SHERLOCK HOLMES: punk spin on a golden era classic

In much the same way as Jon Pertwee will always be the definitive Dr Who to me because he's the one I grew up watching, so will Basil Rathbone forever be Sherlock Holmes.
Thanks to the BBC's habit of regularly screening his series of low budget 1940s thrillers I got hooked at an early age on Rathbone as the great detective and Nigel Bruce as his bumbling sidekick Dr Watson.
Although the films bore little relation to the original source material (especially after Universal took over the franchise in 1942) they became the yardstick against which I measured all other incarnations of the famous private detective.
In this context I should have hated director Guy Ritchie's action oriented punk-rock take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's creation at first sight.
But it kind of works.

As played by Robert Downey Jr, Holmes is considerably more physical and bohemian. He participates in bare knuckle boxing matches for recreation, and is given to jumping out of second storey windows while in pursuit of his quarry.
Jude Law as the faithful Dr Watson is as far removed from Nigel Bruce's idiotic old fogey as it's possible to get. This Watson is almost as sharp but not quite, and quick to exasperation over Holmes' idiosyncratic behaviour. 
Despite the pre-release hype over Downey's claim that he'd injected an element of homoeroticism in their relationship, the reality is that both men are firmly attached to other women. Watson's about to get engaged to an attractive and rather proper young governess while Holmes has unfinished business with Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), an alluring and dangerous former girlfriend who reappears to seduce and doublecross him.
Director Ritchie further stamps his mark on the storytelling with copious use of the jumpcut. It's like watching one of those youth targeted shows on cable tv where the picture continually cuts between different angles on the assumption that it's the only way to hold the interest of its short-attention-span-afflicted audience.
What's weird is that Ritchie then abandons this approach halfway into the film in favour of a less jagged, more straightforward style,  presumably in the belief that now he's got our full attention he can hold it without further need of visual gimmicks.
The story, about a renegade Lord's attempt to take over the government of Victorian Britain using black magic, takes an awful long time to tell and the action really starts to drag in the second half. It takes Downey over 2 hours to solve a case that Rathbone would have wrapped up in 70 minutes.
On the plus side Downey makes Holmes his own. He even made me forget about Rathbone for a while, and it's interesting to see a star of Law's stature playing a sidekick and doing it so effectively. While all actors have an ego Law must have checked his at the door because he gives Downey the space to perform without worrying about being overshadowed.
The end result is a superior class of blockbuster. It's reasonably enjoyable if not particularly memorable and having seen it once I have no desire to ever see it again. 
Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, I can watch over and over again.

THE HURT LOCKER: Oscar tip overpraised and underwhelming

If THE HURT LOCKER walks away from the Kodak Theater in Hollywood on March 7 with the Oscar for Best Film it won't be because it really is the best film of 2009.
It'll be because the competition is so weak.

THE HURT LOCKER has nothing new to say about it's subject matter, nor does it offer an interesting spin on themes already covered elsewhere. Director Kathryn Bigelow takes "war is hell" as her starting point - in this case the war in Iraq - and proceeds to demonstrate how guerrilla warfare is even more hellish.
Her film focuses on one US Army bomb squad unit in Baghdad and follows them on their daily sorties into the city to defuse IEDs planted by insurgents in cars, under roads, strapped to unwilling suicide bombers, and even sewn into the stomach of a murdered child. 
It's suicidally dangerous work made even more deadly by the environment in which they have to operate. As James, Sanborn and Eldridge attempt to defuse these devices they can feel countless pairs of Iraqi eyes watching them from surrounding buildings. Any one of these onlookers could be holding a detonator or sniper's rifle in their hands, waiting for the moment to inflict maximum casualties.
There's no arguing that these men and - more importantly - their real-life counterparts are incredibly brave. It takes a special kind of person to walk towards a bomb, but it's difficult to develop any real empathy for the characters.
Even as I learned more about each of them as individuals I didn't find myself investing any emotion in them. Maybe I'm suffering from war movie fatigue, or maybe it's that the real battle in Iraq and Afghanistan is even more horrific than it's possible to depict on screen. A Hollywood recreation can't compete with what we can see on the tv news or read about in the newspapers even though Bigelow's cameras can get us closer to the staged action than journalists can.

THE HURT LOCKER starts out looking like a documentary (the casting of three relatively unknown actors in the lead roles contributes greatly to this impression) but then gets sidetracked into drama in it's efforts to give the main character a human face and a backstory. 
Hollywood's fixation with this docudrama approach to telling war stories almost always leaves me with a sense of disappointment. Whatever sense of reality has been created by the documentary approach to telling the story is shattered the moment it switches to drama. 
My suspended disbelief comes crashing down.
Having already won or been nominated for more than fifty awards it's a dead cert that THE HURT LOCKER, director Bigelow and lead actor Jeremy Renner will figure in the Oscar nominations on Tuesday, and there'll likely be nods for cinematography, sound and screenplay as well. 
I just hope that when the Academy members cast their votes they look beyond the subject matter and consider the film itself.

DARLING: a hollow shell around an empty interior

DARLING is a film as empty as the shallow young woman whose story it tells. 
Made in 1965 and set in Swinging London this drama charts the rise and rise of Diana Scott (Julie Christie), a beautiful and amoral young model who uses her looks to get what she wants,  and discovers nothing but disappointment when she finally makes it to the top. 

She has no discernable talent beyond the ability to bewitch a variety of men, starting with a tv journalist and ending with an Italian Prince. She uses them for what they can give her and moves on without remorse, but the men, the film makes clear, are as much to blame for what happens to them as Diana is for doing it to them.  The film's intended as a critique on the vapidness and corruption of jet-set society; that breed of shallow hedonists with too much time and money on their hands; people who were chiefly famous for being famous. But director John Schlesinger makes the point within the first thirty minutes and then repeats it over and over for the remaining hour and a half of the film. 
The film's saving grace is Dirk Bogarde as the tv journalist, Robert Gold. He's the only character with real depth and the only one for whom we feel any shred of sympathy. Bogarde plays Gold as a young fogey with a penchant for cardigans, and a passion for the arts. He's serious about his work and wants to share it with Diana. He recognises her for what she is but still allows her to overwhelm him with her passion and her beauty. 
Sadly Bogarde is absent for long stretches leaving us with Christie's monotone performance and Laurence Harvey's one-note riff on the jet-set pimp-procurer stereotype. Harvey's an interesting actor but his character doesn't give him much scope to develop. 
Incredibly Christie won an Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe for her performance, which suggests that it wasn't just the men in DARLING who were blinded by her beauty.

AN EDUCATION: graduating with honours from the School of Hard Knocks

I'm not sure if it's just coincidence but it seems like anytime I see Peter Sarsgaard in a film he's playing a creepy guy - not out and out written all over his face creepy - but not-what-he-seems-to-be creepy. The kind of guy who's nice on the outside but inside he's rotten to the core.

His David Goldman in AN EDUCATION is just such a man. Charming, sophisticated, reasonably well-off, and just rough enough around the edges to make him exciting, he comes into the life of 16 year schoolgirl Jenny Mellor (Carey Mulligan) and turns her world upside down.
Jenny's a precocious teenager. Hardworking and naturally talented she's set her sights on winning a place at Oxford. She thinks of herself of sophisticated, listening to Juliette Greco records in the bedroom of her suburban London home, smoking cigarettes, and peppering her conversation with French words. But her book smarts are no match for David's street smarts as the older man whisks her off her feet, introducing her to a world of nightclubs, classical musical concerts and weekend trips to Paris.
It's all so entrancing that she's prepared to abandon her long-laid plans for her future, pouring scorn on warnings from her teachers, and turning a blind eye as the seamy underside of David's life is gradually revealed to her.
The corruption of innocence, and the intoxicating power of first love to warp and mangle common sense and good judgment are themes that have been explored many times before in coming of age dramas. What makes them feel so fresh and worthy of our attention here is the compelling way in which they are explored by Nick Hornsby's script and articulated by the cast.

Sarsgaard, with his flawless English accent and air of increasingly seedy sophistication, is superb, while young British actress Mulligan is completely convincing as the naive teenager willing to throw away everything she's worked for in pursuit of being cool. Despite her comparative inexperience Mulligan more than holds her own against Sarsgaard, and the magnificent Alfred Molina in a best supporting actor Oscar nomination-worthy performance as her self-centred, pennypinching and domineering father.
As Jenny's mother, Cara Seymour uses silence and a submissive posture more effectively than any words could to express the smothering effect of her husband's behaviour. He has almost literally sucked the life out of her, and Jenny recognises that she has to get away if she is to avoid a similar fate. 
This air of repression is a constant presence in the story. Jenny's overbearing father is her own personal incarnation of the repression she feels as a teenage girl in early 1960s Britain, pushing against the confines of her sex and the mores of middle-class life. A place at Oxford looks like her only chance for a shot at a fulfilling life until she meets David. He offers the prospect of an easy and comfortable escape while the alternative appears long and difficult with no guarantee of success. 
In a landscape of massive multiplexes and shrinking art house cinemas AN EDUCATION is a small film that's unlikely to attract much of an audience and that's a real shame because it has so much to offer. 

IT'S COMPLICATED: growing older disgracefully

In a business where, the cynics like to say, the only truism is that nobody knows anything, there's one exception to this rule and her name is Meryl Streep. For the last couple of years every project she's put her name to has become a critical or box office hit or both. "Mama Mia", "Doubt", "The Fantastic Mr Fox", "Julie and Julia"and now IT'S COMPLICATED.
Her most recent release sees her invading and successfully occupying the romantic comedy territory usually reserved for younger, more conventionally attractive actresses like Meg Ryan, Amy Adams, Sandra Bullock, and Jennifer Aniston.
This is no small achievement for a youth-obsessed business which has traditionally relegated any actress over 45 to playing mothers and widows. 

As successful businesswoman Jane Adler, Streep demonstrates that age and experience are no guarantee of a straightforward and complication-free lovelife. Divorced from Jake (Alec Baldwin) for almost a decade and with three grown-up children, she discovers that she's still susceptible to Alex's roguish charms when the two spend a weekend together attending their son's graduation in New York.
Throwing caution and commonsense to the wind she plunges into an affair with her ex-husband, after he confesses that he's never stopped loving her even though he has subsequently married  the much younger woman whom he cheated on Jane with in the first place.
At the same time she finds herself being courted by Adam (Steve Martin), the warm hearted but dull architect she's commissioned to design an extension to her house. Adam, who's more recently divorced and not yet recovered from the trauma, is everything that Jake isn't. Jane suddenly finds herself spoilt for choice after a long barren spell in the dating desert. So should she go with her head or her heart?
What IT'S COMPLICATED makes clear is this is a decision that's much more complicated in practice than it is on paper, even for a woman with as much life experience as Jane. Jake is undeniably charming, persuasive and a heck of a lot of fun to be around. Adam, by comparison, is emotionally fragile, boringly low key, and looks like a waxwork of Anderson Cooper at 50.
But rather than agonize over her situation Jane exploits her new found opportunities to have some fun. This is a comedy after all, not a drama. Meryl Streep hasn't giggled this much since "Mama Mia," regaling her girlfriends with her adventures and luxuriating in the emotional high brought on by this unexpected reawakening of her lovelife.
Streep is good but she would not be half as effective if she didn't have an actor of Alec Baldwin's calibre to play against. Jake is a big cuddly bear of a man with a smile as wide as the cat who got the cream, and he's so effortlessly persuasive and appealing that we're almost prepared to forgive him for having the emotional maturity of a teenager. Even more than Streep, Baldwin deserves an Oscar nomination for his performance, but I fear that he's made it look so easy that his skill in bringing Jake to life will be overlooked by the Academy.
By no stretch of the imagination can IT'S COMPLICATED be described as a work of art. It's too fluffy and glossy for that, but perhaps it merits an Oscar nomination in the newly expanded best picture category for convincing the film industry that an audience exists beyond the coveted 18-30 age range who'll pay to watch older actors demonstrate that life and love don't have to end at 45.

THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL: message gets lost in the mystery

Made in 1959, during the height of the Cold War, THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL exploits the very real fear of annihilation by nuclear attack to explore issues of racism and humanity, but they're unfortunately overshadowed by the mushroom cloud-sized nagging question of what exactly has happened to humanity.

African-American mining engineer Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte) emerges after five days trapped in a collapsed tunnel in Pennsylvania to discover he is apparently the only person left alive. Everywhere is completely deserted, homes and vehicles have been abandoned in what looks like a mass panic. Heading east he makes his way to New York City searching for signs of life but all he finds are eeriely empty and silent streets and skyscrapers. 
From what he can piece together from newspapers and radio recordings, life on earth has been wiped out by a deadly radiation cloud released by an unnamed enemy. Then a blonde haired, attractive young woman suddenly appears. Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens) has also escaped the poison cloud.
With this mismatched and reluctant couple thrown together by fate, the question is can they  overcome their prejudices and preconceptions to make a life for themselves? Can they even bring themselves to touch each other? 
This was 1959 remember; the rise of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement to national prominence was still several years away, Belafonte and Sidney Poiter had only recently emerged as cinema's first Black leading men, and the idea of a Black man kissing a white woman on screen was still beyond the pale. The film makes a fairly half-hearted attempt to explore these taboos but our attention is distracted with wondering just what has happened to all the people.
New York is a city of eight million souls and it's clear from the enormous jams of abandoned cars that most did not make it beyond the George Washington Bridge, yet there's not a single body in sight. All these millions and millions of people have just vanished. It defies logic and science. Yes, some of those closest to a nuclear blast will be vaporised but as the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed, tens of thousands more died slow, painful and visible deaths.
And anyway, according to THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (hereafter referred to as TWTFATD) it was a radiation cloud not a bomb which wiped out the human race, so it's highly unlikely to have also made every last body vanish. 
While I'm a sucker for these 'last man on Earth' movies, mostly because I love the idea of having a completely intact Manhattan entirely to myself, this glaring lack of corpses stinking up the streets seriously weakens the film's efforts to discuss loftier concepts.
Belafonte is an impressive screen presence and a fine actor - his second release of 1959 "Odds Against Tomorrow" is one my favourite films of the 50s - but as producer of TWTFATD as well as the star he lets himself down by sanctioning this enormous hole in the plot.
And as for the ending - please don't get me started! All I'll say is if there was an Oscar for the year's most implausible, biggest cop-out finale it would be known as the TWTFATD.

CABIN FEVER: pumping new blood into a tired body

You're out in the woods with four friends, miles from anywhere.

Your car and mobile phone don’t work, and there’s a disturbing looking hobo lurking out there in the trees.

Then one of your friends falls sick with an illness which makes their skin peel off like wet papier-mâché.

What do you do ?

Do you bravely set out on foot to get help, or do you lock them into an outbuilding, and pray that they haven’t infected you ?

That’s the dilemma facing Paul (Rider Strong), Karen (Jordan Kidd), Bert, Macey and Jeff in CABIN FEVER, a genuinely scary and gruesomely funny 2003 horror flick which is unashamedly inspired by low budget classics of the 70s like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", and "The Hills Have Eyes".

Those films managed to scare audiences silly without resorting to multi-million dollar computer generated images, and first time director Eli Roth achieves much the same result with a cast of unknowns, numerous buckets of fake blood, and a tight, no-nonsense story.

All the familiar elements of a horror movie are present and correct, from the teens in terror, to the in-bred hillbillies, and the isolated location, but there are none of the tiresome, self referential jokes that had become the staple of Hollywood horrors in the early noughties with the "Scream", and "I Know What You Did Last Summer" series.

CABIN FEVER also neatly sidesteps the stale clichés of the horror genre.

None of the group decide it would be a good idea to split up to search for help, no one creeps silently up behind someone else, grabs their shoulder, scaring them half to death, then says “hey Brad, we’ve been looking for you”, and neither of the girls twists her ankle while running for her life.

Roth’s twist on the formula is to make the terror invisible. Its not a masked man with a chainsaw, or a family of deformed cannibals, but an ebola-like flesh eating disease which turns the teenagers end of college holiday into a living nightmare.

CABIN FEVER is funny, scary and a refreshing change of style. Just don’t watch it on your own.

CHRISTMAS IN JULY: I'm happy it could not be Christmas everyday

CHRISTMAS IN JULY was the second film to be directed by the yet to become legendary Preston Sturges and on the basis of this it's difficult to discern exactly what all the fuss is about.
Sturges' latter day reputation as a great comedy director rests on a handful of comedies he made in the 1940s and this isn't one of them. The story is dragged down by the two central characters, Jimmy MacDonald and Betty Casey, who are so sappy that it's impossible to empathise with them. They both deserve a good slap.
Not only are they wetter than the Atlantic Ocean but there's something a little disturbing about the 36 year old Dick Powell in the part of a young man on the make. Jimmy MacDonald is a supposedly humorous spin on the kind of characters Powell made his name playing in Warner Bros backstage musicals in the early 1930s. Back then he looked convincing as a fresh faced juvenile trying to make his way in the world and woo the equally young lady of his dreams. By 1940 he had assumed a more mature appearance but here he is still living at home, still trying to make it in the rough and tumble of New York City, and still wooing his young lady.
Guy Kibbee, Hugh Herbert, Warren Williams and all those other members of the Warner Bros stock company whose job it was in those early musicals to place obstacles in the path of young Dick's route to happiness and success have been replaced by lesser known actors such as Raymond Walburn, William Demerest and Harry Hayden but otherwise the film pretty rehashes the themes and scenarios which were presented to much better effect in "Gold Diggers of 1933", "Footlight Parade" and "42nd Street."
Preston Sturges is admired for his acerbic characters and sharply witty dialogue but there's precious little of either here. CHRISTMAS IN JULY is a very minor entry in his canon and if you want to discover just why he is so admired by many cinephiles I recommend you start with the movie he made immediately afterwards.
"The Lady Eve" with Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda and a wonderful cast of character actors has everything that this film doesn't.

UP IN THE AIR: I see Oscars on the horizon

UP IN THE AIR is a masterclass in how to achieve more by doing less. There's no discernable acting involved in George Clooney's performance as Ryan Bingham. He doesn't play the part,  he just is Bingham and he does it so effortlessly that it's easy to forget Clooney isn't simply being himself.
There's two reasons for that. Clooney is undoubtedly a very fine actor but, more importantly, the character of Bingham so closely resembles Clooney's own public persona that it's easy to believe he's playing himself. Bingham is a resolutely heterosexual bachelor, openly interested in no-strings attached relationships with women that are purely sexual, and vocally opposed to the idea of settling down or having children. He's a man perpetually in motion, subconsciously fearful that - like the shark he compares the human race to - he'll die if he stops moving.
Bingham is a creation of the 21st century - a corporate downsizing expert. He lives his life out of a perfectly packed carry-on suitcase criss-crossing the USA firing employees on behalf of employers who are too cowardly to do the deed themselves. In an era of downsizing and economic recession it's a rare boom industry.
The job keeps Bingham so busy that he's almost never home and he couldn't be happier. "Last year I spent 322 days on the road" he says, "which meant I spent 43 miserable days at home"; a point that's emphasised with a brief trip to his studio apartment which reveals a small, souless all white space resembling a hotel room, completely devoid of any personal touches. Home for Bingham is the first class cabin of an American Airlines jet at 33 thousand feet. His one ambition is to rack up 10 million air-miles and earn one of the airline's coveted silver cards giving him a lifetime of flying privileges.

Director Ivan Reitman explores and illustrates the consequences of Bingham's compartmentalised, emotion-free life through the no-strings-attached relationship which develops with Alex (Vera Farmiga). A successful businesswoman who is also constantly on the road, she is apparently his female equivalent. They flirt in a hotel bar by trading comments on the relative quality and service of car rental companies and compare their respective collections of customer loyalty cards before retiring to his room for sex.
Running in parallel is the reluctant relationship which develops between Bingham and Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), a hotshot young graduate hired by his employer to take their business to the next level. Her big idea to fire people remotely by videolink rather than in person, threatens Bingham's whole way of life, but he's forced to take her on the road with him to help her learn the ropes.
Without writing a four page essay it's impossible to discuss all of the themes and ideas which are so skilfully introduced in the course of the film's 1 hour 50 minute running time. Clooney is magnificent in his portrayal of this hollow man whose way of life is shaken to its core by his interaction with Alex and Natalie. Both Farmiga and Kendrick more than hold their own in the face of such formidable competition. It's the strength of their performances which make Clooney as effective as he is. 

If there's any justice (and often in Hollywood there isn't) 'm predicting Oscar nominations for Clooney as best actor, Farmiga as best supporting actress, a best director nod for Reitman, and best screenplay for Reitman and Sheldon Turner.
UP IN THE AIR is not the kind of film that blows you away while you're watching it. The impact is more subtle. This is a film that gets better and better the more you think about it afterwards - and you will. 

Louis de Funes & his LE GENDARME movies: to Russia and loved

Cinematic comedians who've made a career out of playing halfwits have an uncanny knack for crossing national boundaries to find love and admiration in the most unlikely places - places where they can't even be understood in their own voice for heaven's sake. 
American Jerry Lewis is a god in France, Briton Norman Wisdom is revered in Albania, while Frenchman Louis de Funes is a perennial favourite on Russian tv.

His series of Le Gendarme comedies in the 60s and 70s made him at one point France's favourite actor but it's difficult now to discern exactly what it was about these films that so charmed the French - who could understand what he was saying - let alone what it is that continues to entice the Russians, who can only appreciate him in dubbed form.
In six films between 1964 and 1982 he played Marechal des Logis-chef Ludovic Cruchot, a sergeant in the Gendarmerie Nationale, based in St Tropez on the French Riviera. Cruchot alternated between toadying obsequiousness towards his slightly dimwitted boss and abrasively insulting the 3 or 4 police officers under his command, while dragging all of them into all manner of foolish escapades.
LE GENDARME A NEW YORK (1965) saw him let loose in the Big Apple, ostensibly to attend an international conference of police officers, while 1978's LE GENDARME ET LES EXTRA-TERRESTRES found him back in St Tropez tackling space aliens with the unnerving ability to take on the form of his fellow officers. Both films feature an awful lot of shouting, exasperation, and running around by de Funes which he, French and Russian audiences clearly mistook for comedy.
It isn't.
It's just a balding man in a Gendarme uniform shouting, getting exasperated and running around a lot. The attempts at humour are unerringly infantile, and I don't mean that in a good way. de Funes in action is like watching someone with no sense of humour trying to replicate the sight gags and situations they've seen in a Laurel and Hardy short. There's a fine art to idiocy and where Stan Laurel created classic routines using a fine-tipped paint brush, de Funes attempts the same with a yard broom.
The result is clumsy, tiresome and unamusing. 
I don't resent the chunk of my New Year I gave up to watch these films. It's added to the sum of my cinematic knowledge and - just like when I had my wisdom teeth extracted - it's an experience I'll never have to go through again.