Posts Tagged ‘England’

The Trip

July 15, 2011

Each of director Michael Winterbottom’s films seems exhilaratingly or maddeningly like a departure from the last. His new mockumentary, a BBC TV series here condensed into a movie, follows a friendly but antagonistic pair of self-centered comedians on a week-long road trip through England’s Lake District. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play pitiless exaggerations of themselves, touring tony restaurants so Coogan can write a Sunday newspaper article. Really it’s so he and Brydon can bore and annoy and enjoy each other, riffing up a willfully meandering comedic jam session whose highlight has to be the dueling Michael Caine impressions. Other impressions vary, as impressions do (accent-wise, Brydon’s Woody Allen seems much more on target than his Al Pacino, weirdly), and the general question of just where the tedious-hilarious threshold lies will be a rich vein of post-viewing debate, but all parties probably will agree it does get crossed.

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Never Let Me Go

October 5, 2010

Here are two things you should know about me before reading my impressions of “Never Let Me Go.” One: I went to boarding school in New England. Two: Our mascot was a pelican. Yes. Now imagine what it has been like for me as a grown-up in this world, forever unsure whether to pity myself or kick my own ass.

The pelican, not exactly an intimidator on the sports field, is known instead — at least in some circles — as a divinely or perversely charitable creature, ever willing to draw its own blood as sustenance for its offspring. (See also: Jesus Christ.) As such, it top-heavily flapped into mind while I watched “Never Let Me Go.”

To give it away, the basic story is this: A love triangle forms at a boarding school for organ-donor clones. Poignancy ensues. For the record: This boarding school is in old England. Also for the record: To give it away is not to spoil it. For one thing, the very notion of the spoiler is a conceit to the dullard’s view that plot is all. Here the manner is more literary, with a more elevated purpose, to ask: Why bother being a lover, an artist? For another thing, the basic story already has been out in this world for five years. Before being a movie, “Never Let Me Go” was a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the same specialist of stately yearning, born in Japan, raised in England, who also wrote the novel and inevitable Merchant-Ivory fodder “The Remains of the Day.”

In “Never Let Me Go”‘s case, the moviefication was done by screenwriter Alex Garland, the same specialist of pseudo-posh science fiction who wrote the Danny Boyle film “Sunshine.” And here the director is Mark Romanek, who obviously has watched a Merchant-Ivory film or two in his day, and knows what Garland wants, which apparently is to leave the movie seeming stifled by its own pretty dignity.

The leads — Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield, the latter occasionally channeling a young Anthony Perkins — show good command of their lofty sci-fi source material. It’s shrewd casting, actually, and may be useful to jaded American audiences. In one fell swoop, “Never Let Me Go” manages to extend the Knightley continuum of literary period-piece hottie allure; to further elaborate on Mulligan’s exquisite, uneasy beauty of ruined innocence; and to naturalize the newcomer Garfield, whose other recent crypto-sci-fi parables of sensitive souls finding and losing their place in the world include “The Social Network” and Spike Jonze’s wistful short film of doomed robot love, “I’m Here.” Plus, Charlotte Rampling and Sally Hawkins appear in brief but memorable roles. So the thing has credentials.

Yet you come away wondering what Tim Burton might have done with the same basic concept and some puppets.

The problem with “Never Let Me Go” is that its pretext is a medical and political horror that’s never fully acknowledged as such, as if reticence on the matter might actually be more telling. Well, it isn’t. Romanek diverts his energy into modulating costumes and hairstyles to indicate the passage of time. Only gingerly do he and Garland touch on the novel’s other inherent literary quandaries. How do you make meaning from a highly sheltered life? And what if your naive notion of self-actualization through service to others gets perverted it into something monstrous?

This dainty little quasi-allegory — of fatally protected, soul-stunted elites and their trickle-downs to the lower orders — could inspire a fine satire, now that I think of it. Maybe one of my fellow pelicans is up to the task?

 

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Harry Brown

June 10, 2010

Maybe you were expecting a review of The A-Team. It’s reasonable, on account of that film having been made by Joe Carnahan — who, not incidentally, once left this reviewer a huffy voicemail, demanding, “Man up!”

Well, just because The A-Team didn’t screen in time for our deadline doesn’t mean all hope is lost for wallowing in nostalgia and hidebound macho posturing. It is with Carnahan’s injunction especially in mind that I have forgone Waking Sleeping Beauty, the documentary about cartoon Hollywood musicals — indeed, that might seem too much like manning down — and turned my attention instead to Michael Caine’s new geezer-vigilante flick, Harry Brown.

With a movie like this, formula itself is posited as a threatened pillar of the social order. To paraphrase a more famous vigilante named Harry, you’ve gotta ask yourself three questions. When does it get ridiculous? How ridiculous does it get? How satisfying is it in spite of itself? For the record: Not for a while; quite; not very, but better than your bleeding heart wants to admit. The rest is atmosphere, in which director Daniel Barber luxuriates quite adeptly, and star charisma, for which Michael Caine was invented.

Harry wakes at 6:30 a.m. to the clock-radio news of a brutal and senseless nearby homicide (we glimpsed it just prior to the opening credits); flips over in his lonely, too-big bed; scans photos of absent loved ones; takes an inhaler drag to stay the emphysema; and tucks himself with toast and coffee into the usual kitchen corner of his dreary English sink-estate life.

En route then to visit his dying wife in the hospital, Harry hesitates at the obvious shortcut of a pedestrian-highway underpass. Cowed, he takes the long way. Later he’ll push a few chess pieces around at the pub with his oldest pal (David Bradley), while two blasted young scuzzers carry off a drug deal right in front them. And finally, before bedtime, he’ll have one last peek out the window at that ominous underpass. Yes, it all comes back to the foul, gaping mouth of that tunnel, from which thugs now seem to spill out like meth-wrecked teeth.

So that’s the long and the short of Harry Brown’s day. Then the wife succumbs, the scuzzer thugs off his oldest pal, Harry goes gun shopping and payback ensues. All of which is happily revealed by the movie’s official trailer — except the part about Harry’s wife, that is, because the movie itself doesn’t much bother to reveal her either. Apparently, in screenwriter Gary Young’s estimation, it only needed her in order to comply with the formula mandate of our geezer vigilante being an ailing war-veteran widower (see also Death Wish, Gran Torino, etc.). The best thing Harry can say about his marriage is that it superseded his stint in the Royal Marines. But it’s only the death of his old pal — his mate, as it were — that gets him really crying.

After that, though, he does a lot of manning up. Is it any wonder? The only other woman in Harry’s life, albeit also in a vacant sort of way, is a detective on his tail. And how nobly the ever-charming Emily Mortimer tries to mitigate the lack of characterization with which she’s been saddled here. For her efforts, she gets to wear some nice suits and to seem generally more competent than her fellow officers, who eventually ignite a catastrophic riot in Harry’s housing complex.

But the movie belongs to Caine, who grew up near where Harry Brown was filmed and did military service of his own during the Korean War. Happily, the character-star correspondences end there, as Caine himself has not since been provoked to murderous fascist individualism. Of course, Harry might say that all he wants is just to be able to stroll through that underpass without fear. Ridding the area of repellent degenerates — who, as one broadcaster reports in the film’s last spoken words, have “blighted the lives of the silent majority” — is just a means to an end.

Well, OK. If you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team. You might need them to protect you from this guy.

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Pirate Radio

November 12, 2009

The movie formerly known as “The Boat That Rocked” had to change its name for American audiences, and now goes by “Pirate Radio.” Does that count as being kept down by the Man, or as sticking it to him? In Germany it’s called “Radio Rock Revolution.” In Italy, “I Love Radio Rock.” “Good Morning England” is how it’s known in France. Taking the film’s own convivial demeanor as an example, let’s assume not that its makers don’t actually know what story they’ve told, but instead that the distributors just wanted to be sure its peculiar charms weren’t lost in translation.

Those charms are real, if cursory; the story “Pirate Radio”’s makers have told is what amounts to a buoyant dollop of docile anti-establishment nostalgia. It’s like this: See, the ’60s were great for rock ‘n’ roll in Great Britain–except for the fact of the government there being so threatened by the stuff, and the conservative BBC Radio, which monopolized the airwaves, not broadcasting it for more than an hour a day. Under such circumstances it seemed only natural that a literal boatload of unlicensed rock deejays would take over an old trawler, drop anchor just beyond British territorial waters in the North Sea, and start rocking around the clock.

In this reality-derived but fictional case, from writer-director Richard Curtis, it’s also a pretext for the sort of ensemble comedy in which each member of the ensemble tends toward one-dimensionality but it’s mostly OK because there are so many members, and they’re all so talented. The “Pirate Radio” ensemble includes, among others, Bill Nighy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nick Frost, Rhys Ifans and Rhys Darby (with an Emma Thompson cameo, as artificially occasioned as it is delightful); in musically supporting roles it includes, among others, the Who, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and Cream. Curtis’ approach is straightforward enough: Measure your casting carefully, then add water and stir.

“Pirate Radio” has plot, of sorts, winningly presided over by a dry, dandyish Nighy as the ship’s captain, and jerry-built around the initiation of his fresh-faced adolescent godson (Tom Sturridge) into the mysteries of sex, drugs and seafaring rock ‘n’ roll. Also: frothing opposition to same from an earthbound culture minister played by Kenneth Branagh, whose stifling prudery and ashen milieu is drafted with concise cartoonish brilliance. And it has subplot, most notably in the rivalry between a grizzled, rollicking Hoffman and an imperious, carnally charged Ifans. Chaotic camaraderie is of the essence–it can get sentimental (there is quite a lot of hugging, in fact), and it can get cruel (there is some cold-hearted hazing), too.

It can also get tired: Curtis’ potently episodic structure does seem sometimes to chafe at standard feature-film proportions. Importantly, before he wrote “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Notting Hill” and the “Bridget Jones” movies, and wrote and directed “Love Actually,” Curtis worked in the shorter form of television, specializing in sketchlike, character-driven and palpably eccentric shows such as “Blackadder,” “Mr. Bean” and “The Vicar of Dibley.” It’s easy to imagine this film working well in that abbreviated format, maybe even better than it works as a movie.

At its best, though, “Pirate Radio” is as brazenly grooving and as blissfully immaterial as one of the many classic rock anthems whose virtues it commemorates. To look on the bright side of Curtis’ glancing approach is to see that it doesn’t suffer from the stolid self-importance so common in other narratives of rock music history; instead of overselling the era’s significance, he manages to luxuriate in its triviality.

For better and worse, it’s telling that the character with whom the movie first identifies is entirely peripheral — just a plain suburban kid, standing in for the filmmaker himself, who sneaks a radio under his pillow to tune in the pirate broadcasts at bedtime. Perhaps, after all, Curtis should have just met the Man halfway. Perhaps he should have gone ahead and called his film “Pirate Radio Rock Revolution Love Boat of England in the Morning,” just to be sure he’d pleased absolutely everybody.

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Is Anybody There?

April 27, 2009

isanybodythere

What a charmer Michael Caine still is. Do we have another 76-year-old actor so able to get away with choosing a movie in part because he recently saw a friend succumb to Alzheimer’s? In this see-saw of poignancy and drollery from writer Peter Harness and director John Crowley, Caine plays a crusty old magician who, while en route to senility, checks into a seaside English village retirement home and reluctantly befriends the death-obsessed young son (Bill Milner) of its harried owners (Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrissey). “You accumulate regrets, and they stick to you like old bruises,” the old man says, with the authority of embittered surrender. In spite of a probably unintended message that mortality is only slightly harder to avoid than cliché, the movie does have its moments. But a more adventurous take would just go ahead and be a Harold and Maude remake, with a cross-dressing Caine in the Ruth Gordon role. 

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Scott Walker: 30 Century Man

January 24, 2009

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If Scott Walker: 30 Century Man doesn’t quite know what to do with its subject, aside from revering him, well, who does?

Director Stephen Kijak, in this points-for-bravery, first-ever Scott Walker documentary, does at least shrewdly begin by invoking Orpheus, the famed poet-musician of Greek myth whose skills were serious enough to persuade Hades to give back his girlfriend. The idea is to make us think “wow” and “yikes” simultaneously.

And that is about what it’s like to witness Walker’s long strange trip from ’60s Britpop trio the Walker Brothers, who were not related or actually named Walker or even British in his case, to avant-garde recluse adored by fellow artistes as disparate as Sting and Radiohead and responsible for increasingly weird and infrequent recordings to which he won’t ever listen upon their completion, probably because even he doesn’t fully understand.

Yes, when Brian Eno says, “These are very, very spaced-out pop songs,” and David Bowie says, “I have no idea what he’s singing about,” the artist being discussed is nothing if not a serious one. Kijak may even figure he doesn’t need to work too hard; as an insidery profile of an ultimate outsider, this is music-doc manna.

Most of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man feels like having just been slipped an unknown LP from an earnestly intelligent fanboy friend who has locked the door and won’t let you leave without listening. For starters, just take the voice — that bewitching, reverb-abetted, somehow confidently tremulous baritone. Somebody in the movie says it’s beautiful and unpleasant at the same time, and that’s an understatement. One minute it’s as trivial sounding as some sci-fi ritual ditty sung by Spock in the original Star Trek; the next it’s, well, still kinda sci-fi, but with enough music-of-the-spheres seriousness to make you think the universe really is singing to you. Or just watch Walker go when he’s in his studio. How demanding life must be within his selective fraternity of random sessioners; how exactingly he gathers, say, the sounds of meat being punched for a piece inspired by the execution of Mussolini.

Just get over the idea that your leg’s being pulled, Spinal Tap-style, with that array of early solo albums: Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3 and, according to the prim narration, “what was regarded as his masterpiece of the period, Scott 4.” Upon this last, incidentally, is inscribed a useful quotation from Camus: “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

The engagement to be had here isn’t from parsing Walker’s mysteries, or making a case that he’s the peer of James Joyce or Francis Bacon or whomever. It’s about the pleasure of witnessing one man’s steady, uncompromising approach to his own unique artistic ideal.

Kijak also makes telling use of footage from archival performances, illustrating both Walker’s divergence from American popular music and his own individual consistency. Whether in a rudimentary TV spot from the ’60s or an actual music video from the ’80s, Walker wears the given era’s trappings awkwardly. Not because he’s unattractive; quite the contrary, as several people here attest. Not because he’s a poseur; even more people, including the man himself, will attest to the conviction with which he has shunned public attention. No, he doesn’t fit in because the trappings can’t trap him — or even seem to keep up. Quite clearly Scott Walker has always been ahead of his time.

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Last Chance Harvey

January 12, 2009

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A washed-up jingle-writer (Dustin Hoffman), in London for the wedding of his estranged daughter (Liane Balaban), meets a solitary poll-taker (Emma Thompson) at the airport and comes on to her like a pushy creep. Will love bloom? Give it to the Coen brothers and it could be nasty genius; for writer-director Joel Hopkins, it’s merely a disposable, predictable, wafer-thin romance between Baby Boomer sad sacks. For Hoffman, lately so habituated to antic waddling and acting-bag tricks, schmaltz can be like quicksand; Thompson’s warmth and testy intelligence has the unfair burden of keeping them both afloat. Apparently actors of their ages really don’t get many good scripts. But that’s no reason for moviegoers of the same ages to enable this film’s commonness with gratitude.

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Control

December 6, 2007

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You remember Ian Curtis. A delicate soul, that one, the sort of lad who seemed like he’d been born into the dreary north of England—not even Manchester, mind you, but Macclesfield, a suburb thereof—just to reiterate the public dream of getting out.

You can picture him—or let Anton Corbijn’s feature debut, Control, do it for you—as a sweetly solemn teenager, reclining shirtless on a bed among his collected records and original literary works in progress, quoting Wordsworth and Bowie with equal appreciation, winning over a sweetly simple girl who will become his wife, waiting to be galvanized.

Well, it happened when he got a glimpse of the Sex Pistols live in ’76 and promptly decided to front his mates’ new band—which then promptly became the gloom-mongering post-punk prototype, Joy Division. Corbijn gives us this formative epiphany, but renders it so obliquely that he almost seems to be hedging. Maybe that’s because it was covered from another angle five years ago in 24 Hour Party People. Maybe it’s because music-maker biopics have been on the brain since then, and Corbijn wants to avoid the stale residue of so-so offerings such as Ray and Walk the Line and La Vie En Rose, let alone the dark shadow of a great one like Sid and Nancy, in which Gary Oldman brought the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious so volcanically back to life. Or maybe it’s just that, in Corbijn’s estimation, obliqueness was the Ian Curtis way.

Which isn’t to say the world went without direct expressions of his inner life. Curtis (portrayed here by Sam Riley, formerly the lead singer of Leeds punk band 10,000 Things) was enough the bookish ironist to name his group after a Nazi brothel, and enough the sensualist and admirer of Bowie and Jim Morrison to synthesize those front-men’s vocal styles into just the coiled-up baritone monotone his band’s deliberate mid-tempo dirges required. Not incidentally, he was epileptic—a beautiful spaz on stage, clutching the mic stand as if to guard against a seizure or literally flailing his arms as if to bring on one (more than once, he did). The music, of loneliness and lament, didn’t really break ground but didn’t bother about that anyway; it felt stark and true and vitally melancholic. And that’s how Corbijn’s movie feels. Even non-fans can groove to it.

If it doesn’t seem to convey the entirety of a life, well, neither did the life. Curtis came to everything too soon. His tentative, too-young marriage (Samantha Morton plays that sweetly simple girl) couldn’t withstand an ascendant creative career—not to mention a beautiful Belgian groupie (Alexandra Maria Lara)—and success only intensified the quandary of self-doubt and indecision. Curtis hanged himself at 23, taking his rueful if grimly rightful place among rock music’s too-early dead. (Screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh adapted Control from Curtis’ widow’s 1996 memoir, Touching from a Distance.)

His mates carried on without him as New Order, which sailed the tide of time into synth pop and global celebrity during the ’80s; Curtis’ legacy meanwhile made music safe for the Cure, the Smiths and the subsequent generations of imitators by now so common that a new movie of the Joy Division origin myth seems at once like coolly calculated opportunism and a hotly proprietary elder-fanboy history lecture.

With Corbijn in command, it’s both. He’s as right a man for the job as any, really; Corbijn’s still pictures of the band from 1979 put him on the map as a photographer and an eventual maker of music videos, including a resourcefully retrospective one—assembled from Corbijn’s iconic stills after Curtis’ death—of Joy Division’s “Atmosphere.” Having illuminated the many dimensions in that vast universe between the flat affect of creative depression and the modish affectation of emo posing, Corbijn manages Control with elegant, understated veneration. It’s actually rather a quiet movie.

Riley is the perfect Curtis—prettier than he should be, but only apparently because that’s how we want to remember him. And thanks to fine work from Morton and Lara, the ladies in his life have immediate but never too-obvious appeal. The actors who play the band actually play the band’s music, and Toby Kebbell offers a witty turn as their slouchy self-made manager.

Like the music, cinematographer Martin Ruhe’s bright, flat black-and-white seems both luxuriating and detached. It splits the difference between the Godardian New-Wave chic that predated those Joy Division years and the fashion-mag chic that followed. If you’re left yearning for all the dark, fleeting beauties that came in between, that’s just as it should be.

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