Citizen Caned

They held the Oscars last weekend, and a weird ceremony it was too (at least, the little of it that actually made it onto the news).  Perhaps it’s just me and my unreasonable sentimental attachment to the theatrical experience, but it seems very strange and perhaps even wrong to have an Academy Awards ceremony for a year in which hardly any films have been released to the big screen: I think I’ve been to see about six genuinely new movies in the last twelve months, mostly during that brief July-to-October period when the cinemas reopened. Letting films which have only been available to screen via streaming sites win Oscars is just playing into the hands of those sites, and potentially damaging theatrical cinema itself.

Then again, Netflix has been playing this game for a couple of years now, sneaking one of its movies out with the smallest possible cinema release necessary for it to qualify for Oscar nomination. Most studios make prestige projects with more than one eye on the gong season, but in the case of a streaming site which normally doesn’t release films at all, it seems particularly calculated and mercenary (I am aware this is becoming a bit of a theme when I start writing about Netflix films).

This year’s Oscars tilt from Netflix took the form of David Fincher’s Mank. Shot in luminous black and white, it opens with the arrival at a remote Californian ranch of screenwriter, wit and general bon vivant Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), who is recovering from a broken leg suffered in a car crash. It is 1940 and Mankiewicz, his secretary (Lily Collins), and various other assistants are here to write the screenplay for a movie, to star and be directed by the prodigiously talented young Hollywood outsider Orson Welles (Tom Burke) – Welles will also get sole credit for the script.

The writing of this script is essentially a frame story for a film looking back on the previous ten years or so of Mankiewicz’s career in Hollywood, and particularly his relationship with the media tycoon and politician William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) and his wife Marion (Amanda Seyfried). Mankiewicz’s personal politics tend towards the left-of-centre (inasmuch as he has political beliefs, preferring to just be louchely witty when not drinking or gambling), quite unlike Hearst’s by this point – but it seems that Hearst enjoys having him around.

This becomes increasingly uncomfortable for Mankiewicz, as the ruthless power politics of Hollywood and California in general become more and more savage, and his own career begins to slide into decline as he alienates the studio bosses and generally makes himself unemployable. Perhaps these men, despite their lesser minds and imaginations, have realised more quickly than he the potential power at their command? Phony newsreels play a key role in the defeat of the Socialist candidate Upton Sinclair in a gubernatorial election.

The film’s thesis is that it is these experiences which influence the fallen-from-grace Mankiewicz when he is writing Welles’ film for him. That film turns out to be Citizen Kane, of course, which Hearst interpreted as a hatchet job against him and tried very hard to have stopped or suppressed – most people agree that Kane is indeed based on Hearst, but Mankiewicz’s motives for doing so are less clear-cut than the film suggests.

As noted, at least part of Netflix’s motivation for financing Mank seems to have been the expectation it would snag a few awards – which it has duly done, albeit mainly for its cinematography and production design. Why do I say this? Well, there are certain types of film that are much more likely to get attention from organisations like AMPAS, a set of boxes to be ticked.  One of the best bets is the box marked ‘Make Film About Hollywood Itself’ (the ‘Shoot In Black And White For Added Artsy Gravitas’ box is also good value). The fact this is a true-life tale of a well-remembered industry figure taking a stand on behalf of justice and integrity is also another factor in the film’s favour.

The fact that Mank is a movie about the origins of what’s still often hailed as the greatest film ever made (although apparently it has recently been the subject of a fierce challenge by Paddington 2) is obviously another point in its favour. The fact that this is a film about Citizen Kane in which Orson Welles is a relatively minor character is certainly an oddity: you might even argue that Mank suggests that Kane’s greatness is as much due to the contribution of Mankiewicz (a man with a long career as a Hollywood insider) as that of Welles (a colossal talent unable to find a place within the established studio system).

If you accept this reading, then beneath the surface the film is a little conflicted – the glamour of old Hollywood and its stars rubs up against the venality and ruthlessness of studio bosses (Louis B Mayer in particular gets it in the neck). Then again, perhaps this clash between dreams and reality is at the heart of all the films purporting to go behind the scenes in the movie business.

This one handles both aspects pretty well, at least on a visual level – all those awards were certainly deserved. What’s particularly clever is the way in which many of the scenes reference elements of Kane, even on a subliminal level: Hearst’s palatial mansion, with its own zoo on the grounds, inevitably recalls Kane’s retreat Xanadu; there are countless other references as well.

This kind of self-referentiality extends throughout the movie – transitions between the 1940 sequences and flashbacks are signified by captions in the form of stage directions – and initially I thought Mank was going to turn out to be a bit too clever for its own good: a lot of whistles and bells and great visuals but essentially just another example of the movie business gazing into its own navel while patting itself on the back (if you consider a film never really intended to run in cinemas to be a genuine part of the movie business, anyway).

In the end I think Fincher and Mank get away with it, mainly because of the strength of the central performance: I knew Herman Mankiewicz’s name, vaguely, before watching the film, but wasn’t really familiar with who he was; Gary Oldman brings him to life. It’s not the flashiest of turns – though Mankiewicz’s legendary wit certainly provides him with some good dialogue – which may be why it hasn’t brought him the same kind of acclaim as his (slightly hammy) performance as Churchill a few years ago. By the end of the film you do care about Mankiewicz and how his experiences have affected him. Oldman gets to do some good drunk acting, too, of course, as the screenwriter’s alcoholism and compulsive gambling are both dwelt upon in the movie.

Did Mankiewicz really write the bulk of Citizen Kane in less than a fortnight while permanently sluiced? It is at least an appealing bit of legend, although given that much of the ‘history’ presented in Mank has been challenged, one is inclined to doubt it. (If the rest of the film has the same level of historical accuracy as the scene at a 1930 script conference where someone describes a movie as being like The Wolf Man, a film which wasn’t made until 1941, then I am almost forced to conclude that Citizen Kane was never actually made at all, and our memories of it are just a case of Mandela syndrome.)

Mank is certainly worth watching, if only for the look and craft of the thing, and some great performances – as well as Oldman, Charles Dance is good value as Hearst, and there are decent turns from Tuppence Middleton, Arliss Howard and Lily Collins, too. It’s a witty and intelligent film that presents an interesting tale of life in Hollywood in the 1930s and early 40s. Whether that tale bears much relation to reality is another question, of course, but if nothing else the film reminds us that this has always been a complex and occasionally fraught issue.

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Pastor al Dente

By one of those weird little resonant coincidences which might almost make a person believe in stuff beyond the humdrum quotidian, we currently have a situation where two films on release feature an uncanny degree of similarity in one element of the script. Were you to mosey down to your local UK cinema and say ‘I want a ticket for the film… I can’t quite remember the title… it’s the one where Amanda Seyfried has recently become pregnant but is having trouble in her marriage… can you help?’ you would be basically be taking a gamble. While this is essentially a large chunk of the premise to Mamma Mia! Oh No Not Again, currently occupying an unfeasibly large number of screens in the UK, it is also an essentially accurate description of the set-up to First Reformed.

I would say it is a very good idea to get your pregnant Amanda Seyfried films sorted out before heading to the cinema, because they are in other respects cut from slightly different cloth. The Mamma Mia! sequel is a fluffy, glittery, feel-good piece of froth that doesn’t make many demands of the brain from anywhere much higher than the medulla oblongata; its sole intent is to distract and delight. First Reformed, on the other hand… well, I’m reminded of a Stephen King quote about the literary style of James Herbert – who, according to King, performed the equivalent of grabbing you by the collar and screaming in your face.

This should not come as much surprise once one learns that the writer-director of First Reformed is Paul Schrader, a veteran film-maker long renowned as the grim observer of a certain kind of damaged masculinity: he wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, not to mention The Last Temptation of Christ. You don’t go to a Paul Schrader film for a cheery Swedish power-pop singalong. You go there to have the harsh realities of modern life scraped across your face like a handful of broken glass, and First Reformed really delivers on this score.

Ethan Hawke plays Ernst Toller, pastor in charge of the small, little-attended ‘tourist church’ First Reformed, in upstate New York. Toller has a broken marriage and an intense personal tragedy behind him; he is a lonely man, not in the best of health either physically or mentally, perhaps actually very sick indeed. As the film begins he has just begun keeping a journal of his private thoughts, primarily (it seems) to justify the voice-over which Hawke delivers throughout the movie.

The church is about to reopen for its 250th anniversary, the renovation having been bankrolled by various wealthy local businessmen. Toller is more preoccupied with the lot of one of his flock, a young woman named Mary (Seyfried). She is with child, but concerned by her husband’s response to this news. He is an environmental campaigner, though one who has now fallen somewhat into despondency, and feels it is a fundamentally selfish act to bring a new life into a world which will soon be ravaged by the consequences of human-caused climate change.

Well, this has a big impact on Toller, but how should he respond to it? The very men his church is so reliant on are industrialists and polluters on a massive scale. His superiors in the church do not seem very sympathetic either. It’s almost enough to make a man, even a priest, contemplate the darkest of notions…

So, and I’m not sure I even need to reiterate this again but let’s be on the safe side, not a great many laughs in this one. The trailer for First Reformed looked interesting, and the 94% approval rating it enjoys on a popular solanaceous review aggregator site also suggested it might be worth a look, but I was especially intrigued when a couple of people from work went to see it and came back grumbling loudly. ‘Awful. I fell asleep. It’s so slow. Not what you’d call entertainment,’ was the capsule version of their collective opinion.

Well, I can kind of see where they’re coming from, as even at the viewing I attended, someone behind me stood up at the end and announced with a huge grin ‘It was even bleaker than I’d hoped!’ You would have to be some kind of sociopath to come out of First Reformed skipping and whistling: this is a film which will test you and attempt to shred your soul. Not in any particularly explicit, horrific way – this is first and foremost a personal drama. But it is about as heavy a drama as I can remember seeing at a UK cinema, recently at least.

Initially the film seems content to deal in a sort of non-specific gloominess, as various scenes of Toller drinking too much, peeing blood and sitting in darkened rooms with his head in his hands are intercut with gloomy pronouncements about the state of environment and the theological ramifications and aspects of this. You do wonder where it is going and, indeed, what it’s actually about.

Eventually things acquire a little clarity, and it seems to me that while the film does have some interesting and perhaps challenging things to say about environmentalism and how society deals with this issue, it is really about hope and despair. How does a sensible person fend off despair these days? How can you maintain any sense of hope in the era of Trump, Brexit, accelerating climatic disaster, the collapse of western civilisation as we have known it, and the prospect of any number of apocalyptic futures?

It is, to say the least, a very considerable challenge – or so the film seems to suggest. Unsympathetic viewers might say that First Reformed goes off the deep end in the sheer scale of its darkness and willingness to toy with disturbing notions and imagery. If it were made with less commitment and focus, and had a less impressive performance than Hawke’s at its heart, it might become risible and preposterous, not to mention extremely tasteless, towards the end. The film still often feels like a calculated act of provocation against normal standards of good and bad taste, and it does make unusual demands of the viewer – there’s a sequence towards the end which had me going ‘What the hell…?’ so abruptly and thoroughly surreal is it.

The fact remains, though, that this is still clearly a highly intelligent film, the product of a distinctive directorial vision, and lifted by a superb performance from Ethan Hawke. There are big questions about faith and society being asked here, even if the answers that are given seem provisional at best. First Reformed is absolutely not for everyone, and contains material likely to disturb and perhaps even offend – but if you like some slightly more demanding, chewy material in your cinematic intake, then this is a film with the potential to satisfy you.

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Still no sign of ‘Dum Dum Diddle’

It was Friday night, and the lights were low (as you would expect, in a cinema). There were people everywhere – a sense of expectation hanging in the air. My impatience was slowly creeping up my spine and growing strong. Sitting there no-one could harm me. They just stared at me and wondered why.

As regular readers will be able to confirm, I can keep this sort of thing up indefinitely, but I expect you are more interested in hearing about Ol Parker’s Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again than in clumsily repurposed pop song lyrics, so let’s crack on with that. As it seems like the UK is currently experiencing a shortage of everything except shortages, cinema tickets are not quite big enough to accommodate that title in full, and so the ones we ended up with were apparently for a film entitled Mamma Mia! HWGA. By a strange coincidence, when I asked Next Desk Colleague if he wanted to come and see the film, his response actually was ‘Hwga!’, or at least a very similar sound. The same was true of nearly all my male co-workers when I broached the possibility with them – although there was one guy whose response of ‘I have a serious issue with the intrinsically non-diegetic nature of the musical as a cinematic form’ rather impressed me. Nearly all the distaff members of the office hurled themselves at the chance, though.

So I eventually rocked up to the new film in the company of a bevy of women of various ages and nationalities, all rather excited and wont to emit vowel sounds at unexpected moments as proceedings got underway. Fortunately my Anglo-Iranian affairs consultant had also agreed to come, so I wasn’t the only possessor of a Y chromosome in the party and didn’t feel quite so much of a stranger in a strange land. (I was still a bit worried I might end up spending two hours doing the Peter Rabbit face, though.)

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, in case you have recently arrived from Neptune, is a sequel to 2008’s Mamma Mia!, an alarmingly successful contraption based around creatively-cast performers doing unorthodox cover versions of songs by ABBA, one of the greatest pop groups in the history of the planet. This recipe ended up making $615 million, somehow, and so inevitably a sequel has arrived.

The first thing we should say is – now, does this constitute a spoiler? It’s a plot point that’s introduced virtually at the start, so I’d usually say no, but at the same time it’s deliberately obfuscated in the trailer, so… Oh, what the hell (spoiler alert). So – some time has passed since the first film, and central figure Donna (Meryl Streep) has carked it in the meantime, though whether this was a creative decision or just the result of Streep not really wanting to do the movie I’m not sure; suffice to say that despite her prominence in the publicity, her actual involvement is minimal.

This opens up the film to employ a structure which will probably be familiar to fans of The Godfather Part 2, although quite how big the crossover audience between The Godfather and Mamma Mia! is I’m not sure. Basically, we have one storyline which is a prequel to the original film, in which a young Donna (Lily James, whose publicity material will probably now contain the words ‘has been compared to Meryl Streep’ in perpetuity) leaves Oxford University, goes travelling in Europe, and embarks on the regimen of random promiscuity which will eventually leave her a single parent in charge of a rather cruddy Greek hotel.

The other plot strand concerns Donna’s daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), who is struggling to reopen the same hotel thirty years later, with the help of her mother’s friends and widower (Pierce Brosnan). It soon becomes clear that Brosnan is basically being kept locked in a shed, well away from any sheet music, in case he attempts to sing again. (We will return to this.) Also helping out is a new character played by Andy Garcia, named Fernando (which if you ask me is tantamount to cheating). Will the reopening of the hotel be a big success? Will Sophie’s other two possible-fathers (Stellan Skarsgard and Colin Firth) make it to the island in time? Will anyone get the chance to sing ‘King Kong Song’?

I am tempted to say that if you’re the kind of person who found The Greatest Showman just a bit too gritty and hard-hitting, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again will probably be right up your alley, filled as it is with appealing young actors, some of the broadest comedy turns imaginable, and – of course – a selection of indestructibly great pop classics.

That said, of course, I suspected this film might face what I call the More ABBA Gold problem. Permit me to explain – ABBA Gold is pretty much an essential album for anyone interested in pop music, being literally all killer, no filler: perfect hooks and choruses, emotional resonance, immaculate production, and so on. Every song on it is deservedly famous. More ABBA Gold? Not so much. I mean, it’s still got songs like ‘Honey Honey’ and ‘Summer Night City’ on it, which are quite well known, but also things like ‘Cassandra’ and ‘So Long’ which I doubt I’ve ever heard. The question is this: are there enough first-rank ABBA songs left to fill up another two hour movie?

Well… they kind of try to dodge this issue, mainly by reprising some of the songs from the first time round. There’s another go at ‘Mamma Mia’ itself, a reprise of ‘Dancing Queen’, and a moment when one of the characters, in a French restaurant with a bust of Napoleon, finds himself reaching for a metaphor for defeat, leading to the inevitable production number (this was probably the first moment at which I found myself with my head between my knees in the cinema). But some of the songs are more obscure this time around – the first big tune, bizarrely, is ‘When I Kissed the Teacher’, which at least occasions a truly mind-boggling solo from Celia Imrie, while also popping up are things like ‘Andante Andante’, ‘Kisses of Fire’, and ‘Why Did It Have to Be Me?’ The film’s big climax comes when Cher swoops in, basically playing herself, and sings ‘Fernando’ to Garcia (though I have to wonder what Garcia’s character was doing carrying a rifle across the Rio Grande in 1959, when he would have been about twelve). (The soundtrack album features Meryl Streep’s version of ‘The Day Before You Came’, which I must warn you does not appear at any point in the film. Not that you shouldn’t stay till the end of the credits, though.)

Still, even an obscure ABBA song is most likely a masterpiece of composition and production, and overall the music passes muster. But I have to say that much of the charm, if that’s the right word, of the original film is that it’s basically about a bunch of randy middle-aged people on an island together launching unprovoked assaults on the highlights of the ABBA back catalogue. The focus here is much more on randy young people, and despite winning performances from many of the cast (and I have to say that if Josh Dylan, who plays the young Skarsgard, ever visits my workplace he will be beating women off with a stick, based on the reactions of my colleagues), it is somehow less mesmerically weird and exciting and funny than the original film.

We’re practically into the home straight by the time all the original characters reconvene on the island, and I have to say I can’t help feeling some of them are a little underserved. I didn’t go to Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again to listen to Lily James singing; I went there to listen to Pierce Brosnan not singing (and to watch Colin Firth not dancing, for that matter). Brosnan is permitted a brief reprise of his legendary version of ‘S.O.S’ but is otherwise restricted to doing choruses alongside other people, which if you ask me is just not fair.

Still, everyone was singing along with the choruses during the film, and we all emerged with big smiles upon our faces, so I suppose Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again really does the job as a piece of entertainment. It isn’t as riotously silly as the first film, but it’s still a case of a deeply spurious non-plot being deployed to facilitate as many wonderful tunes as they can possibly get away with, topped off with a lot of knockabout humour and even a few quite touching emotional moments. I expect it will end up doing very well for itself. It’s simple and it’s plain – why should I complain?

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No Thanks for the Memories

Sigh. Coming up with original and engaging opening paragraphs isn’t easy, you know, and I was all set to go with a rumination on how hard it was to find a cinema showing Andrew Niccol’s Anon, which would have led into a by-the-by mention of the fact that all the multiplexes are currently stuffed with films about Josh Brolin beating up superheroes. In my neck of the woods, Anon has only managed to land a very low-profile release at the Curzon, Oxford’s most stylish but least-frequented cinema. Seriously, this is the second time I’ve been there and literally had the auditorium to myself. The whole cinema is like a luxury hotel in the middle of nowhere; I can’t help feeling sorry for them, because it’s quite a beautiful cinema which so often seems empty.

Anyway, you’ll be spared all that. My initial introduction to Anon basically consisted of finding a photo of it online along with a brief description. Upon cracking open Wikipedia to do some proper post-screening pre-review research, I discovered that this is yet another example of a movie which has been grabbed by Netflix and is available to view online for rather less than the price of a ticket to the Curzon. So the message, rather than being that sometimes the universe tries to stop you from going to a movie for very sound reasons, is instead that you should always do at least a little research. As it is, this is a film about the merits of obscurity which may well find itself ending up enjoying them more than the producers would like.

 

Hey ho. In Anon, Clive Owen plays police detective Sal Frieland, who has an American name but a London accent; the movie is set in a sort of mildly dystopian brutalist future archetypal City, so you can forgive the accents being a bit all over the place there. As Frieland walks down the street to work, we see the world from his point of view, with constant real-time annotations telling him the make and model of every passing car, the history of the buildings, and the names, ages and occupations of every passing person.

Yup, we are in gimmicky sci-fi territory here, and the main conceit of the movie is that everyone has had the perception centres of their brains hooked up to Google and Wikipedia (well, effectively: the movie is brand-name free) and their memories connected to YouTube, so they have a digital record of their experiences which can be accessed by the authorities, shared with friends and family, and so on. Being able to download a suspect’s memory, or indeed that of a victim, makes being a detective really easy, and yet Owen still spends most of the movie with the haunted expression of a man once talked of as a future Bond who now finds himself north of fifty and trapped in a string of duff genre movies. So it goes, old boy, so it goes.

However, a string of murders have the cops worried, for the killer has the ability to mask their presence and avoid being recorded by the system: they also appear to have the power to delete themselves from people’s digital memory recordings. Soon enough Sal is on the case, his prime suspect being a nameless young woman (Amanda Seyfried) whose business is hacking people’s memories and editing out things they’d rather other people didn’t learn about. Soon he begins to wonder – is the interest of his superiors because of the killings she has supposedly committed, or because her special skills undermine the whole basis of the way society is currently organised?

What can I say: I have a lot of time for Clive Owen, and I’m always on the look-out for a genuinely smart science fiction film, but Anon is not the latter and doesn’t really do the former many favours, I fear. Now, given the recent kerfuffle about data harvesting by Facebook and the whole issue of privacy on t’internet, there is clearly an issue here to be explored by the right movie. However, Anon is not it. What Anon is, is a rather pedestrian mash-up of Minority Report, Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, and various other undistinguished sci-fi films that nobody remembers with any great fondness.

This is the kind of film which touches on what it considers to be Big Important Issues, but doesn’t actually do anything with them. There’s some stuff about memory, and some stuff about the nature of truth, and some interesting dialogue about the difference between privacy and secrecy, but it doesn’t tackle these things in anything approaching a systematic way. It doesn’t discuss ideas, it ponders and pronounces on them, rarely saying anything especially memorable. There’s quite a good sequence exploring what a potentially lethal enemy someone who can hack and manipulate your perceptions would make, but once again it’s only briefly touched on (and one has to wonder why Owen doesn’t just disconnect his brain’s wi-fi – presumably this is illegal).

I imagine we are supposed to cut the various implausibilities of Anon‘s premise some slack, given that this is supposed to be a serious film dealing with important contemporary issues in a metaphorical manner. I don’t think the film does nearly enough to earn this. Nor do its attempts at topicality excuse several rather implausible plot points, or the fact that you just stop caring about who did the murders well before the end and just want them to get on with the climax of the movie. Plus, I notice yet again that this is one of those serious SF movies for intelligent adults where nearly all the significant female characters are required to perform a gratuitous nude scene. Having said that, the balance is possibly redressed a little by a scene in which Clive Owen humps someone while still wearing his vest: calm yourselves, ladies.

Anon looks good but the story is too sluggish and over-familiar for the film to really come to life; there is the odd decent moment and Owen and Seyfried are always kind of watchable, but it never grips as a thriller and it’s not nearly as profound or original as it thinks it is. Yet another of those films that basically resembles a long episode of Black Mirror but without the wit, focus, or humanity; it also commits the cardinal sin of any movie, especially one in the SF genre, and that is that it’s quite boring. Eminently forgettable, if you can manage it.

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Generation Vexed

Once more unto the Phoenix, where – it would seem – the blight of allocated seating now extends even unto weekday evening screenings. The staff don’t like the policy, and I and apparently many other of the more vocal patrons of the joint don’t like the policy. And yet a poll of the membership has come down in favour of turning the getting of a decent seat in the smaller screen into a ruthless tactical exercise. Hey ho.

Luckily, there were only five of us in there when I went the other day, to see Noah Baumbach’s new film While We’re Young. Baumbach is the kind of director whose name I vaguely know, and whose films I have have heard of, but I wouldn’t have been able to put those two bits of information together, and I was still slightly surprised to learn I’ve actually seen one of his other movies (Frances Ha from 2013 – and, of course, anyone who gets on so well with Greta Gerwig is clearly a good egg). Said movie struck me as a bit Woody Allen-esque in its subject and setting, and the same goes for While We’re Young, which is a comedy-drama about well-off metropolitan types.

Well, probably more of a full-on comedy, I suppose. Regular readers will know my aversion to most mainstream American comedies, on the grounds that they are – erm, how can I put this? – not funny, but the fact that While We’re Young opens with an extended quote from Ibsen should tip the attentive viewer off that this is not a typical mainstream American comedy.

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play Josh and Cornelia, a happily-married couple in their early forties (as the theme of acting your own age is central to the movie, I feel obliged to mention that Stiller is not) who believe themselves to be happy with their lifestyle. Both are film-makers, one way or another, and they have accepted they’re not going to have children. This puts them rather at odds with most of their set, whose lives essentially revolve around grappling with infants of various sizes.

The plot proper gets underway when they encounter another couple, Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried). Jamie and Darby are twenty years their junior and Josh and Cornelia find themselves rather captivated by the passion for life that the young people have – the fact that Jamie is a fan of Joshua’s back catalogue may have something to do with it, as well.

But is everything quite as it seems? Could it be that Josh and Cornelia have simply embarked on a futile attempt to cling onto the vestiges of their own youth? And is Jamie’s interest in Josh quite as straightforward as it seems? It soon becomes apparent that the generation gap is still in existence, and before too long someone’s going to come a cropper falling into it.

Fans of the bodily-fluids-and-profanity school of humour may not find much to attract them here, but While We’re Young made me laugh a lot, particularly in its first half. There are few more reliable sources of comedy than people failing to act in an age-appropriate way and the sight of Ben Stiller attempting to bond with hipsters and Naomi Watts tackling a hip-hop dance class provides many opportunities for proper laughs. The film has a nice line in sharp, deadpan dialogue, too: ‘You’ve made a six-and-a-half-hour film that feels seven hours too long,’ someone tells Josh of his latest opus, while a scene in which he is diagnosed with arthritis by his doctor is also extremely droll: ‘Arthritis arthritis?’ he yelps, distraught. ‘I usually just say it the once,’ replies the physician, unflappably.

Above all, this part of the film is a smart and insightful comedy of manners and social embarrassment with some great set pieces and moments of real perceptiveness: there’s a nice sequence quietly drawing attention to the way that middle-aged people are more likely to adopt new technology than the young. And it does address what seems to me to be a problem for the childless thirty- and forty-something: what exactly do you do with your life to give it value, without either seeming self-indulgent or looking like you’re in a state of arrested development? I’ve seen plenty of people in this situation who wind up taking refuge in the dreaded Ironic Sensibility.

However, there’s not a great deal of scope for plot here, which is probably why the second half of the film concerns itself with knottier and less universal issues – namely, the values of the different generations and whether a lack of commonality here is a serious problem, or only to be expected (or perhaps both). Baumbach’s line of approach on this is the question of authenticity in documentary film-making, which has been a live issue over the last few years in the wake of films like Catfish and Searching For Sugar Man, which were accused of either manipulating the truth or being out-and-out hoaxes. There’s what looks very like a gloves-off swipe at Catfish in particular here, but Baumbach’s attempt to tie this in to the theme of generational difference feels just a little laboured. It’s true that many younger people nowadays interact with culture in a wholly different way to how things were in the pre-digital age, but then so do quite a few older ones as well.

It’s also perhaps a little disappointing that the second half of the film is centred so firmly on Joshua, while the first part was told at least partly from Cornelia’s point of view. This is not because of any weakness in Ben Stiller’s performance – he is as accomplished an actor as ever – but simply because it turns the film into a piece about a middle-aged white guy possibly heading for a mid-life crisis, and we are not short of iterations of that story. It makes the film a little more conventional than it perhaps needed to be. (When it comes to the younger couple, the film gives much more prominence to Adam Driver, too: apart from a couple of scenes, Amanda Seyfried really gets quite little to do.)

The same is true of how the story resolves itself. To be fair, the film is largely built around the premise that a refusal to admit you are ageing is going to result in you looking increasingly foolish as time goes by, but this isn’t quite the same thing as the whole-hearted endorsement of thorough-going normalcy that the end of the movie actually feels like. Then again, this is ultimately still a mainstream film on some level, so I suppose one shouldn’t be too surprised. While We’re Young  is at least a mainstream film with some intelligence and wit about it, and one which made me laugh a lot despite my ultimate misgivings about parts of it. Worth seeing, especially if your fortieth birthday is not too distant a memory.

 

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…hang on, where’s ‘Dum Dum Diddle’?

Hark! What’s that? Is it ‘a water buffalo’? Is it ‘the QE2 sounding its foghorn as it comes into dock’? Or is it simply ‘a wounded raccoon’?

Well, I think we’ll get back to the source of those alarming noises later. Let’s not beat about the bush here, readers: in an attempt to cling onto my current gainful employment, I have agreed to take on the running of the weekly film club, but rather to my disappointment some of my favourite films of recent years (Monsters, The Guard) have been met with a response varying from indifference to downright hatred. I have thus been obliged to break out some rather more mainstream, populist fare, and to be perfectly honest I am wondering if the extravagant remuneration is worth the pain of watching some of these films. On the other hand, these are the sorts of films I never usually write about so there is perhaps an opportunity here to broaden the blog a bit. In short: Mamma Mia! – if I have to watch the damn thing, then you’re going to have to read about it (actually, you don’t have to).

Anyway, Phyllida Lloyd’s film came out in 2008 and has made over $600 million at the box office. (Yes, civilisation officially collapsed several years ago, and I’ll bet you didn’t even notice.) It is, as if you needed telling, practically the index case when it comes to the modern phenomenon of the ‘jukebox musical’, where a selection of hits from a well-known artist or group are strung together by a frankly dodgy narrative.

Mamma Mia! is almost entirely set on a remote Greek island, which plays host to a crumbling hotel run by Meryl Streep, with the help of her almost painfully perky daughter Amanda Seyfried. Seyfried is getting married to Dominic Cooper, but as various women intent on chewing the scenery and pratfalling descend on the place for the wedding (most prominently Julie Walters and Christine Baranski), the bride is not happy. She does not yet know the identity of her father, due to her mother’s (ahem) amatorial generosity around the time of her conception. However she has managed to narrow down the potential candidates to Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard, and Colin Firth, and secretly invited them all as well. Naturally, the scene is set for…

…well, mainly some sentimental and very broad comedy drama, if I’m perfectly honest, punctuated with frequent dips into the back catalogue of the legendary Swedish pop titans. Whatever your opinion of the performances and dialogue in this film, you have to grant the writers some credit for coming up with a plot which crams in quite so many well-known ABBA hits without seeming utterly contrived. There’s definitely some sort of crossword-puzzle solving, Sudoku-completing mentality at work here.

On the other hand, they don’t manage to squeeze in Fernando or Knowing Me Knowing You, let alone The Day Before You Came, which has to count against them, right? Plus there’s a definite cheat involved in only including Waterloo as a non-plot-related encore. In the places of these songs come some rather lesser known tunes like Our Last Summer and When All Is Said and Done, which certainly don’t feature on ABBA Gold (nor indeed ABBA Gold For The Ukulele).

I suppose even these lesser works are solid enough, but the last one in particular is difficult to fairly assess as it is delivered, if that’s the right word, by Pierce Brosnan, who gives one of the more remarkable performances in recent musical cinema. It is of course Brosnan whose vocal stylings have been likened to a raccoon, a buffalo, and so on, but to be fair listening to him yowl, yelp, and moo his way through songs like SOS and I Do, I Do, I Do is strangely entertaining.

This is just part of a peculiar alchemy going on somewhere in the heart of this film. On paper the plot is ludicrous, schmaltzy nonsense, and the general tone of the thing is so frothy and excitable it should really give the discerning viewer a headache. Watching it for the first time I got the rather grim sensation that all of the actors were having much more fun than I was: it’s a bit like arriving late at a party and finding yourself five or six drinks behind everyone else.

And yet, and yet… there are those songs. My God, Benny and Bjorn can write a great tune. Actually, they can write great tunes by the bucketful, all replete with perfectly-honed hooks, surging choruses, and just the right level of grown-up realism and melancholy about them. These songs are like adamantium, not even Pierce Brosnan can seriously damage them. Admittedly, the role-reversal version of Does Your Mother Know emasculates the song, and Streep’s histrionic version of The Winner Takes It All is absurd, but the film’s version of Lay All Your Love On Me captures the song’s mixture of near-spiritual intensity and implicit sexual frenzy perfectly.

All things considered, I would definitely rather listen to two or three ABBA albums back-to-back than watch Mamma Mia! again, because it really does have that air of being an out-of-control middle-aged hen party about it, and Dr K’s description of it as being close to A-list stars performing ‘drunken karaoke’ is, as usual, close to being spot on. But somehow it is impossible to thoroughly object to or even genuinely dislike this film. If nothing it is a testament to the power of… well one thing ABBA’s music isn’t, is cheap. I don’t really think this is the showcase ABBA really deserves, but in its own way the film does an outstanding job of showing just how good their songs are.

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Time is Money (Duh!)

I have been following, with a mixture of interest and bemusement, the saga of the bit-part actors who are suing the venerable and generally trustworthy IMDB on the grounds that it has released their real ages into the public domain. This, say the thesps in question, is going to seriously impact upon their ability to get work, as Hollywood and the rest of the industry is only interested in people who are perceived as being young and fresh, and no-one is ever offered a job playing a character younger than they really are.

What causes a mildly raised eyebrow on my part is that the actors don’t seem to have a problem with the industry itself (casting directors, producers, and the like) having this attitude – or if they do, they seem to have accepted that it’s inevitable and beyond the power of anyone to change. But for the IMDB to facilitate it, even inadvertantly? It’s litigation time! I am reminded of the morally-minded group who, following a shooting spree which they believed was provoked by a violent movie, left the local gun store in perfect peace and proceeded to picket their video rental outlet.

Well, it’s not a fair nor especially logical world and this fact is the subject of Andrew Niccol’s new movie In Time, which has its own take on the intersection between youth and money and suchlike. This is a SF movie set in an indeterminate future in which human biology has been rewritten so everyone stops aging at the age of 25. To reiterate: everyone is physically 25 in perpetuity. The drawback is that society now uses lifespan as a currency – wages are paid in the form of hours, days and months, your current balance is recorded in a glowy green clock on your arm, and should your time tick down to zero you croak, usually dramatically.

Niccol’s movie does a good job of establishing this slightly demanding premise and introduces us to factory-working everyman Will (Justin Timberlake, actual age 30) and his mum (Olivia Wilde, actual age 27). Will’s general resentment of the system finds an outlet when he rescues a world-weary member of the super-rich (Matthew Bomer, 34) from a local gangster (Alex Pettyfer, 21 – eh?). Will finds himself with a lot of time on his hands as a result, but also – due to an unexpected tragedy – a desire to make the rich pay.

So off he trots to the preserves of the super-wealthy where he meets tycoon Weis (Vincent Kartheiser, 32) and his spoilt daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried, 25 – fair enough in this case). However he is also being pursued by incorruptible lawman Leon (Cillian Murphy, 35), who believes Will’s stolen all the time he now has to play with. But Will’s exposure to both extremes of the system has opened his eyes to its injustice and he is now a man on a mission…

Slightly mind-bogglingly, a lot of commentators are describing In Time as cerebral, thought-provoking SF very much in the same vein as Inception. Come on… once you get your head around the basic premise, this movie isn’t much more cerebral than Logan’s Run, which it superficially resembles in many ways. It’s a very Seventies-style piece of SF: not an awful movie, but nothing very special either.

It looks fine – the film-makers have created an austere, abstract world of some style, but this seems to have been inspired by the characters, who are all pretty much ciphers, designed to facilitate the plot. Timbo does a workmanlike job as the lead but the romance between him and Seyfried fails to stir and as a result most of the movie feels like a rather mechanical succession of plot developments and set pieces instead of an engaging narrative. (The climax is very contrived, too.)

But the problems run deeper than this, to the very heart of the film’s premise. Normally I tend to be hard on movies where the future is utterly identical to the here and now barring the single innovation on which the plot is predicated, but in the case of In Time this would be missing the point, which is that the similarity between the movie’s world and the real world is intentional. (The movie doesn’t bother trying to explain the precise details of how its world came into being, for what I suspect is the same reason.)

Well, look. If my engagement with In Time as a film of ideas and with a statement to make had taken the form of a conversation, it would have gone something like this:

In Time: ‘So here is the world of the story. Multitudes carry on desperate existences of privation and hardship so that a few can live in luxury.’

Awix: ‘Gotcha.’

IT: ‘The majority are crushed by the poverty of the time they have, while a tiny minority are dehumanised by the excess which surrounds them.’

A: ‘Still with you.’

IT: ‘And it doesn’t have to be this way! The whole system is an artificial construct supported by the vested interests of the few and the power structures they manipulate!’

A: ‘Right…’

IT: ‘And… the real horror at the centre of this story is… (pauses for effect) That the world in which we live is exactly the same!’

IT sits back, beaming and nodding sagely.

A: ‘…sorry, is that all you’ve got?’

IT: ‘What?’

A: ‘Is that supposed to be profound, or a surprise, or something? I figured out this was a fairly unsubtle allegory for modern society in the first ten… well, actually the first time I saw the trailer for the movie. It’s not exactly deep.’

IT: ‘Umm… well… I bet a few people will look slightly differently at the world around them now. You never know, it may open a few eyes to the facts of existence.’

A: ‘Well, maybe, but what kind of person wanders around in the world and achieves an age where they can go to the cinema without realising the nature of our modern economic model?’

IT: ‘People who go to see a movie just because Justin Timberlake’s in it?’

A: ‘Hmm, shrewd casting.’

…but seriously, folks. I’m as contemptuous of western capitalism as anyone else with eyes and a brain and a soul, and if you’re pitching me the notion that it surely can’t be beyond the collective wit of humanity to come up with a fairer and more humane way of organising our lives, then I’m buying, but In Time has nothing to offer on this front beyond some very superficial observations and an overwhelming belief in its own profundity. The artificial nature of the allegory it presents also prevents it from having to come up with a coherent alternative system for Timbo and Seyfried to put in place come the end, but in the real world things are different.

All credit to Niccol for getting such a subversively-themed movie made at all, but the very inanity and shallowness of its ideas really mean that in the end it’s nothing but a bundle of good intentions with no real insight or anything meaningful to say. It’s a proficiently made movie, but nobody involved really gets the opportunity to shine. If you think that putting up a pup tent outside Saint Paul’s Cathedral is the key to bringing down the world system and bringing about a new utopia, then I expect you will think In Time is a classic of challenging and intelligent SF cinema. For the rest of us, it’s a passable piece of entertainment with distinct delusions of grandeur.

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