The Runaways

The film is billed as the story of The Runaways – a manufactured chicks and guitar licks rock ‘n’ roll band whose short career from 1975–1979 was marked by leather trousers, loud pop riffs, manipulative Svengali managers and substance excess. Formed by Sandy West and Joan Jett (who would go on to achieve mass MOR acceptance with her love song to rock n roll), the film quickly sets out its stall as really being about Jett and the band’s singer Cherie Curry. The film is adapted from Curry’s book, so no prizes for guessing who takes centre stage. Into the mix is thrown the snake-like producer Kim Fowley to add some venom to the proceedings.

If truth be told this saves the film from spending too much time focusing on the people involved and losing the interest of its target audience, and instead laces up its leather boots and attempts to kick life into a predictable story of a rock band’s rise and fall. There’s nothing new here but it’s fairly well paced and holds its trashy head up high.

The director Floria Sigismondi brings all her history of directing pop videos to bear on her handling of the film and all too often uses unnecessary and forced flashy techniques in an attempt to portray the ‘wild’ on-screen shenanigans. She directs with a certain amount of control early on in the film and allows the early years to tell their own story without resorting to the flashy techniques that she uses later on. These are quite tiresome – nowhere as much as the druggy scenes that meander in and out of the narrative. The film descends into a bit of a mess after its first half and the audience is served up a rather clumsily handled series of scenes that forego storytelling and take refuge in building up towards its uninspiring conclusion charting the band’s demise and putting Jett on some sort of pedestal. Perhaps her being on set influenced the director’s perception of her.

The limitations of the film are there for all to see as the film takes no risks and gets on with blasting out the music and fitting in enough episodes to create the illusion of following a narrative. While it’s entertaining enough, you can’t help but feel that there was a much better story trying desperately to be told here but was constantly being bullied into submission. But hey that’s rock ‘n’ roll.

The film never really gets down and dirty and it all seems rather clean. There are only really hints of the abuse that the band members suffered at the hands of Kim Fowley. And the film fails to convey the problems the band faced elbowing their way into a depraved, all-male territory. The two central performances from Fanning and Stewart are a bit too contrived and there’s never a real sense of angst beyond the angry pouting and tantrums. It is Shannon as Fowley who truly leads this rock entourage as he chews up his scenes and spits them out in true 70’s hamtastic fashion and in the process steals the film from everyone around him.

Never as bad as it could have been but nowhere near as good as it should be, The Runaways will probably secure the producers a few more dimes in the jukebox baby…

Film Ireland

The Runaways is released on 10th September 2010

M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Moerder

Fritz Lang (1931)

A Personal Journey

Martin Scorsese (1995)

The A-Team

This is a sprawling mess of a movie obviously mashed together by dazed troglodytes under a bridge. What’s the point of it all? Surely there are better ideas for the action movie genre than merely rehashing an old TV series. And why does the fact that working with an established set of characters make it acceptable to produce a script that has all the imagination of a pig’s trough?

The A Team tells the story of 4 lovable mercenary rogues who are trying to clear their names after being wrongfully imprisoned of stuff. The ’80s TV characters are brought to a cinema screen near you by 4 lovable rogues who are now trying to clear their names after being wrongfully attached to this ridiculous nonsense. Liam Neeson plays George Peppard’s Hannibal (Colonel) taking every opportunity to tell us that he derives much pleasure from the completion of a plan. Mr T’s BA Baracus (Lieutenant) is played by Quinton Jackson who has no time for dullards. Bradley Cooper is Templeton ‘Faceman’ Peck (Lieutenant) wooing ladies with his leery grin and coiffed thatch, and Dwight Schultz’s endearing non compos 'Howling Mad' Murdoch (lunatic pilot) is played by Sharlto Copley repeatedly demonstrating the fact that he’s several pages short of a script. Once these lovable rogues have established themselves as the A-Team, they are allowed to get on with the matter in hand; that being lepping about the shop roaring at each other and waving a variety of ammunition at baddies.

There’s really nothing to say about the performances in the film except that poor Neeson looks like he’s completely lost after taking a wrong turn and found himself in the cooking pot of a hungry native tribe. All the characters merely exist to facilitate the crash, bang, wallops of the action scenes, interspersed with some ridiculous dialogue. Manure shovellor/director Joe Carnahan serves up such sequences in the manner of prison slop, incessantly throwing them with neither thought nor care at the screen. The film hasn’t got the brains to be an ironic pastiche of the’80s TV series and hasn’t got the guts to breathe any sort of new life into it. The A-Team is spineless filmmaking bereft of ideas. The pedestrian action sequences, bad CGI and poor editing coupled with the puerile dialogue and ridiculous plot (not to mention BA’s anti-Ghandi subplot) make for one of the most irritating cinema experiences this year.

I can’t wait for the film version of Simon & Simon.

So rather than waste your money going to see The A-Team, why not get your hands on the boxset of the original series – hell, even Boy George pops up in one episode. Now repeat after me: ‘In 1972 a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum-security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.’

The A-Team is released on 30th July 2010

Film Ireland

Tetro

Now I know what a dog locked in a car on a hot day feels like. Tetro is an excruciating experience and its energy-sapping sense of its own magnitude is preposterous. Waiting for the credits was like the dog waiting for its owner to return the car. I jumped up and gasped for air, thankful to still be conscious.

Tetro is Francis Ford Coppola’s first original screenplay for almost 30 years since his tense, paranoia-fueled debut The Conversation (which is set to be re-imagined for a TV series). In the meantime he’s been behind the camera for several of the most lauded epics of modern cinema, and more recently the awful crud that was Jack and Youth Without Youth.

Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), travels to Buenos Aires in search of his older brother Tetro (Vincent Gallo). Tetro was once destined to be a writer but has been wrestling with daddy issues and, as a result, his magnum opus is no more than the coded scribblings of a neurotic procrastinator. Who will enter his life, find his writing, make him wrestle with his daddy demon and decode and finish his magnificent octopus? Cue Bennie…

Gallo’s tortured writer is a melting pot of his trademark quirks and humourless sense of self-importance and his pseudo intense delivery of lines is always guaranteed to drag proceedings from the ridiculous to the sublimely ridiculous. Alden Ehrenreich puts in a decent Di Caprio-like performance, but is a little lightweight when tackling the film’s more lofty ambitions. The excellent Carmen Maura at least has a bit of fun with her role, camping it up as influential Argentinean cultural critic ‘Alone’.

The film plods along gazing doefully at its own naval and fails miserably to engage with the familial issues at hand. There are far too many car crashes. They say that in dreams car crashes may be a sign pointing to something in your life that needs repair (rubbish), perhaps Coppola’s overuse of them in Tetro points to his writing career being beyond repair.

Coppola behind the camera is another matter altogether. The film looks great. Mainly shot in monochrome on digital in HD, there are a number of beautifully shot sequences, including a Powell & Pressburger tribute, and Beunos Aires looks amazing. Coppola’s DOP, Mihai Malaimare Jr., uses the black and white to great effect as it gives off a radiant and luminous brightness and his distribution of light and shade make for some sumptuous shots. Sadly, all of this is belittled by the overblown, turgid pomposity of the hogwash that is the script. The film utterly fails to connect on any sort of emotional level and the tension that should be present in such a tale of familial betrayal is remarkably absent. There really is nothing to care about here.

A bloated, dying beast of a film, whose visions of theatrical grandeur are laughable, based as they are in half-arsed melodrama and Oedipal pontificating. The overblown writing masks a poor unsatisfactory story, as each development is hammered into place to resemble a child’s jigsaw. The film descends into some sort of grandiose Empire Strikes Back parody, while all the time begging to be taken seriously. Ridiculous muck. Hopefully this is last time we’ll have to suffer an original Coppola screenplay. Someone should make him an offer he can’t refuse.

Tetro is released on 2nd July

Film Ireland

Occupation 101

Sufyan Omeish & Abdallah Omeish (2006)

Chaplin's Shoe-Eating Scene

Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925)

Gaea Girls

Kim Longinotto (2000)

Please Say Something

David O'Reilly (2008)

Avatar Days

Gavin Kelly (2010)

Ken Loach feature films available

• 

The Ken Loach Films section of the video-sharing website You Tube currently offers five of Loach’s feature films, along with Carry on Ken, a documentary about the director made to mark his 70th birthday in 2006. Loach will add a film each week.

Among those available so far are Kes, Loach’s acclaimed 1970 feature debut about a working-class boy’s relationship with his kestrel.

Click on the film below to watch:

Cathy Come Home (1966)
Kes (1970)
Poor Cow (1967)
Sweet Sixteen (2002)
Ae Fond Kiss (2004)
Carry on Ken (2006)

[REC]2

The 2007 Spanish film [REC] took the zombie/haunted house template of horror and infested it with fresh blood, carving out a genuinely thrilling atmosphere full of heart-pounding tension and grab-your-partner shocks. Director/writers Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza return to the confined spaces of the original film in [REC]2 carrying on immediately from where and when the first film left off. While never scaling the horror heights of its predecessor – it was always going to be hard to match the visceral thrills of [REC] – with Balagueró and Plaza still at the helm, [REC]2 offers a slightly lesser yet still impressive slice of flesh-eating fireworks.

The film begins with a group of policemen heading into the apartment building that hosted the cannibal carousing of the first film when a TV crew followed firemen into the building in the hope of getting a story – that story of course soon came to a deadly demonic demise. Once they enter the now ‘quarantined’ building they soon discover that things aren’t what they seem. The film moves on from its original premise and expands its story beyond the zombie attackers of [REC]. What works well here is the fact that the action takes off from the start and the filmmakers are not afraid to get down and dirty from the off and have the skill to carry it over the film’s running time.

It is all well shot and takes full advantage of its diagetic use of the camera to crank up the terror by thrusting the viewer slap bang into the pulsating action. The use of the TV camera in [REC] is replaced here by the use of multiple cameras. For the first part of the film we see things through the perspective of the policemen’s live feed. Then the camera is that of three (annoying) teenagers who enter the building and we see things from their camera’s lense. This also allows for a different perspective on events as they occur. As in the original, the filmmakers’ unnerving camerawork, use of light and subtle editing are used effectively to provide the necessary scares that push the narrative along.

Where [REC]2 fails to match its predecessor is in its use of characters. The rather faceless band of officers that go into the building create no bond with the audience and seem to be offered up to the horrors that lie within without ever having the audience care about them. And those pesky teenagers have you hoping for their swift zombification. In this way, because of this film’s lack of character focus, [REC]2 aims to provide its thrills on a more adrenaline level, whereas the first pursued a more tension-driven narrative as the audience were taken on an emotional thrill at the expense of people they cared about.

But there’s still plenty to recommend for fans of [REC] as the sequel provides enough ample scares and effective shocks to justify itself as a healthy zombie offspring. All things considered the franchise deserves a [REC]3. Bring on the bloody carnage…

([REC]2 is released on 28th May 2010)

Film Ireland

Nosferatu

F.W. Murnau (1922)

Vincere

One day’, the young Mussolini assured his mother, ‘I shall make the whole world tremble!’ He didn’t, but such a hyperbolic and pompous statement is typical of the odd little man that young boy would become, famously crowning himself ‘His Excellency Benito Mussolini, Head of Government, Duce of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire’.

Vincere tells the tragic story of Ida Dalser whom ‘Il Duce’ attempted to airbrush out of history. Dalser was Mussolini’s first wife who funded his early political activities and bore him a child (named after his father) but was soon discarded by Mussolini as he rose to power, taking another wife and denying any knowledge of their past. When she refuses to accept this and speaks out, she has her son taken away from her and is banished to a mental institution where she persists in her determined efforts to get recognition for herself and her son.

The director, Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pockets), treats the story as a highly stylized theatrical melodrama. It is operatic in both its content and style and sets out its stall from the opening credits with a rousing grandiose score. He directs with a mannered camera and, with his cinematographer Daniele Ciprì, captures beautifully lit interiors and stage-like exteriors in sumptuous tones. At times he holds static shots that immerse the audience in the power of the image. Bellocchio is very much concerned with both image and expression and creates many moments of close ups that elevate understanding beyond dialogue.

On top of the to-be expected black and white archive footage, the film includes stylistic nods to Futurism, a popular movement in Italy that admired violence, glorified man’s technological triumph over nature and was fiercely patriotic. Its chaotic nature and smear of madness is used effectively throughout the film to mirror a sense of what the country itself was going through during this time as it was dragged under Mussolini’s spell.

The film can be seen as historical allegory and seems to engage with the power of seduction. There’s a wonderful scene at the outset of the film when Dalser first falls for Mussolini’s charismatic megalomaniac as he stands up in front of a crowd and goes head to head with God – a scene that reflects somewhat how a nation itself was to be seduced by a man who carried out such pompous acts of theatricality.

But ultimately Vincere is Dalser’s story of abandonment, betrayal, and incarceration and it is her story that fuels the sentiment behind the film. And it is a demanding role that is wonderfully undertaken by Giovanna Mezzogiorno. She has that marvellous gift of being able to summon up a storm of emotions within her eyes alone and blazes up the screen with a performance of visceral ferocity. Some of the scenes are painful to watch as she maintains her futile agenda, but her courage of conviction is admirable and Mezzogiorno never seeks our sympathy.

Filippo Timi plays both Mussolini and toward the end of the film his son and brings the perfect amount of theatricality to the roles, one bordering on the carnivalesque comedy of the dictator’s pomposity and self-importance, while the latter steeped in sadness that his father’s mannerisms had now become clinical symptoms. When Timi slips out of the film in his first incarnation, he is sorely missed. Yet in a way this allows for his return later on in his second role – it also highlights the strength of Mezzogiorno’s performance as she becomes the film’s central focus.

Ida Dalser and her son by Mussolini both died in mental institutions. She died of what was officially recorded as brain haemorrhage. He, after repeated coma-inducing injections. She was 57. He, only 26. As Dalser herself once wrote, ‘Not even Nero or Caligula would have done what you have done’.

(Vincere is released 14th May)
Film Ireland

The Ten Steps

Brendan Muldowney (2004)

American: The Bill Hicks Story

In an age of anodyne comedy in which smug, arrogant put-downs, anecdotal, whimsical banter and crass moronic observation are the bread and butter of stand-up comedy, Bill Hicks is desperately missed. American: The Bill Hicks Story charts the story of the comic from his early beginnings of sneaking out of his family’s home at the age of 13 to do stand up to his later raging and perfectly formed monologues on, in his own words, ‘everything your parents hate, everything the church preaches against, everything the government fears’.

The film is structured around the memories of Hicks’ family and friends coupled with animation and archive footage to piece together a coherent narrative of Bill Hicks’ rise to cult status as a no-nonsense comic voice and social critic raging against the machine. There’s ample archive footage throughout American: The Bill Hicks Story that bears witness to Hicks’ intense stand-up performances. His anger, disgust, and apathy is plain to see in the footage used from his stand up and is always coupled with a deadly delivery that, at times, is like a bullet into the brain.

He raged at a US political system that constantly exhibited ‘a totalitarian government’s ability to, you know, manage information’. His paralleling of the US’s imperialist tactics with Jack Palance’s psychopathic gunslinger in Shane is a sublime exercise in potent comic delivery.

He spits venom at ‘Satan’s little helpers’ who work in advertising or marketing berating them and imploring them to ‘Kill yourself. Seriously. It’s the only way to save your soul, kill yourself. Rid the world of your evil machinations.’

His routines were fuelled by his anger at mediocrity and banality within the media and popular culture, referring to them as oppressive tools of the ruling class, in place to ‘keep people stupid and apathetic’. His ‘I want my rock stars dead’ routine is a chilling slice of dark humour.

Behind this anger you detect a great sadness and heartfelt disappointment at the world around him. He saw lies being peddled by hypocrites everywhere around him. Hicks’ message was, at its simplest, a plea for authenticity.

Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas, the filmmakers behind this documentary, are certainly not afraid to wear their admiration for Hicks on their sleeves and you won’t find any challenging voices here – some critics have accused Hicks of being misogynistic, harbouring a deep resentment towards those people not as educated or informed as he was, and ranting to the detriment of humour. All the voices heard throughout the film belong to Hicks’ family and close friends and all serve the filmmakers’ objective of the canonisation of his cult.

Despite this, American: The Bill Hicks Story is a valuable document of an important voice in comedy as well as beyond it. For people familiar with his work, the documentary works as an intimate testament to his career. For people not so familiar, the documentary provides an absorbing insight into his vision and ample reason to go out and seek his work, such as Bill Hicks Live DVD, which contains 3 of his finest live performances. Hicks died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at the age of 32. It’s a shame we’ll never see what direction his career would have taken. One thing’s for sure, the targets he levelled his acerbic vitriol at are as ubiquitous as ever and you feel for sure that he never would have run out of material.

Best to end with Hicks himself, who once imagined a news broadcast that, instead of scaremongering, featured a positive drug-related story for a change: ‘Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death; life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves… Here’s Tom with the weather!’

(American: The Bill Hicks Story is released 14th May, 2010)

Film Ireland

The Herd

Ken Wardrop (2008)

Lena Horne (1917-2010)

Stormy Weather (Andrew Stone, 1943)


From NY Times:

Ms. Horne first achieved fame in the 1940s, became a nightclub and recording star in the 1950s and made a triumphant return to the spotlight with a one-woman Broadway show in 1981. She might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early: she languished at MGM for years because of her race, although she was so light-skinned that when she was a child other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.” Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” film musical after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.

“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.

But when MGM made “Show Boat” into a movie for the second time, in 1951, the role of Julie was given to a white actress, Ava Gardner, whose singing voice was dubbed. (Ms. Horne was no longer under contract to MGM at the time, and according to James Gavin’s Horne biography, “Stormy Weather,” published last year, she was never seriously considered for the part.) And when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage, in 1947, took place in France and was kept secret for three years.

Ms. Horne’s first MGM movie was “Panama Hattie” (1942), in which she sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Writing about that film years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing, and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture.”

Even before she came to Hollywood, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, noticed Ms. Horne in “Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939,” a Broadway revue that ran for nine performances. “A radiantly beautiful sepia girl,” he wrote, “who will be a winner when she has proper direction.”

She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in 1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for “Stormy Weather,” one of those show business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing, Ms. Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature songs. In MGM’s “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by Vincente Minnelli, she was the brazen, sexy handmaiden of the Devil. (One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.)

In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program “Command Performance.”

“The whole thing that made me a star was the war,” Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. “Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.”

Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. “So the U.S.O. got mad,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl.”

Ms. Horne later claimed that for this and other reasons, including her friendship with leftists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, she was blacklisted and “unable to do films or television for the next seven years” after her tenure with MGM ended in 1950.

This was not quite true: as Mr. Gavin has documented, she appeared frequently on “Your Show of Shows” and other television shows in the 1950s, and in fact “found more acceptance” on television “than almost any other black performer.” And Mr. Gavin and others have suggested that there were other factors in addition to politics or race involved in her lack of film work

Although absent from the screen, Ms. Horne found success in nightclubs and on records. “Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria,” recorded during a well-received eight-week run in 1957, reached the Top 10 and became the best-selling album by a female singer in RCA.

In the early 1960s Ms. Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches and protests.

In 1969, she returned briefly to films, playing the love interest of a white actor, Richard Widmark, in “Death of a Gunfighter.”

She was to act in only one other movie: In 1978 she played Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wiz,” the film version of the all-black Broadway musical based on “The Wizard of Oz.” But she never stopped singing.

She continued to record prolifically well into the 1990s, for RCA and other labels, notably United Artists and Blue Note. And she conquered Broadway in 1981 with a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” which ran for 14 months and won both rave reviews and a Tony Award.

Ms. Horne’s voice was not particularly powerful, but it was extremely expressive. She reached her listeners emotionally by acting as well as singing the romantic standards like “The Man I Love” and “Moon River” that dominated her repertory. The person she always credited as her main influence was not another singer but a pianist and composer, Duke Ellington’s longtime associate Billy Strayhorn.

“I wasn’t born a singer,” she told Strayhorn’s biographer, David Hajdu. “I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me vocally.” Strayhorn occasionally worked as her accompanist and, she said, “taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything.”

Strayhorn was also “the only man I ever loved,” she said, but Strayhorn was openly gay, and their close friendship never became a romance. “He was just everything that I wanted in a man,” she told Mr. Hajdu, “except he wasn’t interested in me sexually.”

Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. All four of her grandparents were industrious members of Brooklyn’s black middle class. Her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, were early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in October 1919, at the age of 2, Lena was the cover girl for the organization’s monthly bulletin.

By then the marriage of her parents, Edna and Teddy Horne, was in trouble. “She was spoiled and badly educated and he was fickle,” Ms. Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her family history, “The Hornes.” By 1920 Teddy had left his job with the New York Department of Labor and fled to Seattle, and Edna had fled to a life on the stage in Harlem. Ms. Horne was raised by her paternal grandparents until her mother took her back four years later.

When she was 16, her mother pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934.

At 19, Ms. Horne married the first man she had ever dated, 28-year-old Louis Jones, and became a conventional middle-class Pittsburgh wife. Her daughter Gail was born in 1937 and a son, Teddy, in 1940. The marriage ended soon afterward. Ms. Horne kept Gail, but Mr. Jones refused to give up Teddy, although he did allow the boy long visits with his mother.

In 1938, Ms. Horne starred in a quickie black musical film, “The Duke Is Tops,” for which she was never paid. Her return to movies was on a grander scale.

She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.”

Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, “Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it,” Ms. Horne said. “When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me.” Bogart, she said, “sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know.”

Roger Edens, the composer and musical arranger who had been Judy Garland’s chief protector at MGM, had heard the elegant Ms. Horne sing at Café Society and also went to hear her at the Little Troc. (The war had scaled down Mr. Young’s ambitions to a small club with a gambling den on the second floor.) He insisted that Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM’s lavish musicals, listen to Ms. Horne sing. Then Freed insisted that Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, hear her, too. He did, and soon she had signed a seven-year contract with MGM. She was not the first black performer under contract to a major studio — MGM had signed the actress Nina Mae McKinney for five years in 1929 — but she was the first to make an impact.

The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated her contract as a weapon in its war to get better movie roles for black performers. Her father weighed in, too. In a 1997 PBS interview, she recalled: “My father said, ‘I can get a maid for my daughter. I don’t want her in the movies playing maids.’ ”

Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley. Her husband died in 1971; her son died of kidney failure the same year.

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”

Four Lions

Four Lions is Chris Morris’ first feature, co-written with Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, the creators of Peep Show, alongside some additional writing provided by In the Loop’s Simon Blackwell. Morris’ previous barbed satirical TV output is well complimented here by his collaborators as Four Lions opens out through satire and embraces that particular human condition of comic tragedy that so often lies behind failure. It’s a decent debut from Morris and it will be interesting to see where he goes from here.

The film follows the bungling exploits of a sub-par band of Jihadi terrorists from Sheffield who set out to become suicide bombers during the London marathon. The group consist of Omar (Riz Ahmed), his brother Waj (Kayvan Novak), Barry (Nigel Lindsay), Faisal (Adeel Akhtar) and Hassan (Arsher Ali). Omar is a family man who believes what he is doing is his destiny. Waj is in on it out of blind idolisation of his brother. Barry is a Caucasian convert with a nihilistic personality that needs to yolk his anger onto a cause so as to channel it. Faisal is a few chapters short of a Koran. And Hassan is roped in after threatening to blow up a political meeting with a set of party poppers strapped around him.

After Omar and Waj return from their calamitous experience at a training camp in Pakistan, Omar devises his plan to bring attention to their cause by donning ridiculous costumes and, under the guise of charity runners, running in the London Marathon and blowing themselves up. As they are about to join the Marathon an inquisitive policeman remarks to them that, ‘You’ll die in those outfits’, which elicits the response: ‘Yeah. But it’s for a good cause’.

The film balances Morris trademark acerbic social insights and invective ridicule with more playful scenes of out-and-out physical comedy. Armstrong and Bain capture the nuances and rhythm of dialogue and their skill in creating character comedy is on display here. There’s some excellent verbal farce as well and the banter results in some amusing gag jousting. As you would expect from Morris, the tone is never quite clear as it throws up some skilfully constructed jarring scenes of tonal contrasts that produce conflicting emotional responses. There are also some touching scenes as when Omar goes to say goodbye to his wife. Indeed the family dynamics produce some of the film’s most tender and dramatic scenes.

Morris incorporates certain aspects of reality into the film and exposes cack-handed preposterousness with a deft comic touch, such as during the marathon when the police are trying to ‘shoot the bear’, and instead shoot a wookie, and the resultant discussion over whether a wookie is a bear – an allusion to the electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot dead on 22nd July, 2005 by police who mistook him for one of four would-be suicide bombers who had attacked London's transport system the previous day. Such displays of the incompetent stupidity of human activities grounds so much of Morris’ output.

The film is well cast and Ahmed and Lindsay give the two standout performances. Although Preeya Kalidas as Omar’s wife Sophia brings an underplayed tension to the few scenes she’s in that brings the terrorist aspect onto a deeper emotional level that is acutely painful. There are some structural flaws with the film and there are two or three contrived scenes to crowbar in comic set ups. It flags a bit in the middle stumbles on in search of its culmination. But for the most part the film contains some fine moments and fulfils its aim of exposing the absurd nature of reality.

Four Lions is more mainstream than you would expect from someone with Chris Morris’ history. But I think this was necessary for him to be able to tackle the subject matter at hand and produce a film that at its heart deals sympathetically with that most curious of matters – human failure. The film’s final scenes are bathed in a bleak humour in the face of the brutal futility of the situation as matters come to a head. And by this stage, Morris has done enough with his humanized terrorists to make you care, which makes it all the more striking considering where our sympathies lie.

(Four Lions is released 7th May, 2010)

Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager

Matt Sloane/Aaron Yonda (2006)

Date Night

Is this really the best Hollywood has to offer its current hottest male and female TV comic actors? Steve Carrell and Tina Fey are currently pulling in millions of viewers and guaranteed laughs on American prime-time television with their hugely successful Emmy-laden comedies The Office and 30 Rock. So, here they are together starring in a film for the first time in Date Night. You can picture the pitch – ‘So Steve and Tina together; brilliant, huh…well, they’re a married couple set in their routine ways. How about that. They get caught up in a case of mistaken identity and are on the run from some baddies. They get in a boat! They smash up cars!! We could even get them pole dancing!!! In the end they realise their lives are perfect just the way they were. Hey. What a trip. It’s gotta be winner!’ Cue high fives all round…

Well the ‘brilliant’ idea to pair Carrell and Fey does bring some comic style to the proceedings, and their performances are backed up with some decent cameos by Mark Wahlberg, James Franco, Mila Kunis and Ray Liotta – doing a James ‘Jimmy’ Conway, which again shows us what a pity we don’t see more of him in decent roles. Apart from that Date Night is no more than a series of bad comic set ups and anaesthetic-type humour. The problem here is with the script. Written by Josh Klausner, who is best known for providing additional screenplay material for Shrek the Third, the script seems to have been the product of a graduate scriptwriter being held at gunpoint and told to come up with something funny in 10 minutes. 2 or 3 scenarios are strung together and our protagonists have to somehow get themselves out of them – sadly, with less than hilarious results.

It’s a shame that so many comedies these days seem manufactured to suit the whims of marketing buffoons, who forego any sense of what is funny in the pursuit of box-office takings and have no sense of risk. Instead Hollywood churns out banal concepts that sound funny, and slaps itself on the back in the knowledge that a safe bet will bring in the money. Date Night is indeed a safe bet.

Frankenstein

J. Searle Dawley (1910)

Centurion

I suppose you have to give Centurion’s director Neil Marshall his due – after directing the triple Ds of Doomsday, The Descent and Dog Soldiers, I’m fairly sure he could be Hollywood’s lapdog at this stage and putting his talents to misuse on unnecessary hollow remakes of horror films. But instead he continues to plough his trade in England. His latest film may not be up to his previous work, but it is mildly entertaining and if this spring sunshine is too much for you, there are worse reasons than this to seek refuge in the cinema.

Centurion is his stab at the sword and sandals genre, telling the story of the alleged mysterious disappearance of the Ninth Roman Legion in Britain in 117 AD. For mysterious, read brutally slaughtered by the Picts – a confederation of Celtic tribes.

Basically, a ridiculous plot is put in place to serve the purpose of a small band of Romans being forced on the run and being picked off (is there a pun possible here?) one-by-one as they are pursued by the painted warriors defying the Roman Empire.

The film chugs along at a frantic pace as the funny-named Roman protagonists, led by Quintus Dias, (spoiler alert!) run and fight, and run and fight…and hide…and then run and fight. Marshall has no intention of exploring any depth of character and motivation here, as simple premises are quickly interjected and disposed off in order to set up the action. As a result it’s pretty hard to actually give a damn what happens to this gang of Romans on the run. Truth be told, I spent the entire film cheering for the Picts. You’ve gotta love them.

Yet in its simplicity there are things to like about the film. The battle choreography is excellent and edited skilfully to provide the necessary thrills. The gore quotient is high and of good quality – there were a lot of ‘eyuch’-type sounds coming from those watching. The production design is top notch and the Scottish landscape is used to great effect; shot in drained steely colours with sweeping camera movements capturing the terrain with a keen eye.

The performances are irrelevant and the dialogue ludicrous. Most of the talent on offer here is wasted. The hardest part of the actors’ performances was probably to deliver their lines without falling about the place laughing. (‘Did nobody tell them never to fuck with the Romans’).

Though visually engaging, Centurion never strays from the template of survival set down in The Descent and Dog Soldiers, With its limp storytelling, superficial characters and repetitive structure, Centurion stubbornly refuses to veer from its basic narrative framework of survival and extend beyond its one-trick pony of a game of ‘kill-chase’.

Ghosts Before Breakfast

Hans Richter (1927)

The Ghost

A slick political thriller, The Ghost is Roman Polanski's adaptation of Robert Harris' novel, which reads as testament to Harris' finger pointing at Tony Blair as a war criminal.

Ewan McGregor plays the unnamed ghostwriter drafted in to re-write ex-Prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), Adam Lang's memoirs after his predecessor's watery demise. His lowest-common-denominator style of writing – his previous book about a magician being I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered – is seen as just the sort of stuff necessary to turn the dullness of Lang's memoirs into a best seller to rival those of the Premiership footballers' successful literary oeuvre.

Heading over to Lang's retreat on a Martha's Vineyard-type island, the ghostwriter soon finds himself embroiled in a plot far more intriguing than anything the memoirs have to offer as he discovers details about Lang that whet his appetite to investigate matters further. Ghostwriter becomes gumshoe as McGregor starts sniffing about (quite haplessly really) filling his nostrils with the stench of conspiracy and deceit. All of this going on while Lang himself is facing charges of war crimes as the Foreign Secretary he fired levels accusations at him.

Polanski builds up the tension well and keeps a steady, anxious pace with his long takes and skilful editing. His palette bestows a moody monochrome setting upon the island in keeping with events taking place there. Its vast open spaces contrast sharply with the claustrophobic confines of the house and McGregor's increasing sense of alienation and isolation. And the rain beats down incessantly flooding the screen with mystery and intrigue.

The fairly basic clue-following and revelation does sometime border on the Nancy Drew-type bizarre coincidence school of sleuthing, and the fairly unoriginal, implausible denouement is groan-inducing, unnecessary nonsense – redeemed, it must be said, by the film’s wonderful closing shot. Despite all this, the story holds up well under Polanski’s control – injecting moments of black humour that beautifully season the film’s conspiracy narrative. He maintains a tight focus on the material and (as always) brings out good performances from the cast.

McGregor and Brosnan are well cast in the two main roles – never really pushed beyond their abilities, but do enough to bring life to Harris’ oily PM and thrown in out-of-his-depth ghostwriter to cinematic life. Olivia Williams provides the film’s outstanding performance as Lang’s wife, Ruth – her detached cool exterior masking a controlling observer of events around her.

The film also boasts excellent cameos. Jim Belushi shines as the shiny-headed publisher. The legendary Eli Wallach devours his scene as the outcast inhabitant on the island who provides vital information. And Tom Wilkinson, who always brings a touch of class to roles he makes his own, excels as a shifty Professor with dodgy connections. His restrained menace is a thing of beauty. The film is backed up with a beautiful score by Alexandre Desplat, which rises throughout the film alongside the growing tension as plots thicken and mysteries unravel.

The Ghost, for all its flaws, is be recommended as a mature, well-crafted piece of cinematic spin.

Cycles

Cyriak (2010)

The Blind Side

How did this dross manage to be nominated for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars®?

The Blind Side is supposedly based on the life of Michael Oher, a rags-to-riches American football star, but really it is the ‘true’ story of the Tuohy family – a rich, squeaky-clean family the likes of which George Bush senior dreamed off when he was quoted pontificating jibber-jabber about how families should be less like the Simpsons and more like the Waltons. Headed by the gun-packing, right-wing, Christian mother Leigh Anne (Sandra Bullock), the family wave their magic wand and sprinkle their dream-dust over the poor Michael Oher (Quintin Aaron) and grant him the perfect life he never would have been blessed with had he stayed in that goddamn ghetto where his uncaring, druggie momma dragged him up. Thanks to the divine intervention of the Tuohy family, Michael ‘learns’ how to play football and is 'given' an education so that he can go to college and play his way to the major league, where he becomes a star. Lucky for him he met some rich selfless white folks who save poor helpless black folk. That’s the major problem with this film – it depicts some sort of white saviour syndrome.

Now this may well be based on a true story (interesting to note that Oher himself has virtually disowned the film). But the truth is predicated on the Tuohys’ side of events. In particular Leigh Anne Tuohy. As a result, it is Sandra Bullock’s film (hence her Oscar®). Everything that goes on around her exists to spotlight her performance. While there’s no denying Bullock’s performance, it also stands as testament to the ignorant portrayal of Michael Oher. He is nothing in this film but a stooge that allows Bullock to shed tears, sissy fit about the place and make a home for her newfound exotic pet. There is nothing in the film that seeks to give a voice to Michael’s experience as his discomfort is used as an excuse to starve him of lines, strip him of motivation, and deny his own experience. He is basically a non-entity in the film, lacking any sort of subjectivity and exists as nothing more than an object of ‘charity’.

There is one among many grating scenes when the Tuohy’s provide Michael with a tutor (Kathy Bates) to improve his grades. Determined for him to go to a particular college, she attempts to put him off going to a rival’s college by force-feeding him some gobbledygook about bodies being buried under the pitch to scare him away – so there you have it: his tutor treating him like an imbecilic child who’ll swallow any old crap so that she can get her way. Tute on!

John Lee Hancock directs with all the skill of an ice-skating hippopotamus and serves up as many stereotypes and one-dimensional characters as Rafael Nadal’s aces. The script is full of wince-inducing dialogue and peppered with inanities (‘You’ve changed that boy’s life’…‘No. He’s changed mine’).

This revisionist skewering of biography has all the empathy of those ’80’s Sunday made- for-TV true stories of how heroic humanity can be in the face of despair. But in this film there is no sense of despair; rather an endless parade of backslapping heroism of the haves helping out the have-nots. Its saccharine oversimplification of complex sociological issues is a travesty. Don’t be fooled by Mister Oscar® – this is aneurism-inducing storytelling. At times, it’s like being in a coma and being force-fed heroin by Sarah Palin.

The Eye Like a Strange Balloon

Guy Maddin (1995)

Kick-Ass

W. C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty

Alice in Wonderland (Norman Z. McLeod, 1933)