Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)

A former CIA agent trains his daughter to become an assassin as they hide out in a log cabin in the Arctic Circle.

Here's another teenage girl with problems but unlike Fish Tank's Mia the problems are slightly more fantastical than winning a dance competition or falling in love with her mother's boyfriend.

Saoirse Ronan plays assassin Hanna, a ghostly-looking teenage girl, who we first meet killing a moose in the snowy wastes. Eric Bana plays her father Erik Heller, a rogue CIA agent on the most-wanted list since losing his German wife Johanna.

Cate Blanchett plays the villain Marissa Wiegler, an over-the-top CIA agent obsessed with oral hygiene, in a similar vein to her turn as an OTT KGB agent in the last Indiana Jones film. She wants Hanna and her dad terminated with extreme prejudice, as these assassin types always say. Tom Hollander puts in an hilariously camp turn as the sadistic Isaacs, a German nightclub owner with bleached blonde-hair and euro trash clothes, flanked by two skinheads with bomber jackets and DMs.

Is this film a fairy story dressed up as a spy thriller or a spy thriller in the style of a fairy tale? The film’s beginning is straight out of the Brothers Grimm with a fairy-tale cottage in the forest where a huntsman and his daughter live undisturbed by the outside world. Or they did until they turn on the GPS tracker so Cate Blanchett can begin hunting them down.

Like the average Bond film the action travels about a fair bit from Arctic Finland to Morocco to Germany though no Bond film I ever saw had 007 hiding out in a VW camper van with a family of Bowie-singing hippies. (Perhaps Daniel Craig should give it a go in the next one...) There's even time for some half-baked exposition about altered DNA and super assassins along the way too.

If it sounds like the proverbial curate’s egg in many ways it is but remarkably the film works which is in no small way due to Joe Wright's solid confident direction. The Chemical Brothers provide a throbbing kinetic soundtrack and the actors manage to keep straight faces throughout.

Although Hanna has a plot that strains at credibility it is a film that looks great and has style in abundance as befits the director of Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement. (Like both those films it features a bravura Steadicam sequence filmed in one take - here Eric Bana enters a Berlin subway station followed closely by a few of Marissa's agents.)

It’s no classic certainly but this brilliant slice of nonsense is worth two hours of anyone’s time.

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

A 15 year-old girl, Mia, lives in Essex with her sister and single mother in a council flat when an Irish security guard called Connor comes into their lives.

Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank evokes the naturalism of Ken Loach’s classic Kes updated to modern day Essex. Mia, played by Katie Jarvis in her first role, is an angry out-of-control teenager excluded from school and waiting to be moved to a “special school”. The first time we see her she abuses another group of teenage girls practising a dance routine in the street, head-butting one and breaking her nose, for no real reason. But underneath all her bravado and swearing lies a scared and vulnerable child trying too hard to grow up fast.

Mia needs something to cling to in order to transcend her everyday drab surroundings. In Kes Billy Casper finds some redemption through training the kestrel. In Fish Tank Mia doesn’t find redemption although she tries to free an old horse from the gypsy encampment thinking (wrongly) that it’s being abused. Mia’s only possible escape comes from secretly practising hip-hop dancing alone in an empty flat dreaming of stardom. Her mother brings home a new boyfriend, Connor, played by Michael Fassbender who befriends her and encourages her dancing aspirations.

It’s almost hard to believe that Katie Jarvis, discovered by the casting director arguing with her boyfriend at Tilbury Town railway station, hadn’t acted before as she is truly mesmerising as Mia. Michael Fassbender is, in roles like this one and in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, steadily becoming one of the best actors of his generation.

Andrea Arnold, writing and directing, has beautifully illuminated that section of society that you don’t often see on film in anything but the most negative terms. If you took much of the output of British cinema as a barometer of the country you’d imagine it was some vast heritage site full of stately houses and vapid grasping yuppies.

The recent inner-city riots and books such as Chavs: the Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones have pushed the debate back again onto the front pages and the front benches of Parliament. What do we do about the generations of the disenfranchised and marginalised who have never worked for a living? Do they have rich inner lives that the middle classes are unaware of? Or do they just want to get wasted and watch reality TV? Would reading a few books help? Is the breakdown of family the real reason that a whole generation of children and young adults live their lives without hope?

A film like Fish Tank certainly forms part of this debate, though it’s not some heart-warming didactic tract about hugging a hoodie. It’s an enjoyable and sometimes heartbreaking film about a young girl trying to make sense of her world which luckily for a lot of people is a world they never have to see unless it’s in a film like this or exploding onto the evening news.

UPCOMING

Upcoming reviews include:

You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010, Woody Allen)
Source Code (2011, Duncan Jones)
Of Gods And Men (2010, Xavier Beauvois)

I am also planning an article about "paranoid" cinema in the 1970s and the influence on today's cinema. Expect a lot about The Conversation, The Parallax View and Chinatown. Probably a bit about Zodiac and the TV series Rubicon.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010, Apichatpong Weerasethakul)

A Thai widower dying of kidney failure spends his final days on his farm conversing with his relatives, alive and dead, while considering his past lives.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul , was last year voted winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is based on the true story of a man named Boonmee who told a Buddhist monk that when meditating he could recall his past lives in great detail.

The long (and dialogue-free) opening sequence has a water buffalo wandering off into the forest before cutting to a long scene in a car travelling to Uncle Boonmee’s farm. Mostly filmed in medium to long shots with little or no close-ups the film has the title character’s reflecting on his past, and eager to make peace with it. As such the film is spiritual without being overly religious. Certainly Buddhist concepts such as Karma and reincarnation are discussed by the characters as are the folk beliefs of Thailand but neither is given precedence over the other. Apparent supernatural phenomenon such as the appearance of Boonmee’s dead wife as a transparent ghost are treated as normal by the characters as is the reappearance of his long missing son who returns in non-human form as a monkey spirit.

The acting by the mainly amateur cast is very naturalistic with standout performances by Thanapat Saisaymar as Uncle Boonmee (the calm point around which the other characters orbit) and Jenjira Pongpas as his playful sister-in-law Auntie Jen. The cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Yukontorn Mingmongkon and Charin Pengpanich is almost painterly with beautifully composed shots of the natural world.

David Bordwell, author of The Way Hollywood Tells It, has shown how the likes of Paul Greengrass in the Bourne films and others have reduced the average length of shots in the modern Hollywood film from roughly 10 seconds pre-1960 to an average range of 4-6 seconds with the average shot length (ASL) of the Bourne Ultimatum a dizzying 2 seconds. For the viewer this means a film is edited into a rapid succession of images which are constantly changing thus giving a forward momentum to the film. The detractors of this style say this reflects a culture where concentration is at an all-time low and an audience impatient with anything requiring our full attention.

In contrast to the Bourne Ultimatum’s queasy 2 seconds per shot the ASL of Uncle Boonmee is a stately 34.1. (That’s slow although not quite as slow as Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr’s film Werckmeister Harmonies which has an ASL of 219 seconds.) For some people the pace of Uncle Boonmee is so slow that we might feel that time has stopped dead in its tracks. There seems to have been a resurgence recently for things like slow cooking as a reaction to the way things are getting ever faster and more frenetic so perhaps a film like Uncle Boonmee is one step in the direction of slow cinema.

The film has little in the way of incident, but you find yourself adapting to its rhythms and getting drawn into its hypnotic pace. It’s refreshing to see this side of a society such as Thailand that we somehow seldom see in the cinema unless it’s used as a touch of “local colour” in a Western blockbuster. It’s sobering to think that had it not won the Palme d’Or what sort of release it would have had in Britain and the United States. We can only wonder what other hidden gems are unseen by the cinema-going public at large because they haven’t won an award or accolade.

Limitless (2011, Neil Burger)

A wannabe writer known more for his drinking than his prose enters into a Faustian pact when he becomes hooked on an experimental smart drug called NZT which increases his intellect.

Limitless is a great thriller with a wry sense of humour. When we first see Eddie Morra (played by Bradley Cooper, of The Hangover fame) he’s dressed like a roadie for Pearl Jam with long straggly hair and is immediately dumped by his go-getting editor girlfriend (Abbie Cornish). What was she doing with this loser anyway? The Inciting Incident (as Robert McKee would have it) is a meeting with his ex-wife’s brother who we infer used to be a small-time drug dealer (and might still be). He gives Eddie a clear pill called NZT which when taken increases his intellect exponentially. A few scenes later Eddie is dressed in a smart suit, with a fashionable short haircut, looking more like the suave Bradley Cooper we’ve seen in the A Team and the Hangover films. Imagine if we could all take a pill just to iron out our sartorial crimes (let alone allowing us to learn Italian in a weekend) I think the drug companies might be onto a winner...

But into each life some rain must fall... The rain in Eddie’s case comes in the form of Gennady, a crazy Russian gangster he’s borrowed some money from with which to invest on the stock market. Silly boy. (Gennady is played by Andrew Howard, an actor surprisingly from Port Talbot in Wales and not St Petersburg.) Robert De Niro has a few scenes as a tycoon called Carl Van Loon (think Donald Trump minus the comb-over) who is impressed enough by Eddie’s new-found intellect that he asks him to broker a major corporate merger. Anna Friel, playing Eddie’s ex-wife and Abbie Cornish, so good as Fanny Brawne in Bright Star, Jane Campion’s film about John Keats, take on the other main roles.

Leslie Dixon’s screenplay sticks (for the most part) closely to the plot of The Dark Fields, the source novel by Alan Glynn. It’s always tense when one of your favourite novels is adapted by Hollywood but this is one rare occasion where the author needn’t disown the film. (Incidentally, I still think the Great Gatsby-inspired title The Dark Fields is better than Limitless but that’s a minor quibble.) Style-wise it owes something to David Fincher’s Fight Club, as well as some visual touches from Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind (I’m thinking particularly of the representation of cascading stock market figures via some clever CGI effects).

Neil Burger, previously best known for enjoyable magician romp The Illusionist with Edward Norton, has made an extremely enjoyable and stylish film with solid performances and hyper-kinetic cinematography. One of the most purely enjoyable films of the year so far, Limitless is a thriller that I can unreservedly recommend to anyone.

Vincere (2009, Marco Bellocchio)

Vincere (Italian for "Win", a popular Fascist song) is the story of the future Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's relationship with Ida Dalser, a woman who may or may not have been his first wife. They had a son together but once Mussolini returned from the battlefields of the First World War he married someone else, cut himself off from Ida and set about erasing both her and their son (also called Benito) from history.

We first meet Mussolini, played by the excellent Filippo Timi, as a moustached Marxist on the up challenging God to strike him down. When God fails to oblige he declares that God does not exist. In the aftermath of a rally he meets shop-owner Ida, played by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who soon in the throes of amour fou sells both her business and home to fund his newspaper venture. We sense immediately that this will end badly. Once WWI comes along young Benito is swept up by nationalistic fervour into joining the fight and loses touch with Ida. On his return the former socialist has become a committed fascist, soon to become Il Duce. Though the emotional world of the characters, mainly Ida, is easy to follow the same cannot be said for the political and historical background which is often either muddled or simplified with too much jumping around in time at the start of the film. And why exactly does Mussolini change from the left to the far-right - was it simply political opportunism? Alas we never find out here.

The two main actors are excellent but the direction frustrates their efforts with unnecessary stylistic tics such as the "March of Time" style newspaper headlines which flash up on screen accompanied by newsreel footage of rallies, marching goosestepping Fascists and most curious of all, a line of breastfeeding lady Fascists. The disappearance of Timi halfway through the film is only explained when Timi returns towards the end sans moustache playing Benito Junior for a few scenes. Once he becomes Il Duce, Mussolini is only represented in the film through marble busts, paintings and newsreel footage, his chin jutting out arrogantly, arms tightly-folded like Les Dawson, delivering his Fascistic slogans.

The acting is never boring but it's a film more to be admired than enjoyed.

If you want to see a film about Fascist Italy I'd recommend you watch Bertolucci's masterpiece The Conformist instead.

L'Emploi du Temps /Time Out (2001, Laurent Cantet) and L'Adversaire/The Adversary (2002, Nicole Garcia)

In 1993 Jean-Claude Romand, a seemingly well-respected and wealthy French doctor claiming to work for the World Health Organisation, murdered his wife, two children and elderly parents when his lies and deception were about to be uncovered. This true story provided the inspiration for two French films: 2001's L'Emploi du Temps (Time Out) and the following year's L'Adversaire based on Emmanuel Carrere's bestseller.

L'Emploi du Temps (Time Out):

Two different approaches to the source material result in two very different films. L'Emploi du Temps takes the Romand case as a starting point to explore a man’s relation to his work and how it defines him as a father, a husband, a son and as a man.

In L’Emploi du Temps Aurelien Recoing plays Vincent, fired from his office job at the start of the film and who invents an imaginary job in preference to admitting his failure to his family. He spends his days driving around France and Switzerland pocketing his friends’ money in a bogus investment scheme to fund his deception. Recoing carries the film, in his interactions with his unsuspecting family or as he meets a number of odd characters on his travels through the motorways and motels almost in the manner of a European road movie.

Cantet uses the Romand case to produce a film more drama than thriller. It shows well the emasculating effect that unemployment can have on a person’s sense of self and self-worth without coming across as either didactic or moralistic. The film treats Vincent’s plight with understanding as to why he should have chosen to lie to save face though never completely shying away from showing him as a sometimes desperate and weak man. L’Emploi du Temps is leavened with some moments of light relief and a possibly optimistic ending.

L'Adversaire:

In L'Adversaire Daniel Auteuil plays Jean-Marc Faure, a version of Jean-Claude Romand in all but name who as a family man and imposter treats his lies as a way of life until he is left with no way out except committing the most heinous of crimes. Auteuil is like a character out of a Patricia Highsmith novel simultaneously desperate to carry on the charade but also subconsciously doing everything he can to expose the subterfuge in which he has entrapped himself. Initially it seems as if Auteuil hopes his deception is exposed so he can confess all but the deeper he gets the more unable he is to extricate himself from his situation.

Faure is a both a failure and a coward, unable to face up to his responsibilities and admit that he never qualified as a doctor but instead drives around aimlessly (like L’Emploi du Temps the film shows the sheer boredom inherent in living such a lie ) pretending to attend his office or bogus conferences. During one scene we see him sitting in a motorway car-park pointlessly highlighting sentences in a medical textbook as if such behaviour lends veracity to his dreams of a high-flying medical career. We never fully get to the bottom of why Auteuil’s character needs to pass himself off as a bogus doctor though we get hints that his upbringing as the smart son of a forester has left him ashamed of his humble background. Like L’Emploi’s Vincent, he begins swindling his family and his father-in-law out of their life-savings to fund an increasingly extravagant life-style.

Auteuil, in a rare dark role, is excellent as the fantasist devoid of emotion coldly eating dinner while his murdered family lies dead upstairs.
In this more thriller-like treatment of the Romand case L’Adversaire shows the darkness behind the bourgeois dream of a bigger house and a better car and how in deceitfully acquiring these material things he ends up destroying both himself and his family.

Barney's Version (2010, Richard J. Lewis)

Paul Giamatti stars as Barney Panofsky, another lovable loser of the type that Giamatti played so well in Sideways and American Splendour.

We first meet Barney in 1970s Rome where he, Boogie and their artist friend Leo live a bohemian lifestyle of booze and drugs. Barney then moves back to his native Montreal to pursue a career as a TV producer of a soap opera about a Canadian Mountie. The two strands of his life, his marriages and his friendship with the talented but feckless Boogie intertwine until Boogie’s disappearance.

It’s a film that’s not afraid to be touching one moment and laugh-out funny in the next but it nevers feels affected or forced. Minnie Driver is brilliant as his gauche second wife. Dustin Hoffman nearly steals the film as Giamatti’s ex-cop father Izzy particularly during the dinner party scene at Barney's in-laws.

The lugubrious Giamatti is excellent (as always) as Barney showing how one man can live an ultimately worthy and decent life despite being a bit of a rogue.

Barney’s Version is one of the better films I’ve seen recently with an life-affirming message about life, love, friendship, memory and regret.

Unknown (2011, Jaume Collet-Serra)

Liam Neeson heads to Berlin in Unknown, following the success of 2008’s Paris-set action thriller Taken.

Neeson plays Dr Martin Harris who's just flown into Berlin for a science conference with his slightly frosty trophy wife Liz (played by January Jones). However, as soon as he arrives at his hotel he finds he’s left his briefcase and passport at the airport taxi-rank so without telling Mrs Harris he hops into the first taxi available and back he goes. Four days later, he wakes from a coma to find that... But to say any more would spoil the plot of this implausible Hitchcock knock-off.

Like Roman Polanski’s Frantic and other Hitchcock-style “wrong man on the run” films it can never compete with the master of suspense’s best. What starts out as a nifty thriller with an intriguing premise ends up through illogical plotting as plain daft. Whereas Taken had memorable scenes and good action sequences Unknown never feels anything other than an exercise in creating another film by stitchng together similar elements in slightly different ways. The acting is good with a standout cameo from Bruno Ganz’s kindly ex-Stasi officer and solid support from Diane Kruger as a beautiful Bosnian taxi driver. The excellent cinematography makes the most of a dark and wintery Berlin.

To make a great film Alfred Hitchcock once said you need three things: "the script, the script, and the script" and this is exactly what Unknown lacks despite having a lot of other things going for it.

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Welcome to my blog, an attempt to do a few film reviews, think and write about what I've seen, what I liked and what I didn't. Any comments that you care to leave will be appreciated and I'll answer any questions as and when they come up!

Films and filmmakers that I enjoy include Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Woody Allen, the Coen Brothers. But expect an eclectic mix of reviews and views.