The Kids Are All Right

As part of my annual watch-as-many-nominated-films-as-possible-before-the-Oscars rush, I recently sat down to watch The Kids Are All Right. Despite being nominated in no fewer than four awards, including Best picture and Best Actress, my expectations were muted. I mean, middlebrow, middle-class comedy-drama isn’t exactly the most enticing genre for a twenty-three year-old male. But in this instance, I am very pleased to admit that my lack of enthusiasm was sorely misplaced. The Kids Are All Right is a warm, unconventional and excellent film.

No doubt causing a quiver of controversy among the American Right, the movie details the fall-out after the two teenage children of a comfortable suburban L.A. family go in search of their sperm-donor biological father; the catch being that the two parents are a lesbian couple Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening). As director Lisa Cholodenko is a lesbian mother whose child was conceived by donor sperm and co-writer Stuart Blumberg donated sperm himself while at college, the plot has a veracity and a heart-felt feel to it.

The film starts with an incongruous montage of 15 year-old Laser (Josh Hutcherson) skating, snorting and smoking with a buddy of his, accompanied by the spiky, up-tempo ‘Cousins’ by Vampire Weekend. This opening, combined with the title, is calculated subterfuge, misleading the viewer into thinking that it may be another teen coming of age drama. A relatively minor constituent part, the film is much more than that. Laser’s wayward behaviour is contrasted with his saintly, science whizz sister, Joni (Mis Wasikowska), who is preparing to leave for college at the end of the summer and suffering from unrequited love. On Laser’s instigation, the pair go in search of their biological father, who turns out to be So-Cal dropout, turned successful organic restaurateur, Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Initially mildly irritating, given his penchant for staring glassy-eyed and studding his sentences with “right on”, Paul impresses Joni and disappoints Laser.

It is when their meeting comes to the attention of their “Moms” that the real drama begins to unfold. Doctor Nic is the bibulous, stricter parent and Jules the stay-at-home mother who never quite became an architect; their difference in approach in some way the route of the troubles. After an affair begins between Paul and Jules, the very fabric of their relationship is strained and put to the test. It is as if the conventional is in someway challenging their situation.

A naturalistic, organic film filled with incredible performances, it is engaging and amusing all at once. It is not hard to see why Bening won the Golden Globe as she, Ruffalo and Moore are fantastic in inhabiting the roles they play. The two children also deserve a special mention for their acting. The Kids Are All Right is an intelligent, poignant and witty portrait of a very modern family facing very modern issues. It is certainly well worth both all the acclaim and a watch.

(Out on DVD on 21 March)

Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky has always delighted in making idiosyncratic (read: a little bit mental) psychological thrillers. This trait can be traced from his brilliant debut, π, through the cult classic Requiem for a Dream, right up to his current film, Black Swan. Fans of Aronofsky’s earlier work who were in some way indifferent to the mawkish and depressing The Wrestler will not be disappointed; the film is unhinged delight of a picture with a strong hint of melodrama about it.

Heavily reminiscent of giallo classics such as Dario Argento’s Suspiria, it tells the story of twenty-something New York ballet dancer, Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman), and her struggles to play the lead role in a production of Swan Lake. Brittle Nina can easily pull off the vulnerable white swan but cannot, rather obviously, master the darker, more mysterious black swan. Already haunted by her domineering mother (Barbara Hershey) and the ageing, past-it lead ballerina she has replaced (Winona Rider), eating little and self-harming, Nina’s mind begins to come apart at the seams. To make matters worse, a new dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), has joined the company and she just happens to be the exact opposite of Sayers: a free-spirited, uninhibited minx perfect for the portrayal of the black swan.

As the tension ratchets up inexorably, Nina plunges headlong into an eerie psychosis. She begins to see things and her reflection continues to stare back at her long after she has looked away. Added to that, her mother’s creepy infantilization and attempts at vicarious satisfaction become more obvious and they begin to clash. The paranoia doesn’t stop there as Nina is convinced that Lily is conspiring with the Gallic sleaze of a director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), to take her part and an uncanny, feather-like rash begins to appear on her back.

So far, so ridiculous, one might say. But it is exactly that horror movie-style, bizarro lack of plausibility that lends the film such an exquisite charm and is so refreshing from a “big” awards contender. The tale of Swan Lake is so well known that there was hardly much scope for ventures into terra incognita, anyway. The performances, while a touch one-note (as befits the picture) are universally brilliant: a key piece in the films creepy crescendo. Those who go in expecting a strict, realist representation of a young woman battling to overcome her demons will be sorely disappointed. But those who go in open-minded and prepared to be taken along on a hysterical, jumpy, scary, visceral ride will be richly rewarded. Well worth the fare (even in London), go and catch it before Portman inevitably wins the Best Actress Oscar.

The Secret Life of Words

Henry Hitchings’ achieved that rarest of feats in 2008, winning the John Rhys Llewellyn Prize for a work of non-fiction: The Secret Life of Words. For any lover of the English language and its near-infinite richness the book is hard to beat. Meticulously conceived and executed, the book tracks English’s development as a language from its first stuttering Anglo-Saxon steps to its current incarnation as the world’s lingua franca. Through examining the foreign influence on the English language, Hitchings first illuminates the British national character. Then, by examining human beings’ relationship with language and the influence of technology on the world, it mutates into something all the more universal.

The author is an English lecturer at UCL and famously wrote a book about Samuel Johnson and his dictionary; on this showing it is not hyperbole to suggest that Hitchings shares something of the doctor’s love for scholarship and language. The breadth of the subjects and words covered boggles. Seemingly everything from Shakespeare to bukkake to Beowulf to Marco Materazzi is covered with great wit and verve.

To me, part of the book’s great attraction was the fact that each one of the chapters – manageable at around twenty pages – can be taken as a free-standing entity or as part of the narrative whole: namely the development of the English language. The chapters that I found most interesting were ‘Angst’, which examines twentieth-century preoccupations; ‘Blizzard’, which analyzes American English and the United States; and ‘Invade’, which details the Anglo-Saxon languages early struggles for assertion in Great Britain. Every anecdote is studded with a wry observation or humour and the Hitchings’ sheer joy is contagious.

One can hope to take more than a plethora of great facts (such as there are more words in the English language of Greek origin than there were words in Ancient Greek) away from this erudite-yet-accessible book. It certainly helped me to better understand British and European history, colonial or otherwise, as well as to better appreciate my mother tongue. A joyous celebration of a book; read it.

Dogtooth

The winner of the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes, this incredible and scary Greek film has recently been nominated for an Oscar. Yet, with the usual dull and faintly saccharine fare nominated for Best Picture, this film couldn’t be more different. Profoundly idiosyncratic, one watches transfixed at all the bizarre-yet-familiar, askew images that flash past one’s eyes. Surely influenced by the Josef Fritzl case of a few years back, the film details the warped lives of a superficially normal, middle-class Greek family. Home-schooled, the three children are taught the wrong meanings of words, encouraged to act like dogs and forbidden to leave the beautiful grounds of the compound they live in. Why things are as they are is only ever hinted at and a sexuality both innocent and otherwise casts a shadow over the proceedings.


The action starts with an ingenious scene in which the three kids are being played a tape-recording teaching them the incorrect meanings of the words like “motorway” and “road-trip”, seemingly needlessly, which immediately plunges the viewer in to this world of sinister strangeness. The action doesn’t let up from there as we see the paterfamilias driving a female security guard from the factory where he works to his home to service his twenty-something son. With the children kept in this stymied state of childishness, the father is the only one to leave their house, going to and from work and running the necessary errands. Inevitably curious, his children yearn to know of the dangers that dwell outside their four walls, their stultified cabin fever leading to random acts of violence against one another.


The cinematography of the film really is something to marvel at, as every single shot exudes a bright and dreamy beauty. At times, the action is shown using a Haneke-esque fixed shot, which beheads some characters and lends the images a Big Brother feel. The acting, it must be said, is universally brilliant. One really feels drawn in to the strange irrational logic (if you’ll permit the oxymoron) of the household, whilst simultaneously being appalled. As the film meanders along unfussily, the gradual accretion of detail provides the plot with real impetus as the security guard is cast off for leading one daughter astray, the children long to be out, and the real meaning of dogtooth is revealed. A mysterious older brother and a Doberman being trained by an outsider deepen the mystery.


A real strength of the movie is that it makes no attempt to justify the perverse actions of the dominant father and his attendant wife. It would surely be impossible in 90 minutes, anyway. What it does provide you with is a blackly humourous, starkly individual exposition of the family. Watch it and be gripped right up until the brilliant ending. Unmissable.

The King's Speech

British films are an odd one. For a number of reasons, I never know how to react to them. The chest-beating, patriotic part of me always wants to think that they are excellent and my other more curmudgeonly part wants to put them down as the cheap, illegitimate step-child of Hollywood. This dilemma – American screenwriter aside – was in full force when I went to go and see The King’s Speech this week. For, that Colin Firth seemed a shoo-in for The Best Actor Oscar and the movie was nominated for another 11 gongs made me vicariously proud; yet I also thought it would be a cynical, trite royal story constructed solely to bother award ceremonies and please the British and American publics. In a way, both of my initial fears and feelings were confirmed.


As everyone will already know, The King’s Speech is about Bertie, The future King George VI of England and his attempts to overcome his stammer before, during and after the abdication crisis. His final goal is addressing the nation by radio at the outbreak of WWII. Said in those terms, it shouldn’t work; but it resoundingly does. What might initially be seen as a fairly pointless story about an uptight, unsavoury and unwilling monarch is granted a degree of universality through his unconventional relationship with equally unorthodox Aussie speech therapist, Lionel Logue. This ‘bromance’ (as Colin Firth has incongruously described it) is the source of much laughter and the human heart of the film. Bertie, or “His Majesty” as he insists on being called, must conquer his inhibitions to overcome his stammer and be King.


As has been mentioned, Colin Firth is magnificent as the stuttering king: convincingly stammering the audience into a visceral frenzy. The supporting cast, especially Geoffrey Rush as Logue and Helena Bonham-Carter as Queen Elizabeth, are also fantastic. So what was it that left me somewhat cold? The movie also seemed well-pitched and very well directed. There have been multiple reports of audience ovations in Dublin and elsewhere. But somehow it didn’t click with me.


It wasn’t really the re-writing  (or airbrushing, depending on your take) of a mildly unsavoury, Nazi-sympathizing chapter in British history that left me indifferent. Though, while I do find that slightly unsettling, one must inevitably bow to the spectacle in these types of films and provide entertainment, not existential angst. I think I simply found it too perfectly-crafted: a decent film about a human subject that held no interest for me at all. Shallow where it could have been profound, it seemed to skirt the big issues. Involving but pointless as it had nothing new to say about human nature, it was a very contradictory affair. Worth going to see if only to see what all the fuss is about, 127 Hours has my vote.

Blue Valentine

Don’t take your girlfriend, they said. Depressing but like real life, they said. Oscar-worthy performances, they said. While all of the above are true, and my girlfriend did leave slightly red-eyed, it was, above all, a superb, transcendentally brilliant film. Intriguing, gripping and heartbreaking in equal measure, it brilliantly walks the line between indie romance and dirty realism.

Blue Valentine tells the outwardly simple story of Dean and Cindy, their relationship and its seemingly terminal decline; it starts with a scream and ends in a firework display. But this is certainly not the stuff of the Hollywood rom-com. For one, it has a quite controversial past as the American board of censors took umbrage at its graphic descriptions of sex – and particularly oral sex – and slapped it with an NC-17 rating, precluding TV advertising. Although it was rescinded on following an appeal, the anecdote certainly serves to show the sort of feathers the film has and will ruffle.

Through a series of flashbacks, the sparse storyline is leant a tragic poignancy as events slide inexorably towards the cathartic conclusion. There we see Dean and Cindy’s background, when they first meet, their wedding; here Gosling’s natural charm and attractiveness shine through. He and Michelle Williams are coruscating as the two leads and inhabit the characters with 70s De Niro brilliance. Their dealings with their daughter, the way they go about their lives and, above all, the way they are with each other contain a seldom-seen realistic quality. The writing and the seemingly haphazard accretion of details, causes, reasons and recriminations only add to this feeling. The fact that Gosling looking around a stone and half a head of hair lighter is meant to signify the nadir of early middle-age loserdom would be my only complaint.

Any film with a (fitting and excellent) soundtrack by Grizzly Bear is going to be leant a stately melancholy, at least in my eyes, and this is no different. Its powerful examination of romance, love, sexuality and the ageing process lingers long in the mind. I am certainly still thinking of it forty-eight hours later. A must-see.

127 Hours

Danny Boyle’s new film doesn’t need much introduction. After the supernova success of Slumdog Millionaire, culminating in the Best Director and Best Picture Oscars, the director is very much hot property. Add respected rising star James Franco, a host of great reviews and smattering of Golden Globe nominations to the mix and you start to see why it has been such a talking point. I can, however, safely report that all the talk is justified. As is the praise.

The film does, of course, tell the story of American thrill-seeker Aron Rolston, who, after a freak accident in 2003, got his arm trapped under a boulder in the desert where, after almost five days, he was forced to cut his own arm off with a blunt knife. One has to ask himself how a story that everyone has heard, with an ending that everyone knows, which essentially takes place in a giant crack can 1) be entertaining, or 2) have any dramatic tension. But somehow, miracle worker that he is, Boyle manages it. The film is both engaging, gripping, fun and, above all, incredibly well-made.

It starts in a caffeine-induced frenzy, frantic action appearing in split-screen, accompanied by the infectious, thumping 'Never Hear Surf Music Again', by Free Blood. The action does not let up from there as we see Aron preparing for his trip, not telling anyone where he is going and forgetting his pen-knife. We then see him drive to the wilderness, leave his car and then cycle (intermittently punctuated by jumps and wheelies – natch) the 17-odd miles to the fateful Blue John Canyon. There he meets two young, female hikers, proceeds to show them a secret drop into a hidden pool, before leaving them as quickly as he has met them. There is the faintest hint of attraction between Aron and the two girls but, for the most part, he is in his own self-absorbed bubble. And then comes the accident.

It is here that Franco comes into his own, as we spend at least 90% of the rest of the movie in his capable company. Where others might o played Aron as a self-satisfied bore, Franco finds a novel humanity and empathy. Claustrophobically  and inventively (not to mention brilliantly) shot by cinematographers Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak, the closeness never once gets tiring. The action is interlaced with various fantasies, memories and remeniscences of Aron’s that bring his desperate, dehydrated plight into clear focus. Family, friends and a vague failed romance bring a gentle poignancy to the events.

When the time comes for the ‘hero’ to amputate his own arm I was engrossed. Then I was grossed out, as the bone-cracking, tendon-snapping, flesh-carving spectacle brutally played out before my eyes. If there was any message to be had, it seemed to revolve around Ralston not forgetting his nearest-and-dearest and needing this personal tragedy to paradoxically bring him closer to them and make him a better person. But all that is an irrelevance – go and see it; I can’t think of many better or more fun ways to spend ninety minutes.

Blood Meridian

First published in 1985, Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece remains as unsettling today as it was on publication. Its infrequently brutal, crude and unemotional depictions of atrocities linger long in the memory. Nonetheless it is an essential novel that aspires to greatness and deals with the weightiest of themes: man’s primordial need for violence.

It tells the story of a young Tennessean known only as the ‘kid’, who is first orphaned and then drawn into a nightmarish world of savagery. He is initially recruited by a gang of filibusters on the U.S.–Mexico border in the 1850s at the time of the Texas-Mexico war. Later, out of luck he then joins the Glanton Gang, a now-infamous band of mercenary scalp-hunters employed by the state of Chihuahua to protect its citizens from rampaging hordes of Apache Indians. Although readily apparent before, it is with Glanton that the primeval lawlessness of the time comes into sharp focus; massacres, rape and pillaging are as common as in the time of the Vikings. As both the whites and the Indians equally partake in the maelstrom, we become aware that this is no ordinary Cowboys and Indians tale.

Among Glanton’s men is the massive, menacing Judge Holden, a hairless, seven-feet tall, twenty-one stone giant who is the apotheosis of bloodthirsty evil. Apparently a historical figure, he is a fine fiddle player, balletic dancer and a polymath capable of holding court on topics as wide-ranging as astrology, philosophy and draughtsmanship. He is also one of the most sinister and memorable characters I have ever encountered; recently voted one of the hundred best characters in all American fiction, he is almost a reason in himself to read the book.

However, one of the things that most impresses throughout the novel is the prose. For, as in all of McCarthy’s books, the type is shorn of any extraneous marks, such as inverted commas or semicolons, and the text is left to speak for itself. And speak it does: the rhythmical, lyrical prose at once evoking Milton and the Bible, the extended descriptions of the sky and landscape evoking Homer’s Greek epics. This allusiveness and ambition never comes over as bombastic, it merely lends the events an importance and grandeur that makes one sit up and take notice.

Indeed, McCarthy does have much to say about the vagaries and violence of our species. Thus, his interweaving of fact and fiction, peppered with a web of allusions, is his own way of lending credence to his views, whilst striving for immortality through fiction. For fans of McCarthy, attracted by his brilliant, The Road: this is an impeccable next stop; for people new to his oeuvre: this is an enchanting, beguiling, hypnotic read. For firm fans of McCarthy: why not have a re-read?