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Dreams of a Life (Carol Morley 2011)

2012-01-28T12:58:00.001-08:00

In 2006 bailiffs broke into a Wood Green bedsit to find the decomposed body of 38-year old Joyce Carol Vincent. An investigation revealed that the body had been there for three years, with the television still running. Carol Morley’s documentary attempts to piece together how Joyce could have disappeared from public life, and why friends and family failed to contact her. The result is a moving work that combines straightforward interviews with reconstructions of Joyce’s life and childhood that attempt to uncover both her personality and the events that led to her tragic death.

Zawe Ashton plays the adult Joyce, with sequences covering her relationships in the late 1980s and early 1990s, while Morley scans back to partial recollections of her childhood in Hammersmith. With Joyce’s family not agreeing to take part, much of her life is narrated by former partners, housemates and colleagues. With varying degrees of disbelief and emotion, they struggle to reconcile a lively, if drifting personality, with her tragic death.

While some of these interviews suffer from repetition, it also acknowledges the guess-work that went into the investigation, with Morley frequently cutting to stacks of notes and possible connections. Riding through the documentary however is both a strong sense of the tragedy of Joyce’s life, and the many gaps and inconsistencies of her personality. In this way, the dramatised sequences work best when imagining the claustrophobia and loneliness of Joyce’s final hours, while also providing scenes of light relief from earlier periods of her life.

Dreams of a Life stands as one of the most significant British documentaries of the year, with a sense of craft that reflects both Morley’s rigorous research and efforts to keep the momentum and depth of Joyce’s life-story going. Helped by an excellent, virtually dialogue-free performance by Ashton, and some judicious splicing of real recordings, photos and footage of Joyce, the documentary is an intimate, but compelling warning of the dangers of losing touch with friends.

Haywire (Steven Soderbergh (2012)

2012-01-28T12:39:00.001-08:00

Another foray by Steven Soderbergh into straight genre territory, Haywire is entertaining, if a bit forgettable. Focusing on special operative Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), it follows her her attempts to evade capture after being framed by her former employer (Ewan McGregor). Globe-hopping trips take in Barcelona and Dublin, while support from Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas completes a starry lineup. Cutting between Mallory's pursuit and her explanation of the events leading up to an attack by another agent, Lem Dobbs' screenplay wastes little time on bridging a series of spectacular fight scenes.

Soderbergh's ability to move from precision-engineered genre thrillers to more experimental digital dramas, or the epic, creepingly-paced Che series is a credit to his polygot talents. Haywire rarely lets up the pace, delivering multiple fight scenes with the Mixed Martial Artist-trained Carano holding back on montage editing to deliver bone-crushing single shots and expertly choreographed collisions. Bursts of violence are savage and, in the case of an opening brawl in a diner, initially shocking as muscled fighters punch, kick and smash Mallory through furniture.

Like many female-led action films, there's a perpetual tongue-in-cheek tone to Haywire, where characters are warned against misjudging Mallory's femininity, only to be gleefully pummelled. As Ewan McGregor's character explains, 'don't think of her as a woman'. Soderbergh's taken on the hyper-feminised heroine before in Erin Brockovich (2000), although in a slightly more grounded take on the battle of the sexes. Mallory is more of a Terminator-like action figure, perhaps a wise choice given Carano's limited acting experience.

Still, while there's a lot to admire about Haywire's craft, it's still driven by formula and a delight as much in its construction as it's ability to draw genuine sympathy. Take away Soderbergh's expert direction, and the bare-bones plot could be lifted from most direct-to-video thrillers. In this case, style is enough though to make Haywire a success, at least on the modest terms that Soderbergh sets for himself. Not as stylistically challenging or emotionally engaging as last year's femme spy picture Hanna, but also not pure genre exploitation, Haywire contradicts its title to represent a well-tuned action exercise.

Moneyball (Bennett Miller 2011)

2012-01-28T11:38:00.001-08:00

Despite being mostly about baseball statistics, Moneyball is never less than entertaining. That achievement might be the result of Aaron Sorkin's input on the final screenplay, reproducing his ability to convert heavy non-fiction subjects into an accessible narrative from The Social Network. Based on Michael Lewis's 2002 book, Moneyball explores how an approach to baseball rooted in sabermetric analysis of statistics rather than traditional player evaluations could revolutionise the sport. This becomes the case for the Oakland Athletics, a mid-level MLB team overseen by General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt).

Having lost a 2001 playoff, and forced to sell the team's key players, Beane's desperation turns him to Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale graduate and proponent of sabermetrics. With his help, and against significant opposition from within the club and the media, Beane builds a cut-price team that collectively gels to take the Athletics' on a record 20-game winning streak.

Even without a knowledge of baseball, it's easy to get into the rhythm of Moneyball's central philosophy, with Pitt as Beane adding an extra layer of character development through flashbacks to his own career as a poorly scouted teenager. With Beane's family also getting some attention, much of Miller's film directs itself towards the day-to-day process of applying Brand's approach. In this way, Moneyball relies on the surefire sports movie formula of the underdog rising to success.

However, this is also levelled against Beane's pessimism over the entrenched opinions of the game, and the value of success. Like recent sports dramas such as Friday Night Lights, much of the thrill of individual victories is contrasted by the cynicism and misfortune that comes along with them. Ultimately Beane comes to make a personal decision over his career that accepts, but also resists some of the professional excesses of the game. The extra degree of pessimism about professional sports this brings helps elevate the still-engaging sports story, helped by a mix of real and staged footage.

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen 2011)

2012-01-20T07:40:00.000-08:00

Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen's best film in some time, retaining but also broadening the scope of his recent European city-hopping work. Like Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona, it deals with an American both enchanted and forced to come to terms with European nostalgia. Owen Wilson stars as Gil Pender, a frustrated Hollywood screenwriter and novelist visiting Paris with his needy Beverly Hills fiancee and her overbearing parents. Fascinated by Paris's cultural history, to the horror of his fiancee, Gil suddenly finds himself transported back to the 1920s while on a midnight walk.

Surrounded by figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Picasso, Gil bemusedly goes along with what becomes a nightly journey to the cafes, salons and parties of a Paris at the height of fashion, music, art and literature. He meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a model and girlfriend of various artists, leading him to question his future engagement, but ultimately the dangers of nostalgia as Adriana retreats to her own ideal past in turn-of-the-century Paris.

Allen's work has always been fascinated by nostalgia and characters caught out of history, from the future-hopping Sleeper, to his love letters to Manhattan, to classical Hollywood, jazz, radio and musicals. Midnight in Paris is perhaps closest in terms of story to Allen's Zelig, where he becomes an Everyman figure inserted into various moments of history. Gil's meeting of a wide-ranging cast of artists and writers is played straight, but with a casual approach that maintains his own bemused, but awestruck experience. With cinematography by frequent David Fincher-collaborator Darius Khondji, Paris has also rarely looked so beautiful, full of saturated yellow lights, rain-swept streets and gorgeously realized interiors.

However, like his earlier work, Midnight in Paris builds towards Allen's tendency for self-reflection and criticism of nostalgia. Gil realises that nostalgia is only a temporary solution to the disappointments of the present, imagining a golden time that never existed, or at least not in the ideal form he imagines. Like the grudging acceptance of the difference between romantic fantasy and reality in Annie Hall, or the pathos of Broadway Danny Rose and The Purple Rose of Cairo, Allen's characters ultimately see through the illusion to find a more pragmatic, but balanced attitude to art and life.

Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog 2011)

2011-12-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

Continuing Herzog's prolific documentary output, Into the Abyss takes a hard, but unspectacular look at capital punishment in the US. Focusing on a triple homicide in Texas that has one killer awaiting execution, Herzog pieces together the original crime, the participants and those involved through three segments. Much of the film's power comes from Herzog's judicious use of original police crime footage to provide a chilling journey through the murder scene, and from simply staged interviews. Herzog's interest comes less in attacking capital punishment, although he comes out against it, then in attempting to find some common logic for the crimes committed.

The convicted Michael Perry gives up little than a refusal to be drawn on the murder, and a sense of wilfully failing to comprehend his situtation. More powerful are the interviews with the family of the victims, including a sister who has lost virtually all her immediate family, and a Death Row guard who admits that the job eventually broke him. At its best Into the Abyss is about the human consequences, the absurdity and the tragedy of the deaths at its centre, making a case that the punishment can't match the complexity of the crime. Like Herzog's best films, it's about the extremes of human experience, elevated through careful cutting and authorial detachment.

Limitations however emerge over the film's scope, being at once an exploration and a reflection on capital punishment that distances itself from explicit commentary. Unlike Herzog's powerful studies of man and nature, the anchor for recent documentaries Grizzly Man or Cave of Forgotten Dreams, it feels more voyeuristic, a director fascinated by capital punishment but aware of its more specific ambiguities. Although well-constructed, it also feels slighter than Herzog's most recent work, less invested in the potential of a technology like 3D than Forgotten Dreams, or as unique as his single character studies.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese 2011)

2011-12-16T16:07:00.000-08:00

The idea of Martin Scorsese making a child-friendly film was always going to invite curiousity. How would the director of Taxi Driver and Casino adjust to the demands of catering to a large family audience, while working around the visceral content that often drives his work? Hugo ultimately demonstrates both the director's love of cinema's universal, child-like appeal, but in its reverent tone also falls just short of the the kind of depth and accessibility found in the best work of Disney, Pixar and Spielberg.

Set in 1930s Paris, Hugo follows Hugo Cabret, an orphan fighting to survive in a train station. While eluding an accident-prone inspector, Hugo tries to rebuild an automaton writing machine discovered by his recently deceased father. Encountering Georges, an elderly toy shop owner at the station, Hugo befriends his godddaughter Isabelle. She helps him locate the key to the automaton, while uncovering the broader mystery of Georges' past. They discover his identity as Georges Melies, a filmmaker whose innovations in special effects pushed the boundaries of cinema as a fledgling medium in the late 19th and early 20th century. Converted to the joys of Melies' masterpiece La Voyage Dans La Lune, they attempt to revive the old man from a decades-long bitterness at a disappearing audience for his films, prompted by new expectations of narrative cinema and the economic hardships of WWI.

Hugo is Scorsese's love letter to cinema and Melies, delivered through a glowingly realised, 3D-enhanced fable. The Paris setting is an assortment of whimsical touches, with Scorsese using 3D to accentuate depth and perform elaborate tracking shots through space. The romantic orphan story of Hugo, itself backed by questions over identity and place, overlaps neatly with Georges' personal recuperation. Cinema, and the simple joy of mechanical movement and illusion, drives the two plots forward. Scorsese's use of 3D works in this way to draw attention to how characterisation becomes fused with different forms of mechanical purity, from Hugo's identification and desire to recover the automaton and its links to his father, to the emotional connection made between the children and Georges' films.

The latter is however perhaps the most heavy handed example of Scorsese's enthusiasm, often delaying action to sweep through key moments in cinema history, and to recreate Melies' films in flashback and as contemporary documents, occasionally interspersed with real footage. Hugo and Isabelle also sneak into a Harold Lloyd film, delighting as he navigates a skyscraper, while a story of a filmed train terrifying first-time cinemagoers enters into Hugo's nightmares. Hugo and Isabelle's desire to achieve resolution through the discovery and the celebration of the magic of cinema, is satisfying for the cinephile, with the use of 3D merging with the mechanical roots of the medium to generate a pleasing fusion of form and content.

However, it is difficult to move past admiration to the kinds of emotional connection that Hugo strives for throughout. It's particularly easy to see Hugo's slow-pacing and history lessons boring child audiences while enchanting film lovers, straying into worthy territory without the catharsis and slick pacing regularly produced by Pixar. There's no doubting the care that Scorsese invested into the film, but it's lasting impact may be more as a treasured oddity from the director than a children's classic able to stand up to extensive re-viewing.

The Ides of March (George Clooney 2011)

2011-11-16T11:05:00.000-08:00

Earnest but dull, George Clooney's The Ides of March fails to make the most of its award-winning cast. Set during an Ohio Democratic Primary, Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling) is part of a team attempting to elect Mike Morris (Clooney). The campaign takes a wrong turn when Myers becomes involved with intern Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), leading to revelations over Morris' character. Meanwhile, Myers struggles to keep his head above water as campaign managers Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) and Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) attempt to manipulate him. With its wintry Ohio climate, and ground-level perspective on the election machine, The Ides of March is guilty of working through political film cliches, with campaign cynicism, illicit revelations and individual compromise all present.

Clooney and producer Grant Heslov previously collaborated on HBO miniseries K Street, which served up a similar take on insider politics. Both reference the negotiations of political and private life of 1970s conspiracy films, but both also suffer from a lack of real energy at their core. While the A-list cast do their best, early scenes in The Ides of March feature rapid-fire conversations that feel like warmed-up West Wing drafts, while a sudden shift to melodrama midway through the film upsets its momentum. Clooney's direction is also workmanlike, failing to reproduce the cast chemistry or the retro stylings of his previous major directorial efforts Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). Although not as forgettable as Clooney's Leatherheads (2008), The Ides of March ultimately revisits well-worn territory without generating new insights.

New Article on PopMatters

2011-10-31T16:29:00.000-07:00

Head over to popmatters.com for an article I wrote about Six Feet Under's development on HBO

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/149488-your-whole-life-is-leading-up-to-this-developing-six-feet-under-at-h/

Hackney Picturehouse opens on Mare St

2011-10-30T07:19:00.000-07:00

Opening its doors last Friday, the Hackney Picturehouse has been promoted as a new hub for cultural activity in the borough. A £3.5 million investment, the art-house cinema complex sits just off Mare Street opposite the Hackney Empire and Town Hall. It offers four screens, three bars, live music and stand-up comedy. Opening weekend films include Tintin 3D, The Help, We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Ides of March, while November events will range from locally curated films to a Film Africa festival, combining to create what the theatre describes as a ‘rich mix of mainstream and specialised film, music and other locally centred activity’.

Introducing a new film theatre and cultural site to central Hackney is both a valuable extension of a film gap in the borough, and a reflection of broader tensions over gentrification in the year leading up to the Olympics. Coming at a time when Hackney Council face pressure to revamp the image of the borough after the August riots, the cinema helps shift attention away from poverty and crime to state-of-the-art local culture and community. Its chief audience is arguably Hackney, Dalston, Clapham and Hackney Wick’s middle-classes and young professionals, drawing film-viewing patterns away from central London and Islington. In terms of scale and the range of arts attractions, the cinema also adds to the much-loved Rio in Dalston, and the success of pop-out exhibition ventures such as Films on Fridges and the East End Film Festival.

For Picturehouse owners City Screen, the general aim is to provide a cosmopolitan venue that tailors itself to the local community. The ideal model is the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, praised by the council for helping to partly regenerate the depressed area by attracting investment from national brands. Described as a ‘landmark of gentrification’, City Screen executive Lyn Goleby suggests that a ‘cinema can give heart to a place’ and bring audiences back to deprived areas. The Picturehouse consequently aims to generate what executive Dominic Swartland describes as ‘natural synergy’ with Hackney and Dalston, with Film Africa and the hosting of the Kurdish Film Festival making it a ‘linchpin of cultural activity in the borough’.

However, some caution must be exercised. The Picturehouse takes over the site from The Ocean, Hackney Council’s attempt to create a music and arts venue in 2006 by converting property that previously served as a Methodist hall and library. Costing council taxpayers £20 million, with £15 million also provided by the Arts Council, the Ocean folded against poor sales and violent local incidents. Difficulties arguably remain in convincing audiences to migrate to Mare Street, particularly given the area’s reputation for crime. In this respect, the Council decided to sell the property to City Screen as a compulsory purchase, shifting some of the risk experienced by the Ocean.

The decision forms part of longer-running concerns over how Olympic gentrification has encouraged multinational investment in Hackney and Dalston, often at the risk of inflating property and housing rents for local residents. In 2008 Michael Rosen launched an attack on New Labour’s attempts to gentrify Dalston and the surrounding areas, promising new tube services while threatening local markets and businesses. In terms of Hackney’s cultural life, the value of investment has also overshadowed long-term community efforts to protect the demolition of historical sites. This includes the Friends of Clapton Cinematograph Theatre in Clapton Pond, where one of the East End’s oldest cinemas, built in 1910, faces dereliction.

It remains to be seen whether the Hackney Picturehouse’s vision of using art-house and more mainstream cinema to boost local culture will be a long-term success. As a recent Hackney resident living just five minutes from the venue, it could be an excellent alternative to the West End, or the Islington Vue multiplex. Having missed the opening, I hope to see We Need to Talk About Kevin this week.

Melancholia (Lars Von Trier 2011)

2011-10-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

Unremittingly bleak despite flashes of arch humour, Lars Von Trier's Melancholia continues the director's uncertain mix of ambitious themes and intimate studies of misery. Taking on the end of the world, Von Trier filters the apocalypse through a disastrous country house wedding and the parallel anxieties of sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). The first section of the film sees Von Trier explore, in excruciating close-ups, pauses and emotional simmering, the fragility of Justine's wedding. Bathed in orange light and featuring crisply shot ensemble scenes, the final exploration of the sister's resistance and acceptance of the end of the world by comparison employ a stark, washed-out look.

Von Trier's ability to lay out neuroses and oppressive, violent worlds has understandably produced some audience divisions in the past. Melancholia isn't as bleak or cruel as Breaking the Waves or Dancing in the Dark, or as violently explicit as Antichrist, but takes Justine's near-mute depression as a marker. It's a sometimes grim experience, but like Von Trier's other films, is at least partly redeemed by some outstanding sequences that display the director's technical gifts. Chief among these scenes is an extended opening that follows, in high-definition slow-motion, various reactions to the apocalypse, establishing the foundation for the remainder of the film's inevitable tone.

Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn 2011)

2011-10-03T12:25:00.000-07:00

Stylishly understated, Drive is one of the films of the year. A first foray into American cinema for Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn, it mixes neo-noir with a visual style influenced by the neon LA landscapes of Michael Mann and David Lynch. Ryan Gosling stars as the Driver, an ice-cool stunt car professional who also moonlights as a getaway man. Drawn to the beautiful Irene (Carey Mulligan), a young mother with a husband in jail, the Driver finds himself caught up in a mob plot. The noir elements however act as a backdrop for Drive's cooly observed style, with cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel employing long takes, digitally shot location work, and a neon color palette. Minimal dialogue underscores bursts of sudden action, while the sprawling LA cityscape is layered with an electronic soundtrack.

Criticism of Drive has focused on its studied cool as an art-house masking of its more exploitative gangsters, cars and sex appeals. However, what Winding Refn arguably brings instead is a sharp eye for the open interpretations of noir as an exercise in style as much as its conventional content. Take away the measured long take driving sequences, Gosling's laconic performance and a subtly evolving romance with Irene, and Drive is a straightforward heist indie on a reasonable budget. For Drive, it's these deviations that make the film, performing the rare feat of making style the star over the substance.

Attack the Block (Joe Cornish 2011)

2011-09-26T03:49:00.000-07:00

Written and directed by Joe Cornish, Attack the Block puts a fresh spin on the alien invasion genre, producing a stylish, lo-fi British B-movie. Set in South London, it follows a group of teenagers as they respond to an attack of pitch-black, fluorescent-toohed creatures. However, these aren't earnest, coming-of-age Spielberg teenagers but knife-wielding, weed-smoking 15 year olds putting themselves into a violent situation. The film opens with their mugging of student nurse Sam (Jodie Whittaker), and beating of a small, relatively harmless alien that forms the first wave of the attack. Returning to the their tower-block, they present the creature to weed-dealer Ron (Nick Frost) and local gangster Hi Hatz (Jumayn Hunter). Soon they are under siege from the police, and a new set of aliens that attempt to track them down within the maze-like block.

Cornish delivers visual flair and a sharp awareness of the genre, constructing familiar chase and siege sequences around rolling South London dialogue and location grime. The young cast are similarly excellent, switching from masked criminals to vulnerable children. Sympathy might not have been so high if Attack the Block had been released a few months later during the London riots, but Cornish avoids romanticising his young cast. There's a few gestures towards social causes and the limitations that the young cast face, but most subtleties are jettisoned for the demands of the plot. While sharing some genre similarities with Shaun of the Dead in its transplanting grimmer world punctuated by ironic humour. It actually lost money on is £9 million budget in theatres, although it is likely to recoup this on DVD, television and internet rights.

The Golden Coach (Jean Renoir 1953)

2011-09-05T17:08:00.001-07:00

Released in 1953, The Golden Coach formed part of French director Jean Renoir's experimentation with Technicolor dramas, which also included French Cancan and Elena and Her Men. It's a lightly comic farce, saturated in primary colours and a fascination with stagecraft. Set in a Peruvian town in the 18th century, it focuses on Camilla (Anna Magnani), an actress in a Commedia Del'Arte troupe, as she negotiates three suitors. Chief among these is the town's viceroy, who indulges and mocks aristocratic life while tempting Camilla with the golden coach. Overlaps between the town's gentry and the commedia del'arte troupe set up confrontations and misunderstandings.

Filmed at Cinecitta and shot in multiple languages, The Golden Coach's location is initially hard to place, with the Peruvian setting only becoming clear after the film through a check on Wikipedia. Renoir blurs the line between the different levels of his Italian sound-stages, preferring grand tableaux that showcase the depth of color afforded by the Technicolor process. Andrew Sarris identifies Renoir's influence by the music of Vivaldi, and the sheer charisma of Magnani in the lead role. He also draws attention to Renoir's fascination with theatre and real-life, and the artificiality of the isolated community that the theatre troupe mock. For Sarris, 'the two customary poles of his (Renoir's) work - art and nature, acting and life - take shape in two facing mirrors, which reflect each other's images back and forth until it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins'. I haven't seen much Renoir, but on its own merits The Golden Coach succeeds in transforming its subject matter - commedia del'arte meets the New World and aristocratic pretension - into a richly humanistic farce.

Hanna (Joe Wright 2011)

2011-08-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

A return to form for director Joe Wright after The Soloist, Hanna is an inventively pitched action thriller with significant heart. A US, British and European production, it moves through Scandinavia and Western Europe in focusing on the genetically-modified 16-year old Hanna (Saoirse Ronan). Raised in the woods by her father (Eric Bana), she leaves their hidden cabin to pursue Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), the CIA agent responsible for her mother's death. Tracked through Europe, and overlapping with the lives of a British family, the almost-superhuman Hanna follows through on her mission while negotiating a world previously heard about through books.

It's credit to Wright's assured direction, and Alwin H. Kuchler's cinematography, that Seth Lochhead's genre-mashing screenplay retains a distinctive setting and voice. Hanna's world is one revealed through fairytale analogies, bursts of violence and adolescent tenderness, all set to a dreamlike Chemical Brothers score. That it also succeeds in some dark comedy, and that it resists spy-film conventions, makes Hanna a distinctive, warmly realised feature. The European setting also draws comparison with both the angular urban geography of The Bourne Films, while shooting Hanna's adolescent point of view with rich reds and oranges. Kuchler is a versatile cinematographer, with a track record of straightforward dramas (Marley and Me) with bleaker, independent features (Morvern Callar) and collaborations with Danny Boyle (Sunshine). Taken together, Hanna is one of the best films I've seen so far this year, and one that I wished I'd caught in the cinema.

Push (Paul McGuigan 2009)

2011-08-14T11:11:00.000-07:00

Push is an unusual hybrid. A stylish take on the superhero genre, some of its best ideas are overwhelmed by incoherent plotting. Written by David Bouria and directed by Paul McGuigan, it was developed by Icon Entertainment and received theatrical backing from Summit in the US. Bouria's screenplay focuses on a world where WWII experiments into psychic abilities led to attempts by US agency the Division to control individuals with telekinesis, mind control and the ability to view the future. On-the-run from the Division are 'mover' Nick Gant (Chris Evans), 'watcher' Cassie Holmes (Dakota Fanning) and 'pusher' Kira (Camilla Belle), with the latter having survived an experiment to boost her powers. They meet in Hong Kong, where they try to evade Division and a local crime syndicate.

Push's basic concept is formulaic, with its government vs psychics plotline drawing immediate comparisons with Stephen King's Firestarter. However, it mostly makes up for this by choosing to set virtually the entire narrative in Hong Kong. Affording opportunities for neon-soaked, impressionistic cinematography by Peter Sova, McGuigan and editor Nicholas Trembasiewicz cut precise action sequences and flashbacks. Art direction is similarly effective, exploiting lurid Hong Kong interiors and long-lens location shooting on the streets of the city. Rarely has a superhero film delved into an almost entirely foreign landscape, albeit one that remains a stage for fight and chase sequences.

Except that Push isn't really a superhero film. It's more of a paranoid conspiracy thriller crossed with a Hong Kong action film, from its fragmented flashbacks, flash-forwards and deception, to its kinetic location style. This gives it a unique edge that occasionally provides some arresting visuals, and opportunities to stretch the lead casts' plot-driving abilities. Evans, as in Captain America, brings physical and emotional weight to the lead role, while the teenaged Dakota Fanning steps up to a more adult role with assurance. Their on-screen chemistry adds stakes to an otherwise flawed screenplay.

At times Push feels like it's striving towards some larger, hoped-for franchise. It remains distinctly rooted in Hong Kong, but gestures to the global reach of the Division. Unfortunately, this produces a third act that fails to provide a strong ending. While presenting an extended climax, certain plot threads seem to set up a further confrontation with the Division that never appears. While the producers' desire to set-up a sequel is understandable, an extra half hour would have at least tied up the single film. In the end, Push struggled to produce either critical support or theatrical box office. It's a shame, as despite its flaws Push is stylishly shot and occasionally follows through on the potential of its ideas. However, the world presented never quite feels original or rich enough to support a franchise, making Push an interesting but limited experiment.

Rent (Chris Columbus 2005)

2011-08-12T05:54:00.001-07:00

My route to Rent was a bit unusual. I was aware of the musical, a major hit on Broadway in the 1990s, and its poorly received 2005 film adaptation by Chris Columbus. I only decided to watch it however after watching a YouTube clip of one of the show's actors performing a song from Hedwig & the Angry Inch. This led me to the Spotify soundtrack, and the film itself. One of the best things about fast access to most media online is that these connections can focus attention, and in the space of a few days take you across most of the major forms of a particular film or franchise, with the option of going deeper if you want to. This is probably not going to be case with the Rent. As a musical it has distinctive moments, but can also be unbearably cheesy. The film version mostly reproduces the former, but significantly amplifies the latter.

Rent was developed by Jonathan Larson in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a small-scale New York musical. It soon became a Broadway hit, going on to win Tonys and even the Pulitzer Price. Set in the Lower East Side, or Alphabet City, in 1989, it loosely adapts Puccini's opera La Boheme. Focusing on a group of artists struggling to get by while dealing with AIDS and eviction pressures, the musical does have some memorable numbers. The reviews I've read also suggest that it can excel as an intimate live experience. It's also very sentimental, and overblown in a way that stretches the usual limits of the Broadway musical. Characters sing about heroin and AIDS, stand up to stern-faced businessmen and put on avant-garde shows.

The film version, developed by Robert DeNiro and handed to director Chris Columbus after Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese passed is occasionally watchable but more often bland in delivery. Columbus, who assembled the first two instalments of the Harry Potter franchise, rarely if ever takes risks, delivering middle-of-the-road major studio adaptations. While bringing back most of the stage show's original cast, as well as actress Rosaria Dawson, the production struggles to balance its mock-grungy art direction with elaborate song and dance numbers. The problematic shift from stage to screen has been covered in some depth at the Onion AV Club, who have provided both a retrospective review by Nathan Rabin and a commentary track analysis by Tasha Robinson. Both come to much the same conclusions over the film's lack of substance. Nathan Rabin suggests that 'Rent doesn't just feel like a fairy-tale version of New York bohemia created for blue-haired tourists and clueless out-of-towners; it feels like it was created by them as well'.

In some ways, this wasn't really the problem for me. Rent does have some effective moments, even if these are overwhelmed by earnestness. My problem was actually that I ended up feeling more sympathy for Benny, the put-upon former friend of the performers who now owns their tenement building. Married to the daughter of a real-estate mogul, he allows them to live rent-free in exchange for supporting the construction of a 'virtual cyber' studio on the block. He also tries to prevent local avant-garde artist Maureen from not protesting about the re-development. At one point Benny has to sit and watch stone-faced while his former friends cavort around a diner declaring their love of 'la vie boheme'. Granted, he later enters into a brief romance with Mimi, an erotic dancer who suffers from HIV and heroin addiction, but I still felt a bit sorry for him, yuppie ambition and all.

The Other Guys (Adam McKay 2010)

2011-08-11T06:30:00.000-07:00

On the one hand, Adam McKay's 2010 comedy The Other Guys is a straightforward vehicle for Will Ferrell, supported by Mark Wahlberg and a broad ensemble cast. However, it also manages to insert a criticism of the recent banking crisis, if only in a somewhat awkward fashion. Following on from McKay's success with Ferrell on Anchorman, it deals with a pair of hapless detectives Gamble and Hoitz in a New York police department. As the film begins, they are overshadowed by Highsmith (Samuel L. Jackson) and Danson (Dwayne Johnson), exaggerated action heroes who are prepared to cause extensive damage for minor busts. When they die after deciding that a jump from a 20-storey building will probably turn out fine, Hoitz pushes the mild-mannered Gamble into pursuing new cases, or at least some that take them out of the office.

Drawn into a conspiracy involving Steve Coogan's billionaire investor, shoot-outs and chases provide a loose structure for playing off Ferrell as Gamble. Like most of the comedian's characters, his deadpan style is offset by incongruities that include an unreasonably beautiful wife, and a shameful past as a college pimp. Meanwhile, Wahlberg's Hoitz lets the actor deviate from his usual dramatic roles, playing a wound-up, frustrated hero to Gamble's straight-man. The Other Guys is no Anchorman, but in terms of gags its usually hits more than it misses. A high-end budget and McKay's occasional stylistic virtuosity also help it to punch above its buddy-comedy weight.

What is more unusual though is the decision by McKay and screenwriter Chris Henchy to take a few swipes at big business and the economic recession. While Coogan's scheming billionaire and the reveal of a Ponzi scheme plays for broad comedy and a number of mistaken identity gags, Gamble and Hoitz occasionally reference the larger problem of Goldman Sachs and fraud. This is highlighted by end-credits graphics that break-down various banking and investment scandals, while comparing the rising inequality between average workers and CEO pay. It's not a particularly radical stance to take, given the populist response to the economic recession, but it does stand out as a somewhat odd addition to a mostly broad action-comedy.

Super 8 (JJ Abrams 2011)

2011-08-10T07:03:00.001-07:00

A broken suburban family, a mysterious but misunderstood alien invader, and a shadowy government conspiracy. J.J. Abram's Super 8 takes the basic ingredients of his executive producer Steven Spielberg's 1982 classic ET and reworks them into an affectionate but limited tribute. Set in an Ohio town in 1979, Super 8 follows the effect of an escaped alien creature on the community, shown through the eyes of the 13-year old Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney) and his friends as they attempt to make a Super 8mm zombie film. With Joe's sheriff father struggling to deal with the death of his wife, he finds an outlet in filmmaking and a relationship with local girl Alice (Elle Fanning).

The period setting and homages to Spielberg are all present, from art direction to lens flares, as well as occasional bursts of contemporary music. It's a suburban world all too familiar from the run of late 1970s, early 1980s work of the director (ET, Gremlins), with some Goonies thrown in for good measure. In the alien attack, compiled through video footage and gradually revealed through state-of-the-art CGI, Abrams also references his own digital experiment Cloverfield. It's a well-balanced tribute, playing off the pathos of small-town family life in the thematic overlaps between the young cast and an alien that is gradually shown to the victim of military imprisonment.

In this way Super 8 works as a form of cinephilia, or more specifically Spielberg-philia (not the best term admittedly). Its filmmaking sections carry the love of DIY cameras and models that informed Spielberg's rise into gifted Hollywood prodigy, while incorporating a 1979 love for the low-budget thrills of George Romero and Halloween. Abrams' film consequently becomes not only a recreation of Spielberg's style, but also a series of allusions to his fellow filmmakers at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. This is all fine, but also means that Abrams' love for the period and his collaboration with Spielberg results in a retro-style that mimics his style, but doesn't really add anything more than modern CGI.

That's not to say that Super 8 isn't well-made. The young cast are excellent, and the casting of Friday Night Lights' Kyle Chandler as Joe's father is a great showcase for the actor. But it's also a strangely hollow experience, hitting the right notes but without ironic distance, or a critical response to the earlier films. As a time-trip for Spielberg as a producer, and an exercise in recreating the smaller-scale drama of the 1980s family blockbuster for Abrams, it's a welcome antidote to the Michael Bay-school of summer fare. But it's also ostensibly another remake, in some ways only separated from the wave of 1970s and 1980s nostalgia-fests of major studio releases by its original screenplay. For lovers of Spielberg and the period it's a fitting tribute, but as a stand-alone film it's functional at best.

Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston 2011)

2011-08-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

The latest in Marvel's film franchise, Captain America: The First Avenger delivers a more rounded experience than Thor, but still reproduces the superhero series' problems. Directed by Joe Johnston, who had previously produced cult favourite The Rocketeer (1991), Captain America's distinction comes through its WWII period setting. It focuses on how Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), determined to join the Army despite his physical weakness, is recruited into a government scheme to create a Super-Soldier.

Transformed into the peak of physical perfection, Rogers becomes Captain America, a costumed hero initially used to market war bonds. Frustrated, he joins the war effort in Europe and leads the Allies against Hydra, a covert Nazi unit headed by the insane Herr Schmidt (Hugo Weaving). Turned by the same enhancing serum into a red-skulled monster, Schmidt pans to use an ancient power source to achieve world domination. Plunged into a series of European conflicts, Rogers targets Schmidt's bases while negotiating a tentative romance with British agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell).

The first hour or so of Captain America offers well-paced movement through 1940s New York and Occupied Europe, showcasing richly photographed art design and effects. Rogers' unassuming character and earnestness do not make him the most charismatic of Marvel heroes, but the progression from early struggles to Captain America is well-balanced by moments of pathos and excellent supporting performances by the likes of Stanley Tucci and Tommy Lee Jones. The period setting is the film's best feature, playing off the heightened drama of the war and providing a basis for a series of climactic action sequences. While still incorporating futuristic technology, courtesy of Iron Man's father Howard Stark, and Hydra's weaponry, Johnson brings a lo-fi approach to his set-pieces. Gone are some of the weightless CGI of Iron Man, with street brawls, parachute jumps and speeding trains providing pulpy thrills.

The homage to Captain America's pulp roots, as well as to its first film incarnation as a low-budget serial in 1944, are best demonstrated in a montage that sees Captain America become an increasingly uncomfortable poster boy for the government. Enlisted into dance troupes, fake-punching Hitler and starring in propaganda films and comic books, Rogers' frustration at his one-dimensional performance sustains the reflexive approach to superheroics of Iron Man. However, that lightness of tone can also work the other way, with Captain America's WWII setting also presenting some uneasy moments in balancing period immersion with pulp heroics. The title itself, even with the more internationally-accessible add-on The First Avenger is laden down with the character's origins as unapologetic propaganda. Efforts were later made to reinvent the comic book character as conflicted, resentful and even oppositional to his government sponsors, and the film's own reflexive montage deflates some of the patriotic rhetoric.

The villains are also carefully positioned as a splinter group from the Nazis, with their own symbols and salutes, as well as a faceless mob of soldiers that make up Captain America's principle body count. Moreover, Steve Rogers' moral compass is tested before the operation, with the recruit asked if he isn't just in the war to 'kill Nazis'. Captain America's gung-ho violence is also positioned in this respect as justified force through clearly signposted evil, rather than force for force's sake. Still, the idea of Captain America as a genetically engineered 'superman' created to win the war through physical strength can't quite shake its wish-fulfillment basis (or Aryan connotations), at least without deviating significantly from Marvel's original property.

Perhaps this isn't so much a problem with the film, but with the complicated history of Captain America as a pulp hero whose context arguably only works to its fullest effect in WWII. This is going to be The Avengers' biggest challenge, with the Captain emerging by the end of the film from a frozen prison to contemporary New York. Essentially, how do you make a character interesting and relevant to the post-WWII world? This is a particular problem when The First Avenger already deals with Rogers's self-awareness as a superhero. Unlike the comics, the ensemble nature of The Avengers will presumably mean that there won't be enough time to flesh out some of the more interesting possibilities of Captain America in a post 9/11 America. Without a political or wartime context to give Captain America meaning, he runs the risk of becoming a bland addition to a superhero team that aside from Robert Downey Jr's Iron Man, leave little room for character development. The presentation of Tony Stark as negotiating extreme capitalism and moral anxiety over the effects of his technology might also stop short of forcing wider perspective.

These aren't really the problems that Marvel, distributor Paramount and parent company Disney are necessarily concerned with though. In tone and in their attempts to produce a coherent serial world, their emphasis has been on a pulp sensibility that acknowledges darker social questions but puts them to the service of maintaining elaborate set-pieces and cliffhangers. As a multi-part franchise, the sense of bringing something together that is both rooted to an extent in real-world history and in the cosmic scale of Thor, means that a self-contained narrative arc is secondary to constructing the fantasy universe. This is something that becomes arguably more practical in a long-running television series or literature. In this respect, it'll be Avengers' writer-director Joss Whedon's biggest challenge to adapt his depth of characterisation to a superhero team whose personal crisis have already been rehearsed by their origin stories.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two (David Yates 2011)

2011-07-22T04:10:00.000-07:00

'It All Ends'. The tagline to the final instalment in the Harry Potter franchise is a bit misleading. Yes, this is the technical end to the most successful film series in history, and as a self-contained film it delivers a satisfying end-point. However, as a franchise, Deathly Hallows: Part II works in some ways more like a template for much more. The relationship between the Harry Potter films, their source books and the various merchandising and theme park extensions of the franchise has been managed with care since their inception. This has seen an evolution within the films into an area somewhere between the workmanlike style of the first two Christopher Columbus films, the looser interpretations of Prisoner of Azkaban and The Goblet of Fire, and the fast-paced adaptations of The Order of the Phoenix onwards.

Part of this process has been dictated by efforts to reproduce the length of the books, which resulted in the split of the Deathly Hollows into two parts that balance economic storytelling with sequences of reflection. The first Deathly Hallows was able to provide some of the latter, drawing out Harry, Hermione and Ron's journey to find Voldermort's Horcruxes. It was also able to deliver what has always been my favourite parts of the films. Not the epic sequences, or even the elaborate production design, but the glimpses of an external, contemporary world. This has been something that the books were never quite able to realise, and the presentation of the grimy London streets and washed-out suburbia give the films their own depth.

Which makes the final instalment slightly disappointing in its decision to hit the ground running and race through to the books' sprawling final battle. There is a satisfaction in the breathless pacing, moving from a raid on the Gringotts bank to Hogwarts and Harry's confrontation with Hogwarts, but it's as much a reflection of Rowling's plotting as suspense. The lack of the latter has always been a bit of a problem for the films. They were never going to really deviate from the books, choosing instead to recreate in the highest-quality possible the world that Rowling laid out.

As a result, the viewing experience becomes a series of rewarding fan moments, or a 'how are they going to do this bit' effect. The Deathly Hallows: Part Two has multiple examples, from Gringotts to the reveal of Snape's past and the series' epilogue scene. It's difficult to judge the effectiveness of the films outside of the context of the books, and I've rarely seen reviews that aren't at least familiar with their plot points. Many new fans might however come to the books through the films. Working the other way, the books arguably always have the edge of detail, establishing a consistent, deeply grounded fantasy world.

They also raise the emotional stakes in more complex ways than the films have been able to, particularly for supporting characters. Figures carefully developed through the books, most notably Ginny Weasley, are sketches by comparison in the final film. This is not to say that the films have been unsuccessful. On a purely stylistic level they have created some of the most beautiful examples of contemporary production design and scoring. They have also incorporated CGI upgrades and 3D in mostly organic ways, and have benefited from a consistent production team. But perhaps more than any other book-to-film adaptation, they have been been carefully designed to always complement, rather than test the template set by Rowling and the books.

It will be interesting to see whether the film franchise does return in some form. It's not a stretch to say that there will be future remakes, perhaps including backstory details provided by new prequels and other stories. This might be extended into trans-media features, television specials, comics and other extensions, something that the films have not had to rely on so much for marketing and licensing purposes. In this way, it's possible to see The Deathly Hallows' ending as far from final, but rather a first, successful draft.

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick 2011)

2011-07-11T11:09:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. Between holidays and work I haven't had much time to visit the cinema, or catch up on my online viewing. There'll be more reviews pending time and probably unemployment. Both widely praised and criticised, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life was unmissable though. Expanding on Malick's entrenched themes of mortality, youth and nature, the film also plunges inwards into a singular experience, but one that leaves some questions.

Malick focuses on the O'Briens, a Texan family of three boys and parents (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) who offer alternative philosophies. The former, a life of ruthless ambition, the other, an acceptance and love of the world. The film opens with the fall-out from the death of one of the sons at 19. It goes on to explore how oldest son Jack (Sean Penn) tries to understand his brother's death by remembering their childhood in Waco, Texas. A straightforward plot description soon becomes irrelevant however. The opening reaction to the death cuts between the O'Brien parents and Jack's detached, dizzying POV of his life as an architect in the city. The film subsequently moves into a long sequence that covers, virtually dialogue-free, the Big Bang and the rise of life on Earth, ending with the destruction of the dinosaurs. The latter provides one of The Tree of Life's most memorable scenes, as a dying dinosaur is approached and hovered over by another, before it moves away into the jungle.

From here the film switches to Waco, and follows the O'Briens childhood in a more-or-less linear sequence. Most of these sequences are shot either from low angles, emphasising childhood perspective, or in superb handheld and Steadicam tracking shots across fields and homes. Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezi have created perhaps the most beautifully-shot film in recent history, with these nostalgic sequences standing out. As with Malick's other films, there is a primal fascination with tying together images of innocence and nature. The wilderness of Badlands and Days of Heaven, the tropical landscape of The Thin Red Line and the Edenic America of The New World are joined here by a timeless suburban and rural America.

However, these worlds are also unpredictably violent sites for the O'Brien's warring philosophies. Malick's never been afraid to draw on religion, family conflict, war and nation-building to provide a backbone to his imagery. In this case the question of explaining death, and by extension Jack's relationship to his brother and family, develops from nostalgia to darker, more sexual and violent scenes. For young Jack, part of an excellent cast of unknown actors, his identity becomes defined by the strictness of his father and the permissive but religious approach of his mother.

This is The Tree of Life's greatest strength. The process of Jack remembering his childhood is cluttered with attempts to identify meaning. Taking this to the broader level of the creation and the end of the universe is bold, but is also claustrophobic, returning obsessively to the microcosm of the O'Brien family and the impact of a few short years. Little context is provided for the events after childhood, or indeed the death that opens the film. The overall narrative structure, bookended with scripture and detours into outer space, instead has an impressionistic quality. Moments of striking visual brilliance, underpinned with choral music, knit together the non-linear events and substitute for plot.

The film's religious themes have been its most controversial. Others have described it as a religious masterpiece for its awe at creation and an underlying faith in the design of the universe. There is no guiding message, but rather a series of conflicts between futile attempts at order and acceptance. It could be argued that Malick creates a sensory overload that like a cathedral invites awe and reflection. In this way it's easy to see why people would be offended by the kind of cosmic solutions Malick offers to his characters' search for meaning. A problematic final sequence, which I won't spoil here, is particularly blunt.

Another way to view the film is as a sensory experience informed by, but not determined by religious experience. Just as it's possible to appreciate great art that has been driven by religious questions or themes, The Tree of Life can be enjoyed on its aesthetics alone. The same can be said for his earlier films. Just as The New World or The Thin Red Line were not explicitly pro-Indian, or anti-War, The Tree of Life draws on nature and narrow personal experiences to reflect, if not always critically, on universal experiences. Whatever the more overt religious points made by the film, it's hard not to credit Malick's ambition.

X-Men: First Class (Matthew Vaughn 2011)

2011-06-11T15:07:00.000-07:00

Enjoyable but flawed, Matthew Vaughn's X Men: First Class takes the franchise back to its 1960s roots. Telling the story of how Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) met, formed the first X-Men and ultimately split into rival groups, the result is only partially successful. Anchored by some fine lead performances, Vaughn is unable to prevent the film from devolving into a series of in-hokes and bland set-pieces.

Opening in 1944 with Erik being separated from his parents in a concentration camp, his emerging magnetic powers draw the attention of scientist Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon). With Erik's powers initially driven by anger, Shaw provokes him into a display after killing the boy's mother. Meanwhile, a young Xavier confronts an intruder at his family's upstate New York home. Finding what appears to be his mother, he uses his telepathy to confirm that it is a disguise by the shape-shifting girl Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) to hide her blue-skinned mutation. Xavier befriends and offers her sanctuary.

Fast-forward to 1962, and Erik is a Nazi hunter on the trail of Shaw, while Xavier has graduated from Oxford with a thesis on genetic mutation. Both are recruited by the CIA to combat the Hellfire Club; a group led by Shaw, he is revealed to be a mutant plotting to star a nuclear war. Xavier, Erik and Raven meet and recruit a range of young mutants, including the super-intelligent Hank McCoy (Nicholas Hoult), a young government scientist fighting a bestial mutation. Clashing with Shaw's own team of mutants, a race to prevent nuclear meltdown sees Xavier and Erik clash over a long-term war with mankind.

There are a few things that really work in First Class. For the first hour or so, it delivers well-balanced character introductions, with McAvoy and Fassbender's performances being particularly strong. Erik's global Nazi hunt and a few Mod-ish locations establish a tongue-in-cheek, James Bond-inflected style. However, by the midpoint of the film, the plot has separated between Shaw's mutant team and the prototypical X-Men. Training montages lead to an extended climax that repeats earlier X-Men films' reliance on multiple brawls.

This shift is also joined by increasingly awkward in-jokes and foreshadowing. Characters debate what their mutant names will be, Xavier jokes about going bald, and a future X-Man makes a gratuitous cameo. While resisting a Stan Lee appearance (although I might have missed it), the character chemistry of the first hour is lost. More might have been done to build up the 1960s setting, with the civil rights/mutant parallels surprisingly under-played, aside from one awkward cut to a black mutant as Erik denounces mutant slavery.

1st Class becomes something of a missed opportunity, but one that revives many of the franchise's problems. The best moments come through early character development and flashbacks. Once the characters are established though, it just becomes another series of set-pieces. This might be seen as an early warning for Marvel's Avengers film. Simply throwing together cool characters only works up to the point that character identification goes out the window. I'm not suggesting that 1st Class should have been a sensitive character drama, but that the strong work of its lead cast and period setting unravels once the spandex comes out and the CGI brawling takes over.

Terminator: Salvation (McG 2009)

2011-05-28T06:17:00.000-07:00

Grimly played, Terminator: Salvation took the film franchise in a new direction, but doesn't add up to the sum of its parts. Released in 2009, and soon after the completion of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, director McG and Josh Brancato and Michael Ferris' screenplay moves the action into the future. Set after the Skynet robot apocalypse, Salvation focuses on the resistance efforts against the machines in 2019. Christian Bale plays John Connor as an experienced soldier struggling to achieve his destiny as the leader of mankind.

While testing out what seems to be new superweapon in the war, he discovers that the machines have targeted his father Kyle Reese, the man he will eventually send back in time to save his mother. Meanwhile, death row convict Marcus Wright donates his body to an experimental program in 2003. Awakening in 2019, he enters into the resistance, but soon discovers that he is part machine, the result of a procedure that made him a human/cyborg hybrid. Attempting to convince Connor and the resistance of his motives, he eventually plays a key role in a raid on Skynet's base, and the rescue of Kyle Reese.

Only briefly glimpsed in previous films, Salvation's future focus works up to a point. The scale of the human and Terminator attacks expand, and benefit from a desaturated, dystopian production design and colour palette. Similar in tone to The Matrix trilogy, it also however reproduces its claustrophobic, and somewhat one-paced feel. What works in microcosm in the other films doesn't always translate to an engaging experience as a feature.

The original Terminator films, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles, draw on time travel, and the singular threat of a chase and mission to futuristic, but contemporary effect. Blown up to a 90 minute war film, Salvation loses some of that balance. McG's routine direction renders much of Salvation to a combination of war film and video-game, with point-of-view shots, and longer CGI sequences overshadowing combat. Efforts to add some complexity with Marcus Wright's questioning of his identity and the meaning of humanity ultimately functions as more of a plot device. Moreover, Bale's performance as John Connor adapts his gravel-voiced Batman persona, and doesn't get much to do beyond action sequences and shouting (something that might explain his infamous rant on the set).

One explanation for the series' radical shift might be the prolonged conflicts over the franchises' rights in the 2000s. C2 Pictures had acquired the rights in 1999, and produced Terminator 3 with Warner Bros. in 2003. Failure to get the cast to return for a sequel, and a switch of distributor to the financially-struggling MGM in 2006 delayed production. Ongoing production feuds over rights then saw the Halycynon Company acquire the property, before entering into a lawsuit with MGM. Warner Bros. and Sony eventually acquired domestic and international rights.

Technically an independent production, despite its $200 million budget, the parallel development of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and numerous rewrites and recasting dragged out production, and the finished result bears up some of those gaps. Gone is a real sense of character complexity, replaced by carefully designed set pieces and some rushed exposition. This doesn't make Salvation a bad film, but after its long history, it has the somewhat patched-together feel of multiple rewrites and changes in direction. Box office was eventually strong if not as expected, and reviews mixed to negative.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-2009)

2011-05-26T03:45:00.000-07:00

Running on FOX from 2008 to 2009, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles represents a franchise extension that adapts itself well to television. Set after the events of Terminator 2, it sees Sarah Connor and her teenage son John face up to new threats from the future, with Terminators sent back to kill him before he can lead a human resistance against an apocalypse. They are helped by Cameron (Summer Glau), a young female-appearing Terminator. Beginning in 1999, a time jump places them into 2007, where they evade attack and attempt to prevent the Apocalypse.

I haven't seen Terminator: Salvation, and didn't get much out of Terminator 3. The original films blended their high-concept (if sometimes illogical) time travel plot with straight-ahead chases and spectacular set-pieces. By the franchise's revival in the 2000s, mining the potential and plot-lines had produced diminishing returns. Developed by Josh Friedman, the series ignores the latter two films and instead focuses on the relationship between Sarah and John. It's a dynamic that works well, with Game of Thrones' Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker providing a believable mother-son dynamic. And it doesn't hurt that Summer Glau brings the acrobatics of her Firefly role to the deadpan Terminator, as well as being, well, Summer Glau.

What works about the series is its relatively simple goals, transplanted from the film franchise. Escape, battle and travel across the US, with each episode tying together a longer serial arc over evading the Terminator and connecting the pieces of the series' broader mythology. The pilot is particularly strong here in making a time travel jump from 1999. There's something oddly nostalgic about the series' 1999, with its boxy computers and dated fashions. The future, represented by wonder at laptop stores, sleek mobile phones, and bafflement at 9/11, doesn't dwell on these differences, but the transition is in itself effective. Considering how much the original Terminator is saturated with mid-1980s Los Angeles fashions and locations, it might have been interesting to see the entire show set in the (near) past.

Either way, Sarah Connor benefits from its tight focus, running through the momentum of episode-to-episode confrontations. Side-plots develop an FBI investigation, and follow the attacking Terminator. Fox, Warner Bros. and co-producers C2 clearly chose to heavily invest in the pilot and subsequent episodes, mixing CGI with high-quality prosthetics and action sequences. Nothing beyond hourly primetime budgets, but Terminator has a pleasingly grungy industrial look that reproduces the earlier franchise instalments.

I'm about four episodes into the series so far, and mindful that it only had an abbreviated run. That it never found a sufficiently consistent audience, and suffered from the Hollywood Writers' strike in 2008-2009, as well as rescheduling from FOX, is something of a shame. Like other sci-fi dramas, notably Joss Whedon's Firefly and Dollhouse, Terminator never quite translated its cult appeal into wider accessibility. Some reviews also note difficulties in managing episodic and serial plotlines by the second season, while continuing to work within budgetary constraints. Still, as a sharply scripted action-drama that mines surprising depth within its premise, the series comes highly recommended.

Thor (Kenneth Branagh 2011)

2011-05-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

The first comic book blockbuster of the summer, Thor falls just the right side of knowing fun. Choosing Kenneth Branagh to direct a tentpole release was always going to be an unusual choice, although his experience on Hamlet and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein worked in his favour. Part of the ongoing development of an Avengers franchise by Marvel Studios, Thor fits into the longer story arc of Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, but mostly does so without downplaying its self-contained plot.

Here we move between Asgard, imagined as another dimension of super-powered beings, and New Mexico. Having defeated an invading army of Ice Giants, Asgard's leader Odin (Anthony Hopkins) rules over a peaceful Kingdom. Prepared to name his oldest son Thor (Chris Hemsworth) as his successor, he is distracted by a surprise attack. Encouraged by his younger brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Thor launches a pre-emptive raid against the Giants with his similarly-powered friends. Banished to Earth, and severed from his invincible hammer (stay with me here), he enters into a relationship with scientist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). Meanwhile, Loki plots to take control of Asgard, setting up a confrontation on Earth.

It's credit to screenwriters Ashley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz and Don Payne that Thor doesn't get bogged down by its over-blown plot. Like the best fantasy series, it benefits from a consistent mythology that draws on the Marvel comics, balanced against a central romance and conflict for power. Most of all, and like Iron Man, it's played tongue-in-cheek, with Hemsworth particularly strong as Thor, forced to adapt to Earth. Deadpan, and supported by strong performances from Portman, Stellan Skarsgaard and Kat Dennings, it's a good antidote to the theatrics of Asgard.

I avoided seeing Thor on its initial 3D release, making Avatar the only film I've seen so far with the process. I'm still not convinced by it, and can't see how much it could significantly enhance Thor's set-pieces. Branagh handles the scale of these well, and limits the amount of weightless video-game brawling to a few early scenes. At times Thor did feel like a multi-million dollar adaptation of Thundercats, but then again the character's always been one of the most easily parodied of Marvel's characters. Taken together, Thor is never less than enjoyable though, well-paced and polished enough to compensate for its sillier moments.

Source Code (Duncan Jones 2010)

2011-04-30T05:54:00.000-07:00

Duncan Jones' Moon dealt with a man attempting to come to terms with his death against multiple versions of himself on a space station. Source Code takes a similarly investigative and subjective approach, structuring itself around Coltar Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), an Army pilot enlisted for an experimental program aimed at preventing a future terrorist attack. Awakening on a train, Stevens finds himself in the body of Sean Fentress, a teacher sitting opposite potential date Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan). Confused, he wanders around the train before it explodes, plunging him back into a cramped pod and a video-link with a military base. There he learns about the 'source code,' a program that will transplant his consciousness into Fentress' memories for a few minutes at a time in an attempt to discover who set the bomb. Playing out the same scenario with varying results, Stevens also begins to question his own memories and the disturbing reality of his part in the program.

Source Code is tightly plotted by Jones and screenwriter Ben Ripley, retaining a focus on Stevens' limited point-of-view as the rules of the 'source code' are established. The time loop plays out multiple variations on the scenario, establishing both a clear causal goal and providing the spine to Stevens' own dilemma. Like many other train-set thrillers, the procedural elements, tied to deadlines (the explosion of the bomb) offer scene-to-scene complexity without departing from its overall target. Jones and cinematographer Don Burgess exploit this scenario well in breaking down point-of-view options within the carriage, while sparingly using CGI for bridges between Stevens' pod and the train.

The latter is Source Code's biggest challenge. Providing a pseudo-scientific context for the 'code,' economic exposition helps prevent Stevens' own uncertainty over his surroundings from being bogged down in implausibility. Without giving away spoilers, the 'source code' device is also stretched for a potentially divisive conclusion. However, the pay-off doesn't detract from the film's overall precision and engaging lead performance by Gyllenhaal. Various reviews have compared this complex narrative structure and emphasis on ambiguous subjectivity to Christopher Nolan, as well as precedent in sci-fi time travel. Without going into too much depth, the Nolan comparison is suitable in terms of how Source Code mixes a high-concept plot with grounded characterisation in order to maintain its inner-logic.

Norwegian Wood (Tran Ahn Hung 2010)

2011-04-09T11:51:00.001-07:00

Adapted from Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel, Tran Ahn Hung's Norwegian Wood is beautifully shot but lacks emotional impact. Set in late 1960s Tokyo, student Toru struggles to deal with the suicide of his best friend, and a tentative romance with the latter's girlfriend Naoko. Negotiating her increased mental problems, and isolation in a mountainside retreat, Toro also enters into a relationship with Midori, a charismatic but manipulative fellow student. Moving between Toro's visits and attempts to break through Naoki's sexual and psychological neuroses, the three-part relationship heads towards tragedy.

Norwegian Wood's trailer, and much of its marketing, seems to suggest an epic love story, developing against the tumult of 1960s student protests and rock music. Both the latter are present, albeit in restricted form - the student protests viewed in the trailer are essentially the whole contribution to the film, while the title Beatles song receives a brief, if effective use. Norwegian Wood is a romance, but one that rarely breaks from its more overriding concern with suicide, dysfunctional sexual relationships and Toru's stoic attempts to find a stable identity.

While Murakami's books usually feature these themes, they are offset by his love of incidental detail, and breaks into magical realism-influenced dreams. Ahn Hung, working with Murakami, delivers some of the more surreal examples of the latter, but with an emphasis on brittle, close-up long takes of Naoko's breakdown, and extended tracking shots through the Japanese landscape. Mark Lee Ping Bin's cinematography, pushing colors for exteriors and developing both softly-lit, 1960s-designed Tokyo locations while eschewing a consistent period look, adds significant style alongside an original score by Jonny Greenwood, but doesn't substitute for sluggish pacing.

After an arresting opening, the focus on the central romance descends into repetition, and despite exploiting long takes and a narrative that targets psychological realism and incidental detail over plot, falls the wrong side of oblique. Maybe it's something to do with my own difficulty at switching into the pace of the more elliptical, psychologically ambiguous structure of an Asian art-film after a diet of mainstream US film and television, but Norwegian Wood's suggestion 0f a beautifully presented period romance (in the style of In the Mood for Love) can't seem to find the emotional focus that could lift it from well-crafted but empty drama.

Autism: The Musical (Tricia Regan 2007)

2011-04-06T04:33:00.001-07:00

Affecting and simply played, Tricia Regan's 2007 documentary Autism: The Musical was acquired by HBO for a first-run cable premiere in 2008, having previously received a limited theatrical release. Added to Sky Atlantic last Sunday as part of a themed block with Temple Grandin, the documentary forms part of HBO Documentary Films' variation between pro-social acquisitions dealing with controversial subjects. An attention-grabbing title provides the basis for a sensitive study of the Miracle Project, an arts-led program for autistic children in Los Angeles as it sets up a musical performance. While using a rehearsal and backstage preparation to add a loose structure, Regan focuses on a series of compiled segments exploring the background and difficulties of individual children and their parents.

From the musical director's own near-mute son to more socially able children with Asperger's, including the son of Crosby, Stills and Nash's Stephen Stills, much of the documentary's impact emerges from the clear difficulties and coping strategies of the parents. Picking up on the relationship strains and the day-to-day challenges, from educational to financial, it's a straightforward appeal to empathy that stays just the right side of sentiment in its (mostly) successful final night performance. A few backstage conflicts add tension, while archive footage provided by parents helps connect shared experiences of realising individual cases.

Nominated for a Documentary Oscar, and winning two Emmys, Autism: The Musical has been widely praised for its sensitive but unflinching study of treatment of various conditions on the autistic spectrum, advocating the kind of socialisation through play philosophy of The Miracle Project. It was also the first HBO documentary that I'd viewed on Sky Atlantic. With some rights restrictions on broadband distribution, not all of the specials that have played on the satellite channel have appeared on the website, but have so far leaned towards the award-winning, prestige end of the network's back-catalogue.

Moreover, these have offered complementary scheduling with series and original films, extending aggregate subscriber exhibition strategies, including When the Levees Broke and Treme. With distribution options for HBO documentaries previously limited in the UK (despite an output deal with Channel Four in 2006), satellite and broadband exhibition has continued Sky Atlantic's more focused aggregation of the network brand, extending the core US service's emphasis on diversity and compatible links across the monthly service. In this way, while my viewing, partly due to time restrictions, has mostly been for series programming, the fact that documentaries are added to the channel's schedule at all is a positive sign of how far the HBO brand's global extension into satellite and broadband channels has retained the structure of it US base.

Duel (Steven Spielberg 1971)

2011-03-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

Effectively Steven Spielberg's calling card for his move into theatrical features by the mid-1970s, his work on Universal's 1971 made-for-television film Duel represented a landmark in the young director's career. Having graduated from a series of director-for-hire jobs at Universal's television department, Spielberg's interest in Richard Matheson's short story led to his commission by Universal to direct the ABC Movie-of-the-Week. With budgetary restrictions, and the pressure of shooting the film in just ten days, Duel's careful craft and stretching of its limited resources demonstrated the director's mix of technical precision and the large-scale project planning that has underpinned his prolific career.

Duel's plot is straightforward. Businessman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) sets out from Los Angeles for a business trip, but is intercepted by a diesel truck whose unseen driver attempts to drive him off the road. After an early miss, Mann stops off at a diner where he fails to identify his attacker, and begins an ordeal across the desert roads. Eventually leading to a stand-off over a mountain range, Mann succeeds in forcing the truck off the road. Running to approximately 70 minutes, with extra footage added for a European theatrical release, once the concept has been established, Spielberg gives free rein to the stylistic possibilities of the two vehicles.

Shooting rapidly on location, and against the studio's initial plan for soundstage production, Spielberg was able to generate enough coverage through multiple camera-set ups, and lowered tracking cars to make Duel rise above its budget. Having meticulously planned out the truck and car's journey, the 10 day shoot, while gruelling, followed a strict schedule and scene order, while more elaborate stunts were achieved in a few takes. Interviewed on the DVD, Spielberg explains that he probably wouldn't be able to reproduce the pace and finished product today, attributing Duel's logistical success to his youth and ambition. On the same disc, Spielberg also links his early television work to the potential of breaking down the medium's reliance on close-ups and coverage to longer takes and shots and more fluid camera movement.

The mid-point diner sequence demonstrates this precision, moving from a handheld tracking shot of Mann through the building, before alternating rack focuses of a background Mann and a row of truckers sitting at the bar. Voice-over narration was played on-set for star Dennis Weaver, while Billy Goldenberg's orchestral score, foregoing traditional string sections for African instrumentation, provides backing. In this way, much of Spielberg's early use of depth, blocking and long takes, a key feature of Jaws' economy in cutting between ensemble dialogue sequences and shark attacks, can be found in self-contained form.

As a forerunner to Jaws, albeit preceded by the more character-driven road movie The Sugarland Express, Duel demonstrates Spielberg's early mastery of thriller and horror movie conventions. Although aided by a large editing team for rushing Duel into completion for its ABC premiere, the careful depth compositions, restricted point-of-view, and simple tricks for exaggerating perspective - for low-angle mounted camera set-ups (developed from Bullitt), see the water-level cameras in Jaws - make Duel a prototype for the director's later action work.

The Region 2 DVD is also recommended here for Spielberg's candid interviews, and linking of the film's various motifs, characters and particular sound effects (the crashing truck sound is later reproduced in Jaws) into his later films. Spielberg also wryly notes how Duel's theatrical release established him as auteur material for European critics, who found levels of symbolism in the truck-vs-car chase that he admits were not at the forefront of his mind when shooting. Watching Duel, having re-viewed ET a few weeks ago, I now plan to catch up on Sugarland Express and 1941. The latter, currently unavailable through LoveFilm on DVD, has received at best a mixed critical reception, and represented a rare Spielberg misstep before the director's record-breaking run of 1980s hits, from Raiders of the Lost Ark to production involvement in some of the decade's highest-grossing features.

Radio Days (Woody Allen 1987)

2011-03-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

Woody Allen's Radio Days was produced during the prolific director's 1980s alternation between his more serio-comic work (Hannah and Her Sisters; Sisters) and stands as a sketchy but appealing continuation of his fascination with classic broadcasting, film and music. Along with Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the later Bullets Over Broadway and Sweet and Lowdown (to name a few), Allen revisits a love of cinema and art's transformative power, both for shaping otherwise scattered autobiographies and for connecting families and relationships. It's perhaps the most useful bridge between his more focused character-comedies, and efforts at Bergman-styled pathos, bringing warm and a depth to character ensembles that rarely feels forced.

Radio Days, set in the late 1930s and 1940s, focuses on a loosely autobiographical childhood of Joe on Rockaway Beach, Queens, intercut with their love of radio and vignettes exploring the stars and legends of the medium's pre-television heights. Within this we have Joe's bickering but loving parents, an aunt pursuing love, and his own love of radio mystery serials, and the bonds created over variety shows, sports and national events. The radio vignettes then provide a combination of anecdotes (burglars become the unlikely winners of a phone-in contest), and a running set of episodes featuring cigar-girl Sally's unexpected rise to fame.

With Allen providing a wry voiceover, it's understated, and while occasionally arch, is driven by a love for the bonds and the imagined glamour of the medium, whether considered against its more mundane realities. Allen doesn't work to deconstruct or even satirise the blurring lines between reality and fantasy of the radio and family vignettes - like his love letters to classic cinema, it's the escapism and the romantic ideals suggested by art and entertainment that briefly allow for resolution to his flawed, neurotic New Yorkers.

Allen's commitment to shooting and releasing a film practically every year has produced its share of misses, and for many his recent work has demonstrated an exhausted talent. His own refusal to watch his films after their completion, and comparison of his filmmaking technique to an 'institutionalized person who basket-weaves...busy fingers are happy fingers' and an admittance of returning to the same obsessive themes, also tend to produce diminishing returns. There's bad Woody Allen movies, unmemorable ones with a few great lines, and those like Radio Days which has modest aims but delivers on them with considerable craft. There's no excess, the familiar themes - love and death, the relationship between art and everyday life - are subtly rather than broadly drawn, and Allen's love for the material comes through.

I want to fill in some of the gaps in Allen's filmmaking, probably avoiding some of the generally savaged works, and perhaps the more ambitious Bergman imitations, but certainly the smaller films like Radio Days that work in and of themselves. I had a similar experience a few years ago with Zelig, a film with essentially one gimmick - Allen's character is photographed, Forrest Gump-like, into major events in world history, but one that as scripted comes across as a more effective comedic take on Allen's occasional foray into broader themes than the 'serious' movies.

There's been a fair bit of attention to Allen recently, and his latest film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. The Guardian has an interview with the director, and David Thomson's discussion of Allen's distance as a performer. Sight and Sound magazine has also devoted a front cover, and a feature on Allen's body of work and a case for his historical and current relevance by James Stevens that also argues for re-examining his recent European-set productions.

Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields (Kerthy Fix; Gail O'Hara 2010)

2011-03-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

Found on LoveFilm's increasingly strong Watch Online service, Kerthy Fix and Gail O'Hara's Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields is a slight but engaging insight into the band and its creative director. Framing Merritt's lifestory around the band's rise from difficult-to-define late 1980s circuit feature to crossover indie success with 69 Love Songs, and more recent adjustments to Merritt's relocation to LA from New York, Fix and O'Hara compile and document ten years of footage without really doing much more than fleshing out a neat timeline. Direct interviews cut into studio recording sequences, while archive footage and photographs bulk out the rest of the 80 minute feature.

It does have a fannish quality, bringing the band to attention, while considering Merritt's problematic relationship to the media. The time given to Merritt's creative process is perhaps its strongest element, focusing on the improvisation, and the prolific output of the composer. Some wry asides from bandmate, long-time friend and manager Claudia Gonson also tap into some of Merritt's contradictions, remaining just outside mainstream success, and his happiness to pursue an eclectic body of work. Some attention is also paid to media controversies over allegations of Merritt's racism, but are largely dismissed by both the composer, bandmates and the original journalist.

What emerges then is a straightforward profile, extended to a feature-length style and concise enough to convey Merritt's talent and promote the band to new audiences while falling short of being a more incisive portrait. Part of this might be due to Merritt's own inscrutability and lack of significant drama - there's no drug addiction, mental illness and family tragedy - the composer's life, while drawing in a life on the road with a hippie mother and having never met his biological father, is sketched out as finding a stable if occasionally fluctuating level of success from the late 1980s.

I got into The Magnetic Fields through 69 Love Songs a few years ago, and it remains one of my favourite (triple) albums, a concept piece without some of the more pretentious problems of the genre. For fans of the band, Strange Powers is a useful complement, but one that perhaps could be achieved as well with some extended Wikipedia, Google and YouTube searching. Whether the documentary, which received a limited art-house release and festival promotion in the US and has quickly moved into online distribution, will connect to a wider audience is also questionable, given the band's already cult status.

A better companion piece might be L.D. Beghtol's free-associating mini-encyclopedia of the cultural and musical references that fill 69 Love Songs. Released as part of the 33 1/3 series of album commentaries, it comes closer to getting through to Merritt's talent via the work itself as an autobiographical catalogue of his musical history and influences, rather than Strange Powers' affectionate profile.

Sky Atlantic round-up

2011-03-16T09:18:00.000-07:00

It's been some time since I last commented on Sky Atlantic. Since launching in February, the channel and its digital extension has steadily built an audience, even if the blanket marketing of its launch has subsided. For me, the channel has become an essential part of an online television schedule that has been difficult to keep up with. Between Sky Atlantic, BBC's iPlayer and Channel 4OD, as well as LoveFilm's expanding Watch Online service, legal options for broadband viewing are now more than enough to satisfy viewing time. Sky Atlantic has particularly settled into a pattern for catching up on new episodes of Boardwalk Empire, Entourage, How to Make it in America and Weeds.

Of these, Boardwalk Empire has increasingly grown on me as one of the most consistently paced and realized of recent contemporary dramas, drawing out its 1920s setting with a period detail and excellent ensemble cast - Michael Pitt deserves particular praise here for an understated performance as as Jimmy Dorrity. After an action-filled pilot, the first half of the season settled into underworld dealings, a set of interlinked romantic plots, and the diversion and widening of criminal activities to Chicago. There's missteps, and I'm still unsure about FBI agent Van Ahlgren, but for the most part Boardwalk emulates earlier HBO dramas like Deadwood and The Wire in slowly warming up its narrative world with consistent viewing.

While the show's not quite in that territory yet, its the first of the network's dramas since The Wire to arguably find a long-running format for the prestige historical series that was partly eclipsed by the wider appeal of True Blood from 2008. Coming against promotion for Mildred Pierce, and the focusing of HBO Films around familiar personnel, talent and HBO's traditional broad-appeal prestige historical dramas, the stability that was briefly rocked after The Sopranos has been arguably restored.

I've also been able to use Sky Atlantic to gain a fresh appreciation of Entourage and How to Make it in America - the former is still gleefully played, but never dull satire, although the now seven-season run looks to have all-but exhausted the possibilities of lead Vincent Chase's career rise and falls. America has been the more interesting show, despite being downplayed in its US first-run as a New York-spin on Entourage, minus the industry insider commentary. Yes, the show's planted as a consciously hip effort to draw in younger audiences to the brand, but it's also illustrative of the importance of the city to shaping HBO's identity, particularly its conversion of bohemian style and reflexive commercial criticism into a mini-travelogue of Downtown.

Sky Atlantic's licensing of Lionsgate's Weeds, aired on Showtime in the US, has also allowed me to get back into the show after catching up on the DVDs a few years ago - the suburban family as drug dealer angle, and Showtime's arguable tendency for aiming its adult content broader and more traditionally sitcom-compatible remains, but it's strong cast can still pull pathos out of the light-hearted concept. Aside from the above shows though, I still need to catch up on Treme, while I've now missed a good five or six episodes of Blue Bloods, and can't find the time to fill up on the occasional documentary or original film licensed from the HBO catalogue.

As it is, Sky Atlantic works for me simply because it aggregates these shows in an easily-accessible setting, providing a diverse package that encourages repeat viewing and loyalty beyond its individual shows. There are drawbacks to this exhibition context, most notably having to sit through the same sponsor and advertising messages, and putting up with the website's occasional slow-downs, causing an episode to be restarted and fast-forwarded through the same adverts. Moreover, there are lots of shows that air on the linear digital channel that aren't available online, so the service remains a partial complement to a Sky package. But for the most part, Sky Atlantic is preferable to DVD distribution gaps, downloading, or waiting for individual shows to get picked up by a UK network.

Inside Job (Charles Ferguson 2010)

2011-03-10T08:42:00.000-08:00

Sometime it's difficult to separate the intent of a documentary from its entertainment value. Charles Ferguson's Inside Job, a meticulous analysis of the systemic corruption that led to the global financial meltdown, can't be faulted for its argument, but is also gruelling, a PDF-heavy 2 hours with added rogues' gallery elements. Beginning with the case of Iceland's deregulation and loss of a seemingly ideal economy, Ferguson carefully outlines how deregulation of US banks and investment companies led to wholesale double-dealing, unquestionable risk and a significant lack of accountability. From Goldman Sachs to AIG, and many other institutions inbetween, Ferguson's point is ultimately simply - unregulated, and with a disproportionate conflict of interests with higher education and government, the banking sector brought on the crash, and perhaps more tellingly, continue to maintain a system set to take the same risks.

One of Ferguson's strengths is that he takes what is probably now a standard opinion - that the banks over-reached, became greedy and produced a global domino effect - and the hammering home of how and why this was allowed to happen, and the ways in which it continues. The personal side of the crash, from the mix of anger and flat-out denial of interviewees from the banking sector, allows for a few sequences of disbelief in the sheer excess of CEOs and regulators. Given that challenge, these are important for breaking up Ferguson's wealth of figures, charts and documents that highlight sub-prime mortgages, derivatives and other economic factors.

In this way it is a challenging documentary, one that restricts some of the broader generalisations and confrontational style of Michael Moore's work and focuses instead on the facts, and the burden of evidence against its interviewees. But it's also one that is unfortunately restricted to an audience already well-versed in the banking crisis, those who will agree, praise Ferguson for his investigative achievement, but perhaps note that it's a reinforcement of a well-versed story, and challenges for potential intervention. Ferguson's hope, broadcast during Inside Jobs' Oscar win for Best Documentary, that the film will continue to raise awareness of a program of change, particularly over support for re-regulation of the financial sector, is therefore key to how far Inside Job can be held up as part of a broader campaign for reform. It's an excellent achievement in documentary production, but one that might struggle to find wider audiences.

True Grit (Joel & Ethan Coen 2010)

2011-03-10T08:26:00.001-08:00

Perhaps unfairly passed over at the 2011 Oscars, the Coens' True Grit is a fast-moving blend of ornate Western dialogue, stirring action and a respect for its source material that moves it beyond pastiche. In remaking an already well-established 1969 John Wayne adaptation of Charles Portis's novel, the Coens bring their own character-driven sensibility to the material, playing up the idiosyncracies of its lead while returning to Americana mythology and familiar style. Young actress Hailee Steinfeld plays Mattie Ross, a strong-willed 14 year old determined to avenge her father's death by Tom Chaney, enlisting US Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to follow him into the Indian wilds. Joined by Texas Ranger LaBouef (Matt Damon) as he pursues Chaney from a previous crime, they confront criminal gangs and the dangers of the landscape.

Like No Country for Old Men, the Coens' previously highest-grossing theatrical release, True Grit is a chase movie and Western that also serves as a bleak reflection on revenge, the passing of time and the effects of violence. But it's also consistently witty, characterized by the Coens' rapid-fire dialogue, and supported by excellent performances by Steinfeld, Bridges and Damon, as well as the Coens' regular supply of character actors in supporting roles. Elements of the Coens' work that some find offputting, most notably digressions into extended trivial debates, an arch sense of ironic humour and pathos are all here, but find an ideal match in Portis' ramshackle characters and leisurely adventure.

True Grit's probably been my favourite film of the year so far, less brittle an experience than Black Swan (which lacks some punch on second viewing), and richer in terms of characterisation, and beautiful location cinematography by Roger Deakins than its most immediate rivals. Wide landscape sequences, candle-lit interiors, and crisp moonlight sequences were backed up here by an excellent projected print, and in turning towards a more classical Western setting, the Coens do not hesitate to celebrate the visual scope of its setting. It's worth noting here though that I haven't seen The King's Speech, which in beating out The Social Network and True Grit at the Oscars seemed to represent a concession to a solid feature, but one that probably won't be discussed and re-viewed in significant depth in say ten years time.

Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek 2010)

2011-02-17T10:57:00.000-08:00

Adapting Kazuo Ishiguro's intimate novel into a well-crafted if difficult-to-define drama, Never Let Me Go sees director Mark Romanek and co-screenwriter Alex Garland draw on the intensity and tragic inevitability of its source. I read the book a few years ago, and enjoyed Ishiguro's sparsely realised depiction of an alternate world where life expectancy has been extended by cloning and later harvesting humans who are raised in special schools before 'donating'. Its mix of English boarding-school adolescent tension and a tragic adulthood for its leads Kathy H (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) reflects Ishiguro's skill in delving into familiar genres and a sparsely plotted but detail-rich narrative.

This was part of the challenge for Garland and Romanek, with the former having provided an early treatment of Ishiguro's novel in 2005, before the project received financing through Film Four, and later Fox Searchlight and co-production by DNA Films. Translating the first-person focus of the novel, Garland focuses on Kathy H's structuring voiceover in bringing the adult and childhood sections of the novel together. The straightforward outline, divided between three periods (childhood in the late 1970s at the boarding school, their early adulthood in the mid-1980s, and final stages of life in the mid-1990s.

With little exposition, the film draws much of its strength from the boarding-school sequences, with Romanek and cinematographer Adam Kimmel's development of an autumnal colour scheme, long takes and richly layered mise-en-scene enhanced by the performances of its child cast. Almost wholly restricted to a child's perspective, the rendering of detail, routine and the idiosyncrasies of the school provide a neat complement to the washed-out greys and blues of the modern world the children briefly enter into. Here the matter-of-fact tone, with Kathy H taking on the role of 'carer' as a delay to her own donating, rotating around sparsely designed hospital wards and sleepy seaside towns.

As in Ishiguro's novel, Romanek and Garland recognise the strength of the ordinary, routine way in which the dystopian world is realised - the inability of the leads to escape their designed fate as 'donors' provides a disturbingly matter-of-fact realism that is partially offset by a romantic triangle between Kathy, Ruth and Tommy. With Kathy's lifelong love for Tommy complicated by his relationship with Ruth, a hoped-for escape from donation by convincing others of their genuine love for one another. Mulligan and Garfield are excellent here, with a romance that grows out of the confusion and missed opportunities of their youth into a brief chance to be together before death.

Never Let Me Go approaches these heavy themes with a lightness of tone, breaking down the complex morality of human cloning, the presence of souls and choice into a resignation and a bittersweet romance that grounds the high-concept premise. However, despite featuring some beautiful moments of cinematography and soundtrack choices (Kathy's replaying of song 'Never Let Me Go' acts as a running commentary on a frustrated romance), it's a difficult film to pinpoint as a success. As its so-far stable but not as hoped-for theatrical box office, and generally positive critical reception have shown, in some ways Never Let Me Go is too subtle and under-played to reach the wider audience that the care taken in production deserves.

This is a difficult criticism to make, but more time perhaps could have been spent at the boarding school in fleshing out the relationships of the leads, or alternately providing some of the wider contexts of the later donations. There's also some casting issues, with Keira Knightley lacking the range of Mulligan and Garfield in an admittedly-difficult role to play, acting as the obstacle between their romance while presenting the physical costs of the donation toward the end of the film. Part of this might simply though be down to the fidelity to Ishiguro's novel, which in tone and delivery reads quickly and leaves much of its disturbing themes implicit. It's a difficult style to match on film, and while I was drawn in by some key sequences, Never Let Me Go as a whole is perhaps too measured to become genuinely affecting.

Cinemax Original Programming

2011-02-15T10:44:00.001-08:00

It's been announced that Cinemax will begin running its own original prime-time series over the next couple of years. A New York Post article cites HBO's desire to partially re-brand its junior channel, long the home of more comprehensive film programming, and late-night erotica, away from its 'Skinemax' reputation. Article author Michael Shain also notes the pressure of raising value for the subscription network at a time when a reliance on Hollywood movies has gone the way of earlier HBO in re-focusing marketing around original specials in a bid to compensate for DVD, PPV and online distribution window changes.

This will provisionally involve co-production with Sky of Strike Back, a US-British secret agent partnership action series, with Cinemax also expected to cut costs by allowing producers greater control over distributing and finding co-financing for programs outside the US market. This comes in contrast to HBO's gradual consolidation of program distribution and licensing rights, and the various efforts to build a more stable overseas infrastructure for the subscriber service in the past five years.

The Cinemax decision more broadly reflects the often-overlooked status of HBO's 'second channel,' and its dual complementary and more distinct identity from its market-leading parent brand. Launched in 1980 as further competition to protect HBO's market exclusivity over rivals such as Showtime and The Movie Channel, Cinemax increased choice but retained Time oversight and shared rights. The service could be added independently for viewers, or alternatively bundled with HBO, adding value to the primary service.

It went to 24 hour scheduling a year or so before HBO, and notably attempted in its early years to emulate contemporary broadcast, cable and subscription networks for a more specialised, 18-34 male demographic. This typically meant adapting popular pay cable formats such as stand-up comedy, original films and documentaries, while becoming an early home for erotica deemed too lowbrow for Time Inc and HBO's efforts to broaden its upscale subscriber base in the period and differentiate from Showtime, The Movie Channel and The Playboy Channel.

During the mid to late 1980s Cinemax became a testing ground of sorts for new comedy and documentary programming, with future CEO Chris Albrecht developing low-budget specials series Cinemax Comedy Experiments. In the early 1990s Cinemax's profile shifted as more erotica crossed over to HBO late-night, and experiments were attempted in all-comedy basic cable networks such as The Comedy Channel in reaching out to a more specific, younger audiences. Cinemax's value as a much smaller pay network was however revived, as it both continued to market low-cost erotica through co-produced serials and acquired softcore features, while also promoting documentary series Cinemax Reel-Life.

The documentary strand remains perhaps Cinemax's strongest programming achievement, acting as an exhibition outlet and co-producer (via HBO Documentary Films) of programs too specialist for wider HBO promotion. These typically included shorts, foreign documentaries, avant-garde experiments, and more explicitly political material. In the 2000s though Cinemax's profile has steadily grown alongside HBO, benefiting from packaged deals, and the channel has around 10 million subscribers.

Most of this appeal continues to rest on its stronger emphasis on a 90% movie schedule, with block rotation of major studio-licensed genre features and older library appeal, as well as the aforementioned erotica. The service also occasionally airs music tour documentaries and other specials. Moreover, the more generic movie channel focus on aggregating a broad range of features for niche exhibition has also extended to the varied exploitation of overseas rights for branded Cinemax channels. This is also a familiar tactic for Showtime's The Movie Channel and Flix sub-channels, as well as varied multiplex services, and competition from Starz, Encore, the IFC, Sundance and AMC's film programming niches.

The original programming movie is so far tentative, and Cinemax will probably continue to act as a bonus feature rather than a distinct service for HBO - investing significantly more in exclusive programming could eat into the primary service's market share. In this way, Cinemax's focus will primarily remain on added value alongside digital distribution of services for subscribers, offering exhibition choice as well as more specialist programs. However, producing more broadly accessible action series with adult content should provide a link between the success of FX, Showtime, AMC and Starz, as well as basic cable, in adapting more traditional genre formats. While True Blood and the future Game of Thrones remain lavish exceptions for HBO's focus on balancing individual show appeals (ratings, demographics, licensing rights) within consolidated exhibition cycles and aggregate promotion, Cinemax could plug that gap and produce more restricted, but potentially more flexible syndication, DVD and internet distribution for any successful shows that emerge from the niche channel.

127 Hours (Danny Boyle 2010)

2011-02-13T14:11:00.000-08:00

A detour in scale for director Danny Boyle after the lush, Bollywood-styled Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours goes down into darker, if ultimately affirmative areas. Starring James Franco in a role that extends Hollywood's current Renaissance Man (actor, student, soap star, etc), 127 Hours adapts Aron Ralston's book Between a Rock and a Hard Place. In 2003 Ralston, an adventure junkie, became trapped by a boulder in the middle of the Utah desert. Over a gruelling few days, Ralston's attempts to escape are repeatedly derailed, leading to an extreme (and gruesome decision). Recording parts of his ordeal through a digital camera, Ralston's story forms the basis for a study in claustrophobic point-of-view and familiar graphic energy for Boyle.

From a credits sequence alternating screens of city crowds and adventure sports, Franco as Ralston's early scenes resemble a soft drinks ad, complete with low-angle, rock-soundtracked biking, and a charged sequence as he and two hiking girls dive into an underground pool. By the end of the abbreviated first act however, Ralston is trapped with only his camera, and determination to hold onto his sanity. Here Franco excels, with both the prosthetic set-up and the challenge of working a kinetic narrative around a restricted situation. Boyle's solution is to, as podcast Filmspotting has noted, take a cue from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by switching to Ralston's subjective POV for most of the narrative.

Flashbacks, memories and visions crowd for space, allowing for both handheld video sequences, densely layered sound design, superimposition, while Boyle and chief cinematographer Antony Dod Mantle rotate stocks, pushed processing and digital editing to inventively manage Ralston's fragile hold on his sanity. All of which adds up again to Franco, given the challenge of believably negotiating the physical challenges, and the on-screen revelation of character, to handle. It's engaging material, and Boyle's precise craft, equal parts kinetic overload and grounded characterisation, as well as flashes of sentimentality, reinforce the director's genre-hopping and ability to choose and work with some of the best international actors available.

127 Hours isn't for the squeamish, although after the build-up Ralston's escape has already wrung out most of the more extreme edges. It's been a critical success for Boyle, and a gradual box-office winner for Fox Searchlight, Pathe and co-backers Film Four - a high-concept idea rooted in a relatively low-budget concept, delivered with technical grace and pacing, but almost wholly driven by interior character perspective around a straightforward plot structure. Franco's performance has dominated press attention, and with an upcoming lead in Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl, his choice and now-comfortable ability to lead major studio releases and prop up mainstream art house pictures makes him one of the most interesting actors working in Hollywood today.

More thoughts on Sky Atlantic's launch

2011-02-02T04:01:00.000-08:00

While it'll be some time before Sky Atlantic's long-term future is clear, the channel's first night was largely successful, delivering the extended pilot of Boardwalk Empire, as well as the pilot of CBS' police procedural Blue Bloods. In terms of immediate responses, this has varied from mixed Twitter reviews of Empire, to some caution over the show's innovations. Ratings don't seem to be available yet. Paul Martinovic of website Den of Geek reviews HBO's subscription success and its influence on the industry, but acknowledges that Sky have done little but re-package existing shows without offering much in the way of original content, or indeed British programming.

There's also some suspicion here over the timing of the channel, coming after many of HBO's hit series have faced increased competition - for the catalogue re-issue, it is important, as I suggested in last week's preview, to acknowledge the channel as part of HBO's broader history of non-subscription distribution. Most first-night reviews have however focused on Boardwalk Empire, praising production values, acknowledging epic scope, performances and content, while making links to Scorsese and The Sopranos.

Having watched the Boardwalk Empire pilot on its initial release, I was impressed by the style, but not gripped enough to watch the rest of the season on its US first-run - Buscemi is excellent, the momentum is maintained by a fairly tight ensemble structure, and production design is on the level of Deadwood or Carnivale. Having Sky Atlantic, and its On Demand option, will mean though that I'll watch the rest of the season this way - episode 2 is on tonight. For me however, it's the secondary shows, and the daytime lineup that'll provide ongoing interest over the high-profile first-run material that'll dominate marketing.

Chances are I'd have seen Empire, Game of Thrones and miniseries Mildred Pierce with or without Sky Atlantic; what the channel does is, or what'll it hopefully do, is reproduce my addiction to the BBC iPlayer and 4 On Demand as a regular viewing destination. Safe, legal services that I don't mind contributing towards, predicated on release windows and some pay walls, but more reliable and better-quality than downloads. Moreover, Sky Atlantic will provide a wider back-catalogue of more specialist HBO programming that probably wouldn't have found a buyer in UK syndication - How to Make it in America, Treme, and a range of documentaries will particularly test the new structure of the channel, and demonstrate how much primetime will be dominated by HBO's aggregated output.

But what about the other non-HBO shows that'll boost upscale appeal in primetime and across dayparts? Last night's premiere of Blue Bloods was a useful case in point - a CBS broadcast drama scripted by former Sopranos staff writers and producers, it's set in contemporary New York, and explores the dynamics of the Reagans, a family combining a police commissioner (Tom Selleck), rookie son, maverick detective, and a sister who's a DA - oh, and the grandfather was also in the force. While treating episodic crimes (the pilot was animated by a kidnapped girl), Blue Bloods deals with broader questions over criminality, the city, and the effects on the family structure.

Blue Bloods is an expensively produced drama, at least from the pilot, and so far makes the most of its New York locations, de-saturated palettes and a few set-pieces - but it's also fairly routine as a network procedural - this coming from CBS, home of the CSI franchise. The conceit of the Reagans is an interesting one, but seems to act as a prop for weekly debates over law and order, and suitable approaches. The pilot also packs a lot of extraneous plot-lines, and foreshadows more - a back-story for one of the characters in Iraq, a covert police operation and FBI presence set up later plot-lines. It's a well-crafted show, and benefits from a great cast and location shooting, but ultimately feels more like a pumped-up procedural with added serial melodrama.

Content is fairly restricted, and it's presumably not going to stray too far from episodic procedurals to keep the show ticking over. I'll try to carry on watching it, as pilots are traditionally difficult to judge a show's longer tone, and it gives some indication of how more traditional series will hold up in primetime. I'm also hoping to use Sky Atlantic, or at least its first few weeks of launch, to catch up and think through how the channel packages its shows. In primetime, reruns of Six Feet Under (Thursdays), new seasons of Entourage (Thursdays), are joined by reruns of Fox's Prison Break (Fridays), and HBO specials (When the Levees Broke is run this Friday).

In terms of back-catalogue, the excellent HBO Films' drama Wit airs this Saturday night, while they're also running Curb Your Enthusiasm's prequel special. The Al-Pacino-starring You Don't Know Jack premieres on Sunday night, while from next Monday we have Curb, paired with Showtime-Lionsgate's Weeds. Sky part-owned Battlestar Galactica launches on Tuesday nights. The emphasis on building consistency through pairing older HBO dramas and films, as well as documentaries also extends this week to the Martin Scorsese-produced special Public Speaking, a profile of New York writer Fran Leibowitz. These kind of specials are ones that would never probably have received a UK run, and corresponds to the exporting not only of HBO's hit series, but also the aggregation of the back-catalogue that shapes the US subscriber network. Reruns of The Sopranos don't seem to be listed yet, although at present there's only so much primetime space to dedicate to older material.

Also interesting are the current choices for the day-part reruns. HBO shows, or the odd Showtime series, don't lend themselves well to early afternoon runs, so Sky Atlantic has wisely invested in surefire syndicated series - we have 20th Century Fox series and Sky parent News Corp perennials The X-Files, a staple of Sky One, Virgin One and FX, as well as 24's seventh season. From Warner Brothers comes ER, Paramount Star Trek: Voyager, as well as MGM's thirtysomething. While most of these shows have been reliable for Sky in the past ten years, thirtysomething, the victim of ownership problems since the 1980s, will probably be the only one I'll try to catch up on. It apparently received a brief run of More 4 in 2006, and DVD versions are just creeping out.

Most of these shows, with the exception of regular short segments from Inside the Actors' Studio, will be run in conventional syndication, stripped Mondays-Fridays on an episode-by-episode basis, with more commercial breaks per hour than primetime. Having the opportunity to follow the channel, its scheduling choices and more general aggregation of shows over the next month should then provide some opportunities to both engage with the first-run UK premieres of new shows, while also picking up on how the channel builds wider appeal and manages its quality back-catalogue across its primetime focus and day-time staples. This'll also be a bit clearer once initial ratings, subscriber spikes, and responses from chief sponsor Blackberry filter out, as well as its effect on On Demand and Sky Anytime usage.

HBO and Sky Atlantic Part II

2011-01-20T09:54:00.000-08:00

Still from Boardwalk Empire

2000-2005

Between 2000 and 2002 HBO's identification with quality programming helped define debates over niche options for quality television, industry praise and a range of new distribution and exhibition choices for the industry, from Curb Your Enthusiasm to The Wire, Band of Brothers, Six Feet Under and other shows. It was also a period of institutional adjustment for HBO, with domestic centralisation of original film production, aggressive entry into domestic syndication via Warner in the US with Sex and the City, and distribution success with DVD, as well as ventures into theatrical film and merchandising deals establishing the network as a by-word for adaptation and diversification demands.

International changes retained some difficulty though, compared to the rapid changes taking place domestically. While HBO's extension of a US subscriber base provided the foundation for most diversification, boosting numbers and reproducing long-held genres and production strategies, syndicating series abroad was both overtaken by DVD while sharing common problems. For the former, while successful, the overseas popularity of Sex and the City and The Sopranos was offset by Paramount's foreign rights to the hit comedy, and the varied licensing agreements and suitability for primetime and long-term reruns for the gangster drama between varied territories.

Suitability for foreign broadcasters and co-owned pay channels also affected stable deals, while the popularity of DVD held some rights changes. Most notable here was again Paramount's oversight of Sex and the City, which while employing the HBO brand, lowered control over global packaging. Moreover, international DVD lacked the wide rights ownership of the domestic HBO Home Video, relying on Warner for the most part to market and negotiate international territories.

By the mid-2000s this was further complicated by the lower selling potential of new HBO series such as The Wire, Carnivale and Deadwood. While building support within the general subscriber framework of the domestic market, the show's varied performances overseas - whether for traditional resistance to complex serial narratives, adult content, African-American popularity, or license costs, lowered the rate at which foreign distribution could recoup negative losses. Again, Paramount played a significant role, with HBO's deal with David Milch for Deadwood coming against the writer-producer's existing contract with the studio, who handled foreign distribution.

In the same period, HBO attempted to increase control over international rights for DVD, film and documentary, developing HBO Home Entertainment offices in London, as well as opening an exchange branch of HBO Films in the city to negotiate sales. This also overlapped with expanded interests in theatrical film as a window for HBO financed releases, with deals with Fine Line, New Line and Newmarket eventually consolidating into Picturehouse, an acquisition and distribution service for the US market.

The varied rate of exploiting shows overseas, particularly those with similar negative costs but lower returns than The Sopranos came to a head with the lowered performance of Rome from 2005 to 2007, with early broadcast co-production and licensing deals falling away in 2006. Picturehouse's early performance in the North American market also did little to suggest that HBO's push into the theatrical market could provide more than marginal profits over the subscriber network, and the venture closed in 2008. HBO have by comparison found more success through limited collaborations with New Line and Warner for remaking Sex and the City for cinematic release, although in some ways this can be viewed as a solution to the divided Paramount television rights.

Through this period, while not experiencing the same level of growth as previous periods, HBO's subscriber market share continued to provide the most reliable first-run source of exhibition, financing and aggregated rights - as well as the most centralised form of control for managing the brand and exporting to global territories. Digital distribution online, and opportunities to extend centralised rights overseas would thus begin to adjust around resistance and adaptation to questions over broadband access and economies of scale from 2006 to the present.

Broadband and Global issues: 2006-

In late 2006 HBO Enterprises took central control of marketing and distributing series overseas, citing problems with 'disparate' agreements and commercial partners not 'brandishing' the HBO label as well as could be hoped for by the parent company. While in some ways the matter of differences between lucrative and less-lucrative profits, HBO's traditional detachment from extensive co-production, cross-promotion and television studios ties provided uncertainty over relaxing premium prices and entering more fully into more economical co-production.

This was best seen by problems with broadband, with CEO Chris Albrecht suggesting in 2006 that HBO would not use technologies to 'cannibalize our brand,' and while other networks and studios began to filter program libraries online and through iTunes to combat internet piracy, HBO were and continue to be more cautious. Alternative strategies turned to previews rather than longer license windows, late deals with iTunes and disputes over pricing, and more recently, efforts to adapt domestic HBO subscriptions into broadband services. Included here has been HBO On Broadband, extending HBO On Demand subscriber packages, and in the past year, HBO GO - an online iPlayer of sorts available only to existing viewers.

By contrast, Showtime has licensed its shows regularly to fellow Viacom networks, and through Viacom and studio partners such as Lionsgate and MGM, has made most of its hit shows available in wider territories and on DVD, tactics also taken by smaller basic cable networks AMC and FX. HBO's preservation of its pay-wall for subscribers, continually promoted as adding value rather than substituting a core business model, has consequently affected the extent to which new shows and wider licensing agreements retain control of the central service.

In this way, although HBO continues to syndicate some of its series to basic cable partners, their lowered returns typically retains the value of DVD, and HBO-subscription services to boosting exclusivity. The network has also experienced disputes with NetFlix and other services over licensing series - for the most part, subscription-only services are touted as alternatives, a problem complicated by HBO's long-term output deals with major studios for cable rights to recent movies, and lucrative carriage agreements with cable and satellite operators . All of which has provided a model for extending exclusivity and re-centralising control over foreign sales.

Again, HBO lacks a consistent subscription outlet in most foreign territories that emulates the market share or the programming variety of the US, although the network has taken full control of some of its international affiliates in the past few years. Efforts have been made to extend On Demand models to alternative subscription packages - in the UK, Israel and other territories HBO On Demand services were offered from 2007 - Virgin and BT channels here typically recycle both well-known shows and more obscure properties. In terms of the latter, the low value of much of HBO's programming bulk, e.g. documentaries, standup comedies, more specialist series, tends to work better when blocked with stronger series.

Coming back around to Sky Atlantic then, the deal with SKY represents a significant attempt to centralise distribution through a single outlet for HBO programming in a major market, building off the wider value of the brand in aggregate as a quality label, which takes in both hit series and the wider back-catalogue. Notably, HBO's most successful recent series, True Blood, is not covered by the deal as rights are currently held by FXUK, while Paramount retain rerun rights to Sex and the City for Five USA and Comedy Central. The regular home of many HBO series since 2005, adjusting rights to Sky Atlantic, while still falling under News Corp's system ownership, at least gives the network an opportunity to brand itself outside of identification with FOX.

Conclusion

Sky Atlantic thus represents something between a compromise and a future ideal for HBO's global branding. Providing a stable outlet for a back-catalogue of programming, with a more balanced emphasis on the brand as well as the individual, varied performance of each show, provides a solution to widening access for long-term exhibition. This is particularly true for some of the HBO shows which have had a limited or no DVD release, including Big Love, Treme and How to Make it in America. Of course, the network also has more general quality television ties to Lionsgate's Weeds and Mad Men, but in most respects it's an outlet for HBO series, reinforcing a leading market position.

While not a subscription channel per se, it's an indication of how much HBO's approach to branding itself globally and maintaining expansion has centralised and re-adapted an exceptional US model over more radical broadband distribution. Understanding this process is important both to continuing to frame HBO's contributions to worldwide television as adapting, rather than substituting existing copyright protectionism, market share and economies of scale - the future of HBO, and its ability to consistently generate quality programming, therefore depends on this adaptation, and around a historically isolationist, or at least stubborn approach to sacrificing what remains its most distinctive asset - a US subscriber empire, and a back-catalogue of programming that traditionally work best when set within a HBO-branded, rather than diversified exhibition context.

Sky Atlantic and HBO Overseas Distribution - Part I

2011-01-20T05:50:00.000-08:00

The February 1st launch of Sky Atlantic looks to be a major milestone in the continuing success of HBO as a brand, with praise and anticipation for a range of new shows such as Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones overlapping with Sky's promotion of the channel as a new, relatively inexpensive home for quality television for UK fans. It was also announced yesterday that Blackberry would be the sole sponsor of the network. Of which HBO is a key part, with billboards featuring the 'exclusive' home of HBO programming as a key feature (one of these lies about fifty feet from my house). In some ways, this has been presented as another example of HBO's global branding impact, leading to op-ed pieces celebrating output and new opportunities for UK exhibition. However, the deal can also be unpacked within HBO's still often-problematic history of international distribution and exhibition infrastructure, which has retained some key problems over exclusivity and commercial partnerships.

Part I: Going Global - Making a pay cable brand work overseas: 1972-1999

HBO's enormous success in the US during the 1970s and 1980s as the leading pay cable brand exhibiting uncut movies, sports and some original programming, was swift and gained the Time network an exceptional market share, easily outstripping closest rival Showtime, owned by syndicator Viacom. At this time HBO was owned by publisher Time Inc, and underwent consistent negotiating problems with Hollywood studios (the principal supplier of movies to the service), that produced some compromises over rights deals by the end of the decade as video supplanted pay cable as the first-run home entertainment window for movies, In this period Time occupied an unusual relationship to the New Hollywood, with HBO contributing to multiple financing and new windows for Hollywood product, while predominantly operating outside of trends for studio and broadcast interdependence - studio production for networks and syndication participation.

In contrast to Showtime, owned by leading syndicator Viacom, HBO entered both negotiations - film output deals, some shares in cross-owned basic cable systems, but largely emphasised independence and bargaining power through market share, while launching a HBO Home Video label in 1986 through UK and independent Cannon. During this period, making HBO into an international brand was more problematic, with cable and satellite growth lacking US momentum, while early efforts to export services in the early 1980s through subsidiary HBO Enterprises by then-CEO Frank Biondi were shelved as the company underwent a brief crisis in 1984 and 1985.

During this period HBO's original programming was limited, and of generally poor quality, but would promote compatibility through choice and aggregate value for its subscriber audience, promoting not perhaps the best individual programming, but the best-managed exhibition outlet and a focus on reinforcing exclusive packages for subscribers. In this way, HBO typically entered into co-production deals that guaranteed US cable rights, with producers distributing overseas on video, broadcast and theatrically. Moreover, for HBO's bargaining of boxing and other sporting rights, international re-transmission of live bouts remained problematic for recouping long-term costs through syndication or video highlights packages.

1989 - Time Warner and Global Distribution

In 1989 Time finally bent to merger pressure and became part of Warner Communications, with HBO as a prized asset - in effect, the record success of HBO and investment in cable distribution and a few leading basic cable networks had allowed Time to take a disproportionate share of the US entertainment market. This had immediate significance for HBO as a global brand, with deals set up for co-ventured movie outlets in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia emerging - however, these remained more conciliatory ventures, acting as branded efforts to gain leading market share in new cable markets for studios. HBO's television programming relationship to its newly merged identity was similarly mixed (McElvogue May 2 1995).

On the one hand, the network began to participate in co-production deals with studios for shows such as Tales from the Crypt, Dream On and The Larry Sanders Show. International rights for these shows were typically handled by studio partners, from Warner to MCA-Universal and Columbia. Conglomerate partner Warner Brothers also offered a ready-made syndication and video distribution network for HBO programming, although rights were initially limited to some entertainment-news programming, and limited film rights - for the most part, the HBO Video label remained domestically-focused, with multiple rights for films, documentaries and other specials still negotiated between producers and outside syndicators/video distributors.

Problems however developed into the mid-1990s, with the further merger of Time Warner with Turner establishing wider distribution rights for exporting cable channels, but with some key limitations - unlike Viacom or News Corp (owner of 20th Century Fox and the FOX network), Time Warner's entry into Western European markets had fallen behind rivals - by the mid-1990s Rupert Murdoch's SKY satellite system provided a market-leading outlet for FOX-produced and syndicated programs such as The Simpsons and The X-Files, while Viacom had established international versions of MTV and Nickelodeon networks fairly early - Turner, now part of Warner, had also moved to establish international versions of its domestic networks CNN, TCM, and the Cartoon Network, but with recurring issues over rights - today, TCM (Turner Classic Movies) operates with far more restricted film library rights than its US parent. Viacom's Showtime had also made some limited inroads into using its brand for expanding international markets for pay movie channels, most notably in Australia.

For HBO, establishing a consistent overseas presence in the UK was also complicated by SKY's monopoly over studio outlet deals for its subscription-only film channels - Sky Movies, The Movie Channel, and the similar monopoly over premium film exhibition established in Continental Europe by French company Canal + - more significant rights in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe (as well as some holdings in Scandinavia), remained co-ventures, and would later change. So, by the mid-1990s HBO-branded programming had a limited international distribution beyond a handful of cult shows - Dream On, Tales from the Crypt and Larry Sanders had regular broadcast rotation in the UK during the decade, although as US producers and rights holders HBO's control or revenues from global sales remained mixed.

Even so, this was fairly exceptional for a US pay cable company with a select audience - Viacom's Showtime had by contrast relied on its parent to co-finance and distribute series as early as 1984, with the syndicator selling niche shows such as Brothers and It's Garry Shandling's Show into domestic and international markets. Showtime worked in this way as more of an extension of Viacom's existing syndication empire, and would frequently act as a first-run window for shows destined for basic cable runs by the 1990s - this was particularly true of a series of deals with MGM for shows such as The Outer Limits and Poltergeist: The Legacy. HBO's own experiments in regular domestic syndication were varied, with early licenses to PBS for some documentary specials carrying a limited appeal - more significantly, deals with FOX to license edited versions of Tales from the Crypt and Dream On were largely unsuccessful in 1995 and 1996.

From the mid-1990s HBO rebranded to focus on producing and owning more exclusive original programming to reinforce and grow US market share, but this didn't immediately mean gaining access to lucrative global markets for syndication. In the US this meant gradually using budget re-allocation to reduce dependence on studio production companies in order to vertically integrate production of series programming and films - documentary programming and some limited sports and standup material were already cheap enough to retain more exclusive rights. International partners were still needed though, with HBO's relationship to Warner not always a productive one.

In short, HBO enjoyed a remarkable degree of autonomy and bargaining power over US rivals that had allowed the network and Time Warner to dominate the pay market, invest in greater exclusivity, first-run output deals with studios and increasingly invest in promoting vertically integrated deals for original programming that would offer far greater single control than more traditionally interdependent network and studio rivals. Moreover, despite being part of Time Warner, during this period the conglomerate worked more like what one critic has described as a 'feudal system,' with each subsidiary encouraged to dominate their respective markets, while collaborating on exceptional synergy of properties.

By 1996 HBO had entered into a select deals with Rysher Entertainment, an independent company, who provided co-financing for early shows such as Oz, Sex and the City and sports comedy Arli$$, while picking up some rights to boxing and other shows. In this way, by the end of the decade the former two shows had entered into limited in the former, and wider syndication, while Arli$$ - whose appeal was always more tied to HBO's sports audience, and has yet to be distributed overseas on DVD.

By 1998 record investment in miniseries From the Earth to the Moon also established co-production investment from overseas broadcasters in first-run rights, offsetting costs while retaining HBO's exclusive control over production and US exploitation - Earth also became the first HBO production to receive a DVD release in late 1998. In 1999 HBO's brand identification with quality programming reached the landmark of The Sopranos, while growing distribution of Sex and the City, and the roll-out of DVD distribution by Warner promised to significantly expand niche television markets for the 2000s through digital technology.

HBO had already been working on adding value to its US subscriber share, experimenting with multiplex channels, and adding a full digital package for early adopters in 1998, while looking into high-definition exhibition, widescreen and digital sound. However, entering the 2000s, HBO's transition into a globally recognised production brand would retain tensions over retaining exclusive US market share with international compromises, and distribution over rights. The acquisition of Rysher in 1999 by Paramount (Spring May 31 1999) would be particularly significant here for setting up tensions over global syndication rights, while HBO's DVD success, and exceptional run of programming would also be qualified by tensions over control of the brand.

References

McElvogue, Louise, 'Company Town: HBO takes a more global view of TV strategy: international ventures have taken a back seat at the largest US pay television firm. But that's changing,' LA TImes Online, May 2 1995

Spring, Greg, 'Paramount adds to library with Rysher,' Electronic Media, May 31 1999, News, 2

Easy A (Will Gluck 2010)

2011-01-19T09:42:00.000-08:00

For a teen film whose trailer suggested a disposable sex comedy with some 10 Things I Hate About You literary pathos thrown in, Will Gluck's Easy A mostly finds some interesting notes in its premise. Distributed by Screen Gems, Emma Stone stars as Olive Penderghast, a high school sophomore who finds that lying about her lost virginity, and subsequent willingness to promote her imaginary promiscuity as favours to boost fellow students, is enough to grant her a sudden popularity. Inspired in some respect by their English class reading of The Scarlet Letter, Olive pins a red 'A' to a successively skimpier set of outfits, and works her way (metaphorically speaking) through her high school's various cliques, while negotiating Evangelical Christians and an eventual long-term romance with childhood sweetheart Todd.

With Stone as a bemused, eloquent lead, framing narration through webcasts, and a wryly self-conscious family unit of Stanley Tucci, Patricia Clarkson and adopted African-American brother Chip, Olive's behaviour only rarely seems to get out of hand - lying for an adulterous guidance counsellor, or questions from the principal. Altogether her social climbing as 'Easy A,' with its light handling of teen sex, gay sexuality, adult and religious hypocrisy, has some of the straightforward satire of Heathers, if less of its bite and nastiness. Olive's world is ultimately one that while occasionally open to real-world crises, fits safely within the ironic dismissal and cosy family unit that derails some of the more exploitative elements.

In this way it's closest comparison is Juno, sharing a caustic if loveable lead, and a progressive attitude to teen sexuality that performs the difficult balancing act of showcasing its lead's gendered stigma - unplanned pregnancy, sexual reputation - while making its lead hyper-aware and mostly in control of their romantic plot-lines. Directly alluding to fellow teen movies, including repeated cues to Say Anything, Easy A does little however to present itself as a smartly self-aware take on the high school comedy, inverting familiar outcast-to-popular cliques for a comfortably paced teen comedy while offering little in the way of significant innovation.

Monsters (Gareth Edwards 2010)

2011-01-10T14:16:00.000-08:00

A man and a woman meet in Mexico, and en route to a delayed return to the US, gradually fall in love in a casual, complicated but ultimately sweetly romantic way, playing off semi-improvised dialogue and digital location shooting. Oh, and encounter a race of alien creatures deposited between the US and Mexican border by an asteroid. First-time director Gareth Edwards's Monsters might just be the first British indie romance/monster movie, building an affable, performance-led narrative around CGI effects that obscure the $15,000 budget. Developed between Edwards and indie producer-distributor Vertigo Films, the former's background in BBC effects, saw early creature designs link to Vertigo's suggestions for the semi-improvised romance, with particular influences coming from In Search of a Midnight Kiss (Holdridge 2007).

With Midnight Kiss' lead Scoot McNairy starring as photo-journalist Andrew, McNairy's off-screen girlfriend Whitney Able appears as Samantha, the daughter of Andrew's magazine publisher. Charged with returning her safely to the US, travel problems divert them into an illegal trek across the 'infected' zone to Texas. Helped by river crews, and bands of mercenaries, Edwards emphasises the mix of incredulity and ordinariness of the alien colony, and its ultimate subordination to Andrew and Whitney's negotiation of their gradual feelings for each other.

With location shooting supplying Edwards with a panoramic backdrop, Monsters has the look of a film ten times its budget, making the most of natural lighting and handheld tracking shots. Edwards' effects work, incorporating glimpses of enormous aliens to night-time scenes, security cameras and background television footage, is perhaps Monsters' most ingenious strategy. From a bravura opening handheld to aerial footage of a military attack on a towering alien, to more restricted perspectives, budget restrictions aside, their secondary presence adds a twist that elevates Monsters from potential schlock.

The premise for travel and escape through the jungles of Central America while avoiding alien attacks could have been taken into exploitation territory, but with most violence off-screen or concealed by night sequences and grainy diegetic footage, McNairy and Able's chemistry and developing warmth presents Monsters with an anchor that places it into multiple indie variations on the quirky, narratively linear, restricted deadline and semi-improvised success. While some members of the audience might have been expecting more of a straightforward monster movie, Monsters is neither conventional indie or low-budget effects breakthrough, but rather a sign of a unique project worked through to become a sleeper hit for Vertigo. Its success has led Edwards towards a commission for a reboot of Godzilla - at least raising hopes that a subtler touch could move past the blundering scale of Roland Emmerich's charm-free 1998 effort for Sony Tri-Star.

Winter's Bone (Debra Granik 2010)

2011-01-04T07:28:00.000-08:00

Debra Granik's 2010 feature Winter's Bone falls somewhere between bleakly observed backwoods realism, and a recent cycle of American dramas returning to regional themes, settings and stark morality tales - also see Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008). Focusing on the struggle of 17 year old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) to hold her family together in Missouri's Ozark region, a bail collection for her missing, crack-dealing father takes her into a confrontation with her extended family's criminal underworld. With Lawrence delivering a stand-out performance, Granik traces both the routines of life in the Ree's dilapidated home, where she cares for her young siblings and mute mother, and the circle of violence that surrounds the Missouri woods.

It's a narrative broken up by moments of shocking violence, although the threat, rather than the on-screen depiction carries the strongest effect - Ree runs through a crowded slaughtering pen, tracks her way through the woods to a crack-dealer's compound, and in a climactic scene, is taken out to a swamp to discover new evidence over her father's disappearance. Unsentimental in approach, Granik acknowledges the almost mythic quality of the family ties surrounding Ree's struggle, but contextualizes them more narrowly through a cycle of violence. Opportunities for escape from dependence are similarly limited, with Ree's application to join the army rejected before she can turn eighteen.

Shot by Michael McDonough, the location work makes the most of natural light and washed-out production design, exploiting the cramped conditions of the Dolly home and extended tracking and lot shots through the Ozurk woods. Rightfully nominated for a series of awards in late 2010, Winter's Bone's strongest achievement is perhaps its unwillingness to turn its lurid subject matter into exploitation, finding an anchor in Ree and Lawrence's straight-forward, stoical performance as she pursues a disturbing conclusion to her family's survival.

Best Of/Upcoming 2010-2011

2011-01-01T13:56:00.000-08:00

Picking a top 10 film list for 2010 is more difficult this year - I haven't been to the cinema since October, and aside from the obvious critical/box office candidates, there's still a lot that I haven't got around to seeing. As a result, without putting all the films that I watched in the cinema last year into one list, here's a top 5:

5) Black Swan - dark, gleefully gruesome modern fairy story enhanced by Arofnosky's usual visual flair.

4) Scott Pilgrim vs. the World - translates Bryan O'Malley's comic strip to flawed but lovingly crafted, and excellently sound-tracked and scored cult favorite (also the only film I saw twice in the cinema)

3) Inception - Christopher Nolan delivers again on his ability to mix blockbuster scale with narrative puzzles, and needs to be rewatched again soon.

2) Toy Story 3 - challenges Up for pathos, and again demonstrates Pixar's almost unerring consistency as the family studio of the 2000s

1) The Social Network - needs another rewatch, but perhaps simply for taking the 'Facebook movie' pitch and producing an electric study of obsession and some sympathy for poor old billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, Fincher and Aaron Sorkin managed to make me question some of the darker side of Facebook (for a few days at least)

And just to make a New Year's resolution to go to the cinema more often, here are some anticipated movies of 2011:

Terence Malick's The Tree of Life looks suitably ambitious, although I'm still not quite sure what it's about. The Coen Brothers' critically praised True Grit should be out soon, as will Danny Boyle's mountaineering 127 Hours, and if it gets a release in Exeter, John Carpenter's The Ward will be an interesting test to see if the director still has it. David Fincher's US remake of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo might improve on some of the abridging of the Swedish version, while Martin Scorsese's Hugo Cabret could be a great homage to early cinema.

Rabbit Hole (John Cameron Mitchell 2010)

2011-01-01T13:41:00.001-08:00

Adapted from David Lindsay-Abaire's award-winning 2007 play, Rabbit Hole's exploration of the grieving process for a New York couple takes director John Cameron Mitchell from the excess of Hedwig & The Angry Inch and Shortbus into more restrained territory. Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman star as Becca and Howie Corbett, who struggle to move past the death of their 3 year old son in a car accident. Opening nine months after the death, Howie's efforts to enter into group counselling clashes with Becca's isolation and efforts to remove the reminders of their son around the home, while attempting to find some reconciliation with Jason, the teenage driver involved in the accident.

Equal parts emotionally heavy melodrama and tender take on grief, Rabbit Hole depends on both the chemistry and the individual performances of Eckhart and Kidman as they work towards the same conclusion - Howie through friendship with group member Gabby (Sandra Oh), and Becca's more extreme mood swings. Complicated by the announcement of a pregnancy for Becca's younger sister and its effect on their own mother's earlier loss of an adult son, the ensemble drama works through its carefully observed confrontations, and tracking of routines. While adding in Becca's fascination with Jason's comic book Rabbit Hole, exploring parallel-worlds, Mitchell wisely squares style around performance and the flat, stylistically muted tones of their Queens home.

Compared to Mitchell's flair for theatricality with Hedwig, and the taboo-busting Shortbus, Rabbit Hole is purposely devoid of embellishment, reproducing the naturalism and dialogue-led emphasis of Lindsay-Abaire's stage version. Lionsgate picked it up for North American distribution, and while only set to receive a small international release, critical buzz for a quiet, adult drama and its lead cast should translate to Oscar nominations. Kidman's particularly mixed success in adapting a brittle style to occasional indie dramas, more neurotically annoying than engaging in Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding, works well here in service to Becca's gradual retreat from her husband and family towards limited catharsis.

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky 2010)

2010-12-30T09:05:00.000-08:00

Taking an unusual turn after The Wrestler, director Darren Aronofsky explores the world of professional ballet in the psychological drama Black Swan. Natalie Portman stars as Nina, ambitious but pushed to breaking point by an over-protective mother and the pressure of the lead role in Swan Lake. Required to play both the 'White' and 'Black' Swans, Nina's insecurities expand beyond repeated scratching to paranoia and increasingly elaborate delusions over sabotage by new dancer Lily (Mila Kunis), as well as a mix of romance and abuse by company director Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel).

Nina's point of view remains fixed throughout, alternating extended over-the-shoulder tracking shots with circular pans through dance sequences and repeated mirror motifs. As Nina's already-fragile psyche begins to crack, Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique extends the staged Swan Lake's formal concerns with duality and mirror imagery into a claustrophobic Manhattan mise-en-scene - scenes rarely take place outside of the cavernous architecture of the dance studio, the mirror filled space of Nina and her mother's apartment and its collection of portraits and ballet figurines, or the distorted spaces of the underground subway. A trip midway through the film for Nina to a club with Lily similarly finds the potential for immersion around Nina's narrow point of view and breaks into subjective POV - transforming characters and jumps forward and backwards in time.

Dreamlike qualities and the psychological detours and ambiguity of Nina's perspective then make The Black Swan a stylistic counterpart to The Wrestler's verite digital realism, over-lit interiors and parallel focus on immersive point-of-view. The switch to ballet then allows for motivation of both the kind of expressionist set-pieces, choreographed tracking and pans through performances, and the more literal plays on Nina's sense of self. Performance changes, as Nina's struggle to perform the Black Swan emerges elsewhere in her life as physical outbursts and sexual dreams, play on horror and thriller conventions for psychological uncertainty, and are backed up by Portman's disarming blend of vulnerability and willingness to push the more extreme physical demands of the role.

Just as The Wrestler zeroed in on the stresses to its lead's body, Black Swan amplifies physical discomfort, from bone-cracking and stretching sound effects to repeated scratches, breaks and bleeding, whether real or imagined. Arofnosky's earlier focus on elaborating disjointed point of view, with its opportunities for subjective styles, claustrophobic tracking, blocking and mise-en-scene in Pi and Requiem for a Dream consequently find an ideal expression in the perfectionist world and gruelling routines of the ballet company. The balance of formal precision and excess, anchored by the performances of Portman, Kunis and Cassel then makes Black Swan the rarely successful mainstream art-film that avoids descending into blunt performer-art comparisons, showcasing Arofnosky's fascination with the gruesome appeal of body horror and obsessional characterisation.

The Wackness (Jonathan Levine 2008)

2010-12-17T05:22:00.000-08:00

An award-winning period drama from writer-director Jonathan Levine, The Wackness focuses on the long summer between high school and college for New Yorker Luke Shapiro (Josh Lucas). A 'period' drama probably isn't the right word, as The Wackness takes place in 1994. However, with a predominantly rap soundtrack and multiple topical references - most scenes don't go by without Beverly Hills 90201, OJ Simpson or Rudolph Giuliani receiving a mention - it's growing evidence of how depictions of the 1990s are switching to the nostalgic, pop culture-laden conventions.

Levine's screenplay follows Luke as he alternates between pot dealing, a collapsing family situation and a relationship with therapist Dr. Jeffrey Squires (Ben Kingsley). Pot-smoking and happy to flaunt medical ethics, Squires' own disintegrating marriage is tied together by Luke's fractious romance with the therapist's daughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), and the gradual decision by both men to move on with their lives. As a late-teen drama, set around the final trials and conflicts of adulthood - relationships, parental responsibility and identity - The Wackness is unremarkable, if well-played by its leading cast. Movements from therapy commentary to overlapping plotlines between Luke and Squires maintain a generational balance, and some throwaway humour, pathos and dream sequences mostly keep the tone light.

The Wackness is more distinctive though for its period detail, with Petra Korner's and Levine's desaturated colour palettes, wide angle lenses and occasional distortion contributing to the washed-out tones of early 1990s Manhattan. It's a suitably grimy, if nostalgic approach - even Luke's drug dealer seems a strangely low-key figure, with any real menace removed. In the same way, Squires repeatedly comments on the gradual disappearance of an old New York by the mid 1990s under Giuliani. As Mayor, he would work to clean up the city, and particularly Times Square, working towards a gentrification of the previously drug and prostitution-ridden area.

Reflecting ironically on the changes taking place to the city, the rites-of-passage thus becomes, in teen film-period nostalgia style, indirectly comments on the passing of an era. However, this also produces some of the more clumsy shorthand of recent historical dramas, where anything topical gets shoehorned in to provide a background and entry point for characters. Still, it's a trend that without looking more extensively, will continue to colour the retro-1990s nostalgia and their teen and young adult characters as the decade becomes as much a part of comedy and dramatic shorthand as its predecessors.

15 Minute Hangover

2010-12-04T06:16:00.000-08:00

It's rare that I don't watch a film to the end, but The Hangover only managed fifteen minutes. Produced by Legendary Studios and distributed by Warner Brothers, the Todd Phillips-directed comedy became a box office and DVD hit in 2009, and was something that had floated around as a possible download or rental for ages. So I was expecting something a bit more, or at least enough appeals in the opening scenes to justify carrying on watching. A male friendship comedy built around efforts to reconstruct a Las Vegas bachelor party that spins out of control, the film won praise as a straightforward succession of gags, gross-out moments and cast chemistry.

The Hangover represents a successful variation on a recent cycle of comedies such as The 40 Year Old Virgin, I Love You, Man and Hot Tub Machine that have seen maladjusted men struggle with responsibilities and hedonism against a backdrop of gross-out gags. In some ways updating teen film conventions for rites of passage transplanted into thirtysomething anxieties, I'm not against the formula, and enjoyed Hot Tub Time Machine earlier in this year for its mostly successful balance of pathos, gags and broader comedy. There's not much separating The Hangover in premise, with a cast mixing social awkwardness, frustration, optimism and doubts over married life and relationships complicated by clumsy negotiation of Vegas extremes and eventual development into more assertive, or more reflective attitudes to adult anxieties.

However, after the opening cuts between the lead cast, road trip to Vegas and initial decision to start drinking on the rooftop of Caesar's Palace, I skipped ahead ten minutes to the first scenes of the post-night response - a wrecked suite and a tiger in the bathroom - but decided to leave it there. This probably sounds like I didn't give The Hangover much of a chance, with the comedy's distinction apparently coming from its succession of crazier plot twists and guest cameos after the set-up. And judging any film on its first fifteen minutes is never a good idea. Maybe it was something to do with realising how the next hour and a half was going to go, or perhaps that most of the sight and dialogue gags fell flat and the product placement cluttered the screen before even arriving in Vegas.

Either way, betting on some sporadic twists and a hyped cameo from Mike Tyson didn't really appeal. Again, trying to criticise The Hangover for being a broadly pitched, self-aware adult comedy is perhaps missing the point, and I can't complain that I was lured in by false advertising. So maybe the fifteen minutes was more the problem of watching a film that's probably best appreciated in the cinema with an audience, or through a group of friends on DVD, not last thing at night. And probably not after just completing the second part of Channel Four's excellent adaptation of Any Human Heart, where jumping from a grim finale and cliffhanger to the broad strokes of a Vegas comedy didn't exactly provide the best double-bill. In this (roundabout) way, I should probably go back and give The Hangover another viewing, or at least a full one.

Black Dynamite (Scott Sanders 2009)

2010-11-20T10:18:00.000-08:00

A parody of blaxploitation movies, Black Dynamite has its moments but overall is perhaps too patchy to reward repeat viewing, although it seems destined to become a cult franchise. Directed by Scott Sanders, a love of the 1970s genre's excess of pimps, soul music and killer one-liners (as well as some exploitation-ready camerawork and gratuity) translates into a compilation of action set-pieces and gags. Michael Jai White stars as Black Dynamite, a kung fu master, ex-CIA agent and Vietnam veteran looking to avenge his brothers' death while cleaning up a crack orphanage and investigating a drug targeting African-American men's, well, pride is one way of putting it. With a list of enemies ranging from mob bosses, Chinese warlords and Richard Nixon himself, extended riffs on Black Dynamite's increasingly convoluted back-story and abilities draw in a romance with an orphanage worker and civil rights activist.

Sanders rarely lets down the pace, and on a technical level the Super 16mm reversed stock, jump cuts, soul soundtracking, crash zooms and recycled archive footage effectively condenses the sleazy charm of the genre while showcasing its excesses and silliness. Perhaps the best sequence here is a rapid mid-film montage where Black Dynamite uses a helicopter and magnet to pinch an escaping mob car before dropping it into a ravine, all the while manically cackling. Unfortunately, while occasionally hitting these ridiculous highs, maintaining consistency is a problem and the film too often falls back on the same sight gags and digressions that exhaust blaxploitation's checklist - over-earnest social messages spliced with nudity, car chases and kung fu, with samples from wider kung fu and Vietnam veteran flashbacks.

While a big step above in quality and delivery from the lazy blockbuster and genre recycling parodies of the past few years (Epic Movie; Vampires Suck), Black Dynamite is perhaps a victim of its source material's already tongue-in-cheek silliness and love of excess to translate to more than an effective love-in for the genre. However, this hasn't stopped it from being developed as a successful cult franchise, with an animated series, comic book adaptations and spoof viral marketing all extending the thin premise and riffs on the genre into alternative forms over the past year. In some ways then it's cheerfully low-budget, fan-pitched take on a cult genre was always going to be more than the sum of the thin premise and film, providing a basis for viral clips, quotes and shorter-form cartoons and riffs than a substantial stand-alone spoof.

The Walking Dead (AMC 2010)

2010-11-08T13:37:00.000-08:00

AMC's The Walking Dead is an important statement for the network's future, a six-part drama pushing budgets and genre exercises beyond the low-concept gloss and edge of Mad Men and Breaking Bad towards the higher-concept Rubicon. The network has made significant progress since just 2007 in developing some of the most widely-praised dramas in US television, working from a similar basis to FX and to an extent Showtime in budgeting for a handful of very high-quality, widely licensable series from limited precedent (in contrast to HBO's wider history of interaction and promotion of crossover value across its original productions and exclusive service).

As a zombie drama taking on a genre close to saturation point, and working from a pre-sold comic franchise, Dead seems to be AMC's take on the successful pulp franchises developed by Showtime (Dexter) and HBO (True Blood). Based on Robert Kirkman's bleak black-and-white survival tale, which I read part of a few years ago, it follows the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse through a set of disparate characters and families via a base in Georgia. Following an occasional trope for the genre, the unexplained attacks are framed through a coma and awakening of lead, policeman Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) from a gunshot-induced coma.

Like 28 Days Later, he finds himself in a radically changed world, where the dead are piled outside the walls of the hospital, and a severed torso crawl at him from an outside lawn. Meeting a man and boy struggling to survive and avoid confronting their post-transformation wife and mother, Rick resolves to find his own wife and young son in Atlanta. After accidentally missing their broadcast as part of a refugee camp apparently led by his former police partner, he horse-rides into a city overrun by zombies who force him to hide in a broken-down tank.

With a flash-forward teaser setting up in one superb tracking shot of the lines of dead, and Rick encountering and shooting a young zombie girl, The Walking Dead's opening hour is grim stuff, even lacking some of the darker humour of some of its feature versions. Shot in 16mm for de-saturated grain, with technical scope widened for location shooting, tracking shots and inventive POV (sight-lines), and a spectacular zombie assault in Atlanta shot from low-angle to helicopter shot, AMC haven't held back in lavishing the pilot with high-end production values. Director Frank Darabont, who also developed the project for the network, avoids comic-book routes for straight adaptation, widening out from Kirkman's claustrophobic tone towards the emptiness and uncanny post-apocalypse world that characterised the 28 Days Later.

It's difficult to make something new of the zombie genre, with its survival story occasionally varied through comedy, inventive scenarios or transplanting to contemporary tensions and significance. Some initial comparisons have been made between Darabont's connections to Stephen King and The Stand for the washed-out tone, grimly surviving characters and small-town American menace, and look to be one of the strongest influences on the drama so far. As a limited series, rather than a twelve-thirteen episode cable drama, Dead can probably afford to distinguish itself from Mad Men and Breaking Bad's slower-paced format, delivering more plot and opportunities for action.

While both series regularly dealt in slow-burning personal drama and harder content, Dead puts its zombie and cult credentials firmly on display, with inventive zombie deaths, effects and the climactic city attack particularly standing out. Basic cable can take harder content when connected to quality audiences, even if AMC have been occasionally wary with language on Mad Men. The series, while perhaps more limited in tone and approach than True Blood, looks set to make fan reception and interactivity key to its longevity in first-run, merchandising and later DVD sales - simultaneous global premieres, fan-designed episode credits and the pre-sold buzz of the comic cover the bases needed to deliver new audiences to AMC and international sales.

Adaptations across comic books and online platforms should help to make Dead a cult favourite, if the budgets can hold out and the promise of the pilot can be developed over the next six weeks. Darabont, and British actor Lincoln certainly deliver, but with little to currently separate the zombie attacks, and general progression towards desperation and survival, recycling the series premise for a second or third year will be the real challenge for bringing the show up to the exceptional standards set by AMC in breaking-out prestige programming from FX, Showtime and HBO influences into its own set of quality series.

Panic Room (David Fincher 2002)

2010-11-08T13:14:00.000-08:00

Filling in the last gap in my return to David Fincher's filmography, 2002's Panic Room transitioned the director between the punk energy of Fight Club and the forensic detail of Zodiac. The film explores the struggle by Jodie Foster's Meg Altman to protect herself and daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart) from a home invasion as the palatial Manhattan brownstone they move into becomes a target for the dispossessed grandson of its wealthy previous owner. David Koepp's screenplay, for which Columbia Pictures paid a substantial fee for development, wrings the possibilities from its thriller structure, with Fincher's de-saturated locations and occasional flourishes into in-camera effects and elaborate digital tracking shots exploiting the closed location.

Almost completely taking place within the multiple stories of the town-house, and the state-of-the-art panic room that Meg and Sarah use to hide from their would-be attackers, including uncertain security expert Burnham (Forest Whitaker), a half hour or so set-up lays out space, contingencies and personal tics that animate the remaining hour. From introducing the logistics of the building, including lifts and the mechanics of the panic room to Meg's claustrophobia and Sarah's diabetes, the pay-off comes through an engagingly paced game of cat-and-mouse between the robbers and the two women.

Fincher had explored similar territory in 1997 thriller The Game's delight in plunging its hapless hero into a city-wide chase, while Seven revelled in finding variations on its serial killer structure. A case could even be made for continuing the claustrophobic set design and woman-in-peril structure of Fincher's troubled Alien 3. Perhaps Fincher's greatest strength has been picking great scripts as a backbone to revelling in the intimate character dynamics and impressionistic uses of space afforded by thriller and horror genre work. Collaborating with both Seven cinematographer Darius Khondji and Conrad Hall, low-key interiors, bursts of sudden light and the pursuit structure exploit the dynamics of the town-house's almost fetishistic detail and recreation. With occasional dynamic digital tracking shots translating the space into a 3D model alongside a menacing score by Howard Shore, unraveling the puzzle of escaping the house and second-guessing options for Meg and Sarah ticks over as a formal game.

However, Panic Room would be a somewhat dry exercise in style if it wasn't for Foster, and a young Kristen Stewart's performances, with Foster's ability to carry the physicality and the intensity of a thriller finding a similar vulnerability to Silence of the Lambs. A three-man robbery team also benefits from Whitaker's reliable rounding out of a potentially stock role. Panic Room ultimately succeeds then in bringing together Fincher's formal cleverness and attention to detail in working through tightly written screenplays, with the long-in-development Zodiac returning to similar genre puzzles and fascination with the architecture of 1970s San Francisco.

An argument could be made that saddled with a bloated and unworkable script in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fincher's traditional delivery of precise 90 minute thrillers and dramas collapsed under the three hour prestige picture. The return to form with The Social Network, again benefiting from Aaron Sorkin's screenplay and a structure allowing for claustrophobic personal drama and a wry take on obsessional characters and an unfolding puzzle at the centre of its narrative - how does Mark Zuckerberg attempt to solve his romantic crisis while creating the Facebook - bringing Fincher back alongside contemporaries such as Christopher Nolan in making the narrative mechanics of his pictures as satisfying as their broader strokes.

Batman Returns (Revisited)

2010-10-31T12:27:00.000-07:00

Going back to Batman Returns every now and then is a strange experience. I was seven when Tim Burton's film was originally released, and my experience of it was more focused around the merchandise than the actual picture itself. As such, by the time I came to watch it on video, having been too young to see what was either a 12a or 15-rated release in 1992, I already knew the plot, most of the dialogue and key set-pieces from novelizations, comic adaptations, trading cards and sticker albums. It was a bit strange watching the film to realize how much of the dialogue I still remembered almost word-for-word. At the time though I was probably less aware of how strange Burton's film is, and how it remains one of the most unusual, willfuly perverse examples of 1990s blockbuster filmmaking.

After the global success of Batman in 1989, launching a franchise for Time Warner and DC Comics that defined the stakes for studio tent-pole releases for the next decade, Burton's return to the series after Edward Scissorhands represented a fuller exploration of his thematic interests, riding less on the superheroics and more on the bizarre side of Batman's world and fixations. Batman Returns is a dark picture, but not in the psychologically absorbing, quasi-realism style of Christopher Nolan's latest efforts. Swamping the viewer in a winter-time Gotham City's overwhelming production and art design, with tracking shots through elaborate miniature sets and Gothic architecture, the plot-line veers from scene to scene between grim fable, farce and action set-pieces.

The opening half an hour of the film is perhaps its strongest in the former, before giving way to disjointed confrontations and some awkward dialogue. An introduction sets up the birth of the deformed Oscar Cobblepot and his wealthy parents' decision to flush him into the sewer, where he is raised by penguins and leads a criminal gang of circusperformers and freaks. So far, so summer popcorn movie. Meanwhile, corrupt industrialist Max Shreck's plan to siphon Gotham City's power supply for himself brings him into launching the Penguin as Gotham's new mayor. Joining them are Selina Kyle's Catwoman, transformed from Shreck's meek secretary after being pushed through a window into a latex-bound criminal. In this way, Bruce Wayne/Batman is largely a peripheral figure, played with deadpan humour by Michael Keaton rather than the obsessiveness of Christian Bale's vigilante.

Early scenes then showcase inventive confrontations between Batman and the Penguin's gang, while Catwoman's origin and the exposure of the Penguin's power represent distinctively choreographed and shot exercises in baroque production design. From the Penguin's mayoral race to a romance between Batman and Catwoman that trades double-entendres, most of this balance is substituted for an uneasy tone and an under-whelming final confrontation. Much of the motivation driving Catwoman, aside from her revenge plot against Schreck, is under-developed and the Penguin, while a grotesque achievement burying poor Danny DeVito in make-up, lacks the charisma of Jack Nicholson's Joker from the 1989 original.

There's a lot of fun to be had with Burton's world, and in terms of some of the visual kinks - a physically improbable Bat-Cave of looming ledges and an entry tube opened from a fish-tank, and the Penguin's underground lair - but as a complete picture seems to have one script re-write too far (or not enough). Efforts to draw on the perversity of Batman and Catwoman's double lives and sexual pleasure of fighting in costume fall just short of clumsily winking to an adult audience, and it's surprising even now how much Warner Brothers let Burton and screenwriter Daniel Waters (Heathers) get away with. Merchandising a film that features a grotesque man-penguin unsurprisingly led to some issues, with McDonald's pulling their Happy Meal support for the initial release.

Unfortunately, there's not much wit and enough moments that I'd forgotten that are pretty cringe-worthy - a verbal sparring match between the Penguin and Catwoman, and some mugging/double takes from Keaton - that maintains tensions between Burton's Gothic vision and uncertainty over how to deliver a sequel to one of the largest box office successes in history. As a result, there's almost two or three films within Batman Returns - a well-crafted if under-developed Gothic nod to Burton's German Expressionist and B-movie influences, a campy take on some of the sillier excessesof the 1960s series - the Penguin running for Mayor, Bruce Wayne as self-aware and bemused rather than particularly conflicted, and a string of set-pieces generating merchandise opportunities around a skeletal, if somewhat unrewarding action climax.

Of course, Batman Returns looks relatively subtle compared to the hyperactive directions that Joel Schumacher would take the franchise with Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, but on its merits still stands as one of the strangest, if flawed superhero films and major blockbuster releases of the past twenty years. It's always worth going back for the scenes that are carried along by Christopher Walken as Shreck or Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in particular, and the nostalgia that comes along with its connection to a time in 1992 when buying all things Batman Returns, from life-size Penguin posters, to sticker albums and action figures, made not actually being able to see the film in the cinema relatively insignificant for my 7-year-old self. Well, probably anyway.

Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby 1976)

2010-10-31T11:43:00.001-07:00

Released in 1976, Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory represents an understated, but lovingly crafted take on folk singer Woody Guthrie. A figure whose rose through the poverty of the American Dustbowl into radio stardom, Guthrie's left-wing politics and songs such as 'This Land is Your Land' made him one of the most influential American folk singers of the 20th century. Adapting part of Guthrie's autobiography, Bound arrived at the tail-end of the 'Hollywood Renaissance,' a period of American filmmaking where art-film and auteur promotion briefly (if debatably) varied studio filmmaking from roughly 1967 to the end of the 1970s. Director Hal Ashby was a key figure in the period, producing among others Shampoo, Coming Home and Being There and Harold and Maude, one of my personal favourites.

Moving between genres but retaining off-kilter characters, dark comedy and an ability to work with and express sly political satire, Ashby perhaps lacked the landmark impact of Scorsese, Coppola and Altman as a stylist, but remains one of the most interesting directors of the period for his political commitment to gentle but lasting satires and reflections of the late 1960s and 1970s. Glory was a step back in some respects from a contemporary approach, realizing a two hour vision of 1930s America that shared the period sweep and elegant cinematography of Badlands or Bogdanovich, while taking on a life-story that resonated with the mix of idealism and pessimism of liberal and radical 1960s politics.

Tracking Guthrie from a Texas sign painter who, caught in the national depression, relocates from his family to California to find work. After a trip hitch-hiking, riding rail cars and avoiding union-busting men, Guthrie's songwriting talent is identified at a migrant camp, and he becomes a radio star. Struggling with the comfort that his success brings his family, and the pressures of sponsors and the radio station to censor his political songwriting, investment in unionization and attacks on privilege eventually lead him towards a rejection of more commercial opportunities.

As Guthrie, David Carradine emphasises the singer's laidback friendliness and growing political awareness, and like many male leads of the 1970s, brings out the selfishness that drives him away from his family and risk in sacrificing a career for morals. Robert Getchell's script does well here to focus on Guthrie's life from the 1930s, avoiding the family tragedies that defined his early years, and later success, choosing instead to structure around escape from Texas, the journey to California and negotiations with fame. Like many films of the period, simple allegorizing of characterisation is possible - Guthrie is an idealist who deals with both his own talent and the lure of major radio airplay - not a far step from the auteurs whose creative license to lure audiences and prestige for Hollywood revelled in both formal and political innovation.

Bound is notable then for its more explicit promotion of Guthrie's message, even if, like Bonnie & Clyde and other 1930s-rooted pictures of the era, it's contemporary impact is somewhat displaced by the extreme poverty and business ties of the Depression. Without extensive psychological motivation, and a measured pace whose romantic and familial plot-lines are largely subordinate to Guthrie's political awareness, and vignettes focusing on broader and family crisis. Later influence, and Guthrie's decline as Huntington's Disease left him bed-ridden for much of his final years, are sketched out in a coda, making Bound as much about a man finding his purpose as achieving personal resolution.

Perhaps Bound's strongest feature though is Haskell Wexler's Oscar-winning cinematography, employing low and natural light (including twilight), smoke filters for interiors, and occasional Steadicam and crane shots, as well as long shots of train journeys and matte paintings. The overall effect is a combination of warmth, setting an opening half hour of the film within the saturated light of Texas and dusty interiors, and the later panoramic shooting of California. Given Ashby and Getchell's digressions into extended songs and performance, as well as lyrical country scenes, Bound stands with Terence Malick's Badlands and the later Days of Heaven (of which Wexler contributed) and Heaven's Gate as as some of the most beautifully low-lit, painterly compositions of the Hollywood Renaissance and 1970s cinema.

Ultimately though Bound lacks the dream-like moral fables and epic scope that characterised the latter's trawl of criminality and youth in the Great Depression, but remains in love with the aesthetic nostalgia and political potential of the 1930s. Bound rarely makes the same appearances in histories of the Hollywood Renaissance, with its low-key approach on the margins of the more spectacular efforts of contemporaries, and in some respects it's an exercise in pacing and compression of Guthrie's life that concentrates less on the man, and more on the message in places. Teasing out more of his family abandonment, and the later decline would perhaps have taken it to close to traditional biopic, rather than more broader themes, but like Guthrie himself, the scope of his life and his impact does enough to fuel nostalgia and relevancy to make Bound a classic example of a director and period.

The Social Network (David Fincher 2010)

2010-10-18T10:35:00.000-07:00

Turning what seemed like a problematic idea ('the Facebook movie') into one of the year's most tightly scripted and relevant dramas, David Fincher's The Social Network has already received near-universal critical acclaim. In adapting Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires, Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have acknowledged bending the facts somewhat for the story of Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and now multi-billionaire co-owner of Facebook, but in some ways the exact facts are irrelevant. The motivations supplied for the founding of the site, and its subsequent global success, are laid out as a tragic, relentless refusal both to accept an initial romantic rejection by Zuckerberg and its implicit commentary on online communication's distortion of human interaction.

Beginning in a Boston bar in late 2003, brilliant programmer and Harvard undergrad Zuckerberg is dumped by girlfriend Erica after belittling her and showing off his arrogance, all without awareness, in a rapid-fire dialogue scene that sets the pacing for the remainder of the film. Driven to drunkenly create a site comparing Harvard female co-eds as 'Facemash,' the notoriety leads Mark to a job offer from an elite college club and privileged twin brothers the Winklevosses to create a Harvard site. Meanwhile, he is inspired to collaborate with friend Eduardo Saverin on an expanded version of the college's exclusive 'Facebooks'.

Sorkin and Fincher structure Mark's rejection of the Winklevosses' plan and development of Facebook around future legal suits claiming intellectual property infringement, and the marginalization of Eduardo from the success of 'the Facebook.' With rapid success in expanding through colleges, Eduardo's business plans are interrupted by Sean Parker, the charismatic founder of Napster and his persuasion of Mark to move to California and turn Facebook into a billion-dollar business. Cut out of the deal-making, Eduardo's pleas as Mark's only friend from the founding leads to clashes and a financial settlement for both cases that while not entirely clarifying blame, ultimately comes down to loose change for the company.

Mark Zuckerberg has attempted to distance himself from his on-screen persona, and with Jesse Eisenberg providing an award-worthy performance, it's easy to understand why. Obsessively driven and unable to engage with others' feelings, Zuckeberg's almost robotic pursuit of the site leaves him as the world's youngest billionaire, but in essentially the same position as his 2003 desperation to win back Erica. To this end Andrew Garfield's equally impressive performance as Eduardo finds an emotional anchor to the rapid success story, with Justin Timberlake embodying the energy and the self-destructiveness of dot.com venture capitalism. With Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenwerth restricting major stylistic flourishes in favour of low-key Harvard institutions and the corporate architecture of Silicon Valley, Sorkin's dialogue carries the weight of making a film about modern communication that considers the emotional pettiness, isolation and adaptation of class distinctions and exclusivity as a base for situating Facebook's global success in a darkly personal context.

Lip Service (BBC Three 2010)

2010-10-14T06:15:00.000-07:00

BBC Three's new lesbian drama Lip Service is both a sign of the digital channel's commitment to broadening its range of audience and a continuation of raising long-form quality. Along with the success of Being Human, and the low-budget, observational comedy of Ideal or Him and Her, BBC Three's mandate for appealing to 18-34 demographics, and the leeway it has in terms of branding through more explicit content and niche sensibilities has at least given it the potential to challenge Channel Four and E4 in terms of brand recognition. Lip Service, produced by Kudos (Life on Mars, Spooks) and written and produced by Harriet Braun, goes some way towards addressing the lack of quality LBGT-themed drama on British terrestrial television, and has affinities with Channel Four's breakthrough success with Queer as Folk.

Compared to the latter's diminished edge eleven years later, Lip Service is perhaps more in the line of The L Word or Sex and the City's female-focused urban serials, but perhaps shouldn't be compared to the soapiness or the broader, tongue-in-cheek style of the latter. Set in contemporary Glasgow, Service follows a group of lesbian women - abrasive photographer Frankie, architect Cat and struggling actress Tess. Built initially around Frankie and Cat's failed relationship and the former's return from New York for her aunt's funeral, Tess's somewhat lighter pursuit of romance is offset by unrequited love from her male best friend and a fling with a supposedly straight television presenter.

The pilot sets up some long-term romantic triangles, back-stories and opportunities for comic relief, but so far seems to lack balance. On the one hand, softcore scenes, lifted straight from the pre-credits sequence showcase its post-watershed distinction (there's even a later sex scene in a morgue), but seems more attuned to a kind of This Life-ish trawl through the disappointments and hedonism of late twenty and thirtysomething professionals. Frankie seems to be the clearest concession to the former concept, as a bisexual and unpredictable figure, at least compared to the insecurity of Cat and Tess.

Ultimately it'd be unfair to categorize Lip Service as a lesbian drama in this way, as its appeals should be broader both generationally and demographically. Where Queer as Folk was very much a taboo-breaking show for British television, Lip Service exists in a broadcast-climate where Torchwood and other dramas and comedies have made made representational anxieties over sexuality or gender secondary to romantic and professional goals. And that's possibly where Lip Service might fall short as either an adult drama or a positive example of representation, absorbing itself in an upscale Glasgow and fashion-shoot-pretty cast. Once the hype has died down over the show (admittedly it hasn't received a major saturated campaign), it'll be interesting to see how the format settles down and finds an audience for BBC Three.

Be Kind Rewind (Michel Gondry 2008)

2010-10-12T15:34:00.000-07:00

Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind was a picture that I'd managed to miss in its theatrical release in 2008, and subsequent availability on DVD. It took reminding from another blog post to add it to my LoveFilm list, and while lacking the broad appeal of the director's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it's a slight but enjoyable film. Set around a New Jersey video store run by out-of-the-times Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), employee Mike (Mos Def)'s charge to look after the store is sabotaged by eccentric friend Jerry (Jack Black). Accidentally erasing the store's tapes after becoming magnetised, they find themselves recreating the missing films for customers. Sparking unexpected demand, the 'Sweded' versions of popular titles, from Ghostbusters to When We Were Kings, becomes central to saving the store from gentrification.

Loosely structured around footage from a biopic of Fats Waller that becomes the centre-piece of the 'Sweded' project, Gondry packs the off-the-wall premise with his usual DIY flair. The 'Sweded' films are a pleasure, from the ultra-low budget Ghostbusters to a superb montage as their ambitions increase. Between the visual invention of the in-camera practicals that Gondry previously exploited in music videos and Sunshine, a love letter to film and the rallying inspiration of amateur filmmaking animates nostalgia and myth. With Fats Waller's supposed birth in the video store offering an initially-flawed plan to save the building and becoming the basis for a community-wide project into his biopic - complete with fans set up in front of the camera to simulate silent footage.

Jason Sperb's blog post on the film considers its DIY aesthetic as an exercise in cinephilia, the loss and restoration of community, collective memory and attempts to translate the ephemerality of digital film into a tangible form. Its an interesting take from an excellent scholarly blog, and Sperb highlights the ritualistic aspect of experiencing film in multiple locations, its adaptability and the ambivalence of cinema as a collective event. Viewed against the fragmentation of convergence media and the knitting together of shared media experience, Be Kind Rewind is both technical pleasure and a commentary on audiences, producers and the medium's contemporary status.

With the success of the 'Sweded' films coming under threat by copyright lawyers (with one played by Sigourney Weaver in a nice nod to Ghostbusters), it's also a reminder of uncertainties between the global flow of media content, its appropriation and immersion, and the tangible connection of copyright and traditional forms of media control to filter and manage brands. Academic interest aside, Gondry's style is never less than engaging, and give-or-take your patience with Jack Black's mugging, Be Kind is recommended viewing if only for the delight of the 'Sweded' films, showcasing Gondry's ability to circumvent CGI special effects for arresting physical presence.

The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko 2010)

2010-10-09T11:24:00.000-07:00

A surprise screening while attending a reception for the opening of the Exeter Picturehouse (plush sofas and stadium seating now included), Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right wavers somewhere between warm-hearted character study and indie edge. Focusing on lesbian couple Jules and Nic, and their children Laser and Joni, the family is challenged by Joni's decision to contact their joint sperm donor Paul. With Jules and Nic's relationship frayed by Jules' attraction to the free-spirited Paul, anxieties over Joni's departure for college lead to a break and reconciliation for the alternative family. Offering a strong ensemble cast led by Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, much of Kids sails by on chemistry and under-stated, gently satiric dysfunctional comedy.

Varied by a lesbian plotline, and its potential for some early sight gags and misunderstandings, Kids is a stable variation on familiar middle-class, generational divides of American indie dramas. Unusual family set-ups, self-mockery of pretension and professional strains, along with the emotional fall-out of a younger generation hitting adulthood makes for awkward dinner-table comedy and a build-up to catharsis and reaffirmation of an alternative family unit. In this respect Igor Jadue-Lillo's cinematography forms around showcasing Californian landscapes, occasional handheld grain, resting around shot-reverse-shot dialogue and occasional subjective POV.

It's to Cholodenko and co-screenwriter Stuart Blumberg's credit that Kids is not overly concerned with the consequences of its lesbian marriage and surrogate family, opening out some of the confusion created by Ruffalo's Paul while showcasing that neither more loving or unhealthy, it's a family as dysfunctional as any other. There's less of the commentary and conflation of professionalism and sexual desire of Cholodenko's 1998 break-through feature High Art, and the lifestyle crisis of 2002's Lauren Canyon - Kids takes place in a world where much of the hard work and family-building has already taken place, and what's left is the acceptance of change. To this end Kids might be accused of being fairly middle-of-the-road in its ambitions, but within its conventional structure and cast finds enough character moments to produce winning, if somewhat undemanding drama.

Belated Blog Entry

2010-10-06T04:00:00.000-07:00

Updating a blog is mostly about routine. Get into the habit of typing up a review the day after a film, or finding articles to write about can mean 10-15 posts a month. Alternatively, miss a few and suddenly it's down to 1 or 2 a month. With trying to finish my thesis, the blog has been a bit neglected, so hopefully today will be a way back into it and more regular reviews. In terms of what I've seen recently, it's been a mix of a few cinema trips, catching up on Mad Men, True Blood and watching some great British series in The Inbetweeners and This is England '86.

After seeing Scott Pilgrim, my next cinema trip was to see...Scott Pilgrim again, as someone else wanted to see it. I also watched The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second adaptation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. Without the self-contained murder mystery of the original film, Fire was challenged to turn a book whose extensive subplots and first-person narration is largely shelved in favour of action plotting. Turning the books into a miniseries in the style of Wallander would probably have been a more suitable idea, given the directions Larsson went in terms of fleshing out conspiracies. At the same time, and without discounting Noomi Raplace's excellent performance as Lisbeth Salander, one of the strengths of the book was the introspection given to the character's borderline-autistic status. Translated to the screen, there's not a lot of room for subtlety.

This week I had the pleasure of seeing the Back to the Future digital re-issue in the cinema. As a film that I've probably seen twenty or so times, revisiting it in projection was a novelty with a few minor differences. Its brilliantly structured narrative, making the time travel/near-incest romance the focus for countless memorable scenes, is still one of the most carefully constructed set-ups and resolutions of classical narrative. On the big screen, some of the comedy mugging of the lead cast is a bit more pronounced, while the digital re-master doesn't do some of the ageing make-up many favours. It's still worth catching though in its run, if only because...well, it's Back to the Future.

Other than that, Mad Men has been moving towards its finale with the assurance and risks in digressing further and further into Don Draper's struggle to keep his identity intact. With the season focusing on Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Campbell's increasing problems, Don's breakdowns have come against Peggy Olsen's firmer sense of place as 1960s New York moves into 1965. In the last week I've also been trying to catch up with the second half of True Blood's third season, which has been an improvement over last year. Wisely jettisoning a lot of the Bon Temps sub-plots to exploit vampire mythology and clashes, the series still has its awkward moments but has matured significantly from its second year dip to remain HBO's most successful series since The Sopranos.

On that note, the pilot for Boardwalk Empire showed promise, with its study of Prohibition-era Atlantic City led by Steve Buscemi's lead performance as a corrupt official combining the period detail of the HBO historical drama (Carnivale, Deadwood, Rome) with less of the abstractions and density of the former and the soap-opera excess of the latter. Former Sopranos writer and show-runner Terence Winter has helped produce a meticulously realised world, with gangster and working class sub-plots so far not over-burdening itself with a broad ensemble cast. The pilot was also directed by producer Martin Scorsese, bringing his tracking shots, freeze frames, and period-detail iris cuts, overhead crane shots to reinforce distinction. Need to catch up on the more recent episodes, but a second season has already been commissioned by the network.

Closer to home, I finally got around to watching The Inbetweeners, E4's explicit teen series. Like most people, one episode got me viewing the first two seasons on 40D, and just in terms of rapid-fire gags, and awkward gross-out comedy, it's rarely short of excellent. In the last month I also enjoyed Shane Meadow's four-part This is England '86, aired on Channel Four. Picking up on his feature This is England's study of the 1980s Midlands and skinhead culture, 86 picks up on the main cast several years later to explore the lack of direction and personal tragedy of its working-class characters. Set loosely against the 1986 World Cup, and moving between broad comedy to almost unwatchable violence, it's a strong collaboration between Channel Four and Meadows that retains the broadcaster's arguable lead in adult drama over the BBC and ITV.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright 2010)

2010-09-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

Approximating the energy and wit of Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novels, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World sees director Edgar Wright tune his visual flair to an unconventional love-story. I'd read the graphic novel series earlier in the summer, and was hooked by the expressive anime style, video game riffs and deadpan humour, but most of all by the development of a solid romance at the centre of O'Malley's narrative. The film adaptation does well to cut down the six-book series, dispensing with some back-story and sub-plots, and while flawed in some respects should have found a wider audience (chances are it will do on DVD). Michael Cera stars as Pilgrim, a Toronto slacker and bassist for indie band Sex-bob-omb. After a chance meeting, he leaves 17-year old schoolgirl Knives Chau to pursue the mysterious American Ramona. Soon learning that he'll have to defeat her seven 'evil ex-boyfriends,' episodic confrontations lead towards a confrontation with the 'G-Man,' Gideon Graves, while tying into Sex Bob-omb's quest for a record contract.

Wright and cinematographer Bill Pope, shooting on location in Toronto, sustain a video game style, from an 8-bit Universal logo to exploding villains depositing reward coins and superbly crafted action sequences blending kung-fu with cartoon violence. Unlike recent comic adaptation Kick-Ass though, the action sequences remain compatible with the breezy tone, non-sequiters and affable performances of its lead cast. While some reviews have noted a lack of empathy (or even sympathy) with Scott and Ramona's romance, it's far from an exercise in stylish hip. Helping here is a soundtrack combining T-Rex (Teenage Dream) with Beck and Blood Red Shoes, providing perhaps the best extension of O'Malley's skewed world and the indie-pop scene it slyly references. In any case, it was enough for a repeat viewing, something that I don't remember doing for a film since The Dark Knight back in 2008.

Once Upon a Time in New York...

2010-08-15T06:10:00.000-07:00

Over the last month or so I've been able to catch up with various New York-punk and music-scene documentaries and films, whether on the BBC iPlayer (Once Upon a Time in New York: The Birth of Hip Hop, Disco & Punk) or from LoveFilm with Susan Seidelman's Smithereens and Desperately Seeking Susan. Ok, perhaps the last one doesn't quite qualify as punk, but it's a useful transition between some of the late 1970s/early 1980s grime and low-budget work that emerged out of the Lower East Side and the Bronx, and the brief mainstreaming of many of these directors. There's something about the New York of the 1970s and early 1980s that's always been fascinating for me, whether it's the explosion of the alternative music scene, the art-film and documentary movements, or just the general mix of decay and creativity that seemed to emerge from the period.

Jim Groom's blog reprints an old cultural studies paper on the gentrification of the 'old' New York, or at least the one that emerged out of the crisis and neglect of the 1970s and the wave of documentaries and films that negotiated these tensions. From Times Square (1980) to The Warriors, Groom links the sub-cycle of horror pictures (C.H.U.D.) and vigilante thrillers (see Fort Apache et al) to a rhetoric of the new frontier and the 'civilising' process of the city. Or, as Groom notes in quoting Marge Simpson after Homer's flashback to a previous visit to the city, 'oh, Homer, of course you'll have a bad impression of New York if you only focus on the pimps and the C.H.U.D.S.' It was a fascinating (if not always high-quality) era for filmmaking and the general art movement of the city, and documentaries like Once Upon a Time in New York do well to survey some of the music scene's growth and distinctions from the latter in the 1970s.

Ben Whalley's production, narrated by Richard O'Brien, tracks the development of disco, punk and hip-hop, moving between the Lower East Side, the Bronx and Midtown, splicing interviews with pioneers against archive footage. Much of the basic story of the period is familiar, but it's still an engagingly well-made hour that has been tied by BBC Four into a series of archive re-issues for 'New York on the BBC'. While Once Upon a Time principally focuses on the music scene, other documentaries have surveyed the late-night cinema trends (Midnight Movies dir. Stuart Samuels 2005), although there still lacks a significant project on the development of the independent film scene in the city (at least to my knowledge). Still, the films themselves do an excellent job of documenting the city and its overlaps with the music scene.

A few weeks ago I watched Susan Seidelman's Smithereens, a low-budget 1982 picture that became her calling card for the box office success Desperately Seeking Susan. Smithereens follows Wren, an aspiring, if talentless New Jersey performer, as she orbits the New York punk scene, tagging onto Richard Hell's semi-interested singer Eric, while rejecting the well-meaning Montana native Paul. Closing down what little opportunities she finds, Wren eventually isolates herself from both and finds herself abandoned on the streets. While it might sound dark, Smithereens finds the pathos in its situation, location shooting Wren across the city, and acting as a document as much of the crumbling brown-stones and alleyways of Manhattan. Gradually put together by Seidelman after graduating from NYU, it had a notable impact at Cannes and remains a slight, yet specific historical sketch of the city.

Desperately Seeking Susan by comparison extends the immigrant theme and its focus on urban life and female play-acting, but softens the harder punk style of Smithereens for a parallel-story plot-line between Rosanna Arquette's bored housewife Roberta and the free-spirited Susan (Madonna). Mistaken identities, amnesia, as well as roving gangsters take on heist movie and some screwball elements, while playing off Madonna's rising star image. Kristin Thompson has examined Susan in some length in her 1999 book Storytelling in the New Hollywood as an example of minor variations on classical structures. Identifying shared traits, juxtapositions and continuity through Manhattan, Thompson views the parallel-protagonist structure as a method for merging shared traits, while playing on the delays and resolution of parallel plot-lines.

Although this post has become a bit of a ramble, trends towards gentrification, and the documenting and overlaps between the punk scene and independent film, also developed by Jim Jarmusch, and John Sayles' mix of Harlem blues and social history (Brother From Another Planet)helped frame ties between the city's geographical focus of production and creative talent. The role of New York in HBO's development, particularly through documentary and the rise of the 1990s independent scene in contributing towards series success, has been an unfortunately small but still-present part of my thesis, and something that I'd like to return to in the future. Future work on the relationship between the city's hip-hop community and independent film, the transition between emerging upscale-crossover forms drawing on the 'indie' spirit of the city, from Miramax to in some respects HBO itself, might also be useful.

Go Fish (Rose Troche 1994)

2010-08-14T06:41:00.000-07:00

One of the many mid-1990s American indie pictures that I've been meaning to get around to, preparation for a future encyclopaedia entry led me to Go Fish, Rose Troche's 1994 break-out lesbian comedy. Micro-budgeted and translated from a rough cut to a Sundance sale by Christine Vachon, Tom Kalin and John Pierson, Go Fish navigates accessible 'queering' comedy with circular debates on lesbian identity. Set around a cautious romance between Max and Ely in contemporary Chicago, their meetings and eventual coming together are framed by explorations of a small lesbian community that provides recurring commentary and associational scene transitions. With the majority of the romantic plotline sequences delivered in episodic, hand-held and interior tracking black and white, enhanced by lens distortion, close-up cutaways and cross-cutting, the everyday overshadows and complements the erotic. Transitional scenes then highlight influences from experimental video and avant-garde style, with Super 8mm footage, close-up motifs (spinning tops, hands), joined by direct-camera address.

More extended montages similarly cut between questions of self-definition, assembling its cast in wedding dresses, while extended fantasy scene sees a member of the community who sleeps with a man confronted by an angry court of women. That's not to say though that Go Fish takes on its themes with earnestness or pretension - while the transitions foreground questions of lesbian history, visibility and the multiple variations on identity and sexuality, Troche and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner inject comedy and self-deprecation into their broader discussions. After a movie date, Ely and Max debate the challenges for queer film-makes to 'represent the community,' and for the most part debates circle and mock the categories of butch/femme. Commentary scenes by a Greek Chorus of supporting characters then provide knowing asides to Max and Ely's relationship, while debating the merits of naming body parts.

Go Fish's mix of subcultural specificity, immersing itself in a close-knit lesbian community as both a refuge from confrontations (although genuine threat or homophobia is brief), while playing with its own diversity, then anchors Max and Ely's romantic plot-line. Celebrating incongruities, accidents and missed opportunities, it's a girl-girl series of 'meet cutes' that celebrates romantic ideals as much as debating its forms, personal preferences and consequences. In this respect Go Fish remains one of the most accessible examples of the 1990s 'New Queer Cinema' trend in American independent cinema - loosely termed for the success of Gus Van Sant, Tom Kalin, Todd Haynes, Cheryl Dunne and others, including the more punkish and explicit video sensibility of Gregg Araki, for experimenting with genre, form and style while enabling its gay characters and representations to emerge as complex, affirmative and critical.

The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone 2010)

2010-08-14T06:24:00.000-07:00

It's difficult not to come out of The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone's hyper-macho summer outing, without wanting a shot of romantic comedy. Or anything really that's not a wall-to-wall barrage of former and present action stars, explosions and hyper-kinetic editing. Billed as a compilation of stars, from Stallone to Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham, Stone Cold Steve Austin and brief cameos from Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, much of the cultish fun only serves to question how much 1980s pictures The Expendables riffs on can actually be revisited with much nostalgia or irony. A team of mercenaries hired to depose an ex-CIA agent's coup of a Latin American island, the assault on the assembled army mixes with romantic sub-plots for Statham and Stallone, and a betrayal crisis with Lundgren - kudos though to for a somewhat silly speech by Rourke on failing to prevent a suicide.

'Assault' is perhaps best word though for describing the picture, from switches between digital hand-held to sweeping helicopter shots, battle cross-cutting and a numbing series of explosions, and flying limbs. What's perhaps most difficult to take about The Expendables is the excess that doesn't quite seem to fall into self-parody, instead putting its star bodies and machismo into a boy's game of video-game competition. In some ways that's all The Expendables was probably going to be, a high-concept exercise in straightforward plotting and one-liners. Still, there's not much craft or invention in staging or cutting, and too often it varies unnecessarily into more exploitative territory with water-boarding and a brutal beating by Statham to avenge his ex-girlfriend's abusive boyfriend. I'm never against the back-end of the summer blockbusters, but compared even to the silliness but enjoyably pulpy Predators, The Expendables is more head-ache inducing than disposable fun.

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich 2010)

2010-08-08T10:26:00.000-07:00

Beautifully crafted and delivered with painstaking attention to simple, emotional characterisation, Toy Story 3 continues Pixar's seemingly unstoppable run of success. Facing rejection as owner Andy leaves for college, Woody, Buzz and the other remaining toys negotiate a mistaken packing to children's day-center Sunnyside and Woody's determination to reunite with their past owner. With Sunnyside emerging as a brutally enforced social divide overseen by Lots O'-Huggin-'Bear, escape plots overlap with the gradual realisation of the need to accept change. Tying together its prison movie references, like Up and previous Pixar releases, the action plot lend momentum and the best celebration of the studio's CGI craft and carefully-motivated comic hooks to the moving opening and closing scenes. The passage of time represented by Carl and Ellie's condensed marriage in Up, reproduced here through Andy's growth from child to young adult, relies on similar shot transitions, moving through video camera, photographs and toy optical POV to arrive at a point of unwillingness to change.

In this respect the character growth achieved across the trilogy against their recycled functions, highlighted by Buzz's brief 'resetting' and the ability to fix but also uniformly replace, helps produce what Dan North at Spectacular Attractions describes as the trilogy's 'achingly beautiful introduction of themes of mortality, obsolescence, the passing of time and making the best of what you have before it's gone' and the 'masterfully ambiguous depiction of products as characters, allegories as agents'. It is difficult in this sense, as North notes, to combine ambivalence over planned obsolescence and the marketing blitz that accompanies the picture, from branded nappies to Lego games. Rather than make these gestures in spite of its hyper-commercial intention, and twist them into irony, it is again to Pixar's credit that a global blockbuster can be truly universal and ambitious in its scope and design. Viewing some of the surrounding family films for this summer, and their wave of talking cats and dogs, the niche that Pixar has found within a genre where box office success can sometimes boil down to release windows over quality is all the more impressive.

BSkyB acquires HBO catalogue for UK

2010-07-29T03:48:00.001-07:00

It's been reported today that BSkyB has acquired HBO's catalogue for UK play on Sky. This gives the service access to both older hits like Sex and the City and The Sopranos and future series such as Boardwalk Empire. It seems predominantly to cover HBO's high-end product, i.e. series drama, comedy and miniseries, which have proved most popular overseas compared to the US network's wider aggregation of documentaries, original films and other specials in marketing the pay service. Funding the deal is framed as Sky's attempt to improve ownership of content, but how the shows will work will be interesting. Much of HBO's UK cable and satellite distribution from the late 1990s was through a range of different companies and licenses - as Paramount owned the foreign rights to Sex and the City, that went to Channel Four and later syndication on the Paramount Comedy Channel (now Comedy Central), as well as Five. Paramount also had the rights to Deadwood, which went out in latenight on Sky One. Much of recent programming has however been licensed to FXUK, and packaged alongside FX, Showtime and Fox series.

The move is interesting from my end because it seems to indicate a next stage in HBO's decision to significantly expand ownership and collective brand marketing of its programming, and particularly rights to fully-financed series in 2006, after a range of disparate arrangements. This also followed from the usual practice of directly syndicating miniseries like Band of Brothers or Angels in America abroad. While shows were syndicated before, this effectively meant that they all went through the network's overseas licensing division HBO Enterprises and HBO International, allowing for more focused catalogue sales. In effect this means that HBO's strength as a branded service based in the US subscription market and its packaging of a diverse audience, could be provisionally reproduced as diverse catalogues of premium content for the international market, something that had already been partly achieved through DVD (albeit still with some split rights and windows). This also follows the licensing of HBO On Demand packages to Virgin Media, and the availability of HBO shows for premium prices on iTunes (although licensing to a wider range of broadband On Demand services is either restricted to rerun broadcasting, as in Channel Four, or not at all).

That BSkyB now have the exclusive rights to the HBO catalogue seems to offer a further example of selectively re-packaging and coordinating catalogue, rather than individual shows, as a solution to the occasionally lucrative but varying per-program rights of the past. It also highlights how the release windows for new shows has now narrowed, with licensing outside the US pushing to make the HBO brand a simultaneous subscription and licensing service associated with paid cable and satellite rather than broadcast licensing - through DVD, On Demand titles and merchandise internationally. A guaranteed premium in licensing a service, i.e. a catalogue of publishable titles reinforces the brand as a package, as well as its embodiment for individual shows. It seems like Sky will run these on the flagship channel and older archive work on Sky Anytime, and provide on-demand access to subscribers.

In any case, it's led The Guardian to spin-off a piece about HBO pushing back the boundaries of drama since 1997. It's the usual stuff, pointing to creative freedoms, a lack of focus groups, and general praise for daring in taking on risky, niche series and pushing boundaries, while offering some precedent in early 1990s shows. Wishing that 'sometimes it's hard not to wish that all TV was HBO,' it's more or less the rapidly commissioned profile that comes out whenever a new story or a hit show comes along.

True Blood - 3.04 - '9 Crimes'

2010-07-23T05:38:00.000-07:00

'Nine Crimes' opens with Sookie and Alcide recovering from the Lou Pine brawl, before she receives a phone call from Bill. Coldly explaining that he's breaking up with her before lashing out at a mocking Lorena, Sookie resolves to discover the truth. Meanwhile, Franklin's pursuit of Tara leaves her tied to a toilet for the day after he hypnotises Sookie's journey to Mississippi out of her. At Fangtasia, Eric dreams of Sookie, while Sam again clashes with his family. Sookie and Alcide prepare another mission to Lou Pine's when she detects an induction of Alcide's former lover to an exclusive pack. Jason clashes with a group of high schoolers at a Merlotte's retirement party for Sheriff Dearborn, and Arlene worries about the new arrival of Jessica as the bar's latest waitress.

Eric rescues Lafayette from a drug confrontation, but is ambushed at Fangtasia by the Magister, who demands answers to the V-blood ring, and holds Pam hostage. Attempting to track Bill's whereabouts at Lou Pine's, a disguised Sookie and Alcide watch as Russell Edlington arrives to feed the werewolf pack with his own blood, linking together the ancient vampire and the SS pack. With the bikers transforming, Alcide warns Sookie to escape before the change. Across town, Bill appears to seal Russell's trust by picking up a stripper for their evening meal, with the girl's desperation only weakening some of his disgust. Built around the ongoing Sookie-Alcide detective plot, now overlapping with Tara-Franklin and the exploration of Russell's broader plot to dethrone Sophie-Anne, provides perhaps the most engaging arc of the series so far - True Blood's at its best when it cranks up its vampire action and draws on tongue-in-cheek mythology.

Again, less successful is the domestic melodrama of Bon Temps, with Sam's family conflict hopefully leading up to something more significant than variations on the pathos of the town's broken families and supernatural edge. When it works, with Lafayette's navigation of being Eric's kept-dealer, or in reliably hilarious Jason Stackhouse moments, the series finds a balance of Southern farce, but too often tips into running through its limited supporting cast. As it is, this season has so far appeared to have found a wider supernatural action plot that it can run with, and indulge in the Southern gothic mise-en-scene and bursts of stylised violence that retain the series' pulpy roots and black comedy.

Inception (Christopher Nolan 2010)

2010-07-22T14:39:00.000-07:00

It's always hard to find something new to say about a heavily debated summer blockbuster, especially one of Inception's quality. Christopher Nolan's follow-up to The Dark Knight developed out of a long-term pitch for dream plotting, and in execution re-emphasizes the directors' grasp of superb classical plotting re-structured around simple yet powerful ideas and visuals. Taking the concept of dream extraction, entering people's minds (this is thankfully never specifically explained) in order to shape dream-worlds for removing secrets, Nolan focuses on Dom Cobb (Di Caprio), part of an elite team of extractors. Industrialist Saito requests a more novel mission: to implant an idea in Robert Fischer, the son of a dying billionaire in order to prevent his company's total monopoly over the world's energy supplies. Despite reluctance from his team, Cobb works with young architect Ariadne (Ellen Page) to devise and develop an intricate three-part dream taking them through Fischer's sub-conscious. However, Cobb also faces the growing complication of his dead wife's projection from his subconscious, uncovering a back-story linking together his determination to return to his family, and the fragility of the mission.

Inception is difficult to summarise, and in many ways that's one of its core strengths. You have to commit to its pacing, gradually learning its dream-logic after being thrown into the middle of an opening extraction, while weaving in Cobb's romantic plot-line. Take away the dreams-within-dreams, character switches and the elaborate mission itself, and Inception is at its heart a classical mix of action and romantic plotting, playing off the two within concentric circles and extended flashbacks-flashforwards. Like Memento and to an extent The Prestige, this is less about formal gymnastics than the careful layering of point of view and the foreshadowing, recurrent motifs and engagement in selective exposition and synchronisation. On one level, Inception is thus an action film, using its dream conceit to build an elaborate, but logical heist, where like The Prestige part of the pleasure comes in the build-up, rather than the ambiguous reveal.

Here Nolan and cinematographer Wally Pfister build around a smoothly orchestrated variation on The Dark Knight's intensified continuity style, while playing off expressionistic mise-en-scene, optical perspective and practical effects to complement dream-world CGI. As in The Dark Knight, the physical weight of the sequences lend credibility to the otherwise depthless potential of fully computer-generated sequences, while Hans Zimmer's score provides the muscular chords and action pacing of the Batman franchise. Strip away the effects though and Inception provides a striking pay-off to its dream concept, where a few degrees either way could have resulted in silliness. Di Caprio's pursuit of his wife, resulting flashbacks and the unfolding of the more poignant side of the extraction brings Nolan back to the structure of Memento and The Prestige, with a grieving protagonist working through the death of his wife through the overcoming of a plot that necessarily demands a simultaneous regression and flash-forward.

Where the two Christian Bales or the multiple Hugh Jackmans faced the multiple degrees of illusion of the Victorian stage and magic, Cobb has to work through multiple time frames and his own questionable memories to achieve catharsis. And that's where Inception pulls off Nolan's latest achievement, in bringing the narrative precision and confidence in convoluted but unified formal logic of his lower-budget work to the epic scale of The Dark Knight (itself in some respects a story of a man struggling with the partially self-inflicted death of a lover), again demonstrating that rarest of contemporary feats - an intelligent but accessible summer blockbuster, delivered with high-end style but backed up by a foundation of ideas. In this respect, it's a trust in audiences that as The Dark Knight shows, can be pulled off, albeit with low frequency. Arriving alongside the similarly accessible but beautifully crafted Toy Story 3, Inception sets a high mark for Nolan and the rarified mega-budget action film.

Predators (Nimrod Antal 2010)

2010-07-19T09:31:00.000-07:00

Going into Robert Rodriguez and Nimrod Antal's Predators with a bit of apprehension, I was pleasantly surprised if not overwhelmed by a solid, tightly paced science fiction thriller. Essentially jettisoning the successful but slated run of Aliens vs. Predators franchise fillers (apparently no longer on the cards if reports that Ridley Scott has re-acquired rights to the Alien series), Michael Finch and Litvak flesh out a Rodriguez pitch from the 1990s for a Predator game reserve planet plotline. Led by Adrien Brody as a mercenary, a cast of special ops, assassin and Yakuza figures, as well as a man claiming to be a doctor find themselves suddenly transported from Earth to a jungle planet. There they gradually work out that they have become the prey for Predator sport, with the dreadlocked aliens tracking and killing them alongside glimpsed other races. Mixed in with some ambiguity on the fine line between predators and victims, Antal and Rodriguez reduce back-story and characterization to a minimum, and let a series of mostly successful set-pieces unfold.

From rival Predators to Laurence Fishburne as a half-mad survivor, and a Predator-samurai sword battle, establishing and working towards an escape for the planet produce a tightly orchestrated spectacle. Shot rapidly in Hawaii, with long lens and handheld cinematography by Gyula Pados, and a mix of prosthetics and CGI, Rodriguez's niche for unpretentious pulp, delivered in a kinetic style bring some economy back to the bloated franchise. Strong box office, more than recovering its $40 million approximate budget for Fox then suggests that rebooting, or in effect cutting out everything after the 1987 Schwarzenegger original (which gets an obligatory nod here) has made the most out of what was arguably the weaker cousin to Fox's Alien franchise. Lacking a real touch-stone in terms of Ridley Scott's seminal original or James Cameron's Marines-in-space rollercoaster, that the Predator series remains a lucrative source for the studio forms part of the Hollywood emphasis on 1980s action summer, from The A-Team to action hero-redux The Expendables.

True Blood - 3.03 - 'It Hurts Me Too'

2010-07-15T04:08:00.000-07:00

Getting back to the blog after two or so weeks of solid thesis writing, I've mostly been following 'True Blood' and catching up with the odd feature (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist; Predators). The HBO drama's third season continues to enhance 2009's consistency with 3.03's 'It Hurts Me Too', scripted by Alexander Woo and shot by Michael Lehmann. With Eric and Sookie fighting off a werewolf attacker, she heads to Mississippi to track down Bill, despite Eric's warnings. Faced with Russell's threat over Sookie's life, a trapped Bill agrees to help him in his plan to overthrow Sophie-Anne's Louisiana kingdom, while Tara's encounter with vampire Franklin is interrupted by a call to Eggs' sparsely attended funeral. Meanwhile, Sam's reconciliation with his family hits further obstacles, and he returns to Bon Temps, where Arlene and Jason struggle with guilt. While Arlene discovers that her pregnancy began before the death of Season One's vampire serial killer Rene, Jason's continuing anxieties over his part in Eggs' murder flare up as he meets Tara.

In Mississippi, Bill remembers his previous attempt to return to a human life with his family, and Lorena's savage demonstration of their vampire differences. Sam's family visits him at Merlotte's, and proceed to indulge in free food and drink, with the bartender later catching his brother attempting to rob his safe. Across town, Eric visits Lafayette and rewards him for his part in the vampire blood-selling deal with a new Bentley. Sookie is visited by Alcide, a werewolf repaying debts to Eric, who accompanies her to the were-bar Lou Pine's, and a brawl as she attempts to detect Bill's kidnappers. At the mansion, Bill's anger with Lorena descends into savage, neck breaking sex, while Franklin's interest in Tara darkens as he forces his way into her home.

True Blood's third season has at its best stripped away some of the dragging sub-plots of the second year, focusing on the broader vampire-clashes. While some arcs remain less engaging, most notably Sam's estranged family and Tara's continued crisis and recovery, episodes maintain their fast-moving pace, dark humour and superbly realised production design and high-contrast colour schemes. Tracking the series forward, a fourth season commission confirms that with the franchise expanding, DVD distribution and foreign syndication boost a renewed art prestige and cult appeal have successfully negotiated in limited form the break-out potential of a post-Sopranos series. In the past few weeks I've also thrown myself into George R.R. Martin's epic Song of Ice and Fire fantasy saga, getting over my usual indifference with the genre as HBO prepare a 2011 premiere for miniseries-scaled, True Blood franchise emulating effort.

From the first book at least (A Game of Thrones), the series promises to unite some of Rome's adult saga scope with the energy and dark comedy of True Blood, and if successful should confirm new experiments in merging HBO Films' miniseries prestige scope with serial drama licensing. With September's Boardwalk Empire performing the similar calculated risk of a prestige historical drama routed through gangster precedent, the extension of network stability across an increasingly centralised global structure from 2008 looks set to continue. Recent announcements of HBO's attempt to produce their own Netflix service, building on exclusive HBO On Broadband, and increased stakes in foreign channels, DVD rights and cross-promoted brand stores set up the ancillary revenues of individual series with the continued strengths of the brand as an accumulator of distinctly compatible subscription content formats.

True Blood - 3.2 - Beautifully Broken

2010-06-29T03:49:00.000-07:00

The second episode of True Blood's third season, 'Beautifully Broken' picks up and complicates back-stories, if loosening some of the pace of the opener. Having killed and badly wounded his werewolf attackers, Bill is confronted by Russell Edlington, the Vampire King of Mississippi, who explains the kidnapping as an unfortunate result of a plan to make him an offer to broker a deal with Sophie-Anne. Sookie visits Eric with the werewolf symbol, producing a WWII flashback to his time in the SS alongside Godric, where they encounter 'Operation Werewolf', an elite group of werewolves powered by vampire blood. Sam finally meets his birth family, but escapes a collision with a truck after shape-shifting with resentful brother Tommy. Lafayette tries to shock Tara from her suicide attempt by visiting his unstable mother, committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Meanwhile, Sookie is tracked by a werewolf outside Merlotte's, and Jason's guilt over shooting Eggs turns to envy, and he later accidentally breaks up a drug bust, spotting a mysterious woman who escapes the scene. In Mississippi, Bill is entertained by Russell as a guest/prisoner, but claims that his knowledge of Sophie-Anne's deals have been exaggerated. His distrust rises when former Maker Lorena arrives, and he sets her on fire. Still struggling to deal with Eggs' murder, Tara is rescued from a fight with rednecks by Franklin, a newly arrived vampire with an apparent grudge against Bill. Eric arrives at Sookie's, where he reveals his knowledge of the werewolf pack, before her wolf tracker appears and prepares to attack.

Nazi werewolves, the broadening of the Southern vampire mythology and the exploration of back-story keep True Blood's third season plotlines ticking along, while still setting up and working through the introduction of new characters. Stylized flashbacks (or at least more stylized than the series' usual painterly style) have been one of the series' main strengths, and the sepia-toned WWII flashback joins the American Civil War, the Jazz Age and Eric's ancient origins in adding flourishes to Bon Temps. As usual, the episode races by, and while the Sam and Tara plotlines remain the least interesting in terms of rehashing flawed but difficult-to-see developing characters, stepping up mythology rewards the series' broader serial construction.

While the first season retained a narrow perspective, mixing more conventional HBO realism with gradual reveals, the series has now fully embraced its cult roots and world-building, without losing the balance of character-driven black humour. Developing True Blood's franchise strengths within a straightforwardly pulp structure arguably allowed HBO to build on the failed experiment of Carnivale's densely layered and ultimately almost incomprehensible back-story as a historical drama. Whether the same will work for A Game of Thrones should be interesting, given the series' seeming return to the potential for epic scope of the historical miniseries. Combining spectacle with the serial detail of the long-form drama, adapting another pre-built world should help some of the glossing of extensive backstory in favour of emulating True Blood's diversion of much of its set-up into ancillary media during its run, leaving the series itself to be powered along by more linear plotting.

Incidentally, this is my 300th blog post, which is remarkable to me considering how updating this started off as an experiment two years ago that kept on going, if not always as consistently as last year.

True Blood - 3.01 - Bad Blood

2010-06-23T05:18:00.000-07:00

So True Blood is back for a third season on HBO, and as ever it remains the network's most distinctive success of the past few years for both boosting the unique subscriber package and embodying a flexible program brand that has arguably achieved, if not in critical praise or awards, the cult franchise world-building that The Sopranos and Sex and the City never quite could. Backed by another great saturation marketing campaign, as well as now-typical near-synchronous premieres in key markets - a sign of HBO's tighter ownership of its international satellites services, the series occupies a fairly unique position as a crossover hit whose success outstrips the smaller margins of Treme, Eastbound & Down and How to Make It in America.

Without going into my thesis again, True Blood represents a contemporary example of a limited solution to what HBO came to struggle with in the 2000s - reconciling the exclusivity of the network and the satisfaction of a comprehensive base of subscribers with the risk and the unpredictability of a program brand able to both enhance and work outside the unique context of the channel and its offshoot DVD label for non-subscription success on an approximate scale to The Sopranos or Sex and the City. It's also been the focus for some of the most inventive marketing and cross-promotion of the series, from blogs to added video features, all complicating and adding depth to the wider franchise.

Back to the series though, which picks up from the climax of Season Two with 'Bad Blood', setting up arcs loosely based on Charlaine Harris' novel Club Dead. Daniel Minahan and Brian Buckner direct and write. After the defeat of Maryann, Bill's kidnapping, Eggs' murder by Jason Stackhouse, Sam Merlotte's decision to find his family, Eric and Pam's vampire blood business with Sophie-Ann, and Jessica's first kill dominate the episode. Held by a silver collar, Bill is driven over state lines by a group of bikers, while Sookie's attempt to involve the police in his disappearance is met with indifference. Returning home, she finds Jessica trying to disguise her accidental kill. At Merlotte's, Andy and Jason try to work out a plan to focus Eggs' murder on the chief, while Lafayette struggles to keep a distraught Tara calm.

Sookie visits Fangtasia, where she finds Eric in the middle of, well, breaking in a new dancer - confessing that he is just as surprised by the disappearance, Eric holds off on informing Sophie-Anne. Meanwhile, despite being drained by his captors, Bill manages to force their car off the road and escapes, and psychically 'calls' Jessica. Although unable to locate her maker, Jessica leads Sookie to the abandoned car, where they identify a mark on one of the kidnappers of a werewolf cult. Sam's journey to find his family also comes across an apparent brother, Tommy Mickens, despite his attempt to drive him away. A confusingly erotic dream featuring Bill does little to ease Sam's state of mind.

Sophie-Anne visits Fangtasia with the Magister, investigating reports of vampire blood sales and a lack of disappearing vampires. The Queen later again threatens Eric into keeping the operation running, with Pam paying a similar visit to their chief distributor Lafeyette. At Merlotte's, Arlene realizes she is pregnant again, and Jason's attempt to 'act normally' after the death with a threesome causes problems when he imagines bullet holes in their foreheads. A drained Bill comes across an old woman's home, and is forced to drink from her, later hypnotizing and leaving money from her son. Learning he is now in Mississippi, he enters the woods and is surrounded by a pack of wolves.

Without breaking a beat from the Second Season, True Blood's fast-paced pulp storylines stack up to reproduce the best of the series' mix of excess, well-drawn character pathos, and wider integration of tongue-in-cheek mythology. Although facing the challenge of season openers of laying out future plotlines, the second season's running complications look to hopefully turn away from the Maryann arc, which arguably dragged down the final episodes. Sookie's investigative plotline, struggles to deal with the events of Season Two within the town, and the unfolding of wider conspiracies and vampire struggles, introducing werewolf sub-plots, also seems to indicate the broader scope approximated up to the suicide of Godric midway through last year.

At its best True Blood's TV-MA content, accelerated plotlines and splashes of dark humour make it still one of the most distinctive hours in current television drama. Its scope and success in merging HBO drama's graphic realism with less densely realist plotting, psychological ambiguity and art-film to verite shooting styles is also re-enhanced by Matthew Jensen's brilliantly pushed processing, swampy colour palettes, filters and location shooting, and Suzuki Ingerslev's baroque production design.

Coming in at about 5 million first-run viewers, the third season faces the challenge of maintaining its general buzz for driving summer marketing alongside the more aggregated comedy niche focus of Hung and Entourage, as well as setting up branded-DVD, international syndication and merchandising for crossover and cult fans. As openers go, pacing, style and set-up promise to emulate some of the best third season potential for confidence in concept, mature characters and the stretching of more ambitious serial plotlines with a fourth season already confirmed for 2011.

Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach 2007)

2010-06-22T03:19:00.001-07:00

With Greenberg currently enjoying critical success in theatres, I caught up on writer-director Noah Baumbach's 2007 feature Margot at the Wedding. Baumbach, a frequent collaborator with Wes Anderson, received a break-out personal success in 2005 with The Squid and the Whale, building on a series of low-budget pictures from the mid to late 1990s. A deadpan autobiographical study unpicking the neuroses of a Manhattan family in the 1980s, Whale's success led to a low-budget deal with Paramount Vantage for Margot, attracting Nicole Kidman and Jack Black to a film centred around a similarly dysfunctional upper New York group. Starring Kidman as self-help writer Margot, Baumbach traces out the tensions surrounding her visit with 11 year old son Claude to the upstate home of sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and fiancee Malcolm (Jack Black), as well as Pauline's young daughter. Given over largely to static takes of awkward conversation and increasingly desperate behaviour as Margot upsets and helps spark friction between the couple and their neighbours, visiting husbands, and Malcolm's cheating complicates but eventually restores the fragile relationships of the opening narrative.

Margot at the Wedding finds Baumbach back in family crisis territory, but lacks the wit and the easier pathos of Squid and the Whale's divorce plotting, or the lighter tone of his work with Anderson on The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic. Margot's European art-film influences are more pronounced than the Upper East Side black comedy of Whale, from the claustrophobic rural setting to the plotting focus on awkward vignettes in drawing out the selfishness and a conclusion resetting both the uneasy co-dependence of Margot's relationship to her son and Pauline and Malcolm's engagement. Kidman's cool reserve and bursts of brittle hysteria help anchor some of the latter here, but with Jack Black occasionally falling back into mugging mode, the black comedy and emotional complexity jar more uncomfortably into mannerism.

Maybe this is more a problem with my own generally mixed enjoyment of dialogue-driven, emotionally brittle melodramas and black comedies, with some reviews noting Baumbach's acknowledgement of Eric Rohmer's influence. It's not that I don't appreciate the intent of dark character quirk and the shifts into conversational digressions made by Margot, as well as Harris Savides' beautifully de-saturated colour palettes and natural lighting, but it's always a fine balance for character engagement and over-determined tone. This balance made The Squid and the Whale one of my favourite films of 2005, while Bambauch's collaborations with Anderson and recent success with Greenberg demonstrate how he has more often than epitomized US independent cinema's ideal of character-driven accessibility with darker themes and stylistic experimentation. The sometimes grating effect of pushing pathos and melodrama to more extreme levels ultimately though reminded me why I didn't take to Rachel Getting Married last year, wherebeing left alone for 90 minutes with frustrating characters quickly builds into impatience rather than narrative appreciation of the deconstruction of family life.

Temple Grandin (Mick Jackson 2010)

2010-06-15T01:20:00.001-07:00

The first HBO original film I'd seen in some time, Temple Grandin finds the network still attached to a range of stable conventions. Focusing on the life of autistic animal husbandry expert Grandin, British production company Ruby Films came to the project on the back of several mid-range literary adaptations and biopics, including Brick Lane and The Other Boleyn Girl.

Other producers include actor Anthony Edwards, the indie-film associated Scott Ferguson, and experienced HBO collaborator Greg Spence. Director Mick Jackson had previously worked on Live from Baghdad (2002), while of screenwriters Christopher Monger and Merritt Johnson, the latter worked on In Treatment. Similarly experienced HBO cinematographer Ivan Strasburg (The Corner, Generation Kill) helps round out the production. Originally developed by producer and agent Emily Gerson Saines in the early 2000s from Grandin's autobiography, after a film treatment the project was picked up by HBO sometime in the past few years and produced through late 2008 for a premiere in February this year.

Starring Claire Danes, Grandin returns to and varies HBO Films' tradition for offbeat biopics, mixing a life stories' negotiation of autism with the start of a successful career creating new techniques for livestock handling. The bulk of the film's opening hour deals with two large-scale sections set between the 1950s and 1960s, introducing Temple's unique character traits at an aunt's ranch, before moving into the complications of college. Flash-backs then establish Temple's mother's struggle with medical pessimism over a future with autism, building against a gradual opening out of her personality at a specialist high school, with help by science teacher Professor Carlock (David Straithairn). Hyper-sensitive and socially awkward, Temple's photographic memory and ability to see problems in pictures however leads her to produce distinctive inventions, creating a 'squeeze-box' device to calm stress, Later she develops more humane ranch and slaughterhouse procedures for an initially skeptical livestock industry. Setting up Temple's contemporary fame as a writer and public advocate for autism, an epilogue features her visiting and making a first impassioned speech at an autism convention.

The biography structure thus moves between flashbacks to construct Temple's point of view and back-story, established through an opening direct-to-camera scene outlining her condition, and particular ability to 'think in pictures'. Offset by more standard coverage and intensified continuity, exploring character subjectivity motivates flourishes by Strasburg and Jackson. This ranges from CGI overlays of Temple's thought process, converting images into line diagrams (in a similar way to A Beautiful Mind), to fast motion effects, lens distortion and saturated lighting. Predominantly set between the 1950s and 1970s, HBO Films' long association with the period enables detailed production design and a bright primary colour palette, while exploiting Texas location shooting for wide shots and long lens photography.

In many ways Grandin represents an ideal HBO Films project, combining a strong cast led by a strong performance by for Danes with a sensitive, character-driven treatment of a complex condition backed by strong production values. Structured around wider explorations of prejudice and middle America, precedents immediately spring from 2003's transgender-themed Normal, as well as Documentary Films' extensive treatments of individuals with uniquely presented points of view. In prestige terms, a period setting and the use of expressive stylistic techniques to enhance the biopic form share the critical success of titles from Boycott through to Iron Jawed Angels and Something the Lord Made. Taken within the recent development of HBO Films, Grandin highlights a wider mix of entrenched continuity but also more accelerated change, helped by a reduced theatrical ambition after the collapse of Picturehouse and the departure of original executive Colin Callender in 2008 after more than 20 years at the network.

Current head Len Amato has mostly stuck to successful film cycles and a range of prestige (although in wider original programming terms mid-range) titles, and smaller-scale collaborations, as well as continuing to work with the BBC and Channel Four. Significant prestige miniseries have also continued 2000s trends for epic historical scope for branding events with Generation Kill, John Adams and this year's The Pacific. I haven't actually been able to watch many post-2007 titles, but from synopsis and production details, the scope seems to have narrowed to less frequent, and upscale-scale focused prestige. Extensive recombination and compatibility across the programming package still seems to be key though to production cycles, from Grey Gardens' adaptation of documentary collaborators' The Maysles Brothers' 1970s original project, to You Don't Know Jack, an Al Pacino-starring biopic of controversial doctor Jack Kevorkian previously covered in a mid 1990s documentary.

In this respect Films' production style and themes are now more level with the mid-range of older, deeply recombinant drama series titles in generating network prestige and long-term package value against lowered syndication margins, from In Treatment to Treme. This has worked as a more stable base against the wider multi-platform marketing flexibility of 18-34 comedies and success with the more exceptional experiment in genre franchising with True Blood. Without making this post into a thesis ramble, Temple Grandin became useful for reminding me that while much has changed over the past couple of years for HBO, the old conventions and attachment to production cycles still remains very much consistent with the specific historical roots of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Starman (John Carpenter 1984)

2010-06-08T09:44:00.000-07:00

Back to John Carpenter, and his 1984 crossover success Starman, financed and distributed by Columbia during the director's spell as a go-to genre producer in the early part of the decade. One of Carpenter's most distinct films in terms of its romantic plotting, despite general science fiction conventions and cutting-edge ffects work, Starman won praise for lead Jeff Bridges' performance as an alien force that responds to a communications signal and takes the form of Jenny Hayden's recently deceased husband Scott. Pursued by the government and increasingly disillusioned SETI scientist Mark Shermin, Jenny's initial horror at the Starman gives way to romance as they travel from Wisconsin to Arizona for his rendezvous with a home planet spaceship. As the Starman acclimatizes to Earth, he gradually develops an awkward language and a philosophical perspective on the human race.

The latter in particular suggests Starman as moving away from Carpenter's hard-bitten B-movie plots into more saccharine areas, and in some respects the picture hits sentimental beats throughout, and is not a million miles away from the innocent intruder and reconciliation of loss and family that structures 1982's ET. It's to Bridges, and co-star Karen Allen's credit then that the relationship more or less works, with a making-of documentary seeing the actor credit their awkward meet-cute and relationship to the screwball reconciliation of It Happened One Night. Similarly, Carpenter has explained how his earlier telefilm work on an Elvis biopic proved that he wasn't solely relegated to adult and teen film horror, and Starman remains, along with Big Trouble in Little China, the most warm-hearted and wryly humorous examples of his versatility.

Helped by Donald M. Morgan's well-crafted if never outstanding cinematography, with long lens location shooting and coverage-led interiors enhanced by a few virtuoso tracking shots and some early computer graphic effects (helped by Industrial Light & Magic) and prosthetic transformations, continuing Carpenter's higher-budget studio flourishes for greater camera movement within a still economic shooting style. As a road movie Starman also fulfils Carpenter's consistent attention to plot pacing and his working over of classical narrative form within unorthodox characters and smart takes on B genres. It's not my favourite of the now several months' long (if infrequent) Carpenter marathon, but it's certainly not the worst, and at best finds the sweetness in its fish-out-of-water comedy. Any viewing can also be enhanced by the Region 2 DVD's extra of a contemporary music video featuring Bridges and Allen's rendition of 'All You Have to Do is Dream', a suitably mid 1980s mix of excessive video effects and somewhat problematic montages of virtually the whole plot.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog 2009)

2010-06-05T06:16:00.000-07:00

Keeping its potential for full-blown gonzo energy on a surprisingly even keel, Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is as much a sly example of restraint by the famously extreme director. Neither a 'reimagining' or a sequel to Abel Ferrara's Catholic sin and New York exploitation-drenched 1992 original, Port of Call is instead a suitable addition to Herzog's catalogue of men in extreme situations, from Kinski to Grizzly Man. Moreover, it sees the German director reproduce his formal and generic versatility from documentaries, shorts, naturalist epics, silent cinema remakes, into POW war films, bringing clear signature interests adapted to a spread of avant-garde, art cinema and more mainstream releases. In this respect, Port of Call manages to be both detective drama plotted around increasingly amoral decisions, a brutal portrait of a post-Katrina New Orleans and an exercise in psychological ambiguity, causality and symbolism.

Starring Nicholas Cage in a role that allows him to fully vent his teetering from wild-eyed intensity, to well, slightly less wild-eyed intensity, Orleans focuses on sergeant Terrence McDonagh, who suffers from debilitating back pain after rescuing a prisoner from the Katrina floods and becomes a lieutenant. A year later, McDonagh exploits his position to secure drugs, indulges in illegal betting, and a loving relationship with prostitute Frankie (Eva Mendes), all while being drawn into a murder plotline bringing him into an alliance with gangster Big Fate. Here Herzog's collaboration with screenwriter William Finkelstein, a former NYPD Blue writer, works best at establishing a twisted but still logical procedural plotline around McDonagh's addictions, eventually establishing through a chain of manipulation and abuse a new position as a captain and a secure family unit.

A through-line of plotting logic thus helps anchor extended detours into McDonagh's addictions, whether through hallucinating iguanas or the soul of a dead gangster dancing over his body after a shoot-out. Unlike Ferrara's verite exercise in grime and deep-seated moral ambiguity, Cage, Herzog and Finkelstein's bad lieutenant is a strangely slapstick creation, pushing explicit extremes with a kind of manic glee and solipsistic point of view that ultimately holds together and ironically resolves the multiple detective and romantic plots. In addition, Herzog and regular cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger invest Orleans and Louisiana with sustained interest in alternating handheld tracking shots, more conventional long lens rack focus and editing with pushing for both the de-saturated naturalism of its post-flood locations, as well as skewed compositions and point of view (most memorably from a roadside crocodile).

Port of Call ultimately worked for me as an exercise in generic versatility tied to Herzog's eclectic and frequently black comic thematic and formal concerns with extreme characters navigating extreme situations, while restraining itself from the spiritual and psychological weight of Ferrara's original to celebrate the opportunities for expressionistic, comic character performance building off a richly composed landscape. One complaint though would be that most film trailers and reviews (including my own probably) overly spoiled and emphasized some of the film's most memorable digressions into fantasy or subjective point of view. Expectations for a complete Cage or Herzog meltdown did however allow its attention to structure and above all an entertainingly staged, if never overtly psychologically ambitious, tone to lift it above potential shock value.

Hot Tub Time Machine (Steve Pink 2010)

2010-05-31T03:35:00.000-07:00

Hot Tub Time Machine is never going to rank as one of the best pictures of 2010, but is nonetheless an enjoyable adult comedy anchored by a strong lead cast who make the most of its silly premise. Produced by MGM/UA with co-star John Cusack and directed by Steve Pink, Time Machine follows down-on-their-luck thirtysomethings Adam, Nick and Lou, as well as Adam's twenty year old slacker nephew Jacob. Coming together for a weekend at the ski resort where they experienced a dramatic 1986 summer, a night in the hot tub sees them inxplicably transported back to the decade. There they face the complications of the 'butterfly effect', attempting somewhat unsuccessfully to prevent the future from changing while attempting to return to the present, before realizing that manipulating time travel could have its benefits.

While featuring sex, drugs and projectile vomiting in equal measures, Hot Tub shares earlier comedies such as The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up and The Hangover's mix of gross-out content and a capable lead cast who find enough emotional engagement without sacrificing riffs on its setting and a bare-bones plot. From Nick (Craig Robinson's) deadpan delivery to camera ('it's some kind of...hot tub time machine') to a comprehensive visual and aural checklist of 1980s kitsch, time travel's set-up indulges ironic interaction with a decade compiled almost exclusively from popular cultural cues. Even Chevy Chase pops up for a winking cameo. It's fitting then that Hot Tub includes Back to the Future's 1980s-1950s contrast as part of its knowing comedy, including Crispin Glover in a supporting role, but twists its plotting and cautionary tale.

Like the male-focused 'coming of age' comedies mentioned above, Hot Tub revolves around directionless but likeable characters who experience limited change while navigating adult situations, and goes as far as to use its time travel plot to re-work miserable lives in the present to create a wealthy, happy future. It's somewhat like if Back to the Future mixed Biff abusing knowledge of the future to become rich and famous and Marty McFly's desire to use time travel to improve his family's future. Whether a message of characters resolving marriage, depression or professional failure through a magical solution is ethical or not is debatable, but in playing with literal embodiments of arrested adolescence puts a spin on the sub-genre that falls just short of excessive irony or fleshing out some of the darker thirtysomething themes. In this way it's also a strangely suitable resolution to a presentation of the 1980s as an opportunity for indulgence and a second childhood for its leads that effectively depends on audience and character pop cultural literacy to justify its stakes. (More pragmatically though, much of the film might have been an excuse to build a script around a great title).

Living in Oblivion (Tom DiCillo 1995)

2010-05-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

A well-written sketch riffing on the anxieties of independent filmmaking, Tom DiCillo's 1995 feature Living in Oblivion has since become a critical and cult favourite. Developed on micro-indie level (investment from friends and colleagues) from a short, New York-based writer-director DiCillo worked with friend Steve Buscemi and others to expand for a 90 minute feature with limited theatrical release in the US through Sony Pictures Classics. Divided into three parts, DiCillo focuses on two dream sequences, from increasingly nervous director Nick Reve as a single scene collapses around technical problems, to actress Nicole (Catherine Keener)'s tensions with an arrogant co-star and insecurity. This then moves into a third sequence ostensibly built around the difficult shooting of a dream sequence featuring a dwarf and Nick's retirement home-escaping mother.

The vignette structure, playing on the same subjective coda for justifying its increasingly farcical behaviour, also allows DiCillo to move between shooting the mock-production itself and the fictional, unnamed feature, alternating black and white and colour stock, as well as reflexively drawing attention to compositional decisions, close-ups and missed cues. With its restricted studio location and variation through repetition on shooting from character to character, Oblivion's economical style is able to work through indie and art-house conventions (dreams, twists in perspective, vignette character plotting) as a compositional exercise underlined by offbeat, but still identifiable character goals. Helped by a strong cast led by Buscemi and Keener, the scenario and variation between tongue-in-cheek despair over the filmmaking process just about finds a balance in the 90 minute running time to avoid overplaying its simple concept.

A frequently cited example of the micro-to-mainstream US indies of the mid 1990s, Quentin Tarantino jokes and actor frustrations over the high prestige and low returns of the feature help make Oblivion the cult time capsule it is today. The latter becomes clearer in a 20 minute documentary on the DVD featuring DiCillo and Buscemi answering questions at an early 2000s New York event to showcase its impact. From questions wondering at the difference between Hollywood and the mainstream, to gushing over the film's low-budget status, both DiCillo and Buscemi acknowledge how while coming together around luck and timing, in practical terms it would be the latter's growing star name through studio features that eventually helped sell distributors and market the picture for Sony. With a full Region 2 DVD release delayed until 2008, Oblivion is perhaps not essential viewing, but a wry accompaniment to a key period for US independent cinema.

Iron Man 2 (Jon Favreau 2010)

2010-05-24T15:28:00.000-07:00

As a new addition to Marvel/Paramount's franchise building project, with all individual features seemingly moving towards The Avengers, Iron Man 2 suffers from an abundance of functionality without finding the lighter inventiveness of the original. With most of the original production team returning, director Jon Favreau and star Robert Downey Jr. hit many of the same beats, but get lost in superhero sequels' tendency for cluttered plotlines, minor character overkill and the draining of the energy of an origin story for variations on the same conflicts. Here Favreau and screenwriter Justin Theroux pit Downey Jr's billionaire inventor against Ivan Danko (Mickey Rourke), a Russian physicist whose father was allegedly cheated out of the design that led to Iron Man's creation. Vowing revenge, Danko's mission crosses over with Stark's industrial rival Justin Hammer's collusion with military interests in the Iron Man design, while Stark's career is derailed by a potentially fatal reaction to the device meant to keep him alive.

Crisscrossing with Stark's professional and romantic plotlines with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and friendship with military Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes, adapting the Iron Man technology, realizing a solution to his fatal condition and setting up a confrontation with Danko's Hammer-funded robots and the Russian join to further sub-plots as the climax is set against a broader test by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) of Stark's credentials to join superhero team The Avengers. The latter is where Iron Man 2 feels mostly like a passable entry in what Marvel seem to laid out as a compatible franchise linking together annual blockbusters, with Captain America and Thor next on the agenda to match reboots of the Hulk franchise (and possibly Ant-Man). Developing Stark's character and fleshing out the mythology of the world combine as a basic structure, but ultimately the scene-by-scene stakes are never genuinely established.

Early exposition sequences, including a dive into a Stark expo, complete with arcing cameras, and multiple cutting between television feeds, handheld and POV perspective boost a run of scenes that includes a lengthy Senate hearing tying together most of the lead cast, and a first confrontation between Stark and Danko at a Monaco race track. These scenes more directly sustain the roving camera-work and practical effects that set up Iron Man's origin plotting, but soon transitions into a sluggish development that explores Stark's downward spiral, and a finale where crashing together multiple robots produces the CGI sheen but weightless action sequences of the Transformers series. A double epilogue resolving romantic and action plot-lines then frames the longer serial development of Iron Man's place in the Avengers, tagged with a post-credits scene setting up Thor.

Altogether Iron Man 2 is well-paced and enhanced by Downey Jr's performance in the first third of the film, but sags under the challenge of keeping up blockbuster kineticism, rarely pausing without CGI effects, handheld and multiple screen perspective switches, and untangling the momentum and tension to Stark's crisis within the build-up of villains and the franchise-building Avengers sequences. Ultimately though it's a tactic that holds enough value to Marvel to resist deviating too far from the long-term plan, with Iron Man 2 well-crafted enough to deliver global box office success while self-promoting the wider Marvel universe. Disney's acquisition of Marvel Entertainment last December then reflects the success of Marvel Studios in producing a conveyor belt of universally-appealing tent-pole pictures while increasingly seeking to define the reach and the potential for re-issuing and tying together it's multiple holdings, from rebooting Spiderman to developing the X-Men: Origins series.

It's an approach that seems to run against DC's more flexible approach to Nolan's Batman series as relatively stand-alone blockbusters that have performed the rare feat of critical and audience crossovers alongside ongoing legal disputes over Superman rights and development problems with Wonder Woman. While DC under Warner proved that superhero pictures could exemplify blockbuster strategies, Marvel have seemingly banked on the piecemeal process of creating a running, increasingly intertextual mega-franchise. What this means though for the quality of the individual films is dubious though - Iron Man 2 on its own merits slots into this process, but outweighs individual character in favour of ticking enough boxes to set-up what may or may not be a satisfying conclusion when The Avengers rolls out in two years time.

Four Lions (Chris Morris 2010)

2010-05-20T14:24:00.000-07:00

Not shy of a bit of controversy, Brass Eye creator Chris Morris' first full-length feature takes aim at suicide bombing, and manages to find the pathos within a difficult subject. Long-in-development from the reclusive Morris, and eventually co-produced via Warp and Film Four, Lions follows a group of Muslims as they attempt to plan and execute a terrorist attack, taking them from Sheffield to Pakistan and the London Marathon. Focusing primarily on Omar, a security guard and father, as well as the dimwitted Waj, convert Barry, the hapless Faisal and new recruit Hassan, Morris and Peep Show screenwriters Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain explore the rising complications of their plotting and a farcical if still tragic finale.

In this respect Four Lions is able to maintain a fine line between the acerbic satire that made Morris' work for the BBC and Channel Four some of the most influential and still powerful British comedy of the past twenty years, without tipping into absurdity or blank parody. Characters are well-drawn and occasional bursts of slapstick are weighed against the more careful development of Omar's family life. Here the unspoken acceptance of his mission within his young family, and the resistance to explaining a clearer or more specific motivation provides some of the more understated, and incisive moments of the picture, particularly in taking care to demonstrate the miscommunication of Islam across the narrative.

Shot primarily with a mix of handheld video, slow telephoto zooms and a combination of surveillance motifs linking together security and online video footage, a credits sequence providing an epilogue linked by security cameras does well to combine an omniscient, if ultimately failed narration in averting the terrorist plot. Consequently, while stumbling through complications, including blowing up a crow and destroying an Arab settlement in Pakistan, Four Lions does not pull away from the desperation, confusion and the build-up of semantics that accompany the final attacks. The concept was always going to be an uncomfortable one, but credit must go to FilmFour for supporting Morris through to a limited release and a so-far reasonable box office. Four Lions is far from a broad reduction of its subject, and like the best satire finds both the absurdity and the everyday banality of its political and religious criticism without a need to spell it out through blunt rhetoric.

Nightmare on Elm Street (Samuel Bayer 2010)

2010-05-13T12:58:00.000-07:00

Another horror franchise reboot that ups the gore and the subtext while sacrificing much of the subtlety of its original, the Michael Bay produced and Samuel Bayer directed Nightmare on Elm Street does less to reinvent than downgrade Wes Craven's 1984 effort. While the first Nightmare, in shaping slasher conventions around a novel concept (death in nightmares) and an effective blend of iconic villain characterization, inventive deaths and an occasionally logic-defying but straightforward plot, the remake grasps for the psychological nastiness within the frenetic style of Bay's Platinum Dunes-produced series of franchises. As with Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the recent Friday the 13th, the formula for complicating plot structure with extended back-story motivation and opportunities to expand shocks into high-contrast colour palettes, handheld camerawork and rapid cutting has yielded consistent box office success if not always fan and critical support.

At its basic level Nightmare and its remade predecessors are virtually critic-proof, relying on their pre-sold packaging, saturation marketing and cross-promotion of existing and new franchise material (DVDs, comic books, online extras and competitions) to capture enough of a broad youth and horror cult audience for opening weekend. With Craven cut out of the project, the value of the franchise to New Line, now formally under the umbrella distribution of Warner Brothers, has less to do with fidelity to the series back-catalogue than re-launching box office on relatively mid-level investment. From Platinum's acquisition of project rights in 2008 through Bay and shooting on a $35 million budget, turnaround and advance marketing has been relatively quick in capping the beginning of the blockbuster summer season with successful global box office.

The film itself expands on the original's premise, focusing on a group of teenagers, and lead protagonist Nancy as they combat the growing threat of Freddy Kruger in their dreams, from an opening series of deaths through to the complication of discovering and resolving to overcome the attacks and compile their explanations. Working through a development that identifies causal links between the teenagers through shared child molestation by Kruger as pre-schoolers and their parents' cover-up of his murder, Nancy and fellow survivor Quentin work towards a climax where the original's key resolution - pulling Freddy out of the dream-world into theirs - brings a partial resolution, and an epilogue hooking a sequel with Freddy's reappearance.

For the most part the basic plot structure of Craven's 1984 screenplay remains intact, as well as the mechanics of most of the key dream murders from the original, albeit rendered in state-of-the-art prosthetics, CGI and Bay's preference for high-contrast filters and hyper-stylized production design via Bayer and cinematographer Jeff Cutter. Most notably though the implicit suggestion of child abuse from the original is developed to more clearly explain Freddy's motivation. As with Rob Zombie's reboot of the Halloween franchise, more is sometimes less, and while briefly playing with a possible ambiguity in Freddy as a victim, the aggressive reinforcement of molestation by the climax drains what subtlety the film may have achieved in its concept. Here then the desire to take Freddy away from the franchise's self-reflexivity and increasingly silly humour to grim realism only succeeds in pushing implicit interpretation into a clumsy level of exploitation.

This is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the horror franchise remakes, where in trying to find a new hook to distinguish themselves from exhausted concepts and narrative and stylistic variations they enhance grime and shock, while attempting to justify more realistic motivation and relevance. As a result, the psychological ambiguity and the unsettling and expressive stylistic transitions from real to dream world of Craven's original are substituted for blunt effects, from blaring sound cues to dialogue scenes cut together around restless handheld pans, rarely allowing the kinds of extended tracking shots or takes to distract from the overkill of production and sound design. With a recent trailer for the non-Platinum produced I Spit on Your Grave facing the tough task of finding something new to hang the lucrative process of recycling on, Nightmare is an unfortunate contribution to a cycle that has done less to celebrate the invention of their subject matter than reassemble them as cruder caricatures.

Trust (Hal Hartley 1990)

2010-05-11T16:01:00.000-07:00

In the past few weeks I've become quite attached to Lovefilm's Watch Online feature, which has recently expanded to more than a thousand options. While a great many of these are low-budget direct to DVD titles, it also includes a great range of independent and classic studio era work. Last week I was able to catch up on Hal Hartley's darkly comic 1990 feature Trust. Forming part of what has been a prolific career of low-budget filmmaking on the resolute margins of the 1990s mainstream independent movement, supported by stable financing, productive star-relationships (most notably Parker Posey) and a small but loyal following, Hartley has tackled religion, family conflict and turn-of-the-century anxieties, all while producing a steady stream of shorts and several DVDs worth of incomplete material.

Trust was the first Hartley film I'd seen, and while it's perhaps not going to launch a John Carpenter-length director marathon, it was a well-crafted mix of character-led irony and production economy. As Hartley's second feature, Trust was co-produced with Film Four and independent Ted Hope, who would go on to establish himself and company Good Machine as one of the leading New York-based producers of the indie boom of the early to mid 1990s, with recently established New Line sub-label Fine Line distributing. Rapidly written and completed after Hartley's 1989 debut The Unbelievable Truth, Trust centres on high school dropout Maria and alienated repairman Matthew and their uncertain romance within dysfunctional families and bleak job prospects in contemporary Long Island.

Beginning with Maria announcing her pregnancy and expulsion from high school, her father's heart attack drives her onto the street, setting up plotlines for reconciliation with passive-aggressive mother and older, divorced single mother sister Peg (Edie Falco). Meanwhile, Matthew struggles to contain bursts of violence, quitting his job and maintaining a boiling-under resentment with his widowed father. With complicating turns through secondary characters bringing Maria and Matthew together, their relationship and future experiences a protracted development and a pragmatic climax establishing an uncertain future.

One of Hartley's defining features is a tendency towards rapid-fire, deadpan dialogue, reducing performative affect for blank irony and a nihilistic, dry humour. With recurring, eccentric motifs (Matthew carries an unexploded grenade as a potential suicide device), sub-plots including investigation into a missing baby help contextualize Maria's offbeat rites-of-passage arc and a romantic through-line based almost wholly on dialogue non-sequiters and debates over the difference between love and trust. Dangling causes for romance, breakup and resolution are then complicated for digression and extended sequences of contemplation and ambiguous motivation, as well as briefly resolved sub-plots such as Maria's abortion. Like most independents comfortable in layering quirk over classical narrative structures, Trust is best at finding idiosyncratic patterns and associative character dialogue within loose deadlines and slower narrative pacing.

Similarly, Hartley works with Michael Spiller (who would go on to become a regular cinematographer on Sex and the City) to compose Long Island scenes predominantly through wide angle, shallow focus compositions, tracking shots, and occasional flourishes into rapidly cut repeated sequences, reflecting a rapid shooting schedule economy and encouragement for improvisation from his cast. In particular, Hartley has cited a desire to work with actress Adrienne Shelley again after The Unbelievable Truth, driving the development and turnaround on Trust in 1990. Taking several festival awards in 1990, Trust led Hartley to a further eleven features in the decade.

While it takes some time to adjust to the deadpan delivery, like the best independents of the period it finds a winning balance between solid structure, craft and varied but far from incoherent plotting and characterization. Moreover, with Edie Falco's performance and Michael Spiller's link to Sex and the City expanded through the role of editor Nick Gomez, who would go on to work on Oz and The Sopranos, Trust provides a brief example of some of the rich connections within the New York indie community of the period that would help shape HBO's late 1990s reinforcement of a distinctive original programming identity.

Halloween (John Carpenter 1978)

2010-05-04T04:16:00.000-07:00

Arguably the most successful of John Carpenter's films, Halloween's breakout impact as a limited distribution to cult hit in 1978 would later anchor a long-running franchise and recent remakes. I'd seen it before a few times, but after my recent Carpenter season, returning to the film allowed me to place it more clearly within the director's development through Assault to Precint 13 into The Fog (skipping the odd television movie along the way). Set around a Halloween night, bridged by the 1963 murder of his sister by the child Michael Myers, and his return to the town of Haddonfield, Illinois fifteen years later to stalk high school student Laurie Strode, Halloween is another example of Carpenter's precise structures and motifs in helping to refine slasher and teen film conventions.

Halloween is perhaps the most understated of its later, body count-ramping franchise, with Carpenter bookending the 90 minute run-time with bursts of violence separated by growing tension and exposition. From the point of view-tracking shot setting up the initial murder and its iconic crane shot out from the reveal of the child Myers, to the Panaglide steadicam shots crisscrossing the suburban blocks of Haddonfield, Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundley find multiple variations on point of view, ambiguous perspective, and flashes of background action. Using Myers' psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis to establish exposition and characterization for the mute, towering killer, Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill set up deadlines and dangling clauses for Halloween night, before playing out Myers' stalking of Laurie and friend Annie through cross-cutting their parallel suburban homes.

At its best, Halloween restricts and delays its violent, if not overly gory conclusion, with interruptions, digressions culminating in a brief, charged close-up confrontation between Laurie and Myers. Carpenter's skill at executing a mix of unseen, simply defined threat in Myers and the relentless repetition of point of view, and tracking shots through restricted space, broadened through Jamie Lee Curtis's grounded performance as Laurie, characterized again by a slow-burning unease in identifying and reacting to her pursuer. From Assault on Precint 13's Western-influenced urban conflict and character-driven plotlines for stacking obstacles and a siege mentality, Halloween then sees Carpenter explore opportunities for formal tension and ambiguous perspective in blending narrative pursuit to amplify its more lurid elements..

Moreover, an occasionally explicit but stereotype-breaking teen cast and setting, as well as a de-motivated, elemental killer would be revisited in Christine, ramping up the guignol violence and explicitness, but without sacrificing Halloween's complex treatment of a high-concept pitch and potential for broad teen film appeal. Carpenter's love of classical genres, narrative structure and visual style exploiting budgetary restrictions thus frame the director's crucial role in a period that saw the maturation of theatrical and tie-in merchandise youth-marketing, and later cable and video distribution define both saturation and occasional, more lasting contributions to horror and the crossover genre picture by the early 1980s.

Cemetery Junction (Stephen Merchant; Ricky Gervais 2010)

2010-05-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

Having missed both of Ricky Gervais' recent studio outings with Ghost Town and The Invention of Lying after disappointing reviews, Cemetery Junction didn't fill me with tremendous enthusiasm. Saying that, while limited in scope, its conventional coming of age period comedy work-out was enjoyable if perhaps indicative of Gervais' prolific output at present. I tend to vary between enjoying the innovation of The Office and to a lesser extent Extras, but after podcast, celebrity and standup saturation over the past few years, the comedian seems to be running the danger of spreading himself too thin in low-cost, mid-level transatlantic productions. Supported by Columbia, Junction stages itself in Gervais' home town of Reading in 1973 and the varied attempts of its twentysomething leads to break out of family and local restrictions.

Focus falls on Freddie Taylor, who joins an insurance company in a bid to distance himself from his father (Gervais) and friend Bruce's passing into the local factory. Along with fellow friend Snork, a station conductor, they plan to break out of Reading and the working-class Cemetery Junction, while Freddie's doubts over his new career intensify as childhood sweetheart Julie reappears as the fiancee of cynical work colleague Mike, linked through their joint boss and Julie's father Mr. Kendrick. As Freddie gradually realizes his dead-end situation, motivation shapes around persuading Julie to avoid her mother's fate and escape the town.

Without necessarily offering many surprises in terms of plotting and characterization, Gervais and co-director and producer Stephen Merchant are able to indulge in low-key character comedy, supporting cast and a range of period-specific set-pieces, from impromptu Slade performances, discos and segments of ironic dated comedy. However, Gervais resists fully exploiting period trappings for excess, instead grounding a straightforward coming of age story with enough pathos to maintain depth without amping up realism. With Remi Adefarasin's cinematography working around detailed production design and straightforward editing and shooting with occasional bursts of slow-motion soundtracked bridges, Cemetery is effectively produced without breaking too far from the staples of its genre, from revelatory crisis, and a fast-paced climax hinging on a partial escape and romantic reconciliation.

In this respect it almost feels like Gervais working through a stack of potential projects, taking on nostalgia within clearly structured rites of passage, efficient if unremarkable production and crowd-pleasing character beats. With a recent adaptation of his podcast as an animated half hour for HBO and Channel Four, a nationwide tour and a BBC commission for a Warwick Davies comedy, Gervais' alternation with solidly made but formulaic Hollywood romantic comedies reflects a career still driving box office success. Gervais certainly can't be accused of resting on his existing success, although at this rate it seems unlikely that a new Office will be coming along any time soon. As it is, Cemetery Junction is pleasing and likely to stabilize Gervais' bankable output for another few years at least.

The Straight Story (David Lynch 1999)

2010-04-30T09:27:00.000-07:00

David Lynch not being David Lynch is usually how reviewers describe 1999's The Straight Story, essentially the director's most conventionally structured and shot work. Distributed through Disney, and co-produced by Film Four, Straight came after the body-splitting Lost Highway, and would win praise for its warm-hearted, if still resolutely quirky tone. Adapting the true story of Alvin Straight, an elderly Iowan who decides to travel to his estranged brother in Wisconsin after he suffers a stroke, obstacles see him make the 6 week journey on a tractor. In meeting a range of characters on the journey, Alvin is able to reflect and ultimately reconcile with his brother. Richard Farnworth's performance as Alvin would see the actor and former stuntman win praise for anchoring an understated narrative punctuated by dark humour. Unfortunately, soon after Farnsworth would take his own life after suffering from prostate cancer.

In some ways Straight follows familiar Lynchian interests and stylistic tendencies, from a cast of eccentric middle American characters to incongruous cameos and sweeping, long and tracking shot journeys through landscapes retaining the director's fascination with the textures and the spaces of rural and urban America. However, the eccentric excesses and the darker undertones of Lynch's other homages to Americana are restrained into a more casual naturalism that allows the effectively 'straight' story to be explored through a series of intimate vignettes. Most of Lynch's work has been arguably characterized by undercurrents of sentimentality and emotion offset by surreal plot detours and abstract stylistic flourishes, contributing to the director's distinctive control of tone.

Alvin's monologues, reconstructing a life from boyhood to the war and marriage, are carried by Farnsworth's performance and recurring sections of travelling through the Iowan and Wisconsin landscape, layered by Angelo Badalamenti's rich score's refrains. With supporting turns by Sissy Spacek and a range of Lynch regulars, dialogue detours and Freddie Francis's mix of location cinematography and simply blocked interiors and set-ups then reinforce a simple but effective style. While Lynch would go on to return to more familiar surreal plotting and darker subject matter with Mulholland Drive, The Straight Story proved his ability to mount a well-crafted, emotionally grounded and rewarding narrative within carefully worked restrictions, finding depth in Alvin's story without resorting to sentimentality.

Dark Star (John Carpenter 1974)

2010-04-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

Something of an oddity, John Carpenter's debut feature Dark Star (1974) developed out of a film school project with co-writer Dan O'Bannon, before finding independent financing for a release that built a cult status in the mid 1970s, helping the director towards Assault on Precint 13. O'Bannon would later go on to find broader success by scripting Alien, which coincidentally I also caught up on this week. Set in a distant future where a space ship destroys unstable planets light years from Earth, the mostly bored crew Doolittle, Pinback, Boiler and Talby pass the time, communicate with the ship's computer and carry out their mission. Marketed as 'the Spaced Out Odyssey' for the 'Strangelove Generation', it's a compact riff on the space genre, blending light countercultural references with an intimate silliness.

With simply designed sets producing stacked interiors, tracking shots and miniature to animated space effects, as well as video cut-aways and Carpenter's trademark electronic scoring, the film's growth from a short is most evident in the extension of its core plotline, as the crew deal with a sentient bomb that malfunctions after an electro-magnetic storm, leading Doolittle to try and persuade it of the rationality of explodig itself. Whimsical asides and a conclusion producing a planet surfing journey then establishes much of the film's character-focused charm and tongue-in-cheek rambling, digressionary structure. This is best seen in a central sequence as Pinback duels with a captive alien (in effect a beachball) through the ship, setting up some of Carpenter's later virtuosity with simply staged action blocking and cutting for a lift shaft escape.

As a youth-marketed film whose blunt effects and throw-away humour bring a laidback degree of playful realism to the operatic space genre, Dark Star's cult status in limited release and as a midnight movie drawing small but loyal audiences allowed it to become a calling-card for both Carpenter and O'Bannon. Taken on its own merits the inventive use of space, technical limitations and solutions bear out an enjoyable feature that spins out the pastiche humour of its student project origins. In later taking the concept of the cynical space crew, claustrophobia and an alien into darker territory with Ridley Scott in Alien, O'Bannon's cues from B movies to the scale of the science fiction character comedy would then anchor his longer-lasting contribution to the science fiction genre, albeit without the charm of beachball terrorization.

The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson 2009)

2010-04-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

In retrospect, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (2002) was never going to be the easiest novel to adapt. Focusing on the violent rape, death and afterlife commentary of the 14 year old Susie Salmon on her grieving family, it's a distinctive, if sometimes uneasy mix of saccharine sweetness and graphic realism. Still, Peter Jackson's track record, particularly the fantasy-laden Heavenly Creatures and a precedent with wife Philippa Boyens for adapting tricky novels, acquired the option via FilmFour, development rights and financing, with distribution eventually going to DreamWorks and then Paramount. The long development process, stretching back to 2001, and the rewrites and adaptations taken from its FilmFour to Jackson production, are then perhaps evident in a final feature that while excellent in places, quickly unravels in a rushed final third.

In 1973, Susie Salmon narrates her life within a small Pennsylvanian town, parents, younger sister and brother, shifting from boyfriend troubles and an occasionally fractious but loving relationship with her family into a brutal country field murder (and rape, though not covered in the film) by loner neighbour George Harvey. Continuing to observe from a place somewhere between the world and Heaven, Susie watches as her father sinks into obsession as a police hunt, headed by Michael Imperioli's local detective, runs out of steam and her mother leaves them. While the novel spans out the Salmons' story, Jackson and Boyen's screenplay notably flags up suspicion over Harvey, his disappearance and the reuniting of the family, allowing Susie to pass on.

This final third then upsets an uneasily pitched, but occasionally beautifully shot range of narrative segments, with Andrew Lesnie's cinematography both capturing the 1973 period detail and an expressive, CGI afterlife. Saoirse Ronan's performance also does well in anchoring the voicever, although without the deeper pathos and darker themes of the novel. The latter is probably the film's greater problem - while showcasing some of the blunter aspects of Harvey as a serial killer, the sense of grief conveyed in the film mostly falls between pathos and hysteria. Casting Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, as well as Susan Sarandon as an eccentric grandmother probably wasn't the right mix either, and too often Bones runs the risk of competing performance tones cancelling each other out.

Moreover, while Jackson retains his natural flair for fluid action sequences, wide compositions, and period design, the limited blocking of the family home and the visual flourishes of Susie's afterlife never quite integrate stylistically, and the film's effects mostly fall into a few well-executed segments upset by some pacing issues. While running to over two hours, sub-plots and extensive, if perhaps unavoidable attention to the grieving process at the centre of the narrative leave the film's resolution somewhat rushed, and unbalanced by a glib flashforward to Harvey's accidental death.

Given time to explore and draw out Susie's pathos as she watches her family age, Sebold's novel works itself to a reflective conclusion, a balance lacked by the adaptation's compression of a good few hundred pages of the novel. As it is, The Lovely Bones was better than I expected, given the theatrical reviews, but ultimately falls down in executing visually, rather than structurally the impact of its source. In this way, it's a weaker variation on the similarly problematic Time Traveler's Wife, which at least managed to strip out the book's more literary flourishes and retain a straightforward, but compact romance.

Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn 2010)

2010-04-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

A long in the releasing adaptation of Mark Millar's tongue-in-cheek, ultraviolent comic, Kick Ass achieves the rare success of an action film (and a comic book one at that) with genuine comedic timing and balance. Focusing on Dave Lizweski, a New York teenager whose consideration of real-life superheroes leads him to a tightfitting wetsuit and an early beating that leaves him in hospital. Soon after though he finds himself involved in a citywide conflict between crime boss Frank D'Amico and the 'real'' superheroes Big Daddy and Hit-Girl. A father and young daughter, with the former an ex-policeman vowing revenge for D'Amico's part in his framing and death of his wife, Hit-Girl's training into a deadly weapon sees them cut through city crime. Lizweski's sudden internet popularity after a video of a fight starts a YouTube phenomenon then anchors his uneasy, but increasing role in Big Daddy and Hit Girl's push into D'Amico's New York stronghold.

Directed by Matthew Vaughn, with screenwriting credit to Jane Goldman, Kick-Ass resisted studio calls to tone down the comic's violent content for theatrical distribution, and eventually found willing partners in niche-oriented Lionsgate and wide release through Universal. Taking a risk on the concept is however fully justified (if not perhaps in terms of a slower than expected US opening weekend) as Vaughn and Goldman bring out Millar's comic into a tightly packed action-comedy. Structured around Lizeweski's ironic voiceover, setting up and breaking expectations for superhero origin stories, while gradually upping the scale and cartoon realism of its setting, the origin-to-crimefighting transition rarely drops a beat in establishing and then resolving its two-part plot and subplots. Bringing the Kick-Ass story in line with the Hit Girl and Big Daddy flashback and motivation, while playing off Lizweski's romantic struggles and a father-son relationship between D'Amico and comic-loving son Chris, familiar teen film to superhero conventions are recombined to strong effect.

Similarly effective, and drawing most of the film's press, is Chloe Moretz's breakout performance as the 11-year-old Hit-Girl as an incongruous mix of profanity, ultra-violence and vulnerability. Finding a comedic balance across the cast then lets Vaughn enjoy the escalating set pieces without tipping into pastiche. With Ben Davis's cinematography achieving the primary coloured Manhattan glow that distinguished the Spiderman franchise, throwing everything at the screen is then earnt through the gradual cues to Kick-Ass's initial beatings, and while sharing The Dark Knight's lowered rating for 'comic book', as opposed to 'strong bloody violence', the film doesn't pull back from the unease of its actions.

Arguments for the film's unsuitability for a younger audience should though consider it's resistance to an adult tone - it's an adolescent fantasy that plays off its audience, holds back exploitation and does so with enough ironic humour to balance out and make subtextual interpretation part of the narrative's running commentary. While criticism of films that might disguise their exploitation through on-screen deconstruction might point to the same end result, Kick Ass is simply fun and intelligent enough to clearly signpost tone and expectations to its broad, niche genre and wider 15 plus to adult demographic.

Christine (John Carpenter 1983)

2010-04-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

Produced at Columbia during John Carpenter's prolific spell as a major studio director in the early to mid 1980s, Christine succeeds in delivering its Stephen King-adapting concept without sacrificing the essential silliness of its premise. In King's novel (unpublished when the rights were acquired), the possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury of the title leads to obsession for high school student Arnie Cunningham in 1978 and a series of deaths. Coming in a period where King's work alternated between the epic and the readable but somewhat bizarre, extending to killer dogs (Cujo), Christine as book and film nonetheless becomes a sly, well-crafted homage and contemporary achievement within the conventions of the teen horror film.

Following the car's evil beginnings in a Detroit factory to its hold over Arnie, a student struggling as a senior alongside his more popular best friend Dennis, Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Phillips trace Arnie's gradual obsession with Christine. As he refits the car, Arnie's personality experiences radical changes, and police investigate the deaths of a local gang after they attack the Fury. Dennis and Arnie's former girlfriend Leigh then attempt to destroy the car as the death count, and Arnie's madness rises. Purely as a concept, Christine shouldn't really work, but once the assumption that the car is possessed is established, Carpenter brings menace and some economically produced set pieces to a well-acted ensemble cast. Moreover, screenwriter Phillips provides some depth to the teen film setting, establishing both a high school quarterback as an eventual protagonist, while playing with exploitation conventions for the moral and physical corruption of its teenage lead. With explicit dialogue pushing the film into a hard R rating, its targeted appeal indulges in youth film excesses without losing momentum as an effectively structured plot between identifying and destroying the car.

In this respect Christine is more light-hearted and knowing than the similarly staged Carrie, pushing at its marginally sillier horror premise. Accompanied by a predominantly classic rock and roll score, with nods to fifties delinquent cycles, Carpenter and cinematographer Donald Morgan put a higher-end budget to good use, with Panavision crane shots, blocked car chases and a central reverse-photography rebuilding of the car enhancing practical effects. Christine works then in showcasing Carpenter, but also the production as a whole's balancing of solid conventions without becoming overly ironic or glib in its homages, retaining the director's tight 90-100 minute running lengths, reduced exposition and focus on developing rounded characters to offset some of the excesses of its killer car premise. As a result, it's not as atmospheric as The Thing, or as consistent within Carpenter's style and narrative structuring as his early 1980s work, but acts as an entertainingly constructed response to the challenge of turning King's high-concept source into a superior teen horror.

Viewing Round-Up

2010-04-13T04:16:00.000-07:00

With conferences, thesis writing and squeezing in trips to the cinema filling up time over the past couple of months, being able to regularly update this blog has been difficult. Like most things, it's more a question of habit than demand. Still, over the past few weeks I've managed to get through a range of interesting films, as well as continuing to follow and build on past and ongoing television series. In terms of film, my John Carpenter marathon, while stalling somewhat, returned to 1976's Assault on Precint 13.

A signature production for the director as he moved from early critical acclaim for Dark Star into the margins and independent success of Halloween, setting up the stable video-linked distribution and studio specialities of the 1980s, it's Carpenter at its best. 90 minutes long, simply structured around a siege at an abandoned police station in Los Angeles, narrative and stylistic economy combines to develop Carpenter's focus on B-movie scenarios with rounded characters and a love of remixing classic genres. Still on my Carpenter list: Dark Star, Christine, Star Man and hopefully Prince of Darkness if I can find a copy.

More broadly, my television viewing has continued to build around Lost's final season, which may get a fuller post on completion. So far though, and owing to the shift from marathon DVD to weekly episodic viewing, the show's juggling time-frames, character development and mix of mythology and cyclical moral lessons could go either way for the conclusion. Mostly good so far though. In addition, E4 has served up more episodes of one of my favourite sitcoms in How I Met Your Mother, which I came across on network repeat, followed through E4, caught up on DVD and now watch weekly on the channel. Taking a narrative twisting concept - retrospective explanation of how the lead character met his future wife to his children through constant flash and sub-flashbacks - the show depends on its consistently sharp writing, and like the best sitcoms, the chemistry between its lead cast.

I've also been following, and highly recommend Chuck, an ABC/Warner show focusing on a Burbank computer technician who downloads the CIA's secrets to his brain and has to work with agency minders in a double life. While the concept didn't leap out at me when I first heard about the show, it's one of the most underrated programs of the past few years, exercising pop nostalgia, goofiness and emotional sincerity in line with the kinds of flexible format and complex character interaction and intertextual virtuosity of cult-oriented series.

By contrast, I also caught up on the first season of AMC's Breaking Bad, a superbly dark blend of cable drama pathos, adult content 'edge' in its high school teacher with cancer becoming a meth chemist. Although maybe not quite on the level of Mad Men, the show's critical impact and lead performance of Bryan Cranston have helped the basic network cement their upstart brand identity as bridging some of the best of HBO's boomer-oriented, slow-moving family narratives with the slightly harsher and more explicit edge of FX and Showtime.

Closer to home, I've thoroughly enjoyed Stephen Moffatt's relaunch of Doctor Who, which without going too far into a rambling account, promises to take the writer's standalone episodes into a season-length enhancement of the tired final years of Russell T. Davies. Just based on the first two episodes, Moffatt brings out the best in Davies' 2005 reimagining without some of the sillier excesses, dated pop culture references and clumsy plotting of the series at its flawed, but still landmark best over the past few years. I also need though to catch up on the third season of the flawed but occasionally compelling Ashes to Ashes.

In film terms I should see Kick Ass this week, and have Roman Polanski's The Ghost, and Iron Man 2 on the radar. For television, a combination of time and broadband has meant following HBO's aggressive push for The Pacific will have to wait for DVD, as well as last Sunday's premiere of David Simon's Treme, and continuing episodes of How to Make it in America. Probably given my regular HBO writing, what has become a crucial year for series development and programming ambition might end up being more of a restrospective rather than immediate experience.

RIP David Mills

2010-04-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

David Mills, co-writer and producer on The Corner, The Wire and more recently Treme, died a few days ago after suffering a brain aneurysm at the age of 48. Mills was involved in some of the most groundbreaking primetime dramas of the 1990s and 2000s, working on NBC's Homicide and ER, as well as ABC's NYPD Blue from a background in newspaper reporting. He went on to play a key role in the production of The Corner for HBO in 2000 with David Simon, and was briefly involved in The Wire with Simon from 2002, as well as troubled CBS crime miniseries Kingpin. Treme, which debuts this month on HBO, would have continued his productive relationship with Simon and the network.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/01/local/la-me-david-mills1-2010apr01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/31/AR2010033101772.html?hpid=moreheadlines

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/arts/television/01mills.html