Summer Fizzle : ‘The Brothers Bloom’ [3/10]; ‘The Killer Inside Me’ [4/10]; ‘Robin Hood’ [5/10]; ‘Sex and the City 2′ [4/10]; ‘Vincere’ [4/10].

Published on: June 17th, 2010


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So far, the summer of 2010 is a fizzle. Anthony D’Alessandro reports:  “It was another horrendous weekend at the summer box office with the top ten films totaling $120 million, off 25% from last year’s post Memorial Day frame. Last weekend’s bad Feng Shui continues to pervade the multiplex. Distribution execs often say that post-holiday weekend numbers are sluggish, but that excuse won’t work this time: in recent years the weekend after Memorial Day has been strong. ”
….. Thompson On Hollywood, 6th June 2010

   That ‘bad Feng Shui’ isn’t confined to American multiplexes. Since the start of May, my visits to various cinemas in my native north-east England and (occasionally) beyond have yielded dispiriting results. Particularly disappointing: Four Lions, The Brothers Bloom, Vincere, The Killer Inside Me. Unsurprisingly below-par: Robin Hood, Sex and the City 2, Cop Out. The only relative ray of sunshine came via American – The Bill Hicks Story, which wasn’t really anything to write home about but at least managed to fulfil its aims with reasonable success.
   Am I enduring an unusual period of impatient critical ill-will? Are the films out now in the UK simply below standard for some reason? Are there good pictures out there and I’m just not managing to catch them (I’ve so far managed to miss the ecstatically-reviewed Dogtooth)? Where are this year’s pleasant surprises in the mould of The Last House on the Left and A Perfect Getaway?
   Anyway, it was my original intention to devote a page to each of the following. But I’m presenting my comments in abbreviated format because (a) I don’t have time to write at length on them all, and (b) none of them really deserve such treatment.
   Neil Young, 6th June.
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The Brothers Bloom.
Insufferably cute, self-satisfied “romp” from Rian Johnson, writer-director of 2005′s mystifyingly overrated high-school private-eye spoof Brick. Emboldened by the cult success of his small-scale debut, Johnson now takes an ambitious leap to a wider canvas - and falls a long way short of success. Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo are a pair of con-man brothers (their total lack of filial resemblance being all part of the “gag”) whose latest grand wheeze involves dunning a ditzy, lonely, hobby-obsessed heiress (Rachel Weisz) while gadding about various scenic corners of Europe. 
   Weisz is nothing but game, and contributes what little the picture possesses in terms of recognisably human emotions - she certainly fares much better than Rinko Kikuchi, whose pyrotechnics expert ‘Bang-Bang’ wanders in and out in a bowler hat, barely saying a word from start to finish. Such ostentatious artificiality is typical of what is much more mechanism than movie, heavy-handedly peppered with classical allusions, desperately aping various tricks and strategems familiar from the work of the (non-)brothers Anderson – Wes and Paul Thomas – right down to having Ricky Jay provide an archly over-poetic introductory voiceover, just like PTA’s Magnolia. 
   Such comparisons are not, shall we say (shall we venture, shall we posit) to Johnson’s advantage. He’s a fine example of an unfortunate trend noticeable over the past decade or so, whereby talented folk choose to work in cinema because that’s where the money, the attention and the glamour currently are – even if their gifts (and there is evidence of ability lurking within both Brick and The Brothers Bloom) would be better suited to novels or plays. That said, there will undoubtedly be people out there who will be entranced, charmed and seduced by The Brothers Bloom. Avoid them.
15.vi.10

The Killer Inside Me.
The most tirelessly prolific and eclectic of British directors, Michael Winterbottom has rarely put a foot far wrong over the course of a very packed decade or so – until now. This is a bafflingly misconceived adaptation of Jim Thompson’s terrifically spare, 150-page novel from 1952 – forsaking the original’s relentlessness, brevity and taut structure for a “stylish” but shapeless series of episodes. What’s especially disappointing is that Winterbottom allows his leading man Casey Affleck – as a small-town sheriff whose nicey-nicey exterior hides a sociopathically violent personality – to veer into method-ish mannerism in scene after scene, his reedy voice so high and quiet that it’s often difficult to work out what he’s saying (it’s a similar situation with that rock-solid character-actor Elias Koteas in a smaller but quite pivotal role, and when the two share scenes the audience is often in need of subtitles to make out the dialogue.)
   Marcel Zyskind’s slick cinematography, meanwhile, is a very bad match for this down-and-dirty tale of evil deeds in a sun-baked Texas backwater – especially incongruous during the already-notorious sequence in which Affleck’s nogoodnik lawman graphically beats his prostitute girlfriend (Jessica Alba, rather too fresh-faced to begin win) to death as part of a complicated revenge scheme. The scene is, appropriately enough, hard to endure – but it comes so early in the time-hopping narrative that everything afterward feels decidedly underpowered. It’s been quickly established that Affleck’s Lou Ford is a despicable lout far beyond our sympathies (much further, say, than Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley) - the overlong picture thus becomes a somewhat pointless exercise in seeing how long he can get away with his crimes, and seeing how slavishly Winterbottom can pay homage to Terrence Malick’s masterpiece Badlands.
   To do so with any notable measure of success would have required a much sharper script, one much more in tune with Jim Thompson’s novel. Written in the first person from Ford’s perspective, the book is, admittedly, a tough subject for adaptation to the big screen. Which makes it all the more surprising that such a task was entrusted to Tony Curran, who has directed movies himself (most notably 2004′s We Don’t Live Here Anymore) but whose first feature-film writing credit this is. The sooner Winterbottom reunites with his former collaborators Frank Cottrell Boyce (A Cock and Bull Story, etc), Laurence Coriat (Genova, etc), John Orloff (A Mighty Heart) or Mat Whitecross (The Road to Guantanamo, etc) the better for all concerned.
15.vi.10

Robin Hood.
“There may have been a Robin Hood – nobody knows. If there was, he was probably ‘a flat-footed Englishman walking through the woods’ as Doug [Fairbanks] said. Certainly there was no band – we took complete liberties with the spirit of Robin Hood and his crowd, and naturally the love-story was more or less invented. But Doug was always insistent on historical accuracy, though I doubt there was ever a castle as big as ours.” - Allan Dwan, director of the 1922 Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks (Sr) as England’s most legendary medieval hero, Wallace Beery as ‘Richard the Lionhearted’ (sic) and Enid Bennett as Lady Marian Fitzwalter.  Not Maid Marian, please note – and it would be nice to think that, 88 years later, the fact that Cate Blanchett is playing “Lady Marian” in this latest version of the story is a nod to Dwan’s picture.
   That’s perhaps where the similarities end, however – he may have shed several stones since his alarmingly corpulent turn in Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, but nobody is going to mistake Russell Crowe for the astonishingly lithe (though by no means svelte) and dashingly swashbuckling Doug Fairbanks. As handled by Scott and scriptwriter Brian Helgeland, this Robin Hood is a much more dour, downbeat, yeoman-like affair, going to great pains to establish some kind of plausible back-story for this famous – but, it’s pretty safe to say – entirely mythical individual. Anyone going in to this Robin Hood expecting the classic robs-from-the-rich outlaw tale is going to be sadly disappointed. Such exploits are seemingly being kept in store for Robin Hood II, a prospect which is decidedly unlikely given the disappointing box-office of this first “instalment.”
   Then again, perhaps Scott and company will look to Blanchett’s Elizabeth pictures as an example of how a sequel can appear a decade after the original – indeed, Robin Hood is essentially a cross between The Golden Age and Scott’s own Kingdom of Heaven: Robin is a veteran of the Crusades (topically, he was sickened by the anti-Muslim violence he witnessed), while Blanchett’s Lady Marian even shows up at the end for the climactic beach-front battle with the perfidious French (the relentless anti-Gallic theme making this a decidedly odd choice to kick off the Cannes Film Festival.)
   It may surprise viewers to find Robin Hood battling alongside the King’s forces to repel the cross-channel invaders – indeed, for much of the running-time he’s about as far from an outlaw as it’s possible to be, and it’s only through dastardly regal fickleness in the final reel that he’s banished to extra-judicial exile in Sherwood Forest. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with seeking to breathe fresh life into a story that’s seldom been too far from our screens, whether large (Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Sean Connery) or small (Richard Greene, Jason Connery, Michael Praed, and most recently Jonas Armstrong). But turning Robin into a cross between Lord of the Rings‘ Legolas and Thomas Paine – our hero’s dad is, in effect, the author of the Magna Carta – is surely taking things a step too far.
   And while the opening and closing are rousingly action-packed, things don’t half bog down into tedious politicking for much of the middle-stretch, as Helgeland explores the intrigues of European courts in numbing detail (shades of George Lucas’s obsession with trading negotiations in those Star Wars prequels.) Still, it’s quite refreshing to find a major multiplex release that relies more on old-fashioned film-making craft than CGI and 3-D, one which isn’t a sequel or a remake (it’s too different from the previous Hoods to qualify as the latter), and which showcases such a range of high-calibre thespian talent, from Crowe (wobbly accent notwithstanding) and Blanchett, through to the likes of William Hurt, Mark Strong, Eileen Atkins and Max Von Sydow, even if the screen-time allotted to Douglas Hodge, Simon McBurney and Inglourious Basterds‘ Denis Menochet ends up being dismayingly brief. 
   In terms of impact-per-minute, meanwhile, the show is arguably stolen by a droll Matthew Rhys as a grimy-toothed Sheriff of Nottingham – more comic-relief conniver than diabolical villain here. And this is rather appropriate as the project was initially conceived as a revisionist take on the Hood legend from the Sheriff’s long-neglected perspective, before the endless round of studio-imposed rewrites kicked in, resulting in the half-cocked hodge-podge we now see on our screens.
15.vi.10

Sex and the City 2.
   Or, Of Birkins and Burkinis. Four fashion-and-shopping obsessed New York women go on an all-expenses-paid mega-freebie trip to Abu Dhabi, where their extravagant, free-spirited ways fairly quickly cause offence to the more conservative sections of the local Muslim society.
   Second film to spin-off from the highly successful TV series (itself derived from Candace Bushnell’s original books) isn’t by any means the universe-ending cine-cataclysm described by many reviewers. But nor does it remotely justify its 146-minute running-time, its tone veering all over the place from garish excess to half-baked satire to (most successfully, but most infrequently) quieter, more character/dialogue-centric scenes.
   It’s very hard to get a handle on the picture’s tone: are our “heroines” being celebrated, mocked, or is it a combination of both – a classic case of having one’s cake and eating it (not that the calorie-counting protagonists are much in the way of cake-eaters)?
   Then again, given the fact that we get a glimpse of Susan Sontag’s book Against Interpretation and Other Essays at a crucial late stage, perhaps Sex and the City 2 exists on such an intricately meta-ironic plane of ambiguity that any analysis is fruitless.
   But there’s clearly a little more going on here than the slickly glossy-blingy-spangly surfaces that meet (or rather assailt) the eye. Given the east-vs-west culture clash theme, for example, the fact that a randy European architect is Danish (when the actor playing him is English, and makes no attempt at a Danish accent) must surely be because of the Copenhagen-centric controversy involving cartoons of the prophet Mohammed (PBUH). A tantalisingly intriguing little detail – albeit somewhat undone by naming him “Dick” Spurt, and having a scene pivot on his erection being so prominently visible through his otherwise Charles-Dance-esque white-linen trousers.
17.vi.10

Vincere.
   The fascinatingly tragic life of Mussolini’s mistress Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) is the basis for this extravagantly demonic, dark melodrama, following the obsessed protagonist over the course of several years as she struggles to make Il Duce acknowledge her existence and that of their child, Benito Jr. Heavily reliant on superimposed newspaper headlines and monochrome newsreels for exposition, it quickly bogs down into a kind of political soap-opera/potboiler – one which says very little about Fascism and/or its appeal, focussing instead on one individual’s pathological mental disorders.
   Leaving aside the morality of expending so much time and effort on the story of a single “victim” of Mussolini’s callousness, Vincere (Italian for “to win”) is a repetitive tale of hopeless amour fou, as Dalser comes up against moustache-twirlingly villainous blackshirts while her former paramour quickly (indeed, somewhat seamlessly) rises from left-leaning local demagogue to major world political figure.
   The emphasis is much more on the domestic, with scene after scene unfolding in dimly-lit rooms – or, very often, darkened cinemas – including one daft sequence where an audience sit stony-faced as Charlie Chaplin capers around on screen. There’s clearly some intention to examine the power of cinema as a mind-control propaganda medium, but any resulting point remains frustratingly vague as the picture dribbles out into a series of asylum-movie cliches and confusing shifts in time and tone in the scrappy latter scenes. Glumly file under “regrettably missed opportunity.”   17.vi.10

Neil Young
4th June, 2010

THE BROTHERS BLOOM : [3/10] : USA 2008 : Rian JOHNSON : 114m (BBFC) : {6/28}
seen 2nd June at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (press show) digital projection

THE KILLER INSIDE ME : [4/10] : USA 2010 : Michael WINTERBOTTOM : 109m (BBFC) : {9/28}
seen 4th June at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (£7) digital projection

ROBIN HOOD : [5/10] : US(/UK) 2010 : Ridley SCOTT : 140m (BBFC) : {14/28}
seen 12th May at Empire cinema, Newcastle (press show)

SEX AND THE CITY 2 : [4/10] : USA 2010 : Michael Patrick KING : 146m (BBFC) : {11/28}
seen 2nd June at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (£6) digital projection

VINCERE : [4/10] : aka Win : Italy(/Fr) 2009 : Marco BELLOCCHIO : 125m (BBFC) : {9/28}
seen 2nd June at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle (£6) digital projection