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EDINBURGH
2003
brief
notes on movies shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, 2003
by
Neil Young
PART
THREE : One For the Road to Wondrous Oblivion
(click here for Part One or Part
Two)
ONE
FOR THE ROAD
7/10
UK 2003
: Chris COOKE : 96 mins
Given its sub-Full
Monty premise, this is a surprisingly strong and successful British
comedy – one whose laughs derive in no small part from the very dark undercurrents
that periodically flare towards the surface. A disparate group of men
– all of them having been found guilty of drunk-driving – come together
once a week for an awkward group-counselling session in an unnamed East
Midlands town (Newark?)
The strong
suit is Cooke’s script, brought to vivid life by a mostly unknown cast.
Hywel Bennett (looking more and more like David Hemmings) is the only
‘name’ on view, and he provides welcome ballast as a sleazy fat-cat businessmen
who lords it over his less financially comfortable ‘friends’. Among these
Mark Devenport gets most of the belly-laughs as a doughy, easy-going taxi
driver – but the biggest impact is made by Rupert Procter’s delightfully
two-faced schemer: all wheedling vulnerability one minute, all venal,
vicious cunning the next.
The story itself
is a little ramshackle – Devenport, Procter and Greg Chisholm (the nominal
lead as the youngest member of the group) plot to draw Bennett into a
dubious “business deal” that degenerates into a chaotic, violent party
at the latter’s country mansion. And Cooke suffers from directorial first-time-it
is, with much cut-happy DV gimmickry, and some over-fussy camerawork (he’s
clearly studied the bar scenes from Mean Streets). But these faults
do little to detract from what is at once a genuinely funny comedy, and
also a piercingly bleak voyage into a post-Thatcherite provincial, pub-centred
netherworld of delusional losers clinging to hollow mantras of management-speak
as they drift into the abyss.
For a full
review of this film click here.
PARTY
MONSTER
5/10
USA 2003
: Fenton BAILEY & Randy BARBATO : 99 mins
This year’s
Hedwig (same producer)
– rise and fall of post-Warhol Manhattan ‘club kid’ Michael Alig (Macaulay
Culkin) and his partner-in-fashion crime James St James (Seth Green),
on whose salacious memoir Disco Bloodbath the movie is based.
Audience’s tolerance for camp / kitsch will be tested to full – waspy
chat, extreme costumes, music of the period, set-pieces, scandalous excess
of drugs/sex/violence: “The road of excess leads to a palace of fabulousness!”
St James exclaims.
Split-focus
biopic of Alig / St James – also chronicle of NY club scene from late
80s to early 90s … has any era of NY club scene NOT been chronicled and
celebrated on celluloid? (or, in this case, cheap-looking DV… directors
take cue from St James’ boast that him and his pals are “PROFOUNDLY SUPERFICIAL”)
Doesn’t help that now we’re on to the relatively obscure “club kid” period,
sans celebs (“No poor or ugly people allowed” reads one flier.)
Compensatory
plusses : top-value Seth Green breaks loose with shameless, suitably outrageous
performance (“I’m not addicted to drugs, I’m addicted to glamour!”) in
array of wigs, makeup and costumes that must have eaten fair-sized chunk
of whatever budget there was.
All pretty
awful on the eye – though paradoxically, cheap and ramshackle look probably
creates accurate idea of the period… their artificiality, or actors’?
or both? anything goes – they’re living their own self-referential movie,
and they know it (“cue the music!” … “perception is reality”)
Post-modern
to-camera winks and nods are entertaining, but have been done many times
before – most direct comparison is 24
Hour Party People, chronicling roughly same era and similar ecstasy-fuelled
culture on other side of the Atlantic (again the Warhol influence: ‘Factory
Records’ in 24HPP) Not in that picture’s league. Direction distinctly
prone to cliché (tinkly piano!)
Energetically
assembled, however, and sometimes all suddenly comes together – impromptu
Dallas gig with Culkin and Chloe Sevigny on stage: “Money, Success, Fame,
Glamour!” he intones through a miniature loud-hailer and it all clicks
into place.
But, like all
such bios (openly building to tragic finale, cf Auto
Focus), very episodic, much less fun on way down (inevitably drug-fuelled)
than up : as HE unravels, so does pic’s momentum – somewhat garbled finale.
We don’t find out what happened, and must depend on the testimony of a
rat – literally. Hallucination sequence: man appears in rat costume to
deliver exposition. Then all comes to sudden end – disappointing there’s
no picture-credits, no “what happened next” after this messy final stretch.
Directors, it seems, have attention spans as short as their heroes.
For an interview
with Randy Barbato, Fenton Bailey
and James St James – directors and writer of Party Monster
click here.
THE
RAGE IN PLACID LAKE
4/10?
Australia
2003 : Tony McNAMARA : 90 mins
After last
year’s Australian Rules,
and this year’s Ned Kelly (see Edinburgh
2), further evidence to support the theory that Edinburgh artistic
director Shane Danielsen selects some distinctly underwhelming films from
his own homeland. This one is a very inoffensive and minor teen comedy
in which a bumbling semi-weirdo lad (Ben Lee) - named Placid Lake by his
flower-child parents - engages in a geeky romance with a spectacle-wearing
oddball stunner (Rose Byrne).
Writer-director
McNamara seems to be aiming for some kind of cross between Rushmore
and Ghost World,
but doesn’t have the skill as a writer or director to pull it off – and,
while Byrne has plenty of svreen presence, the oft-wooden Lee isn’t much
help. Even Miranda Richardson struggles to breathe much life into the
stilted dialogue, with McNamara trying to milk the laziest kind of laughs
out of her dippy-hippy pronouncements. Gauzily TV-bland to look at, this
is forgettably mild fare that seems a baffling choice for what’s supposed
to be a major international film festival.
SHIMKENT
HOTEL
4/10
Schimkent
Hotel : France (Fr/UK) 2003 : Charles DE MEAUX : 92 mins
Of all the
post-USSR “new” countries, Kazakhstan is among the most enigmatic and
fascinating - even in John McTiernan’s duff Rollerball
remake, with its striking night-vision scene in which Chris Klein
and LL Cool J try to escape on motorbikes across the vast Steppes landscape
It’s definitely the real thing in Shimkent, in one of most bizarre
movies of year.
Conventional
structure (psychiatrist’s interrogation of traumatised individual, then
chronological flashbacks fill in the story leading up to mysterious dire
event that left him sole survivor) but content is decidedly offbeat :
young French businessfolk (fake?) attempt to buy into Kazakh aluminium
industry!
They lose their
way…At times, a little Blair Witch – if that picture took place
in vast treeless expanses of central Asia. Docu feel, obvious there aren’t
many actors here – aluminium factory people are the real deal.
Plenty of ‘down
time’ for audiences to spend time wondering why and how film was made
– because premise, while engagingly oddball, isn’t enough on its own.
Execution,
while visually striking (inevitably, given geography of setting, despite
usual limitations of digital video) is dramatically inert. Proceeds in
fits and starts, and we’re never really sure why or how. Drive a camion
or camel through some of the arty pauses (check out the French people’s
priceless non-reaction when “their” workers go on strike). All ends rather
abruptly, with clunky revelation of what happened to the rest. But by
this stage we don’t really know or care what’s happening, who lived and
who died. This reviewer found himself snoring at a crucial stage : not
a good sign.
SPUN
1/10
USA (US/Sweden)
2002 : Jonas AKERLUND : 100 mins
Drug-pic Spun
is terrible for many reasons, but the main one is that every hyperbolic
shot, every cut and every camera movement has been done 1,652,571 times
before in other films, videos and TV – there’s not a trace of originality
in either direction or script. Spun is like a sour parody of what
you’d expect an “acclaimed” music-video director’s first feature to be
like. Or perhaps a sour parody of all those post-Tarantino pseudo-ironic,
drugs-n-thugs-n-cops pictures. Except parodies should make you want to
laugh. This film may make you want to die. It’s the kind of film that
gives “style” a bad name. It’s also the kind of film that gives “film”
a bad name. Pointless, witless, cliché-ridden, laboured, ugly, misogynistic,
repetitive rubbish – cynically made to pander to worst aspects of white
middle-class teenage/student audiences. But they’re not quite as stupid
as Akerlund and his pals seem to think. Are they?
For other reviews
of films rated 1/10 an 2/10 try our Diorama
of Dishonour
SWIMMING
POOL
4/10
France 2003
: Francois OZON : 103 mins
The arthouse
Identity – a superficially
twisty, well-acted pseudo-thriller that ultimately vanishes up its own
backside, mocking you for ever having taken it seriously. Charlotte Rampling
is an English crime-writer who spends some time at her publisher’s house
in the south of France. Her calm is disturbed by the arrival of a young
woman (Ludivine Sagnier) claiming to be the publisher’s daughter. Complications
ensue… or do they?
It’s not entirely
unpleasurable watching Ozon toy with the conventions of the thriller format
– and Rampling (all of a sudden, apparently one of our Great Actresses?!)
has a rare old time as a character she describes as combining elements
of PD James, Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. But any of those three
writers would run a mile if confronted with the flimsy nonsense that constitutes
Ozon’s story: it’s as if he’d read only synopses of their novels, without
ever coming close to grasping the psychological depth that makes them
successful.
Instead, Ozon
retreats into a film-buff smart-arsery, the idiotic ‘twist’ climax (and
nonsensical coda) revealing him as the latest in a very long line of phoney-fakey
frauds all too happy to play the role of cinematic magus-auteur. He seems
to be believing his own publicity – and his reputation has now apparently
grown to the point that nobody dares point out to him how absurd his “English”
dialogue sounds in the mouths of actual English performers like Rampling
and Dance (as the publisher). According to reliable sources, Ozon has
now moved to the top of the list of directors Nicole Kidman wants to work
with – a state of affairs which, if true, says much more about her than
it does about him.
TORREMOLINOS
73
7/10
Spain (Spn/Denmark)
2003 : Pablo BERGER : 93 mins
Extremely likeable,
thoroughly daft and idiosyncratic satire of movie-making in the dying
days of Franco. Serious subtexts occasionally surface: this is, among
many things, a wry but optimistic view of early pan-European co-operation
between the chilly-but-liberated north and the warm-but-repressed south:
a Danish film-crew helps out a budding director (Talk
To Her’s hangdog Javier Camara) as he progresses from ‘educational’
sex shorts to his “epic” entitled Torremolinos 73. But while the
director has lofty aims to emulate his hero Bergman, the money-men insist
on the film containing some rather more salacious – and therefore commercial
– scenes.
The porn elements
incorporated with some of the bouncy, innocent glee of Boogie
Nights – atmosphere is ‘naughty’ rather than sordid, with period
details (everything is orange and/or brown) captured unobtrusively. Direction
never approaches Paul Thomas Anderson heights of inspiration, but script
is strong: most amusing (and touching) moment comes when our hero has
to produce sperm so that his fertility can be checked: he goes into a
hospital cubicle whose walls are covered with images of naked women, but
prefers to use the passport-sized photo of his own wife for ‘stimulation’.
Movie glides
along on this kind of good-natured character comedy for almost all running-time,
only losing momentum a little in final stretches – not a scrap of self-importance
here, even if film-within-film Torremolinos 73 is the most wildly
pretentious grab-bag of images from likes of Fellini and Bergman. On this
evidence, in fact, Berger is much more entertaining as a film-maker.
WONDROUS
OBLIVION
4/10?
UK 2003
: Paul MORRISON : 106 mins
Cricket / racism
in 1960 London … impeccable pro-tolerance intentions, dull execution …
style would have looked and sounded (that incessant score!) somewhat dated
back in 1960 (Peeping Tom), and here we are more than 40 years
on still making these lukewarm pics – suitable for Sunday afternoon TV,
but what’s it doing taking up cinema screens?
Dodgy “catchphrase”
title that’s often (awkwardly) used (especially in relation to sport)
but never explained – cf Purely
Belter – also aimed to tackle social issues via sporting subculture
and whimsical comedy – only marginally more successful than French pic
Inch’Allah Dimanche,
which also featured cardboard-cut-out neighbours stirring racial strife…
Oblivion clearly a cut above both, but nothing here to detain those
not already interested in subject matter.
Good to see
Delroy Lindo back in Britain as the ‘coach’ who moves in next door, of
course, and the kid is fine in a Harry Potterish kind of way… but sort
of pic where all the kids’ haircuts are anachronistic, despite so much
attention paid to cars, furnishings, etc. Unwisely veers into Far
From Heaven country – tentative “forbidden” romance beyond the
colour bar between married Jewish woman and married Jewish man but there
the comparison ends.
Why set in
London 1960 when Burnley 2003 could have been used? What about lad’s playing-colleague
‘Singh’? (perhaps dealth with in final half-hour – this critic had had
enough after an hour.) Final straw : Lindo’s character quotes CLR James’
definition of “style” as “significant form”. The cheek of it in such
a workmanlike “middle-order” movie.
For the full
stand-alone review of this film click
here
films seen
at Filmhouse, Cameo and UGC cinemas, Edinburgh, between 12th
and 23rd August, 2003
Edinburgh
Film Festival
reviews written
15th September, 2003
For the full
list of every Jigsaw Lounge reviewed film at this 2003 Edinburgh Film
Festival click here
by Neil
Young
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