Legend

The poster for Legend, brilliantly hiding the 2 star review from The Guardian

Because I’m a member of the metropolitan elite, I got to see Legend last weekend, before its release for ordinary people like you. Disappointingly it’s not a remake of the Ridley Scott fantasy film from 1985.  (actually I’ve never seen that film. Is it any good, or is it one of those forgettable films that Scott makes every so often?).  It’s actually about The Krays.

Directed and written by Brian Helgeland (his excellent BAFTA screenwriters’ lecture from a few years ago is worth watching here), it’s funnier than you think (“a paranoid schizophrenic walks into a bar…”) as well as being very violent (see the scene that follows that line).

Most attention will be paid to Tom Hardy’s double performance as both Reggie and Ronnie Kray.  Sometimes, when they’re both on screen at the same time – or rather, he’s on screen in both roles, you can see the green screen “join”, and there are other times when the film is shot in a way that wouldn’t have been done if it was two actors in the roles, but enough can’t be said about how good Hardy’s performances are.

I don’t think enough will be made of them, however, because people will make incorrect assumptions about how it was shot.  If I hadn’t seen the Q&A with Helgeland that followed by screening (again, metropolitan elite only), I’d have assumed that Hardy had shot all his scenes as Reggie (who is the bigger presence in the film), then they’d shut down production for a couple of weeks while he bulked up to play Ronnie.  Turns out the budget and logistics meant he had to play both brothers every day on set, quite an achievement when you see how different they appear.

It’s worth noting that Helgeland got a credit on Ridley Scott’s pisspoor Robin Hood, which started off as a revisionist take on the legend called Nottingham, and where Russell Crowe was originally going to play both the Sheriff of Nottingham and his nemesis.  Actors playing dual roles must be his thing.  If I wasn’t a lazy fucker I’d write about Nottingham and Gladiator 2 and loads of other films that never got made but should have.

Though Reggie is the focus, Ronnie gives the dark comic relief; in a scene where Reggie’s doomed wife shows herself to be unable to make a cup of tea, Ronnie and the twins’ mother both exclaim “poor Reggie”.  When Reggie beats her up, his paranoid schizophrenic brother tells her it’s not right; that’s not how they were brought up.

The locations look authentic, though The Blind Beggar in the film isn’t the real Blind Beggar; they actually use The Royal Oak on Columbia Road (around which much of the film appears to have been shot, though Vallance Road, where the brothers lived, was filmed near Waterloo).  I once got told off in The Blind Beggar for messing around with the candle on my table.  It’s OK for the Krays to shoot someone there, but I can’t play with fire and wax?  What a joke.

It’s violent and funny and dark and mostly true, and Hardy gives a performance that should win awards (as he did in Locke, which more people should watch). Go and watch it when it’s released for you proles.

 

 

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

Poster for Going Clear

Going Clear is a documentary by Alex Gibney, based on Lawrence Wright’s book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, which had its publication cancelled in the UK (you can get it on amazon, though).  Wright originally wrote about Scientology for The New Yorker, profiling Paul Haggis leaving the organisation, and article which can be found here.  Read it, then read The Looming Tower, Wright’s book on Al Qaeda.  The watch The Siege, which he wrote the screenplay for, a prescient 1998 film about a terror attack in New York that became a surprise hit after 9/11.

I have no issue with the beliefs of Scientology.  Believing that millions of years ago Xenu transported billions of people to Earth (then called Teegeeack) in ‘planes that look like DC-8s, placed them in volcanoes and killed them with hydrogen bombs is no more ridiculous than the belief than believing the Jesus was resurrected, Moses was told to lead the Israelites by a burning bush, or that the Qur’an is the exact word of Allah.  Hindus, like Glenn Hoddle, believe people pay for their sins in previous lives.

My issue comes not from their ideology, but their practices.  If you leave, friends and family don’t speak to you anymore; you are labelled a “suppressive person”, if you join their Sea Org, one of the organisations within Scientology, you have to sign a billion year contract.

Scientologists hate psychiatry.  I’m not sure why. as the “audits” a member must undertake seem a lot like therapy; you go over incidents in your life and try to resolve them.  The trouble is, the person auditing you writes down everything you say.  The film alleges that Tom Cruise’s audits were filmed.

Obviously, we can only speculate about what Cruise, or John Travolta might reveal in an audit, and wonder why they have stayed in a “church” for so long.  Cruise isn’t stupid; I’ve had to watch Collateral (you haven’t seen Collateral? What the fuck are you doing with your life? Great film, nice FNL links.  All good films lead back to Dillon, Texas, now.) while writing this to remind me how good he can be after seeing him salute a picture of L Ron Hubbard, a liar and fantasist, a cosying up to David Miscavige, the current head of Scientology and whose wife hasn’t been seen in public since 2007, a fact curiously missing from the film.  Reading between the lines, Cruise and Travolta have probably said something that would be damaging to their careers if it were revealed, so they stay in.  It is alleged that Scientologists in Sea Org provide cheap labour for Cruise, so it obviously has its benefits.

It’s worth noting that people that leave Scientology continue to practice the religion outside the organisation. Mark Rathbun, interviewed in the documentary, was one of these Freezoners, or Independent Scientologists. They obviously believe it works, or maybe they just have Stockholm Syndrome.

It’s obvious that Scientology is a cult, and shouldn’t be given tax exempt status.  Believe what you want to believe, but don’t force your beliefs on others, or attack those that criticise you.  That’s not the sign of a mature religion with confidence in itself.  Katie Holmes divorced Cruise because she didn’t want their daughter growing up in a dangerous religion.  Holmes now attends a Catholic Church, which of course is not a dangerous religion at all and has never harmed anyone.

The film itself is a little long, but beautifully shot (there’s something about digital and people’s faces). There are great drone shots of the ridiculous Scientology headquarters in Los Angeles.  It’s worth watching, but if you’re the sort of person who reads about this shit anyway (like I am) you won’t learn anything new.  I’m looking forward to the next Mission: Impossible film slightly less now.

Foxcatcher

Steve Carrrell and Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher

You know the drill with sports films; there is a character from the wrong side of the tracks who has talent but no outlet for it, he meets a mentor who becomes a father figure and turns his talent into something good, he triumphs, and wins the approval of the father of the blonde girl from the right side of the tracks, and becomes a better person as a result.

Foxcatcher is nothing like that. It tells the true story of Mark Schultz, a good medal winner in wrestling at the 1984 Olympics, as he comes under the wing of John du Pont, the heir to the du Pont family fortune. Much has been made of Steve Carrell’s physical transformation, but all the three leads – Carrell, Channing Tatum as Mark Schultz and Mark Ruffalo as his brother David, all look considerably different to their usual appearance, with Ruffalo balding and Tatum ambling about like some sort of Neanderthal. I think the last Channing Tatum film I saw was Magic Mike, which I quite enjoyed, despite (or perhaps because) it was about male strippers.  Now I’m seeing him in a film where he wear a leotard and grapples with other men.

Shultz is all but broke and living in his brother’s shadow when du Pont summons him to his Foxcatcher Farm and makes him an offer to support him financially and help train him. Du Pont is a strange character; ornithologist and philanthropist, he has an odd relationship with the local police, and an even odder one with his mother, played by Vanessa Redgrave.  Imagine a malevolent Sir Jack Hayward on coke.

There is more than a faint whiff of sexual interest from du Pont in Schultz at their first meeting, and his real motives from plucking him from fading into obscurity are never really given.  Eventually the older Schultz brother joins them, Shultz wins the World Championship, and they go to Seoul for the 88 Olympics, and things begin to unravel.

Foxcatcher comes with a warning that it contains drug use and violence.  It doesn’t mention vomit.  Frankly, if a film features someone throwing up, I want to be warned about it. The film is a bit too long, but also cuts out a massive chunk of actual history – it seems to jump from 1988 to the shocking denouement that takes place in 1996.

Women don’t really figure in the film; I could say this was a deficiency, but I imagine they didn’t play much of a part in the real events that the film relates. As well as Redgrave, Sienna Miller appears in the rather thankless role of Dave Schultz’s wife. Miller appears to be moving from a tabloid staple to an actual actress; she’s in American Sniper, too. I noticed she’s on the cover of American Vogue at the moment, with a strapline about her second act.

I’m not sure how I felt about Foxcatcher; it was a good film, but I felt like the finale came out of nowhere (which may be how it actually happened), and I get the impression lots was cut that would have explained things better.  I’ve said this before, I can’t help but feel it would have been better as a  miniseries, giving a bit of background and depth to everyone.

The performances aside (it’ll be interesting to see if Carrell repeats his success here in more dramas), I doubt I’ll be thinking about Foxcatcher much in the future.

 

 

 

Birdman

Birdman

Birdman isn’t out until the new year, but I got to see a preview of it a while back, and have only just got round to writing a review.

Much has been made of the casting; if you don’t know, Michael Keaton plays an actor who appeared in a comic book franchise call Birdman in the 1990s, and is now trying to gain credibility by writing, producing, directing and starring in a Raymond Carver adaptation on Broadway. Obviously it plays with Keaton’s own past as Batman, but it would stand up if it didn’t have that intertextuality (yeah, I have an MA in Film Studies and I’m not afraid to use it.)

The casting is superb, from Keaton right down to Lindsay Duncan as the theatre critic for the New York Times. Special mention must got to Emma Stone (fuck you Andrew Garfield, fuck you) as Keaton’s daughter, fresh out of rehab and working as his assistant.  I’ve been a fan of Edward Norton for so long I even got the same chest tattoo that he has in American History X, and here he’s brilliant once again – the conversations he has with Stone outside the theatre are superb.  There is so much good stuff about modern life, from Stone in particular (fuck you Andrew Garfield, fuck you).

The cinematography, by Emmanuel Lubezki is also great; made to look like one continuous shot, the camera follows characters around the winding corridors backstage at the theatre. Chivo, as Lubezki is known, will get an Oscar nomination, like he does all the time, because he’s the best cinematographer out there. Check out his instagram page.

There are probably better films out this year (well, probably one better film), but no film has better performances.  It’s an actorly film – if actorly wasn’t a word, it is now – and I imagine because of that it will do well at the Oscars.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Keaton won and Stone got a nomination.

There are moments of magic realism that you’re not quite sure are actually happening – the film leans one way, then the other, before finally, well, I’m not sure, but it is also a brilliant domestic drama, with Keaton still having issues with his ex, and his new younger girlfriend, and his daughter. It would probably stand repeated viewings.

Mentions of twitter make me wonder how quickly it will date, but right now, in 2014, it’s spot on.

The score is great, too. Go and see it, when you hoi polloi are allowed to see it.

American Gigolo

As 80s as Tom Cruise in Ray Bans with an F-14

When Mike Nichols died recently, we lost the man responsible for the greatest opening shot in film history; the beginning of Working Girl. Not far behind would be the opening of Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo. To the sound of Call Me by Blondie, Richard Gere drives down the California coast in a convertible Mercedes.  Along with the opening of Top Gun, you won’t get three more 80s openings, or three better.

I mean that as a compliment.

Watching American Gigolo, made in 1980, three questions kept going through my head.

1. What happened to Richard Gere?

2. What happened to Jerry Bruckheimer?

3. What happened to Hollywood?

Gere is excellent here, as the gigolo of the title who gets framed for murder. Huge in the 1980s and half of the 90s, it’s probably been ten years since he starred in a big, successful film.  He’s due a comeback, if he wants one.  Someone give him a big role in a HBO series as a lawyer and he’ll be back on top again.

Bruckheimer produced American Gigolo, and though he is still successful, the films he makes are a world away from this.  Sex, murder, politics are what the film is about.  You cannot be further away from Transformers.  He repeated the Giorgio Moroder-soundtracking-an-iconic-80s-film with Top Gun, and though people poke fun at it, the target audience is at least ten years older than the people the films he makes now are aimed at.  The more I think about it, the more I realise Don Simpson – the coked up, whoring producing partner of Bruckheimer for much of the 80s and 90s (not a producer on American Gigolo) was the talent.  Read High Concept, Charles Fleming’s excellent biography of the late Simpson, and be amazed; at his talent, his appetite (for sex, food, and all kinds of drugs).

Of course, what happened to Hollywood is what happened to Bruckheimer; they no longer care about grown up films for grown ups. There are no explosions here, and no teenagers. It’s a really good film, and would maybe get made as a low budget indie today, but there is no way a major studio would back it.

There are some interesting moments; a politician (whose wife is a client of Gere’s) mentions austerity and fossil fuels in a speech, and Gere driving around Hollywood at night is very reminiscent of Travis Bickle driving round New York in Taxi Driver, which was scripted by Schrader.  A naked Richard Gere, lit only by light streaming through venetian blinds, is as 80s an image as you can get. I’m surprised you could never buy it as a poster in Athena. Even the scene of Gere working out by hanging from his ceiling seems like something you only see in films from that era.

Just as The Expendables has reignited the careers of has been action stars, we need a series of films that pastiche and pay homage to 1980s/1990s psychological thrillers. I’d watch. Get Gere in to star, chuck in one of those blondes who didn’t mind getting naked, Adrian Lyne could direct, it’d ride on the coattails of Gone Girl and make a fortune. If Jerry Bruckheimer produced it’d be the best film he’d done for years.

You should probably watch American Gigolo on a VHS tape you’ve rented from your local independent video shop.  You thought Drive was the first cool driving in LA film with an electro soundtrack? Richard Gere was doing it before Ryan Gosling was born.

Three war films

Last week was a bit of a war week for me; I went to see three films that all dealt with war in different ways, spent another morning with a couple of military doctors (one of whom was organising the deployment to Sierra Leone to combat ebola: be afraid, be very afraid), and on Saturday I went to a conflict zone: The Den, to watch Millwall Vs Wolves.

The entire cast of War Book

I started the week by seeing War Book, a low budget, high concept British film that uses a handful of locations and a cast of nine. They are civil servants and a government minister acting out a nuclear war scenario. Internal politics, the personal lives of those taking part and the moral questions of the issue all come into play. The film-makers said they didn’t want it to be a polemic, but you could see where they were coming from. There is one subplot that I didn’t feel was fleshed out enough, but it is a worthy, worthwhile film.

War Book is a film that made me feel old. Ben Chaplin, who I first came across as a young twenty something in Game On, plays a 40 something lecherous spin doctor. Really though, it’s as if his Game On character has got over his agoraphobia and become a government advisor. The bloke who played Nathan Barley plays a cartoonish Tory minister – is he old enough, I thought? Then I remembered the likes of Aiden Burley, a cartoonish Tory MP, and realised yes, he is. Who is this middle aged woman who looks like Theresa May? Oh, it’s Kerry Fox. When did she get old? Oh fuck, Shallow Grave is more than twenty years old, isn’t it? When did I get old?

The standout performance is from Sophie Okonedo, channelling Oona King. She gives a great speech about John Winant, a man I had never heard of and who was the US ambassador to Britain after Joseph Kennedy had left in disgrace because of his pro appeasement sympathies. Winant, by all accounts, did a brilliant job, but when Truman became President he returned to America, his marriage ended and, on the day his book about his time in London was published, she killed himself. I hate bullshit “inspirational/motivational” quotes that idiots share on facebook, but Okonedo quotes Winant’s epitaph, which is worth repeating here in full:

“Doing the day’s work day by day, doing a little, adding a little, broadening our bases wanting not only for ourselves but for others also, a fairer chance for all people everywhere. Forever moving forward, always remembering that it is the things of the spirit that in the end prevail. That caring counts and that where there is no vision the people perish. That hope and faith count and that without charity, there can be nothing good. That having dared to live dangerously, and in believing in the inherent goodness of man, we can stride forward into the unknown with growing confidence.”

I disagreed with the film’s politics (I’m far too hawkish for nuclear disarmament), but it was well made, and shows what you can do with a few locations and not much money (I asked the director afterwards how much it cost, and he said he couldn’t tell me, but I guess it was less than £200,000). The setting and the low budget do sometimes make you think it would be the sort of thing Channel Four should make, probably followed by a discussion with a former cabinet minister, a moral philosopher and a retired General. Well worth seeing, though.

 

The Den on Saturday, or Belfast in 1971

Confusion, collusion, pub bombings, bombs going off early, dead kids, summary executions. It must be Northern Ireland. ’71 is the sort of film you take your mate’s girlfriend to see when he’s on a work trip to Hong Kong.

It is, alongside Alan Clarke’s Elephant (which one moment reminded me of) and Steve McQueen’s Hunger, set ten years after ’71, and which also references Elephant, one of the best films about what we euphemistically call “The Troubles”. Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, made for television, would be up there, too.

A young soldier becomes separated from the rest of his unit while the RUC raid a house in Belfast, he flees across the city, encountering friendly Loyalists, two branches (Official and Provisional) of the IRA, and a shadowy undercover army unit do deals with all sides.

There are some genuinely shocking, bloody moments and it is not an easy watch, but it is a good one. There is no reason why there could not be a sequel – ’81, set during the hunger strikes, the soldiers older, wiser, more cynical, and a third film, ’91, to complete the trilogy, with squaddies fresh from the Gulf War returning to the streets of Northern Ireland. I definitely want to see more from the director Yann Demange, who makes a very impressive debut here after working. Probably one of the best British films of the year.

 

Bella Swan goes to Guantanamo Bay

I liked Kristen Stewart in her small role in Into The Wild, and it’s not her fault that the material of the Twilight films was so bad. In Camp X Ray she plays a guard at Camp X Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There really isn’t much to say about the film, and  apart from an opening sequence of a detainee being rendered that could have been the start of a great Kathryn Bigelow or Paul Greengrass film, of a John Le Carre novel, it isn’t very good.  Instead it becomes a hackneyed film where Stewart builds a friendship with a detainee and her fellow guards are thick headed jocks. Oh look, he’s a detainee at Gitmo but he likes Harry Potter books, aren’t we all the same inside? Give me fucking strength. Give me a fucking film about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or the Battle of Qala-i-Janghi, and showing what the people who ended up in Camp X Ray did to Johnny Micheal Spann. I should have stayed for a fourth gin and tonic with my mate instead of going to see it. There is a great film to be made about “enemy combatants” being detained without trial, but this isn’t it. It’s not even the best film set at Guantanamo Bay. I’m sure Guardian readers will love it.

Great films about the wars of the 21st Century are hard to find. I like The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, United 93 (about war because it shows the first battle of the War on Terror), Syriana, The Kingdom, Lone Survivor and Battle For Haditha. Four of those seven films are made by two directors (Kathryn Bigelow and Peter Berg). As an enthusiast for both war and films, I want to see more thought going into films about the events that history will remember the first decade of the 2st Century for.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films

The Cannon Films logo, familiar from dozens of bad films you watched on VHS

 

There’s a certain kind of person who, on a Saturday afternoon in Islington, goes to see a documentary about a film studio that specialised in 1980s action films. Invariably male, they are in their 30s, probably single, and spend the moments before the film starts talking about 4K screenings of old films, David Cronenberg and the Twin Peaks revival. You know the type. They have a blog of their film reviews and probably got excited when they saw that Kim Newman was in the audience.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is exactly that; a documentary about Cannon Films, a small production company that was taken over by two Israeli cousins, Menahem Golan and Yoran Globus in 1979. Exploding onto the scene with an odd mix of softcore sex and ultraviolence, their business model involved selling films to foreign markets often on the basis of a poster for a film that hadn’t been made, then making the film, and repeating the process over and over again. They bought a cinema chain in Britain (the cinema in Cannock – hello, readers from Cannock was a Cannon cinema), made dozens of a films a year, and eventually imploded/exploded when they started making big budget films.

It’s an entertaining romp, but maybe a little too long. Everyone interviewed for the film seems to have liked the cousins, or at the least have an amusing story about them. The clips from their slate of films get loads of laughs, either for the dialogue, the not-so-special-effects or just the plain ridiculousness of them.

It’s a story from another age; of independent video shops filled with cheap Rambo knock offs or cash in skin flicks. The title comes from the sequel to Breakin’ the breakdancing film they made, one of the actors from that film, interviewed here, claims that it brought races together in a way that the UN has failed to do. It’s hard to tell if he’s serious.

Among the tits and explosions, they also bankrolled auteurs; Franco Zeffirelli says they were the best producers he ever worked with. It’s an incongruous mix of low culture and high art.

The company’s downfall came when they overextended themselves and made films such as Superman IV and Masters of the Universe (I liked Masters of the Universe when I was a kid) dodgy accounting practices are glossed over here, but the end was nigh.

Mark Hartley, the Australian director pointed out in the Q&A after the film that they were perhaps ahead of their time; they held the rights to Captain America and Spiderman when nobody else thought they would be successful films (the Spiderman film was never made, however). They funded an action film about Pirates before anyone had heard of Johnny Depp. They would have liked to have been the Weinsteins, but it didn’t work out.  He also pointed that the likes of Pieter Jan Brugge, who has worked with Michael Mann as a producer, got his start at Cannon, as did David Womark, one of the producers of Life of Pi.  They also produced a science fiction martial arts film (Cannon seemed to specialise in hybrid films) starring Jean Claude Van Damme called Cyborg, which is all but forgotten now, but worth is noting because its sequel was the first starring role for Angelina Jolie DCMG. (If Julian Fucking Fellowes gets to sit in the House of Lords then Angelina Jolie deserves an honorary Damehood, OK?)

It’s good fun; if any cinema or film club showed a couple of Cannon films as part of a season, I’d be well up for going. If they don’t, then wait for the DVD, dust off an old VHS of a Cannon film, get your mates round and you’ll have a good night.

 

Gone Girl

The future Bruce Wayne pleads for the return of his wife, but does he know where she is?

Ben Affleck recently stated that he thought Seven was the perfect film, and that’s why he wanted to work with its director David Fincher on Gone Girl. I’m not sure I agree (it’s been a while since I saw Seven), I don’t think it’s Fincher’s best work (Fight Club would get that honour for me) but I was surprised the journalist Affleck was talking to didn’t push the matter further. Specifically, why did he think a film that ends with the head of one of his ex girlfriends in a box was perfect? Someone should ask Chris Martin what he thinks of the film.

There are moments in Gone Girl when you think it could end with a blonde’s head in a box (spoiler: it doesn’t). Based on the bestselling novel by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay, it tells the story of a couple, Affleck and Rosamund Pike, who meet in New York, fall in love and, after they lose their jobs in the recession and Affleck’s mother falls ill, they return to his home town in Missouri. One their fifth wedding anniversary, Affleck returns home from the bar he runs with his sister to find a table smashed and Pike gone.

The story of the early days of their relationship is told in flashback.  One of the best moments of the film is the cut from Affleck proposing to Pike at a New York book launch – her parents are bestselling children’s authors, with a series – Amazing Amy – loosely based on her own childhood – to Affleck having his mouth swabbed for DNA in a Missouri Police Station.

You know Affleck didn’t do it, but you’re not quite sure who did.  Is it Doogie Howser? (Yes, I know he’s done another stuff, but he’s still fucking Doogie Howser; that’s what the blokes in front of me as I came out the cinema called him and that’s what I thought when I saw his name in the credits), I suspected one of the cops, and when the person responsible for Amy’s disappearance is revealed, you will be shocked.  If you’re thinking the whole “I didn’t kill my wife” angle is a bit too much like The Fugitive, then at no stage is a one armed man a suspect.

It’s a nice satire on the media coverage of crime that we haven’t seen in a while, there are some genuine laugh out loud funny moments, and one very shocking, bloody scene that had the audience I saw it with gasping.  Oral sex seems to be a motif, too; Pike, in voiceover, mentions blowing Affleck and the first time we see them having sex his head is between her thighs.  I have no comment to make on this, I’m just mentioning it.

There are great performances all round – Kim Dickens as the local police detective is great, as is Tyler Perry as a lawyer famed for representing men accused of killing their wives.  Perry isn’t a big name over here, but the films he has written and directed have made fortunes. Affleck is no slouch when it comes to directing either.  It says a lot about Fincher that two successful directors will act in his films. Reese Witherspoon is credited as a producer.  I presume she wasn’t on set everyday making sure the director stuck to his schedule; it’s more likely she bought the rights to the book with a view to starring in the film herself and got the credit that way. She’d have been good in the role, but Pike is too.

The cut I mentioned earlier, the blood soaked scene that got the film its 18 rating in the UK, a skip from Pike are all moments that add up to make this a very good film.  Like Before I Go To Sleep, another portrait of a marriage gone bad based on a novel, it does feel like an update of an early 1990s psychological thriller.  That’s not a criticism.  I wonder if we’ll see more of them in the future.  If they are as good as Gone Girl, I hope so. It’s a great portrait of a failing marriage, and a crazy whodunnit. What more could you want?

Gone Girl is one of the best American films of the year. No list of the best films would be complete, in my opinion, without it on it, or without Boyhood, or Fruitvale Station, or Lone Survivor.  Shall we throw in The Wolf of Wall Street, too?  Was Dallas Buyers Club released this year? That can go on the list.  All of these films are related, but we’ll come to that at some other point.

The Riot Club

The Riot Club before one of their dinners. Beats going to The Hogshead in Wolverhampton.

Almost exactly two years ago, in a university lecture hall with 300 odd other people, I was asked if I thought I was part of the elite. Nobody, of course, said yes.  We were told that we were; we all had university degrees (I had an MA, too) and were about to start another postgraduate qualification. A few months later, failing to control a primary school class in Barking, I did not feel like a member of the elite, let me tell you. Of course, to the unemployed bloke in Doncaster, I would look like a member of the elite, just as right now, the life the bloke in Doncaster has looks pretty cosy to a Yazidi woman who has been enslaved in Iraq.

The journalist Owen Jones has recently published a book called “The Establishment”, where he skewers those at the top.  The problem is, of course, that Jones went to Oxford, writes for The Guardian (which has never had an editor educated by the state), regularly appears on the BBC and used to appear on platforms with the 2nd Viscount Stansgate. The book comes with an approving quote on the cover from Russell Brand, proclaiming Jones as our generation’s Orwell, which only proves that Brand hasn’t took Robert Webb’s excellent advice to read some fucking Orwell.  (Re-reading that, I’m reminded that Webb was in Footlights with The Hon. Dr Tristram Julian William Hunt FRHistS MP, the Shadow Education Secretary, and a man parachuted into a safe Labour seat at the last election).

From where I’m sitting, Jones and Brand and their ilk are the establishment. Of course, from where they are, David Cameron and George Osborne, privately educated, going on to Oxford, before getting jobs as SpAds and climbing the ladder of the Conservative Party, are the establishment.  They’re right, of course.  We’re all right.  The bloke who had a nice line in jumpers who told me I was part of the elite, me casting a sceptical eye at Guardian columnists having a go at the establishment, and the millionaire comedian taking pot shots at the government. Two women behind me at the preview screening I went to talked about being invited to a party by Prince Harry. In this country, we are all part of the elite.

The Riot Club is based on Laura Wade’s 2010 play Posh, which tells the story of an Oxford dining club (they didn’t have fucking dining clubs when I did my degree at Wolverhampton) very much like the Bullingdon Club.  Wade had her first play produced before she was thirty, so she’s definitely a member of the elite.  The film is directed by Lone Scherfig, whose first British film was (the excellent) An Education, written by Nick Hornby (son of a knight, educated at Cambridge, a man who complains in Fever Pitch – only half joking – that he had to settle for a Grammar School education, rather than a private one). An Education was based on a memoir by Lynn Barber, who was privately educated, and went to Oxford. Among the cast of The Riot Club is Max Irons, son of a bloke who made his name appearing in Brideshead Revisited (oddly, no TV or film company has ever wanted to adapt Brideshead, always going for its better known sequel), and Freddie Fox, son of Edward Fox. One of the producers, Peter Czernin, is not only the heir apparent to Baron Howard de Walden, but also David Cameron’s old roommate at Oxford.

So excuse me if I’m slightly cynical about a film made by members of the elite sneering at members of the elite.

The score is great, there are some nice, naturally lit shots of the skyline of Oxford early on.  That, I am afraid, is all that is positive about the film (oh, and Natalie Dormer plays a hooker; I might have to start watching Game of Thrones). I can just about see the material working as some agitprop in 2010, but it doesn’t work on a big screen in 2014.

When The Riot Club have one of their dinners, smashing up the backroom of a country pub (they’re barred from anywhere close to Oxford) the landlord is beaten to a pulp.  Who among us hasn’t wanted to kick the shit out of a Scottish pub landlord, I ask?  As well as having characters that were in some way believable, and not drawn in crayon by a fifth former fed on a diet of Eoin Clarke tweets and and below the line comments from The Guardian, the film would have benefited from this incident moving up in the film, and us seeing more of the fallout from it.

A few years ago, Harry Pearson wrote a book about his obsession with war gaming.  He said everyone that collected toy soldiers had someone they could say “well, I might be bad, but I’m not as bad as that guy (Harry’s that guy was from Cannock; I imagine lots of people’s that guy is from Cannock).  The Riot Club felt like it was made by those that knew they were privileged, but at least they weren’t that privileged.
One of the characters in the film says he cannot stand poor people.  Neither can I. I wish there were no poor people.  Sadly, I think a lot of people who will like this film do like poor people, if them existing means they can have a go at those at the top.  They would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich.

The closest I got to the The Riot Club was spinning around on the dancefloor of the student union during my MA.  Frankly, getting dressed up and off my face with the best and the brightest at Oxford before getting a job running the country sounds fucking amazing.

It is a good job that this film is released after the Scottish Independence referendum. After he is beaten up, the Scottish landlord has money stuffed in his mouth by the English toffs.  Alex Salmond, an elected politician for more than twenty years who has a good relationship with the Queen but hates the English establishment, will love this film.  Nigel Farage, the privately educated former banker turned member of the European Parliament who hates the European establishment, will love this film.  Russell Brand, the multimillionaire comedian and film star who lives with Jemima Khan, an heiress whose father started a political party, and whose first husband started a political party (her brother has to make do with being the Conservative MP for Richmond), and who hates the political establishment, will love this film.

If you think referring to the Prime Minister as “David CaMORON” or the phrase “ConDemNation” is the height of wit, then this film is for you.

Before I Go To Sleep

“Well, what’s she like?”

“Oh, she’s just one of those women, you know; if you like football you must be a yob. Bollocks.”

“Is she fit?”

“Not that you’d prove her point or anything.”

Before I Go To Sleep is not the first film to feature both Colin Firth and Mark Strong; that honour goes to Fever Pitch, from which the above dialogue is taken (Firth is the first speaker, Strong the second). They worked together again on Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Firth and Kidman worked together on The Railway Man, and were going to be reunited on Paddington before Firth was replaced by Ben Whishaw. Before I Go To Sleep is directed by Rowan Joffe, who directed the recent adaptation of Brighton Rock, wrote the George Clooney curio The American, and is the son of Roland Joffe, who directed The Killing Fields and The Mission, it’s produced by Ridley Scott, based on a best-selling novel. Firth has won an Oscar (for the wrong film) as has Kidman. Strong is bald and bald men are not only highly intelligent but also make the best lovers. So this film comes with a good pedigree; decent actors who have worked together well in the past with a young, up and coming director and a successful source material.

It largely lives up to that pedigree, too.  I only read books by or about members of the special forces, so I can’t comment on how well (or not) it sticks to the events of the novel, but I was gripped by the film as it turns one way, then another, then another.

Briefly, Kidman plays a woman who wakes up every morning with no memory. Firth has to explain that she had an accident, that they are married, and she forgets all the memories she builds up when she goes to sleep every night. Strong plays an attractive (bald men are sexy) doctor treating her without Firth’s knowledge.  It becomes clear that Firth isn’t telling the whole truth. We are led down one alley that turns out to be a dead end, then another, as Kidman, and us, piece together what happened.

Close ups of Kidman’s eyes abound, and the cinematography reflects the blue-grey of her iris. It is a cold, grey, house in cold, grey South London (nice to see somewhere in Greenwich that’s not the Old Naval College make an appearance in a film) where Kidman and Firth live.  It’s a cold, grey reservoir where Strong meets Kidman (and the film takes us down a dead end). It’s a shame that Firth and Strong only share one scene, as we never really get to see how much more attractive a bald man like Strong is than Firth.

I had low expectations of Before I Go To Sleep, but it works as an update of an early 1990s psychological thriller.  I expected it to be a middle class Memento without the murders, but it’s more than that, and also features the best use of an iron as a weapon since the first Home Alone film.

Oh yeah, the whole of Fever Pitch (with Turkish subtitles) is on YouTube. It was directed by a Wolves fan. Watch it. “It’s not the smoking, Steve, it’s the crapness.” Great line.