Funerals & Snakes

Two films this week made by screen legends whose careers have settled in to something a little less than their glorious past. Sidney Lumet was making television drama when it was broadcast live from the studio in the 40s and 50s, and made the first (and best) version of courtroom drama 12 Angry Men in 1957. In the 70s he made some of the best of those gritty New York stories that defined the decade (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network) but his most recent work has passed under the New Zealand radar, his last two features not even getting a local release. To be honest I thought he was dead and figured that I must have missed his name pass by in one of those Academy Award salutes to the fallen.

Which makes Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead a lovely surprise: a gritty, R-rated, heist-gone-wrong picture, set in those New York mean streets we seem to know so well (but also the verdant Westchester suburbs). Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke play two down-on-their luck brothers, young men whose character flaws render them inadequate to cope with the various pressures of modern living. Hoffman’s Andy is an ambitious real estate accountant (not a deal-maker but a wannabe player) with a drug habit and an embezzlement problem. Hawke’s Hank is divorced and struggling to pay the prep school fees and child support to his tough bitch ex-wife (Amy Ryan from Gone Baby Gone).

When Andy suggests that the robbery of a small suburban shopping mall jewellery store would be the answer to all their problems we are about to get one of the great set-ups for a thriller in modern memory and they are about to get in to a whole heap of trouble. Effortlessly switching perspectives and time-frames, Lumet proves that he hasn’t lost that ability to reveal human frailty by piling on the pressure. Totally recommended.

The other legend emerging from the shadows this week is English director John Boorman. He made Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific with Lee Marvin in the 60s, Deliverance and the batty Zardoz in the 70s, Excalibur and multi-Academy Award-nominated Hope & Glory in the 80s, but has been pretty quiet ever since. His new film The Tiger’s Tail is set in Dublin, where he now lives, and The Tiger of which he speaks is the “Celtic Tiger” of the economic boom.

Brendan Gleason (stretching his legs) plays self-made property developer Liam O’Leary who, under pressure from the banks and corrupt politicians, starts seeing visions of a man who looks like himself, following him around. It turns out this fellow is his doppelgänger, bent on destroying the life Liam has built for himself and taking anything valuable to be found in the rubble. The “evil twin” story is one of the oldest in literature and it makes for a pretty lumpy metaphor here. Despite all the success and riches brought by the Irish Miracle, as Father Andy who runs the homeless shelter (Ciarán Hinds) says, “for every success, someone else has to lose”. Boorman’s direction is workmanlike but he retains that annoying habit of re-recording all the dialogue later using ADR, making it sometimes seem like you are watching a poorly-dubbed foreign film.

Kung Fu Panda is a boisterous and entertaining animated flick that resembles an eight-year-old’s bedroom while they are throwing all their toys around. The story makes no attempt at originality, hoping that the voice genius of Jack Black and the thrilling broad-brush animation will provide enough energy to carry you through (and for the most part it does). Black plays Po, a panda with dreams of kung fu glory. When Tai Lung (Ian McShane), the evil snow leopard, escapes from detention bent on revenge the search goes out for a new Dragon Warrior, for only a Dragon Warrior can defend the valley from such a menace. And so on and so forth.

Finally, in the annals of pointlessness a new chapter must be written and that chapter will be titled Speed Racer. I fell asleep during The Matrix at the Embassy in 1999 so The Wachowski Brothers have never managed to work their magic on me but even so, I have rarely felt so detached from a big screen movie as I did watching this adaptation of a (supposed) cult Japanese kids cartoon. In fact, I found myself pondering the total carbon footprint of the experience if you add the appalling cost of the film to my sitting in an empty, climate-controlled, theatre on a Monday morning to watch it.

Here’s a free idea to anyone interested - if you want to adapt a Saturday morning cartoon about motor racing, pick “Wacky Races” starring the great Dick Dastardly and sidekick Muttley. That is something I might pay to see.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 2 July, 2008. Sorry for the delay in posting but somehow I managed to get pretty busy this week.

No review to post this week (only Hancock released and Will Smith will do nicely without any help or hindrance from me) and next week I’ll be putting up my mammoth Wellington Film Festival preview (cross-posted to Wellingtonista).

The allotment is one of the United Kingdom’s greatest achievements, unrepeated I believe anywhere else. In exchange for moving in to shoeboxes stacked upon each other the British poor were given a back garden somewhere else - a nearby shared field converted into small plots where they could grow some food and still experience something of a life outdoors, connected to the seasons. And who could have guessed that, at the same time, the allotment could also be such an effective metaphor for life in modern England.

In Richard Laxton’s film Grow Your Own, the spare plots at a Liverpool allotment are being allocated to refugees, to help them adjust to life in their new country and give them something to do during the otherwise long days. The locals, led by ex-cop Big John (Philip Jackson) with the help of his downtrodden son Little John (Eddie Marsan from Happy-Go-Lucky), don’t like the idea of their patch being invaded by “gypos” and turn a cold shoulder to their new neighbours.

When a mobile phone company arrives wanting one of the plots for a new mast the locals see an opportunity to start throwing their weight around. Meanwhile, Chinese refugee Kung Sang (Benedict Wong), broken by the loss of his wife during their journey, discovers a kind of rebirth via the soil and shark fin melon.

Grow Your Own is the best of the three contemporary UK films released in the last month (Happy-Go-Lucky and Brick Lane are the others). An excellent script by Carl Hunter and Frank Cottrell Boyce (24 Hour Party People and Welcome to Sarajevo) contains plenty of diverting comic moments while never losing sight of the human stories unfolding close at hand, reminding us that Social Workers may well be the heroes of the 21st century.

The strengths of Grow Your Own (good characters with story developments driven out of those characters, or rather the character of those characters if I may) can also be found in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, the excellent sequel to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe from 2005. It helps that CS Lewis knew what he was doing when he wrote the books but there’s something very satisfying about seeing a story moved forward, seemingly inevitably, by the nature of the characters. Peter’s pride, Lucy’s faith, Edmund’s ADD and Susan’s hormones all play a part in either getting the children in to or out of trouble as they return to Narnia after a year in Finchley.

1300 years of Narnia time after they left they have been summoned back by Susan’s magic horn, now in the possession of young Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes). Caspian is the rightful heir to the Telmarine throne but his Uncle (King Miraz, played superbly by Italian favourite Sergio Castellitto) wants him out of the way. To make things worse, the Telmarines don’t even belong in Narnia but are fascist invaders who have forced the talking animals and mythical creatures into hiding. Aslan, as you might expect, is nowhere to be found.

Caspian chugs along at an excellent pace and the whole thing is sprinkled with plenty of wit. The casting is superb: Castellitto as I have already mentioned; Peter Dinklage must be sick of playing dwarves but he won’t find a better one than Trumpkin; Eddie Izzard is the voice of the very amusing Reepicheep, mouse musketeer, and I just loved Trufflehunter the badger (Ken Stott).

Australian thriller The Jammed is a tightly-wound piece of work about people-trafficking and prostitution in present day Melbourne. Not quite as spiritually desolating as the similar Lilya 4-ever, it still effectively mines the same rage. Through a series of (possibly unlikely) coincidences, young office worker Ashley (Veronica Sywak) is helping a Chinese woman find her missing daughter. The trail leads to an illegal brothel where “Rose” (Anna Anderson), strung out on drugs, shares a room with “Crystal” (Emma Lung) and Vanya (Saskia Burmeister), all of whom have been conned, trafficked into Australia and then kept out of sight of all except clients and bosses.

If the film is correct, and these people are treated not as victims of a heinous human rights violation but as illegal immigrants and locked away in detention centres, then it is another stain on Australia’s record and I hope it isn’t true.

Finally this week, tickets for the 36th Wellington Film Festival went on sale Tuesday and the programme was launched last week with a screening of Marjane Satrapis’ excellent animated autobiography, Persepolis, about growing up either side of the Iranian Islamic revolution. Recommended.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 25 June, 2008.

I have linked to it, above, but would like to draw your attention to NZ playwright Gary Henderson’s 2002 interview with Frank Cottrell Boyce, conducted while both were at the Cannes Film Festival.