Carnage

Two sets of middle-class parents meet to discuss and try and sort out a fight that happened between their two sons leaving one boy quite badly hurt. From the intially civil, gradually the polite and correct masks begin to slip, the arguments deepen and alliances continually shift.

Carnage is decidedly stage-y for a film. There are two reasons for this - it is adapted from a French stage play and (due to his well-publicised legal difficulties) director Roman Polanski shot the whole thing in a Manhattan apartment completely recreated on a French sound stage, rather than on location. There are disadvantages to this - the reasons that one couple don't just leave sometimes feel rather implausible, the characters become drunk that little bit too quickly - in other words, at times it feels contrived. But it's worth bearing with it, because once it really gets going this is a brutally funny satire of middle-class mores. It's probably the best that Polanski has produced in a decade.

The strong cast are all on great form too - Christoph Waltz's lawyer is probably the most emotionally, morally and physically detached, spending half the time on the phone trying to hush up a scandal with a drug company he's representing. He also seems to almost delight in the mayhem that ensues and gets most of the best lines. Kate Winslet does well with perhaps the most difficult, least defined character who swings the most from compliant to resistant. Jodie Foster is perfectly cast as the liberal writing a book on Darfur, the most attached to doing the right thing as she sees it, but unaware of her own hypocrisy, whilst John C Reilly is great as her blue collar husband pretending to go along with her values whilst pining for the world of John Wayne. There are some great moments like the men bonding in mourning over the drowned Blackberry.Also notice the moment not in the apartment over the closing credits and what this says about the point of it all.

Overall - 7.5/10 Funny, at times brutally so. Get past the theatricality and there's a brilliant ensemble with great material.

The Descendants

The Descendants is Alexander Payne's first full length film since 2004's Sideways. It is the tale of Matt King (George Clooney), Hawaiian landowner and descendant of the original royalty, having to come to terms with his wife being in a coma, needing to take a more hands on approach to parenting his two daughters and learning that prior to the coma his wife was having an affair. On top of this he also has a decision to make on behalf of his extended family about who (if anybody) to sell a huge bit of untouched Hawaii real estate to.

As in his previous movies (Sideways, About Schmidt and to a lesser extent Election), Payne takes complex human situations and mines them for both pathos and humour, the humour sometimes straying into the apparrently inappropriate but nonetheless funny - the scene where King and his oldest daughter verbally disect his wife's lover (a surprisingly good Matthew Lillard) whilst standing in front of him is one standout. Here, this is also combined with a strong sense of place, giving the audience a real feel for Hawaii (even if the music does begin to get irritating after a while). The story goes to some rather predictable places (the ultimate decision about the land-sale) and some unpredictable ones, but ultimately that's not really the point. It's the humanity of the characters and very real emotions they face - even the most apparrently shallow (Nick Krause's Sid coming across rather like Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted mode) get moments that reveal another side.

Here Payne is aided by some stunning performances. Clooney has gathered all the praise and he's on note perfect form here (although maybe not career best) from the comedy running to the moments of real feeling. As he gets older, the comparisons with the likes of Cary Grant become more telling - it's a great performance and yet you never forget that you're watching Clooney, but really that doesn't matter. The really amazing thing is that someone who you never forget is such a big star can still make a millionaire into an everyman hero and that's what puts Clooney in a class almost by himself and where the Grant comparisons are so valid. For my money, he was better in both Syriana  and Up in the Air than he is here, but still deserves the Oscar nom (although either Oldman or Dujardin would be worthier winners for me).

The buzz around Clooney has also distracted somewhat from two amazing performances by the young actresses playing his daughters. Shailene Woodley (as the older Alex) is particularly good and is clearly a name to watch for the future.

Overall - 8/10 Intelligent, heartfelt and funny. Payne and Clooney combine well to make this well worth watching.

The Year Oscar Got it More or Less Right

So the results are in, the campaigning and speculation are over for another year (and no, I'm not talking about the US presidential elections). Oscar has made its decisions and, for once, there's not much you could really argue with.

No Country for Old Men edged out There Will be Blood in the big categories and it was the more enjoyable of the two films. Daniel Day-Lewis' performance was justly recognised as was Javier Baardem's - a talented and undersung actor finally getting his deserved moment in the spotlight. There was finally some deserved love for the Coens and a subtitled performance winning in best actress. It was also good to see The Bourne Ultimatum picking up awards, albeit only in the technical categories.

Atonement thoroughly deserved the best score as Juno did for screenplay and it was nice to see indie-charmer Once holding off the Enchanted three-pronged attack for best song. Ratatouille was always a shoe-in and The Counterfeiters was the only one of the foreign language films I'd seen, but it was good, so no complaints there.

The only slight quibble I'd have would be in the best supporting actress - not that Tilda Swinton wasn't good - she was, but Cate Blanchett was just superb in I'm Not There. At the end of the day maybe her double nomination hurt her or maybe the film was just too inaccessible for many Oscar voters.

But all in all, Oscar has set itself a high standard to live up to in years to come and given the right people the prizes.

Just for fun - some Oscar predictions

So what will happen tomorrow night. Well here are my guesses - I think in general we're looking at a contest between the two Texas-filmed entries - There Will Be Blood (review coming soon) and No Country for Old Men, with There Will Be Blood seeming to have the momentum going into things.

Best Picture - Lets rule out Juno as indie comedies don't win big, Michael Clayton ain't good enough and Atonement seems to lack the buzz, so you'd have to go for There Will Be Blood although I think I preferred No Country more as a watch. Overlooked in the nominations was The Assassination of Jesse James


Best Director - Traditionally this goes to the same film as Best Picture, so could be Paul Thomas Anderson's year, but don't bet against the academy following a recent trend and splitting them and going for the Coens. As a real outside bet, Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Overlooked in the nominations - Joe Wright did a better job with Atonement than either the direction in Michael Clayton or Juno. Also, although it would never happen, Paul Greengrass did a wonderful job directing The Bourne Ultimatum - unfortunately you need to be called Scorcese to get nominated for directing a genre flick.

Best Actor - It's hard to look beyond Daniel Day Lewis at the moment - a neck ahead in a strong field. Johnny Depp will win an Oscar one year, but not this one. If its not Lewis, it will almost certainly be Tommy Lee Jones. Overlooked in the nominations - Brad Pitt for Jesse James and Beicio Del Toro for Things We Lost in the Fire. Along with second nominations for Jones (No Country) and Philip Seymour Hoffman

Best Actress- well it won't be Ellen Page, I've a feeling Cate Blanchett's (stronger) supporting actress nod will count against her and Marion Cottillard's performance is subtitled, rarely a winner with the academy. So, Julie Christie is favourite, but don'tbet against a surprise win for the perenially overlooked Laura Linney. Overlooked in the nominations - Halle Berry for Things we Lost in the Fire.

Best Supporting Actor - a very open and high quality field, ranging from young to old, co-leads to cameos. Will probably come down to Javier Baardem against Casey Affleck, but don't rule out a sentimental vote for Hal Holbrook. I'm going with Baardem to get a well-deserved award. Overlooked in the nominations - Tom Cruise for Lions for Lambs and Chris Cooper for Breach.

Best Supporting Actress - for my money Cate Blanchett is streets ahead of the field in the category. As an outside bet, Tilda Swinton to repeat her Bafta success. Overlooked in the nominations Meryl Streep for Lions for Lambs

Original Screenplay - it's hard to see this not being Juno's deserved moment for success in the category quirky indies traditionally triumph in.

Adapted Screenplau - Will probably be between the big two again, although don't rule out The Diving Bell. I'm going for No Country for this one.

Elsewhere - Ratatouille will win Best Animated film and Atonement's consolation will come in Best Score.With three out of five nominations, Enchanted will surely win best song and The Assassination of Jesse James will pick up best cinematography.

What I've been watching this week

Shooter – 3/5

This is a film for everybody who loves a good conspiracy theory. The plot, such as it, follows Mark Wahlberg’s Bob Lee Swagger (how’s that for an all-American name) – an expert marksmen, left for dead when a mission in a country he shouldn’t have been in goes wrong. Having survived, several years later his patriotism is played upon to recruit him to try and work out how a potential assassin is going to make an attempt on the president’s life. Too late he realises that he’s actually there to take the fall for the assassination. What follows is less an attempt to clear his name than an effort to wipe out those responsible through the standard twists and turns.

In reality its nothing new – its all been done before and done better. Without giving too much away, the conspiracy revolves around securing oil supplies in the developing world, which you guess is supposed to add some contemporary relevance, but without the seriousness of, say, a Syriana, it just feels a bit bandwagon-y and old hat now. Danny Glover, his voice husky to the verge of incomprehensibility at times, is the year’s least surprising villain to date. And the implied treatment of token woman/romantic interest (Kate Mara – seen in last season of 24) when she’s captured feel unnecessarily nasty for a film which is fundamentally about entertainment. All in all the film’s just not really as smart as it would like to think.

On the plus side, director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) handles the action and set pieces very well and the action is very entertaining. This is aided by Wahlberg’s increasing confidence as a leading man/action hero – carrying the movie more or less by himself for the first time. He’s come a long way since the Funky Bunch! He’s ably assisted by the excellent Michael Pena as the FBI agent who twigs that something’s not quite right.

So, nothing original – but entertaining conspiracy thriller/action piece. Despite its best efforts it can’t compete with Bourne, but if you like this sort of thing is probably worth checking out.

The Lives of Others (Das Lieben der Anderen) – 5/5

This is the film that to the surprise of many (most of whom, myself included, probably hadn’t seen it yet) beat Pan’s Labyrinth and Days of Glory to the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. I’ve got to admit that, despite the critical acclaim I approached this film with a fair amount of wariness. I guess I kind of resented the defeat of Pan’s Labyrinth, which was one of my favourite films of last year. I was also aware of Oscar’s tendancy in the Foreign Film category to reward overly sentimental mush over genuinely innovative and excellent films (Nowhere in Africa – Exhibit A). Finally a German film about the Stasi observing people in the old East German promised to be, honestly, just a little bit grim.

Having seen it, my opinion is that the Oscar was well deserved – this film is utterly compelling and enthralling, brilliantly scripted and acted and subtly, yet powerfully, moving. The plot centres around Stasi Captain Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) who is assigned the task of surveilling playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch – seen recently as the SS officer in Black Book). Gradually, as he is drawn more into Dreyman and his actress girlfriend’s lives, the more he moves from observer to participant – manipulating and controlling events.

Koch is suitably charismatic as the committed socialist writer who still falls under suspicion and Martina Gedeck (Matt Damon’s German secretary in The Good Shepherd) is excellent as the girlfriend. However, the film belongs to Mühe’s subtle and complex portrayal of the Stasi captain. In contrast to his self-interested superiors, Wiesler is a true believer in the rightness of his role – his cold detachment describing interrogation techniques to students in the film’s opening is truly chilling. However, the more he is drawn into Dreyman’s life, the more he begins to change himself. I have seen parallels made with Robin Williams’ Sy in One Hour Photo, but the difference is crucial. The more Sy gets drawn into the life of the family whose photos he develops, the creepier and more divorced from reality he becomes. However, Wiesler, through Dreyman’s life, starts to re-discover his humanity and seek more connetion with the world. He emerges as the true hero of the film, risking and ultimately losing much as he plays a dangerous game.

A post-script, set after the fall of the Berlin wall, could potentially have been a mis-step, but as with the rest of the film, the obvious grandstanding moments are sidestepped in favour of more delicate and convincing touches. And the final scene of recognition between the two leads is entirely appropriate for two me who impact each others lives greatly without ever actually meeting and is carried out with a brilliant yet careful touch. The final line is astoundingly simple, and yet profoundly works on several levels – a fitting climax to an intelligent, gripping, original, thought-provoking and moving film. A film made even more remarkable by the fact that this is writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s debut feature.

Following on the heels of other recent successes like Downfall and Goodbye Lenin, this is further evidence that German cinema is thriving both creatively and commercially. A genuine must-see movie – don’t let any preconceived ideas about it, put you off!

The Curse of the Golden Flower – 3.5/5

The latest film from Zhang Yimou, the director who gave us The House of Flying Daggers and the brilliant Hero, is as you might expect visually striking. In fact, its so striking that, like staring at the sun, its in danger of burning a permanent image on your retina. The exquisite beauty of the previous two films is replaced by the jaw-droppingly spectacular in excesses of silver and gold and a variety of gaudy colours. At one level, this reflects the moral decadence and corruption of the royal family at the centre of the film, it does all feel just that wee over the top. This is also a much gorier film than the previous two – whereas in the Flying Daggers blood dripped poignantly onto the snow at the end, here it splatters just about everywhere. Finally, it is a much less fight/action driven film than the previous ones.

Other critics have compared the plot to Shakespearean tragedies like Macbeth or King Lear, but in truth the characters lack that amount of depth, and if a Western cultural comparison must be made, Greek tragedy is perhaps a better point to start from. The royal family at the centre of the film and whole new layers to any understanding of dysfunctional. The emperor is slowly sending the empress demented by poisoning her medicine with a black fungus. The empress is plotting the overthrow of the emperor, recruiting the middle of his three sons to her cause. The eldest son is a bit of bumbler who manages to get romantically involved with both his step-mum and, unwittingly, his half-sister. Whilst the youngest son has nobody-loves-me, I’m going to kill you all issues.

Three things lift this above the average. Firstly, Chow Yun Fat’s coolly restrained, smug-glint-in-the-eye, beard-stroking villain as the emperor is a joy to watch throughout. Secondly, Gong Li adds real depth and a strange kind of dignity the empress, who is forced by circumstance and protocol to repeatedly drink the medicine she knows is killing her. Her performance adds real tragedy to the mix. But most of all, when the fight scenes do come, we are given evidence yet again that Zhang’s are the surest hands in the business at this kind of thing and he can still turn out the stunning and exciting that leave other directors in his shadow.

This is no Hero, but if you go with lessened expectations, its still worth checking out, sitting back and just drinking in the spectacle for a couple of hours. You probably won’t see anything quite like it for a very long time.

Thoughts on the year so far in Movieland

OK, so I thought I’d start this off by looking at the year so far movie-wise now that we’re at the end of the award season. And I think the overall feeling has to be one of vague disappointment. The major contenders have come and gone, but very little actually sparkled. The Pursuit of Happyness, Bobby, Dreamgirls, The Good Shpherd, Letters From Iwo Jima, Apocalypto, Notes on a Scandal – there were all OK movies in their way, but nothing to rave about – a definite sense of could do better. I seem to have been one of the few who actually liked Babel, but would have to admit that it wasn’t up to the standards of Amores Perros or 21 Grams. A similar sense of underachievement pervades less award-friendly, more crowd-pleasing genre efforts like Ghost Rider or Music and Lyrics.

Africa
On the plus side, Africa has come out rather well (or badly, depending on your perspective) with The Last King of Scotland and Blood Diamond proving to be two of the most powerful and gripping films of the year to date. The former driven by such a wonderfully accurate performance from Forrest Whittaker (fully deserving of all the plaudits and awards that followed) that it quite distracts from a plot which is slightly hokey. It is probably marginally the better of the two, with Blood Diamond losing marks for turning a bit too Rambo-esque in the final act. However, I have one quibble – both films, as with every Hollywood film of Africa I can think of from The African Queen to Cry Freedom, felt the need to have a white hero to the story. When will Hollywood have the courage to make an African film with an African hero?

Oscars
This year’s Oscars for me had to rank amongst the most disappointing and just plain wrong for many years. Yes, on the merit of his career Martin Scorcese fully deserves an Oscar, but is The Departed really the best example of direction this year? Surely the work of Greengrass (United 93), del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) or Cuaron (the shamefully un-nominated Children of Men) were better examples of the art of direction. And best film? Yes The Departed was an entertaining movie, but it was somehow less than the sum of its parts and considerably inferior to its excellent Hong Kong original (Infernal Affairs). Is this the best Hollywood can offer an inferior copy of a far eastern film in a genre where it used to reign supreme? It managed to add length to the running time, whilst simultaneously losing character depth. Matt Damon’s character in particular suffered from a change in motivation which made his actions in the final act completely inexplicable and ridiculous (when I went to see it, the audience ended up laughing, and not in a good way, at the end).

And don’t even get me started on all those nominations for The Queen. Yes, Helen Mirren’s performance was a superb dramatic creation, but it was surrounded by and mismatched to a series of cheap and flabby caricatures at the expense of soft targets. Does the fact that this aspect of the film is so little remarked upon indicate that this is the way we actually see these public figures now? If they had been fictional characters, the criticism would have been of a shallow lack of realism – maybe we should be more critical of the images portrayed in the media. As such it felt like the film failed to really get to grips with the events of those weeks when the whole country seemed overcome with something – grief? Guilt? Insanity? – at the death of a woman they had been quite happy to see exploited and ridiculed in the press just weeks before.

But back at the Oscars, the acting awards at least were more deserved – Forrest Whittaker was richly deserving of his statuette, whilst it was great to see the ever-reliable Alan Arkin getting some recognition for the excellent Little Miss Sunshine. However, the all-conquering Whittaker-Mirren juggernaut did disguise the fact that this year, for once there was some real quality in the Best Actress field (more so than for the male counterparts) and the hype surrounding Dame Helen’s royal turn meant Judi Dench’s and Penelope Cruz’s equally impressive performances were largely overlooked. Ms. Cruz, of course, always being likely to miss out as academy voters seem incapable of judging the quality of an acting performance whilst reading subtitles. Which brings us to the criminality of Volver not even get a nom for Best Foreign Film and, having been nominated, Pan’s Labyrinth not winning. Meanwhile, back with the acting, Jennifer Hudson’s award was the end of a fairy-tale story, but was surely on the basis of her singing than her acting, which whilst good for a first outing, was not the equal of any of her fellow nominees.

Silver Linings
Well, good to get that off my chest. But amidst this sense of vague disappointment, let’s be thankful for the few rays of sunshine – the unrestrained fun and joy of Hot Fuzz and charmingly weird yet strangely moving The Science of Sleep – which have brightened the cinema screens so far this year. Here’s looking to the Summer of Three to raise my spirits – Bourne 3, Spidey 3, Pirates 3, Shrek 3 – surely at least one will not disappoint.