Memento Mori

In one-of-a-kind Guy Maddin’s paean to Manitoba’s cold and sleepy capital city, the Canadian surrealist analyses his relationship with his home town, its history, the people and his own family for My Winnipeg, an archly comic, monochrome pseudo-documentary.

Over the course of his nine features and umpteen short films, Maddin has honed his unique method – influenced by silent films, industrial shorts, golden age melodramas and camp science fiction serials – to create a flavoursome, visually breathtaking body of work unlike any other. It is also one which you will either love or hate on sight. In My Winnipeg, commissioned by the local government, Maddin pens a fluid biography of the snowbound city, using old stock footage, puppetry, video and painstaking recreations, one of which opens the film. We then cut to a long poetic sequence on a moving train as Maddin, (played by Darcy Fehr) tries one more time to leave Winnipeg for good. Maddin narrates his story in a sonorous baritone, blending old legends and questionable history with an acid critique of the town’s efforts to modernise itself and fantasies about his youth and his family.

As Maddin tells it, Winnipeg is a place of dreams, its citizens sleepwalking through the streets at night dreaming of the ancient natives and lost underground rivers. They dream of lost back streets, forgotten department stores, old sporting glories and strange historical happenings; like when horses fled a stable fire and were trapped in a freezing river to, overnight, become a macabre sculpture garden for local picnickers. Maddin recreates it all, from the waving skaters astride the staring, icy horse heads to an infamous Masonic séance that channelled the god of the bison through a psychic ballerina. The director himself plays a role in these intricate restorations, describing how he made a facsimile of his childhood home and cast actors to play his siblings. His mother, he tells us, was herself an actress, starring in a local soap opera called Ledge Man where, every day for 50 years, she talked a suicidal man down from the side of a building with sweet words and gentle encouragements.

We are told Mrs Maddin is playing herself, but in fact, the role is taken by Ann Savage, a leading lady in 1940’s noirs, most notably the surreal classic Detour. I didn’t recognise her - she is 87 now - but seeing her name in the credits, I was tempted to find out what else Maddin had invented. Are the city streets in fact named after famous brothel keepers? Is there a by-law that allows Winnipeggers to keep the keys to their old homes? Was his convent school really named “The Academy of the Super Vixens”? Did a corrupt mayor once fix the result of the annual Golden Boy male beauty pageant? No, of course not, but it doesn’t matter. In Maddin’s singular imagination this is how it happened and he spins from those fragments a fascinating, funny tale of place and time, loss and remembrance.

Maim Mama!

Theatre director Phyllida Llloyd makes her feature debut with this starry-cast but horribly saccharine adaptation of the stage musical, based on the lyrics of Abba songs.

The story of Mamma Mia! is wafer thin. Meryl Streep plays Donna, a fifty-something former showgirl who owns a dilapidated hotel on a Greek Island. Her twenty year old daughter Sophie, played by Amanda Seyfried (the dippy blonde in Mean Girls) is about to marry her sweetheart Sky (Dominic Cooper), with the ceremony to be held at the hotel. Having read her mother’s secret diary, Sophie has discovered that her father could have been one of three former lovers that Donna met over the course of a very busy month years before. Desperate to meet her father before her marriage, she invites all three, (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgård) to come to the island. Thus met, the gang then race around looking for reasons to sing Abba songs - lyrics crammed to fit the situation - before a predictably sweet and sun-kissed conclusion. For ‘Dancing Queen’, they have a dance and crown a queen. ‘I Have A Dream’ allows Sophie dreams of her real dad. 'Money, Money Money' brings about a discussion of the hotel’s precarious finances. On it goes, a race through twenty songs from the back catalogue, each of the principals getting their moment in centre stage, the story trailing along behind them.

So it’s rubbish. Upbeat, inoffensive and determined to entertain, but rubbish nonetheless. The biggest challenge of any musical is integrating the songs into an interesting, credible story; so it feels ‘natural’ when the actors suddenly break into song. That never happens here. Mamma Mia! is jazzed-up karaoke, a feeble excuse to run through the Abba classics, hanging limply from the bare branches of a gossamer story.

Streep, who last sang on screen in Postcards From The Edge, has a fine, clear voice, with her natural exuberance covering most of Donna’s character inadequacies. Likewise, Julie Walters gives it both barrels as best friend Rosie, belting out her numbers and kicking her heels to disguise a shaky, uninvolving presence. As the pairs preening rich-bitch friend Tanya, comedienne Christine Baranski carries most of the film’s sense of camp, a burden that proves too much for her.

From the men, only Pierce Brosnan shows any sign of having twigged the ridiculous nature of proceedings. He nervously warbles his way through a few numbers, his strained expression and awkward movements betraying his acute discomfort. Firth, as the millionaire lawyer Harry, plays a former punk but that still doesn’t excuse his tuneless screeching. As the adventurer Bill, Stellan Skarsgård doesn’t even attempt an entire number, wisely delivering his few lines in a croaking sing-song and hiding somewhere during the more bombastic set-pieces.

If the singing is a disappointment, the unconvincing sets and chocolate-box photography are even more so; the airy, fluent location exteriors crassly matched with the over-lit, unconvincing studio settings. Director Lloyd, who originated the stage show, lacks the basic technical and narrative skills to make the film bounce. A broad, flat and silly film, Mamma Mia! is strictly for the fans.

Going Gently

The tangled life of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas is told through the lives of the two women who loved him in Love Is The Devil director John Maybury’s artful, awkward The Edge of Love.

Opening during the Blitz in a tube station, we first meet the beautiful Vera Phillips (Keira Knightly) as she sings an uplifting song to the huddled Londoners. Watching her is a soldier, William Killick (Cillian Murphy), who trails her to a nearby pub when the all clear is sounded. There, Vera has meet her lifelong friend the poet Dylan Thomas, in the city to work on a propaganda documentary. Propping up the bar with the tempestuous writer is his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller), and soon all four are joined in a squared-off relationship, Killick and Thomas butting heads over Vera’s affections while she and Caitlin strike up a thorny friendship, clouded with elements of jealously and rivalry. Before he is sent overseas, Killick and Vera marry and she returns with Thomas and Caitlin to a seaside town in Wales to wait for his return. There, away from the world, the competition between the two women becomes more irrational and intense.

As the twinned objects of the poet’s affections, Miller and Knightly give fine, nuanced performances, in turn delicate and boisterous. Miller in particular is a revelation as the fiery, feisty Caitlin, brilliantly evoking the pain of living with genius, made even more anxious by the imminent prospect of death and ruin in wartime. Knightly as her rival and best friend plays Vera in much the same way as she did her lead in Atonement, her practical façade cracking under heartfelt emotional pressures. Their relationship is the heart of the film, and both prove worthy of the assignment.

Although he looks the part, Rhys cannot find the power in his voice to match the poet’s words, unable to match the rolling, tumbling intonation of the poet, a disappointment given that Thomas recorded much of his work on tape. His recitation in voice-over of one of Thomas’ best known poems, Lament (“When I was a windy boy and a bit…”) is weak and flat. Worse than that, the actor gives such a dislikeable performance, full of actorly tics and goggle-eyed mooning, that he never gives us any reason to believe that two women would have fallen so deeply in love with him. His lechery seems half-hearted, his alcoholism and depravity an overly careful, measured descent. Murphy, as the damaged soldier Killick, gives a far more interesting performance, full of bravado and wit but the war absents him for long sections, returning him in a shell-shocked trance as a remote, jealous misfit. Pushed by his own demons into an act of desperation, Murphy brilliantly evokes the man’s panic and fear but the constantly self-referencing script noticeably deflates his performance, repeatedly underlining emotions the actor is well able to communicate himself the first time.

Despite being flawed in its execution dramatically muddled and jumpy in tone, The Edge of Love is a well mounted and, for the most part, well acted drama about fascinating people in extraordinary circumstances. It tries very hard to distil these freewheeling characters into easily digestible nuggets of information, but Maybury cannot give them their required force, leaving us still waiting for the definitive film about Dylan Thomas.

I Know Kung Fu

In DreamWorks funny and charming Kung Fu Panda, the titular black-and-white bear is Po (Jack Black), son of noodle-selling father Mr. Ping (James Hong) with secret dreams of becoming a kung-fu expert like his heroes, The Furious Five. One day, the Kung Fu Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim) has a premonition that the evil snow leopard warrior Tai Lung (Ian McShane) will escape prison and destroy the town unless a warrior is chosen to stop him. Tai Lung is a former student of Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), the trainer of the Furious Five, Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Viper (Lucy Liu), and Crane (David Cross). Through a series of misfortunes, the mystical Oogway picks Po as the champion, and so begins a familiar, but inherently entertaining, story of overcoming obstacles and achieving dreams.

In real life, Black’s incessant jabbering has made him an increasingly difficult presence but in animated form his childish, high-tempo act suits the simple-hearted, easy-to-assemble Po, requiring little more than gumption, crisis and the battle for glory to construct a worthy hero. From the outset, Kung Fu Panda is a winning combination of knockabout farce, ticklesome one-liners, easily digested lectures and blur-motion fight sequences. It’s a wuxia story that’s a framework for jokes, not the other way around. The period setting eliminates any of the incessant pop culture references that blot other animations, and there is no discernable trace of the self-aware cynicism that can find its way into the new wave of digital cartoons, aimed squarely at the audience’s more worldly chaperones. Kung Fu Panda is innocent entertainment, a cartoon first and foremost.

And what an attractive animation it is. The opening dream sequence is a striking, Samurai Jack inspired arrangement of blacks and reds, swooping shapes and punchy action. The character designs are extraordinarily charming. Po has a waddling walk and big-boned presence, dwarfing his tiny Yoda-like mentor and clashing with his team of limber animal ninjas, their distinctive moves taken from the fighting styles they represent. The animators have crafted an array of beautifully lit, artfully composed background vistas, peopled with a constant rhubarb of sweetly observed villagers –pigs and ducks and rabbits. It is DreamWorks’ best-looking movie so far, stunningly rendered and presented with obvious affection for the long history of Asian martial arts cinema.

Pixar’s eco-themed Wall-E is likely to steal much of this bumptious film’s thunder, but if kids are looking to see both, grown-ups shouldn’t complain.

Green Eyed Monster

Louis Leterrier’s surprisingly compelling re-imagining of The Incredible Hulk (more the 1970s television show than Ang Lee’s overly lyrical misfire from 2003) sees Edward Norton takes over from Eric Bana as Bruce Banner; a government scientist blasted by gamma rays when a nuclear experiment goes wrong and condemned, Jekyll & Hyde-like, to carry a monster within him that he cannot control.

Be in your seat on time because much of this Hulk’s origins are explained in the opening credits, flashes of prologue flitting between images of mutating cells and pumping veins, accompanied by a reworking of the haunting score from the 1970s television show. As an on-screen graphic explains, Banner hasn’t had an ‘episode’ for 150 days, thanks to the meditation techniques he has learned from a martial arts master at his hideout in Rio de Janeiro’s favela. Banner’s attempts to control his body are part of his search for an antidote to his unique condition, which famously becomes unmanageable when he is angered.

But his military paymasters, personified by grim-faced General Ross (William Hurt), who also happens to be the father of Banner’s girlfriend Betty (Liv Tyler), want him back in the US so they can use his irradiated blood to create a new breed of genetically-modified super-soldiers. Ross sends a crack squad of commandos, led by the deadly Blonsky (Tim Roth) down to Brazil to bring Banner back. Following a breakneck chase, he escapes, making his way back to Betty’s office in a university campus and a painful reunion. But the army are close behind, and Ross has found a way to create a worthy adversity for the all-powerful Hulk by injecting a willing Blonsky with a sample of his blood.

Norton, always willing to take a risk, gives an excellent performance as the tortured boffin desperate to exorcise a curse of his own creation. At least, until the computers take over and he morphs into a giant, green, imaginary object. Even Norton cannot act through such a dense binary mask. Nevertheless, when in human form, Norton is always interesting and self-contained. Alongside him, Liv Tyler offers heart and hope as the loyal Betty with the two of them presenting a likewise credible and frequently touching romantic relationship, quickly drawn in tight, emotional scenes and well sustained throughout.

Director Leterrier, working from a script by comic-book specialist Zak Penn and Norton, brings his high-octane action movie sensibilities to the material, staging a well-measured succession of blistering set-pieces and pyrotechnic fight scenes. Banner and Betty don't become fully rounded characters, but this lack of probing insight suits the material far better than his predecessor’s tortured art-house moping. This Hulk hasn’t got time for angst; the film is driven at a breathless pace by a straight-ahead plot and endless action. There are frequent asides for summer-friendly comic moments – Marvel creator Stan Lee gets his obligatory cameo and the original television behemoth Lou Ferrigno pops up as a pizza-munching security guard.

Never short on spectacle, this bravura blockbuster noticeably collapses in the last twenty minutes into a mush of over-digitized combat - the streets of New York are again, flattened-but what had gone before was solidly entertaining, hitting all the marks expected by fans with careful - probably too careful - precision.

We Are Three

It's the third blog-a-versary here at Confessions of a Film Critic. Yay me. Thanks to those that read the posts, nobody seems to comment much but thanks to those few that do and roll on another year.

It Keeps Happening...

Reading these guys pick apart just how awful The Happening really, truly is, almost makes me want to see it again.

Just to keep up with the dissection, like an anatomy student in a glass-walled gallery flipping through a textbook. In comparison I was only prodding the corpse with a stick, from four feet away.

It goes to show you how important film criticism is, even if only to shield the audience from the gore. And a surgeon gets to wear rubber gloves.