Mike Leigh's Lord of the Rings
On set report, East Hobbiton
No film is shrouded in so much secrecy and anticipation as a new work from Mike Leigh. After a much publicized slip of the tongue from a now disgraced Jim Broadbent, it was revealed that the quintessential English director would be rounding up one of the twentieth century's most popular and thoroughly English author's most beloved work. Mike Leigh is preparing his film of JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
"Some see Tolkien's achievement as a stunning work of imagination, but that is only the foreground of a complex subtext of middle class manners and working class aspirations." Leigh avers, although he is otherwise somewhat taciturn in discussing the direction of his film, preferring to focus on the process he uses with his actors. "This has been one of the toughest films to develop, we spent nearly four months wandering around in circles in a mire in Norfolk, just to come up with twenty pages for the shooting script."
Timothy Spall, who spends nearly thirty minutes in make-up to achieve the look for Frodo, tells me that he wants people to know the real Frodo, "he's essentially repressed, he's wanted adventure, but been stuck, literally a square peg in a round hole by society. When he has his chance, he's terrified of the responsibility."
"Galadriel, could easily just come off as one of those housewives who becomes a do-gooder out of boredom." says Imelda Staunton, "but she feels everyone else's plights deeply, leaving no time for herself. She frets over Arwen (played in the film by Sally Hawkins) because of the relationship with Aragorn (David Thewlis), who is of a different character class."
Eddie Marsan (The Balrog) "the Balrog is mistaken for a terrible fire breathing monster, I see him as someone isolated, downtrodden, forgotten, left deep in the mines after Thatcher shut them. He just wants someone to hear his pain. He's just that bloke that complains too loudly in the pub and everyone ignores out of embarrassment."
Leigh discusses casting one of the key roles "I worked with Andy on Topsy-Turvy and Career Girls, and thought he just has such a rubbery face and physicality, he'd be able to do Gollum without us resorting to loads of make-up, or those special effects that no one understands and always looks a bit uncanny." Serkis chimes in, "I wanted to give the truth of Gollum," but, sidestepping actorly pretention, he adds with a twinkle, "it don't half hurt my throat."
Labels: Alternative Cinaverse, Life Irritates Art
The Last Picture Show as Reviewed By A Critic With an Axe To Grind Over This Gimmick of Black and White
Based on Larry McMurtry's semi-autobiographical novel, and featuring a talented ensemble of both promising unknown newcomers and stalwart character actors, this movie should have been a calling card for up and comer, actor/film critic turned director Peter Bogdonovich. However, all are ill served by the incomprehensible decision to release the film in black and white. This move can only have been driven by "the business", some accountant has worked out that the film can be distributed for less by releasing it on less expensive black and white stock. The cynical studios have the young director, whose career has consisted of Drive-In fodder thus far, naively claiming that the choice was aesthetic, not financial.
Set in a mid-western town during the early 1950's, a time of the birth of rock and roll and lurid red cars with tailfins, it depicts the slow disintegration of a community which abandons its public spaces, pool halls and movie houses, to live in tract house suburbia and watch TV. This was an opportunity to show how much more real, and the style is otherwise very realistic, the lives of genuine people are in natural colour, instead the gimmick of black and white makes the film look like television.
For many years Hollywood has fought a war of attrition with TV, and the popular conceit was that by offering bigger wider screens, better sound, and vivid colour, audiences could be tempted back into theatres. This has not worked, so the suits probably thought, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". Although colour TV is now available, more people own black and white than colour, making it the clear preference. The film even has a an aspect ratio half way between Cinemascope and TV. Hollywood's scientific wizards have found a way to port the black and white of television back onto film.
Having presented his television series, Hitchcock famously experimented with this technology, retrofitting Psycho into monochrome to tone down the gore of the shower scene (Michael Powell showed Hitchcock's timidity by releasing Peeping Tom, as it was meant to be, in colour). But Bogdonovich is no Hitchcock.
Bogdonovich claims that his "decision" to use grayscale was commended by his pal, himself once a wunderkind, Orson Welles. The now has-been cigar and cheap chablis shill sleeping on Bogdonovich's couch, whose own exercise in nostalgia, The Magnificent Ambersons, was taken away from him, too late to re-shoot in colour. The studio, concerned that without the period colour, fans of Booth Tarkington's blockbuster best seller, expecting another Gone With the Wind, might react with anger, and indeed the film flopped. Welles has perversely flown the flag for black and white since, and has clearly manipulated his disciple into the same artistic blind alley.
Underneath the dross of this gimmick, there may be a half decent film struggling to get out. The sad failed romance of Sam the Lion, the tragic trajectory of idiot child Billy, Sonny's coming of age reflected in his variable friendship with Duane, his longing for Jacy and his affair with Ruth, should all congeal to some kind of poignancy. But frankly I didn't notice, my eyes were struggling the whole time to try to reintegrate the colour that had been forcibly drained from the images. It is this problem, chromosthesia, that causes headaches in viewers. I may have been able to recommend this movie, if only some cinemas were brave enough to show it in its colour print.
There is a solution to this problem, you can construct your own "colourizing" spectacles. Merely purchase two pairs of sunglasses with polarizing lenses, some wire, a motorized toy car, and some sticky backed plastic. Break one of the sunglasses leaving the lenses separate. Attach the bisected toy car by the axels to the extra lenses, suspending them in front of those of the unbroken sunglasses, using the small motor to rotate them. Other viewers may object to the sound of the motor, but you can cover this up by buying more popcorn and nachos and chewing loudly with an open mouth. Granted, this will not give you true colour, you will see swirls of colour akin to Corman's The Trip, but you can enjoy these to fuller effect if you also smuggle in a cassette player with a tape of Atom Heart Mother, hitting "play" when Cybill Shepherd joins "the club". Finally, place the sticky backed plastic over your mouth to suppress any loud squeals of delight.
Despite the slight dimness caused by the reduction, up to 20%, of what I think they call footchromas, Bogdonovich is sticking to his guns, pledging to shoot Paper Moon in "genuine" monochrome, and rumour has it that Mel Brooks may follow suit with Young Frankenstein. Whatever its good intentions may be, I hope that The Last Picture Show fails to find an audience, as its success would be a prophetic death knell to the industry, making it "the Last", indeed. There is some hope on the horizon as avant garde film-maker George Lucas, who is remaking his enigmatic student film in glorious washed out colour, is considering a look at a similar period as this film, hopefully he'll put the pink Cadillacs and the yellow neon back where it belongs on our nation's screens.
[Author's Note: This is another piece that I wrote as a potential entry for the New Forest Film Critic of the Year 2011 Competition, but which I decided was too fanciful for the competition. It's really more like science fiction, the review is set in a slightly alternate universe. My short listed entry (Review: The Brothers Bloom: The Sum of Its Parts), and its other unsubmitted sibling "Mamma Mia! as directed by Michael Haneke" may be read following the links.]
Labels: Alternative Cinaverse, Life Irritates Art, New Forest Film Festival, Reviews
Fantasy Reviews: Mamma Mia! as directed by Michael Haneke
In Mamma Mia! Michael Haneke gives us his grimmest unblinkingly bleak dissection of the human condition yet. Meryl Streep (Silkwood, Ironweed) performs her most blisteringly tragic role since Sophie's Choice, with which she creates a dramatic throughline, again playing a woman haunted by the decisions of her past, this time the mother of a character named Sophie.
Always the maverick, Haneke breaks new ground by having the characters shatter the realism of the mise en scène by expressing their thoughts suddenly in the songs of an obscure, darkly contemplative Scandinavian band, ABBA (whose name perversely describes a rhyming scheme their sinister lyrics never employ). The effect of these random bursts into song is his most shocking arresting device since the "rewind" scene from Funny Games (both the German and U.S., as well as the unreleased Japanese animé version). The inexplicable transitions into song, with often surreally sourceless musical accompaniment, form a polemic against American cinema's disempowerment of the spectator by providing more answers than questions, and upends the viewers expectations of a Haneke film by sidestepping his usual formal use of silence.
The plot concerns a young bride-to-be, Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls) trying to discover her true parentage. Haneke is playing with issues of identity, squarely honing in on the post-feminist struggle of a woman against a culture that insists she define herself in terms of men, her unknown father and her soon to be husband. The ghosts in Streep's past are Pierce Brosnan (Nomads, The Long Good Friday), Colin Firth (Trauma) and Stellan Skarsgård (Breaking the Waves), playing multiple nationalities and members of male dominated professions, they are really just portraying facets of a single male archetype, domineering and global.
There are some missteps. Haneke draws us briefly away from the grueling emotional tension to deconstruct the fall from grace of capitalism ("Money, Money, Money"), and throws in some overwrought metaphors conflating the battle of the sexes and the horrors of war ("Fernando", "Waterloo"). Dominic Cooper (From Hell), Julie Walters (G.B.H.) and Christine Baranski (Reversal of Fortune, Cruel Intentions), who round out the cast are cruelly underused, perhaps intentionally, as meaningless ciphers. Whilst Haneke's motives are semiotically unfathomable, it is possible that we are being provoked to establish a Brechtian emotional distance from the characters. These flaws do not dim this staggering achievement.
In one masterstroke, with the song "SOS", Haneke is telling us that by driving to our multiplex, buying not just tickets, but family fun pack refreshments, with extra big gulp, yard of slushee, large popcorn and plastic tray of nachos with a compartment of scalding microwaved processed jalapeño cheese food, and by sitting in designated seats, perhaps encroaching on the personal space of the seat next to us by using the arm rest reservoir for our soda pop, whilst we balance the nachos between us, by participating in this earth resource draining consumerist charade, we are implicitly culpable for the grotesque spectacle of Pierce Brosnan's singing. We are complicit and responsible for every jarring flat semiquaver as it thuds against our ear drums, as Haneke makes clear to us by rigidly keeping the sound level from dipping and by not sparing us one moment of horror, cutting away or processing it through autotune. For if we are not there to hear it, he would not need to film it in the first place. Just as Haneke used the unflinching audio of the offscreen murder in Benny's Video to harrowing effect, he reminds us that in a cold uncaring universe, our own cries of SOS will go unheeded.
It is particularly telling how Haneke uses one of the most recognizable dirges, "Knowing Me, Knowing You", played instrumentally as the couple walk down the aisle. Pitting this denunciation of the delusion of understanding between clearly unknowable minds, against the societal conventions promoting this illusory union, creates a damning reevaluation of the institution of marriage. That Haneke deftly weaves this into a tableau of skin deep glamour and taffeta, makes the viewer's inescapable realization of the shallow futility of all human interaction at once poignant and searingly painful.
Given the "emo" cult of the music, this will no doubt make the film a draw for teenagers. Here, I feel, the BBFC have criminally rated this film a liberal PG, permissively ignoring the effect of such traumatic material, clearly inducing suicidal thoughts, in that impressionable age. For youth, having the hope of life ahead of them surgically removed, as this film does coldly and clinically, there may be no other way past the pain and misery that Mamma Mia! evokes. Parents, lest that be the last cry you hear from your wounded child, ban them from this film! Just tell them to say "No Thank You to the Music".
In the end, a nearly unwatchable, though masochistically compelling, pitiless excursion into brutal nihilism.
And the tunes are catchy.
[Author's Note: This is another piece that I wrote as a potential entry for the New Forest Film Critic of the Year 2011 Competition, but which I decided was too fanciful for the competition. Also, although I was able to knock my short listed entry (Review: The Brothers Bloom: The Sum of Its Parts) down from about 900 words to the competition limit 500, the verbose pseudo-intellectualese used in this piece denied much trimming from its first draft and even grew a bit as I finished it off for inclusion here. Not being as tight, I hope it doesn't overstay its welcome.]
Labels: Alternative Cinaverse, Life Irritates Art, New Forest Film Festival, Reviews
