to mend broken hearts.
Nobody’s favourite cake is a mince pie but December rolls around and it seems sacrilegious to avoid them. Same with this hokey houseporn fluff. It is predictable, languorous and fails to sell Jack Black as a romantic lead through no fault of its own. Kate Winslet definitely gets the wooden spoon here in terms of prize blokes. So Meyers over compensates by adding a hundred extra scenes of Diaz and Jude Law’s more winning but drama-lite Blighty hook-up and giving Kate Winslet a better non-romantic pairing to spark off. Her segments with retired movie writer Eli Wallach have the magic you want – he’s a gem here (as always) and treats his top billed scenemate with the reverence and glamour she deserves. It is a warm, comfy film with zero surprises. Tasteful and expensive as the dream homes it takes place in but you wouldn’t want to touch anything for fear of going bankrupt. The only truly impressive thing is the sheer amount of accurate boozing that goes on in the U.K. half of the movie.
Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 