A Girl & A Gun

I'm Not There (2007), Todd Haynes

It's a Todd Haynes film, and it's around and about Bob Dylan. It's a twisty beast of a biopic and it's going to infuriate a lot of people - particularly hard-core Dylan fans who have a lot of versions of Dylan here to dislike, many of which will probably come across as parodies to the extremely well informed and non of which are going to necessarily conform to their particular preferred version.

You get seven ages of Dylan, played by six actors:

Woody Guthrie (the 14 year old Marcus Carl Franklin) - Dylan's imaginary youth as orphaned black hobo
Arthur Rimbald (Ben Whishaw) Dylan as uppity symbolist poet national security threat
Jack Rollins (Christian Bale) Dylan as truth-singing folk star
Robbie Clarke (Heath Ledger) as famous womanizing actor and rubbish husband
Pastor John (Christian Bale again) Dylan as sincere 1970s evangelical preacher
Jude Quinn (Cate Blanchett) Dylan as cynical, drug addled Rock and Roll star
Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) Dylan as post-66 exile

Haynes seems to be having a whale of a time grappling with the thorny task of representing genuine, massive celebrity, wisely dispensing immediately with any pretense to be uncovering the truth about his subject. Instead he cycles through the most popular myths about Dylan (and not necessarily in chronological order), ending up in a town full of masked and costumed characters. Richard Gere's Dylan may be conceptually the strongest character in what turns out to be a Dylan themed Masque, unfortunately he also turns out to have the least interesting stuff to do and say.

Christian Bale's return from the wilderness of disillusionment as Pastor John has got to be my favorite Dylan, and the short segment is Haynes at his observational best. Cate Blanchett, as the snake hipped, electric haired and newly electrified Dylan is the star performer here though. She really manages to channel her experience of the insanity of celebrity through Jude Quinn, despite having some of the most cringe-worthy moments of the whole movie to deal with. Particularly noteworthy for sheer crass embarrassment is the literal montage to Ballad of a Thin Man, but unfortunately that isn't only the only heavy handed note in her sequence. Her performance is incredible though. 

Dylan granted Haynes rights to use his music in the movie, and in the end it's clearly the soundtrack which plays the starring roll here - precisely as it should be.   

Grace Is Gone (2007), James C. Strouse

Although this film is set in present day US, it's main character Stanley Philipps (played by John Kusack),  could have stepped strait out of the 1950's. Stanley manages a hardware store, isn't great at sharing his emotions and believes in the nobility of armed service. His wife Grace (Sargent Philipps) is stationed in Iraq, and their two daughters are both dealing with her absence. Unfortunately Stanley doesn't cope well with the news of Graces death, and instead of telling his daughters, drives them across the country to visit a theme park.

It sounds like a promising story and won the Audience Award for Drama on it's premier at the 2007 Sundance Festival. Unfortunately the films ambition isn't matched by what's delivered, and the award puts me off Sundance a bit. The obvious attempt at a universal message about loss and the emotionally manipulative ending intentionally softens the blow of any hard edged questions about war, and in particular the US's involvement in Iraq. It's as if they set out to make a film for conservative war mongers in the hopes that by the end they'd be wiping away a tear and muttering, "well, it's not really nice when people die. Especially for their families".

The film seems overly concerned with not offending anyone, and therefore is a good donkey to back at next years Oscars. The only person who says anything anti-war or anti-Bush ("your monkey president"), Stanley's brother John, is effectively dismissed by being portrayed as a high school drop out who's made a complete mess of his life.

   

4: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), Tim Story

I just checked out my previous review for the first installment of this abomination of a franchise and found I must have been slipped some kind of hallucinogen (actually, exposure to Thunderbirds may well have been enough to twist my melon into some non head related fruit).

Without a doubt the worst movie of 2007, spewing bile on the mighty Marvel empire. Stan Lee should have stapled himself to his dressing room rather than taking the lame cameo he gets here. Not only was it hard to care about the fate of any of the leads, it became hard towards the end of the film to belive that humankind deserves anything more than protracted, painful annihilation. It's also tough to come up with more than one adjective to describe any of the characters. I love Andre Braugher and while I'm glad he's eating, this film actually made me doubt his greatness.

Plus Galactus is an enormous disappointment.   

Eastern Promises (2007), David Cronenberg

Viggo Mortensen is back; he's similarly as mysterious as in his last Cronenberg outing, but looking like a scarier version of Kurt Douglas as Nikolai Luzhin, driver and 'cleaner' to a Russian gangster boss living in London. Hard-working Naomi Watts  plays an innocent midwife drawn into a world of grimness when she tries to find relatives for the child of a 14-year-old who died giving birth.

OK - this sounds like a pretty contrived and slightly preposterous set up, but the script, by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), manages to just about wheel the characters into a world of probability. Personally, all my favorite Cronenberg films are the ones he's scripted himself (which he seems to have stopped doing around the turn of the century). Similarly, the scenes that work best for me are the ones where he and his effects crew get to go ape in: After watching this you'll realize that there are just not enough naked men knife fight  scenes in cinema.

Machinima Festival Europe 07 Awards

I was delighted to be invited along to the first Machinima Festival Europe 07 award ceremony last night. The party followed a full day of screenings and a programme which covered Machinima's history, tools and techniques, and legal issues at Leicester's De Montfort University. International luminaries of the machinima community were out in force, including Paul Marino, Friedrich Kirschner, Burnie Burns, Hugh Hancock and Frank Dellario.

Nanoflix's Stolen Life took the awards for Best Visual Design, Best Direction and Best Picture.

Best Story: The Snow Witch - Britannica Dreams (UK/Canada) Sims 2

Best Commercial: When the Postman Spits Twice - SL-Inworld Productions Second Life

Best Technical: Machinima Island (episode 1) - La-Interactiva (UK) Second Life

Best Experimental: Cirque du Machinima: Cuckoo Clock - Tom Jantol (Croatia) MotionBuilder

Best Sound: Innocent Minds - James Dubose (USA) Halo 2

Best Student: Machinima! with Officer Dan - Amorphous Blob Productions (USA) Half-Life2 (Counter Strike Source)

Best Series: The Grid Review (episode 3, 7 and 8) - the ILL Clan (USA) Second Life

Best Visual Design: Stolen Life - Nanoflix Productions (Australia) 3D game studio

Best Direction: Stolen Life - Nanoflix Productions (Australia) 3D game studio

Best Picture: Stolen Life - Nanoflix Productions (Australia) 3D game studio

A full list of all nominated films (PDF warning)

Half Nelson (2006), Ryan Fleck

It's the anti-Dangerous Minds, and that's high praise and a good enough reason to exist for any film. The cast here are superb too and do a great job. Anthony Mackie is pitch perfect as local entrepreneur Frank, and Shareeka Epps puts in an outstanding performance as Drey, Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling)'s student and confidant. If anything, the film is a victim of it's own success - there are few things more boring in this life than a crack-head, but a Marxist historian has got to be high in the running and unfortunately Dan, the main protagonist, happens to be both. Ryan Gosling does such a great job of convincing the audience that he really is that much of a loser that you begin to long for more scenes without him in. Dan's dates in the film are all completely out of it - which explains their high tolerance to his endless bleating about his ex-junkie ex-girlfriend and his failings as a teacher.

At times, his class room technique put me in mind of Titicut Follies, with Dan taking the role of the Frank Sinatra impersonating superintendent, and I felt desperately sorry for his students who were basically hostage to his constant rambling on about dialectics. Little wonder the youth of today are flocking to crime.

Meet the Robinsons (2007), Stephen J. Anderson

Far less painful than expected. Perky, rapid-fire Disney animation which breezes through the story of Lewis, an abandoned child brought up in a children's home, with a genius for invention that's driven by his need to belong to a family and held back by his self-doubt.

My 10 yr old son enjoyed the film on the whole, especially Lewis's room mate Goob, but was incensed by the loop holes in the films time-traveling logic and kept shouting "time paradox!". Four days later and I am still listening to his complaints and ruminations on these, but I'm taking it as a good (if slightly tiring) indication.   

It had some decent, if non-too subtle, messages that most parents would welcome (probably including my own): Make the best of your situation however rubbish; appreciate your failures as necessary to your successes; keep trying. Translated to cynical, these are probably easier to recognise as if you think your situation is crappy then do something about it; failure and abandonment are tough but thats life; and no one likes a whiner.

A Girl & A Gun goes to the Times BFI 51st London Film Festival

It's true - I've been blessed with a press pass to this years BFI film Festival. Highlights abound, but I'm already trembling slightly at the thought of Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, Haynes' I'm Not There, Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire & Takeshi's Glory to the Filmmaker!.

Gonggongui jeog (aka Public Enemy) (2002), Woo-Suk Kang

Sticking with South Korean cinema for the time being, the first thing I've got to say is what an excellent title Gonggongui jeog is. If I never manage to learn many more Korean phrases, I'll be OK muttering this one (probably to myself, since I don't know how well it'll go down in most everyday situations).

Public Enemy can be taken to initially refer to the films anti-hero, Detective Kang of the Kang Precinct, a bad-ass cop who spends all his time beating up villains in order to extract bribes or steal their merchandise in order to sell on himself. What differentiates this film from Kitano's 1998 Violent Cop and 1992s Bad Lieutenant is easy to sum up: pace and humor. It's a really gripping, actually funny film which charts Detective Kang's transformation from total git to partial git, who develops a familiarity with the idea of public service and starts actually arresting people.

Kang's change of heart comes about when he meets someone who is even worse than him, and decides to make sure the villain gets his comeuppance - Kang style. The only down side to the film is the ominous presence of a Public Enemy II and III over at IMDB. I'll just avoid them though.