Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Jean-Luc Godard: a beginner's guide

Godard is as revolutionary and influential a hinge-figure in cinema as Joyce was to literature and the cubists were to painting. He saw a rule and broke it. Every day, in every movie. Incorporating what professionals thought of as mistakes (jump-cuts were only the most famous instance), mixing high culture and low without snobbish distinctions, demolishing the fourth wall between viewing himself as a maker of fictional documentaries, essay movies, and viewing his movies as an inseparable extension of his pioneering work as a film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s.



Here are six films from his enormously productive 1960s period, when he ground out one masterpiece after another, 14 in a mere seven years. Don’t feel limited to this one decade, though, the rest of his career is no less fascinating, infuriating and masterly.

À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)

The revolution starts here. A barely-there sub-Série Noire plot involving a vain and nihilistic petty criminal (Jean-Paul Belmondo) with a Bogie fetish, and his sometime American girlfriend (Jean Seberg). He shoots a cop and goes on the run – sort of – and then gets shot himself. The real revolution is formal, stylistic. Just as the Velvet Underground incorporated the “accident” of feedback, Godard used the flaws and formal no-nos of conventional cinema to reinvent cinema. Shooting without permits, using no real script (dialogue was post-dubbed), and liberated by the same new lightweight cameras that powered the 60s documentary boom, Godard achieved an off-the-cuff, free-form documentary feel that felt totally new and invigorating in 1960. He also shattered notions of high culture and low, proving that you could infuse seedy B-movie trash with Apollinaire and The Wild Palms, Shakespeare and teddy bears, Dovzhenko and Frank Tashlin. And nothing was ever the same again.

Le Mépris (Contempt)

At Cinecittà Studios in Rome, a film of The Odyssey, directed by Fritz Lang himself (one of the four or five giants who locked down the grammar of cinema, lest we forget), and funded by Jack Palance’s crude American producer, is slowly failing to get made. The screenwriter’s (Michel Piccoli) marriage to a frequently naked Brigitte Bardot, meanwhile, is slowly being unmade. Shot in widescreen and color by Coutard, Contempt is almost ridiculously gorgeous to look at, inflected primarily by Godard’s career-long obsession with the color red (JLG loves red almost as much as Michael Powell did), and graced with enviably smooth and elegant tracking shots, some of enormous length and complexity. And despite working with a higher budget (from Carlo Ponti, of all people), one never loses the impression that Godard showed up in the morning with an idea or two, found a pre-existing set or locale, and just started shooting. The result, however, is one of the masterpieces of French cinema.

Bande à part

The “cutest” and most accessible of all Godard’s early movies, Bande à part has ingrained itself into the international folk-memory of cinema, and is referenced in dozens of other movies, whether directly, as in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, which re-enacts Bande’s famous nine-minute race through the Louvre, or indirectly, as in Tarantino’s production outfit, A Band Apart Films. At the centre is Godard’s then wife and 1960s muse, the utterly beguiling Anna Karina, who takes up with two criminals who plan to rob her rich employer. Mostly they just lark about in the perfect Paris of 1964, riding cars, bullshitting in cafes – including one moment when one character asks for a minute’s silence, and the entire soundtrack drops out for that period – and generally failing at being crooks. This is the approachable, antic, fun-loving Godard who largely vanished during his radical Maoist decade after May 68. Still a joy to devour.

Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman)

Godard made a number of intriguing and provocative films about women’s lives in the 60s: Une Femme est Une Femme, Vivre Sa Vie, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and this long out-of-circulation 1964 portrait of a woman being slowly but steadily eclipsed by advertising, consumer goods, fashion spreads and consumerism in general. Into the mix are thrown the early-60s Auschwitz trials in West Germany, extended montages of fashion photography, and the fetishization of leading lady Macha Meril’s body, which gradually becomes indistinguishable from the advertising that constantly assails her. For reasons not made public, A Married Woman was initially banned by the French censors. Godard believed that the ban arose not from the mild instances of nudity in the film, but because it was “an attack on a certain mode of life, that of air-conditioning, that of the prefabricated, of advertising”. All the horrors of modern life, in other words, made into great art.

Alphaville

A magical and bizarre sci-fi fantasy, somewhere between Cocteau’s Orphée and Lang’s Dr Mabuse movies, starring American expatriate actor Eddie Constantine – with his Warner Bros private-eye face and manner – as Lemmy Caution, an investigator sent to destroy the notorious Alpha 60, a sentient computer, half HAL 9000, half the computer in The Prisoner, much given to quoting Borges, that controls the city of Alphaville, absorbing the soul of the individual into the mindless mass of the collective. With his legendary cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Godard discovered the future – unevenly distributed, then as now – in contemporary Paris without building a single set. In Alphaville one can summon up a “Seductress Third Class” for assignations, but no one understands the meaning of “love” or “conscience”. Lemmy’s weapons are poetry and literature, their meanings ambiguous and ever in flux, and thus intolerable and rebarbative to Alpha 60, which is finally destroyed by the words “I love you.”

La Chinoise

La Chinoise – along with Weekend, another masterpiece from 1967 – closed off the first period of Godard’s career – the approachable era – and foreshadowed his politically committed, near-Maoist Dziga Vertov period in partnership with Jean-Pierre Gorin, during which he seemed determined to alienate anyone who’d ever loved his early work. La Chinoise (very loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed) is a black comedy about political commitment, starring Nouvelle Vague icon Jean-Pierre Léaud and Godard’s future second wife Anne Wiazemsky (star of Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthasar), and is rife with visual jokes and audacious editing (keep an eye on the ever growing and shrinking quantities of Mao’s Little Red Book that appear on the shelves behind the direct-to-camera speakers). Weekend, which is extremely formally aggressive, contains one of the most striking and hilarious tracking shots in movie history, an endless traffic jam that somehow contains all of life – birth, meals, fist-fights, philosophical arguments, sex and death.

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Spectre review: James Bond is back, stylish, camp and sexily pro-Snowden

If nothing else, the spelling of the title should tip you off that this is a thoroughly English movie franchise. Bond is back and Daniel Craig is back in a terrifically exciting, spectacular, almost operatically delirious 007 adventure – endorsing intelligence work as old-fashioned derring-do and incidentally taking a stoutly pro-Snowden line against the creepy voyeur surveillance that undermines the rights of a free individual. It’s pure action mayhem with a real sense of style.
Ralph Fiennes’s M finds himself battling a cocky new colleague Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott) who wishes to abolish the 00-programme in favour of a vast new multi-national computer-snooper programme. The code name of this awful new stuffed shirt is C – and Bond does not scruple to make crude innuendo on that score.

James Bond is cutting loose from duplicitous, bureaucratic authority - in the time-honoured fashion – and plans to track down a certain sinister Austrian kingpin at the heart of something called Spectre, played with gusto by Christoph Waltz. This is the evil organisation whose tentacular reach and extensive personnel may in fact have accounted for all Bond’s woes in Craig’s previous three movies.

The movie doesn’t say so but the “t” in Fleming’s Spectre stood for terrorism – the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion – and perhaps one of the first uses of the word in pop culture.

Is this Craig’s last hurrah as Bond? His somewhat tetchy remarks in interviews preceding this movie – indicating a readiness to quit – oddly mirror the tetchy media comments that greeted the news of his casting almost 10 years ago. Craig showed they were wrong: and I hope he carries on now. He is one of the best Bonds and an equal to Connery. That great big handsome-Shrek face with its sweetly bat ears has grown into the role.

He has flair, sang-froid, and he wears a suit superbly well by bulging his gym-built frame fiercely into it, rarely undoing his jacket button and always having his tie done up to the top. At one point he simply snaps the plastic handcuffs the bad-guys have put on him, with sheer brute strength. Yet there is also an elegant new dismissive tone that he introduces into the dialogue bordering on camp. “That all sounds marvellous,” he purrs when advised of some footling new procedural restriction, adding later: “That all sounds lovely.”

He is particularly vexed at the news that a sleek new car has in fact been reserved for 009. The script by John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth runs on rails with great twists and turns and gags.

We start with a gasp-inducing action sequence in Mexico City for the Day of the Dead. Director Sam Mendes contrives a stylishly extended continuous tracking shot to bring our hero into the proceedings and it isn’t long before an outrageous set-piece is in progress with a helicopter repeatedly looping the loop while 007 vigorously punches the pilot and a fellow passenger.

A clue salvaged from the chaos puts Bond on the trail of Spectre, taking him at first to Rome where he has a romantic interlude with a soigné woman of mystery, played with distant languor by Monica Bellucci. Then he is to infiltrate the horribly occult headquarters of Spectre itself – a wonderfully old-fashioned “evil boardroom” scene for which Mendes manages to avoid any Austin Powers/Dr Evil type absurdity.

Waltz’s chief is an almost papal presence of menace, upsetting all his cringing subordinates by saying and doing next to nothing, and photographed in shadow. When he recognises Bond in the room, he leers: “I see you! Cuckoo!” – a French expression which in fact is to have a darker significance, revealed at the end.

From here we go to Austria and this is where Bond is to encounter his main amour: Dr Madeleine Swann, stylishly played with just the right amount of sullen sensuality by Léa Seydoux. It is of course ridiculous that the pair manage to get away from there to Tangier in such stunning changes of outfit without worrying about suitcases, money etc. but it is all part of the escapist effect.

Madeleine and James’s train journey comes with vodka martinis in the dining car followed by a colossal woodwork-splintering punch-up with a beefy henchman. They appear, moreover, to be the only passengers on the train.

Later, he gets a horrible hi-tech torture scene, with Waltz’s ogre whispering: “Out of horror, beauty....” A new version of the sadism that was on display when Mads Mikkselsen was roughing him up in Casino Royale.

Another person who has grown into his part, incidentally, is Ben Whishaw as the perennially stressed quartermaster and tech supremo Q: Whishaw has developed him as a very enjoyable comic character.

It’s deeply silly but uproariously entertaining. At the end, I almost felt guilty for enjoying it all quite so much – almost.

Thursday, October 8, 2015

99 Homes review – chillingly topical eviction drama

It so happens that this film gets its release here just as high-risk, high-yield mortgage bonds are making a cheeky comeback in the US. The name has been changed from “sub-prime” to “non-prime”. There are higher safeguards, reportedly, although that new prefix weirdly makes it sound like fewer. So 99 Homes coincides with the financial world’s Windscale/Sellafield moment.

It first appeared at last year’s Venice film festival but it gripped me just as much on a second viewing – a piercing comment on the toxic-loan slump and the bailout bonanza that appears to underline Milton Friedman’s immortal words: socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the rest. Ramin Bahrani – who directed Goodbye Solo (2008) and Man Push Cart (2005) – has created a middle-class nightmare driven by the powerful engine of shame: the shame of losing your home and the shame of then having to work for the person who took it away.

Michael Shannon gives a lip-smackingly good performance as Rick Carver, a predatory real-estate broker in Florida; he is as dead-eyed as the local alligators which, as he admiringly comments, never sleep. Carver smokes an e-cigarette, and its sinister blue glow is never far from his lips: increasingly the sign of a smarmy screen villain.

He is the court-appointed agent for houses that have been repossessed by the bank, because the wretched debtors (for whom Carver has nothing but contempt) could not keep up with the payments on risky loans. Backed up by armed officers from the sheriff’s department, Carver supervises that unwatchably horrible moment when these people and their families are ordered out of their houses and their belongings piled up on the front lawn in front of the neighbours.

Carver enjoys a rich harvest of misery, taking a juicy cut from the eventual repo sale which, although a bargain, will be generally more than the loan sum. Everybody wins, apart from the poor homeowners whose rash borrowings created this carrion opportunity in the first place. Carver is armed because, at the moment of eviction, those devastated residents have a habit of brandishing their own guns, often turning their weapons on themselves in an ecstasy of self-hate and despair. The movie opens with Carver cruising gator-like through a grisly scene of carnage.

One of his victims is Dennis, played by Andrew Garfield, a hardworking carpenter and builder: he is a single dad who lives with his son Connor (Noah Lomax) and his mother Lynn (Laura Dern). Dennis falls behind with his debt repayments, and duly gets the treatment from Carver and has to move into a grim motel, sharing a room with his mother and boy. But then a twist of fate means that Carver himself needs a willing builder to work on a particularly horrible job.

Swallowing his pride and self-respect, Dennis offers to work for Carver and something in his mixture of desperation and willing competence compels Carver to like him. He winds up making poor Dennis his favourite employee and confidant: the dependable guy who can execute all the illegal scams he has going for bilking the bank for phoney repairs and fraudulent fees.

Garfield’s performance shows that Dennis, perhaps like a Vichy French official coming to work with the Nazi occupier, forces himself to like and even admire Carver, to throw himself into the whole horrible business, almost to brazen out his humiliation and cauterise his own despair.

Carver has his own compulsion to school Dennis (a little like Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke in the cop drama Training Day), driving him around the quietly desperate neighbourhoods, showing him how to spot the opportunities for profit in all the badly tended and tatty houses. He insists Dennis must “pop his cherry” by having to supervise an eviction himself, and really earn his money. There is something deeply horrible in way the habits of gentility persist: the evictees and evictors have a grimly insincere habit of addressing each other as “sir”.

Watching this movie for a second time, I wonder if writer-director Bahrani did not perhaps originally intend Laura Dern’s role to be that of a wife; interestingly, the script would not need to be changed much for this to make narrative sense and she seems in one scene to have a say in what happens to Connor that would be more likely to come from an outraged spouse. But the set-up, as it stands, has a tough plausibility. It’s a compelling and relevant picture, with terrific performances from Shannon and Garfield.

Friday, September 18, 2015

In Cold Blood review – still chilling Capote adaptation

There’s a televisual brashness to Richard Brooks’s 1967 film version of Truman Capote’s true-life reportage classic, now on cinema rerelease. It’s strange to think how fast things were working: the book had been published the previous year and the killers executed the year before that.
Robert Blake and Scott Wilson play Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the two young drifters and ex-cons who broke into a Kansas farmhouse, expecting to find a safe full of money, slaughtered the family and got away with a paltry amount in cash.

Capote’s non-fiction novel brooded on the sheer pointless nightmare, and so does the film, to some extent; the killers’ casual excitement at the prospect of murderous violence is still chilling. But there are ellipses here in which the film averts its gaze from the horror, deferring the key murder scene to the end. And there is a more high-minded emphasis on Blake’s psychiatric disorder and broken family home.

The movie features a fictional choric reporter called Jensen (Paul Stewart), a stoic and traditional-looking newspaperman – very different from the dandyish Truman Capote. Watched again now, In Cold Blood looks similar to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (which is explicitly referenced) and it is a missing link between Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Psycho (1960).

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

L'Eclisse review – Antonioni's strange and brilliant film rereleased

Sphinx-like … Monica Vitti in L’Eclisse
Michelangelo Antonioni’s mysterious and disquieting 1962 film L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) is rereleased in UK cinemas for the first time in 10 years: a twilight zone of anxiety and alienation in which the director displays his ability to slow time down a stop and allow his characters to wander in an eerily untenanted landscape. He had a knack of making Rome look as empty as the middle of the night – in the middle of the day. Did his film intuit the emptiness of growing postwar prosperity, or just have its own strange vision of the aftermath of nuclear attack?

When I last watched L’Eclisse, for a feature about the Antonioni centenary in 2012, I found myself worrying that it looked dated: especially the startling “blackface” party scene. But watching it again now, I find myself gripped as never before, and the “African” scene is bizarre, stylised, and I think the point is to jab at the leisured classes’ casual racism.

The carina-brutta beauty of Monica Vitti was never more sensual or sphinx-like than here in the role of Vittoria, the well-to-do young woman who embarks on a difficult, doomed affair with Piero (Alain Delon), the nervy, conceited young stockbroker making money for Vittoria’s mother (Lilla Brignone) – who herself has become addicted to the thrill of day-trading.

The film really is visionary: it has a gift for unearthly images to compare with Fellini: the crashed car resurrected from the water with the hand of its dead joyrider visible is unforgettable. But it also discloses an enigmatic void in its own strange, hectic little love story: almost as if extraterrestrial forces are preparing this ground for some uncanny incursion.

Antonioni opens up a sinkhole of existential dismay in the Roman streets and asks us to drop down into it. What a strange and brilliant film it is.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Bruce Willis, Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg star in new Woody Allen film


Stars line up for Woody Allen … Bruce Willis, Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg
Woody Allen’s hold over Hollywood’s casting directors appears as strong as ever, as Bruce Willis, Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg have all signed up to appear in his next project, which is due to begin shooting later this year.

Eisenberg is a repeat collaborator, having already featured in the 2012 ensemble movie To Rome With Love, but Willis and Stewart will be making their first Allen. film. However, Willis will not be entirely unfamiliar with the director’s working methods as his then wife Demi Moore appeared in 1997 film Deconstructing Harry.

As is customary, no details or title have been announced for the new film, which is due to be produced by Allen’s regular partners: his sister Letty Aronson, agent Stephen Tenenbaum (who has worked on 15 Allen films) and cable-TV tycoon Edward Walson.

Allen is readying his current project Irrational Man, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as an academic who has an affair with a student (Emma Stone), for release in July 2015. Allen also signed up to make an as-yet-unspecified TV series for Amazon Prime, due to be available in 2016. It is not clear if his commitment to Amazon will affect his regular film-a-year schedule.

Monday, July 13, 2015

The Girl on the Train film to be set in US not UK

‘It could take place in any commuter town’ … Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train. Photograph: David Levene/for the Guardian
The film adaptation of bestselling mystery novel The Girl on the Train is set to be shifted to the US from its original English setting, it has been reported.

The film rights to the book were optioned before its publication by Hollywood studio DreamWorks, and in a recent interview with the Sunday Times, its author Paula Hawkins said it was likely to take place in “upstate New York”. However, she said: “I’m not really concerned about the repositioning as I think it is the type of story that could take place in any commuter town.”

Inspired by Hawkins’ own commute to work, The Girl on the Train is a thriller about a woman whose curiosity about a house she can see from her train carriage leads her into a missing persons inquiry. The novel, described as “the new Gone Girl”, has topped the charts in the UK and US, and broke the record stay in the UK No 1 slot held by Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.

Hawkins also appears unconcerned to exert authorial control over the planed film, a la EL James, saying: “I don’t want to be involved … let them get on with it.”

The Help’s Tate Taylor is to direct the film for DreamWorks, from a script by Erin Cressida Wilson. Emily Blunt is the favourite to land the lead role.

Monday, June 29, 2015

Ted 2 beaten by Jurassic World and Inside Out at US box office

All dressed up and nowhere to go … Ted 2
Seth MacFarlane’s rowdy comedy sequel Ted 2 failed to live up to expectations this weekend at the US box office, opening in third place on a disappointing $32.9m behind enduring powerhouses Inside Out and Jurassic World.
Jurassic World once again topped the chart for the third week in a row, Colin Trevorrow’s dinosaur disaster epic scoring another $54.2m in its third week on release and becoming the first film to hit $500m in North America in 2015. Pixar animation Inside Out was not far behind, pulling in $52.1m for a two-week total of $184.9m.

Some experts had predicted the weekend might see three films hitting $50m in North America for the first time ever. But Ted 2 ultimately struggled to compete with a double dose of box office firepower. The sequel, featuring Mark Wahlberg, Amanda Seyfried and the voice of MacFarlane as the foul-mouthed talking teddy bear title character, eventually dipped much lower than 2012’s Ted ($54.4m on debut). It has also suffered from middling reviews in comparison to its predecessor, which was one of 2012’s biggest sleeper hits and went on to make $549m worldwide.

“You have to remember that no one expected Ted to do what it did,” Nicholas Carpou of studio Universal told the Hollywood Reporter. “So for Ted 2 to do $33 million in a very crowded weekend isn’t bad. And we have a very good chance of playing out. Ted 2 will be a successful film for us.”

The only other wide release this weekend in a hugely competitive marketplace was the family-friendly adventure film Max, about a dog who returns from duty supporting US marines in Afghanistan to be adopted by his handler’s family after surviving a traumatic experience. Boaz Yakin’s drama, which cost just $20m to make, landed in fourth spot with $12.2m on debut.

US box office chart, 26-28 June

1. Jurassic World: $54.2m, $500m
2. Inside Out: $52.1m, $184.9m
3. Ted 2: $32.9m - NEW
4. Max: $12.2m - NEW
5. Spy: $7.8m, $88.3m
6. San Andreas: $5.2m, $141.8m
7. Dope: $2.8m, $11.7m
8. Insidious: Chapter 3: $2m, $49.7m
9. Mad Max: Fury Road: $1.7m, $147m
10. Avengers: Age of Ultron: $1.6m, $452.4m

Monday, June 15, 2015

Christopher Lee 1922-2015: an appreciation by Mark Kermode


Christopher Lee, appreciation
Sir Christopher Lee loved to sing. I remember being at the BBC one afternoon in 1994 and hearing his voice booming majestically down the corridors of Broadcasting House – rich, mellifluous, commanding. As a longtime horror fan, I instinctively recognised that voice from the Hammer films that made Lee an international celebrity back in the 60s. But as well as being an iconic screen presence, he was an acclaimed vocalist whose powerful range could be employed from opera to heavy metal with breathtaking results. Alongside his many other accolades, Lee received a Spirit of Metal award in 2010 for his work on Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross, a “symphonic metal concept album”, which cemented his reputation as a genuinely unpredictable cultural polymath. “It’s fascinating,” he said at the time, “that people are starting to look upon me as ‘a metal singer’.” To my surprise and great pleasure, I suddenly find that there seems to be another string to my bow… ”

I first met Lee in 1991, when he provided the narration for a Channel 4 documentary I was working on entitled Fear in the Dark. The script (which I had “polished”) was somewhat perfunctory, but Lee made it sound... important, vibrant, engrossing. I remember sitting in the control booth with director Dominic Murphy listening to Lee breathe dramatic life into words that had seemed so sterile on the page. The timbre of his voice was astonishing – if he’d read the phone book out loud, it would have seemed deep and meaningful. I also remember his numerous notes – correcting small factual errors (he believed very strongly that the devil was in the detail), reconfiguring clumsily constructed sentences, challenging lazy generalisations. He also politely, but firmly, put me straight on the correct pronunciation of the word “piranha”, a word that has never sounded the same to me since.


For a certain generation of film-goers (those aged 50 and over), Lee’s name will always be associated with key roles in such Hammer classics as 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein, in which he played the creature, or 1958’s Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula), in which he played the Count. The latter of these would establish Lee as the screen’s most celebrated vampire, a label with which he became increasingly uncomfortable. Yet despite the fact that his biography was self-deprecatingly entitled Tall, Dark and Gruesome, Lee consistently rose above typecasting, reinventing himself time and again in a career of quite bewildering diversity.

Many younger viewers will think of Lee as Saruman from Peter Jackson’s blockbusting The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies, or as Count Dooku from George Lucas’s Star Wars series – roles in his later life that introduced him to legions of new fans. For others, it is his portrayal of the evil fiend Fu Manchu, whom he played in a string of hit movies in the 60s, that will resonate most richly, or his mesmerising title role in Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966). In the 70s, he worked with Billy Wilder on The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, portrayed triple-nippled Bond baddie Scaramanga in The Man With the Golden Gun, and played Rochefort in Richard Lester’s popular The Three Musketeers movies. He had a major role in HBO’s epic 1984 TV miniseries The Far Pavilions, and in 1990 he did sterling comic work as Dr Catheter in Joe Dante’s fantasy satire Gremlins 2: The New Batch.


In 2009, he was knighted for services to drama and charity, and received the Bafta fellowship (the organisation’s highest honour) in 2011. The award was presented by Tim Burton, who worked with Lee on films such as Sleepy Hollow (1999) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and who described him after his death last week as “the last of his kind – a true legend – who I’m fortunate to have called a friend”.

Following my first own starstruck encounter with Lee on Fear in the Dark, I crossed paths with him again in 1998 when I joined him on a BBC World Service programme in which he looked back at his extraordinary career, and talked enthusiastically about his two most recent projects; a recording he had made of Wand’rin’ Star in a baritone so rich it would have made Lee Marvin cry; and the film Jinnah, in which he played the founder of Pakistan – a role he was particularly proud of.
The Wicker Man. ‘I don’t think that anyone up to the time we showed it had ever seen a film quite like it,’ said Lee.

But it was while making a documentary about the cult British classic The Wicker Man that I saw Lee at his most passionate. “I don’t think that anyone up to the time we showed it had ever seen a film quite like it,” he told me in 2001 of the film he considered to be his finest work. Based on a script by Anthony Shaffer, The Wicker Man cast Lee as Lord Summerisle, the leader of a pagan island where ancient rituals are given horrifying new life. Although the film tapped into Lee’s horror status (“I was typecast in the sense that people said: ‘Oh he kills people, and he makes these frightening, dark, gruesome movies’”), The Wicker Man was something new, a film that replaced the gothic trappings of yore with a modern-day terror all of its own. Lee is astonishing in the movie, bringing gravitas, intrigue and a touch of black comedy to a role that could easily have descended into farce. The film’s fiery climax remains one of the most memorably chilling finales of modern cinema.
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The Wicker Man was a masterpiece but it struggled to find a home in the landscape of 70s cinema, with which it was bizarrely out of step. Unloved by its production company British Lion (“they told me they thought it was one of the 10 worst films they had ever seen,” said Lee), it was cut down and released as a B-picture on a double bill with Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Years later, thanks largely to Lee’s tireless flag-waving, the film was reassessed and partially restored, having been hailed by Cinefantastique as “the Citizen Kane of horror movies”. All of which gave Lee great cause for rejoicing – although he continued to believe that a superior, more complete cut of the film languished in a vault somewhere, awaiting rediscovery.

“We do all of us depend on the elements that have been there since the dawn of time, and without which we could not exist,” he told me while musing on the enduring power of The Wicker Man. “There’s a touch of paganism in us all…”

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Viggo Mortensen: ‘Often people are desperate, so I do what needs to be done’

Viggo Mortensen is in his socks – he likes to go shoeless whenever he can – and is making a cup of tea. If this does not seem a thing of note, you’ve never watched Viggo brew. He carefully portions out green leaves from his own pouch into his personal silver vessel – a modern version of the South American mate gourd – then decants the water into a silver Thermos, adding the leaves to brew. “I’m ready to go,” he says, pulling his vessel close.
I mean, obviously he’d have been ready to go five minutes ago if he’d just dunked a tea bag in a cup with a slosh of milk like most of us do, but it’s clear Viggo likes to do things on his own terms and to his own very precise standards. You just have to look at his CV to see that. Viggo became an internationally fancied and bankable star as Aragorn, king of men, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy starting back in 2001. It’s a reputation he’s cemented over the years, in large part with another trio of films – A History of Violence, Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method– all directed by David Cronenberg. Though he received an Oscar nomination for Eastern Promises in 2007, Viggo never capitalised on the earning potential the LOTR franchise offered. In fact, that idea is baffling to him. He says he only took the role of Aragorn to please his son, Henry, who was around 10 years old at the time.
Given the choice, what Viggo wants above all else is to tell a story he thinks is interesting. “I don’t really look for movies based on the budget or the nationality or the language,” he has said. “I just want to be in movies that I wouldn’t mind seeing 10 years from now.” Looking at the films he has been in since he made his name, it’s fair to say his vision of enduring storytelling is not one seen in the romcoms and blockbusters that typically make for box-office hits.
Jauja, the film we have met to discuss, is possibly one of his least commercial yet. It’s an Argentinian-Danish movie directed by Lisandro Alonso, an award-winning young director, and co-written by Alonso with Fabian Casas, an Argentinian poet. “Jauja” is a Spanish word with Arabic origins which roughly translates to Neverland. After he’s patiently clarified the pronunciation (“How as in how you doing? And huh as in uh-huh,”) Viggo explains that the promise of Jauja was used as propaganda by the Spaniards who conquered South America in the 16th century.
Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn in Lord of the Rings: Two Towers.
‘What else would I do?’: as Aragorn in Lord of the Rings: Two Towers. Photograph: AP
“It was hard to convince people to go there. You’d either die on the way or die when you got there. You never got to go home. So they tried to make it sound like the ideal place. Something you’d dream about seeing or achieving. But you never really get what you’re looking for, do you?”
The film is about a Danish captain stationed in a remote Patagonian army outpost. He’s travelling with his 15-year-old daughter and when she vanishes into the pampas, he goes on a desperate quest to find her. Viggo stumbles and sweats through the unforgiving landscape and a series of surreal encounters. At one point he follows a dog through the mountains – chasing not his own tail, but someone else’s.
Viggo’s lack of physical vanity has become a recurring theme in his work. On film he’s been beaten up (Eastern Promises), starved (The Road) and kicked in the balls (A History of Violence), but he can’t imagine work being any other way. “What else would I do?” snorts the 56-year-old. “Those films where I’m the hero with a 20-year-old girlfriend? I go for what needs to be there. Often people are desperate or ridiculous rather than heroic, so I do what needs to be done.”
Jauja is a beautiful film – lit like a Technicolor classic and surprisingly funny – but also baffling. I went to the loo during the screening and, when I returned, for a moment I thought I’d walked into the wrong auditorium because the film had changed so completely. “It’s nonlinear,” agrees Viggo. “But even people who resisted it and didn’t think they liked it find there’s a resonance on an intellectual level. You can get existential about it. What’s it about? Well, you keep thinking about it. Most movies don’t do that.”
Viggo’s animation and enthusiasm as he talks about the film are contagious. He’s very smart and articulate and his intensity is interestingly at odds with his laidback appearance – his scruffy jeans and faded San Lorenzo football shirt (Viggo is a huge football fan and the Buenos Aires team was his first love), and the ratty friendship bracelets that slither up and down his arm as he drinks his tea.
Viggo Mortensen in The Road with Kodi Smit-McPhee.
In The Road with Kodi Smit-McPhee. Photograph: Allstar
Jauja is also a personal project for Viggo. Though he was born in New York, he grew up in Argentina with his American mother Grace, Danish father Viggo Sr, and younger brothers Walter and Charles. His father worked as an agricultural manager and, though they mainly lived in Buenos Aires, they also spent time in Chaco in the rural north. “We’d go on camping holidays over the Christmas holidays in the area where Jauja was shot, just our sleeping bags in the car,” he says. “It made me really happy to be on a horse in that landscape again.”
Viggo left South America aged 11, when his parents divorced and he moved to upstate New York with his mother and siblings. The move was a shock: to lose that Spanish culture, the TV, the football. He and his brothers mainly spoke Spanish, but then they were living near Quebec. He adapted – learned some French, started supporting the Montreal Canadiens hockey team – but it seems unsurprising that he now mainly lives in Madrid with his girlfriend, actor Ariadna Gil (best known here for the film Pan’s Labyrinth).
Working on Jauja made him think about his father a lot. “In the film I speak Spanish with a thick Danish accent, copying my father. I was raised there so there were connections for me in terms of culture, language and landscape. I knew those things would be assets for me and for Lisandro.” Did it make him think about his parents’ split? “Maybe subconsciously. I certainly thought a lot about our life there.”
Even without the personal connection, Viggo approaches each film as a learning experience. “Making a movie for me is not always about being paid, but it is a new university course. There’s no limit to what you can learn. I mean, it’s perfectly fine for an actor to say I’m just going to learn the lines and get on the horse, but I happen to enjoy digging deeper. In this case, I already knew about 19th- century Danish history and the wars the captain would have fought, so I went to Denmark and met with antiquarians and military historians. I found the uniform he would have worn and also picked out a medal. It was only given to soldiers who served in 1848-64 against the Prussians.”
Viggo Mortensen with his son Henry.
With his son Henry. Mortensen says he only took the role of Aragorn to please Henry who was 10 at the time. Photograph: Matt Baron/Rex
For Viggo, this research is pretty superficial. He slept outside in his costume for the first few days of the LOTR shoot. For the big-screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road he went one further and slept outside in sub-zero temperatures wrapped in nothing but a tarpaulin and always made sure his shoes were soaking wet before filming, for added discomfort. While researching Good (2008), in which he plays a German professor working with the Nazis, he drove more than 1,000 miles around Germany and Poland visiting concentration camps. To get under Freud’s skin for A Dangerous Method, he not only learned to write like the psychoanalyst but also bought first editions of the books that the good doctor would have had on his study shelves.
“I just think,” explains Viggo, “that the more realistic and specific you are with the details, the more universal the story becomes.”
Much of Viggo’s LOTR money was sunk into Perceval Press, an independent publishing company (named after the knight who stars in his favourite part of the myth of the Holy Grail). Perceval produces albums, art books and poetry collections by obscure artists, and the company recently diversified into film with Jauja, the second film it has been involved in.
Viggo’s own art books, poetry and albums are also available on Perceval. He was a published poet before he set up the imprint and his art had already been shown around LA (you can see his paintings in the 1998 film A Perfect Murder. He played an artist and, of course, created the work for the film). Perceval’s biggest profits come from Viggo’s own artistic output – though whether that’s because his fans really love his spoken-word albums or because they fancy him and would buy anything he released is hard to tell. His latest album, Under The Weather, came out last month, dedicated to feminist author Ti-Grace Atkinson and Albert Camus.
Perceval Press’s website is interesting even if you’re not in the mood for buying a book of paintings of endangered species by an Iranian artist. It’s a repository for Viggo’s political and world views, too. He regularly posts features, news stories and poems which he thinks will interest visitors. Currently the home page is a jumble of pieces about Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election and climate change.
Viggo Mortensen in his latest film, Jauja.
‘The more realistic and specific you are with the details, the more universal the story becomes’: in his latest film, Jauja. Photograph: Rex
“Putting that stuff up there makes me pay attention,” he says. “I concentrate when I’m reading the newspaper in case there’s something I can take from it. It’s like having a camera. I’ve carried a camera since I was a teenager and whether you’re using it or not, it means you look at composition, think about what around you would work well in the frame. The pieces on Perceval are just things I think are interesting to read. I’ll put up pieces I don’t agree with – conservative, right wing – if I think they’re well written. I’m not saying what I think, I’m asking questions and giving you the opportunity to ask yourself how you relate to this.”
This is a nice idea, but not strictly true. Viggo has always been fairly outspoken: no one would be in any doubt about his left-wing political affiliations. “Yeah, I’ve been called antisemitic and I got so much shit for speaking out against the Iraq invasion, but it was a huge waste of material resources and manpower.”
One of my favourite stories about Viggo comes from 2005. He heard that Californian mother Cindy Sheehan had driven her motorhome to Texas and parked outside George Bush’s family home in the hope of talking to the president about her son, who had been killed in Iraq. Viggo decided to show his support, so he flew out of LA and turned up unannounced at her motorhome with fresh vegetables, mineral water and a copy of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (to read, in case she had to wait around before meeting Bush). He only spoke to Sheehan for 20 minutes because he had to go back to LA to pick Henry up from school. Sheehan said she was a bit surprised when Aragorn turned up on her doorstep, but she appreciated the gesture. Viggo dedicated his next album, Intelligence Failure, to her.
You have to admire Viggo’s intentions, no matter what you think of the end results. Whether he’s stumbling through a desert looking for life’s answers, bringing his own tea set to an interview or flying across the country for a 20-minute chat, the man knows what he wants. As we finish, I tell him I think he has a pretty nice life – he basically gets to do all the things he enjoys. He shrugs: “Yeah, but if people weren’t interested in that stuff, I’d be doing it anyway. You just have to go ahead and do it, don’t you?”
Jauja is in cinemas now

Monday, March 9, 2015

Holy help: what Octavia Spencer can learn from other movie Gods

This weekend saw the news that Oscar winner Octavia Spencer will be taking on one of the most powerful roles in Hollywood: God. The star of The Help has been attached to the adaptation of a best-selling Christian thriller called The Shack, about a man who receives a note from God concerning his missing daughter.
It’s a role that Spencer is already “daunted” by. The actress, next to be seen in this month’s dystopian sequel Insurgent, says she has “huge shoes to fill” and finds the opportunity “overwhelming”.
Physical godly manifestations have been thin on the ground in recent years, despite a huge uplift in the number of faith-based movies, such as Heaven Is for Real and Son of God, and even Ridley Scott’s big-budget epic Exodus: Gods and Kings used the voice of an 11-year-old boy rather than an on-screen actor.
Given the fervent fanbase for the book (it’s sold over 18 million copies worldwide) and the actors who have already inhabited the role (Morgan Freeman, John Huston, erm, will.i.am), she has reason to be nervous. But what can she learn from other movie portrayals of God?

The wisdom of Morgan Freeman

An almighty act to follow
An almighty act to follow
In Bruce Almighty, and less memorably Evan Almighty, Morgan Freeman’s take on the omnipotent creator was as Morgan Freeman-y as you’d expect, and for all the very best reasons. His commanding yet soothing voice and bottomless pot of charisma served the part well, and he was easily the best part of two comedies that deserve to be remembered for approximately nothing else. But while his performance might have gone down well with the masses, some Christians were less impressed, thanks to the film’s “unscrubbed framework” and “questionable content”. This should serve as a reminder for Spencer not to make any chocolate pies during production.

The helpfulness of Steve Coogan

Religious ecstasy
Religious ecstasy
While the appearance of God in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People might be another displeasing portrayal for many Christians, things could have been a lot worse, given what happens in the rest of the film. Steve Coogan takes on dual roles in the drug-fuelled Madchester biopic as Factory Records co-founder Tony Wilson and God, seen by Wilson on a rooftop after a particularly strong joint. He offers a stream of pragmatic business advice and musical opinion, including praise for Shaun Ryder and the Smiths. Given the tortured protagonist of Octavia Spencer’s upcoming thriller, let’s hope she can provide some equally useful input, especially if it involves her calling Mick Hucknall’s music “rubbish” all over again.

The subtlety of Alanis Morissette

She's got the whole world in her pocket.
She’s got the whole world in her pocket. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Channel Four Films
When news hit that Kevin Smith’s Dogma would feature sweary female rocker Alanis Morissette in the role of God, there was an expectation, and an associated fear from Catholic groups, that the casting would result in offence. But the small role was surprisingly dialogue- and angst-free, and Morissette, after understandably killing Ben Affleck’s fallen angel, comes off as actually pretty charming. The decision to lose the booming voice so often seen in films such as The Ten Commandments made for a refreshing change, and although The Shack is mainly focused on the conversations with God, Spencer would be wise to avoid loud histrionics. Plus it never hurts to feature an exploding head.

The kindness of George Burns

Burns in heaven
Burns in heaven. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive
At the age of 80, George Burns was an unlikely choice to play the almighty in the comedy Oh God! but his portrayal of God as a sweet-natured grandparent was a big success. It played into what people wanted to see – benevolent rather than destructive – and the film was followed by two sequels and rumours of a remake, with both Betty White and Ellen Degeneres attached. While a compassionate grandmother might be a bit more of a stretch, Spencer could easily pull off a loving aunt.

The otherworldliness of Val Kilmer

Talk like an Egyptian.
Talk like an Egyptian
While last year’s underwhelming epic Exodus: Gods and Kings might have given us a glossy three-dimensional take on the classic story, the tale had already been told with far more skill on a much smaller budget in 1998’s animated musical The Prince of Egypt. In the burning bush scene, the voice of God appears to Moses as a more ethereal version of his own voice, both originating from Val Kilmer. It’s a smart idea, as it helps to make the advice seem like it comes from Moses’s conscience. Kilmer manages to be commanding and godly yet still mysterious. Spencer’s soothing voice could suit this style rather well, although a lack of musical numbers would be a most welcome diversion.

So in summary...

Thou shalt be wise like Morgan Freeman
Thou shalt not indulge in potty humour
Thou shalt provide helpful advice about how terrible Mick Hucknall’s music is
Thou shalt not be shy about exploding at least one head
Thou shalt act like a kind, older relative
Thou shalt not allow any musical numbers involving Mariah Carey

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Astro Boy film in the works for makers of The Lego Movie

Astro Boy is about to be given a reboot by Australian animation studio Animal Logic.
The Australian animation studio Animal Logic is set to make a live-action superhero film, based on the popular manga character Astro Boy. The makers of past animated hits The Lego Movie and Happy Feet, have signed a deal with Japan’s Tezuka Productions.
Chief executive Zareh Nalbandian said the plan was to create a “Marvel-style” franchise that would be “at the very convergence of live-action, animation and visual effects”, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
“There are very few characters in the entertainment world like Astro Boy that haven’t already been brought to the big screen in a live-action movie,” said Nalbandian.
Authored and illustrated by Osamu Tezuka, Astro Boy was originally titled Mighty Atom, and was a popular Japanese manga series in the 1950s and 60s. The character found new life in the following decades as an animated television show.

The series is based on a robot boy modelled after the late son of his inventor Doctor Tenma, who passed away in a car accident. Astro Boy quickly proves to have special powers and skills that he uses to fight crime and injustice, often defending humans from other more maniacal robots.
A 2009 film adaption of the character was co-produced by American, Hong Kong and Chinese film companies. Called Astro Boy, it had a US$65m budget, featured the voices of Freddie Highmore and Kristen Bell, but outside of China it did not fare well at the global box office.
Animal Logic is one of the world’s busiest animation and visual effects studios having won several awards for its work in The Lego Movie. Fans have suggested it was snubbed by the Oscars when the film failed to receive an Academy award nomination for best movie.
Founded by Nalbandian and Chris Godfrey in 1991, the company’s film credits include the Matrix series and, most recently, The Great Gatsby, Unbroken, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Avengers: Age of Ultron and The Rover.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Testament of Youth: battles of Brittain make for moving biopic

Testament of Youth (2014)
Director: James Kent
Entertainment grade: B
History grade: C-
Vera Brittain’s memoir of her experiences and losses in the first world war was published in 1933 as Testament of Youth. It became an instant bestseller and remains a classic.

Youth

Before the war, Vera’s main obstacles are parents and boredom. She is played brilliantly by the Swedish actress Alicia Vikander (A Royal Affair). Her parents don’t like the idea of her going to university: they fear that if she becomes a bluestocking she will never find a husband. This is more or less accurate. Brittain was bored out of her mind during her girlhood in the beautiful but snobbish and conservative environs of Buxton. “Even at 18, a mentally voracious young woman cannot live entirely upon scenery,” she wrote, adding that she would have been in danger of “dying of spontaneous combustion” had she not had her diary to write and an interesting curate in a nearby village. The film’s screenplay might be accused of losing a little of Brittain’s wit in its translation from page to screen, but it captures her courage and sharpness well enough.
Testament of Youth
‘A mentally voracious young woman cannot live entirely upon scenery’ … Testament of Youth. Photograph: Allstar/BBC Films

Romance

Just as Vera is shouting at her father (Dominic West) that she doesn’t want a husband, in walks hunky young Roland Leighton (Kit Harington). “Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron. All these romantics aren’t good for you, you know,” he says, rather patronisingly, as he helps her collect the books she has hurled out of a window in a fit of teenage angst. The meeting seems contrived, and it is – the two really met at dinner, according to Brittain’s memoir, and there was no book-throwing rage or patronising putdown. Both Vera and Roland are due to go to Oxford, until Roland announces – when they meet on the station platform to go up together – that he’s joining the army instead. The film has, understandably, dramatised this moment, which in real life was communicated by letter. “I don’t think in the circumstances I could easily bring myself to endure a secluded life of scholastic vegetation,” the real Roland Leighton wrote. “I feel that I am meant to take an active part in this war.”
Alicia Vikander with Kit Harington in Testament of Youth
‘All these romantics aren’t good for you, you know’ … Kit Harington as Roland Leighton with Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain

More romance

The film’s recreation of Roland and Vera’s courtship is sweetly done, and the scene in which he leaves for the war – with a train full of desperate, heartbroken women saying goodbye to the men they love – is extremely moving. It is fictionalised, though. “We never kissed and never said a word,” wrote the real Brittain of seeing Leighton off for France.

Heartbreak

Vera cannot live a life of scholastic vegetation either, and leaves Oxford to become a nurse. Christmas approaches, and Roland gets leave to come home and marry her. Vera’s parents are with her at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, and she is already wearing a white suit – “Just half an hour to go!” Then a telephone call comes through. She thinks it must be Roland, but it is his sobbing mother (Anna Chancellor), with the news that he is dead. In reality, there was no wedding scheduled – just a small reunion. The call from Roland’s mother came on the morning of 27 December 1915, as Vera was getting up.

War

The film misses out the real Brittain’s period of nursing in Malta, skipping to 1917 when she travelled to France to work in a field hospital. She is put to work nursing German prisoners of war. One day, a huge number of British casualties come in. As she walks out of the hospital hut, the camera pulls back to show rows of stretchered men laid out on the ground. It pulls back and back, showing more and more as Vera picks her way between them. This isn’t in Brittain’s book, though film buffs will recognise the shot from the famous moment when Scarlett O’Hara walks through lines of injured soldiers in Gone With the Wind. Told that her brother, Edward (Taron Egerton), is among the wounded, she searches frantically for him among the bodies. She finds him, and carefully nurses him back to health. This is fictional. The real Edward Brittain was not wounded in France, nor was he nursed by his sister.
Alicia Vikander in Testament of Youth.
Testament of Youth charts the origins of Brittain’s pacifism Photograph: Allstar/BBC Films

Verdict

A fine and moving film, if heavy-handed in places. The screen version of Testament of Youth gilds the lily of Vera Brittain’s memoir – though fans of the book may well feel it didn’t need so much extra adornment.