SOMEWHERE: art or arse?

On the basis that less is more SOMEWHERE has way too much.

Director Sophia Coppola's latest film is a masterclass in slow moving emptiness. The camera doesn't just linger on scenes, it develops a long term relationship with the inactivity being captured by the lens. If we're lucky the camera performs a very slow reverse zoom but most of the time it just sits and stares at the nothing happening in front of it. This tone is set with the very first shot in which a Ferrari sports car repeatedly passes in front of the static camera as it laps a circular track in the desert. On the one hand you've got to admire Coppola for holding her nerve long after everyone watching has started screaming, but on the other hand does a director really want to alienate a large section of their audience so early in the film?
I found myself simultaneously irritated and hypnotised by the story's languid pace. The film should come with a warning not to operate heavy machinery immediately afterwards. By the time the final credits rolled all I was fit for was a long nap.
SOMEWHERE surveys similar terrain to Coppola's most famous film 'Lost in Translation' - the off-screen reality of life as a film star. Where Bill Murray was trapped in a Tokyo hotel far from home, Stephen Dorff as Johnny Marco is voluntarily exiled to the famous Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. His life while inbetween films is utterly devoid of meaningful activity. he spends his days lying on his bed in his hotel suite watching twin blonde pole dancers perform for his edification, smoking, and going out for aimless drives in his black Ferrari, occasionally following an attractive young female motorist who's pulled up next to him at the traffic lights. Marco's life is the dictionary definition of torpor. He nods off while watching the pole dancers and even manages to fall asleep with his head between the legs of a young woman he has all too easily seduced at one of the endless, joyless parties held in his suite.

This is a man in the apparently enviable position of having more money than he needs and all the time in the world to indulge himself, but barely able to function. He struggles to rouse himself when his young daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) comes to stay with him. He takes her ice skating and to watch him play dice at a Vegas casino but there's rarely a sense of any real enthusiasm for what he's doing. The long lingering gaze of Coppola's camera heightens Marco's ennui but fails to create the real sense of atmosphere which was such a powerful element in 'Translation' and 'The Virgin Suicides.' Maybe the harsh California sunlight and soulless LA city landscape is partly to blame but the film feels as empty as Marco's existence. Those films were bona fide arthouse cinema whereas SOMEWHERE veers dangerously close to self indulgent arse territory.
The blame is completely Coppola's. Dorff is totally convincing as a Stephen Dorff type film star and 12 year old Fanning turns in a performance thankfully devoid of Hollywood child star theatrics and insincerity.
If like me you're an admirer of Coppola's work you'll want to see SOMEWHERE. Just prepare to be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you're one of those weird people who totally failed to appreciate the magnificence of 'Lost in Translation,' this film will only (and this time justifiably) reinforce your negative opinion of her style.

DEEP END: a seedy bath time sex story

Back in the day, long before she became best known for decorating cakes, Jane Asher was quite a little raver. Or at least she portrayed one in DEEP END, and was damn good at it!

She plays Susan, a bored young woman working as an attendant at a run down public baths in a run down suburb of London. Back in 1970 people still visited these establishments to take a bath, as well as a swim in the pool, and it's her job to provide the customers with a clean towel, shampoo and soap, and clean out the bath afterwards. It's mind numbing work but there's the occasional perk in the form of a tip from a customer who wants more than their back scrubbed.
She takes impressionable new employee Michael (John Moulder Brown) under her wing, showing him the ropes and setting him up with some of the more sex starved middle aged female customers (including a let-it-all-hang-out cameo from Diana Dors) who are willing to tip generously for some young male company. Michael's only 15 and very awkward around women and Susan plays up to that, unwittingly encouraging the teenager to become besotted with her with tragic results.
For a story about sexual awakening DEEP END is resolutely unsexy. The baths are depressingly drab and dingy; paint is peeling off the walls, the private bathing cubicles feel dirty, and my mind was swamped with thoughts of foot infections like verrucas. When the action does move outside it's to the sex shops and cheap hookers of Soho, and a seedy cinema showing a Swedish sex film. Michael and Susan appear trapped in this hellishly demoralising world, surrounded by lecherous and uncaring older adults.
24 year old Asher is superb as the undeserving and callous object of young Michael's infatuation, and Brown is utterly convincing as the naive and emotionally immature boy who loses his head over her.Director Jerzy Skolimowski also deserves high praise for telling a compelling story in such an unappealing setting. Perhaps it takes the unsentimental eye of a foreigner (he's Polish) to create such a disturbing image of London's slimy underbelly.
DEEP END is a unique viewing experience. Its combination of drama, comedy, romance and craziness doesn't fit comfortably into any of the other genres of British movie (swinging London, East End gangsters, Carry On, literary classics) that were popular in the late 60s and early 70s. It's also a very hard to find film so if you get the chance to see it - grab it. You won't be disappointed.

CALLING DR DEATH: tiny cop cracks the case

This first entry in a series of six low budget 'Inner Sanctum' thrillers shot by Universal in the mid 40s is notable chiefly for the whispered inner dialogue going on inside the head of the protagonist, Dr Mark Steel. It's almost as if he doesn't want to disturb himself by having his inner voice speak out loud, but disturbed is what he is nonetheless.
The good doc (Lon Chaney Jr) is married to an unfaithful wife (Ramsay Ames) who won't give him a divorce because she likes the good life and social standing that comes with being the wife of a prominent neurologist. When she's found brutally murdered and the doc can't remember where he was on the day it happened, he turns to his loyal nurse and secretary Stella (the beautiful Patricia Morison) to save him from the electric chair.
Ignoring the misleading title (no-one ever calls Dr Steel Dr Death) the plot succeeds in staying just this side of plausibility (unlike some later entries in the series) and masks the killer's true identity for long enough to hold our interest. There's some obvious red herrings, most notably the repeated interjections of Inspector Gregg (J.Carroll Naish) who pops up in almost every scene to make ludicrous accusations which threaten to push the good doctor over the edge.
Naish plays the part as if he's Joseph Calleia but can't quite pull off the oily-suave smoothness or air of slightly exotic mystery he's reaching for. Part of the reason for this is his obvious lack of height. It's almost a cliche that many actors are actually considerably smaller than they appear on screen, but Naish looks tiny even with the help of the camera. Chaney is unlikely leading man material but that doesn't really matter when the actresses surrounding him (Morison, Ames) are so bad they couldn't convincingly exude love playing opposite Clark Gable in his prime.
CALLING DR DEATH was never designed to be high art. It's a 62 minute B-movie intended for the bottom half of a double bill and it suits its purpose very well. Switch brain to off-position, sit back and enjoy.

ACCIDENT: an academic's life under the microscope

After he outgrew his matinee idol beginnings Dirk Bogarde moved on to some very interesting work, essaying a variety of challenging and varied roles which allowed him to show his true talent as a serious actor.
I've always found his 60s films particularly worth watching, but ACCIDENT tested the limits of my admiration. This 1967 Joseph Losey directed drama is ponderous in the extreme, full of meaningful silences and lingering shots which give the impression that he forgot to call 'cut!' at the end of the scene.

Bogarde plays Stephen, an Oxford University don fretting about the onset of middle age, who becomes entranced by one of his female students. Anna (Jacqueline Sassard) is an Austrian princess with striking features, a frosty demeanor and all the personality of a tree stump, and I've read criticism elsewhere that ACCIDENT doesn't work because Sassard's not a good enough actress to play a convincing temptress. But that ignores the fact that a man going through a mid-life crisis is highly likely to be less interested in a great personality than looks and youth and Anna has both.
Stephen faces competition for Anna's attentions from another of his students,William (Michael York), and - more creepily - Charley (Stanley Baker), one of his colleagues who's also married with kids.
This bizarre love triangle plays out at a glacial pace under the hot sun and rural splendour of Oxfordshire in the summer, with Stephen mostly a passive and frustrated observer of William and Charley's considerably more pro-active pursuit of the emotionless Anna.
The film's languid pace plays up to the characters' sense of boredom and frustration. Stephen and Charley latch onto Anna more as a shortsighted reaction to middle age and their stagnating marriages  than because they're smitten by her particular charms. William's life is equally unfocused beyond the immediate gratification of his feelings for Anna. It all adds up to a pretty depressing picture of life among Britain's academic elite, condemned to live out their years in the emotionally unrewarding splendour and comfort of ivory towers and country homes.
Bogarde is pitch perfect in his portrayal of Stephen's angst and ambivalence over the situation he's created for himself. He clearly sees himself as morally superior to the increasingly loathsome Charley but the expression in his eyes constantly gives himself away. ACCIDENT may challenge your patience but it's worth rising to that challenge for the pleasure of another masterclass from one of British cinema's most talented names.

LAST NIGHT: haunting and understated

LAST NIGHT is a thoughtful, honest and painful exploration of trust and infidelity in marriage told through the experiences over one night of a young New York couple separated by the demands of his job.
Joanna (Keira Knightley) is a writer with one unsuccessful book under her belt and earning her living as a freelancer writing whatever a publisher will pay her for. Her husband Michael (Sam Worthington) is in commercial real estate, working on a project which requires an overnight trip to Philadelphia with his team to meet with a client.
Joanna's convinced there's something going on between Michael and his attractive colleague Laura (Eva Mendes) and challenges him with her suspicions as he's preparing to leave. He insists she's imagining things but the accusation plants a seed and as the business trip gets underway he finds himself looking at Laura in a new light. Meanwhile Joanna bumps into Alex (Guillaume Canet) an old flame, on the street and he invites her out for the night. He rapidly makes clear his continued feelings for her, reawkening in her emotions she'd kept repressed since marrying Michael.
LAST NIGHT reminded me of 'Closer' with one important difference. While all the characters in that 2004 drama were so unpleasant that they thoroughly deserved the misery they inflicted on one another, it's much less easy to apportion blame on Joanna and Michael. They're both decent, likable people who want their marriage to be a strong and enduring union but find themselves unable to resist temptations they know to be wrong and recognise will destroy what they've built together. In that very middle class way some will find excruciatingly annoying, both Joanna and Michael articulate their disapproval of what they're about to do and its consequences, with the people they're about to do it with, and those people agree with their assessment!
It's all very civilised and all the more tragic to watch two well matched individuals so knowingly orchestrating the destruction of their relationship for something both recognise is not worth the pain it will cause.
Director Massy Tadjedin wisely resists the temptation to have the film take sides, positioning the camera as a neutral observer, giving both Joanna and Michael equal screen time and treating Laura and Alex with sympathy also. Judgment is passed on everyone and no one leaving it to the viewer to decide who, if anyone, is most to blame for the events that unfold.

Worthington is not the most charismatic performer but he nevertheless holds his own against impressive but understated competition from Knightley, Mendes and an irresistibly charming Canet, and there's great support from Griffin Dunne as Alex's old friend who tries vainly to stop Joanna from doing what she appears helpless to stop herself doing.
Tadjedin's other master stroke is to know exactly when to bring down the curtain, It left me wanting much more but also appreciating that more would have spoiled everything that had gone before.

HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE: and outstay your welcome

This 1965 battle of the sexes comedy is crying out for the deft touch of director Billy Wilder. What it gets is the rather more heavy hand of Richard Quine who fails to get the best out of his star, Jack Lemmon or the material.
HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE was a rare misstep for Lemmon at the midway point of a hugely successful decade long creative streak which had already produced 'Some Like it Hot', 'The Apartment', 'Irma La Douce' and 'Days of Wine and Roses', with 'The Fortune Cookie'. 'The Odd Couple', 'The Out of Towners' and 'Save the Tiger' still to come. Wilder directed him in four of these and would have made a better job of HTMYW than Quine did.
Lemmon plays Stanley Ford, the creator of a wildly successful newspaper cartoon strip depicting the exploits of Bash Brannigan. He lives an idyllic bachelor lifestyle in his Manhattan town house, waited on hand and foot by his devoted valet Charles (Terry-Thomas). Both men have nothing but scorn for the institution of marriage so when Stanley wakes up the morning after a friend's drunken stag party to find himself married to the young lady who jumped out of the cake, his entire world turns upside down.

Stanley incorporates his change of lifestyle into his cartoon strip but when he decides to have Bash murder his wife at the same time as Mrs Ford disappears he is arrested and charged with her murder.
All this plays out rather too slowly to maintain meaningful forward momentum. The story is stretched beyond it's natural length as the script is milked for every last drop of misogynistic humour, taxing even the prodigious comedic talents of Lemmon and Thomas.
Not helping matters is the casting of Virna Lisi as the Italian cake model. Lisi was one of those interchangeable European models slash actresses Hollywood became enamoured with in the 1960s, and who were brought over to add exotic glamour to numerous American films. She tries her best but she's no match for Lemmon and Thomas.
If this film had been 15 minutes shorter I'd have liked it a lot better. As it is it outstays its welcome and left me with visions of what might have been in the hands of Mr Wilder.

TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN: superior soap

TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN is director Vicente Minnelli's 1962 sequel of sorts to his "The Bad and the Beautiful" made a decade earlier, and it suffers by comparison. Kirk Douglas played a film producer in that earlier expose of the seamier side of Hollywood, and he returns in the role of Jack Andrus, a washed up film star thrown a lifeline by his former friend, director Maurice Kruger (Edward G Robinson).
To explain away the fact that Douglas is now playing a different character, TWIAT includes a scene in a screening room with Andrus, Kruger and assorted hangers-on watching TBATB, and discussing it as a film that Andrus starred in when he was a star.
TWIAT is a fascinating time capsule reflecting a moment in Hollywood history when - for financial reasons - much of the action had shifted from southern California to Italy and Rome's famed Cinecitta film studio in particular.
Released just a year before the real-life Liz Taylor-Richard Burton soap opera played out at Cinecitta during the making of 'Cleopatra', the story centres around Kruger's efforts to shoot a drama at the studio pairing an American leading man (George Hamilton looking eerily like Anthony Perkins) with an Italian leading lady. The stars' inability to speak the same language will be resolved afterwards in the dubbing suite.
Fresh off a stint at a clinic to deal with his alcoholism and mental health issues Andrus is not in the best shape to cope with the bubbling cauldron of overheated emotions he's dunked straight into on arriving in Rome. There's the lingering animosity with Kruger over their previous professional partnership, the temptation of his ex-wife Carlotta (Cyd Charisse) who's all too willing to exploit the torch he still carries for her, and his burgeoning relationship with a beautiful young woman who is actually in love with Hamilton's character.

Claire Trevor's overblown performance as Kruger's vindictive wife only adds to the perception of all of this as a big budget soap opera. I've got nothing against soap operas if they're done well, but this one's a little too much talk and not enough action. TWIAT is a visually and emotionally bloated, lushly furnished melodrama which replaces the sharp edges and caustic dialogue of TBATB with a lot of petty sniping, trade chatter and a climactic scene so atrociously badly shot that it wouldn't even have made it into Kruger's fictional movie.

JUST GO WITH IT: stinks worse than a sack of angry, frightened, sweaty skunks

I never ever give up on a film. No matter how bad or boring I make it a rule to stick with it to the end. How else can I offer an honest assessment if I haven't seen it through to the bitter end?  If I switch off early I might miss the miraculous, cinematic equivalent of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.
I made an exception to this golden rule for JUST GO WITH IT.

I stoically bore the pain for 52 minutes before pulling the plug. To put it plainly Adam Sandler's latest romantic comedy is unwatchable crap.
In truth I knew this from 2 minutes in. Right from the opening shots it's clear there's not going to be the digital equivalent of a single frame of originality in the ensuing two hours. This cookie cutter rom-com is the cinematic equivalent of a paint by numbers picture of an empty cardboard box. Director Dennis Dugan and his screenwriters have packed the witless script with every tired convention and overused cliche of the genre, chucked in some blatant product placements (I spotted Pizza Hut, Pepsi, Hilton Honors and Barney's New York without even trying) and then wound up the clockwork key in the back of stars Sandler and Jennifer Aniston and pushed them in front of the camera to lifelessly regurgitate the witless dialogue.
I've never been a fan of Sandler's brand of manchild humour but even that would have been welcome in place of the characterless performance he offers here. Both he and Aniston go through the motions with an evident and understandable lack of enthusiasm for the material. Aniston's inability (or is it unwillingness?) to pick material that's something more than third rate is one of Hollywood's abiding mysteries, although some of the dross she's put her name to in the past looks like 'Citizen Kane' compared to JUST GO WITH IT.
This is not just rubbish, it's rubbish that insults our intelligence after picking our pocket, taking ticket money from us under the false pretense of offering entertainment in return. And now I've got that off my chest I will not waste any more of my time or energy on getting angry about it.This is already considerably more attention than it deserves.

BLACK BOOK: who would have thought he had it in him?

It's difficult to imagine the same Paul Verhoeven who directed such overblown and garish Hollywood monstrosities as ‘Showgirls’, ‘Starship Troopers’ and ‘Basic Instinct’ could also be responsible for writing and directing such an adult (in the good sense of the word), complex, thought-provoking thriller.

BLACK BOOK will force you to the edge of your seat, keep you perched there for the story’s entire two and a half hour running time, and leave you shocked, surprised, frightened, horrified and breathless. Verhoeven has created a tale which is so incredible that you'll need to keep reminding yourself while watching it that it's based on actual events which happened a little more than sixty years ago.

BLACK BOOK is set in Occupied Holland in September 1944. The Nazis are still firmly in control of the country. The Allies are advancing across Europe towards Germany but they’ve just suffered a major setback at Arnhem. Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten) is a beautiful young Jewish woman living in hiding in the attic of a farmer’s house. When we first encounter her she is trying to memorize a section of the Bible in order that she can pass more convincingly as a Christian. “If the Jews had listened to Jesus they wouldn’t be in such a mess now” she’s told by the farmer sheltering her. Her already precarious existence is further threatened when a crippled US bomber struggling to gain height accidentally drops a bomb on the farmhouse.Now she’s homeless, without an ID card and at continual risk of arrest and deportation, or arbitrary execution. But for Rachel the horror is only just beginning. Her efforts to stay alive lead her to a group of Dutch Resistance fighters and a hair-raisingly dangerous plan to rescue three of their captured comrades by having her seduce the local Gestapo chief.

To reveal anymore of the plot would be a severe disservice. Suffice to say that BLACK BOOK continually confounds expectations as its almost surreal tale of wartime betrayal, deceit and disguise unfolds.From the traitor in the midst of the Dutch Resistance to the Gestapo chief protecting his Jewish lover, and the elderly lawyer with a client list of rich Jews desperate for an escape route; everyone has an identity to conceal or a secret to keep. No one is who they appear to be. To trust someone is to sign your own death warrant.

This crushing sense of paranoia and insecurity is heightened by Anne Dudley’s magnificent music score. Restless, insistent and unsettled violins urge the story, characters, and viewer continually forward in a hopeless search for some sort of resolution and peace. The one element lacking from the film is a genuine sense of period atmosphere. For me the story would have felt more authentic if it had been shot in black and white. World War Two was a black and white conflict. Everything we see on screen is correct for the period but it just doesn’t feel like 1944. The colour is too sharp and too clean. There are techniques available to make new colour film look old (David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac’ makes great use of this) but perhaps Verhoeven’s limited budget couldn’t stretch to it.

The director’s return to his native Holland to work in his own language has brought out a side of him fans of his Hollywood movies would never have expected. BLACK BOOK is an R rated movie but there’s nothing gratuitous about the violence, nudity, or bad language. They all play an integral role in the telling of a story which is adult for all the right reasons.

AN IDEAL HUSBAND: I'm not Wilde about this

Oscar Wilde was a brilliant playwright with a biting wit and a brilliant way with words, but you wouldn't know that if all you had to go on was this 1947 British version of his 1895 stage play AN IDEAL HUSBAND.
For much of the running time the cast are swamped by the garish Technicolor and drowned out by the insistent classical muzak score, but that's not an entirely bad thing because in the moments when it's quiet enough to hear them speak it's obvious that none of them are up to the task of delivering Wilde's words in an amusing or convincing way.
Imported American star Paulette Goddard is well out of her depth as the seductive and scheming Mrs Cheveley, and Hugh Williams as the target of her machinations is so dull that it's impossible to evoke any sympathy for his plight. Diana Wynyard just looks bored with the whole affair while Michael Wilding should have sued cameraman Georges Perinal for shooting him exclusively from angles so bad that he reduces the dashing matinee idol to a collection of sharp angles clinging to an enormous nose.
Perhaps director Alexander Korda was so distracted by his efforts to cram as many different bright colours as possible into every frame of film that he didn't notice the dismal performances being delivered by his cast. Not even the venerable Sir C Aubrey Smith in his penultimate role can save this flop.
Utterly undistinguished on every level, my advice is to give this film a very wide berth and watch the 1999 version with Rupert Everett and Julianne Moore instead.