NINE: this judge awards zero point zero for entertainment

It's official. I do not like films directed by Rob Marshall. 
"Chicago" was a boring stage-bound adaptation of a musical offering just one memorable song; "Memoirs of a Geisha" was a chick-flick with not one single solitary point of interest for male viewers; and NINE is simply boring.

Not being a Broadway aficionado, I didn't realise the film's based on a hit show though I should have guessed. The action has been opened up more than it was in the film version of "Chicago"  but it's still largely stage bound, with characters that are more at home under the proscenium arch than on the big screen.
The biggest clue though is the collection of tuneless songs which repeatedly interrupt the flow of the story. Each of the film's many stars gets their own big production number, allowing them to express at great length their feelings towards the central character Guido Contini, played by Daniel Day Lewis. And it's here that NINE goes one better than "Chicago" because there's not even one memorable, hummable song among them.
Contini is a thinly disguised version of celebrated Italian film director Federico Fellini. His movies have come to define 1960s Rome to the world, but the maestro's struggling for inspiration for his new movie. He has a title, "Italia" and a star in Claudia Jenssen (Nicole Kidman) but with the start of shooting just ten days away he still doesn't have a script. With two flops behind him, the weight of expectation on him to create a hit is so heavy he's literally finding it hard to breath. 

These professional pressures are compounded by his complicated personal life. He's trying to placate an unhappy mistress (Penelope Cruz) and an even more unhappy wife (Marion Cotillard) while also living up to the expectations of his dear departed mama (Sophia Loren).
On paper this all looks like an interesting premise for a film but it transfers to the screen as dull, self indulgent and directionless. It requires an iron will to stay with the film through it's first fifty shapeless minutes when there's little discernable forward motion to the plot. 
Director Marshall tries to recreate the look and the feel of a Fellini movie but the result is a pastiche which totally misses the point. It's like recreating the Mona Lisa using paint by numbers. The end product looks the same (the visuals are impressive and the sequences in black and white are particularly effective) but it's obviously not the Mona Lisa, and in Marshall's case, having a cast of Irish (Day Lewis), British (Judi Dench), French (Cotillard), Spanish (Cruz) and Australian (Kidman) actors speaking in faux Italian accents really doesn't help.
NINE should have been released on Thanksgiving. It has turkey written all over it. 

AVATAR: not quite the end of cinema as we know it

So I finally gave in and went to see what all the hoopla's about.
I was prepared to be bored rigid by AVATAR but I was pleasantly surprised. I guess that's the big plus point about low expectations.

The film is undeniably a visual treat. The 3-D takes a little while to get used to but by the film's midpoint it felt entirely natural. Director James Cameron has obviously made a conscious decision not to treat 3D as a gimmick by using it solely to throw things into the audience. The technique serves the story rather than the other way around, so while stuff does appear to come out of the screen and into the auditorium it does so organically. 
But while the film deserves praise for it's cutting edge use of computer technology to create a plausible alien world on the planet Pandora, it's also true that without the hi-tec visuals AVATAR would be an overlong sci-fi epic with far more limited appeal. It's the visuals which breathe new life into the rather familiar story of conflict between technologically superior, arrogant humans, and a community of peace-loving primitive aliens living at one with nature. 
Cameron, who also wrote, produced and edited the movie, has his cake and eats it too, using AVATAR to condemn man's use of technology in pursuit of financial reward at the expense of those who value the natural order, while using advanced technology to make the telling of the story possible.
Granted he's not destroying civilisations and massacring hundreds in the process but - if some of the film's loudest supporters are to be believed - the release of AVATAR marks a seismic change in the way that films are made. The film's impact on cinema is the 21st century equivalent, they claim, of the introduction of sound to films in 1927.
I think that's overstating it's significance. Cinema has been making increasing use of computer generated imagery in the last 15 years (remember your initial reaction to seeing 'real' dinosaurs in 'Jurassic Park'?) but cgi has not replaced traditional methods of film making. AVATAR does mark a big step forward in this process but I'm not convinced it will sweep away all that came before it in the same way that sound destroyed practically all the techniques and practices involved in making silent movies.

Cameron's brand of hi-tec 3D works for action/fantasy stories but is much less relevant to other genres. Comedies and dramas for example, have little need for such effects. It's difficult to figure out how 3D would enhance the storytelling process there. 
The other factor limiting 3D's take-over of existing film-making processes is on the customer end. I saw AVATAR at a typical American multiplex - the kind of place where most people go to see films - and the screen wasn't big enough to do full justice to the technology. 3D emphasised the relative smallness of the screen by highlighting it's edges, which cut off the picture everytime it came out of the screen. Similarly the 3D glasses with their solid black frames constrained my field of vision.
I'm glad I went to see it. It was my first experience of a real 3D movie and I liked what I saw. AVATAR is an impressive achievement and there's much to admire. However I'll still be rooting for "Up in the Air" on Oscar night.

VALLEY OF THE DOLLS: trashier than the municipal dump

I'd always imagined that VALLEY OF THE DOLLS would be trashy. I'd read enough about the film in books on the history of 1960s cinema to expect airport novel junk with a high Hollywood gloss but I didn't realise quite what a soap opera it would be as well.

I don't mean those self-perpetuating daytime tv soaps with their cardboard sets and wooden acting. VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is Dynasty style soap, right down to the casting of a Hollywood star who's seen better days.
That actress on the slide is Susan Hayward, playing Helen Lawson, a Broadway legend who's attained her mythic status by clambering over the bodies of those who were more talented but less determined. It's a part that would have also suited the late 60s-era Bette Davis or Joan Crawford, although it's doubtful whether anything or anyone would have remained standing had either of those ladies been cast in the role.
It's a shame that Hayward's part isn't bigger. Lawson is an enjoyable and much needed counterpoint to the shrieking, wailing and immature suffering of the three interchangeable young women at the heart of the story.
I had the hardest time telling Barbara Parkins (Anne) from Patty Duke (Neely). They both look so similar that it took me the first thirty seconds of any scene either of them was in to figure out which one I was watching. It didn't help that the same guys got involved with both of them.
The third of the trio is Sharon Tate as Jennifer. Although beset by the same personal and career setbacks as Anne and Neely in her climb up the greasy pole of showbusiness, with her striking looks, long blonde hair and fixation on her breasts, I had no problem identifying her.
It's the myriad of misfortunes which inject the element of soap opera into the proceedings. Between the three of them they rack up more adultery, mental illness, drug addiction, abortions, fatal diseases, alcoholism, attempted suicides, one-night stands, and ex-boyfriends/husbands in just a few short years than any trio of real-life famous-for-being-famous paparazzi-addicted socialites could manage in a lifetime.

Watching the multiple miseries which afflict them as they drag themselves painfully up that pole, it's impossible to avoid reaching the conclusion that fame and fortune are not worth the price they extract. The drama is so overheated that it's also easy to forget that it's not actually so far removed from reality. The history of Hollywood is littered with stars and wannabes who cracked under the pressure, from Peg Entwistle to Judy Garland. Ironically, Garland, who's own life bore many similarities to Neely's,  was hired and fired from the part of Helen Lawson because of her drinking and unpredictable behaviour.
VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is considerably less scandalous now than it was on it's original release in 1967. Thanks to the tabloids, kiss and tell memoirs, and websites like TMZ, there's little we don't know about what happens behind the scenes in showbusiness and the lengths to which some people are prepared to go to find fame and then hang on to it. 
There's something rather endearing about three young ladies quite prepared to trample the ten commandments in their drive to succeed, but unwilling to speak in anything less than perfectly formed sentences while they're doing it.
But even though it's power to shock is much diminished the film survives as an enjoyable example of ludicrous, overblown, implausible camp trash. 

BEDTIME STORY: I've heard this one before

The most extraordinary thing about BEDTIME STORY is the performance of Marlon Brando.
This is not the tortured, angry, mumbling, method acting Brando of the 1950s, nor is it the increasingly fat, middle aged, mumbling, method acting Brando of the 70s.

This 1964 release features a still handsome, clearly spoken, non-method acting Marlon Brando making his first foray into comedy, and it really is a weird experience. I just didn't expect to see him being so normal, tossing off punchlines and mugging like Jerry Lewis, in a part which could have been played by any number of good looking, marginally talented light comedians.
He and David Niven play a couple of conmen who earn their living by seducing the ladies. Niven uses his suave English charms to separate older females from their fortune while Brando specialises in luring younger girls into bed with promises of marriage and then abandoning them when he's had his way. 
When Brando horns in on Niven's territory on the French Riviera the two team up at first (with Brando playing Niven's idiot brother) but then fall out over fabulously wealthy "soap queen" Janet Walker (Shirley Jones). To settle their differences the two men agree that whoever is first to get $25,000 out of Ms Walker will become 'king of the mountain' while the loser leaves town.
If the plot sounds vaguely familiar - it is. BEDTIME STORY was remade in 1988 as "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" with Michael Caine and Steve Martin. Brando's interpretation of retarded stupidity is tame compared to Martin's gross-out version, but it's still odd watching a man regarded by many as the greatest movie actor of all time hamming furiously as he pretends to careen downhill in an out-of-control wheelchair.
Brando looks neither convincing nor comfortable in the part, and he would have looked embarrassed too if he could have seen the finished product. The story's set on the French Riviera but Brando and Niven never set foot off the Universal studios lot in Los Angeles. Director Ralph Levy chooses instead to stand them in front of some of the most unconvincing back projected footage I've ever seen. A pair of obvious stand-ins are used for the few shots actually filmed in France. 
This kind of lazy filmmaking insults the audience's intelligence. It assumes we'll be so overawed by the superstar charisma pulsating from the screen that we won't notice the weak script and shoddy production values. Rob Reiner tried the same trick with "The Bucket List" using the star power of Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman to try and distract us from noticing how bad his film was. He should have learned from BEDTIME STORY. Even cinema legends can't polish a turd.   

THE UNKNOWN MAN: anguish 101 for actors

Walter Pidgeon was just starting the slow inevitable slide from leading man status when he made THE UNKNOWN MAN for longtime employers MGM in 1951.
He'd reached the peak of his fame nine years earlier as Mr Miniver to Greer Garson's "Mrs Miniver" but he'd been around since the mid 1920s, working with most of the big names at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, usually as the solid, often stolid reliable, husband type. He occasionally got an action part but mostly he exuded dull dependable integrity.
Imagine a large piece of oak, tall and erect, carved with craggy features and endowed with a beautiful baritone voice and you've got Walter Pidgeon.

The part of business attorney Dwight Bradley Masen in THE UNKNOWN MAN was therefore tailor-made for him. Masen's built a comfortable life for himself on the earnings from his law practice. He knows all the right people and has a reputation for idolising the law. He's thoroughly decent and so dull that he blends in with the solid wood furniture lining his office.
Then he takes on a criminal case, defending a young man (Keefe Brasselle) accused of murder. Masen wins on his first time out in court but afterwards learns that his client was probably guilty. What is Mr Live-by-the-law to do? The young man can't be tried again, but neither can Masen let him get away with it.
To articulate his dilemma Pidgeon digs deep into his memory to recall whatever acting lessons he may have taken as a young man and the result is Anguish 101 for Actors.
Masen paces the floor, up and down, up and down, lapping at the speed of an Olympic race walker as his mind turns over the problem "what to do, what to do." He spins so sharply each time he reaches the edge of the carpet that I fear he might fall over but he continues pacing, oblivious to any dizziness caused by the sudden 180 degree change in direction.
Often when he paces he wrings his hands at the same time, just to make sure we fully comprehend the depth of his anguish.
In those brief moments when he comes to rest he stops wringing his hands for long enough to hold his head with them, almost perceptibly squeezing his skull as if to try and force out a solution.
And let's not forget the copious dabbing of his sweaty brow with a neatly folded handkerchief while preparing to betray the moral foundation of his very being with a carefully considered but hesitantly spoken falsehood.
Believe me, Method Actors have nothing on Walter Pidgeon.
To be fair, his acting's no better or worse than the story, which is nothing more than a B crime movie tinged with a thin patina of MGM gloss.
Masen's unnamed hometown is big, progressive and successful yet has just one judge, one courtroom and a DA who has to investigate and prosecute cases all on his own. The mysterious Mr Big of organised crime is played by an actor who looks so weird (in the immaculate world of Hollywood strange looking characters were rarely good or normal) and makes such a feeble attempt at not being Mr Big that the only real mystery is how Masen failed to realise his friend's true identity ten years earlier.
THE UNKNOWN MAN is the kind of film that TCM schedules for a time of day when the only alternatives are infommercials for Miraclesponges, and no-one with a pulse is watching anyway. 
I've got a pulse but I already own three Miraclesponges.

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.