THE COMIC: less funny ha-ha and more disappointing ego trip

I'm totally willing to accept that THE COMIC is based loosely on a true life story (that of Buster Keaton) but that doesn't mean I find any of it remotely believable.
There's two reasons for that.
One is Dick van Dyke's utterly feeble attempt to portray his character as an old man.
The other is the hairstyles.
This 1969 film is set in the Hollywood of the 1920s yet no one sports a haircut appropriate to the era. Everyone is wearing their hair late 60s style - long and shaggy. Maybe the production budget didn't stretch to a barber but the end result is it looks sloppy. It also detracts from the authenticity of the setting.
But that's a small complaint compared with van Dyke's totally unconvincing performance in the second half of the film. His character, Billy Bright, is not exactly a spring chicken when we first encounter him in early 1920s Los Angeles. Let's be charitable and say he's in his early 30s. That would mean he's in his mid 70s in the scenes set in the present day when he's reminiscing about his life and times as one of the silent cinema's biggest comedians. But even if he'd pursued every faddy diet promoted by his contemporary, Gloria Swanson, he would not look as (comparatively) young and fresh-faced as he does.
The only concession van Dyke makes to the aging process is to don a wig of thinning hair. Otherwise the 74 year old Billy Bright looks exactly like 45 year old Dick van Dyke. This refusal to make anything more than a token token effort at growing old further undermines the story's credibility.
Given that THE COMIC was a labor of love by writer-director Carl Reiner, created as a vehicle for van Dyke to indulge his passion for the great comedians of the silent era, it's surprising and disappointing that so little attention was paid to the important details. If they thought he could carry the film by force of personality alone they were wrong. What's intended as a searing critique of a talent overwhelmed by ego turns out to be an object lesson in how ego can smother a good idea.

HUGO: a cracking story and a celebration of cinema

I'm not sure exactly what's inspired cinema's current fascination with its own past but I'm very happy about it.
This year's Oscar nominations are dominated by two films celebrating the earliest days of the movies. 'The Artist' is a beautiful and incredibly faithful recreation of 1920s silent Hollywood, and is reviewed elsewhere on this blog. The other is HUGO, a fictional tale about cinema's first genius film maker Georges Melies, and directed by cinema's current greatest living director, Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese's had a lifelong fascination with cinema and is one of the driving forces in the preservation of old films which might otherwise have crumbled to dust, so it's perhaps surprising that it's taken him so long to get around to actually making a film about about his passion.
In choosing to focus on Georges Melies, Scorsese has employed many of the same techniques that made Melies a pioneer in the industry. He was one of the first to recognise the storytelling potential of the newly invented movie camera, which had up till then been used simply to record simple scenes of everyday life, such as workers leaving a factory, or a train pulling into a station. Melies released his first film in 1896 and over the ensuing twenty years made another 500 more, telling increasingly sophisticated stories and employing ever more elaborate special effects, many of which he invented.
While considerably less prolific than Melies (who isn't?) Scorsese has similarly demonstrated a willingness to explore a wide variety of topics over his career, and now with HUGO he not only employs 3D for the first time but also creates his first truly child-friendly family film.
HUGO (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan living surreptitiously behind the scenes at a grand railway station in 1930s Paris. He maintains the station's giant clocks (a skill he learnt from his late father) and survives by stealing food from the shops on the station concourse. His obsession with restoring an automoton left to him by his father brings him into contact with Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), an elderly man who runs a toy repair shop in the station. Melies is an angry and bitter man who seems inexplicably determined to prevent Hugo from completing his mission, but he's figured without the young boy's resilience and resourcefulness, and piece by piece Hugo begins to discover that the old man may have a past he wants to keep concealed.

Scorsese's skill is in concealing his history lesson (about Melies invaluable contribution to the development of the cinema) inside an exciting adventure story that's about something else entirely. HUGO is absolutely not a biopic about the life and work of Georges Melies, but through the eyes of young Hugo we learn almost as much about the pioneer film maker as we would have done from a biography, but how big an audience would there have been for such a film?
Scorsese the cineaste succeeds in blending his passion for the history of film-making with the expectations of the multi-screen audience not much interested in that kind of thing to create a dazzling film designed to appeal to everyone, and which looks as good as the story it tells. And who knows - you might even leave the cinema convinced of the importance in preserving old films while there's still time. Now that is the mark of Scorsese's brilliance as a film maker!

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN: she wants to make love to you

The longer this film went on the less like Marilyn Monroe star Michelle Williams became.
It's a thankless task to try and capture the elusive magic that made Marilyn Marilyn and while Williams does her best she never succeeds in achieving much more than a low-wattage pale imitation.
It's to her credit that she eschews the cliched breathy, simpering Monroe to give us a more flesh and blood rendering but if this is what Marilyn was really like it's difficult to figure out how she ever became immortal.

Based on true-life events, MY WEEK WITH MARILYN works much better as a behind the scenes exploration of the troubled 1956 meeting of Hollywood's biggest star and England's most revered actor, Sir Laurence Olivier, to make a mediocre movie which did neither of them credit. If 'The Prince and the Showgirl' is remembered at all today it's as a lesson in how the confluence of two great talents does not necessarily result in movie magic.
Schooled in the no-nonsense 'show must go on' training ground of British repertory theatre, Olivier had no time for Monroe's obsession with 'Method' acting, her reliance on acting coach Paula Strasberg (Zoe Wanamaker), or her crippling insecurity which made her late for work almost every single day. Olivier's impatience merely amplified Monroe's problems and made for an incredibly stressful working environment.
Enter Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), the 23 year old son of a wealthy family determined to make it on his own in the world of film-making. After landing his first job as third assistant director on Olivier's production, Clark strikes up an unlikely friendship with the newly remarried (to playwright Arthur Miller) Monroe which rapidly turns into something more serious. But is it the real deal or is the emotionally unstable Monroe merely toying with his affections? And will the jealousy that her attentions provoke in her retinue and her co-star scupper Clark's career before it's even properly begun?
There's a definite fairytale aspect to Clark's story - gangly, naive young man falls in love with world's most famous and desirable woman and discovers his feelings are reciprocated - which mirrors the fictional story that Olivier (the Prince) and Monroe (the Showgirl) are acting out on screen, and that's the level on which I found myself enjoying this film. As regular readers of my blog will know, I'm a sucker for classic Hollywood (I know this is a British movie about a British made movie but Monroe's presence ensures it counts as classic Hollywood) so I lapped up the chance to go behind the screen and watch some of the era's biggest names at work and play and get a sense of what they were 'really' like.
Kenneth Branagh, who earned a reputation as the new Olivier in the 1980s and 90s, is magnificent as the real deal. In some scenes his physical resemblance to Sir Laurence is nothing short of spooky, and he almost succeeds in holding his own against Judi Dench who is even more magnificent as 'The Prince and the Showgirl' co-star Sybil Thorndike. Both of these titans of British theatre could be highly theatrical in real life and it's to the credit of Branagh and Dench that they don't portray them as caricatures.
Redmayne is adequate as the star-struck young man who finds himself living the dream of most red-blooded males on the planet, Julia Ormond is totally wrong as Olivier's film star wife Vivian Leigh, and there's an interesting, low-key cameo from Emma Watson as the costume girl who loses Colin's affections to Monroe.
MY WEEK WITH MARILYN never rises to meet the challenge of capturing the high voltage charisma of the characters it portrays. It feels more like a big budget tv movie than a small budget film made for the cinema, and that's rarely an indicator of a film that's built to last.

THE IRON LADY: caution! fine acting may induce ill-advised nostalgia

For those of us Brits who came to political consciousness in the 1980s Margaret Thatcher was and is an incredibly polarising figure. You either loved her or hated her. Indifference was not an option.

After 11 and a half years in power, her sudden demise as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party was mourned by few and she rapidly faded from public view. Now, 21 years after her final departure from 10 Downing Street it's easy to forget she's still with us. The infrequent sightings of this increasingly frail old lady are reminders of what feels like the dim distant past - not quite when dinosaurs roamed the Earth but pretty close.
So it was that I found myself feeling almost nostalgic for the Thatcher years as THE IRON LADY stirred memories that had long lain dormant. And it was a disturbing sensation because there's really nothing to feel nostalgic about. Politically the 1980s were less of a mess than the 70s had been but they are still not a decade I have a hankering to return to.
I blame this misplaced yearning on the impressive job that director Phyllida Lloyd ('Mamma Mia!') has done in recreating the events and personalities of the era and, in particular, on Meryl Streep's eerily spot-on impression of Mrs T herself. Perhaps impression is not quite the right word because Ms Streep doesn't simply pretend to be THE IRON LADY, she is the woman who struck fear into the hearts of Britain's friends and foes alike and became Ronald Reagan's soul mate. It's a stunning performance particularly given that she had to master a convincing British accent in addition to all of Mrs T's mannerisms and speech patterns. Streep's already picked up the BAFTA and the Golden Globe for Best Actress, and next weekend she could well add the Oscar to that haul.
Jim Broadbent as Denis Thatcher also deserves praise and the fact that he's not received multiple nominations is a reflection on the judgment of the nominating committees rather than the quality of his performance.

But while Streep and Broadbent are magnificent the film itself is not. Given the rich seam of material it had to mine it's disappointingly shallow. An hour and forty five minutes is totally inadequate to do justice to the scope of the subject matter, and so the story jumps around from Margaret's youth to her old age (where it spends entirely too much time), then back to her political beginnings and forward to her arrival as Britain's first female Prime Minister. Not only is that confusing if you're not familiar with British political history, but it's not enough time to focus on anything in any depth, and her 11 and a half years as PM get particularly short shrift.
There's no sense of the seismic shift in British society brought about by Thatcher's policies during the 1980s. Stock footage of police clashing with demonstrators at some undefined protest stands in for the long running battles with the unions, the opposition to cruise missiles and every other confrontation between Thatcher's government and various sectors of the electorate (and there were a lot of them!).
What we're left with is more of a sketch of her life rather than a biopic. Anyone coming to this film hoping to find out just what it was that Mrs Thatcher achieved which makes her worthy of a big budget movie starring Meryl Streep is likely to leave very little the wiser.

THE SECRET FURY: I object! on the grounds of sheer preposterousness

Hollywood's never had any qualms about playing fast and loose with the realities of the judicial system if it got in the way of a good yarn but I've never seen anything quite as ludicrous as 1950's THE SECRET FURY.
RKO must have threatened Claudette Colbert with compromising photos (possibly of her face in right profile) to persuade her to star in this ridiculous melodrama about a woman driven mad by a marriage she can't remember.
She plays highly strung concert pianist Ellen Ewing whose wedding to dashing young(ish) architect David McLean (Robert Ryan) is halted mid-ceremony by a stranger claiming that she's already married to a Lucien Randall. Ellen insists he's lying but when she's recognised as Mrs Randall by the justice of the peace who performed the earlier ceremony, and the chambermaid at her honeymoon hotel, David insists they find Randall and confront him. When they track him down he insists on talking with his 'wife' alone but no sooner do they close the door than a shot rings out and David bursts in to find Randall dead, a revolver on the floor and a shocked Ellen unable to offer a plausible explanation of what just happened.
So far so good.
This is pretty standard thriller/drama territory.
It's at Ellen's trial for Randall's murder where things get seriously nonsensical.
Ellen's defence lawyer is her late father's best friend and guardian of the Ewing family affairs (which is about as close to having a fool for a lawyer as it's possible to get without actually defending yourself) while the prosecution is led by the local district attorney (Paul Kelly) who was also David's rival for Ellen's affections, and who acknowledges pre-trial that he has a conflict of interest (but his boss doesn't agree!).
And so the stage is set for a trial where both the defence and the prosecution can barely contain the urge to address the accused as 'Ellen, darling' and wild, legally totally inadmissible claims and accusations are hurled by both sides reducing Ellen to a screaming wreck and allowing her lawyer to change her plea to not guilty by reason of insanity.
It's at this point that you will - if you've not been completely distracted by the nonsense unfolding in front of you - figure out who the mastermind behind this evil plot really is. It's really not that difficult.
But what you'll never figure out in a million years is why he is doing what he does to poor Ellen. Preposterous doesn't even begin to describe his motive, but at least he has one. Director Mel Ferrer clearly hopes we'll be so overwhelmed by the climactic contrived explanation that we won't notice no one's even attempted to explain why Ellen 'forgot' to mention that this person was in the room with her at the moment that Randall was murdered.
THE SECRET FURY is no one's finest moment. I'm guessing Colbert took it because her star was starting to wane and she was grateful for the work, but she's too old and sophisticated to be convincing in the part. Ryan appears ill at ease in a colorless role which could have been played by any number of less talented B-list leading men. I'm a huge fan of his work but there was little to enjoy here.
Exasperating nonsense from start to finish THE SECRET FURY is prima facie evidence that not everything released during Hollywood's golden age is as precious as the name suggests. Some of it is as worthless as a rusty tin.

I SAW WHAT YOU DID: a great star hanging on by her manicured fingernails

Thirty five years before "I Know What You Did Last Summer" put a bunch of teenagers in fear of their lives after accidentally killing a creepy looking fisherman in a hit and run, low budget horror meister William Castle gave us two teenagers in fear of their lives after unknowingly prank calling a murderer in I SAW WHAT YOU DID.

One could ponder on the relative scariness of knowing and seeing. Is it worse to imagine or actually witness a murder?  For me though, that's not the pertinent question. For me it's a question of which one would I want to watch more than once and the answer's easy.
I SAW WHAT YOU DID features the final appearance in an American made cinematic release of Joan Crawford. By 1965 this legendary film star was reduced to making low budget schlock horror B-movies but she refused to give in to her diminished circumstances. Crawford gives her part the same enthusiasm, (possibly alcohol fueled) energy and commitment as she did in her heyday, working opposite the true greats like Clark Gable, Melvyn Douglas, John Garfield and John Barrymore.
It's a pretty crummy part, playing a sex-starved older woman with all the appeal of a worn-out armchair, so desperate for attention she's prepared to blackmail a murderer (John Ireland) into marrying her, but there's not an ounce of shame or embarrassment in her performance. There's a certain fascination in watching this once great star work, seemingly oblivious to the passage of time, and the toll that it takes on the human body. It's tempting to describe Crawford as desperate - so desperate to continue working that she'd take a part like this - but that would suggest that she knew it was wrong for her and demeaning, and that's not at all what comes through in her performance.
Director Castle was damn lucky Crawford agreed to make the film because without her he's got nothing. Ireland clearly thinks the subject matter is beneath him, co-star Leif Erickson emotes with all the gusto of a California Redwood, and Sara Lane and Andi Garrett as the two prank-calling terrorised teenagers are what's mercifully described as 'inadequate.'
If you ever wondered where the makers of 'Scooby Doo' got their inspiration check out I SAW WHAT YOU DID.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN - PART ONE: self-inflicted punishment

Don't ask.
Just don't ask.
I don't know why I continue to inflict this saga on myself.
'New Moon' and 'Eclipse' were so dreadful it should have scared me off for life.
But I keep on coming back for more punishment.
It's not like I'm even hooked on Kristen Stewart anymore.

Part one of the fourth and final installment was yet another test of my endurance - could I hold it together or would BREAKING DAWN break me, sending me screaming from the room, frustrated beyond my ability to stand a minute more of this tedious dirge?
It was a close run thing but I think I more than proved I possess the resilience and strength of character to serve with the Marines or defuse bombs or talk crazy people down from the ledge of a skyscraper.
I'm still trying to figure out if that's something I should be proud of.
BREAKING DAWN is twenty five minutes worth of plot spread (very) thinly across an almost two hour running time. For the best part of ninety minutes almost nothing happens.
Characters look at each other, there's a bunch of arty-farty shots, and the newly-married Bella and Edward make beautiful PG-13 lurve. Time grinds to a halt.
I'd be lying if I called this a yawnfest. That would suggest the viewer remained awake and at least semi-conscious. BREAKING DAWN is a non-addictive, over-the-counter cure for insomnia.

THE ARTIST: just give this film every award going and be done with it

THE ARTIST, in the humble opinion of this lifelong viewer and reviewer of films from all decades and countries, is the most faithful recreation of old Hollywood ever. And yes, I'm including 'Singing in the Rain' in that pool of contenders.

THE ARTIST is not a pastiche or a tribute to the great silent movies of the 1920s. It is a 1920s-era silent movie. The attention to detail is just incredible, from the exact shades of black and white in each frame to the gestures and facial expressions of the characters you'll believe this is a newly rediscovered 85 year old film that has somehow survived in pristine condition in the vaults of one of the older Hollywood studios.
The film has deservedly been cleaning up at award shows and is tipped to win big at the Oscars later this month. Jean Dujardin as silent star George Valentin gives what I confidently predict is a career-best performance - and that's without having seen anything else he's done, and taking into account anything he may do in the future. This guy channels Douglas Fairbanks Sr with the gusto and confidence of someone who's dedicated their entire life to researching every aspect of cinema's first action hero.
The story borrows liberally from the various versions of 'A Star is Born' but never steals as it charts the decline of Valentin with the coming of sound and the rise of Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), a star struck fan whose chance encounter with Valentin at a movie premiere launches her on the path to fame and fortune as a star in her own right. Bejo's performance is similarly pitch perfect; my only reservation is that she doesn't have the face of a late 20s Hollywood actress. Bejo's an attractive woman but her looks belong to those international jet set movies of the 1960s when actors of all nationalities and accents rubbed shoulders in big budget productions set in exotic locales across the globe.
I've hesitated to mention that THE ARTIST is also a silent film because of the modern day prejudice associated with that word. How can a film where no one speaks be worth an investment of your precious time? "If no one talks how will I know what's going on?" I hear you complain, "And do you really expect me to watch a silent black and white film?" (I can feel the moisture from the contempt dripping from those last five words).
I'll resist the urge to launch into a diatribe about how such an ignorant attitude is shameful, and simply say that you will forget that this is silent film within the first two minutes. Firstly, it's not entirely silent - there's music and sound effects - but more importantly the story is so engaging and so beautifully told that you just won't care that no sound actually emits from the characters mouths.
Director Michael Hazanavicius has created an instant classic - a film that will enchant and entrance and leave you with that warm glow of intense satisfaction so seldom experienced when watching mainstream movies these days.