A Girl & A Gun

A Girl & A Gun goes to the 7th annual Tribeca Film Festival, NYC

That's right - your favorite film blog is off to where the the movie action is right now - New York City. A Girl & A Gun has been given her shiny new press pass and is off to explore. The Tribeca fest is screening a massive 121 feature films and 79 short films from 41 countries. Obviously I'm not going to be able to take them all in, and I'll be missing a couple of the opening parties (boo!), and some of the press screenings I did really want to catch, due to work commitments. But I'll be on the scene from Sunday, enjoying films until my eyes bleed.

What are my top tips/wanna sees?

Savage Grace (Tom Kalin)                                   
The disintegrating psyche of '60s socialite Barbara Baekeland, staring the fabulous Julianne Moore.  

Baghead (Jay Duplass)          
Comedy-horror with of four young actors, a cabin, and something in the woods.

Toby Dammit ( Federico Fellini)     
Restored 1968 Fellini adaptation of a Poe short story, with Terence Stamp as a booze and drug riddled celeb in Rome.

The Caller (Richard Ledes)                              
Film Noir with Frank Langella as a whistle-blowing energy exec.
 
The Cottage (Paul Andrew Williams)
Violent comedy horror with kidnapping that goes terribly wrong plot.
 
My Winnipeg (Girl & A Gun favorite Guy Maddin)
Maddin's hometown "docufantasia".
   
Elite Squad (José Padilha)                                             
Golden Bear winner and (another) one of Brazil's most controversial films, Elite Squad covers a corrupt special police force operating in Rio.

War, Inc. (Joshua Seftel)                    
 John Cusack back playing a comedy hit man in a fictional Middle Easter country were the US is running its first fully outsourced war. Has to be better than Grace is Gone.

Somers Town (Girl & A Gun loves Shane Meadows)
Comedy about a 16 year old running away from the lovely Midlands for the gold paved streets of London and making friends with a lad from Poland.
          

Son of Rambow (2007) Garth Jennings

Went to see this with Joseph and Mark, and we all loved it. It's hugely better than Jennings previous film, the feature length adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Jennings wrote the script here, loosely based on his own childhood recreation of First Blood. The film is simply a joy -  a mad bucketful of reckless, playful abandon.

Set in the early 1980s, two boys, different but both outsiders, fall in to a friendship fixed on making their own Rambo movie. Will Proudfoot (Bill Miliner) lives with his mother, sister and grandma and belongs to a closed religious sect hostile to the outside/modern world. Lee Carter (Will Poulter) lives with an adored and ignoring older brother, in a house attached to an old peoples home that doubles as a store house for aspirational 80s consumer items.

Both the leads are outstanding and perfectly cast. Miliner plays the protected innocent whose lack of stimulus has forced him to rely on/develop an extraordinary imagination - which literally explodes when confronted with the amazing feats of Rambo:

"You don't seem to want to accept the fact you're dealing with an expert in guerrilla warfare, with a man who's the best, with guns, with knives, with his bare hands. A man who's been trained to ignore pain, ignore weather, to live off the land, to eat things that would make a billy goat puke. In Vietnam his job was to dispose of enemy personnel. To kill! Period! Win by attrition. Well Rambo was the best. "

Poulter is just stupidly good as the unscrupulous wannabe wide boy Lee Carter - desperate to win Screen Test, despised by the schools' white sock mafia (how the hell those girls got their socks to stay up for the whole decade remains a complete mystery to me). 

The only scene which jarred for me was Will's hallucinogenic re-imagining of the school 6th form common room (for my non-UK readers, 6th form is typically for 16-18 years olds, taking qualifications to get them into university). In Will's version, it's teeming with goths and new wave romantics - the exact groups which in reality were routinely considered as an unpopular, freakish minority and herded up accordingly. Even with Will's planet-sized imagination it's gotta seem dubious to anyone who was actually around in the 80s that the conformist, insecure and vicious teen majority would be entirely absent, however double dipper and space dust fulled.   

Control (2007), Anton Corbijn

Since the film has to include Ian Curtis's suicide at 23, it's obviously not going to be entirely cheerful. Actually, the film turned out to be both funnier and more heartbreaking than director Corbijn's previous focus on producing videos for U2 and Bryan Adams might suggest.

Shot in brutal-beautiful black and white cinematography, and with a great sound track, the film covers Curtis's brief adolescent/adult life, particularly getting married to Deborah Woodruff (a fantastic performance here from Samantha Morton) while they were both teenagers, and of course, The Joy Division.

The film covers Curtis's fears about his epilepsy and the effect of the drugs he was taking to control it, and the pressure and vulnerability the bands sucess brought, the films central tradegedy is given over to Curis's affair with Annik Honoré. It's testament to the actors and director's abilities that Curtis doesn't just come off as a complete git - having an affair with one woman while his wife was stuck at home with their baby daughter. Sam Riley, who got to play Mark E. Smith in 2002's 24 Hour Party People, which focused on Tony Wilson and also included Curtis's suicide, is outstanding here. Torn between the debt he owes to Deborah for supporting the band in it's early days and the obvious security she provides, and being head over heels with the more intellectually compatible and also pretty hot Annik, Ian is portrayed as confused, weak, unable to cope with the situation, and a terrible dad.

Joe Anderson puts in a great performance as Peter Hook, and while Craig Parkinson isn't a good a Tony Wilson as Alan Coogan was, he does leave you wishing that there were a longer list of Wilson impersonators. Best of all is Toby Kebbell as Rob Gretton, who storms through the film as the bands ballsy, sweary manager, getting the best lines and stealing every scene he's in. My favourite? After a performance has been cut short by a Curtis's on-stage fit, Gretton dismissing his misery with "Cheer up, it could be worse. You could be the lead singer in The Fall".

Beowulf (2007), Robert Zemeckis

Firstly, nothing in the entire movie is anywhere near as frightening as Tom Hanks was in The Polar Express, the last film Zemeckis directed, also released as An IMAX 3D experience. Not even Ray Winston's Beowulf, who seems unable of passing up any opportunity to take his clothes off.

The hugely distorted swords and arrows, which I guess are designed to leer at 3D audiences, are only comparatively weird. There are a bunch of tracking shots which don't work in 2D: they interrupt the action with moments where you feel like you might be politely viewing someone's boring nature photos. The entire cast, with the notable exception of John Malkovich's Unferth, seem prone to unpredictable bouts of Welsh(ish) accent. The whole thing is also filmed using motion capture: At times, if feels like your watching an adult version of Shrek -especially during the sequence when a nudey Beowulf's crown jewels are luckily covered by a range of weapons and strategically placed people. Beowulf standing on the table during his first encounter with the monster Grendel, backlit with flame and only a probably 3D sword for modesty is the films laugh out loud moment.   

The story kind of sticks to the central elements of the epic poem - but anyone expecting a The Passion of The Christ type approach to the Old English epic is likely to be disappointed. Beowulfs three enemies - Grendel, Grendel's mum, and a dragon - are all present and correct. The movie most obviously diverts from the original in it's rewriting of Grendel's mum, whose transformation from aggrieved mother hell bent on vengeance to hot gold painted naked dragon lady who likes to sleep with heroes has the obvious advantage of allowing someone who watched Weird Science too much the opportunity to digitally realise their Angelina Jolie fantasies. Grendel's mum subsequently turns into a Viking themed Pirelli calendar, no doubt helping along the box office receipts significantly.

Crispin Glover (who previosly worked with Zemickis on Back to the Future I & II as Michael J. Fox's dad) plays the most interesting character - Grendel, a monster with overly sensitive hearing and inconsiderate neighbours. Despite his taste for human flesh, Grendel ends up being the films only sympathetic and complex character, his tragedy all the sadder for his mum's indifference toward his death, and the comparative boringness of everyone else. 

You also get three kick-ass action sequences. 

The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Alexander Mackendrick

Mackendrick previous films - Man In a White Suit, Lady Killers, hint at the directors capacity for cynicism and tackled immorality humorously. In The Sweet Smell of Success Mackendrick's team, including cinematographer James Wong Howe, writers Cliford Odets and Ernest Lehman, and co-stars and executive producers Tony Curtis and Bert Lancaster scratch the surface of New York-vicious with a razor blade and expose a malignant pit. It's an amazing film which, unsurprisingly, failed to win over mainstream audiences.

The film is a pacey flight through snappy, venomous dialog, New York's terrible beauty, and Lancaster and Curtis at their finest, pitch perfect and lock-jawed in mutual loathing.

JJ Hunseckers (Lancaster) is based on real life celebrity media commentator Walter Winchell, who introduced the world to syndicated gossip and happily used his influence to destroy the careers of people he disliked.  Lancaster's JJ is one of cinemas greatest monsters: sinister and heartless, his only meaningful relationship - with his sister Susan - is controlling and psychologically creepy. Curtis plays toadying PR guy Sidney Falco, who JJ has tasked with breaking up the romance between Susan and Steve Dallas, one of the few nice characters in the film. 

However, the films critical relationship is the blatantly, and often deliciously loathsome one ("Match me, Sidney.") between JJ and Falco. If Falco wasn't so entirely self-centered in his constant stream of kinetic opportunism, and not quite so keen to lick JJ's boots in return for favors, it might be possible to feel sorry for his constant humiliation. As it is, both characters revel in their awfulness.

Laura (1944), Otto Preminger

Gene Tierney isn't one of those names which leaps off the page in quite the same way of many of her contemporaries - Rita Heyworth, Lauren Becall, Ingrid Bergman amongst the most fabulous of them - do. This certainly isn't because she wasn't as good an actress - just check her out as beautiful mentalist in the classic 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven. It may be that her best roles have just been eye-slashingly perverse. Tierney's role in this film is to act as a cypher for most of the other characters desires - she's a big ol beautiful mirror in which they each make an ideal that most suits them from, and so her weird relative anonymity's works completely here.

Dana Andrews plays hardboiled Detective Mark McPherson, investigating the case of Laura Hunt, the now faceless victim of a shotgun murder. Gradually, as he interrogates the singularly immoral suspects, and sits around her flat drinking too much of her whiskey and staring too hard at a massive portrait of Laura, he finds himself falling in love with the dead woman.

Clifton Webb plays the viciously self-obsessed media celebrity Waldo Lydecker, who Laura acts as companion too (and who has secured Laura's career). Vincent Price plays Laura's flakey playboy fiance Shelby Carpenter, and Dorothy Adam's gets to reprieve a little of her obsessive servant former glory.

Perhaps the really perverse twist is the triumph of traditionalism and the re-assertion of traditional gender roles that the film ends on, although there is an interesting theory (echoed by the films obvious influence on David Lynch) that the entire second half of the film can be read as dream sequence.

Keep an eye out too for Laura's disgusting lampshades, without a doubt the most hideous objects in all film history.

This Filthy World (2006), Jeff Garlin

Filmed over two nights in New York, This Filthy World is an hour and a half long edit of John Waters one man stand up show. The format is pretty uninteresting and the audience questions that pass for an extra are spectacularly disappointing. However, this is John Waters, inventor of trash-core and star of one of the best ever episodes of The Simpsons and a man who could probably make a shopping list sound interestingly seedy.

Walters talks about his films, experiences of making them including his problems with ratings boards and audiences who mistakenly subjected their families to Pink Flamingo after enjoying Hairspray. Rather cunningly, he frames a lot of his conversation about taste in terms of things he regards as going too far - ensuring that he manages to get away with covering plenty of (mainly niche sexual practice) topics that couldn't be as charmingly tackled in a head on celebration. He also tells some very funny filthy jokes.

He also offers some pretty good romantic advice - don't date people who don't own any books; and why not get the name of your favourite director tattooed on your arm to save time? John Waters plumps for the great Joseph Losey.

This is a really tough choice - there are so many amazing directors, and my runner ups are probably Luchino Visconti and Akira Kurosawa. In the end though, with only four perfect films to his name, I just have to go with Jean Vigo :)

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (2007), Jay Russell

Almost charming story of a lonely boy coming to terms with his fathers death through the power of mythological creature friendship. I'm sure his mother would have preferred he just made friends with a human around his own age, but think of all the CGI-related unemployment that would have resulted in.

Set during the second world war, young Angus MacMorrow lives with his sister and mum, who works as live-in housekeeper on a Scottish estate. His dad has died in the war; a battalion of soldiers led by a posh English officer have been billeted at the estate in order to deal with the imaginary threat of German submarines; and a mysterious and slightly suspicious handyman (Lewis Mowbray, played by Ben Chaplin) has turned up, kicking Angus out of the sanctuary of his dad's old workshop.

It's a very old fashioned E. Nesbit-type story that picks up pace after an initially slow start. I watched the film with a bunch of kids who seemed happy enough but not overwhelmed with excitement. The best thing about the film for me was probably the CGI monster, Crusoe, who whilst pretty ugly at least didn't look as if he were constructed from melting poop, unlike Mee-Shee: The Water Giant.