In the Loop

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: comedies / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 19 of 100

After the first five minutes of ‘In the Loop’, I was convinced that Armando Iannucci and his three co-scripters had used a poison pen to write the screenplay. Half an hour in, I decided they’d used a typewriter ribbon marinated in the blood of small fluffy animals. By the end, I was guessing at a stiletto blade dipped in battery acid.

‘In the Loop’ – the big screen spin-off from the BBC comedy ‘The Thick of It’ – is the most cynical and abrasive satire I’ve seen in a while. Not to mention the most profane. Imagine a mash up of ‘Yes Minister’ and ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’, rewritten by Torquemada on a day off from the Spanish Inquisition and you’re half way there.

The plot is a labyrinthine affair sparked off when bumbling minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) makes an ill-advised remark (“war is unforeseeable”) during a radio interview, which he then compounds with an even more ill-advised one (“to walk the road of peace, sometimes we must be ready to climb the mountain of conflict”) when besieged by reporters. His qualifying statement that the mountain is purely metaphorical cuts no ice with the press and suddenly he’s front page news.

His loose tongue earns him the attention of communications manager Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), a man whose approach to communication is roughly the same as Joe Pesci’s in ‘Goodfellas’. In fact, Tucker would probably decimate the Mafia for breakfast and not even have to use a gun. His tongue is deadly enough a weapon. When communications director Judy Molloy (Gina McKee) interrupts Tucker’s dressing down of Foster, reminding him that she should be consulted on the matter as “it falls within my purview”, Tucker apoplectically retorts, “Within your purview? Where do you think you are, some fucking regency costume drama? This is a government department, not some fucking Jane fucking Austen novel! Allow me to pop a jaunty little bonnet on your purview and ram it up your shitter with a lubricated horse cock!”

Nice.

The situation, however, soon escalates beyond even Tucker’s vein-popping brand of expletive-ridden damage limitation. Conflict is imminent overseas: on Capitol Hill, Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy) and idealistic staffer Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky) join forces with General Miller (James Gandolfini) against the warmongering machinations of Assistant Secretary for Policy Linton Barwick (David Rasche – a revelation).

All parties in what rapidly becomes a minefield of political manoeuvring have a vested interest in Foster and before he knows it he’s in America, on the war committee (or, as Barwick prefers to call it, the Committee for Future Planning) and way out of his depth. Then, into a situation already as potentially volatile as the hand grenade Barwick uses for a paperweight, comes Tucker. What follows is a riot of bad language, back-room deals, back-biting, back-stabbing, hidden agendas, ulterior motives and shifting loyalties.

Filmed in an edgy, restless style that perfectly matches Capaldi’s adrenalin-rush portrayal of Tucker, ‘In the Loop’ hits every target with pinpoint accuracy. The faux-documentary aesthetic captures a ragged immediacy. The script takes no prisoners – on either side of the Atlantic. (I was reminded of Bill Hicks’ dictum that “all governments are lying cocksuckers”.) Everyone has something they want and everything to lose.

The performances are priceless. Hollander plays the hapless Foster as a cross between a puffed up Head Boy and a deer just beginning to twig on to the implications of a fast-approaching pair of headlights; Gandolfini does a nice line in slow-burn intensity and quietly spoken threat (“you might be some scary poodle-fucker back in England,” he tells Tucker at one point, “but out here you’re nothing”); and Capaldi ignites the screen like a Tasmanian devil with a firecracker up its arse and a pronounced case of Tourettes.

‘In the Loop’ is the real deal. As a political satire, it makes the likes of ‘Bob Roberts’ or ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ look soft. It’s smarter, nastier and angrier. You’d never pick it as a date movie or a safe option round your mum’s on Mother’s Day, but it’ll give you at least two dozen lines (of varying degrees of obscenity) that you’ll wish you could get away with using at the office.

You glorious basterd!

Congratulations to Christoph Waltz on the Best Supporting Actor award - the only nominee I was actually rooting for this year.

Rachel Weisz

Even if it wasn't Oscar-winning actress Rachel Weisz's birthday today, I think I'd still have found some excuse to post these pictures.

Rachel Weisz's big screen debut in Bertolucci's 'Stealing Beauty' is among the sultriest, most memorable introductions ever. Beyond the obvious appeal, she's also fearless and honest in her characterisations, perhaps most notably in the role that bagged her the Oscar, political activist Tessa in Fernando Meirelles' magnificent adaptation of John le Carre's novel 'The Constant Gardener'.

A large glass of chenin blanc is being raised to Ms Weisz at chez Agitation this evening.

All About My Mother

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Eurovisions (Spain) / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 18 of 100

The opening scenes of Pedro Almodovar’s Oscar-winning ‘All About My Mother’ sketch out a close and affectionate relationship between single mother Manuela (Cecilia Roth) and her 17-year-old son Esteban (Eloy Azorin). Manuela works as a nurse; the studious and intellectual Esteban harbours ambitions of being a writer. Esteban is a fan of old movies – he and Manuela watch a TV screening of ‘All About Eve’ – and has a passion for theatre. For his birthday, Manuela takes him to a performance of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, headlined by his favourite actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes). Esteban has one other request for his birthday – he wants to know, notwithstanding that Manuela has stringently withheld the details from him thus far, what became of his father.

For the first ten minutes, the sensitive Esteban seems to be developing into that rarest of things in the Almodovar canon: a male protagonist (‘Talk to Her’ and ‘Broken Embraces’ are the only Almodovars I can think of with male protagonists – and even then the narratives are set in motion by the women in their lives), then tragedy strikes and Manuela, faced with the worst thing that can happen to a parent, is forced to reassess her life.

Relocating from Madrid to Barcelona, Manuela goes in search of her errant husband – a transsexual who now goes by the name of Lola (Toni Canto). She meets an old friend from way back when (also transsexual), truck driver turned hooker Agrado (Antonia San Juan). [Insert your own trucking-to-hooking gag or double entrende about delivering a load.] Agrado introduces Manuela to her friend Hermana (Penelope Cruz), a good-natured but sadly naïve young twenty-something who works at a women’s centre. Hermana and Manuela have something in common: they’ve both had relationships with Lola, who left both of them without realising they were pregnant. Manuela, though, had the luckier escape: Lola is now HIV positive, and has passed the virus to Hermana. Still, a friendship develops between the two women. Between Agrado and Hermana, Manuela gains an ersatz family to fill the void left by her son.

Manuela also re-encounters Huma, who is touring with ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. Huma is playing the part of Blanche du Bois, with her lover Nina in the role of Stella. Nina is unpredictable and driven by a drug habit; when she temporarily deserts Huma, Manuela steps in. Having played Stella in an amateur production years ago (it was there she met the pre-sex-change Lola; he was playing Kowalski), Manuela takes Nina’s place to some acclaim. Later, when circumstances dictate that neither Nina or Huma can go on, Agrado takes everyone’s place and performs an impromptu one-woman show.

The themes and narratives of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and ‘All About Eve’ are woven into ‘All About My Mother’ to such a degree that the highest kudos are due to Almodovar for achieving a nigh on impossible feat: crafting a supremely entertaining film that doesn’t necessarily require familiarity with the Tennessee Williams play or the 1950 Bette Davis-starrer directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. (Although it goes without saying that a basic knowledge of these two works adds layers to the construction, subtext and appreciation of Almodovar’s film.)

For a film so character-driven and picaresque – there’s no real plot, simply a wryly-observed overlapping of the characters’ relationships – the pace is sprightly. Almodovar keeps track of a melange of connections, coincidences, ironies and mirrored scenes with such dexterity that it would be easy to underestimate how complex things become. For instance: at one point, Manuela is acting as surrogate mother to Hermana (pregnant and terminally ill by Manuela’s transsexual former husband) while jointly fulfilling the role of companion and co-star – ie. surrogate for Nina on both counts – to Huma, acting the role of Stella, a character heavily pregnant for most of the play, thereby reliving the circumstances in which she met her husband as well as being costumed to appear pregnant when she has recently lost her only child. When you break it down, this is melodrama so top-heavy that even Douglas Sirk would have backed off, shaking his head and going “no waaaaaaaaay”; Almodovar, by whatever directorial alchemy it is that he seems to have been gifted, turns in a light, frothy concoction that neither overburdens its audience or condescends to its characters.

‘All About My Mother’ is about many things – loss, acceptance, reconciliation, friendship, motherhood – but its overriding theme is a celebration of the feminine and accordingly it showcases some of Almodovar’s most productive director/actor relationships: Cecilia Roth makes the fifth of her six appearances for him, Marisa Paredes the fourth of five and Penelope Cruz appears for the second time (following a space but pivotal role in ‘Live Flesh’) and has since appeared in ‘Volver’ and ‘Broken Embraces’. It’s Almodovar himself who puts it best in the dedication that closes the film:

“To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider. To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to men who act and become women, to all people who want to become mothers. To my mother.”

Ponyo

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: anime / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 17 of 100

‘Ponyo’ is a deceptive film. The story – an instantly recognisable take on Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ – is straightforward and unencumbered by subplots or a proliferation of supporting characters à la ‘Spirited Away’ or ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’; and yet Miyazaki communicates as much about the wide-eyed joyful innocence of childhood as he did in ‘My Neighbour Totoro’, as much about the environment and mankind’s often destructive relationship to it as he did in ‘Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind’, and as much about responsibility and the work ethnic never mind the youthfulness of the protagonist as he did in ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’.

By the same token, ‘Ponyo’ seems to have the simplest visuals of any Studio Ghibli production. As Tim has pointed out in his absolutely spot-on review at Antagony & Ecstasy, “The gentle look of the film, halfway between watercolors and colored pencils, gives ‘Ponyo’ the certain air of an illustrated storybook.” Tim develops this observation to note that ‘Ponyo’ has the effect of rendering any adults in the audience – and there were a few at the mid-afternoon screening I attended – “to a more infantile state”. Again, absolutely true. Even I stopped being a grumpy old sod for an hour and three quarters (well, except when I wasn’t entertaining murderous thoughts about the little bastards in the front row who wouldn’t stop talking; not to mention the parents/guardians with them who obviously didn’t give a crap*) and simply ended up staring at the screen in bliss and gratitude.

Why bliss? Because ‘Ponyo’ is a dreamily beautiful fable, flawless in its conception, and feelgood in a way that American cinema can seldom do without tipping over into emotional manipulation. The story is simple, but arguably all the more heartfelt for being simple. The characters are immensely appealing (even though I didn’t have the option of seeing this in a subtitled cut and had to put up with Miley Cyrus’s younger sister and an equally prepubescent member of the Jonas clan squeakily providing vocals for Ponyo and Sosuke), the undersea world is riotous blaze of life and colour, and the story’s one and only turn into darker territory (matters relating to a storm which threatens to flood an entire community) is done so excitingly that I doubt even the youngest viewer would find it too scary.

Why gratitude? Because in an age where the majority of child-friendly animated films are CGI, Studio Ghibli continue to produce old school 2D animation with a zest and imagination that makes you wonder why anyone would want to boot up a computer when they could simply draw. And in ‘Ponyo’, they have taken story so sweet and unpretentious – so slight – that it could easily have been risible, and made of it instead a work of art.

*My fault for attending a matinee screening during half term week, I guess.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 1 of 10 / Overall: 16 of 100


Picture the scene: Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam), rifle in hand, strides up to a vantage point overlooking a gorge. He whips off his ten-gallon hat, throws it upended onto the ground and tosses his glasses and watch into it. Thus unimpeded, he hunkers into a sniper’s position and draws a bead on his quarry, who is leading a kidnapped man and a couple of horses along the pass. Belmont’s finger tightens on the trigger.

So far, so ruggedly iconic. All that’s required now is a shot to ring out, Belmont’s quarry to drop from his horse and the sheriff to stand up, toss the rifle to a deputy and walk coolly away. But Tommy Lee Jones’s contemporary western – from an intricate and emotionally resonant script by Guillermo Arriaga – breaks down clichés instead of embracing them; subverts the masculine ethos of the genre instead of being defined by it.

What actually happens is that Belmont, knowing himself enough to know that he can’t shoot a man in cold blood and without warning, releases his finger from the trigger, brings the barrel of the rifle up and rolls onto his back. He squints into the sun and wipes an arm across his brow. His moment of contemplation is shattered by the jangly ringtone generic to T-mobile cellphones.

In this one moment, surprisingly comic, the juxtaposition of modern life and the old way of doing things is achieved as effectively as the juxtaposition of the various masculine codes the main characters cleave to and the challenges those codes are battered with. First time I saw ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’, I imagined the ghost of Sam Peckinpah drifting onto the set, tipping Tommy Lee Jones the nod and leaving a little something of himself in the fabric of the film.

I was still reminded of Peckinpah, watching the film recently for the third or fourth time. Explicitly, the odyssey-with-corpse narrative and Mexican setting are redolent of ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’. More subtly, the dynamics of the pursuit in ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ – Garrett (James Coburn) tracks down the Kid (Kris Kristofferson) with a sense of regret and a palpable lack of urgency – find a corollary in Belmont’s frustrated and lackadaisical manhunt for ranch boss Pete Perkins (Jones).

Said manhunt is precipitated – and I’m not throwing up any spoiler warnings, since the plot mechanics are established very soon into the two-hour running time – by the accidental shooting of Pete’s friend Melquiades (Julio Cesar Cedillo) by Border Patrol guard Mike Norton (Barry Pepper). Pete combines a promise he made to Melquiades (“If I die over here, carry me back to my family and bury me in my home town; I don't want to be buried on this side among all the fucking billboards”) with a ruthless vigilante sensibility after Belmont fails to take the investigation into Melquiades’s death seriously.

Norton’s killing of Melquiades might be accidental, but elsewhere his guilt and shortcomings are writ large. He is violent in his treatment of Mexicans trying to sneak across the border; unfeeling in his treatment of his trophy wife Lou Ann (January Jones, crafting an all-too-human performance out of what could have been a nothing role); and lacklustre in his approach to his job, whiling away the hours on duty reading porn.

Failure of masculinity extends to Belmont, whose impotence as an authority figure is mirrored by his literal impotence during his trysts with married coffee shop waitress Rachel (Melissa Leo), who doesn’t help by remarking that her much older husband swears by Viagra. “I'll turn truck-stop queer and blowjob-giver before I use that shit,” Belmont replies disdainfully.

Even Pete, essentially the one good man in all of this, is no stranger to moral compromise. He’s also carrying on with Rachel (a quietly devastating scene, late in the film, has him pin his hopes on her joining him in Mexico; you can guess the outcome). He works for a man he has no respect for, a man who’s only a rancher because the ranch was bought for him by rich parents. During his odyssey to inter Melquiades and to coerce Norton into atoning for his action, he vacillates between using force towards Norton and being rendered as impotent as Belmont when they encounter an old man, blind and infirm, living out in the wilds who begs them to perform a mercy killing. “I don’t want to offend God by killing myself,” he says. “We don’t want to offend Him either,” Pete replies as he slowly and solemnly rides away.

‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’ is a thoughtful and thought-provoking film. Tommy Lee Jones goes for slow-burn in both the pacing and his performance. As director, he engages with the material on a level that would suggest the work of a seasoned filmmaker, and elicits flawless performances from his entire cast. As an actor, this is up there with his work on the Coen brothers’ ‘No Country for Old Men’.

There is profundity, intensity and raw moments of emotional import on display here. You’d expect nothing else from Arriaga, the man who wrote ‘Amores Perros’ and ‘21 Grams’ for Alejandro González Iñárritu. Yet Jones steers away from the austerity and sense of moral outrage that typify Iñárritu’s films, finding instead a sad but wry humour and an equally saddle-worn humanity. In its final scenes, ‘The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada’ stops being about revenge and becomes a film about redemption, delivering a quietly haunting finale and confirming itself as a modern classic.

Anvil: The Story of Anvil

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: documentaries / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 15 of 100

I’ve never had much time for that old saw about whether the glass is half empty or half full. The answer is so self-evident it amazes me the question still gets asked. If the glass was empty to begin with and then had water/fruit juice/alcoholic substances [delete as applicable] decanted into it up to the half way mark, then it’s half full. If the glass was full to begin with and then half its contents were drunk/spilled/evaporated [delete as applicable], then it’s half empty. End of fucking story.

But wait, you say. The question is hypothetical. It’s designed to test perception, to determine whether one has an optimistic or a cynical outlook. To which I say: that’s as may be, but it’s still a stupid question. As stupid as that one about whether a tree falling in a wood makes a sound if there’s no one around to hear it. Of course it does. It’s a fucking tree. Falling. The bastard’s going to make one hell of a racket.

And besides, the half full/half empty glass question has now been made redundant. Here’s a new perceptional test: is ‘Anvil: The Story of Anvil’ a testament to the power of dreams and never giving up, or is it a study of terminally delusional behaviour?

Much of the blogosphere (as well as a goodly number of film magazines) favours the former, finding in Sacha Gervasi’s documentary a poignant, affectionate and affirming portrait of friendship, self-belief and against-the-odds staying power. All of which is undeniably evident, but I’ve watched the film twice now and, beyond the easy laughs (Gervasi, realising he has a real-life ‘This is Spinal Tap’ for a subject, slyly evokes any number of Tap-isms), I can’t help but find it hopelessly sad and pathetic in places.

Singer and founder member Steve “Lips” Kudrow’s unflagging commitment to the band, never mind that a brief meteoric burst of success in the early ’80s which saw them playing to huge stadium crowds (granted, mainly in Japan) reduced – over the next two decades – to venues of a significantly smaller calibre, is the chief reason for the all “power of dreams”/”never give up” encomium. Fair enough, but hearing him talk about the band as the thing that keeps him going or telling guitarist and co-founder Robb Reiner he’s “the closest person I’ve got in the world” when the man barely acknowledges his wife just doesn’t sit well with me.

Nor is his unflagging commitment always buoyed up by unflappable optimism. There is frequently a palpable sense of despair over him. He comes close to trading blows with a Czechoslovakian club owner who threatens to withhold payment. A potential brawl erupts between him and Reiner. As often as he extols the band’s longevity, he complains that it’s eternally down to him to hold things together. Notwithstanding the semi-happy ending (a gig at a rock festival in Japan where they wow the crowds), ‘Anvil: The Story of Anvil’ contains more than its fair share of moments so squirmily embarrassing you’re almost willing them to call it a day; put themselves out of their misery; pay a little more attention to their wives.

Perhaps the most incisive scene has Reiner’s sister (the interestingly named Droid) and his wife Jane jointly interviewed. Droid is brutally straightforward in her assessment of where Anvil are at: “He [Reiner] has got a son, he’s got a wife, he’s got two stepdaughters, he’s got a mortgage … Anvil, they tour but they don’t make a lot of money and he’s basically telling me it’s got to happen or I’m done.” Jane adds: “I’ve been very patient as a wife. How long do I have to keep waiting?”

The movie’s tagline has it that Kudrow and Reiner, at fourteen, “made a pact to rock together forever. They meant it.” Which is fine for a couple of teenagers; even for two guys in their twenties with no responsibilities. But Kudrow and Reiner are a lot further down the line and life has freighted them with responsibilities beyond the band. Yet the band – certainly for Kudrow, who demonstrates a frightening degree of tunnel vision – is the be all and end all.

Yes, ‘Anvil: The Story of Anvil’ is often funny – the attempts of well-meaning but borderline incompetent would-be manager Tiziana Arrigoni to orchestrate a European tour are jaw-droppingly hilarious – and despite a plethora of embarrassing moments, the film achieves an engagement of even the most cynical viewer (in this case, yours truly) guaranteed to have you cheering for Anvil when they take the stage for the final cathartic concert in Japan. But it’s a sense of sadness that stays with me; a tinge of melancholy that’s all the more disconcerting because so much of its context provokes laughter.