Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XXVI

As the title suggests, so forth.

“I don’t want to sell you Birds of Prey. I want to go back to the office and rethink my pitch”

If you had told me in 2010 that a movie about Harley Quinn would come out in 2020 and that MEW would be in it as Huntress but that I would have as active an interest in not seeing it as I did for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen I would not have believed you.

Imagine this movie instead:

Harley & Ivy

Starring Margot Robbie and Emma Stone as Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy

with Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Huntress,  Nicholas Hoult as Robin

and Jared Leto as the Joker

Screenplay by Jane Espenson

Story by Diane Ruggiero and Paul Dini

Directed by Karyn Kusama

Suddenly I don’t just have an interest, it’s certain – I’m going to it.

Rub and Tug: Production update

So almost two years ago now Scarlett Johansson, having better things to do than fight Twitter mobs, pulled out of playing a female-to-male transsexual in Rub and Tug. Some of the self-same people who mercilessly bullied her online then (incredibly) hoped she would continue producing the movie. But… clearly she’d been producing, guiding the screenplay, hiring a director she’d worked with before, in order to win an Oscar; following in the footsteps of Jared Leto in 2014, as she had noted in her initial response which the usual cyber-bullies dubbed ‘toxic’. Why would she have actively produced the movie after its purpose for her had been gutted? Why would the financing stay in place when an Avenger was gone, to be replaced by a female-to-male transsexual player like… And there was the blank page in the prospectus. Who? Scott Turner Schofield? Films like Rub and Tug depend on star-power and prestige traction. Dallas Buyers Club made 55 million, Mysterious Skin made 2 million. Scarlett Johansson starring probably made it a just slightly better than 50/50 shot at hitting the Dallas colour on the roulette wheel of fate. Scarlett Johansson not starring reduced the odds so substantially the only reason not to pull financing would be the same sort of masochism asked of her: producing a film as a mitzvah to people who bullied her. As of July 2018 Rub and Tug had lost its very high profile star and its director Rupert Sanders. It now has no star, no director, and is just a script in development hell with very little chance of getting made.

From the Archives: Good Luck Chuck

From the pre-Talking Movies archives.

Charlie (Dane Cook) has been hexed since adolescence, if he sleeps with a girl the next guy she sleeps with will be her true love. When he meets the girl of his dreams Cam (Jessica Alba) he must find a way to break the curse.

Jessica Alba, STARK NAKED!! Is not something that you will see in this film. Oh, I’m sorry. Did I just take away your only reason for going to see it?? Please grow up. This is the directorial debut of the man who edited Showgirls! Us adults need the multiplexes to watch films involving characters and emotions so can’t you just go to the embarrassing corner of the DVD store to satisfy your needs? The opening of Good Luck Chuck just screams Superbad as a fat kid obsessed with sex and a skinny kid nervous about it try to impress girls during a game of spin the bottle. The skinny kid is of course our ‘hero’ Charlie who gets hexed by a goth girl he sexually disappoints and so we jump to the present. Charlie is now a playboy while Stu is still fat, single and still obsessed with sex. He discovers that Charlie is famous on perfectmatch.com for being a good luck charm for single women who want to meet Mr Right. He convinces Charlie that he should sleep with all these eager women.

There follows a sex scene montage which plays like it was the ultimate fantasy of 13 year old male scriptwriters but here’s the thing, Superbad was written, at least in its first draft, by 13 year old male scriptwriters, the difference is you just know that Seth Rogen was FUNNY when he was 13 years old. Slapstick accidents that occur to Jessica Alba’s clumsy Cam are as sophisticated as the humour gets here. And there’s precious little humour which leads to the next problem…Who the hell is Dane Cook? He has no charisma and so can’t carry the film on charm alone. I have a memory for actor’s faces that can remember people from supporting turns in CSI and I recognise no-one among the undistinguished supporting players. I shouldn’t be surprised. Casting was probably done on the willingness of actresses to take their tops off.

Let’s be honest. This film is only getting a cinema release because of Jessica Alba or more accurately because of the slavering hordes of teenage boys obsessed with seeing Jessica Alba naked. Thus far thankfully she’s disappointed them but now that Natalie Portman has appeared nude it’s a safe bet that Alba will follow. I’m not sure exactly how it’s meant to be empowering for independent 21^st Century women to meekly obey the cry of ‘Get ’em out for the lads!’, but it’s a given in Hollywood that if you want to be taken seriously (i.e. win an Oscar) you need to take your clothes off. Let’s see how that works out for the actresses exploited in this wretched trash…

1/5

From the Archives: A Mighty Heart

Digging in the pre-Talking Movies archives uncovers Angelina Jolie’s Oscar-bait in which the show was stolen by the supporting players.

Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is kidnapped by terrorists in Pakistan. Through the eyes of his pregnant wife Marianne we follow the frantic search operation to find him.

A Mighty Heart is based on a true story. Daniel Pearl was captured by Islamist extremists in Pakistan in early 2002 and held as a captive before being beheaded, an act of depravity videoed for posterity by his captors. Michael Winterbottom adapts the style of Paul Greengrass, the shaky hand-held camera and documentary feel, to recreate a sense of urgency given that we all know how the story ends. He is helped by an extremely impressive sound design which lets the chaotic roar of Karachi envelop the audience placing us in the midst of a strange city, with many rules for the safety for Western journalists. The most important rule is to always meet a contact in a public place. We see Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman) being told this repeatedly before meeting his contact. When the contact doesn’t appear, Pearl leaves, only to be abducted and used as a bargaining chip to get Guantanamo Bay shut down.

The ensemble of this film is very strong. There are standout performances though from Futterman who convinces us of Pearl’s quiet integrity and courage, Archie Panjabi as the pugnacious Indian Wall Street Journal reporter with whom the Pearls are staying, and Irrfan Khan as the Captain in charge of Counter-terrorism (Pakistan’s Jack Bauer, even down to torturing suspects). In its dogged reconstruction of the intelligence operation tracking down Islamist suspects this film comes close in feel to last year’s acclaimed mini-series The Path to 9/11. While that featured Harvey Keitel’s best performance in years as the doomed FBI agent John O’Neill the responsibility of playing a real person has the opposite effect on the lead of this film.

Angelina Jolie as Marianne Pearl gives a performance designed to win Oscars but that intention is so obvious it backfires. All you can think about is what a ‘performance’ Angelina is giving: look at her curled hair, her darkened pigmentation, her French accent…if she ‘acts’ any harder she might pull something. She’s at her best here in her quiet moments as shouting scenes play like a reprise of the showiness that won her an Oscar for her sociopath in Girl, Interrupted. John Wayne took a number of years to create the persona of ‘John Wayne’ that he perfected in Stagecoach and lived off for the next three decades. Angelina Jolie though has not created a film persona like Wayne’s, she has created a purely public persona that cannot be captured on celluloid. Her sole smash hit of the last decade was Mr & Mrs Smith. Centred on a tempestuous relationship with Brad Pitt this was a heightened expression of the comic book which is her life. The baggage of tabloid headlines she brings to this film fatally undermines it. Marianne Pearl should have been played by a lower profile actress…

2/5

Any Other Business: Part XXX

What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a proper blog post? Why round them up and turn them into a thirtieth portmanteau post on television of course!

The night is always darkest just before it’s totally black

Game of Thrones‘ latest episode has garnered much criticism for being less an adaptation of the work of George RR Martin and more that of Matthew Arnold:

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

But it made me think about Robert Elswit’s work on Velvet Buzzsaw, not least because of its cinematographer’s curious defence. Fabian Wagner, as reported by Variety, blamed the poor saps who shelled out a cable premium to watch this underlit farrago. It’s all down to “viewers’ home devices, which he says aren’t fit for the show’s cinematic filming. ‘A lot of the problem is that a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly, ‘ he said … ‘Personally I don’t have to always see what’s going on because it’s more about the emotional impact. Game of Thrones is a cinematic show and therefore you have to watch it like you’re at a cinema: in a darkened room. If you watch a night scene in a brightly-lit room then that won’t help you see the image properly.'” But but but Fabian, this is a TV show, you’re not meant to light it as if it was a movie, because people can’t watch it as if it was a movie. I loved Bradford Young’s work on Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, but I completely understood the objections of some critics about its sepulchral lighting.  I have never seen it on television, and I can imagine it would lose much impact and become quite frustrating on the small screen because, and pay attention here Fabian, it was lit for cinema viewing – which doesn’t just mean that you watch it in the dark, but that you watch it on a big screen in the dark. A BIG screen, hence Roger Moore’s disquisition on the value of a raised eyebrow because it shoots up about 12 feet on a proper cinema screen. [As for the idea that you don’t need to see what’s going on because it’s about the emotional impact of what’s going on that you can’t see – arrant nonsense.] I had the very odd sensation watching Velvet Buzzsaw that something was off about Robert Elswit’s normally glorious cinematography; and I felt he’d got caught in an existential crisis. Here he was working on something that Netflix wants everyone (especially the Oscars and film critics) to accept is a proper movie damn it, and yet aware that this might be shown at a single film festival and then watched by nearly all of its (usually undisclosed number of) viewers on a small screen. If a movie is made to be watched on the small screen, and not to be watched in a cinema on a big screen, then what makes it different from a Hallmark TV movie other than its star power, budget, and attendant style?

Yes, Renault, I smoke, there’s no need to be so shocked about it.

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there

The BBC has got my goat in the past few days with their irritating nonsense. Multiple times on Friday night’s tribute to Jazz 625 we were treated like small impressionable children with no more free will than a Pavlovian dog by being warned that footage of the original 1960s show would contain people – gasp – smoking – clasp your pearls in horror, there’s worse to come – indoors -gasp for breath as if your lungs were being filled with secondhand smoke from a 1960s image and fall to the floor writhing in agony! Thank you Auntie, but I am capable of realising that the 1960s is not the 2010s.  But there was worse on Thursday night when Janina Ramirez warned us that footage of Alan Yentob talking about Leonardo Da Vinci in 2003 would contain Yentob – gasp – smoking – clasp your pearls in horror, there’s worse to come – indoors – gasp for breath as if your lungs were being filled with secondhand smoke from a 2000s image and fall to the floor writhing in agony! Oh for Christ’s sake…. The repetition of the phrase ‘it was a different time’ clearly means this is some sort of policy at the BBC to lecture the audience at every opportunity, but as so often with this kind of approach it was counterproductive because Yentob simply had a half-smoked cigarette in one hand while he spread out notebooks by Da Vinci on a bar counter. I would not have noticed the cigarette if my attention had not been drawn to it, if I had seen it at all I might have mistaken it for a short pencil. Well done, BBC, well done. This is the kind of policing impulse that shares a mindset with the fools who want all old movies rated 18s because they feature smoking, and it both cases it betrays a mind that wishes to excoriate when it doesn’t forget the past in order to smugly bask in the wonderful nature of the present. Oblivious to the fact that the present will no doubt be excoriated in similar manner in the future, most likely for what it is most smug about right now.

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part IX

As the title suggests here are some short thoughts about the movies which aren’t quite substantial enough for each to merit an individual blog posting.

“No, that doesn’t track”

We now know Wes Anderson’s next film will be live-action and set in post-WWII France, immediately post-war apparently. So perhaps taking cues from Les Enfants de Paradis, Jean Cocteau and Jour de Fete rather than the 50s of Clouzot, Bresson and early New Wave. Insofar as Wes Anderson takes cues from anyone… Any excitement I might have that he’s tackling a specific culture and time is tempered by the knowledge that it will be put thru the wringer until it comes out a Wes Anderson movie. A topic of conversation arises with Paul Fennessy every time there’s a new Wes Anderson – just how much of a straitjacket his trademarks have become. One of our favourite flights of fancy finds Wes and Jason Schwartzman or Roman Coppola or Owen Wilson seated at a diner in Austin; furiously scribbling dialogue and scene ideas in yellow legal pads, and beaming at each other happily, until a shadow crosses Wes’ face, and he asks in horror and disappointment, “But wait, can we do that as a tracking shot or a series of whip-pans?” Because if not, well, there’s no place for it in the cathedral of conventions that Wes Anderson has imprisoned himself within.

Photo: Matt Kennedy

“I can’t help if it I’m popular”

Well now, that didn’t take long. Less than a month after I derided it here, the Oscars abruptly threw engines into full reverse on their wonderfully patronising idea of giving out a new token Oscar for Best ‘Popular’ Movie. It was a bold move to keep the plebeians happy and watching the bloated ceremony honouring films nobody saw. I would wager cold hard cash the decision to ‘suspend’ the new award followed almost instantly on Chadwick Boseman scotching the notion he would be happy to see Black Panther dismissed with a token gong so transparently created merely to commend his all-conquering movie without commending it. He wanted, quite rightly, to be nominated, and seriously, for the Best Picture Oscar; like previous Oscar-winning crowd pleasers The Sting, Forrest Gump, and Rocky. Right now Black Panther has made 700,059,566 dollars at the North American Box Office.  Let us be cruel and note that the combined totals of every Best Picture Oscar winner this decade; The King’s Speech (135,453,143), The Artist (44,671,682), Argo (136,025,503), 12 Years a Slave (56,671,993), Birdman (42,340,598), Spotlight (45,055,776), Moonlight (27,854,932), The Shape of Water (63,859,435); come to just 551,933,062 dollars. That is why fewer and fewer people watch the obscurantist Oscars.

The means defeat the ends

Watching Ken Burns’ incredible documentary The Vietnam War last year it was hard not to think that when someone proclaims ‘the ends justify the means’ any means thus justified actually work against the proclaimed ends.  The brutal means employed in Vietnam actually strengthened the Vietcong and thus worked against the ends of keeping South Vietnam out of their hands.  And, in a disconcerting swoop to utter banality, the shamelessness of the cash-grab of The Hobbit trilogy meant grabbing shamefully little cash. Despite featuring the same writing/producing staff as the Lord of the Rings , (with the regrettable addition of Guillermo Del Toro), Peter Jackson as director, and Andrew Lesnie as cinematographer, the first two Hobbit films (I’ve avoided the last) were nothing like it. They were shot like Janusz Kaminski had left the supernova on in the soundstage, and the greenscreen room, and the digital FX studio, bedevilled by awful acting, unintentionally funny make-up and CGI make-up work, and muddled in nearly every imaginable respect of scripting and directing, with even promising sequences descending into over the top gibberish repeatedly, and this is before we even gripe that the slim volume of Tolkien being made into three films was, as Bilbo once said, like butter spread over too much bread. They were entirely lacking the magic of the Lord of the Rings mostly because of a bewildering lack of reality. Well, not that bewildering after all. The reason that unwelcome CGI was so omnipresent was because the forced perspective practical trickery of set design used to such great effect in the Lord of the Rings would not work for 3-D. So Ian McKellen got to interact with, essentially, named coconuts on sticks, until he started crying; and wailing ‘This is not why I became an actor’. Why abandon forced perspective for 3-D? Because they had to be in 3-D to make as much money as possible! But, because this made them look so awful, on top of the sheer greed of making a trilogy from a small book, people like me, who saw every Lord of the Rings film in the cinema at least twice, and then bought them on home release, in both versions, didn’t go to the cinema to suffer this misbegotten trilogy. Indeed after slogging to the end of the DVD of the second Hobbit film, with its inane love triangle and CGI Smaug whose scale was never clear during his scenes with Bilbo, and which ended with a slap in the face to the audience by leaving his attack till the next movie, I vowed never to watch the third.  And it seems many people felt as I did. The Hobbit’s takings were 1,000m, 958m, and 956m. As opposed to the Lord of the Rings’s takings of 871.5m, 926m, and 1,100m. Note how more people flocked to the Lord of the Rings film by film, while people backed away from The Hobbit. Note also that The Hobbit’s numbers are swelled by inflated 3-D ticket prices, and a decade of inflation. Well, that backfired spectacularly. The ends (making mucho money) justified the means (making awful-looking films, and too many of them, badly). And, the ends, of making mucho money, were defeated by the means employed, an unexpected trilogy of CGI in 3-D.

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part VIII

As the title suggests here are some short thoughts about the movies which aren’t quite substantial enough for each to merit an individual blog posting.

Did you just ask me who I am?…

Humphrey Who?

Patrick Doyle asked an unnerving question on his Sunday Breakfast show a couple of weeks ago. How many people know who Grace Kelly is anymore? … How could people not know who Grace Kelly is?! Then I started to worry… I am interested in history in general, and this extends into burrowing with curiosity and sympathy into the back catalogue of cinema. But I have to admit that for many people, probably I fear the vast majority, they frankly couldn’t give a damn. (And would only have the faintest idea that that was a reference to the most popular film ever made) A particularly dispiriting display of wilful ignorance of the past came at the Lighthouse Hallowe’en screening of Halloween back in 2016. The very young, very very drunk audience, mostly in party later on fancy dress costume, was hooting in derision from the get-go. At anything and everything, any detail of dialogue or costume or reality (like a 70s car) that revealed the movie as having been made in 1978. I couldn’t understand this attitude of unbridled contempt then, and still struggle with it now. Do they not think people as yet unborn will hoot in self-same derision in 2046 at the films they hold precious now? For heaven’s sake most of these people were sporting the Snowflake hair-do whose sheer omnipresence and ostentation means, as I wrote some months back, that it will be as embarrassing on Jan 1^st 2020 as bell-bottomed jeans were on Jan 1^st 1980.

Censor and be damned!

Channel 4 has got my goat recently by showing films too early for its own purposes. Dante’s Peak saw a trio of deaths removed, presumably for fear of upsetting younger viewers. But then why show it in early afternoon?! Instead we got the build-up to the trio of grisly deaths, and the emotional fall-outs of the other characters reacting to the grisly deaths, and but no actual deaths so people seemed to be reacting to nothing. It’s all too reminiscent of the time that RTE decided to cut Raiders of the Lost Ark, and left out Indy getting shot, but kept in Indy in great pain attempting to bandage the bloody wound that he’d acquired mysteriously while driving without incident. Channel 4 also decided to censor Romancing the Stone. They snipped the full bloody detail of the animatronic alligator pulling off the villain’s hand, but then kept in his sustained agonised screams and fumbled frantic one-handed bandaging of the bloody stump where his left hand used to be. I don’t know whether it could be said to be more disturbing to show consequences after eliding the actions, but it is frustrating. Channel 4 should take a page from the book of the censor in Malaysia; who banned a film altogether after he’d had to make so many cuts it was left an incoherent mess that did nobody any favours. Show these films later in the day or just don’t show them!

Rub and … Scrub

So Scarlett Johansson, having better things to do than fight Twitter mobs, has pulled out of playing a transsexual in Rub and Tug. Some of the self-same people who mercilessly bullied her online now (incredibly) hope she’ll continue producing the movie. But… clearly she’d been producing, guiding the screenplay, hiring a director she’d worked with before, in order to win an Oscar; following in the footsteps of Jared Leto in 2014, as she noted in her initial response which the usual cyber-bullies dubbed ‘toxic’. Why actively produce this movie now its purpose for her has been gutted? Why would the financing stay in place when an Avenger is to be replaced by a transsexual player like… And there we hit the customary avoidance of specifics in such campaigns. Who? Daniela Vega? Candis Cayne? Films like this don’t make money without star-power and prestige traction. Dallas Buyers Club made 55 million, Moonlight made 65 million, Mysterious Skin made 2 million, Love is Strange made 2 million. Scarlett Johansson starring probably makes it likely you have a just slightly better than 50/50 shot at hitting the Dallas rather than the Skin end of that spectrum. Scarlett Johansson not starring reduces yours odds of hitting pay-dirt so substantially the only reason not to pull financing would be the same masochism expected of her to produce a film to benefit the people who bullied her.

A Bluffer’s Guide to Phantom Thread

Life is too short to watch the films nominated for the Oscars, but how else can one join in on conversations about the films nominated for the Oscars? Fear not, for here is your manual for being in the know.

Not having seen Phantom Thread should not stop you indulging in in-jokes about it, or making obscure references to scenes to cut out from the chatter people who also haven’t seen it, but haven’t read this piece either. There are three obscure things you simply must do. You must say, “Ah Fitzrovia, all shot on location there, as you recognised I’m sure” and then sigh wistfully, leaving your listeners discomfited at their lack of Old London chic. You must praise Brian Gleeson’s upper-crust English accent, and compare it to Day-Lewis’ cut-glass accent in 1985’s A Room with a View. You must impress upon people the extravagance of Paul Thomas Anderson hiring a 1950s red London double-decker bus for an entire day, only to drive it past a window, out of focus in the background of a shot, for two seconds; and then crush them by saying “Ah, yes, but it is indispensable. Phantom Thread isn’t just set in the 1950s, in that scene for those seconds it embodies the 1950s.”

Now then, quotable quotes; some of which are damned hard to work naturally into a conversation unless you find yourself in a kitchen or eating breakfast. If you do find yourself near some food, clatter the cutlery about, and make a noisy show of scraping your knife on toast; and then mutter “Entirely too much activity at breakfast” or “It’s like you rode a horse across the room” with a knowing wink. To completely dispel any doubt that you have no idea what you’re actually referencing then deadpan very seriously, “If his breakfast gets upset he finds it very hard to recover for the rest of the day.” To chide someone, shush them away, and then bark “The tea is going out, but the interruption is staying right here with me”. To exit in high dudgeon, say “There is an air of quiet death about this house, and I do not like how it smells”. If all this is too much to remember you could just offer to cook someone your famous mushroom omelette and then degenerate into helpless laughter.

So far so good, but you can layer your faux familiarity further. You should comment loudly on the omnipresence of Jonny Greenwood’s score and say that it puts one in mind of Shostakovich, but then of course the driving strings of Plainview’s theme in There Will Be Blood owed much to the 2^nd movement of Shostakovich’s 10^th Symphony, allegedly depicting Stalin’s ruthless energy. And then add in that a new note struck by Greenwood this time was the gorgeous piano cues, reminiscent of Debussy at his most gorgeous and minimal. As a feint you can feign ignorance if you think people are getting suspicious, note that you don’t fully (feign ignorance, never admit to ignorance) understand the purpose of the Clockwork Orange reference when Daniel Day-Lewis drives in the countryside at night. But then trump these sceptics by saying that this move’s ‘milkshake scene’ is surely the ‘asparagus scene’. Compare it to Pinter, compare it to Mamet, compare it to Le Carre as a joke because Day-Lewis raves about spies, and then seem to struggle to remember the words “You know that I like my asparagus cooked in butter and salt, yet you have cooked it in oil. Were the circumstances different I might be able to pretend to like it, but as they are I’m simply admiring my own gallantry for eating it in the way you prepared it.”

Now you are in the know. Go forth and bluster.

Lady Bird

On an avalanche of hype Greta Gerwig’s second film as director finally arrives here, depicting the senior high school year of Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson.

Sacramento native Christine (Saoirse Ronan), who insists on referring to herself by her new self-given given name of Lady Bird, is returning from scouting California colleges with her mother Marion (Laurie Metcalf) when she breaks her arm being melodramatic. Further misadventures involve falling out with her fat best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein) and falling in with the rich, pretty, vacuous Jenna (Odeya Rush) while she goes from romancing charming co-star Danny (Lucas Hedges) to moody musician Kyle (Timothee Chalamet). She is determined to go to college on the East Coast despite money worries caused by her father Larry (Tracy Letts) being let go, and further family tension owing to her brother Miguel (Jordan Rodrigues) and his live-in girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott) working checkouts despite having Berkeley degrees because of the ‘jobless recovery’. This is 2002/3, you see. 

Among the baneful distortions of reality the Oscars cause is the unrealistic hype that can destroy some films, which can never live up to expectations like ‘the greatest screen performance of all time’ Daniel Day-Lewis supposedly gave in There Will Be Blood. Lady Bird is at 99% on Rotten Tomatoes among critics, it’s meant to be the feminist film of our times, the antidote to Trump’s America, take your pick of whatever hyperbole attaches to it online. But after Frances Ha and Mistress America this film is a disappointment. Sam Levy, who shot those two as well as Maggie’s Plan, casts a hazier light over proceedings here which matches Gerwig’s impressionistic portrait of a year with vignettes and montages. But too much of Lady Bird is populated by stock characters, a vague backdrop outside the only carefully etched relationship: mother-daughter.

It’s odd that, after Twilight (!), Gerwig sees fit to also rehash Gilmore Girls’ exemplar: the dull dependable boyfriend versus the edgy erratic boyfriend. More predictable is that, like Wish I Was Here or Middlesex, Lady Bird presents an artist’s abandoned religion as ancient nonsense/psychotic cult. In this case juvenile anti-Catholicism leads directly to a terrible misstep. Lady Bird is horrible to her best friend when she’s chorus and Julie lead in their school musical, she’s horrible to her brother when failing at college admission, and, in one of the most repellent scenes I’ve ever seen, especially for a ‘charming indie’, she’s horrible to anti-abortion speaker Casey (Bayne Gibby) whose very existence she dismisses as a joke. Lady Bird isn’t very funny, talented, smart, or nice. And as this film is steadfastly uninterested in developing anyone else that’s a problem…

‘Important’ films are rarely good, and sadly it seems Gerwig is being feted for making an important film, because this falls short of what she’s done in the past.

3/5

New Irish film The Lodgers to screen at TIFF

Tailored Films’ third and latest feature film The Lodgers has been selected by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) as part of their Contemporary World Cinema programme. TIFF is one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals and is taking place this September 7th – 17th. The Lodgers is one of the few Irish films selected this year, and it is seen as a massive honour to be included at such a highly regarded festival.

The Lodgers is a gothic ghost story set in the 1920s about orphaned twins Edward (Bill Milner) and Rachel (Charlotte Vega) who live in a crumbling manor in 1920s rural Ireland – but they are not the only residents. They share the big house with unseen entities who control them with three absolute rules. As separate fates draw them apart, the twins must face the terrible truth about their family’s ghostly tormentors. The film also features Irish actors Moe Dunford, Deirdre O’Kane, and Roisin Murphy in support. The Lodgers was directed by Brian O’Malley (Let Us Prey), and, bravely, primarily shot in Loftus Hall in County Wexford, which is widely known as being the most haunted house in all Ireland.

Tailored Films is a growing film production company based in Dublin and The Lodgers is only their third feature film by company founders Ruth Treacy and Julianne Forde, and is their first time to be featured as part of the TIFF line-up. Treacy and Forde set up Tailored Films after graduating together from the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT), and are delighted to be a part of the growing Irish film industry and representing Irish film abroad. “It’s a huge honour to have our gothic ghost story The Lodgers selected for the highly competitive and prestigious Toronto International Film Festival. It was always our dream to have our film premiere at an A-list international festival and we’re really excited to see how audiences and distributors respond to it” said Treacy of the news.

TIFF is dedicated to presenting the best of international and Canadian cinema to film lovers. What began as the Festival of Festivals over 40 years ago, has become the world’s most important publicly attended film festival, an Oscar launching pad, and grown to embrace programming 365 days a year. www.tiff.net

ADIFF: Oscar movies

The Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2017 offers the first chance for Irish audiences to see five of the films nominated for Academy Awards earlier today.

Best Animated Feature Film nominees The Red Turtle and My Life as a Courgette will screen as part of the ADIFF Fantastic Flix children’s and young people’s strand, while Best Documentary Feature nominee I Am Not Your Negro and Best Foreign Language nominees Tanna and The Salesman feature as part of the main ADIFF programme. Eagle-eyed viewers will note that I Am Not Your Negro and The Salesman were featured in Talking Movies’ 17 films to watch at ADIFF when the programme was announced last week. Elsewhere Irish actress Ruth Negga was nominated for Loving, ADIFF Volta Award-winning Irish costume designer Consolata Boyle, was given a nod for Best Costume Design for Florence Foster Jenkins; and two films from last year’s ADIFF programme, Zootopia and Land of Mine, were also shortlisted.

The Red Turtle –Fantastic Flix’s Opening Film
A man is shipwrecked on a beautiful island devoid of humans and must make the most of what he has to survive. Watched on by a group of sand crabs, he attempts to escape but is thwarted by the weather and a red turtle with a vendetta. Then an unexpected visitor arrives who will alter the man’s fate for all time.

10^th Feb, 6.30pm at Omniplex Rathmines.

My Life as a Courgette
After his mother’s sudden death, Courgette is befriended by a kind police officer Raymond, who accompanies him to his new foster home filled with other orphans his age. At first, Courgette struggles to find his place in this strange, at times, hostile environment. Yet with Raymond’s help and his newfound friends, he eventually learns to trust, finds true love and at last a new family of his own.
17^th Feb 2017 11.50am at Omniplex Rathmines.

I Am Not Your Negro
Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, and with unprecedented access to James Baldwin’s original work,  Raoul Peck has completed the cinematic version of the book Baldwin never wrote – a radical narration about race in America that tracks the lives and assassinations of Baldwin’s friends, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. Whilst partly anchored in the struggle for equality in the ’50s and ’60s, I Am Not Your Negro sees Peck extrapolate from Baldwin’s actual work to make his own statements about what it means to be black in America today.

Tuesday 21^st February, 8:45pm at the Light House Cinema

Tanna
Tanna is a captivating romance set amongst the Yakel people of Vanuatu and is the first feature film shot completely on that island. Based on real events, and written in collaboration with the cast (all non-professionals), the film tells the story of Wawa and Dain, a young couple in love who must go on the run to escape Wawa’s arranged marriage to an enemy tribe.

Sunday 26^th Feb 2017, 2 pm at the Light House Cinema

The Salesman
After making his previous film (The Past) in France, Asghar Farhadi (A Separation, About Elly) returns to his native Tehran for this story about a couple forced out of their apartment due to dangerous works on a neighbour’s building. Emad and Rana move into a new flat in the centre of Tehran, where an incident linked to the previous tenant will dramatically change the young couple’s life. Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman plays an unexpected part in proceedings, as the nature of honour and violence are explored in typically metaphorical Iranian style.
Friday 17^th Feb, 6.15pm. Cineworld

Tickets for the 2017 programme are available to buy online at diff.ie, in person at DIFF House & Box Office, 13 Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin 1 or by phoning 01 6877974.