for 17.Dec.TRIBUNE: ‘Gonzo’ [6/10]; ‘Mum & Dad’ [6/10]; 2008 Roundup including Top Ten

Published on: December 21st, 2008

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SCROLL DOWN FOR THE "TOP TEN" STUFF
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Gonzo : The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson
USA 2008
Documentary with : Hunter S Thompson, Jann Wenner
Director : Alex Gibney
(released on 19th December)
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Mum & Dad
UK 2008
Starring : Olga Fedori, Perry Benson
Director : Steven Sheil
(released on 26th December)
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THERE'S been a mini-blizzard of documentaries about the late, much-lamented American journalist, debauchee and political provocateur Dr Hunter S Thompson in the last few years. But Gonzo is the first to obtain UK distribution, partly thanks to director Alex Gibney's recent Oscar success with Iraq/Afghanistan/Guantanamo expose Taxi to the Dark Side. Anyone hoping, however, that Gibney has delivered the definitive word on Thompson – author of cult-classics including The Great Shark Hunt, Hell's Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, who committed suicide aged 67 in 2005 – will likely be somewhat disappointed.
   It's a heartfelt but ploddingly chronological, over-conventional survey of Thompson's life and career, one with which its own boundary-pushing subject might well have lost patience (writing of his biker-gang escapades, he recalled having "no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves.") Gonzo focuses more on the ever-burgeoning Thompson mythos – the idea of the author-as-wild-man-celebrity – than on his actual achievements, with results that don't really do sufficient justice to the man described by Tom Wolfe as "the greatest American comic writer of the twentieth century": on his day, a prose-stylist to rank alongside H L Mencken and A J Liebling.
   Thompson's spells of form were, of course, always erratic – increasingly so later in life, when he had to contend with all manner of hellraising celebrity fans and hipster hangers-on. Among the latter, Johnny Depp – who played Thompson in Terry Gilliam's 1998 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and praises him as "a complex walking monument to misbehavior" – inevitably pops up here, reading aloud at a bar with tome in one hand and revolver in the other.
   We hear an awful lot about how Thompson was "the ultimate bad-boy," not so much about his "great breakthrough[s] in journalism." Editing-wise, Gibney allocates so much time to the 1972 US election (an excessive amount, even for those of us who regard Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 1972 as Thompson's masterpiece) that he skips rapidly through the final three decades of his subject's life. In theory, it would be difficult to make a dull film about Thompson – especially with such top-value contributors as his partner-in-crime Ralph Steadman, and long-suffering Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner. But the monotonously hagiographic Gonzo – named after the extravagantly "participatory" style of journalism which Thompson pioneered – comes perilously close.

Although released on Boxing Day, harrowing low-budget Brit-horror Mum & Dad is one of the least 'Christmassy' films imaginable – and thus ideal for anyone fed up with the usual, upbeat fare such as It's A Wonderful Life. The film courts controversy on two fronts: many may reckon that it's somewhat tasteless, given the number of victims' surviving relatives, to use the Fred and Rosemary West case as the (albeit rough) basis for a movie-script; while recent high-profile cases involving the mistreatment and/or killing of children give Mum & Dad, which deals with a violent, murderously dysfunctional "family," a certain grim topicality.
   What's made headlines so far, however, isn't Mum & Dad's grisly content, but rather the means of distribution: it's being released in cinemas, as an online video-on-demand, and as DVD for both retail and rental, all on the Feast of Stephen – "day-and-date across all platforms," as they say in the industry. This may well be a harbinger of the future; or, Mum & Dad may become just a historical footnote along the lines of Brit-indie This Is Not A Love Song and Steven Soderbergh's Bubble - which, back in 2005, tried similar kinds of 'innovative' release-gimmicks on a slightly smaller scale, with decidedly disappointing results.
   While its subversion-of-domesticity approach makes it ideal for front-room viewing (once the kids are safely dispatched to bed, of course) Mum & Dad deserves at least some measure of theatrical exposure. It's a promising, confident debut from writer/director Sheil with an intriguing social/political undertone, focussing as it does a sympathetic Polish immigrant – Lena (Fedori), who works as a Heathrow cleaner. During an evening visit to the home of co-worker Birdy (Ainsley Howard), she's promptly knocked out – and wakes in a squalid bedroom, prisoner of Birdy's sadistic, ever-so-British "parents," known only as Mum (Dido Miles) and Dad (Benson).
   The ensuing shenanigans closely follow (too closely, in fact) the pattern established in many similar chillers over recent decades, with our hapless heroine stuck in a claustrophobic nightmare of ever-present, ever-escalating peril. But while Fedori is front and centre with a game performance under taxing circumstances, Miles and Benson steal the show – both actors are able to segue back and forth between the cheerily quotidian and the psychopathically monstrous with an ease that's startling, chilling and also, somehow, darkly comic.

2008 ROUNDUP

THE TOP TEN NEW RELEASES IN THE UK
   1: W.A.L.L.-E. (Andrew Stanton, USA 2008; UK release July 18). Arthouse and/or subtitled fare dominates this year's Tribune top ten, but further proof that Hollywood can still come up with masterpieces arrived in the globe's multiplexes with the irresistible W.A.L.L.-E. The beguiling, computer-animated tale of a lovelorn robot cleaning up a dystopian-future Earth, this technical wonder works simultaneously on multiple levels, moving with lightning speed and feathery lightness to tell the year's most surprising, most touching, most human love-story.
   2: Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, UK 2007; September 19). It's been another strong year for British cinema, but the pick of the bunch is this superb character-based drama. It takes unpromising-sounding material – the misadventures of affluent middle-class folk on Tuscan holiday – and comes up with something utterly fresh, excruciatingly accurate.
   3: Import Export (Ulrich Seidl, Austria 2007; October 3). Inexplicably prizeless at Cannes last year, the latest provocation from Austria's resident maestro got somewhat lost in the arthouse crush during its brief UK release. But make no mistake – this imaginatively structured analysis of contemporary European issues is one of the major political movies of the current decade.  Seek it out on DVD.
   4: Somers Town (Shane Meadows, UK 2008; August 22). What started out as a short-ish advert for Eurostar blossomed into a charming, disarming miniature that wowed festival audiences from Berlin to Edinburgh and eventually obtained an unlikely – but heartening – spin in cinemas. Confirming Midlands maverick Shane Meadows as one of European cinema's brightest young talents, Somers Town is what Francois Truffaut might have come up with if he'd been born in Uttoxeter.
   5: Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, UK 2008; October 31). Everybody loves a comeback – especially when the returnee is a veteran British auteur who's been so scandalously hors de combat for so long. With his first documentary – a no-budget, acerbic billet-doux to his Merseyside home-town – Davies became the toast of Cannes. Champagne cinema indeed – and great news is that its success has enabled the man behind Distant Voices, Still Lives to get another feature-project underway.
   6:  Burn After Reading (Ethan & Joel Coen, USA 2008 October 17). Only months after their No Country For Old Men (undeservedly) dominated the Oscars, the ever-unpredictable Coen brothers delivered a disarming, deadpan DC comedy that's the best thing they've done since Blood Simple. And B.Pitt is at least as deserving of Academy recognition as J.Bardem.
   7: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Mark Herman, UK 2008; September 12). The director of the dire Brassed Off and the unspeakable Purely Belter seemed an unpromising choice to bring an acclaimed Holocaust-themed novel to the screen – but Herman rose to the challenge and delivered 2008's most shocking, sobering, shattering finale.
   8: Joy Division (Grant Gee, UK 2007; May 2). Released into cinemas thanks to the success of Control - see last year's Tribune top ten – but by any criterion a significant achievement in its own right. The rock-doc is a somewhat dicey, debased genre – but this survey of the seminal Manchester band shows how it should be done.
   9: Funny Games US (Michael Haneke, USA 2007; April 4). One of the year's more misunderstood and underappreciated releases, an almost shot-by-shot, Stateside remake of the director's own Austrian home-invasion masterpiece from a decade before. Brutal, baffling and brilliant.
   10: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, Romania 2007; January 11). Perhaps the most satisfying Palme d'Or winner of the decade, this uncompromising abortion-themed drama crowned the welcome recent renaissance of Romanian cinema – even if the country's much-discussed "new wave" now seems to have run its course.

FURTHER BEST/WORST OF 2008…
   The Best Performances of the year nearly all came from veterans: Fassbinder's muse, Hanna Schygulla (65), heartbreaking in The Edge of Heaven; Tommy Lee Jones (62) turning in career-best work with In the Valley of Elah; the meticulous cameo from Patrick Malahide (63) that was by far the best thing about Brideshead Revisited; and the aforementioned Terence Davies (63), whose vocal contribution to his own Of Time and the City was the finest documentary 'performance' since Paul Scofield's narration of Patrick Keiller's 1990s masterpieces London and Robinson in Space.
   And let's not forget Don Angel Tavira, who died in June one week before his 84th birthday, and whose sole feature-film The Violin, having world-premiered in Guadalajara back in 2005, finally made it into UK distribution in January – albeit on a single screen, in a single cinema, in the very first week of the year. Slightly better-known than the late Don Angel, but no less deserving of recognition: Brad Pitt (45!), unfeasibly hilarious in Burn After Reading – an Oscar is the least he merits for stealing an entire movie from Mr Malkovich, Ms Swinton, Mr Clooney, Mr Jenkins and Ms McDormand…
   Speaking of which, Burn After Reading - whose merits eluded so many critics – must rank, alongside the aforementioned Joy Division and guilty-pleasure Brit-horror Donkey Punch, as one of the year's Most Underrated enterprises. At the other end of the scale – in the Most Overrated category – we find the Coens' "other" 2008 release No Country For Old Men, alongside Hunger, There Will Be Blood and Gomorrah. Fine works, all four (especially TWBB), but hardly deserving of such extravagant hosannas. Deafening raspberries, however, must go to the Worst Releases of 2008: execrable, irresponsible reprehensible Eden Lake narrowly edging out Redacted, Lakeview Terrace and Taken at the barrel-bottom.
   To end on a high-note: special mentions for the year's best Film Festival Premieres: a trio of masterpieces which delighted audiences at Bradford (programmed by yours truly), Edinburgh and London respectively. Ron Lamothe's The Call of the Wild and Jeon Soo-il's With A Girl of Black Soil remain, depressingly, in distribution-limbo – but Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, one of the top half-dozen movies of the decade, is set for UK release in mid-January. Read all about it then, right here.

Neil Young
9th December, 2008
written for 17.Dec. edition of Tribune magazine

GONZO – THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR HUNTER S. THOMPSON : [6/10] : USA 2008 : Alex GIBNEY : 120m (BBFC) : seen 3rd October 2008, Vue Leicester (press show – CinemaDays event)

MUM & DAD : [6/10] : UK 2008 : Steven SHEIL : 84m (BBFC) : seen 19th June 2008, Filmhouse Edinburgh (press show – Edinburgh International Film Festival) – Hollywood Reporter review