Friday, 28 February 2014
For what it's worth...
Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of February 21-23, 2014:
1 (1) The Lego Movie (U) ****
2 (4) Mr. Peabody & Sherman (U)
3 (6) Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy (U) **
4 (2) The Monuments Men (12A) **
5 (3) RoboCop (12A)
6 (5) The Wolf of Wall Street (18) **
7 (10) 12 Years a Slave (15) ****
8 (9) Dallas Buyers Club (15) ***
9 (7) Cuban Fury (15)
10 (re) Frozen (PG) **
(source: theguardian.com)
My top five:
1. Funny Face
2. The Godfather Part II
3. BAFTA Shorts 2014
4. Nymphomaniac: Volume 1
5. The Lego Movie
Top Ten DVD rentals:
1 (new) Captain Phillips (12) ****
2 (new) Turbo (U)
3 (7) Rush (15) **
4 (new) About Time (12) **
5 (new) Filth (18) ***
6 (new) Prisoners (15)
7 (new) White House Down (12)
8 (new) The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (12) **
9 (new) The Croods (U)
10 (1) The World's End (15) ****
(source: moviemistakes.com/charts)
My top five:
1. Gravity [above]
2. How to Survive a Plague
3. Gloria
4. Prince Avalanche
5. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. The Lady Vanishes (Saturday, BBC2, 1.10pm)
2. Grease (Sunday, C4, 4.25pm)
3. Vertigo (Sunday, BBC2, 1.55pm)
4. Beetlejuice (Sunday, five, 2.50pm)
5. The Fountain (Sunday, C4, 1am)
"Unforgiven" (The Guardian 28/02/14)
Unforgiven ***
Dir: Lee
Sang-il. With: Ken Watanabe, Akira Emoto, Shiori Kutsuna. 135 mins. Cert: 15
The symmetry is
irresistible. 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars,
a remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, made
an international star of Clint Eastwood; now Eastwood’s valedictory 1992
Western has been remade by Korean-Japanese director Lee Sang-il. The tale of an
ageing warrior (here Letters from Iwo
Jima’s Ken Watanabe) who returns to the saddle to avenge a vicious attack
on a prostitute translates fluently to the late samurai era, allowing Lee to
refresh the action in pitting rusting swords against the emergent pistol.
Narratively, it’s limited by a certain lack of surprises: if the territory’s
new-ish, the characters are ported over unaltered from David Webb Peoples’
screenplay, and their interplay doesn’t yield any insights on the grim business
of killing that Clint hadn’t already spat out. Still, it’s an enduring yarn,
well told: a rare remake that functions independently, even as it reminds you –
vividly, in places – of the original’s elegiac pleasures.
Unforgiven opens in selected cinemas from today.
Friday, 21 February 2014
For what it's worth...
Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of February 14-16, 2014:
1 (new) The Lego Movie (U) [above] ****
2 (new) The Monuments Men (12A) **
3 (2) RoboCop (12A)
4 (1) Mr. Peabody & Sherman (U)
5 (3) The Wolf of Wall Street (18) **
6 (new) Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy (U) **
7 (new) Cuban Fury (15)
8 (new) Endless Love (12A) **
9 (4) Dallas Buyers Club (15) ***
10 (5) 12 Years a Slave (15) ****
(source: theguardian.com)
My top five:
1. The Godfather Part II
2. Nymphomaniac: Volume 1
3. The Lego Movie
4. The Armstrong Lie
5. Nymphomaniac: Volume 2
Top Ten DVD rentals:
1 (new) The World's End (15) ****
2 (2) The Wolverine (12)
3 (1) The Great Gatsby (12) ***
4 (new) The Heat (15) ***
5 (8) Elysium (12) ***
6 (3) Pacific Rim (12) **
7 (new) Rush (15) **
8 (new) Despicable Me 2 (U) ***
9 (5) The Internship (12)
10 (6) The Frozen Ground (15) **
(source: lovefilm.com)
My top five:
1. How to Survive a Plague
2. Gloria
3. Prince Avalanche
4. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
5. Captain Phillips
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Friday, BBC2, 11.05pm)
2. There Will Be Blood (Saturday, BBC2, 10.45pm)
3. Cop Land (Saturday, C4, 11.55pm)
4. Borat (Friday, C4, 12.20am)
5. Of Time and the City (Sunday, BBC2, 11.30pm)
"Stalingrad" (The Guardian 21/02/14)
Stalingrad **
Dir: Fyodor
Bondarchuk. With: Mariya Smolnikova, Yanina Studilina, Pyotr Fedorov, Thomas
Kretschmann. 131 mins. Cert: 15
This long-haul,
Russian-language WW2 drama deploys a curious bookending device – involving
Russian rescue workers hauling Germans from the rubble of Fukushima – to frame
an equally bizarre main event: a part-recreation of the grimness of the siege of Stalingrad using
the same 3D we're more accustomed to from the likes of, say, The Lego Movie.
The perverse spectacle (child-torching, prostitute-stripping, endless flying
ash) offered as compensation for some indistinct characterisation gets muffled
by this format’s limited light capacity: those few scenes not choked with
self-importance instead succumb to a greyly macho fug of war. The subtext –
Russia endures, flexes muscles anew – doubtless makes it President Putin’s pick
of the week, but someone should really take him to see the Lego film.
Stalingrad opens in selected cinemas from today.
Sunday, 16 February 2014
For what it's worth...
Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office
for the weekend of February 7-9, 2014:
1 (new) Mr. Peabody & Sherman (U)
2 (new) RoboCop (12A)
3 (1) The Wolf of Wall Street (18) **
4 (new) Dallas Buyers Club (15) ***
5 (2) 12 Years a Slave (15) ****
6 (5) Frozen (PG) **
7 (3) That Awkward Moment (15)
8 (6) Lone Survivor (15) ***
9 (8) American Hustle (15) ****
10 (new) Rusalka: Met Opera (uncertificated)
(source: theguardian.com)
My top five:
1. The Lego Movie
2. Journal de France
3. The Armstrong Lie
4. Her
5. Dallas Buyers Club
Top Ten DVD rentals:
1 (new) The World's End (15) ****
2 (2) The Wolverine (12)
3 (1) The Great Gatsby (12) ***
4 (new) The Heat (15) ***
5 (8) Elysium (12) ***
6 (3) Pacific Rim (12) **
7 (new) Rush (15) **
8 (new) Despicable Me 2 (U) ***
9 (5) The Internship (12)
10 (6) The Frozen Ground (15) **
(source: lovefilm.com)
My top five:
1. How to Survive a Plague
2. Gloria
3. Prince Avalanche
4. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
5. Captain Phillips
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead [above] (Saturday, C4, 12.55am)
2. The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (Friday, C4, 11.20pm)
3. The Color of Money (Thursday, BBC1, 11.35pm)
4. The Notorious Bettie Page (Saturday, BBC2, 11.30pm)
5. Synecdoche, New York (Friday, BBC2, 11.05pm)
"The Lego Movie" (The Guardian 14/02/14)
The Lego Movie ****
Dirs: Phil Lord,
Christopher Miller. With the voices of: Will Arnett, Elizabeth Banks, Charlie
Day. 100 mins. Cert: U
An unexpected joy. Phil
Lord and Christopher Miller, the nutty professors behind Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, have picked up the pieces that
might have made for a throwaway brand-expansion exercise – hey, Smurfs movies – and instead fashioned a
work of unbridled imagination, apt to delight sociologists, stoners and
six-year-olds alike. Lego logic has been respected in the assembling of its
meticulous yet changeable and spontaneous-seeming universes; our humble
everyman hero progresses from guileless construction drone to revolutionary
Master Builder (very Joseph Campbell) in cherishably jerky motions. Countless
pauseworthy flourishes should send DVD presales rocketing, yet the zappiness
generates as many drolly satirical gags, finessed by the voice cast’s
sitcom-sharpened timing. It doesn’t think outside the box so much as operate on
another astral plain entirely, yet even at its craziest, the film retains a
tactile, DIY-ish charm: it may be the closest any American animation has come
to emulating the ludic spirit of Aardman or Adam & Joe.
The Lego Movie is in cinemas nationwide.
"Endless Love" (The Guardian 14/02/14)
Endless Love **
Dir: Shana
Feste. With: Alex Pettyfer, Gabriella Wilde, Bruce Greenwood. 103 min. Cert:
12A
Endless Love is in cinemas nationwide.
"Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy" (The Guardian 14/02/14)
Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy **
Dir: Peggy
Holmes. With the voices of: Tom Hiddleston, Christina Hendricks, Lucy Liu, Mae Whitman.
78 mins. Cert: U
Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy is in cinemas nationwide.
Wednesday, 12 February 2014
Shia LaBeouf: is there genius in his madness?
Transformation is rarely as smooth as the movies
make out. Turning a nerd into a cool cat requires hours in wardrobe, no matter
that any on-screen makeover might take a minute; shifting trucks into giant
robots demands weeks, often months, of pixel-wrangling. And these changes are
wrought behind closed doors: effectuating such transformations while in the
public eye has long proven doubly difficult. Macauley Culkin, Lindsay Lohan, Amanda
Bynes: the child actors who became tabloid fodder are legion. With Shia
LaBeouf, star of two controversial new releases and countless recent off-screen
brouhahas, the passage from teen idol to leading man has been scarcely less
turbulent.
In Berlin this past weekend to promote Nymphomaniac, a two-volume adult odyssey
in which he dons a curious mock-English accent and removes his clothes, LaBeouf
walked out of a press conference after repeating Eric Cantona’s epigram about
sardines and seagulls; at that evening’s premiere, he posed for photographers
with a paper bag inked with the words “I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE” over his head.
Even for someone who’d just worked with Lars von Trier, this was eccentric
behaviour. What brings one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars to start covering
their face, and mouthing the utterances of footballers?
To say LaBeouf has come a long way is an
understatement. Born in 1986, he first came to prominence as the smart-mouthed
hero of the Disney Channel show Even
Stevens; he won a Daytime Emmy in 2003, the year he hit the big screen with
the successful family romp Holes.
Plain-sailing career progression belied off-camera struggles, however.
LaBeouf’s parents – a ballerina and a Vietnam veteran battling dependency
issues – separated early in his childhood. Son took care of father, paying him
to stay clean as his legal guardian on the Even
Stevens set, shuttling him to AA meetings at the close of shooting.
By 2010, after running around in Michael Bay’s Transformers films and the Indiana Jones reboot, LaBeouf was being
heralded by Forbes as the world’s
most bankable star, pipping Daniel Radcliffe and Johnny Depp. Yet, though
successful, the movies, plainly, weren’t great: with maturity came growing
doubts about this easy money, and what to do with himself once he’d ensured his
security, and that of his loved ones, for life. There were drunken brawls,
arrests for loitering, car wrecks both figurative and literal. “The hardest
thing… is dealing with all this idle time,” he confessed in a 2011 Details profile. “That’s when I get into
trouble.”
Reading
LaBeouf’s uncommonly candid interviews, you realise three things. First, that
he must be a nightmare for PRs; second, that he’s funnier and more interesting
in person than the movies have thus far allowed him to be; and thirdly that,
like many performers, he finds echoes of family on set. “My director is my god,
my rock, my mother, my father, my lover, my brother, my enemy,” he blurted in
2012. This can generate its own problems, of course. Relations with Steven
Spielberg, a sometime mentor, cooled after LaBeouf ventured the (not wholly
misinformed) opinion they “dropped the ball” on Indy 4.
With
Bay, matters proved more combative. While filming the third Transformers, LaBeouf was preparing for
a less robotic scene by listening to Feist’s downtempo number “Brandy
Alexander”. A furious Bay ripped out the actor’s headphones and cranked up the Dark Knight score instead. It was a
conflict of diverging sensibilities; the 24-year-old star had outgrown his
46-year-old director. LaBeouf moved on, griping that the studios “give you the
money, then… come to the set and stick a finger up your ass for five
months." Bay has since shot Transformers
4, with the Irish actor Jack Reynor
installed as co-lead.
If there is any real downside to being young,
photogenic and paid $15m on a regular basis, this is it. Hollywood has come to
regard the likes of LaBeouf as disposable freelancers: cheap relative to more
established stars, there to fill space between the explosions the summer audience
really wants to see. (Few went to Transformers
because it was “a Shia LaBeouf movie”.) The actor understood this better than
anybody: “There’s
this coming-of-age thing that’s happening… I have these yearnings to do
different things." Warren Beatty, another performer compelled to prove he
wasn’t just a pretty face, was cited as an inspiration.
Aggressively pushing his boundaries, LaBeouf began
going toe-to-toe with notorious directorial taskmasters and proven acting
heavyweights. He brawled with Tom Hardy while shooting 2011’s Lawless, and clashed with Alec
Baldwin during rehearsals for the Broadway play Orphans. He travelled to Romania and dropped acid, spooking
co-star Rupert Grint, during the filming of this week’s grungy, violent
thriller Charlie Countryman, and
prepared for Nymphomaniac by
stripping in the promo for Sigur Rós’s “Fjögur Píanó”, a delicate episode of physical
theatre almost certainly absent from the Michael Bay playlist.
Writing
and directing his own short, howardcantour.com,
allowed the suddenly over-exposed actor to assert some further creative
control; early Cannes reviews suggested it was a confident debut. Trouble began
when the film emerged online late last year, allowing many to note its direct
and uncredited lifts from Daniel Clowes’ graphic novel Justin M. Damiano. Caught in a Twitter storm, LaBeouf gave
varyingly sincere responses, including the offer of a skywritten apology,
before insisting this wasn’t plagiarism but “performance art” – pleading the
Joaquin Phoenix defence, as it were. (Phoenix enacted a similar meltdown while
filming 2009’s I’m Still Here.)
Whether this is art or merely next-gen Hollywood
acting-up, LaBeouf has committed to it. He’s published an online manifesto
(metamodernism.org), and even touted a performance piece to gallerists, in
which he invited visitors to take a Clowes anthology to his contrite form.
(There are similarities to Marina Abramović’s 1974 piece Rhythm 0.) Look at the Berlin footage, and you’ll see the actor
carefully replicates the dramatic gulp of water Cantona took between phrases
back in 1995; his paper mask’s mantra is one LaBeouf has insistently Tweeted –
thereby repeating himself – since announcing his retirement from public life in
January.
Something’s going on here, and it may be that von
Trier – equally persecuted and prankish, enthusiastic compiler of manifestos –
has replaced Spielberg as LaBeouf’s mentor, and given his charge constructive
ways of filling all that idle time: if not original ideas, exactly, then at
least some knowledge of a world beyond sequels.
(Better to replay others for sport than repeat yourself at the behest of
Hollywood paymasters, perhaps.) Channelling Beckett, point seven of the
Metamodernist manifesto insists “Error breeds sense”. We must wait to see what
emerges once this particular pupal stage is completed, and the paper bag comes
off.
A version of this article ran on today's Telegraph film website. The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman opens in cinemas nationwide on Friday; Nymphomaniac: Volumes 1 and 2 open in selected cinemas on February 22.
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