Your Sister's Sister ****

Lynn Shelton’s new film about relationships, both sibling and romantic, is a very sweet and funny three-hander between the lovely Emily Blunt, the equally lovely but cynical and kind of spiky Rosemarie DeWitt, and the endearing emotional mess that is Mark Duplass.

Iris (Blunt) sends her best friend Jack (Duplass) to stay at her family’s remote cabin after an outburst at a memorial party shows he is still struggling to come to terms with his brother’s death a year on.  The idea is for him to cycle there, spend some time in solitude away from distractions, think about his life, and come back a slightly saner man.  When he arrives at the cabin however he finds Iris’s sister Hannah (DeWitt) there for a similar reason, having just split up from her girlfriend of seven years.   Tequila is drunk, lesbianism is temporarily rescinded, and they sleep together.  Iris shows up the next day, unaware of the drunken shenanigans, she reveals to her sister that she is secretly in love with Jack, and over the next few days their entwined relationships get a little knotty.

The strength of this film lies in the first rate performances from all three actors (aside from the first scene they are the only people in the film).  Blunt and DeWitt manage to pull off that complicated sisterly relationship, balancing closeness with a never acknowledged undermining of each other that anyone with siblings will recognise.  The awkwardness between Duplass and DeWitt is also completely convincing and never feels contrived.  All three characters are witty, and endearingly ‘damaged’, but the film manages never to stray into the self-absorption of bad hipster movie territory.

A great scene comes near the end of the film that subtly captures the tone of the whole.  Jack is trying to destroy his bike – he throws it to the ground repeatedly but it barely bends.  It’s simultaneously sad and funny because he’s trying to take his despair out on this bicycle, but his grand dramatic gesture falls flat.  It’s emotionally moving, about dealing with death, and life, but it’s low-key and funny and somehow realistic.  Not many people have a cabin in the beautiful wilderness that they can escape to when life gets too difficult, but everyone has had that moment of frustration when they’ve tried to smash a wall and all they’ve achieved is a throbbing toe.  

Love Like Poison ****

We learn many lessons as we move from childhood to adulthood, about love, and sex, and guilt, and death. But we’ll come to that later. Another, perhaps less soaring, but nonetheless important, lesson we learn is: don’t judge a book by its cover - or a film by its title. Love Like Poison, about a 14 year old girl coming to terms with her parents’ break up and her own emerging sexuality in the lead up to her Confirmation, sounds a bit like it’s going to be a post-Twilight melodramatic angst-fest. It is not.

For one thing, it’s French. Forgive my wild generalisation and stereotyping, but the French are better at talking about sex than us. Here, 14 year old Anna’s nascent sexuality isn’t presented as something controversial or shocking, nor is it sentimentalised. There is no clear divide between childhood innocence and adult experience. The adults are just as confused as Anna is. Her mother is falling apart after the breakdown of her marriage; the priest who tries to offer support is struggling with his faith as a result of his feelings for Anna’s mother. The one thing I struggled with was Anna’s relationship with her dying grandfather. In one scene she is giving him a bed bath and he gets an erection. He tells her he feels handsome and she promptly runs off. There are a couple of scenes like this, and maybe it is done to purposely unsettle the audience. If this is the case then it hit the mark with me.

The film brilliantly captures the awkwardness and insecurity that are not solely confined to adolescence, and subtly weaves together the complexities of love, guilt, and religion, without ever being judgemental. A beautiful quiet mix of melancholy and hope. Much like life itself.


Original review here

The Lodger (1927) ****

My local cinema (the most excellent Phoenix Picturehouse) has an Alfred Hitchcock season this week.  This pleases me.  I like Alfred Hitchcock films.  I can tell someone that Alfred Hitchcock is one of my favourite directors, sound reasonably intelligent, and not be lying.  So having the opportunity to see The Lodger, Hitchcock's first film, was pretty exciting.  Plus it would give me a new talking point in the 'What do you know about Hitchcock?' conversation.  I have never had this conversation but, you know, it's always good to be ready, should the opportunity arise.

The film is loosely based on the Jack the Ripper killings, with Ivor Novello (who I'm sure will be rooting for MY KZ, UR BF to win Best Song Musically and Lyrically at this year's Ivors) playing the titular lodger who may or may not have a penchant for killing golden-haired girls.

It's really interesting to see hints of Hitchcock to come: interesting camera angles, bits with staircases... hmm I think maybe it's a good job I have never had the Hitchcock conversation.  I seem to have run out of things to say already.

The main thing that I will take from the experience is how very weird it is to sit in a cinema when there is no sound.  This wasn't just a silent film in the normal sense, with some tinkly piano accompaniment.  This was literally silent.  For 80 minutes.  I could hear the guy next to me breathing.  I could hear my stomach rumbling (in my defence it was a lunchtime showing).  I could hear my chair squeaking, and what was, I think, the cinema manager having a telephone conversation in the next room with a chap called Michael.

It's remarkable how much will power it required to sit in a silent darkened room for over an hour and keep my eyes open, even though I had huge respect for the moving pictures in front of me.  I don't know whether I should be ashamed to admit that, or whether in actual fact very few people would now watch a silent film for pure entertainment's sake, without thinking 'I'm a bit bored, but this is really good fodder for the "Have you seen any silent films?" conversation so I'll try and concentrate'.  (Obviously I haven't had this conversation either.  But I'm ready now.  Oh yes).  I'm really glad I saw The Lodger, of course.  But I'm even more glad that Hitchcock met Bernard Herrmann.

Source Code ****

Source Code is an extremely engaging, entertaining, and ultimately surprisingly moving sci-fi thriller. To try and write a summary of it, however, takes all the fun out of it. Breaking it into its constituent parts makes it sound preposterous: Jake Gyllenhaal wakes up on a train in another man’s body; his reflection is not his own. Eight minutes later the train explodes and he wakes up in a mysterious pod, where he learns that by the power of the American army and quantum physics he is going to live those same eight minutes over and over again until he finds the man that bombed his train, thereby rescuing Chicago from another bomb that will happen later that day. This all happens in about the first ten minutes of the film.

The remarkable thing is that - despite sounding like Speed meets Groundhog Day - none of the above seems ridiculous at the time. (Though Speedhog Day  is an amazing idea for a film, no?  And there's merchandise available already).  Duncan Jones directs Source Code with the lightest of touches, with a massive debt owed to master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock. The title sequence really reminded me of North by Northwest somehow, and the tension is wound as tightly as possible as we, along with Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, slowly unravel just what is going on.

This is much more than a genre movie, however. Yes, it's a sci-fi thriller - but, as with the very best sci-fi, it is so much more too. It is a philosophical exploration of the idea of fate, and about making choices; it’s a contemplation of what it truly means to be alive; and it’s a love story.

Source Code is sci-fi as Alfred Hitchcock would have made it - with a little bit of Keanu Reeves thrown in, just for fun.


PS. Tenuously linked pop quiz, hot shot: How great is the Speed trailer?*  

Initial review here.


*The answer is that the Speed trailer is very great.  Though it does basically show the entire film.

The Social Network ****

How did a man with decidedly ropey social skills manage to create the biggest social website in the world?  So asks The Social Network.  Well, sort of.  The question is there in amongst an examination of ideas (as in: at what stage does an idea become something more concrete, that can be owned and thus monetised, rather than ‘an examination of ideas’ being my impressively vague description of the film)…  I seem to have lost my train of thought.  This is the challenge of being part of the facebook generation - I don’t even have the attention span for music videos.  3 minutes?  No, no, far too long.  I can’t manage to concentrate for the length of a sentence.

I did actually manage to concentrate for the whole of The Social Network, thanks to Aaron Sorkin’s clever script in which everyone is engaging, but no-one comes across especially favourably, and David Fincher’s masterly direction.  His manipulation of depth of field speaks volumes: in scenes of conversation Mark Zuckerberg is often the only object on screen in focus, subtly but pointedly conveying, if not exactly his self-interest, his obvious lack of interest in what anyone else has to say.

This is a remarkable story, remarkably well told.

A couple of points of interest: 

-It has what I consider to be one of the most realistic nightclub scene ever seen on screen.  I really liked the fact I had to strain my ears to hear the conversation over the music.

-The Winklevoss twins are played by the same person, by way of computer wizardry (much like the other technical term, 'computer trickery', but even more cleverer).  I saw the film before I knew this, and didn’t notice at all.  Things have changed since Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap.  Now that’s a good film.  I wonder if Hayley Mills has a facebook page… What was I writing about…?

The Secret in Their Eyes ****

On the surface The Secret in Their Eyes is a crime thriller set in Buenos Aires in the 1970s, following detective Esposito as he investigates a brutal case of rape and murder.  But to that we must add the layer that he is looking back from 25 years later, as he is now retired and writing a book about the case.

In re-visiting the case he is attempting to deal with his past, including the fact that he was in love with his superior, Irene, and has been ever since, but has never been able to voice it.  This plays out very subtly and beautifully beneath a tense and tightly crafted murder story involving some stunning set pieces - look out for the chase scene in the football stadium.

The corruption of the justice system at the time is an interesting subtext to the film.  I am ashamed to admit that my knowledge of Argentine history pretty much begins and ends with Madonna, so the political edge went over my head slightly, but ultimately this didn’t seem to matter.  I understood that people could just ‘disappear’, without needing a knowledge of the Dirty War (isn’t it nice, this learning together?).

This is much more than a run of the mill crime thriller, and much more engaging than a dry documentary of Argentina‘s political past, which probably explains why it won Best Foreign-Language picture at this year‘s Oscars.  This is a film about constancy, about friendship, about memory, and about people’s reasons for being.  And about secrets.  Revealed in people’s eyes.  But you probably guessed that.

Heartbreaker ****

Heartbreaker (L'Arnacoeur) is the perfect antidote to the below par romantic comedies that have been offered up in recent months.Sex and the City 2? Letters to Juliet? Non, merci. This is so far superior it's almost silly to compare. 

Admittedly, the plot is quite predictable. Alex (the remarkably attractive Romain Duris), his sister, and her husband get paid, by fathers or siblings or friends, to split up couples. Don't worry, only couples where the woman is unhappy and doesn't realise it. We don't need to get distracted by morals here. Alex breaks up relationships, he doesn't break hearts. Even though the film is called Heartbreaker. Hmm, maybe there's a nuance lost in translation. Anyway, quelle surprise, Alex falls for his mark, Juliette (the equally remarkably attractive Vanessa Paradis), but will he be able to steal her away from her fiance? (Her fiance played by Andrew Lincoln. Yes, Andrew Lincoln from Teachers and This Life. In a French film.) And will he be able to keep professional and personal feelings separate? And will they kiss in the end?

You can probably guess the answer to those questions. So why go and see another predictable romcom? Firstly, the guilt factor from seeing a frothy film is completely blown away because it's in French. It's got subtitles, therefore your friends will think you are very cultured and highbrow. Secondly, predictable can be wonderful when it's done well. Most of Audrey Hepburn's films were predictable, but they were glorious because they were charming. And this is certainly charming. It is silly, and funny, and warm, and irresistible. And beautiful to look at, both in cinematographic and aesthetic terms (did I mention how attractive the leads are?). And they recreate the iconic scene from Dirty Dancing, and the only thing that was lame and embarrassing about it was the very big grin left on my face.  Formidable!

Bad Lieutenant ****

'It feels like we're working for some kind of greater good,' says Xzibit's gang boss to Nicholas Cage's eponymous Bad Lieutenant as they make a business deal, whilst in the background his two henchmen dump a body in the river. But there is no greater good here in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, as Nicholas Cage wades through the moral swamp investigating a murder. Everything is corrupt and sleazy. The fact that this scene is funny hopefully goes a little way to illustrating the blackly comic tone of the whole of Werner Herzog's latest release. He takes a traditional good cop gone bad tale, and breakdances all over it. 

Nicholas Cage's manic performance sees him back to his joyously over the top best, as he somehow makes a seedy, drug addled, gambling, corrupt cop someone that you, perversely, want to succeed. It is impossible to take your eyes off him, apart from when a couple of smiling iguanas share a fantastically insane scene with him. He's a brilliant detective, but the sole driving force of all of his actions is the desperation to score drugs. He would threaten to kill your granny if it would help him.

How did something so bleak and amoral make me leave the cinema in such a good mood?

Completely bonkers, and completely brilliant.