Bel Canto (2018)

How did you sing like that? Acclaimed American soprano Roxane Coss (Moore) travels to an unnamed South American country to give a private concert at the birthday party of rich Japanese industrialist Katsumi Hosokawa (Watanabe) who’s allegedly building a factory in the vicinity. Just as an élite gathering of local dignitaries convenes at Vice-President Ruben Ochoa’s mansion, including French Ambassador Simon Thibault (Christopher Lambert) and his wife (Elsa Zylberstein), Hosokawa’s faithful translator Gen Watanabe (Ryo Kase), and Russian trade delegate Fyorodov (Olek Krupa), the house is taken over by guerrillas led by Comandante Benjamin (Tenoch Huerta) who believe the President is in attendance (he’s at home watching TV) demanding the release of their imprisoned comrades. Their only contact with the outside world is through Red Cross negotiator Joachim Messner (Sebastian Koch). A month-long standoff ensues in which hostages and captors must overcome their differences and find their shared humanity and hope in the face of impending disaster. Roxanne and Katsumi consummate their rapidly escalating love for each other while Gen falls for rebel Carmen (Maria Mercedes Coroy) as the military gather outside the building … He is always moved by your music. Adapted from Ann Patchett’s novel by director Paul Weitz and Anthony Weintraub, this might be another instance of be careful when tackling literary fiction:  three mentions of telenovelas remind us that when you strip out the elevated language sometimes what you’re left with is a soap opera. And how unlikely much of this is, these people holed up in this nice residence, all getting along in this unreal idyll, even having sex, you just wonder where the butler is hiding the silver salver with the stacks of Ferrero Rocher and why it never occurs to anyone to escape not even when they’re wandering about that lovely tree-filled garden. Nonetheless Moore and Watanabe are both splendid and the underlying message that music is that other universal language is well made in this fantasy take on Stockholm Syndrome before it concludes in the inevitable bloodbath. What are the takeaways? Don’t adapt posh novels, stay out of South America where the natives are always revolting and for goodness’ sake don’t sleep with your kidnapper – or your biggest fan. It never ends well. Moore lip syncs to Renée Fleming.  Are you sure they won’t shoot you? Not everbody likes opera

Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (2019)

He would craft mythical tales into voyages of the mind. Filmmaker Werner Herzog and author Bruce Chatwin became fast friends when they encountered one another in Australia in 1983. Herzog was researching Where the Green Ants Dream, Chatwin his book Songlines. They talked nonstop, bonding over their shared love of the sacrament of walking which they both believed had therapeutic even mystical qualities. Herzog narrates the story of their friendship and Chatwin’s travels and books over the course of eight chapters, commencing with The Skin of the Brontosaurus, an object in the family’s cabinet of curiosities that was really skin and fur from a sloth but which was one of the many pieces inspiring Chatwin to travel – or walk – the world, emblems of places he wanted to visit, or as Herzog says, points of a compass. Using some voice recordings of Chatwin reading from his work, archive footage and excerpts from Herzog’s own films, and interviews, he traces their interweaving stories across the continents from the neolithic structures at Avebury in Wiltshire to Australia and South America and West Africa, to the Priory in Wales that was his sanctuary, and demonstrates how their journeys and interests intersected:  Herzog famously walked to see Lotte Eisner in Paris and used Chatwin’s novel The Viceroy of Uidah as the basis of Cobra Verde, a film set in another deranged landscape starring Klaus (Fitzcarraldo) Kinski who biographer Nicholas Shakespeare says might best represent Chatwin as an older man, had he lived. Herzog never saw Chatwin’s annotated copy of the screenplay and Shakespeare reads out what the author thought of Herzog:  a compendium of contradictions;  remote and alone. Chatwin had led a highly promiscuous life as a bisexual and was dying of AIDS when Herzog showed him Herdsmen of the Sun, the last images he saw.  Chatwin told Herzog he was dying and Herzog reports that he responded, I can see that. As he lay dying he gifted Herzog his leather rucksack, a totem and talisman in this film about people finding their tribes – it not only played a role in Herzog’s Scream of Stone, it may have helped save Herzog’s life when he could sit on it during a particularly dangerous ice storm. Herzog defuses the myth. Chatwin asked Herzog to help him end his life and Herzog offered to either bash his head in with a baseball bat or shoot him. In fact Chatwin didn’t want his friend to see him die and was lapsing in and out of consciousness and he watched the film when he came to every so often and died shortly afterwards. As Herzog reads extracts from Chatwin one senses the echoes of his own autobiography:  One of the essential locations where he would find his inner balance.  Chatwin had liked Herzog’s film Signs of Life because, Herzog says, he was searching for strangeness.  The myth continues until the final chapter The Book is Closed when Herzog reads Chatwin’s last handwritten words, Christ wore a seamless robe. Talking with academics, correspondents, climbers and Chatwin’s widow Elizabeth, Herzog shapes the contours of an adventurous nomadic life that vibrates to this day, traced along the planet’s navigational lines and proving its very pulse. He was the internet

Bande a Part (1964)

Aka Band of Outsiders.  A Who-Dunit, Who’s Got-It, Where-Is-It-Now Wild One From That “Breathless” director Jean-Luc Godard!  Smalltime crooks and cinéphile slackers Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) spend their days mimicking the antiheroes of Hollywood noirs and Westerns while pursuing the lovely Odile (Anna Karina) whom they meet at English class. The misfit trio upends convention at every turn, through choreographed dances in cafés or frolicsome romps through the Louvre trying to set a record for fastest circumnavigation. Eventually, their romantic view of outlaws pushes them to plan their own heist, but their inexperience may send them out in a blaze of glory – just like their B-movie heroes … Isn’t it strange how people never form a whole?Ostensibly an adaptation of a novel called Fool’s Gold by Dorothy Hitchens, that’s just a skeleton on which the mischievous Jean-Luc Godard drapes his love and admiration of Hollywood genres (and Karina) over a series of apparently improvised riffs in this lightly constructed charmer. A few clues for latecomers: Several weeks ago… A pile of money… An English class… A house by the river… A romantic young girl... It’s a splendidly rackety affair, with several standout scenes providing the postmodern matrix for much of pop culture (and a name for Quentin Tarantino’s production company). It’s Godard at his most playful, joyous and audience-pleasing, exploring what it’s like to not want to grow up and how it’s always possible to have fun with like-minded people. Then, you go a little too far and someone goes and spoils it all for everyone. Maybe. Sheer pleasure. Godard said of the dance scene: “Alice in Wonderland as re-choreographed by Kafka”. A minute of silence can last a long time… a whole eternity

Long Shot (2019)

I look like Cap’n Crunch’s Grindr date! Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) is a daring if shambling journalist favouring the Democrats who has a knack for getting into trouble. We meet him infiltrating a White Power group where he gets identified as a Jewish leftwing writer and he jumps out a first-floor window to escape their wrath halfway through getting a Swastika tattoo. Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron) is one of the most influential women in the world – the US Secretary of State, a smart, sophisticated and accomplished politician who needs to up her ratings to succeed her boss, TV star President Chambers (Bob Odenkirk). Her polling improves every time she’s photographed with the goofy Canadian Prime Minister (Alexander Skarsgard) as she’s counselled to do at every opportunity by her advisor Maggie (June Diane Raphael). When Fred unexpectedly runs into Charlotte at a party his best friend Lance (O’Shea Jackson Jr) takes him to after he’s left his Brooklyn alt-weekly following a takeover by the repulsive mogul Parker Wembly (Andy Serkis), he finds himself in the company of his former baby sitter and childhood crush. When Charlotte decides to make a run for the presidency she hires Fred as her speechwriter to up the funny factor – much to the dismay of her entourage as she’s embarking on a world tour to persuade leaders to sign up to her programme to save The Bees, The Trees and The Seas and he joins them on the road …  I’m a racist. You’re a Republican. I don’t know what is wrong with me. As a product of the adolescent house of Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg you might think this had a gross out element and it does – any film that could have its leading man ultimately labelled The Come Guy has taken a turn in that direction (hence the title). But it’s the getting there that is astonishingly well put together. The stereotypes here are all too recognisable: the woman who can handle herself, and the man who … handles himself in a very particular way; the WASPy politician who has to deal with a doofus Commander in Chief who himself takes his cues from his TV show as the US President (Odenkirk is very good) along with a toothy Canadian jerk PM (Skarsgard sportingly sports buck teeth) similarly looking for a viable political romance, not to mention the hourly misogyny dealt her by an astonishingly sexist TV channel;  the shabbily dressed leftwing Jewish journo (in another time he’d have been part of the counterculture) who learns the hard way that maturing requires a deal of compromise which he only realises when his best friend admits he’s not just a Republican – but a Christian to boot – and then has the lightbulb moment that he is in his own way a racist and a sexist, everything he despises. Therefore beneath this very funny, role-reversing political comedy about two people who want the impossible – a relationship of equals – is a plea to see things from the other side’s point of view.  He needs to grow up, she needs to be reminded of the passionate truth-teller she used to be so they both teach each other valuable lessons. The big political crisis is solved after Fred has given Charlotte her first taste of MDMA (she thinks it’s called The Molly) so that a hostage-taking disaster is averted when she’s off her skull. This is very much of its time, the potshots are relevant and smart if obvious, the sex scenes are hilarious (she has a better time, quicker, and apologises, just like a guy), and the timing is exquisite. And no, it’s not the intellectual wordfest of The West Wing nor does it attempt the kind of fireworks we might wish for from the classic Thirties screwballs but it has its own rhythm and nuance with flawless performances even if the satire isn’t as up to the second as we require in the Twitterverse. There is, though, a teal rain jacket and those Game of Thrones references. Principally it works because of its humanity but it also ploughs a furrow of Nineties nostalgia – bonding over Roxette and Boyz II Men – as well as boasting an environmental message and emitting a howl against media conglomerates and rightwing hatemongers. At its centre is a couple trying to make things work while working together in a horribly public situation with the politics regularly giving way to charming encounters where the stars play against type. That’s clever screenwriting, by Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah. Deftly directed by Jonathan Levine, this epitomises all that is right, left and wrong about the American political scene with a hugely optimistic message at its core about the State of the Union. Highly entertaining with an awesome Theron taking charge. We totally almost just died

Marathon Man (1976)

How am I to fathom your mind if you continue to hide it from me?  Thomas ‘Babe’ Levy (Dustin Hoffman) is a Columbia graduate student and long-distance runner who has just enrolled in a doctoral seminar with Prof. Biesenthal (Fritz Weaver) where his focus will be the fate of his father a fellow historian driven to suicide in the McCarthy era purely on the grounds of his Judaism.  He is oblivious to the fact that his older brother, Doc (Roy Scheider), is not in fact an oil executive but a government agent chasing down a Nazi war criminal Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier) and who is almost murdered by a blue-eyed Asian hitman in a Paris hotel. Doc visits Babe in NYC and meets his girlfriend the allegedly Swiss Elsa Opel (Marthe Keller) whom he figures out immediately as one of Szell’s couriers. Babe doesn’t believe there’s a bad bone in her body.  Doc is murdered and his colleague Janeway (William Devane) tells Babe the muggers who ambushed him in Central Park are Szell’s henchmen but they won’t come for him tonight – but they do, and Babe is held at the end of Szell’s dentist’s drill constantly being asked Is it safe?  He is caught in the middle of a transaction being expedited by The Division who clean up matters arising from disagreements between Washington and the CIA ... Listen, I want you to rob my apartment.  Director John Schlesinger reunited with his Midnight Cowboy star Hoffman to make this iconic paranoid thriller adaptation by William Goldman of his 1974 novel which invokes all sorts of historic nightmares not to mention the fear of unnecessary dental surgery. For a liberal pacifist you have some sense of vengeance Doc tells Babe when he realises he still has the gun their father used to blow his brains out. The last time I saw this was in the middle of another sleepless night during a three-month bout of glandular fever and the words Is it safe? made it impossible for me to recover, for, oh, probably another month at that point. There might be plotholes you could drive a truck through that not even Robert Towne’s putative and uncredited rewrite fixed but even fully conscious and in broad daylight it remains a transfixing piece of work whose echoes are still felt. The schematic structure is emblematic of a film whose many well-constructed sequences take place in famous locations – Columbia, Central Park, the diamond district, where Szell is recognised by two of his victims. Szell! Der Weisse Engel! shrieks a camp survivor as the old Nazi is ironically forced to get a price for his diamonds from the very race he tortured and executed with extreme prejudice thirty years earlier. The entire text is replete with such irony, expressed by Janeway in the line Everything we do cuts both ways after he supposedly rescues Babe only to deliver him back to the Nazi. The dialogue is biting and great:  I believe in my country/So did we all. Michael Small’s score is superb with a real feel for the emotive fraternal and familial issues underlying the narrative action whose logic turns on the notion of history itself and the versions of truth which we tell ourselves and in turn are told to keep us happy.  He did much the same job on The Parallax View, another paranoid conspiracy thriller whose similarly allusive style (and on which Towne also did some controversial rewrite work during a writers’ strike) makes it the best political film of its time. It looks incredible, thanks to Conrad Hall. Oh the Seventies really had great films. Nowadays they’d probably give Szell a sympathetic backstory. Not so much in real life for Keller whose father actually was a Nazi. History is all around us in this persistent, resonant film. Pauline Kael called it a Jewish revenge fantasy. Goy veh. You’re weak. Your father was weak in his way, your brother in his, now you in yours. You are all so predictable

American Made (2017)

A jaunty trip from the Deep South into and around Central and South America tracing the evolution of the drugs trade in the US with a little assistance from the CIA who blackmailed TWA pilot Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) over his illegal importing of Cuban cigars back in the day. He soon finds himself taking photographs on reconnaissance flights when he’s hired by ‘Schafer’ (Domhnall Gleeson) an agent who’s getting all the kudos for these dangerous incursions – Barry’s shot at regularly over rebel training camps. Told from his point of view, talking to camera during December 1985 through February 1986 to account for how things have come to a pretty complicated pass, the comic book approach, particularly when it comes to how he’s hired by what would become the Medellin cartel (including Pablo Escobar), lends pace to what could otherwise be an utterly confusing story. He’s done for drug dealing – disavowed – rehired by the CIA – rehired by the cartel – involved in bringing in terrorists to train for a revolution initiated by  Washington – and makes a shedload of money which is eventually threatened by his dumb brother in law (Caleb Landry Jones). All pretty recent history in various territories. And then there’s the matter of Col. Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair. Seal, in other words, was the plaything of the CIA who nearly brought down Washington and there are some nice little cameos including a conversation with Junior ie Dubya not to mention a crucial call from Governor Bill Clinton. This is told in dazzling fashion with graphics and maps to illustrate the sheer nuttiness of the situation.  This is what was going on with the Sandinistas?! Cruise is wholly convincing as a good-time boy entering unknown territory with a breezy cavalier performance that is truly engaging in a crime story that has echoes of Catch Me If You Can in its tone. The speed with which Seal becomes a drugs and arms dealer is whiplash-inducing so the aesthetic of fast and loose is in keeping with the casual expedience of him, his family and eventually, his life. This is what happens when you train South Americans to supply drugs and kill (even if half the Contras went AWOL and kept well out of harm’s way once they got into the US). The clusterf**k that occurs when the CIA abandons Seal and the DEA, FBI, police and ATF turn up at his aerodrome in Mena simultaneously is a hoot and the aerial feats are phenomenal. An astonishing tale, told with verve.  Written by Gary Spinelli and directed by Doug Liman.

Snatched (2017)

I worship Goldie Hawn. Foul Play is on constant rotation chez moi. After a terrible 15 year break, she’s back, playing Amy Schumer’s mother. I use those words with caution because in one phrase I have alienated Goldie fans and realise that Schumer fans may not even know who Hawn is. Schumer is dumped by her boyfriend in a scene that is excruciating for all the wrong reasons – too long, badly written, overly expository and revelatory of one crucial fact:  Schumer cannot act. Then after social media intervention by her mom who lives with three rather cool cats  (Andrew, Arthur and Philip) she goes home because she has non-refundable tickets for a holiday to Ecuador and nobody will go with her. Turns out there’s an autistic/agoraphobe/nerd brother (Ike Barinholtz) resident too. After more, long, excruciating, badly written scenes, we fetch up with Goldie and Amy in a luxury resort in Ecuador. Amy wants to have sex with an Aussie adventurer (Tom Bateman) but he’s just keen to bring her on a day out. She brings mom too and they’re kidnapped. There are a few funny bits – Amy has the classic millennial reaction to being parted from her smartphone;  she ends up killing someone with a spade (“Are you sure?” she asks Goldie; “I saw his brains,” Goldie deadpans in response);  they partner up with an Indiana Jones-wannnabe jungle guide (Christopher Meloni) who turns out to be a total phony with a week to live (a bit less, actually); the complete lack of interest from the State Dept.; and there’s a tribute to Alien with a massive tapeworm.  But… there’s the brother’s subplot with the State Dept. And don’t get me started on the bewildering squandering of Wanda Sykes and a mute Joan Cusack (mute! Joan Cusack MUTE!!!!) as a sidebar of handy Lesbian rescuers who just …. disappear in a manner that is literally the opposite of good characterisation and plotting . OMG. I lay most of the issues at writer Katie Dippold’s door:  the scenes are long, lazy and the episodes of (literal) toilet humour – playing to Schumer’s apparent strengths/demographic – are just vile. The story simply doesn’t make sense from scene to scene – and don’t ask me how it winds up in Colombia from Ecuador. I mean I understand South American kidnap and murder gangs don’t go through passport control, but …  Misdirected by Jonathan Levine. Schumer is morphing into Will Ferrell. I still love Goldie! Give her a better film!

The Naked Jungle (1954)

I’ll go a long way to see an ant movie but this is only worth it if you’re feeling in the mood for a masochistic melodrama with a two-mile-wide by twenty-mile-long column of bugs at the tail end. Eleanor Parker is the proxy mail order bride who fetches up on Charlton Heston’s South American cocoa plantation at the turn of the century but he doesn’t much like her and takes agin her when he realises she’s a widow. He hasn’t really been there or done that way out in the Amazon jungle so she has him at something of a disadvantage. Some torrid and rather suggestive arguments lead him to send her back to N’Oleans but their gallop upriver is halted by the insects, he greases up to burn them out and she sleeps through the worst of it. Golly, they sure don’t make them like this any more! Based on a story by Carl Stephenson this was adapted by Ranald MacDougall and blacklistees Ben Maddow and Philip Yordan, directed by Byron Haskin and produced by George Pal. This was released March 3rd 1954 so it’s practically an anniversary screening. Personally I prefer Them! and Phase IV. Oh my heaving bosom!

The Colony (2015)

Aka Colonia. This is the film that infamously earned just £47 on its opening weekend in London last year. That means about 5 people paid to see it. Maybe it’s the subject matter. You don’t need me to tell you that anywhere Germans gather in large numbers there’s going to be a problem. They know it themselves at this point. This takes place in Chile in 1973 when the country was at the high point of unrest and General Pinochet was taking over in a vicious military coup. People were rounded up in the streets and identified by masked informers, and shot in football stadia. And caught up in this are Daniel (Daniel Bruhl) and Lena (Emma Watson), a German activist and photographer and his airline stewardess girlfriend who goes to his rescue when he’s kidnapped by the secret police and delivered to a torture camp run by cult leader Paul Schaefer (Michael Nyqvist). Daniel fakes disability to survive beatings and electrocution; she fakes religious fervour to gain admission to this supposed religious cult and finds herself inside a major circle of child abusers and … inbred Germans. There are a lot of them in South America. It’s not a very well observed drama and frankly despite its being rooted in truth – just watch the German Embassy sell them out when they eventually escape the madness, into more madness – it made me giggle at times.  Not, I fear, the desired response. Watson is not very good and Bruhl is doing what they say you should never do as an actor (remember Harrison Ford?!) – going full retard (well, sort of… ) The fact is this is actually the makings of a brilliant documentary, as the closing credits make clear:  the real camp was a centre for Government-ordered torture, the German Embassy was in collusion, Pinochet never admitted to it, and Schaefer wasn’t caught until 2002 – where? Argentina, of course, that other haven for Nazis. Hundreds of bodies were buried at Colonia Dignidad. We are far from Carmen Miranda territory.  Directed by Florian Gallenberger from a screenplay he co-wrote with Torsten Wenzel.

Romancing the Stone (1984)

“Wilder? Joan Wilder?!” What must it be like to meet your Number One fan and they don’t want to hobble you like in Misery but to help you out in the middle of the jungle in South America?! Ah, just perfect this, a romantic action adventure that brought Kathleen Turner to megastardom for a short spell, playing the unmarried romantic novelist who’s allergic to everything. After completing her latest magnum opus she rushes to Colombia when her sister Elaine (!) (Mary Ellen Trainor) calls for help. She brings with her a treasure map sent by her late brother in law who’s been hacked to death:  the map is the ransom for her sister’s freedom. Antiquities hunters Ira (Zack Norman) and Ralph (Danny De Vito) are holding her but Joan gets the wrong bus at the airport on the helpful advice of Zolo (her brother in law’s killer) and when she realises, causes it to crash.and is rescued by exotic bird smuggler Jack Colton (Michael Douglas) promising to repay him for his wrecked Jeep with travellers’ cheques. A love-hate relationship ensues as they spend the night in a crashed aeroplane, dance the hell out of each other, get help from a drug lord who’s her biggest fan (I love that scene!), and find the enormous emerald that’s the cause of all the trouble in the first place. “Aw man, the Doobie Brothers broke up!” moans Jack on finding an old issue of Rolling Stone. Witty, fast-moving, scintillating actioner (written in 1978) with great performances from all concerned. Turner is just great in one of the best movies of the Eighties. The horrible coda to all this is that the brilliant first-time writer, Diane Thomas, was killed in the Porsche Carrera gifted her by Michael Douglas when her boyfriend was driving her home after she’d had a few. The novelisation of this and its sequel, which she was unable to write because of being contracted to doing a draft of Always for Spielberg, is credited to one Joan Wilder. Tremendous, timeless entertainment. Directed by Robert Zemeckis