From the Archives: You Kill Me

From the pre-Talking Movies archives.

Ben Kingsley does a better Robert De Niro than Robert De Niro does these days, and, mirabile dictu, it’s enough here to power this film to great heights. I’ve mocked Ben Kingsley as much as anyone, especially the explosion of pomposity since he got his Knighthood and allegedly starting telling production runners foolish enough to call him Ben, ‘That’s Sir Ben to you!’, as well as inserting his title into the credits on Lucky Number Slevin. But his role as shambolic alcoholic hitman Frank Falenczyk must rank beside his terrifying turn as an unhinged gangster in Sexy Beast as his best performance since his seminal roles in Gandhi and Schindler’s List. The film begins with his alcoholic Frank demonstrating the best way to incentivise yourself to clear the snow off your porch; dropping a bottle of vodka a few feet ahead of you and having to dig your way towards it to get another swig.

Frank passes out drunk while waiting to take out grasping Irish mobster Edward O’Leary and is sent to San Francisco to dry out while his Polish crime family led by Philip Baker Hall’s patriarch seek to prevent a Sino-Irish takeover of their turf in Buffalo, upstate New York. Frank is forced by his Frisco contact, bent lawyer Bill Pullman (in an odd, odd cameo), to attend AA meetings. At first resistant, as he settles into a life working at a mortuary and attending meetings he begins to seek to make amends; not for the murders, he’s not sorry about them, he is sorry about murdering them badly because he was drunk. In a priceless scene he sends a $50 voucher for the Sony Centre to the family of a woman whose throat he was meant to slit, but she moved, so she got a knife in the eye first before being dispatched.

Tea Leoni, as his love interest Laurel (who he meets at a funeral), is more relaxed and thus a better actress now that she’s 41 than she ever was when she was a ‘hot young star’ and it is her hilariously deadpan acceptance of Frank’s past that makes the film work. John Dahl, the director of The Last Seduction and Red Rock West, uses a demented tango soundtrack that underlines the playful absurdity of all of this, and if you didn’t get it already Dahl inserts an insanely happy song to score a montage of Frank using melons to show Laurel how to slice up human beings efficiently. Luke Wilson as his AA mentor also delivers an unusually subtle and effective performance as Dahl draws out a mordant approach to the material from all concerned, while also injecting an undercurrent of deep humanity into the decline and fall of the Polish mob in Buffalo. This is a black comedy to savour.

4/5

Six Days of the Rising

Web Summit, Image Now Productions, and Indiegogo are launching a crowd-funding campaign for new film Six Days of the Rising, helmed by acclaimed director Nick Ryan, at Web Summit 2014.

Old and new worlds will collide at the Web Summit when Nick Ryan (Director-Producer of award-winning documentary The Summit) launches a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo for his latest film on the 1916 Easter Rising. In front of an audience of 20,000 attendees at the Web Summit, Europe’s largest festival of tech and ideas, Nick Ryan and Danae Ringelmann, founder of Indiegogo, will discuss crowd-funding in films on the Marketing Summit Stage on Tuesday 4^th November.

The funds raised through the Indiegogo campaign page (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/6-days-of-the-rising#home) will go towards script and visual concept development to bring the Dublin of 1916 before, during, and after The Rising to cinematic life. In addition to contributing to the realisation of the feature people who subscribe to the fund will also be entitled to certain perks including vintage stamps, personalised newspapers, medals, and limited edition copies of the original storyboards for the movie. The campaign will go live on Saturday November 1.

Six Days of the Rising will be an explosive and gripping account of an epochal moment in history, exploring the human cost of insurrection in a time of great change. The Easter Rising was a pivotal moment in world history, arguably making an independent India inevitable, as a six day war was fought skilfully by a group of rebels against 16,000 troops of the largest empire in the world. Brutal, honest, violent and uncompromising, in the taut documentary style of Bloody Sunday and The Battle of Algiers, acclaimed director Nick Ryan will recreate this epic fight for independence and the destruction of Dublin onscreen as never before seen. And, given recent ahistoric attempts to portray 1916 as a mistake because 1918 would have seen all-island Home Rule, this is a chance to ensure that the foundation of the Republic receives its due cinematic commemoration during this decade of vital centenaries.

The movie will be part-funded through an Indiegogo campaign that will launch around The Web Summit, and is scheduled to go into production in early 2015. Nick Ryan is a founding director of Image Now Films, and has directed and produced the acclaimed Sundance award-winning feature documentary The Summit about the K2 tragedy involving Ger McDonnell. That film went on to win seven other major awards as well as an IFTA for best feature documentary. Nick also wrote, directed, and produced the award winning short film A Lonely Sky, and in 2008 wrote and directed the award winning The German.

Miranda Fleming, of Indiegogo UK Film & Creative says, “I’m in awe of the creativity coming from our European filmmakers and Nick Ryan’s latest project, Six Days of the Rising, is just another example of this. For Nick to select Indiegogo as his crowd-funding platform of choice and to kick off the campaign at Dublin Web Summit speaks volumes. As part of Indiegogo’s ongoing commitment to support talented filmmakers and the creative community worldwide, we’re excited to provide his campaign the support it needs to reach the largest global audience.” Paddy Cosgrave, Web Summit founder, is equally enthusiastic: “I’m delighted to have Nick speak at the Web Summit, his approach to film-making is always innovative and compelling. His work and this initiative fit perfectly with calibre of speakers we have on film and tech this year which includes Tim Webber who won an Oscar for his special effects on Gravity.”

Nick Ryan himself says, “Recreating the Dublin of 1916 will require the representation of the city before and after the immense destruction. The city is a character in the film and we believe that accuracy in the geography and look of the building is essential. To enable this we intend to create a very large exterior stage with the appropriate cobblestone street and lower level structure combined with 100ft high blue/green screen backgrounds, and composite authentic models of the surrounding buildings in the various stages of destruction. Rather than focusing on the leaders of the Rising, we will portray the events from the perspective of a man whose journey across the barricaded city brings him in contact with both sides of the conflict. We will bring a level of authenticity to the production that like The Summit, puts you firmly on the ground during the extraordinary events of Easter 1916”.

Web Summit is Europe’s largest festival of ideas, and has been dubbed “Davos for geeks.” Founded in 2010, the event has grown exponentially; and this year will host more than 20,000 attendees and guests in Dublin on November 4^th– 6^th, with over 1,100 journalists from more than 70 countries covering proceedings. Over the past three years, Elon Musk (founder of Tesla, SpaceX and PayPal), Niklas Zennström (founder of Skype), Reed Hastings (founder of Netflix), David Karp (founder of Tumblr), Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter and Square), and Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim (co-founders of YouTube) have been speakers at the Web Summit. Some of the 600 speakers this year include Peter Thiel (co-founder of Paypal and Palantir as well as the first investor in Facebook), Drew Houston (founder of Dropbox), Brendan Iribe (CEO of Oculus), and TV producer Eva Longoria.

Indiegogo is the largest global crowd-funding platform. Campaigns have launched from almost every country around the world, with millions of dollars being distributed every week due to contributions made by the Indiegogo community. Indiegogo is dedicated to democratizing the way people raise funds for any project – creative, entrepreneurial, or cause-related. The company was launched in 2008 and is (unsurprisingly) headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.indiegogo.com or follow it at http://www.twitter.com/indiegogo and www.facebook.com/indiegogo.

You can contribute to Six Days of the Rising at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/6-days-of-the-rising#home

Blue Jasmine

Woody Allen’s comeback run continues with a third straight humdinger – this time in a more tragic vein as Cate Blanchett essays a comic Blanche DuBois.

Humbled socialite Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) arrives in San Francisco, pleading poverty but still flying first class, to stay with her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins). Both women were adopted, but Ginger always felt their parents loved Jasmine more, and Jasmine continues their disapproval as she instantly disapproves of Ginger’s new boyfriend Chili (Bobby Cannavale); insisting that he’s no better than Ginger’s loutish ex-husband Augie (Andrew Dice Clay). Chili, however, gives as good as he gets, and his constant nagging steers Jasmine into a receptionist job with punctilious dentist Dr Flicker (Michael Stuhlbarg). Jasmine’s disruptive memories of her pampered life with ex-husband Hal (Alec Baldwin), however, see her trying to recreate her previous social standing by landing bereaved diplomat Dwight (Peter Sarsgaard). She also introduces Ginger to a boyfriend a step up from Chili, sound engineer Al (Louis CK). Will love triumph?

Woody Allen manages to combine fantastic comedy with a quite touching tragedy. Jasmine may appear a boozy socialite at first, with an unnerving habit of launching into intimate conversations about her life with complete strangers. Really she’s heavily medicated after a nervous breakdown and gets into those conversations because people assume she’s talking to them, when in fact she’s talking to thin air in which she sees Hal or other people. Blanchett is extraordinary in the lead, retaining our sympathy even as she delivers the most horrible lines. Blanchett is able to shift from gorgeous and intelligent to haggard and schizophrenic within a scene by dint of sheer facial expressiveness. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe, in his second film with Allen after Vicky Cristina Barcelona, bathes the film in warm golden tones which make Jasmine’s sudden mental disintegrations all the more disturbing.

Jasmine’s life with Hal is patiently revealed in flashback to illuminate both the reasons for her breakdown, and just why Augie holds her so responsible for ruining Ginger’s life by trying to do her one good turn. Baldwin is on fine imperious form as the high-flying Wall Street tycoon whose fly-by-night practices Jasmine is (purposefully?) oblivious to, just as she doesn’t notice his endless affairs. But the other side of the comedy-drama tightrope being walked with such skill here is hilariously unhindered performances from Louis CK and Stuhlbarg as remarkably unsubtle suitors of the sisters. Blanchett has any number of waspish lines that are hysterically funny, and her relationship with her two nephews affords great opportunity to deploy them. Yet the comedy never undermines the dramatic substance and betrayal, infidelity, corruption, bad advice and bad luck subtly power the film.

The combination of two women’s romances and mental disintegration inevitably recalls Vicky Cristina Barcelona but this is a more ambitious and more successful film.

4/5

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

James Franco, as smugly self-satisfied as ever, develops a cure for Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately he also manages to bring about the apocalypse. Dude… Not cool.

This movie has been almost destroyed by its unusually long TV spots, which added to the cinema trailers that consisted solely of plot points and thematic statements masquerading as dialogue, leaves precious few surprises for cinema viewing. Franco’s scientist makes a breakthrough on a drug which repairs cognitive functioning in one chimpanzee, however, when she runs amok the entire research programme is canned. Everyone’s favourite slacker Tyler Labine doesn’t have the heart to put down the baby that chimpanzee had been protecting and so gives it to a reluctant Franco. Franco raises it at home where he discovers that it has inherited the effects of the drug, resulting in super-intelligence. Eventually he decides to test the drug on his own Alzheimer’s stricken father Charles (John Lithgow). Frieda Pinto’s vet warns him about messing with nature, but he convinces his boss Jacobs (a nicely cavalier David Oyelowo) to allow him develop an even more potent strain…

There are similarities with this week’s other chimpanzee release Project Nim, as Caesar is raised in a human setting, and shown using sign language and displaying very human traits, before his increasing viciousness sees him abruptly removed to live with chimpanzees who ostracise him. But this is a wild animal, a point made needlessly nastily when Caesar very deliberately bites off and eats a man’s fingers when attacking the angry next-door neighbour to protect a confused Charles. Caesar’s incarceration is interesting as Caesar is subjected to humiliation as the new inmate before using his superior intelligence to rise up the food-chain. It’s like watching Audiard’s A Prophet in a zoo. I’ve said it before but Andy Serkis is an unappreciated marvel as he does so much acting work in motion-capture. His performance as Caesar is wonderfully nuanced; you can see in his eyes the dawning of responsibility for his fellow less smart primates. John Lithgow does wonders with the material he’s given, though his transformation from mangling ‘Clair de Lune’ to concert pianist as the Alzheimer’s drug works is tasteless in its emotional manipulation. Characterisation isn’t this film’s strong point though. Frieda Pinto in particular has a barely written character.

There are a number of deliriously showy moments by director Rupert Wyatt, such as the montage of Caesar climbing a giant redwood that takes us thru 5 years in about a minute (please copy Terrence Malick), a panning shot thru a building as the apes rampage thru office space before tumbling onto the street, Jacobs entering a deserted building and not noticing what’s above him (a homage to The Birds), and a delightfully Spielbergian touch in the first arrival of the evolved primates in San Francisco being conveyed by a sudden gentle rain of loose leaves onto the joggers on a suburban road. Other highlights are an iconic line from the 1968 original, a hilarious moment when the signing circus orangutan gives the raspberry to Caesar’s grandiose plans, and a startlingly well-staged action finale on the Golden Gate Bridge.

This is a vast improvement on Tim Burton’s 2001 disaster but while it features a number of showy moments, and a nicely choreographed finale, the shallowness of characterisation holds it back.

2.5/5