| For TRIBUNE: 'Breakfast on Pluto' (film) / "Hollywood's New Radicalism" (book) |
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  these reviews written for the January 13th 2006 edition of TRIBUNE magazine Just visiting this planet... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Breakfast On Pluto Ireland (Ire/UK) 2005 Starring : Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson Director : Neil Jordan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AFTER the fair-to-middling End of the Affair and the ho-hum Good Thief, Breakfast On Pluto depressingly confirms Neil Jordan's decline as a creative cinematic force - in fact, it's strong evidence that the process is rapidly accelerating. Because this is a quite bafflingly, thuddingly inept filming of Patrick McCabe's Booker-shortlisted 1998 novel - named after a briefly-popular late-sixties novelty single by 'King of the Buskers' Don Partridge. The movie is primarily a showcase for fast-rising star Murphy - whose eyecatching performance as transvestite Patrick 'Kitten' Braden has been duly nominated for a Golden Globe (Best Actor, Comedy/Musical). We follow Kitten from his birth and schooldays in the Irish border-town of Cavan, through his troubled adolescence, and into early adulthood when he treks to England in search of the mother who abandoned him as a baby. Consciously "different" from a very early age, the Candide-like Kitten wafts through life on a cloud of glamour and sequins - his progress only occasionally interrupted by his becoming caught up in the political tumult of his times: most of Breakfast on Pluto takes place around 1970-1974, when the politics of Ireland - 'north' and 'south' - were in a particularly difficult and violent phase... This timeframe gives the costumers and production-designers ample scope to run raucously riot. But the results, under Jordan's guidance, are sadly more Velveteen Slagheap than Velvet Goldmine: many of the period details are just plain wrong, and there's a fuzziness about chronology which means we're never entirely sure precisely when things are taking place. If Jordan's script was up to scratch, of course, the audience's attention wouldn't snag on such peripherals - but the screenplay is a gimmicky confection of camp, sentimentalised whimsy. And it doesn't help that every couple of minutes we get a chapter number and "amusing" title appearing on screen in a childish hand - those numbers reaching well into the thirties by the time this inordinately long picture finally, mercifully, clanks to a halt. Neil Young
Keep the red carpet flying --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hollywood's New Radicalism - War, Globalisation and the Movies from Reagan to George W.Bush : Ben Dickenson ............................................................................................................................ I B Tauris £14.99 HOLLYWOOD'S engagement with political issues - both on and off screen - is a subject as old and complex as the dream-factory itself. Restricting himself (rather arbitrarily) to the period since 1980, Dickenson examines various forms of Hollywood activism, focussing on groups as well as individuals - though it's appropriate that his cover shows not a mass of demonstrators but Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon at the Oscars. The pair are prominent members of the Hollywood-activism pantheon towards which Dickenson shows an almost hagiographic reverence - you wonder what he made of Trey Parker's brilliant, deliriously cynical film Team America : World Police, which so gleefully eviscerated so many of his sacred cows (and which, despite hitting our multiplexes over a year ago, is never mentioned here). One doesn't have to be Rush Limbaugh, for instance, to regard Robbins' Cradle Will Rock (which Dickenson fulsomely admires) as preachy and cack-handed, or to view Sean Penn as a violent, hot-headed, self-regarding, self-righteous blowhard - perhaps the last person who should lecture us about war-torn Iraq. But as Dickenson sees it, Penn, Robbins, Sarandon and Alec Baldwin are valiant crusaders for truth and justice - he posits a Manichean dualism between spotless heroes and black-hatted villains. Among the 'good guys', names such as Haskell Wexler, Mike Farrell, Danny Glover and Ed Asner pop up with monotonous regularity - Asner even makes it onto the front and back covers, supplying blurbs which, given Dickenson's comments about the former Lou Grant star inside, have a distinct "you scratch my back" whiff about them. It's almost (but not quite) enough to make you sympathise with Dickenson's 'devils': among whom director David Fincher seems to be a particular bete noire. "Fincher is disconnected from the anti-globalisation movement," sniffs Dickenson, "and appears on none of the lists of campaigns or activities that Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover or Sean Penn have been involved in."As if these weren't sufficiently heinous crimes, Fincher's Fight Club is dissed and dismissed: "In terms of directorial influence," Dickenson fumes, "Fight Club had no one at the helm with a vision shaped by direct connection to the crisis of liberalism or the re-invigorated Hollywood left that emerged in the late 1990s." Paragraph after paragraph is written in this clunky, nebulous style, one that repeatedly cries out for an editor's guiding hand. As it is, Dickenson (sloppily-indexed) book lacks the discipline and focus to appeal to an academic market, but is simply too dull (and, for a 200-page paperback, expensive) for a mainstream readers. Movie fans, meanwhile, will soon discover that Dickenson's grasp of his ostensible subject is often tenuous: factual gaffes include a reference to Hollywood bigwig "Simon" Redstone (instead of 'Sumner'); there's repeated talk of Cannes' "Palm d'Or"; any film made with a realistic style is mislabelled "faux-documentary"; and Spike Lee's "style of film-making [is] uniquely brilliant," whatever that means. Having gone into great detail about both Fight Club and Oliver Stone's Wall Street, meanwhile, it's astonishing that no mention is made of Fincher's terrific The Game, which deliberately deployed Stone's leading-man Michael Douglas (alongside Sean Penn!) as part of its subversive critique of America's capitalist structures. This is all the more surprising as Dickenson consistently operates on the basis that directors are pretty much the be-all and end-all of the movie-making process. Writers are very lucky to get the most fleeting acknowledgement: he devotes page after page to his interpretation of Sam Mendes' American Beauty, but it's only when discussing TV show Six Feet Under that he bother to mention (in an aside) that the film's script was written by Alan Ball. Ball's writing won him an Oscar; Dickenson's, sad to report, is rather more deserving of a Golden Raspberry. Neil Young
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