| for this week's Tribune : KATYN and NORTH BY NORTHWEST ... plus online exclusive : TELSTAR (22 Jun) |
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 Katyn [5/10]Poland 2007 Starring : Artur Zmijewski, Maja Ostaszewska Director : Andrzej Wajda ------------------------------------------------- North By Northwest [8/10] USA 1959 Starring : Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint Director : Alfred Hitchcock ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------- WITH Roman Polanski's The Pianist, Paul Verhoeven's Black Book and, most recently, Jiri Menzel's I Served the King of England, the present decade has been kind to veteran European directors staging comebacks via large-scale, often autobiographical projects dealing with World War II. On paper Katyń - directed by Poland's most revered film-maker, octogenarian Andrzej Wajda (Danton, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds), and nominated for the Foreign-Language Oscar - looks like the latest example of this mini-trend. Reportedly one of the most expensive Polish productions ever mounted, it addresses the still-controversial Katyń massacre of March 1940, when 5,000 Polish officers were executed in a forested area near Smolensk by Soviet forces (another 17,000 were killed elsewhere on the same day as part of the same operation, bringing the toll to around 22,000.) The Soviets initially tried to blame the Nazis for the killing, and arguments over responsibility continue to rumble on. Wajda, whose father was among the victims, adapted (with Przemyslaw Nowakowski) Andrzej Mularczyk's well-regarded book Post Mortem, bringing it to the screen with the help of high-calibre collaborators such as cinematographer Pawel Edelman (Oscar-nominated for The Pianist) and composer Krzystof Penderecki. The resulting film is as professional and sober as one would expect, its focus alternating between a handful of Katyń victims and their loved-ones back home, the time-frame moving back and forward between 1939 and the immediate post-war period until, finally, we witness the slaughter itself. This sequence is an aptly bleak and chilling depiction of the mechanics of murder, a stream of men dispatched with a single bullet to the head and pitched into one of many mass graves. The impact is such that this sequence almost counterbalances the deficiencies of what's gone before. Because whereas Polanski, Verhoeven and Menzel executed their war-epics with an engaging freshness, Wajda's approach is stiff, starchy: his film is a "prestige" drama weighed down by its own scale and reverence. There are effective little touches here and there, but otherwise Katyń is like a dauntingly heavy kind of painting. It may passably function as a necessary history-lesson for current and future generations, but in 2009 seems distractingly dated as a drama - and not just because of the dubbing applied to certain characters' dialogue. Katyń is a solid, impeccably well-intentioned work, opulently accurate in its attention to period details. But this particular story deserves more. THE best "new" film this week turns out to be a full five decades old. But Hitchcock's North By Northwest - back in cinemas via a new print from the BFI - exudes the kind of old-school wit, charm and style that makes most current Hollywood releases seem staid and frowzy. And even though it's been shown countless times on television over the years, this is a fine example of David Thomson's dictum that the small screen is unfair to all films and cruel to great ones. Ah, but is North By Northwest a "great" film? Such a portentous label would sit oddly on an enterprise which takes such pains not to take itself at all seriously (even the title, ostensibly a quotation from Hamlet, turns out to be a non-sequitur description of an aeroplane trip taken via Northwest Airlines.) The jocular opening scenes set the tone: victim of a fluke instance of mistaken identity, flippant, unflappable, middle-aged, twice-divorced, mother-dominated Madison Avenue advertising-executive Roger Thornhill (Grant, still fabulous at 54) suffers what he terms "a slight case of abduction," sparking what the original posters referred to as "a 3,000 mile chase" cross-country. Working from a script by Ernest Lehman, Hitchcock strings together a series of audacious, plausibility-defying set-pieces, several of which have found their place in movie history: most iconically the near-wordless sequence in which Thornhill is pursued by a crop-dusting aeroplane in the featureless expanses of Prairie Stop, Indiana. Then there's the amusingly oddball climax, in which Thornhill and sympathetic femme fatale Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint) flee the henchman of suave villain Philip Vandamm (James Mason) across the sculpted faces on Mount Rushmore - early drafts of the script famously bore the title The Man on Lincoln's Nose (The People in Washington's Hair would have actually been more accurate.) The Rushmore shenanigans lead in to a furiously breakneck wrap-up - all of the convoluted story's manifold threads dealt with in less than sixty seconds - which is the droll pay-off of an elaborate structural gag, the preceding 130-odd minutes having proceeded at more of a casual, Cary-Grant-at-cocktail-hour saunter than anything approaching a full-tilt gallop. It's typical of a picture which functions more as a sleek paranoid comedy than any kind of nailbiting thriller - one of the lighter "entertainments" of the later Hitchcock and, if not quite up to the level of, say, Vertigo, The Birds, Psycho or Frenzy, right at the top of his career's second XI. Neil Young 9th June, 2009 written for the 17th June edition of Tribune magazine  also released this week : TELSTAR - THE JOE MEEK STORY This relentlessly discordant misfire wastes the fascinating tale of Joe Meek, the 1960s genius/madman producer who was - for a time - the British answer to Phil Spector. Director/co-writer Nick Moran adapts his own play for the screen, and what may have worked on stage simply falls apart on the big screen - not least because of his own directorial deficiencies. His control of tone is disastrously wayward, with the early scenes - in which we're introduced to Meek's makeshift recording studio, above a handbag shop in north London - playing like jaunty farce, while Meek's later descent into paranoia and rifle-toting insanity come over like a half-baked homage to Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. Along the way there's a distracting, gimmicky parade of small-screen faces - pointless cameos from the likes of Jimmy Carr and Marcus Brigstocke, plus a thoroughly charmless turn from James Corden as Meek's in-house drummer Clem Cattini - to the point that 'Tellystar' would be a more appropriate moniker. The film is actually named after Meek's biggest hit, a number-one smash on both sides of the Atlantic that exploited contemporary fascinations with space and satellites. But despite a running-time of nearly two hours, we get hardly any insight into Meek's methods or motivations - and his homosexuality, while not entirely glossed over, is notably downplayed (see Jon Savage's article for a much more rounded and informative look at Meek's achievements, mishaps and torments.) Con O'Neill, who played Meek in the stage version, alternates between spittle-flecked fury and megalomaniac sneering - and so makes it very hard for us to feel any sympathy for his ultimate, painful downward spiral. Pam Ferris copes as well as can be expected as his putupon landlady, but the younger members of the cast appear left to their own devices - and the less said about Kevin Spacey's ginger-wigged turn as Meek's ever-so-English financial backer Major Banks the better. The absolute nadir, however, is the sight of Carl Barat (of The Libertines and Dirty Pretty Things fame) in his two embarrassing scenes as rockabilly legend Gene Vincent - absurd, insulting casting that marks a nadir not only in the unbearable farrago that is Telstar but also, arguably, in the whole of recent British cinema. Then again, what are you to expect from a biopic that can't even spell its subject's name correctly in the end titles: given own legendary attention to detail, one can only presume that "Jo" [sic] Meek is spinning in his grave - at 78rpm. Neil Young 19th/22nd June, 2009 ~ ~ ~ KATYN : [5/10] : Andrzej WAJDA : Poland 2007 : 122m (BBFC) : seen Berlinale Palast, 15th March 2008 (press show) : Berlinale [Berlin International Film Festival] - original review NORTH BY NORTHWEST : [8/10] : Alfred HITCHCOCK : USA 1959 : 136m (BBFC) : seen Pictureville cinema, National Media Museum, Bradford, 25th March 2009 (public show - complimentary ticket) : Bradford International Film Festival TELSTAR - THE JOE MEEK STORY : [1/10] : Nick MORAN : UK 2008 : 119m (BBFC) : seen Odeon cinema, Nuneaton, 12th June 2009 (press show) : 61st Cinemadays event ~ ~ ~ |
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