The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel review (The List, Issue 693)

(12A) 118min

Early in this by-the-numbers comedy drama, a young salesperson eagerly enthuses to retiring couple Douglas (Bill Nighy) and Jean (Penelope Wilton) that 'the grey pound is very strong at the moment'. We’re quite clearly supposed to see this whippersnapper as insensitive and opportunistic, but his position seems plainly analogous to that of the producers of this film, who have clearly decided there is an audience of a certain age ready and waiting for ‘Love Actually for the over-60s … but in India!’ They’re undoubtedly correct, and they don’t hurt their chances of satisfying that audience by casting an irresistible army of pension-age talent including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Tom Wilkinson, all on excellent form. But the story, about a group of unconnected British retirees who come to the titular hotel in Jaipur and find resolution for their various issues and challenges, feels too calculated to offer anything more than disposable entertainment at best, and cheaply manipulative emotional kicks at worst. Actors this good can invest even this trite material with credibility, but they deserve better.

This review first published at The List's Film website.

A Dangerous Method review (The List, Issue 693)

(15) 99min

David Cronenberg’s new film is a change of pace for the seldom gore-shy director of The Fly and A History of Violence, being a talky period drama about the birth of psychoanalysis in the early 20th century. But while the body-horror auteur’s traditionally extreme visuals are absent, his ability to create a sense of broiling unease is palpably present, ensuring what could have been a dry history lesson is in fact a strangely gripping intellectual thriller. What Cronenberg and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (adapting from his own play, The Talking Cure) offer here is a rigorous dramatic investigation of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, seen through the prism of the relationship between the fledgling discipline’s two main proponents, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and his protégé Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). It makes for a fascinating imaginative insight into a moment in history when the world of thought, and the way that we think about ourselves, was being fundamentally reshaped.

The film begins at fever pitch as hysterical patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) is manhandled into Jung’s Zurich hospital. The story then follows Jung as he successfully treats Spielrein using Freud’s controversial principles, but then begins to question his theories as he is drawn into a transgressive affair with her. Fassbender bears the bulk of the film’s dramatic weight, and thoroughly convinces as the dispassionate analyst, only too keen to use his own life as a testing ground for scientific breakthrough. Mortensen is equally effective as Freud, playing him with a humorous charm that conceals an unsettling lack of humanity. While some audiences may struggle to warm to A Dangerous Method’s largely cerebral pleasures, those keen to delve into the darker recesses of the human mind couldn’t wish for a more capable guide than Cronenberg.

This review originally published in The List magazine.

Young Adult review (The List, Issue 693)

(15) 94min

This reteaming of Juno director (Jason Reitman) and writer (Diablo Cody) is a fiercely dark character comedy that once again demonstrates the pair’s refusal to be limited by genre conventions, no matter how sacred. The set-up is straightforward enough: recently divorced writer Mavis (Charlize Theron) decides on a whim to leave her bombsite Minneapolis apartment and drive back to her tiny hometown in order to win back Buddy (Patrick Wilson), her one-time college sweetheart. But Buddy is now a happily married new father, a fact that Mavis has convinced herself can only be superficially true; how, goes her reasoning, could anyone really be happy in a hick town where nothing of significance ever happens? Buddy obviously needs to be rescued.

It all sounds far-fetched enough to make for standard quirky rom-com material that will all rather improbably but reassuringly turn out nice in the end. But despite initial appearances, Young Adult is not that kind of film; somewhat daringly, Reitman and Cody are aiming for something much more truthful and ultimately more painful. Mavis is a conceited car-crash of a woman - the prom-queen who never grew up - and her solipsistic worldview and searing tactlessness are not character foibles that can be neatly ironed out by this story’s end. Theron’s performance was ignored by the Oscars in favour of more family-friendly fare, but in truth her portrayal of Mavis is perfectly judged, and delivered with an unflinching disregard for audience sympathy that few actresses of her standing would have the guts to go through with. The film also features a very strong supporting turn from Patton Oswalt, one of the great ‘where-do-I-know-him-from?’ character actors who, as Matt, the formerly ignored high-school nerd attempting to deal some truth back to Mavis, brings a touch of warmth and acts as a much-needed go-between for the audience.

As in his previous film Up in the Air, Reitman is interested here in offering a patient, perceptive and often very funny analysis of a problematic character. But where the former film was subtly subversive, particularly in its conclusion, here Reitman wears his rebellion on his sleeve. Young Adult’s consistently jarring tone, powered by Cody’s crackling self-aware dialogue, further confirms Reitman’s instinct for original approaches to storytelling. And as a bonus, the film will delight fans of peerless Scottish indie band Teenage Fanclub, whose song The Concept is the cornerstone of the film’s perfectly selected 90s rock soundtrack.

This review was originally published at The List's Film website.

January - The Iron Lady, War Horse, The Descendants, Haywire and The Artist reviews

George Clooney and Shailene Woodley
 in The Descendants

Since I'm generally rubbish at keeping this blog up-to-date, I've decided to just do it monthly, and post links to the current films I've reviewed, along with the odd bonus thought on anything else I've been watching that I didn't properly write or talk about anywhere else. So here's January. Following months will be a bit more timely, maybe.

The Iron Lady (The List)
A film about the cost of power that features a brilliantly convincing lead performance from Meryl Streep, but offers no significant insights on the lady of the title.

War Horse (The List)
Unashamedly romanticised, old-fashioned big-screen storytelling. Absolutely wonderful cinema.

Haywire (The List)
A stripped-down action chase movie directed, shot and edited by Soderbergh with a level of energy and invention that puts most action directors to shame.

The Descendants (The List)
A rich mix of relationship drama, character comedy and weighty meditation; fertile ground for Alexander Payne, a filmmaker with a fine-tuned ability to balance humour and heart in ways that ring true.

Ralph Fiennes profile - Coriolanus (The List)
"There’s no easy access into Coriolanus, but I like playing characters with no easy access."

Movie Cafe - Radio Scotland
26th January - I reviewed The Descendants on this edition of Movie Cafe, as well as discussing the Oscar nominations with host Janice Forsyth and fellow critic Nicola Balkind. You can download the show as a podcast from the link.

22nd December 2011 - Officially yes, this aired last year, but we began the show with a review of The Artist, which was only properly released in the UK in January. There's lots of other fun stuff on this show as it was a review of the year featuring much witty chat from Hannah McGill, Siobhan Synnot and Janice Forsyth.

Also...
I thought Steve McQueen's film Shame was very good, featuring an excellent performance from Michael Fassbender and being a timely and appropriately disturbing portrayal of a man effectively enslaved by an addiction to sex. I also found a lot to enjoy about Like Crazy, an indie romance about the pressures and struggles involved in trying to maintain a long-distance relationship. Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin are very likeable as the couple, and while the film starts out feeling a little too self-conscious and wilfully low-key, I found myself slowly drawn in, and by the bittersweet end I really cared about these two.

Sound It Out review (The List, Issue 690)

The tagline for this affectionate record store documentary is ‘High Fidelity with a Northern accent’, and it is a rare case of the marketing being bang on the money. A labour of love for director Jeanie Finlay, who also produced the film and did most of the camerawork, Sound It Out is as low-budget as professional filmmaking gets, but Finlay’s passion for the subject is evident in every frame; the film resonates with the soul of a music lover.

The subject in question is Sound It Out Records, Teeside’s last surviving record shop, and something of a haven for Northern England’s record-lovers, music completists and social misfits. Through interviews with employees and customers, as well as plenty of in-store footage, Finlay builds up a picture of the community this store, and more specifically it’s devoted owner Tom, has cultivated and in many ways cared for for over 20 years in Stockton. It’s touching, at times very funny and also surprisingly moving. As well as crafting an insightful portrait of a specific place, Finlay effectively captures the moment of transition that record collectors worldwide are in, as the physical, tangible aspect of owning music gradually disappears. Highly recommended.

Showing at Glasgow Grosvenor on Weds 16th November, 6.30pm and Edinburgh Cameo on Thurs 17th November, 9pm, with a post-screening Q&A from director/producer Jeanie Finlay at both screenings. More info at www.sounditoutdoc.com. This review first published in The List.

David Mackenzie - Perfect Sense interview (audio)

David Mackenzie on the set of Perfect Sense

Perfect Sense tells the story of a chef (Ewan McGregor) and a scientist (Eva Green) who begin to fall in love as the world begins to fall apart, when a series of inexplicable epidemics strike across the globe. Listen to my interview with the film's director David Mackenzie (Young Adam, Hallam Foe) from June this year at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It's a fairly in-depth discussion of some of the film's themes, so probably best listened to after you've seen the film.

David Mackenzie - Perfect Sense interview by paulcgallagher

As I wrote on The List blog during the Film Festival, Perfect Sense is a uniquely ambitious work in which Mackenzie picks up some fascinating ideas and uncompromisingly follows them through, with the help of a solid cast, and a great lead performance from McGregor. It's a demanding film, but also thought-provoking and quietly moving. As Mackenzie says in the interview, ‘what I saw in the script was a poetic attempt to tell the story of a possible end [of humanity], and that felt interesting to me. It felt like a subtle and rather magical way of looking at these things as opposed to a bombastic and genre-led thing.’

And if you want more Perfect Sense goodies, check out the exclusive content in the player below from Sigma films:

The film features a haunting score by Max Richter (Waltz with Bashir, Shutter Island), and you can hit the green button to watch a featurette with Mackenzie and Richter discussing their motivations with the score.

Perfect Sense is released on October 7th.

Red State review (The List, Issue 688)

Outspoken filmmaker Kevin Smith hit a creative and commercial low with his last studio-backed production, the Bruce Willis-starring flop Cop Out, but before that film was even released Smith had shifted focus to this long-gestating personal project. Red State defies categorisation, but could, for some of its lean running time, be described as a political horror movie. Having independently raised funds, Smith shot the film entirely on digital cameras to allow for the quickest possible turnaround. The result is an uneven and often unpleasant film that leaves a bitter aftertaste, but despite its flaws suggests Smith has rediscovered his creative mojo, and is not beyond challenging himself yet.

The film begins with a class teacher in the unspecified titular state decrying the homophobic protests of a local fundamentalist Christian church. We soon see first-hand the horrific practices of this church, led by charismatic pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks, giving a creepily authentic performance), as three teenage boys get more than they bargained for after responding to an internet post seemingly offering no-strings attached sex. Smith refashions the traditional backwoods horror movie with Christian fundamentalists as the monsters, and while subtlety is clearly not on his agenda, this is an effective and scary first half hour, expertly put together and shorn of any of Smith’s usual wisecracking comedy. But the introduction of FBI agent Joe Keenan (John Goodman) signals a distinct change in tone, and Smith abandons horror in favour of an attempt at more nuanced political drama. While his ambition is admirable, Smith’s characters – with the notable exception of Keenan – are unsympathetic caricatures, and feel too much like convenient mouthpieces for the issues he wants to tackle. An inspired and bizarre final twist almost works, until Smith pulls the rug and backtracks for a West Wing-lite philosophising conclusion.

Red State was released on September 30th. This review originally published in The List magazine.

Pearl Jam Twenty – not so much a review as a fan’s take

I’m a huge fan of Pearl Jam, and I’m a huge fan of Cameron Crowe (director of Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous amongst others), so there’s no point pretending I can offer an objective critical review of Pearl Jam Twenty, Crowe’s documentary of the band’s 20-year history so far. What I can tell you, having seen it at one of the worldwide one-day only screening’s last night, is that it is definitely one for the fans. Crowe's loosely chronological scrapbook-like approach offers up tidbits on the band's evolution over the years, inter-band relationships and songwriting processes; but ultimately this is a celebration, plain and simple, and taken on those terms it’s terrific.

Crowe has been a close friend of the band since before they were Pearl Jam, when they formed Mother Love Bone in the burgeoning early-90s Seattle grunge scene, and consequently he appears to have had access to every piece of film ever taken of the band. This means everything, from the band’s calamitous drunken performance at the wrap party for Crowe’s film Singles, to their tragic Roskilde festival slot in which 9 people were killed in a mosh-pit crush, is represented by on-the-spot video footage. There’s lots of good interview material with all the band members, as well as the scene’s other significant players, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell chief amongst them, but Crowe never dwells on a talking head for long when he has the pictures available to tell the story. His keen sense for comedy comes through too, with witty cutting between archive material and present-day reflections.

Predictably the first half of the film is more compelling than the second, as it contains so much fantastic footage from early performances and interviews, but even so, Crowe’s choice of live clips is never less than spot on, and he ends the film with a recent performance of Alive that is goosebump-inducing in its intensity. If you’re a fan of the band, you really owe it to yourself to see this movie as soon as possible.

www.pj20.com

Pearl Jam Twenty from Pearl Jam on Vimeo.

30 Minutes Or Less review (The List, Issue 687)

Reuniting Ruben Fleischer and Jesse Eisenberg, director and star of the hit comedy Zombieland (2009), this funny and silly diversion just about matches the previous film in terms of laughs, although it lacks the mix of invention and unique characterisation that made Zombieland particularly special.

Here Eisenberg plays Nick, a pizza delivery driver – hence the title – whose life consists of watching 80s action movies and refusing to get a ‘proper job’ like his best friend, schoolteacher Chet (Aziz Ansari). In a needlessly convoluted set-up, a pair of wannabe criminals (Danny McBride and Nick Swardson) kidnap Nick, strap a homemade bomb to his chest and threaten to detonate it in 10 hours unless he steals one hundred thousand dollars from a local bank for them. The reason they want the money is so they can pay a hitman (Michael Peña) to off McBride’s millionaire father (Fred Ward), but really the motives are irrelevant; Michael Diliberti’s script values laughs over logic, and fortunately enough of the gags hit their targets to make it easy to forgive the story’s shortcomings.

Realising he has no option but to rob the bank, Nick convinces Chet to help him, and Fleischer correspondingly kicks the film into action as they plan the heist, carry it out and deal with the increasingly desperate consequences. There’s some well-staged manic car chase action, nicely connecting with Nick’s love of 80s movies, while the cast have fun with Diliberti’s witty (and frequently potty-mouthed) observational dialogue. Ansari, previously seen in bit-parts and TV shows, is the stand-out performer, and he steals all the biggest laughs from under Eisenberg’s nose as the disapproving and incredulous ‘grown up’ friend. 

30 Minutes or Less is out now. This review also published at www.list.co.uk.

Troll Hunter review (The List, Issue 687)

This monster movie was an unqualified box office hit in its native Norway, and has picked up dozens of rave reviews on the worldwide festival circuit, but aside from a couple of good jokes and a handful of impressive visual effects sequences, there’s nothing in André Ovredal’s film that hasn’t been done much better before.

It begins promisingly, with portentous opening text attesting to the veracity of this ‘found footage’, then a cut straight to handheld camera as three Norwegian media students document their pursuit of an illicit bear hunter. Their conversation is authentically mundane and the spectacular mountain scenery immediately atmospheric; it’s an aesthetic that’s been familiar since The Blair Witch Project so effectively rewrote the rulebook for modern horror. We seem to be on track for solid scares, but Ovredal abruptly gear-shifts to comedy once he reveals the trolls (fantastic CG creations that look like giant versions of Spike Jonze’s Wild Things). Not nearly scary enough to be a horror, but not consistently funny enough to be a comedy, Troll Hunter ends up somewhere in the middle.

Troll Hunter is on selected release from Fri 9 Sep. This review first published in The List magazine.

Weekender review (The List, Issue 687)

The do-it-yourself rave explosion in ‘90s Manchester is a moment of recent history ripe with storytelling potential – Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People demonstrated that wonderfully – but Weekender, Karl Golden’s brazenly shallow ode to the scene, offers less insight than a homemade video of a great night out. It’s the story of best mates Dylan (Jack O’Connell) and Matt (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), who start putting on club nights and are drawn into a world of great success and, once big-city drug dealers get wind of them, great danger. It’s a solid set-up, but Golden and writer Chris Coghill toss aside the moral, political and social issues inherent in the subject matter in favour of taking an hour and a half to say ‘remember the 90s? They were brilliant!’

Pelican Blood director Golden’s attempts at style – essentially using Dutch angles in every other scene – fail to distract from the script’s complete lack of tension, with every potentially dramatic plot turn clearly signposted, and a concluding piece of illogical storytelling that even Guy Ritchie would have reservations about committing to film. Thank the party gods then for Henry Lloyd-Hughes, whose excellent lead performance saves Weekender from being completely unwatchable.

General release from Fri 2 Sep. This review first published in The List magazine.

Project Nim review (The List, Issue 686)

It’s not surprising that director James Marsh has chosen to follow his Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man On Wire by taking an approach often favoured by bands following up a hit album: don’t mess with the formula, just try and do the same thing again, but better. What is surprising, considering how good his previous film was, is how close Marsh comes to bettering it with Project Nim.

The titular project was an ill-conceived experiment in which Columbia University Behavioural Psychologist Herb Terrace took a baby chimp – Nim – and convinced Stephanie LaFarge, one of his ex-girlfriends, now married with children, to take the chimp into her home, and treat Nim as one of the family. ‘Only in the 70s,’ is how one interview subject aptly describes it. The theoretical aim was to teach Nim to communicate through sign language, but in practice the experiment was doomed from the start, and, of course, it was Nim who paid the highest cost.

Marsh’s film plays out through detailed interviews with everyone involved, alongside some amazing archive footage and dramatically charged reconstructions. It’s a very similar filmmaking approach to Man On Wire, but Marsh makes up for playing it safe stylistically by plumbing the subject’s thematic depths to pull out a deeply affecting story. Marsh’s storytelling instincts are good; he carefully withholds information to ensure viewers keep asking their own questions about the motivations of the projects’ architects. This is an animal story that’s populated by a fascinating cast of humans, and Marsh successfully draws out their considered and sometimes fundamentally contradictory opinions about what they did and were trying to achieve. What emerges is both a heartbreaking tale of the mistreatment of one ‘dumb animal’ and a complex meditation on the very best and worst aspects of human nature.

Project Nim is in cinemas on selected release now. This review originally published in The List magazine.
You can also listen to me reviewing Project Nim on BBC Movie Cafe here.

Chris Weitz Interview: A Better Life (The List, Issue 683)

Chris Weitz began his career together with his brother Paul, first co-writing DreamWorks animation Antz (1998) then co-directing the hit teen comedy American Pie (1999). After another successful collaboration, the 2002 adaptation of Nick Hornby’s About A Boy, Weitz’s first solo attempt, The Golden Compass, was a disappointment, ending up as a heavily sanitized take on the challenging book by Philip Pullman. After a happier experience making New Moon, the second in the blockbusting Twilight series, Weitz has directed A Better Life, a much smaller story about a struggling Mexican immigrant and his son in contemporary LA. I sat down with Weitz to discuss the shift from blockbusters to smaller-scale filmmaking, as well as politics, producing and his thoughts on The Golden Compass debacle now.

You seem to have had a particular audience in mind with each of the films you’ve made so far. Was that also the case while you were making A Better Life?
No, I wasn’t thinking about a particular audience, as a matter of fact my sense of what the audience was going to be changed or developed as we made it. The aim was really to take this extraordinary script – which was extraordinarily written, the best I’d read in 20 years – and to do it justice. But that required a lot of research on my part; getting to know East Los Angeles, getting to know a bit about the gang life, the immigrant experience. And I started to realise that there were two audiences for the film, in America at least; one was the Anglo audience that profits from the work of illegal immigrants - in that the food they eat, the garbage that’s taken away from their homes, their cars being parked, their gardens being taken care of is really the result of very inexpensive labour. There’s been a story recently about how these fruits are rotting in Georgia because the price that the planters will pay to have them picked are so low that not even prisoners will pick them. So it’s that, and it’s also an Hispanic audience, that has never had a film that pays proper tribute to how hard the everyday working person works in order to make life better for his family. And now as I think about the international market, I suppose there’s the theme of love of family, but also the immigration question, which is actually global, between north and south, and wherever there’s a rich country and a poor country nearby, there’s going to be this problem. It’s not so much that the film takes a very liberal tack on it, as that the moment you turn a camera on somebody you humanise them, and you have to start talking about them as people instead of numbers.

So is there a particular sentiment that you’d like that first audience group, the employers of immigrant workers, to take from this film?
I think it would be interesting if they were able to understand the lives of their employees in a better way. And not just their employees, it’s really the human infrastructure of the lives they live; what makes it possible for us to lead these comfortable existences? Now, there are a lot of politicians in the United States who really think that if we could just stop the influx of any new ethnicity, everything would be hunky-dory, and there would be no white person out of work and we’d have a lovely country ‘the way that it used to be’. But there’ve always been immigrants in America from the get-go. Even the Mayflower families were a bunch of people who got told to bugger off because their religious views didn’t fit in with the prevailing ones.

The film is an interesting mix of quite indie-style cast and story, but very high production values in terms of music and cinematography – how did that come about?
I suppose that’s a bit perverse but what I wanted to do was make a film that wasn’t all about indie cred, you know? ‘Oh, we shot it in ten days with our camera phones and aren’t we great?’ I really wanted to be able to employ people like Javier Aguirressarobe (cinematographer) and Alexandre Desplat (composer) to give the story the proper amount of polish, and not to run on any received notions of how movies about poor people are supposed to be made. It’s a weird movie, but all of my movies are kind of weird in some ways! The people at Summit saw [the script] while I was making New Moon, which of course is an utterly different kind of film - so different that they almost belong in entirely different categories of medium - but they were willing to make this movie in spite of the fact that there was no quid pro quo of my making another vampire movie for them, or anything like that. And the budget they offered, which was perfectly sensible from what they knew and what their bean counters told them, wasn’t big enough for what I wanted. So we were able to get Lime Orchard, this new production company, to give us enough money so that we could shoot in 69 different locations without stressing the actors too much, and without rushing around so much that we could only have one take of every shot. The result is a weird hybrid between a film about poor people and their lives, and something with sort of a Hollywood gloss. I really wanted to make a film that people could appreciate for its aesthetics as well as for the story and the emotions within.

I hadn’t seen any of this cast before – how did you find them and decide on them as these characters?
We had two casting directors, Joseph Middleton, who my brother [Paul] and I had worked with many times before, and Carlo Hool, who’s a big Mexican casting agent who has come up to work in the States. She knew the vast reservoir of Mexican talent, and Demián Bichir is a big star in his own country – as is Delores Herdia, as is Joaquín Cosio – and the guys who played the people who came from Mexico, came from Mexico to perform in our movie. And so 35% of the movie is in Spanish with subtitles. Demián is an extraordinarily accomplished actor but he’s not known to American eyeballs, and really I suppose not known globally as much as he should be; I think it’s a role for which he deserves an Oscar nomination, and fingers crossed we’ll get one, because he has this tremendous bearing to him and delivers such a stoic and yet commanding performance. If it had been done by any of the more famous Hispanic actors who could deliver that kind of performance, like Javier Bardem or Benicio del Toro, I think there would have been a problem with audiences carrying baggage from their previous experiences of their other films, but with Demián I just had this double whammy of his appearing to be a newcomer and yet having these extraordinary talents.

It’s interesting that you’re very forward in mentioning an Oscar nomination – will you be campaigning for that?
Well he’s my guy! It’s forward, but inasmuch as it’s for my friend and for someone who carries the entire movie, I feel pretty good about that. Every year there is someone who is discovered in America – America suddenly realises that people in other countries make movies and that they’re actually good actors, and so the scenario opens up for them. I would like for this to be Demián’s year.

The film is, as you’ve mentioned, very different to your previous films – was there a personal connection to the material for you?
Yes. My grandmother is a Mexican immigrant; she came her when she was 17. She came under totally different circumstances; she was signed to a contract to be in silent films for Fox Studios. She still lives in America, and she’s now a hundred years old, but she’s still a Mexican national. She’s very proud; Mexicans are very nationalistic and proud. And my father was a refugee from Nazi Germany, so the immigrant connection is very close to me, closer than many people in America. So I felt some affinity for that, as well as for the fact that my wife is Hispanic, and most of my family speak Spanish except for me. So I thought this would be a good excuse to finally learn Spanish, which was in my list of New Year’s resolutions, as well as losing some weight. It was just a handy way to do some of my New Year’s resolutions really!

What was your experience of the immigrant community in LA before the film, and now?
There are so many immigrant communities in LA, and even when you’re talking about Hispanic LA, there’s Salvadoran LA, Honduran LA, Guatemalan LA, Mexican LA, and my experience is that there are these worlds within worlds, tiny bits of other people’s countries within our country. And they are fascinating and full of interest and life. I mean, there are restaurants in Los Angeles where you can get a cricket taco, if you want to! And even gang LA is surprising in its own way; these are not guys who live for violence and drug dealing; they’ve been pushed into these circumstances by a growing sense of nihilism and despair. But the moment you think you understand them, you realise that you don’t. I got into this state of mind where I was talking to all these guys in gangs and they were very friendly, and everything’s kind of cool, and then I was talking to my friend Hector who works in a gang intervention programme and is very much on the straight side of things. He started talking about what got him into jail, saying ‘one day, when I was firing my AK47 at somebody’, and I realised ‘wow, I’m dealing with people who’ve had quite different experiences from me! This is exceptional.’ But it’s all been to the betterment of my understanding of human nature, I think.

Something the film captures very well is the idea of learned behaviour among the gangs, with the younger boys awkwardly ‘trying on’ gang attitudes.
Yeah, I think that they’re not that way by nature; they’re on a sliding scale between the kid who is going to make it out of the neighbourhood and into college, and the gang members, and they are code-switching between these different systems of values and ethics. They know that to join a gang is a dead end in more ways than one, and yet they’re making a calculation in their minds about belonging, and there is a point at which they feel so down that that’s the way that they’re gonna go. And that’s actually contrary to gang life as it’s presented in gangster rap, where it’s something to aspire to and glamorous and all that kind of stuff. That’s not really the case.

A Better Life touches on many hot-button issues – gangs, immigration, education. Is it a political film?
I guess it is, despite the fact that I keep on trying to say that it’s not, because the moment that you a turn a camera on somebody a degree of sympathy is shown. The story that we’re telling is a bit of a thriller and an adventure in some ways, and the heroes are an illegal immigrant and his son, so in that way it’s political, inasmuch as people will hate it in some parts of America, because of that sympathetic eye on an illegal immigrant. But it’s not an overtly political movie in the way that, say, a Ken Loach film would be, or maybe the occasional Mike Leigh film, because there are no bad guys. Nobody’s wrong, not even the people who work at the immigration detention centres, they’re just doing their jobs. Everybody’s really just doing what they feel they have to do, and in that regard it’s apolitical. But it’s impossible, in America these days, to make a film which is sympathetic to an immigrant without it seeming to be making a political statement. Ironically, this was made with the aid of a Catholic priest, and some of the attitudes expressed towards immigration are shockingly un-Christian, and expressed by Christians.

You’ve experienced negative criticisms from Christians previously, with the issues around The Golden Compass, haven’t you?
Well The Golden Compass was fucked because of the Christian reaction in America. The studio had invested too much money to run afoul of the kind of Christian blacklisting that we suffered. Now I told them that it was going to happen no matter what, so we may as well have done an honest version of the film; I think the version of the film that came out was obviously not accurate to Philip Pullman’s vision, which is a particular pity. In Europe people didn’t care, because you guys have had your wars of religion, you’ve gotten over all that stuff, and people believe what they believe. But in America, we are still grappling with these issues; as recently as May this year, many people thought they were about to be raptured. It’s kind of mad!

So was the book’s original ending actually shot? And was there an intention to continue the series?
They had started [on the second one] in happier days, when we thought it was going to be a proper franchise, and we did film the ending of the book, all the way through Lyra’s friend [Roger] being killed and the bridge to the stars opening up. But eventually the top brass at New Line felt that it was too dark. They really had [wanted] Harry Potter or something, and it was devastating. As a director, to have gotten so close; to have filmed the scenes in which someone says “dust is sin”, and Mrs Coulter speaks about Adam and Eve, and then not to be able to deliver it to the public, and then to take it on the head for having done that, because the director is ultimately responsible for it: It’s the biggest failure of my career, and it haunted me for a long time.

Will that faithful version ever see a cinema screen?
It won’t. You can find a hatched-together version on the web, and I think they’ve done a really good job at it. But I did the research, because I really wanted to do a director’s cut, and I worked on my own, ripping dailies and DVDs and putting it together in Final Cut Pro, but it would have cost about $16million to do the visual effects which had been discontinued. And you can imagine the pain for a visual effects specialist who has developed these amazing algorithms for the cracking of ice and stuff like that, and to have that suddenly cancelled – tremendously painful. I’m sure winning the Oscar for visual effects softened the blow! But all the same, there was a lot of creative pain towards the end of that process.

It’s amazing that you came back from that and jumped into another big book adaptation, with New Moon.
Well yeah, but I new that with New Moon what they wanted was a faithful adaptation of the book. They wanted what the fans wanted, which was a movie experience of the book that they loved, and so I thought ‘okay, I’m gonna get back on the horse and prove that I can do this’. And that was the redemptive experience of doing New Moon, that’s why I did it. So that’s good; that made me feel better! And to go from a movie with over 2,000 effects to a movie with 800 was, like, easy-peasy pumpkin pie for me by then.

There’s a connection between these films and A Better Life, as they’ve all been scored by Alexandre Desplat. The music plays a key role in the storytelling of A Better Life; how closely do you work with Alexandre in your films?
Closer and closer. We’ve become really good friends and I have tremendous respect for him, and our families get along really well now, just from having traded visits. But in this case we had only a month between his having finished Harry Potter whatever-part-it-was and the next thing he was going to move onto; one month for him to write the music and record it. So my family and I moved to Paris for a month so that I could go and bother him in his studio, and it was really what you imagine the ideal scenario of a director working with a composer is. We sat around in his studio and had biscuits and espresso, and he had green tea, and he would play something and we’d talk about it for a bit, then he’d play it again; he handmade it while I was able to make my rather amateurish comments on it. But that’s one of the great creative experiences of my life.

And I assume you would hope to continue that relationship in your future films?
Absolutely. I would never want to work with anybody else in that capacity. Alexandre’s very in demand, however, and you’re often dealing with people’s availability when you’re getting a film together, so we shall see.

You have a lot of credits as a producer, by yourself and with your brother – how much of your working life is producing, and what do those credits mean?
Well, I’m not the guy who can tell you how much a crane costs per day, so I’m not a nuts and bolts producer, I’m kind of a creative producer. I can sometimes help people in the growing pains of making a movie, and because I’ve made money for studios, because they believe in my abilities, I can be a buffer between a filmmaker and the studio. I’m tremendously proud with what we’ve been able to do. For instance, to go from a movie like Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist, which I really adored, to A Single Man, which is a completely a different sort of movie, and is really an art film – Tom [Ford] had final cut, even though it was his first movie – and to be of some help to him in the process, in these little moments where I can intervene, was tremendously useful. I mean, he’s an auteur, so my role is strictly limited, and should be, but I try and be the kind of producer that I would want, basically.

So do you have people looking for these kinds of films?
Yeah absolutely, we try to put together films as a boutique production house. We’re not like Imagine, where they’ve got x number of blockbusters and they’ve bought all these films and are adapting the most recent video game that just came out. We find scripts that we think are really good, and then we try to find the right directors for them and put them together as a package. They’re often very idiosyncratic, and so from movie to movie we don’t know whether we’ll be allowed to produce something, but we try our best.

You and Paul began directing together. Is that something you would ever do again?
I would love to do it again, it would take a lot of the load off my shoulders! It’s also good because there’s someone to talk to about what you’ve been through, at the end of the day. It’s really just that we got out of sync; I was too tired after About A Boy to work on the next movie, and neither of us wanted to prevent the other from doing what we wanted to do, if we were less interested in that particular subject or book. But we talk about it now, now that we’ve got some time.

What’s next for you?
That’s a good question because I don’t know. I feel like I’m going to have to spend the next few months of my life supporting this film through its run, because it really is a small movie that needs tender loving care. Also I’ve never had a bunch of projects waiting in the wings, I feel that’s like dating several girls at once and not telling them about each other. So I just wait until I find the next script that I feel I can risk my sanity over, and that can take years, so…

A Better Life is on limited release from Friday 29th July. This is an extended version of an interview from The List magazine.

Holy Rollers review (The List, Issue 682)

Released over a year ago in the US, this true-life drama about naïve young Hasidic Jews unwittingly smuggling Ecstasy into Brooklyn in the late 90s would probably have skipped UK cinemas entirely if not for the presence of Jesse Eisenberg, whose star status has increased considerably following his acclaimed turn in The Social Network. Here he plays Sam, a devout 20-year-old Hasid, beginning to see the cracks in his family’s sheltered religion. When rebellious neighbour Yosef (excellently played by The Hangover’s Justin Bartha) offers him the opportunity to make money importing ‘medicines’, Sam’s eyes are opened to a very different side of the world.

As a drug-smuggling drama, Holy Rollers is conventional, predictable stuff, but Kevin Asche’s film is compelling in its focus on Sam’s relationship to his faith; this element layers some much-needed complexity into the film’s formulaic coming-of-age storyline. It is not a simple case of Sam rejecting his faith and embracing a life of crime; his Judaism continues to define him, and that internal tension of living with inescapable religious conviction while trying to in some way break free is subtly and effectively given flesh in Eisenberg’s understated performance.

Selected release from Friday 8 Jul. This review first published in The List magazine.

Edinburgh Film Festival 2011 Round-Up

The Edinburgh International Film Festival ran from June 15-26 this year, and I was there watching films and doing interviews for The List's online coverage. Here's links to the various bits I wrote:

Perfect Sense (pictured) - review/interview feature

Project Nim - director James Marsh interview

Troll Hunter - writer/director André Øvredal interview

Weekender - stars Henry Lloyd-Hughes and Jack O'Connell interview

How Should EIFF Move Forward? - overview

The List's EIFF Awards

I was also part of a discussion about this year's Film Festival on last week's Radio Scotland Movie Cafe, and you can listen to it here until Sunday 3rd July.

Bridesmaids review (The List, Issue 681)

Kristen Wiig (Adventureland, Whip It!) comes close to grasping the comedy crown from her Saturday Night Live colleague Tina Fey with this hilarious reinvigoration of the chick flick. As co-writer and star, Wiig disposes of traditional schmaltzy predictability, replacing it with the kind of frank raunchiness that’s led to success for blokey comedies like The Hangover and I Love You, Man. With the added oversight of gold-plated comedy producer Judd Apatow, Wiig clearly has her sights set on similar box office glory.

Wiig plays Annie, a 30-something singleton who has settled for less than her ideal, working as a shop assistant since her self-run cake shop went bankrupt, and occasionally falling into bed with commitment-phobic sleaze-bag Ted (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm, stealing every scene he’s in). When her newly-engaged best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) asks her to be chief bridesmaid Annie is delighted, until she meets Helen (Rose Byrne), Lillian’s new best friend; a beautiful, rich bitch who seems intent on driving a stake between Annie and Lillian.

Bridesmaids has all the hallmarks that the association with Apatow suggests: the main characters act in a refreshingly realistic and believable manner, the cast list overflows with comedy talent – Brit Chris O’Dowd is a stand-out – and the jokes are very funny, unapologetically resisting the boundaries of taste and decency (you won’t quickly forget the dress-fitting scene). The only flaw is that the film is let down by weak storytelling; the script fails to connect Annie’s personal journey with the overarching wedding story and, more problematically, director Paul Feig allows scenes that should be moving the story forward to outstay their welcome for the sake of dragging out a joke. Like a drunk wedding guest, Bridesmaids is very funny, but someone should really have kept it under control.

General release from Weds 22nd Jun. This review first published in The List magazine.

Life In A Day review (The List, Issue 681)

This film is the result of a massive YouTube project, directed by Kevin Macdonald and produced by Ridley Scott, that asked people around the world to make a film of their life on a specific day, 24 July 2010. From the 80,000 videos submitted (a mind-numbing 4,500 hours of footage), Macdonald and his army of editors have meticulously crafted this unique and entertaining hour and a half glimpse at one day as lived around the world.

A lot of the material flashes by in quickly-cut montages, throwing up some powerful stand-alone images - a cow being slaughtered is particularly shocking, as is footage of people tragically crushed at Germany’s Love Parade. Macdonald’s over-reliance on music to create mood and connect clips together occasionally feels manipulative; much more effective are the moments that he allows one individual’s story to develop and speak for itself, from a Peruvian shoe-shine boy, to an American cancer-sufferer, to a charismatic round-the-world cyclist. Interestingly, the perspectives offered on humanity are overwhelmingly positive, indeed joyful; audiences will find themselves laughing often out of a sense of recognition and connection with these disparate lives.

Life In A Day is in selected cinemas from Fri 17 Jun. This review first published in The List magazine.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides & Win Win reviews (BBC Radio Scotland Movie Cafe)

Click here to listen to the show on BBC iPlayer

Click the link above to hear me, along with Scotland on Sunday film critic Siobhan Synnot and the show's host Janice Forsyth, reviewing the new Pirates of the Caribbean film and the third film from The Station Agent director Tom McCarthy, Win Win. We also discussed the newly-announced Edinburgh International Film Festival programme and the reception in Cannes to Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (which went on to win the Palmes d'Or a few days later). Also on the show is an interview with Vidal Sassoon, the trend-setting hairdresser who is the subject of a new documentary. The programme is available to listen to until Sunday 29th May.

Both films are in UK cinemas now. Watch the trailers below.

Joe Cornish interview: Attack The Block (The List, Issue 680)

Brit sci-fi film Attack The Block has done a good turn for the asbo generation, by making aliens seem much worse. First time director Joe ‘Adam and Joe’ Cornish (pictured above right, with Edgar Wright) talks to Paul Gallagher about turning the hoodie horror genre on its head

These are interesting times for British film comedy. Last year Chris Morris’ suicide bomber farce Four Lions presented an intelligent reflection on a thorny problem, while earlier this year Richard Ayoade’s Submarine proved that British comedy could tackle peculiar and poignant as well as the best American independents. Now Joe Cornish, half of cult TV and radio duo Adam and Joe, makes his writing and directing debut with Attack The Block, a joyously exciting action sci-fi that imagines the outcome when a bunch of vengeful extra-terrestrials face off against a gang of teenage hoodies in an inner-city London tower block.

There are laughs on hand, but Cornish also has a serious point to make about his protagonists’ exclusion from society, particularly in the character of Moses, the gang’s hotheaded leader, played by newcomer John Boyega. Moses is the kind of character that has become shorthand in recent British cinema for pure evil, thanks to a spate of ‘hoodie horrors’, including the Michael Caine revenge flick Harry Brown and Paul Andrew Williams’s Cherry Tree Lane. It’s a perspective that Cornish hopes to counter with Attack The Block.

‘This is certainly a reaction to [those] often brilliantly-made and well-crafted movies that I think take a slightly inhuman approach to an issue that, actually, involves very young kids. I think that’s the easy option, to take something in the world that already is demonised and frightens people, and just make it even more scary and horrible.’ Cornish favours a more compassionate view: ‘I don’t think it’s an incredibly radical premise to try and have sympathy for someone who has made a mistake. I think you’ll find it in the Bible quite a lot, and in various faiths; for me it’s quite a simple dramatic premise, and I’d be alarmed if contemporary society decided that it could only have absolutely clean-cut, morally pure characters in its narratives. If you went through the history of art and literature doing that, you’d lose most of it!’

Cornish’s upbeat and engaging manner – familiar from the weekly 6 Music radio show in which he and co-host Adam Buxton frequently collapse in fits of giggles – conveys his positivity about humanity, which is both infectious and very welcome in the often bleak world of UK film. It’s an outlook he shares with his filmmaker friend Edgar Wright, and it is what enabled him to see the potential for science fiction storytelling in these unlikely characters and settings, just as Wright did for zombies in Shaun of the Dead.

‘I totally looked at all these amazing tower blocks that have been around me all my life’ enthuses Cornish, ‘and I thought “wow, these are like huge clapped-out spaceships, or they’re like Nakatomi Plaza [from Die Hard], or the Nostromo [from Alien]!”’ He saw similar cinematic potential in the street slang regularly used by London gangs. ‘I was excited by the language, it was another place where this scenario that’s usually used for downbeat depressing social realism could be taken in another direction, towards all the kind of escapist, joyful, science-fictional things that I love, and I think probably the kids who live in those places love too.’

To achieve authenticity Cornish, who admits to being ‘a tiny bit less “street” than Prince Charles’ spent months visiting youth groups in south London, telling them the story of Attack The Block and recording everything they said, ‘as if it was a linguaphone course and I was learning Italian’. The result of that investment is obvious on screen, with the kids’ sometimes-impenetrable dialogue sounding as far from Cornish’s own precise enunciation as possible. Meeting with those groups had a secondary value too, as it cemented Cornish’s conviction that these ‘hoodies’ were worthy of better treatment on film: ‘We did find some who were quite similar to Moses, who’d been excluded from school or got involved with bad stuff. And they’re not monsters. They’re very empathic, and when you spend a bit of time with them they’re normal and sweet, enthusiastic and bright. But they’ve just been cornered a bit by life, and I think that often the way they’re portrayed doesn’t help with that. Culturally, it makes the problem worse, not better.’

Apart from the imminent release of his debut movie there is another not-insignificant string to Cornish’s filmmaking bow; he is co-writer of one of 2011’s most anticipated blockbusters, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s The Adventures of Tintin, shot in motion-captured 3D and due for release this October. Cornish plays down his involvement (‘really you’re talking to the lowest person on the food chain’) but it raises the question, how did that happen? It was, he says ‘purely about being friends with clever people and sticking with them. Peter Jackson had called Edgar [Wright], because they needed some work done on the Tintin script, and Edgar knew I was a Tintin fan, and before I knew it I was sitting round a table with Mr Spielberg and Mr Jackson.’ And what was it like being slotted in beside the biggest cogs in the Hollywood machine? For Cornish it basically meant ‘very hard work; those guys are very clever and bright, and they don’t beat around the bush in terms of telling you what they think. In a very nice polite way, of course.’

For Tintin fans the prospect of Spielberg’s long-gestating film has been exciting and nerve-wracking in equal measure, but Cornish and Wright’s involvement is a promising indicator that this won’t be a mangled studio version of the beloved books. ‘In terms of the [film’s] world,’ says Cornish, ‘it’s pretty true to the books. There are things you have to do to the narrative just because of the way those books were written; structurally they climax on every page, and the characters take a while to get introduced throughout the series. So there’s stuff one has to compress a bit, to make work over a feature-length running time, but I think [fans] will be happy with how faithful it is.’

As for directing again, Cornish has ‘lots of ideas’ and seems firmly bitten by the filmmaking bug: ‘I loved it. It’s all consuming, but it’s really enjoyable. The lack of sleep is tough, but I feel I’ve spent so much of my life being lazy that I can deal with a couple of years of sleepless nights.’

Attack The Block is in cinemas now. Read my review here. This interview first published in The List magazine.

Attack The Block review (The List, Issue 680)

Coming from the same production team as Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs the World, this confident debut from Joe Cornish (one half of duo Adam and Joe) is much less a comedy than might have been expected. Rather it’s a very accomplished sci-fi horror, and a properly exciting one at that, evidencing Cornish’s clear love of the genre classics from its atmospheric synth soundtrack to its flourishes of gory splatter.

Sitting between Aliens and Gremlins in terms of tone, the story straddles reality and fantasy as a gang of errant teenagers attempt to defend their inner-city tower block against an army of bloodthirsty alien monsters. Cornish’s breathlessly-paced script entwines thrilling action set-pieces with a gently provocative portrayal of urban youth, effectively challenging audience preconceptions while never letting up on the entertainment. It’s sporadically funny (most often when accurately skewering the attitudes of modern teenagers) but the science-fiction scenario is played straight rather than as parody, and as the body count rises Cornish generates palpable tension and scares. Despite shaky acting from some of the young cast, leads Jodie Whitaker and newcomer John Boyega are excellent, providing strong characters amidst the action.

General release from Weds 11th May. This review first published in The List magazine.