carlgardner.co.uk

Nowhere Boy, directed by Sam Taylor-Wood

© Mars Distribution

Nowhere Boy is bound to attract interest because of its subject; and hardened fans of John Lennon will of course love it. It's important to ask about a film like this, though, how interesting it would be were its central character not a famous personality. The answer, I'm afraid, is that Nowhere Boy would not be of great interest. It covers a key period of John Lennon's life, from when he was fifteen until his departure with the Beatles for Hamburg. But music is in the background. The writer Matt Greenhalgh chooses rightly to focus dramatically on Lennon's unusual family background: his being brought up by his Aunt Mimi, his rediscovery and then loss of his mother.

The story is well told, and the script is strong. Kristin Scott-Thomas, a good choice perhaps for this rather stiff role, makes Mimi human while Anne-Marie Duff is impressive as the wild, lush, unbalanced Julia. David Morrissey contributes strong support and while Aaron Johnson is unconvincing at first as Lennon, he grows on you. Lennon isn't an uncontroversially attractive character, and a certain self-absorption, selfishness even, comes across together with some charisma.

As far as Beatles history is concerned, Nowhere Boy goes through the motions somewhat. First Lennon is given a harmonica, then he's impressed by Elvis Presley in the cinema – more impressed by his effect on female fans perhaps – then we see him learn to play his first guitar (the only scene in which the Britart debut director indulges in anything overtly artsy). Here are the Quarrymen playing at the local fete; now he's introduced to Paul McCartney; and so on. That, it must be said, is formulaic and irritating. The film looks good, and so does Liverpool in it, but it's not a great work by an artist-director, an important historical piece or a major insight into Lennon the musician. In truth, it's a slight period family drama, well put together.

Paranormal Activity directed by Oren Peli

Blumhouse Productions/Icon

Katie and Micah, a young couple in San Diego, hear strange bumps in the night; Micah buys a fancy video camera to capture evidence in case something weird is happening in their home. And it is. We, the audience, see through the lens as the video evidence accumulates, the bumps get bumpier and the nights get both stranger and scarier.

Paranormal Activity isn't your normal cinematic experience - although obviously a lot of work and editing has gone into it, it's very proudly a low-budget Blair Witch-inspired film, shot over just seven days by a first-time filmmaker with just two assistants. There's no music and a very small cast. At 83 minutes, it's only just a feature film really, and it feels like a short. The atmosphere is also undermined by some comedy, not all of which I'm sure is intentional, an annoying character, Micah - he is seriously annoying, and will be particularly for British audiences I think - and some hilariously clunky storytelling.

But considering the budget, this is a pretty good film, and quite an achievement for the writer and director Oren Peli. It does build tension pretty well and it is quite scary in an old-fashioned unoriginal way. Katie Featherston is pretty good as Katie, while Micah Sloat is okay in his very irritating part, doubling as cameraman. I enjoyed it, and even the clunkiness and occasional laughs contribute to a potentially ironic cult appeal. It could do surprisingly well. It's a slight film, and the ending is a let-down. It says a lot, though, that I felt disappointed there wasn't another twenty or thirty minutes of tension and exploration. I was never bored, and left wishing there'd been more.

I wouldn't like to pay top whack in central London for it - but if you can do it as a local late-nighter after the pub, you'll have fun.

Cold Souls directed by Sophie Barthes

Adam Bell | Samuel Goldwyn Films

Cold Souls is an entertaining watch, and amusing – though not hilarious, not especially satirical, and doing nothing very original. It's a bit like Being John Malkovich crossed with Eternal Sunshine, and not quite as interesting as either.

Paul Giamatti plays himself. Exhausted with anxiety during rehearsals of Uncle Vanya (there's a Woody Allenish feel about this, as about much of the film), he chances upon an article in the New Yorker about a new technique for lifting your psychic burdens through the extraction and storage of your soul. A soul which, in Paul Giamatti's case, is the shape and size of a chick pea. But what if lightness starts to feel like emptiness, and you feel the need to restore your inner self? The actor finds that's not as simple as advertised, in a world where anything can be trafficked. He must tangle with the Russian mafia in a literal struggle for his lost soul.

It's entertaining enough. I've no complaint with Paul Giamatti, the support is pretty good from David Strathairn as the creepy clinician and Dina Korzun as an exhausted soul-mule, and Emily Watson is good in it too, as Giamatti's wife. I think what makes Cold Souls a little disappointing, ultimately, is that it doesn't do all that much, imaginatively, with the idea of being soulless or in possession of someone else's soul. What would that be like? What would it do to you? There are jokes about losing your smell, and a good idea about the effect of trace fragments, but Cold Souls doesn't really get much deeper into any of this. A pity.

Cold Souls is a likeable, well made, reasonable comedy of New York angst. It compares unfavourably though to a similar sort of film from earlier this year - the wilder and baggier, less accessible, but more serious, satisfying and imaginative Synecdoche, New York

.

Harry Brown, directed by Daniel Barber

©Lionsgate

The director Daniel Barber and his cast and crew do well with this material. Harry Brown begins in a very artsy way – not that there's anything wrong with that - but becomes more straightforward as the action gets moving, while retaining some interest in visuals throughout. Performances are decent all round, Emily Mortimer and David Bradley I thought doing particularly well, she as the idealistic, perhaps naive Detective Inspector Frampton and he as Harry Brown's grumpy old mate Len - each making something of a part that is not, in truth, well written. Liam Cunningham is also strong, though in a stereotyped role, and Michael Caine is Michael Caine as an old codger. Dialogue is not Harry Brown's strong point, and the screenplay generally is predictable. But there are impressive things other than the acting.

First, this very familiar Deathwish-style tale with as I've said very predictable characters and plot does have a fair amount of fresh energy about it because of a credible, if very bleak, view of Britain today that will ring true with many people. Second, the way tension and anxiety (a word that fits the film well) are managed is excellent, and makes the comic-book proceedings very effective. The effect certainly isn't achieved by pure violence, either. I'm against violence as entertainment, but gritty and brutal though its vision is, I wouldn't criticise Harry Brown on that score.

The music is interesting, and the orchestral ending I think by Ruth Barrett and Martin Phipps, is outstanding - it helps prolong and deepen the impact and atmosphere of the film, and lends it a more serious mood than the script itself perhaps deserves.

I worry, though, about the social and political impact of this film. It gives such a very bleak, despairing, "broken Britain on smack" view of London today. And although I'm sure not intending to do so - one of the interesting things about Harry Brown is the way it seems careful to avoid the accusation that it racialises urban crime and angst (though not all agree it succeeds) - nonetheless it does I think risk confirming fears about society that may help serve political agendas including the mainstream, but also those of the far right. If I'd been involved in making or marketing Harry Brown, that would trouble me. Some gay people, too, may feel unease about the nasty, squalid nature of the film's one homosexual encounter. There is, finally, an intriguing use of the Northern Irish troubles as a sort of recurring metaphor. I wonder how it'll be received on the other side of the water.

There's real potential for this film to become controversial and politicised if a certain sort of politician sees it, or a certain sort of journalist writes a moral panic story about it. That inflammatory potential results at least in part from the film's sheer effectiveness. Worth seeing, then? Yes. Worth taking a reasonably long popcorn spoon, too.

You can see the trailer here.

Inglourious Basterds, directed by Quentin Tarantino

© François Duhamel/The Weinstein Company

In this stupid and objectionable film, Brad Pitt plays Lieutenant Aldo Raine, a rhetorically and morally challenged Tennessee tough who, in advance of D-Day, recruits emigré German and Austrian Jews to form an irregular band of marauders to torture and murder German soldiers in occupied France. They plan to blow up Hitler and his Nazi high command at a film premiere in Paris: unfortunately, British intelligence has the same plan, as does the young, secretly Jewish woman who will welcome the Führer to her cinema. The plot is typical Tarantino, with everyone's plan of course going wrong, corpses piling up senselessly, and the plot resolving into an orgy of violence.

It's entertaining: there's no denying that. Inglorious Basterds is not dull, and many of the scenes build tension and suspense very effectively. It's also amusing at times, though not as funny as it seems to think it is. The performances, though overwhelmingly camp, are mostly pretty good (Mélanie Laurent is the best thing about it). But there are several things wrong. For a start, it's just the familiar Tarantino-world of guns, repartee and braggadocio we saw in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, with flashbacks, parallel plots intertwining and random occurrences, all reheated and transposed uncomfortably into wartime France. A pity the historical subject inspired no stylistic innovation whatever from Tarantino. Second, it's anachronistic in more ways than one, with a highly unsuitable post-fifties and partly western movie soundtrack that simply underline the silly cartoonishness of the war setting and the utterly revisionist view of the war the film gives, in which the holocaust is known of and avenged by allied troops. Third, it's self-indulgent, with tricks (text superimposed on freeze-frames, graffiti-like arrows and text superimposed on action) included just for their own sake and silly cameos by Mike Myers and, I'm sorry to say, Rod Taylor as a redundant Churchill. The British are of course upper-class idiots whose incompetence royally messes things up for the plucky Americans; the film's wartime clownishness is less funny than that of 'Allo 'Allo, which is comparison looks like the work of Sir Martin Gilbert.

But the main problem with Inglourious Basterds is the way it glorifies violence and cruelty. Just as in Pulp Fiction Tarantino invited us to sympathise with a brutal gang leader and rejoice at the prospect of extreme torture – in that case, “legitimised” by the fact that the victim had attempted a rape – here, the fact that we are dealing with “Nazis” (Germans are ignorantly and wrongly identified with Nazis throughout) impliedly legitimises the most barbaric cruelties. We see a German soldier killed by being beaten in the head with a baseball bat, and a number of men scalped – none of which is necessary of even helpful in terms of plot – and we are invited to find deliberate disfigurement funny and right. In truth the violence in this film is both shocking and sickening, and it's difficult to respect the film-maker who has chosen to present it as entertainment.

Inglorious Basterds parades the director's love of cinema, with continual reference to earlier films and directors, its “film within a film” device and its cinematic climax. But it suggests that humanity is a weakness, and that the identification with others art can inspire is a fraud. Some might argue that Tarantino is somehow criticising screen violence – that the presentation of Goebbels's film Nation's Pride is a sort of satire on “shoot-em up” cinema. I can't see it myself. All I see here is exploitation, amorality and pretext. Tarantino doesn't ask us to condemn them for it, but Aldo Raine and his men are clearly war criminals; he for his part is guilty of something of a film crime. I admired Jackie Brown, but it remains the only one of Tarantino's films I'd like to see again. If Inglorious Basterds is the kind of thing he aims at now, then I look forward to his retirement. 

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort directed by Jacques Demy

Hélène Jeanbrau/Ciné Tamaris

Jacques Demy’s 1967 musical is sheer nonsense. Enjoyable nonsense, undoubtedly, but nonsense through and through. Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac, sisters in real life, play twins here. Delphine Garnier teaches ballet while Solange composes concerti at her piano. Each dreams of Paris, and meeting her dream man. We get to know them and their circle, inhabitants of Rochefort each with his or her sad story – until a fair comes to town and, with a romantic sailor and Gene Kelly thrown in, magical sparkly fate makes everything right for all.

This 1996 restored version has all Demy’s chocolate-box colours, and at times the clothes look fabulous. An unashamedly superficial film - a sort of hommage to Hollywood musicals – it’s also a study in ironic chic. Some of the director’s mannerisms are attractive (the sisters are at times photographed straight to camera) but I think a lack of visual sense mars the experience: a lot of effort goes into costumes but little, apparently, to screen composition - a major flaw particularly in some of the dance sequences. Why have Gene Kelly dance, then show only his top half? It happens too much in Les Demoiselles: the dance sequences are fun, but not well filmed. Compare the famous dance from Singin' in the Rain - in which Kelly's whole body is kept within shot except when his feet are still and the camera focuses on his face for special effect, and in which every cut is timed to match the musical phrasing - with this dance sequence with Françoise Dorléac in which his feet are often cut off and there's at least one unhappy cut across the music. And compare the start of West Side Story, where the camera does not cut into the dancers' bodies except to make striking compositions - freeze-frame at 1 minute 8 seconds and again at 3.40 to see what I mean - with this effort from Les Demoiselles which ends decently but starts with our being unable to see much of the dancers at all. I'm afraid that where Stanley Donen, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise knew what they were doing, Jacques Demy didn't really seem to.

Why Solange falls for the empty Andy, I don’t know. Monsieur Dame would be a better bet, you sense, but Solange’s mother gets her hands on him. Delphine’s happy ending is an absurd anticlimax. There is a dark subplot, with a woman being murdered and hacked to pieces, and at times you wonder if the whole pastel surface must obscure a strange, dark anti-musical. But I’m not sure Les Demoiselles is as good or clever a film as that.

By far the best thing in it is Michel Legrand’s music; particularly Solange’s concerto and the sisters’ signature song, Soeurs Jumelles. Otherwise, it’s a very silly film indeed. 

It's on at the BFI until 27 August, then in October at the Gulbenkian Canterbury, the Riverside Studios Hammersmith and Watermans, Brentford. It's available on DVD too.

Moon, directed by Duncan Jones

© Sony Pictures Classics

Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, an astronaut living alone on the far side of the Moon working out his contract with Lunar Industries, a company that mines material to make alternative energy on earth. Sam’s looking forward to coming home soon: his contract’s nearly up. But as he watches taped messages from his wife and daughter, strange things begin to happen; following an accident, he begins to wonder how alone he really is.

The plot isn’t easy: Sam is confused by what’s going on for quite a while, and so are we. The audience needs to work to get this story. But it’s well worth it. This is a clever tale, intelligent science fiction about a real issue for humanity that could seem worthy if approached face on, but which Sam’s situation makes unexpected, approachable and fresh.

Sam Rockwell is great in his role, about which I can say no more, or I’d be giving away the film’s whole premise. It’s well directed by Duncan Jones, and Nathan Parker’s screenplay is strong, too. The Moon set is convincing enough to work (although I don’t think you can see stars on the Moon), and I enjoyed Clint Mansell’s hauntingly minimalist music. Kevin Spacey is heard, too, if not seen: he voices – and what a strange, unsettling voice he provides – the ever-present computer, GERTY, who Sam thinks is his only companion on the Moon, and who heals and wakes him following his accident. But does GERTY have his own agenda? Why is he communicating with Earth? And how, since Sam himself can only send and receive recordings? The truth about Sam’s predicament is revealed as his relationships are clarified, not just with GERTY, but with humans back on earth – and even with himself.

GERTY sounds a bit like HAL in 2001, I know, and he’s clearly intended to remind us of his cinematic forebear. Yes, the nature of artificial consciousness is one of Moon’s themes. But GERTY is not your standard space computer out of control – Moon is more original and more thoughtful than to repeat that trick. It’s also too concerned with human ethics: it’s a film of ideas. It’s much more about ourselves - where our identities are located, our relationship to the Earth and what it means to be human - than it is about machines or the Moon. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and certainly the best since Synecdoche, New York.

Brüno, directed by Larry Charles

© Universal Pictures

If there's a country that should love Brüno, then it's his home country Austria. It's famously stuffy in parts; but in contrast, Austrians love a good stunt - or Aktion - that punctures it all. So Vienna is the home of the absurd, ritualistic Neujahrskonzert, but also of the superb Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, whose version of the Radetzky March is the best you'll ever hear. I knew Sacha Baron-Cohen from his character Ali G, but had missed his previous film Borat: a friend got dumped by text as I was buying the popcorn, and I spent the evening in the pub rather than the cinema. So I went this time thinking Brüno might be funny, but that it would also be stupid, crude, vulgar and crass. I came out thinking it funny, stupid, crude, vulgar and crass but also brilliant in its own way, and in its own way serious, too.

You have to admire Baron-Cohen, who is bonkers but also brave in his satire. Brüno is an outrageously camp gay fashionista and host of a TV show (Funkyzeit!) who wants to make it really big as a celebrity. After a brief send-up of the fashion business he goes to America (of course), adopts an African baby, and tries first to solve the Middle East conflict (hard) and then to become straight (very hard). Yes, the film gets lots of laughs from gay stereotypes: Brüno loves sex with incredible mechanical contraptions, has to call hotel security to get him and his boyfriend out of chains, and calls his agent while having his anus bleached. But the real target is the homophobia and bigotry of others. The climax, at Straight Dave's TV fight show, is the most hilarious, frightening expose of violent redneck homophobia you could see - Brüno needs a fence to protect him from American men so pumped up with anger at the idea of homosexuality that Baron-Cohen really is in danger. And one of the rednecks is brought to touching, sickening, ludicrous tears at the thought that even this oasis of true butchness could be tainted by the gays.

The middle class is where the true horror is, though. The gay converters Brüno meets are amazing, but you're also moved to pity when Brüno tells one of them his mouth is so pretty it was made not to praise the Lord but "for blowjobs". The preacher is speechless, but his lips quiver: what is he thinking? How hard is he having to suppress the way he really feels? This juxtaposition of the most stupid comedy possible with real social satire is Baron-Cohen at his best, and I think it justifies his humour. He's a wind-up artist without equal, and the things he dares to do (In Jerusalem he runs for safety from people offended by his fabulous cropped "hasidic" outfit) are just as crazy as the things he gets people to say. At one point, Brüno interviews pushy parents, asking what they'd be prepared to do to their children to get them on screen: I won't give away what they say, but believe me, you will be more horrified even than you think.

So liked Brüno, quite a lot. I loved the way it seemed he almost did solve the Middle East question by uniting Jew and Palestinian in their common love of hummus; I loved his Jerry Springer-style appearance, parading his new "African American" baby, and his antics with it, in front of a hostile, conservative black audience (who were right of course - everyone is wound up but they're not all shown up); I loved his night under the stars with mind-emptyingly macho hunters, and I loved his infiltration of a swingers' party - you have to take your hat off to a man who's prepared to be belted for the sake of comedy. The Hollywood charidee consultants are a gem, too, not to be missed.

Not everyone will like this: it's crude enough to attract a lot of people and put off quite a few others. But this is much more risky, much more admirable stuff than the anodyne, feelgood Ali G In Da House, which was shown on the telly the other night. It's also very funny. Offensive? Yes, Brüno certainly is on the offensive.

This review first appeared at The Wardman Wire.

Emmy the Great at the QEH

Aurélien/CreativeCommons

I don't often go to anything that could be called a "gig" - my idea of a concert often involves Mahler and my idea of a music festival is the Proms. But the Queen Elizabeth Hall is a pretty safe venue for the likes of me, free of "mosh pits" and the like, so I was happy to be dragged along to hear Emmy, the 24-year old British singer-songwriter whose debut album, First Love, was released this year. She must have a pretty broad appeal because the audience was delightfully diverse - yes, there were quite a few sensitive-looking young women in short dresses and canvas shoes, like Emmy herself, but there were plenty of old geezers like me, too.

It was a good show. Emmy has a distinct, slightly nervy stage personality that fits well with her songs - the whole thing conveys a confessional authenticity that's well suited to our times. She sounds great, when playing alone and when backed by her band, and I liked her songs, which combine a persistent religious obsession - The Easter Parade is a good atheist song - with a downbeat, darkly comic take on rubbish men and love. Her folky, in part I thought country-influenced tunes are often catchy and the lyrics are both fun, and more intelligent than average - she rhymes "disorder" with "aorta" at one point. And she showed she can do well with other people's material, too, covering "The End of the World" impressively.

I reckon Emmy the Great really is pretty good. You can hear some of her songs on Spotify or MySpace.

The Northern Clemency, by Philip Hensher

photo courtesy of simonknott.com

This is a subtly political novel. In the reading it hardly seems so at all, except for a few obviously political passages like the mass picket at Orgreave - which are arguably superficial, although the Orgreave scene is a fine set-piece. For the most part Hensher’s narrative is resolutely domestic and personal: it’s about childhood and adolescence, boys who are good with girls, pet snakes, middle-aged dissatisfaction, a woman’s crush on her boss, an arrest, dementia, migration. It’s a provincial novel of family, work and the passage of time, set in Sheffield from the 1970s until more or less the present day.

The Sellers family moves up from London: Alice and her husband Bernie who works for the Electric Board, and their children, the timid Francis and his precocious fifteen-year-old sister Sandra. They live opposite the Glovers: local heartthrob Daniel, his sister Jane who dreams of being a writer, their strange little brother Tim, temporarily absent father Malcolm and mother Katherine, whose story the novel is more perhaps than anyone’s. Through their destinies we see Sheffield from many sides: the new and the old; surface and underground.

Presently, with a rattle and a roar, the cage came up, a fragile box in a fragile set of supports. The man pulled the concertina doors open, just like a liftman in a shop, and with ten men he stepped in. The doors were pulled to, and with an electric beep, the lift plummeted; you never got used to that. The only light as it made its shaking, banging fall, hitting the metal struts as it fell, came from the single weak bulb in the roof, loosely wired up like a casual arrangement. The men had been talking noisily at the top but, as they always did, they shut up at this point. The lift seemed to hit something immense and soft, some elastic substance, slowed agonisingly; you felt it might reach the bottom and bounce back. But it hit bottom, and they opened the doors and set off.

Some readers might think there’s too little sense of place in The Northern Clemency, but I disagree. Not just because I’m sure those who know Sheffield will recognise its suburbs as well as its centre, but because I think Hensher has chosen to avoid giving us a predictable, signposted North of caps, pints and chip shops. He refers little to accent, preferring to present Sheffield as middle England - his Middlemarch - a place standing for all of Britain, not merely an easily-pigeonholed part.

It’s a long read, at over 700 pages. It’s a leisurely read, too: the narrative is not driven at a hard pace, and at at times the story has a meandering feel. Perhaps in the middle there is a slight loss of direction. But the story is never dull, the characters and situations are always engaging (Nick, the florist, is a particularly original and absorbing creation) and Hensher’s prose is a pleasure to read from sentence to sentence, in both narration and dialogue.

But he's a stupid man, a weak man. He'd never have done anything if you'd not made him do it, I mean the two of you, not whatever it is the police are after him for, and I just want you to accept that. And the last thing is, whatever it was between the two of you, I don't want anyone else to know about it, ever, and I don't want the children saying anything like that. I can stand it, knowing that my wife once went to bed with someone else, so long as no one else ever knows, and he's a bad person, but I don't believe he's the sort of person who'd go round boasting about it, whatever it was that happened. Tell me it doesn't make any sense, but I can cope with being in that position so long as I'm the only one who knows I'm in that position. Let me keep a bit of dignity here.

The political and social themes come through in the end in, as I’ve said, a subtle and satisfying way, not just through the character of Tim, who in his frustration turns left: to an angry, resentful leftism, nursing the grievance of lost opportunities. It comes through in Daniel’s discovery of the best of 21st century British life (pre-credit crunch), in the disillusionment of more than one character, and in an apaprently ultimate preference for the simple pleasures of humanity over confrontation. Hensher surveys the field but he does not glory in reenacting the civil war of the 1980s. He shows how we have moved on. Not always for the better: leaving Sheffield behind them for hostile London, Francis and Jane seem to live isolated lives, if in one case at least a seemingly contented one. And the values that prosper are not necessarily those of honesty and straightforwardness. In the new world, power and money make you safe regardless of your conduct.

Most of all the politics comes through in the novel’s symbolic climax in Australia, the literal new world that in a way stands for the dream of the new Britain: relaxed, classless, and sunlit. It’s a place unencumbered by the past, where no one is bothered by or about you and where your bothering is unwanted. There’s freedom and a kind of beauty here; but something is missing at the heart, too. There’s an artificiality, a triviality about human relationships and identity. Life may be free of anguish, but it also seems free of passion; if this is a vision of Australia as England refashioned, then something’s been lost in the working. Hensher regrets something about the passing of the bothered old world, while recognising Alexandra’s need - and perhaps not only hers - to cast it off.

He went on walking. He seemed to see himself from outside, as these stupid, stupid handsome people saw him. He walked out into the road, between moving cars; but here on the sea front they were moving so slowly, cruising almost to the point of stasis, that they just slowed a little bit more, not hooting, just letting him pass as they were letting other people pass between them. He reached the other side, still seeing himself, grubby, shabby, hunched, through the eyes of the fit and stupid and rich and share-owning young of this seaside Arcadia, and there was an opening in the barrier.

The Northern Clemency is an outstanding history of England - rather than condition of England - novel. It tells the story of how the Britain we or our parents grew up in became the Britain of wide screens and brasseries. It’s also a considerable feat of sustained high-quality writing and imagination.