Neil Young's Film Lounge

for this week’s TRIBUNE : ‘The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3′ [6/10] and Edinburgh film-festival report

While seldom ranked among American cinema’s greatest classics, Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) is among many viewers’ semi-guilty pleasures – familiarity breeding content via seemingly endless late-night BBC showings. Based on the bestselling 1973 novel by ‘John Godey’ (nom de plume of ex-Hollywood publicist Morton Freedgood) – it chronicles, in compulsively watchable and amiably unpretentious fashion, an audacious criminal escapade whereby a gang take a subway train hostage: the 1.23pm from Pelham Bay Park Station in the Bronx (hence the oft-misunderstood title.)
Led by taciturn limey ‘Mr Blue’ (Robert Shaw) – the outfit’s colour-coded names were stolen by Quentin Tarantino for Reservoir Dogs - the crooks announce they’ll start killing the passengers, one per minute, if they don’t get a $1m ransom within the hour. It’s down to hangdog subway-controller Victor Garber (Walter Matthau) to deal with the situation from his underground control room – while, up above, the city grinds to a chaotic halt…
When it was announced in the Hollywood trade-press that this re-do was to be “helmed” by Tony Scott – the ex-pat Teessider notorious for his bombastic/hyperactive slam-bang approach (most recently Deja Vu) – admirers of Sargent’s grittily low-key, deadpan-amusing original braced themselves for disaster. But while this new Pelham is in no danger of eclipsing Sargent’s, it could certainly have been a heck of a lot worse.
Scott and scriptwriter Brian Helgeland show reasonable fidelity and respect towards the original, down to in-joke details such as changing the hero’s name from Victor to Walter in honour of the late Matthau. This Garber, as incarnated by Denzel Washington, is a inevitably more of an action-man than the original – though actually not that much, as Washington’s alarmingly increased bulk (shades of Russell Crowe in Body of Lies) means that a final-act sprint through the Manhattan streets strains our credulity as well as his shirt-buttons.
As his scheming, train-jacking nemesis – rechristened ‘Ryder’ – John Travolta pitches his performance as the polar opposite of Shaw’s: a motormouth, wisecracking chancer, he’s the latest in a line of enjoyably hammy Travolta baddies. Though seldom visible together – half the movie seems to consist of them chatting/yelling via intercoms – the twin leads’ presence and skill go a long way to keeping this unwieldy enterprise on the tracks. There’s deft support from James Gandolfini as New York’s mayor – as before, a prime and reliable source of comic relief – though the able likes of John Turturro and Luis Guzman are stuck with more thankless supporting roles.
Scott has, of course, never been known as an actor’s director – his priorities lie elsewhere, and he handles proceedings with his customary high-testosterone, flashily kinetic professionalism. If you can stand the shuddery, show-offy camerawork, the crashing soundtrack muzak and the awkwardly-integrated nods to 21st century technology, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 provides acceptable popcorn fodder for an undemanding night out at the pictures. And you might just get back in time to catch the late movie on the box…

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EDINBURGH REPORT

The 63rd Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) – as the organisers (understandably) never tire of pointing out, the world’s longest-running event of its type – has only barely been finished for a month, and already a handful of its most high-profile titles can be found in our arthouses.
The 40th anniversary of the lunar landings dictated the mid-July release-date for Moon, which edged out some stiff competition for the prestigious Michael Powell Award – given to EIFF’s best new British film – and was (very favourably) reviewed in these pages two weeks ago. I’m not sure whether I would have voted for it myself, however, had I been giving the honour of serving on the jury alongside Janet Street-Porter, Frank Langella and company. The bookies’ favourite – in the unlikely event of messrs Ladbroke and Coral having been induced to offer odds on the competition – would almost certainly have been Andrea Arnold’s Loachian slice-of-council-estate life Fish Tank. We’ll cover that film in more detail during the week of its UK release (September 11th), but can already divulge that it’s a quantum leap beyond Arnold’s inexplicably-overrated 2006 debut Red Road and features, from youthful newcomers Katie Jarvis and Rebecca Griffiths, two of the year’s most impressive performances.
Other Edinburgh notables which are already on the release-schedule are the tense, full-blooded US/Mexican co-production Sin Nombre, a powerfully assured debut from writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga (August 14th); Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq-war thriller The Hurt Locker - a flawed film built around a stupendous characterisation from star-in-the-making Jeremy Renner (August 28th); EIFF opener Away We Go (September 18th), which represents an sudden come-down for director Sam Mendes after his masterpiece Revolutionary Road; and the rock-the-house, wildly-inventive Canadian horror comedy Pontypool (October 16th), which is very nearly a one-man show from veteran character-actor Stephen McHattie.
But while Sin Nombre, Fish Tank and Pontypool are eminently deserving space on our cinema-screens – and on your to-see lists – many of the highlights from EIFF 2009 are, for various reasons, yet to obtain distribution in this country. And near the top of the list is the underdog contender to which I award my hypothetical Powell vote: Justin Molotnikov’s cracking psychological-thriller-cum-black-comedy Crying With Laughter.
Taking its title from (or perhaps simply sharing it with) Bob Monkhouse’s autobiography, this is the disarming story of an obnoxious Edinburgh stand-up comic on the verge of something resembling the big time. But fate places several large hurdles in the path of our coke-snorting, severely dysfunctional anti-hero Joey Frisk (Stephen McCole) – most notably a long-lost former schoolfriend with murderously grudgeful intent.
With so many British films let down by melodramatic, contrived screenplays – no shortage of examples on view, unfortunately, at EIFF this year – how splendid to encounter a writer-director who has the wit and the chutzpah to turn such “deficiencies” into advantages. Structured around Joey’s latest swaggeringly exaggerated stand-up routine, Crying With Laughter is a full-blooded, take-no-prisoners affair that entertainingly captures this branch of showbiz’s intoxicating, edgy volatility.
And McCole – a TV star north of the border thanks to sitcom High Times (extremely popular in Bolivia, by all accounts) – is terrific as Frisk: gradually revealing the layers of fragility and pain beneath his burly, scruffily bearded facade, he has something of the young Brian Cox about him. And he’s so convincing on stage as Frisk it’s no surprise to learn that he’s planning several shows at the Fringe in character. Catch him – and the film – if and when you can.
Also keep an eye out for Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s Easier With Practice - one of the sharper, more intelligent and sensitive examples of the much-derided American “indie” scene, in which a twentysomething author (Brian Geraghty, outstanding and barely recognisable from his cocky grunt in The Hurt Locker) embarks on a phone-sex relationship with an elusive and enigmatic female.
Similarly awkward in social situations is the eponymous heroine of Sebastian Silva’s The Maid (La nana) from Chile – Catalina Saavedra’s Raquel, who’s been devoted to the same middle-class family for over 20 years, putting her own emotional needs on hold and storing up mental problems as a consequence. Both films nimbly combine serious cultural/psychological analysis with disarmingly deadpan humour, transcending the technical limitations of digital-video by giving their lead actors ample time and space.
Truth be told, this didn’t feel like a vintage Edinburgh – though it was great to see Roger Corman in person, introducing some of the titles in a dozen-movie retrospective and being interviewed on stage by horror-aficionado Kim Newman. For all the merits of Fish Tank, Moon and Crying With Laughter, for example, there was nothing in competition to match the last two Powell winners, 2007′s Control and 2008′s Somers Town. (Shane Meadows, responsible for the latter, was back in town to world-premiere, hors concours, his lo-fi faux-doc Le Donk & Scor-Zay-Zee, a relatively minor work from a major British talent that’s primarily a showcase for the improv skills of his old mucker Paddy Considine. It may pop up at a cinema near you, but more likely will find its audience through more high-tech “platforms.”)
And if there was a hidden gem lurking in the large programme of this twelve-day film jamboree – an unheralded masterpiece such as Jeon Soo-Il’s Korean heartbreaker With a Girl of Black Soil from last year – for this visitor it remained undiscovered by festival’s end. The closest was, by some measure, Sylvie Verheyde’s French coming-of-ager Stella: a kind of cine-autobiography from the first-time writer-director, in which she revisits, via a very light fictionalisation, her own childhood in the Paris of 1976-1977. Stella (Leora Barbara) isn’t particularly bright or precocious, nor does she have an especially vivid inner life. Her outer life provides stimulation enough, as she lives with her parents in the rough-and-ready bar they manage, where she’s on pally terms with the barfly customers.
Among the latter is the late Guillaume Depardieu, in one of the bewildering stack of performances he somehow squeezed into the final months of his short life. Depardieu Jr is the closest Stella can boast to a “star” name, and his presence will hopefully attract the attention of an enterprising distributor. Verheyde’s movie, a pitch-perfect evocation of a time and a place, with outstanding work from young Barbara (and a lovely scene-stealing cameo from Laetitia Guerard as her holiday-pal Genevieve), is an unassuming, bewitching delight, and it would be a real pity if it was restricted solely to the festival circuit. I caught it on my last day in Edinburgh – and to say that it pretty much made the trip worthwhile would only be a slight, Joey Frisk-style exaggeration

Neil Young
21st July, 2009
written for the 31st July edition of Tribune magazine

THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3 : [6/10] : USA 2009 : Tony SCOTT : 106m (BBFC) : seen at Odeon cinema, Nuneaton, 12th June 2009 – press show – 61st CinemaDays event.