Top Five: Trailers

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A Serious Man, Abraham, Alien, Citizen Kane, Coen Brothers, Hitchcock, orson welles, Psycho, Ridley Scott, Super 8

There is little more irritating in cinema these days than a poor trailer. They are beyond parody. It seems it has become the norm for a romantic comedy trailer to reveal the film’s entire plot within the two minutes it plays out. What are the studios trying to achieve here? Apart from insulting the audience’s intelligence and showing a complete disregard for the women these films are aimed at? (Additionally, I resent the implication that a film should be aimed at one sex specifically). Would a proper filmmaker give away significant plot points before their film’s release?

Imagine it, The Usual Suspects trailer that could have been. The first minute we are treated to explosions, intrigue, mystery, tempting us to part with out hard earned tenner and trot down to our local multiplex, M&M’s in hand. The second minute of the trailer sees a blank white endless room, in the distance we begin to notice a man in black walking purposefully towards the camera. It is Kevin Spacey. He is limping. As he comes closer we notice that he has straightened up and gained swagger, then, looking straight down the lens he declares “I am Kaiser Söze”. Oh right. That’s that then.

This is what a lot of trailers might as well be doing.

Anyway, below are a few decent ones from both modern times and yesteryear.

Psycho (1960)

These days Hitchcock is primarily thought of as The Master of Suspense but in returning to any of his films it is impossible not to notice what great comic sensibilities the man had. Many of his classic works are as imbued with a very British sense of humour as they are with an edge-of-the-seat tension. This particularly comes across in the wonderfully offbeat trailer for Psycho. The director gives us a tour around the set, dropping hints and tidbits about what treats may be in store if we go and see the whole movie. This is all juxtaposed with a jaunty little backing track that couldn’t be further from the discordant orchestral stabs that have since become synonymous with the film itself. The trailer also ends with Hitchcock’s claim that it is a “Picture you MUST see from the beginning, or not at all!” This tactic had the desired effect of adding to the mystique around the film and made it a box office smash.

Citizen Kane (1941)

This is a natural bedfellow to the Psycho trailer. As with the latter it sees the director introduce the feature, its plot and lead players. Despite having yards of wonderful footage to choose from not a single frame from the film is present in the trailer. Instead we have Orson Welles’ unmistakable voice enigmatically describing Charles Foster Kane, the tones somehow laced with both the cheekiness of a prep school boy and the malice of a ruthless killer. I always feel that with Welles you can almost hear the twinkle in his eye as he speaks.

A Serious Man (2009)

This one really is something special. The Coen Brothers have long been masters in their use of sound design, utilising a mix of increased ambient and background sound as their films’ primary soundtracks (No Country For Old Men, for example, only has sixteen minutes of music in the entire film). The trailer for A Serious Man builds a thumping piece of music around incidental bangs and crashes from the film itself, be it Larry’s head being slammed repeatedly against a wall or a door rattling on its hinges. What’s more the trailer perfectly captures the comic and chaotic tone of the film itself as Larry Gopnik increasingly struggles to comprehend why everything is collapsing so remarkably around him.

Alien (1979)

As the camera glides through the infinite blackness of space we begin to understand the complete isolation of anyone stranded in this huge abyss; you realise how totally alone all the protagonists must be, lest we forget, ‘In space, no-one can hear you scream’. After a while of this darkness we see an egg which hatches with an animalistic scream and a beam of light. This sets the tone for the rest of the trailer which comprises of a montage of images cut with Ripley running manically through the ships corridors. Watched in the correct isolation this is truly terrifying, succeeding as a mini short film in all the same ways as the main feature.

Super 8 Teaser Trailer (2010)

Being a teaser trailer this arguably shouldn’t qualify however I wanted to include something  from JJ Abraham on the list, not because I necessarily love the man per se but he has certainly become the king of viral marketing a film, tantalisingly revealing bits about his work in dribs and drabs. There had already been a lot of hype about Super 8 before this teaser was finally premiered at the Super Bowl and it didn’t disappoint. We see the aftermath of a devastating train crash, blazing carriages strewn around the area, smashes and screams as bits of track bend this way and that and then we hear an ominous and otherworldly banging from one of the carriages. Bang, bang, bang. What this trailer successfully did was both show the film’s credentials as a successor to Spielberg films of the 80’s and also have the Cloverfield  monster movie aspect thrown in.

Woody Allen: A Beginner’s Guide.

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Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, crimes and misdemeanors, Love and Death, Manhattan, Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

A good friend of mine recently revealed to me that he had never seen a Woody Allen film. A startling revelation indeed. I have therefore decided to choose a list of five for him to begin with. I am not positing that these are necessarily his finest works, nor my favourite; but they are a good starting point to begin exploring the canon.

Annie Hall(1977)

“My grammy never gave gifts. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks”. 

This is arguably Allen’s most critically respected work. A surprise Best Picture winner at the 1978 Oscars, it redefined the romantic comedy and set the bar for all other filmmakers to aspire to. It is a wonderfully observed, funny and personal deconstruction of one couple’s relationship. Diane Keaton, an ex-girlfriend and some-time muse of Allen takes the title role of Annie, setting the mould for Allen being one of the few male filmmakers writing interesting and three dimensional female characters. Although of course the film is funny  it’s the emotional heart and examination of modern day relationships that give it its lasting power.

That said, it also has an awful lot to answer for, inspiring all manner of knock off and irritating indie flicks that say so little. Zack Braff, I’m looking at you.

Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

“But the law, Judah. Without the law, it’s all darkness.”

Crimes and Misdemeanours is the type of film you rarely see these days. It manages to meld two tonally different storylines perfectly. One, a romantic comedy, the other a dark, existential and philosophical work about the realities of existence in an empty and meaningless universe. Groucho Marx mixed with Schopenhauer.

In one story line Woody plays a struggling filmmaker who has fallen for Mia Farrow’s TV producer. It is great, but typical Allen fodder. Nothing particular new here. The other is an all together different beast. Alan Alda plays a successful eye surgeon who has his mistress (played by a wonderfully chaotic Anglica Houston) murdered lest she reveal their affair. This stepping stone allows Allen to examine the nature of existence and ask what is the place of humans if no overarching moral structure exists? It is one of the moments where you see Allen being the filmmaker he always wanted to be. Ingmar Bergman basically.

Love and Death (1975)

“If it turns out that there IS a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. I think that the worst you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever”. 

Now I’ve never been a particular fan of the ‘early funny ones’. I can take of leave Bananas and What’s Up Tiger Lily for example but Love and Death is a wonderful film, an out and out comedy that places Woody firmly in the Marx brothers tradition. Set in 18^th century Russia it is full of classic one liners and nods to Russian literature, with the plot itself being entirely irrelevant to enjoyment of the film.  Allen’s staple character of neurotic New York Jew is transported to Russia during the Napoleonic invasion resulting in any number of fish out of water one liners.

Sweet and Lowdown (1999)

“Wanna go to the dump and shoot some rats?” 

Woody Allen’s best film of recent years, Sweet and Lowdown sees Sean Penn Play Emmet Ray, one of the most respected jazz guitarists of his day. Framed loosely as historical truth the film is a love letter to the music that Allen so adores; specifically trad jazz of the inter war years. For me this is Sean Penn’s finest role, packed with idiosyncrasies and foibles playing out the complex and not particularly likable character with a subtlety that would have been far beyond Allen himself as an actor. Along side Penn is Samantha Morton, again putting in a career defining performance playing Hattie, a gentle and kind mute women with whom Emit has a relationship. There are some moments in Sweet and Lowdown that rank among the most affecting in any of Allen’s work, specifically when Emmet Ray is playing or listening to Django Reinhardt,  the obnoxious and troubled man creating beauty and emotion that he is unable to express in his day to day life.

Broadway Danny Rose (1984)

“It’s very important to be guilty. I’m guilty all the time and I never did anything”.

Another iconically New York film, Broadway Danny Rose tells the story of the eponymous Danny Rose, a struggling Broadway agent who tirelessly tries to pedal his collection of third rate acts, ranging from a blind xylophone player to piano playing parrots. The story begins with battle hardened stand up veterans sitting in an Italian restaurant and recalling anecdotes about Danny’s career.

It is classic golden era Woody, full of great lines and complex characters but most of all imbued with a residual sadness that underlies the whole film, a resigned acceptance to the flux of relationships and the essentially unstable nature of the human condition.  Allen is playing Danny as we all think of Woody Allen; neurotic, gesticulating and full of irritating one liners. In fact if we see this as the Woody Allen ‘character’ then this is its finest hour. It is the director himself turned up to eleven.

WARNING One to avoid WARNING One to avoid WARNING

This is a difficult choice as there’s been a fair few failures in his recent work, although that said I think that popular critical consensus has been overly harsh on a few of the noughties offerings (Anything Else is nowhere near as bad as its write up’s would have you believe).

The award for me, however, goes to 2010’s atrocious You Will Meet a Talk Dark Stranger (2010). It is a crayon drawn child’s parody of a classic Woody Allen film, unlikable and morally reprehensible cardboard cut out characters spewing meaningless clichés about situations that we care nothing about. Seeing this as your first Woody Allen film would be enough to put you off the director for life, a film so lacking in any redeeming features that it is in danger of making one re-evaluate the classics in a less favourable light. Awful, just awful.

London Film Festival. Rebellion (L’ordre et la morale) Review.

Dir: Matthew Kassovitz
Starring: Mathieu Kassovitz, Sylvie Testud, Philippe Torreton, Malik Zidi, Xavier Jozelon

Based on an incident that occurred in 1988 in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, in the Pacific, Rebellion stars Kassovitz as Philippe Legorjus, a captain in France’s Gendarmerie Nationale. An experienced negotiator, Legorjus is flown in with his men to Ouvéa, where a group of indigenous Kanak separatists have taken hostages. Legorjus soon finds himself in an untenable position, with the French army treating the crisis as if it were a war situation on hostile soil. Structured as a countdown over ten days, the narrative shows Legorjus’s time running out, as an election approaches and the authorities demand expedient measures. (Cited BFI Website)

It’s been almost twenty years now since Matthew Kassovitz seized the film world’s attention with his angry, snarling and uncompromising debut La Haine. Since then he’s been languishing in a sort of artistic wilderness, otherwise known as Hollywood, yet he now returns with a politically minded genre piece that sees him more angry and hostile towards French society than ever before.

Essentially an action thriller, Rebellion takes a wider outlook than La Haine; although it focuses on one small pacific island it is a global film, pointed in its criticism of not only French, but all Western society. Kassovitz, taking the lead role of Philippe Legorjus, has a remarkable amount of screen time yet he facilitates rather than dominates the story. As oppose to tearing through the celluloid a-la Day-Lewis he plays out the character with a subtlety that means you never once think of the performance. For this he must be applauded.

First and foremost Rebellion is a polemic. It is made by a filmmaker who knew what he wanted to say and allowed other concerns to take a backseat to this point. For example, there are moments when characters will voice a particular existential outlook on the unfolding events, (Kanak leader Alphonse giving a razor tongued critique of Western Capitalist excess comes to mind). Now, a critic of the work may complain that some of these characters seem a bit hackneyed, a bit too obvious as the archetypes they undoubtedly are. I think this is acceptable- Kassovitz has one point to make, one story to tell, and each character is a vehicle for him to do this. The down-the-line-don’t-answer-back General, the eggsbenedict-eating-duplicitous politician, they are all characters you have seen before, and certainly seen done with more subtlety, but they are present to convey an idea, to make a point.

The film owes more than a little to Apocalypse now, even lifting Coppola’s most famous scene as the isolated Legorjus watches a wall fan spin perilously round and round; but what the films share most in common is tonal. The sense of impending doom, hopelessness and isolation from society at large, of one man struggling to keep afloat as he watches a situation deteriorate around him. Further more the outlandish soundtrack borders on the absurd, clunking away as the days count down to the inevitably show down between the rebels and the French army, somehow walking the right side of ludicrous to create a real sense of impending doom.

Above and beyond all else Rebellion is an angry film. It filled me with resentment and bewilderment towards international politics, and it doesn’t attempt to provide any solutions to the problems it raises. It leaves you feeling sad and hopeless, terminally downbeat in your assessment of what can be done about the unbalanced state of world affairs, but most of all it left me in awe of the sheer power of cinema, and Matthew Kassovitz mastery behind the camera. It is as tense a thriller as you are likely to see, a remarkable feat when you bear in mind that the outcome of events is revealed in the first scene, with a broken and weather beaten Kassovitz surveying the chaos of battle.

Reading the notices for this one I can simply not understand why it has been so criminally overlooked and undervalued by critics, what reviews I can find have been far from glowing. For my money, however, it was hands down the strongest film I saw all festival, and probably the best of the year.

London Film Festival: Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou) Review

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Dave Evans, London Film Festival, Nobody else but you, Poupoupidou

Dir: Gérald Hustache-Mathieu
Starring: Jean-Paul Rouve, Sophie Quinton, Guillaume Gouix

Director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu’s latest was presented at the LFF as Nobody Else But You, but the original title, Poupoupidou, is a better fit for this playful comedy-drama. It is a compellingly odd film, and a difficult one to categorise; while the sharp, cine-literate screenplay contains nods to Fargo and 1940s noir, it has an offbeat tone all its own.

The meandering plot takes place in and around Mouthe, a small, snowbound village rocked by the suicide of its most famous resident, regional television personality Candice Lecoeur (Sophie Quinton). Middling mystery writer David Rousseau (Jean-Paul Rouve), is passing through, and smells foul play; investigating the case, he pieces together a story that resembles a provincial French version of the Marilyn Monroe legend – perfect material for his new novel. As Rousseau gets closer to the truth, flashbacks fill us in on Candice’s story, and we learn how she rose from frumpy gas attendant to bleached-blonde weather girl and star of improbably sexy cheese adverts.

Elements of his script – such as Candice’s ill-fated relationships with abusive boyfriends and chauvinistic politicos – suggest Hustache-Mathieu intended to make a point about the exploitation of women, but as he places a nude Quinton at the centre of one gaudy photo-shoot after another, we begin to suspect that he’s merely inviting us to ogle along with the slack-jawed locals. The aesthetic in these sequences brings to mind the ultra-stylised “Cinema du Look” films of the 1980s, notably the soft-focus erotica of 37°2 le matin (Betty Blue), in which director Jean-Jacques Beineix lingered admiringly over Beatrice Dalle’s voluptuous figure in much the same way. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Poupoupidou features a coquettish, very Dalle-like hotelier, whose clumsy flirtation with Rousseau is a running joke.)

Ambiguous sexual politics aside, there is plenty here to enjoy, not least Rousseau’s amiably bumbling detective work, which recalls by turns Columbo and Clouseau. Rouve’s performance is pitch-perfect, and showcases a fine talent for physical comedy – his deadpan one-liners and escalating pratfalls are worth the price of admission alone.

London Film Festival: Hard Labour (Trabalhar Cansa) Review

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55th, Hard Labour, Helena Albergaria, Juliana Rojas, London Film Festival, Marat Descartes, Marco Dutra, Trabalhar Cansa

Dir: Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas
Starring: Helena Albergaria, Marat Descartes

Helena, a middle aged housewife, is about to realise her dream of running her own grocery store when her husband suddenly looses his job leaving the family in uncertain economic circumstances. Taking on the shop regardless, strange phenomena start affecting the property, black stains, shadowy figures and things that go bump in the night.

Essentially an examination of unemployment and recession in modern day Brazil, Hard Labour is a sensitive look at one family’s economic struggle in the face of seemingly hopeless circumstances. This may perhaps sound unrelentingly grim, but the film is lifted out of the darkness by a nice spattering of black humour and a slightly incongruous supernatural story line involving mysterious happenings in our protagonist’s new grocery store.

Helena Albergaria’s performance as Helena is wonderfully judged, a subtle portrayal of a women struggling to maintain control as her world begins to fall apart around her. The manner in which she converses with her staff alters with her declining fortunes, highlighting the class divide and the uneasy power structure between employer and employee. Indeed, the way film deals with issues of class and social divide in Brazil is the film’s greatest strength, the manner in which the family interacts with their live-in maid highlighting perfectly the uneasiness the middle classes feel in employing staff in their homes. A feeling of guilt mixed with an unsavory superiority pervading all of their interactions.

The film’s main selling point, and the reason most people will be drawn to it, is the supernatural goings on in Helena’s newly acquired grocery store. Strange stains appear, objects go missing and scratches appear on the walls.  This element of the story is handled nicely, if perhaps slightly unsatisfactorily and there are a few genuine frights and uncanny moments, a sense of impending danger underlying the times when Helena is on her own in the store. The lurking menace in the walls of the building represents, for me, a wider menace in a society during recession, The feeling that in this couples lives there is no safety net, no where to fall. The unknown phantom darkness as an allegory for the economic black hole the couple find themselves sinking in to. For my money though, there isn’t enough of this supernatural element, it feels slightly tacked on, like an afterthought. There are just a handful of scenes concerning this side of the story and some will find the resolution less than fulfilling; certainly selling the film as a psychological horror would leave the distributors liable to an injunction from trading standards.

In balance, Hard Labour is an interesting piece of work. It is a sensitive exploration of a family in crisis, with a humour that lifts it out of being unrelentingly depressing. Otavio’s desperate attempts to succeed on the job market sees him attend all manner of painful networking events that are genuinely funny, think Tom Cruise in Magnolia. It is unlikely to cause a huge stir on the UK market, it may even fail to secure a theatrical release, but it is a gentle, thoughtful and unsettling film that warrants viewing, even if it is a little mild.

London Film Festival: Last Screening (Derniere Seance) Review

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achard, cervo, derniere seance, last screening, London Film Festival

Friends, Romans, Countrymen…Lend me your ears.

Dir: Laurent Achard
Starring: Pascal Cervo, Austin Morel,Karole Rocher

First learning the premise of Last Screening I was expecting, or at least hoping for, Cinema Paradiso with more blood. I was sorely disappointed. Although the movie is set in a run down regional cinema, and has an obsessive cinephile as its main protagonist, it lacked the essential heart of Tornatore’s masterpiece.

The movie revolves around a socially awkward and isolated projectionist, Sylvain, days before the cinema is due to close its doors; a reality that he refuses to face up to. By day he mans the ticket office, cleans the aisles and projects the film to handful of regular customers, by night he scours the streets of his small French town, cutting of women’s ears and leaving them to bleed to death in whatever gutter he found them. That is it. That’s the premise, that’s the film- and herein lies the problem. The movie is one vaguely interesting idea stretched throughout an entire film. Although the work’s self acknowledged B-movie feel excuses a certain lack of depth, there is still not enough continued tension to carry its brief running time. Bearing in mind it is only 81 minutes long this is a damning criticism. From the first on screen killing to the last you learn very little more about the characters motivation, fair enough perhaps, but most frustratingly the film plays out exactly how you expect it to. There are no sudden twists, no interesting diversions and very few gripping set pieces, and by the end I was almost disinterested in the unfolding action.

That said, there are a few morbidly gripping moments. The first reveal of Sylvain’s psychotic personality, when we enter his basement room full of black and white photographs of actresses from cinema’s golden era with severed off ears attached to them, is a sumptuously grotesque moment. But a few strong scenes are simply not enough to carry and entire film, and the predictable and ultimately lifeless script means the film was destined to fail before the first day’s rushes were even in the can.

Towards the end of the film, as Sylvain struggles to hold himself up in the projector beams, blood slowly draining out of his body, he grasps for a reality that never existed, characters that disappear at the edges of the frame, and a dream that instantly vanishes as the last beams of light shine through the auditorium. I only wish I had felt even a fraction of this emotion towards Last Screening.

Sorry for the delay

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festival, film, London

Upcoming London Film Festival reviews:

Hard Labour, Target, Rebellion, Last Screening, How to Re-establish a Vodka Empire and more

London Film Festival

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55th, London Film Festival

Kicking off this week is the 55th BFI London Film Festival. I have been lucky enough to secure a fair few tickets so expect the blog to be full of reviews and comment from a number of the screenings. For more information on the festival see here.

Melancholia. A Review.

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Gainsbourgh, John Hurt, Kirstin Dunst, Lars Von Trier, Melancholia, William Hitchins

Dir: Lars Von Trier

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, John Hurt.

I am finding it difficult to reconcile the way I felt whilst watching Lars Von Trier’s latest, Melancholia, with how I have come to feel about it in the days following the screening. During the film I was at best mildly irritated and at worst bored out of my seat. Although not literally. That would be sacrilege. Strangely enough however, the more I think about the film the more of merit I see in it.

Kirstin Dunst, an actress who I tend to find unremittingly irritating, shines in this film. She is a revelation. When we first see her she is a glowing bride, radiating a truly believably happiness. As the film progresses and we become aware of her chronic depression she is equally convincing. There are moments when she is so remarkably selfish that it is difficult to sympathise with her, regardless of the black dog sitting by her side; but then there will be a desperation and despair in her performance that makes you realise how awful it must be for her just to exist. It is as realistic and accurate a portrayal of depression you will see, one which is as loathsome as it is understandable. There are moments when Dunst’s character, Justine, feels like a mouth piece for the director himself and his much publicised Schopenhauerian world view. As Melancholia approaches Justine comes in to her own, embracing the bleakness of the situation and the impending end of humanity, welcoming death as an old friend. Just in case you hadn’t picked up the grim message of the film she lays it out for you, stating that the universe if empty and we are all alone and we will all die alone. It feels like Lars Von Trier is speaking directly to you through the speakers. I half expected a quip about the benefits of National Socialism.

It was far funnier than I could have had any right to expect, a sort of strange bleak humour that wouldn’t feel out of space in a Tod Solonz film. Justine is at times so unforgivingly awful that humour must surely have been the filmmaker’s intention. Facing the end of the world, for example, her sister suggests a plan as to how they should meet the impending apocalypse. It’s a nice enough plan; they will sit on the patio together, drinking wine, and watch in peace as the planet Melancholia approaches. Apparently not. Dunst coldly replies “Do you know what I think of your plan? I think it’s a piece of shit”. This was received with a hearty laugh in the screening, and why not?

Melancholia can certainly be viewed as a sister piece to Antichrist. They both begin in similar ways, with an impending tragedy that will cast its shadow over the entire film, in Melancholia’s case literally so. Even stylistically the openings are handled comparably, with a long series of ultra slow motion shots, creating more a canvas of still images than a film. Like walking through an art gallery full of renaissance paintings depicting events you don’t yet understand. The images full of meaning and signs that can’t quite be read in to. Both works deal with depression and our place in the universe; crises of faith of various natures. However, where in Antichrist you have Willhelm Defoe’s phallically challenged He to sympathise with, in Melancholia none of the characters are in any way likable and as a result some may find it difficult to stay with the film for its sizable duration. Despite its benefits, the film certainly feels every one of its hundred and thirty six minutes, and on more than one occasion I found myself checking my watch. The mind can only put up with so many shots of people walking around looking miserable and staring at the sky. Despite this it was one of the most interesting and beautiful depictions of the apocalypse I have seen on screen, the planet Melancholia inspiring and menacing as it spins towards the earth, beckoning forth our planet’s sudden, complete and violent end.

Melancholia is a truly cinematic piece of work, made by an auteur who knew exactly the film he wanted to make and seemingly compromised to no-one. An incomplete patchwork of ideas and images, it is as frustrating as it is enthralling but Von Trier, I imagine, would have had it no other way.

The ‘Today-Film’ Quiz ~3

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film, movie, quiz

Today I set in to motion a computer virus that saved the world. Who knew that Microsoft windows would be compatible with an alien spacecraft?