Ruined pieces of nature

"I can't be your friend," warns vampire youngster Eli who's befriended the bullied Oskar (aged 12) in the subtitled Swedish film Let the Right One In. Receiving another outing (Momentum released last year and on DVD) at the open air Somerset House screenings (sponsored by Film 4), a crowd of 2,000 (many seemed not to have seen the film before) nabbed every blanket space. The rain held off and you could feel the bodies heat the sanctum of the courtyard's four walls on a predictably chilly London summer Saturday night. With a ticket price of £14.50 (£18 double bills, not including further purchase of blanket or pillow) none seemed disappointed with many descending in vampire makeup and staying well past the last tube to see The Lost Boys after intermission.
Opera this weekend at Somerset House
For loads of free film admission try the Portobello Film Festival.

In the warm-up intro (including tame expletive) by Film 4's rep, the crowd booed when told of Hollywood's intention to remake Let the Right One In. If the film's plot were scribbled and popped it into a hat (John Ajvide Lindqvist's screenplay from his own chilling novel) alongside other Hollywood vampire scenarios, it wouldn't appear to be in very different company. What amazed at the Somerset House screening (excellent sound and projection as you'd bloody well expect for the price) was the film's 'cinema magic'.

Audiences don't analyse films (thank goodness for the world's geeks) they experience them (most normal people barely seeing a couple of films per month unlike the critics). Some may note a lack of actors' chemistry etc etc but few are ever able to delineate the individual virtues of director, script, cinematographer, music, editing and acting. Elements that should feel seamless yet more often are threadbare. Take Hoyte van Hoytema's exquisite cinematography for Let the Right One In. The symmetrical use of doubling (get it? -masc/fem, vampire/mortal, father/son, fire/air/earth/water) could seem almost artistically laboured if it weren't welded to the film's other constituents. You barely notice this repetition on a first viewing. The film is all to do with Oskar and Eli - we learn little about the bullies, and even Eli's father (more detailed in the novel) becomes somewhat secondary. And as with all great films we exit quietly carrying off our subliminal knowledge of the protagonists into a world that's less real in and of itself and more so in light of the film inside us. Double bills thence demand a master chef in programming.

Director Tomas Alfredson: "Everyone reads one of two newspapers in the morning, one of two at night, watches one of two news shows in which politicians go on about that submarine which ran aground on the coast. Two ways of thinking, red or blue. How do they stand it, those who live there in spite of it all? The people who don't turn to each other for warmth, who hold their tongues and turn their backs for fear of cracking into pieces like statutes, for fear of killing each other?"

Director of The Final Joey Stewart has been working in movies ever since his break as a PA on Oliver Stone's JFK in 1990. His debut horror feature of bullied teenagers dutifully follows instructions on the revenge bottle. A handsome DVD when it's released that will lift the spirits of the oppressed on a Friday night, while not being particularly original or inventive.

Another debut and winner of this year's World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance Undertow bodes well for writer/director Javier Fuentes-León's future (on the cards is a thriller). And though some may feel slightly underwhelmed, the film's quiet, insidious quality is also its virtue while never overplaying it's gay relationship theme. Fuentes-León is also adept at extracting great performances from his actors and his cinematographer.

But if you were to see one 'art-house' movie this summer Sebastian Silva's The Maid (La Nana) is probably the one (Sundance 2009 Grand Jury Prize). It resembles a little Paque Via (as yet unreleased from last year's London Film Festival) but is far funnier. What makes Silva's mostly hand held digital film stand head and shoulders above others is an unforced observation of daily mundanity. Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) is the taciturn maid servicing the middle-class Valdes family. Hers is not a revelatory story and that, of course, is also the point. Nor is the film overtly 'political' in any way. The inevitable problem with cinema distribution these days is that a justly poignant, somewhat indy film, like Precious gets hyped to the 'nth' degree. As LA Film Festival artistic director David Ansen reflected in an interview not long ago there can be queues around the snowmen at Sundance but when a foreign film plays its 'home crowd' in New York there can be barely a trickle outside the theatre. The Maid is one such film that deserves just as much hype as a 'Precious '. It's just not sporting the same colours.

"My loneliness was my only friend," says Angelina Jolie's eponymous Salt (an ironic stab perhaps at SALT - the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty). She's accused of being a sleeper Russian spy: trained with other Soviet orphans in childhood, and coaxed with covert identities that masqueraded as love and affection. Don't be put off by the negative press on this film: director Philip Noyce has never delivered a pic not worth one's time. It also makes interesting comparison to The Expendables this week: a movie with more single product above the title marquee action names (so much so that two go uncredited) than you could throw a script at - probably why one seems obscured. But again, don't be put off - all these guys are consummate in holding your screen attention.

Moreover, Stallone's workmanlike direction of his production crafts-people shows up the slack charlatanism of many Hollywood helmsmen. It's the finesse of a Philip Noyce director we miss, making such talent all the more appreciated. No damp praise intended, but Stallone 'gets on with it' delivering a punching product as he's always done much to the chagrin of his detractors. The Expendables is Salt without the detail - something in a sense it never needs. What would've totally succeeded is more humour - a talent all of those actors have though rarely get the chance to show off. We're both the same "we're both dead inside" says bitter, mercenary CIA op Eric Roberts to Stallone in the final shootout.

Kurt Wimmer's Salt script also deals with childhood, the notion of safety and "the arse-wipes" (The Expendables) that are humanity at its worst and are often most prevalent. Without plot spoiling, when Dolph Lundgrun buddies in the bar with the others, forgiven after trying to blow (or in his case whack) all their heads off, it's not so unbelievable. Life for them is about survival not friendship. "If we need to loose someone for the greater good we will." (Salt) Mickey Rourke's monologue in The Expendables is shot entirely in big close up i.e. nudge - this is profound - like hearing a cello solo far off before the waves of Hollywood's score come crashing down. She walked in. A woman without a past and without a future.

Salt was a script originally slated for Tom Cruise but he fares far better with Knight and Day - entertainment not a million miles away from The Expendables, just with a lot more panache and wit. Salt has gravitas thanks to the extensive research of the production team. It's also Noyce's first studio pic in 10 years: "When I first read [the script], I was overwhelmed by the intoxicating combination of historical fact and popcorn fiction...a film that both pleases the mind and tickles the senses". And Jolie is consummately convincing (more so than Cruise could have been) echoing writer Maxim Gorky's idea that only women ever really know the future because they bear human life inside themselves. The A-Team (based on the 80s TV series) is simply great fun and for most part believable. (Could 4 hi-tech parachutes exist strong enough to keep a tank afloat as it free falls from 20,000 feet? Perhaps.)

Wimmer's Salt script hasn't quite escaped the Hollywood studio formula but at least the handcuffs are off. But when one's suspension of belief starts buckling, belief in events is strained just that bit too far. Then again, life is full of 'buckling' - hence this blog! Or is it that in reality, gritty popcorn and gravitas make very uneasy bedfellows? As Inception director Christopher Nolan observed it's about being "in the maze with the characters...stories that are too objective where you're hovering above the maze watching people make the wrong turns are a little frustrating". We know where we are with The Karate Kid (beautifully/cleverly shot in China by Roger Pratt). The integrity of Mr. Han (Jackie Chan) results in this martial arts prize fighter eking out an existence as a maintenance man. He too has a monologue like Mickey Rourke's - perpetual self-inflicted guilt ever since a car accident. But in the end, good triumphs over an evil will to power and the kid will have the inner and outer strength to be bullied no more. All thanks, of course, to Jackie Chan.

Salt is an exhilarating short story until it's time to duck into the Presidential bunker. Then, the film starts aching to be a novel - yikes! but it isn't long before the movie credits crawl. Like one of those film serials one used to watch as a kid you wish they'd waited until next week to reveal the short conclusion. And the film practically sells itself as a franchise thriller replete with rare Hollywood cliffhanger: who is Salt, where is Salt, what is Salt? Governments are there to reassure their citizens of how 'safe' we all are in their hands and never how vulnerable. It sounded crazy to some at the time but there was 'method in the madness' of the Bush administration when after the 9/11 attacks it asked Hollywood creators to come up with other possible attack scenarios. The Salt team worked hand in glove with former CIA advisors to be factually accurate. Indeed, as a kid Noyce used to follow people taking after his dad who was an Australian spook.

Paradoxically, it's the artifice of Let the Right One In that lets in the truth- the space in the architecture. Salt doesn't give itself time for that but as with all Noyce movies it makes you think not only about the subject matter but also how the film's placed within genre and its close cousins.

Humour is the distinguishing element of Oliver Stone's doco South of the Border, in which he visits the 7 South American presidents frequently maligned on Capitol Hill, by the CIA and the US media. He jokes with Argentine's Cristina Kirchner about her shoes and with Chávez (Venezuela) - or was it Morales (Bolivia) - about the President reading a heavy political time before bed and he chews coca leaves (good for altitude sickness) with Morales. If it weren't for Stone's involvement such a doco would have been relegated into 'well-meaning' but low key slots. People from all American political parties respect and listen to Oliver Stone. And there's a doco feel to all the director's work - knowing that there are many sides to the one story. Stone is one American brave enough to crane his neck and look around those corners - not as a nosy kid, more the neighbourhood cop. A shame his questions tend toward those of a rookie and not a detective.

For most people life, alas, doesn't resolve as does Let the Right One In or The Karate Kid. It veers far closer to co-writer/director Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces. Restored for this year's 40th anniversary by Sony Pictures (Film Forum this Feb/March in NYC), Park Circus has just released the film in London. "All the people in my writing are different aspects of myself," she says, "and each of us has feminine and masculine components in our nature," confessed the film's co-writer Carole Eastman (aka Adrien Joyce) in a 1972 interview on American women in film making for Time Magazine.

Jack Nicholson's 'Bobby' - Robert Eroica Dupea (named after Beethoven's 3rd Symphony) - must really have been a great classical pianist for his sister Partita (Lois Smith) to so love him; not simply a brother. After years of working the blue-collar oil wells (long having abandoned the keyboard), he returns to the family home on an island off the coast of Washington state. En route we get one of cinema's classic scenes when Bobby can't get his toast at a roadside diner:"Okay, I'll make it as easy for you as I can. I'd like an omelet, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast, no mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce . . . now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules."

Although it's a film of its time with requisite rebellion it is also out of time with echos of playwright Eugene O'Neill's family dramas (the Royal National Theatre recently hosted a wonderful revival of his first published play Beyond the Horizon). Like a magnet Bobby's constantly drawn back to his family yet equally keeps turning around and repelling himself. In trying to please everyone he ultimately pleases no-one, least of all himself. It's not that this family isn't strong, just not strong enough and/or their support mechanism is too close to what they are all running away from. What makes Five Easy Pieces such an iconic film is that Bobby is the character we'd all like to be, dream to be, should and definitely should not be.

He has a fling with a student house guest Catherine (Susan Anspach) who asks him to play something. He proffers a mediocre performance (intentional by the soundtrack's pianist Pearl Kaufman) of Chopin's simple haunting E Minor Prelude. When she enthuses he just taunts and enrages her. "I faked a little Chopin. You faked a big response," he grins. They are both faking it, the family is faking it, the world is always faking it to some extent. Bobby is a shit to women because he's a tortuous shit to himself. The piano becomes a metaphor for everything in the world that is gentle, humble, creative, quiet and necessarily cocooned in some way. Bobby is brave enough to break out and learn that the world isn't just full of butterflies. It ain't necessaily so but for so many talents like Bobby's it just always is. You want to climb the distant mountains that you can't or wont assail within. Is there artifice in this film? This is early work of the great cinematographer László Kovács (Easy Rider). As Daniel Barenboim showed in his masterclasses on the Beethoven piano sonata, the more you excavate with precise brushwork the more you can sit effortlessly looking out at the ocean and begin to fly. And as Barenboim knows only too well, nothing will ever, could ever be perfect. To some extent everything is always an illusion. It's an umbilical chord of trust.

I sort of imagined a scene akin to Woody Allen's Annie Hall where a guy's in the movie queue opining Marshall McLuhan's philosophy and the great man pops up the rear in a cameo exclaiming that the Columbia professor clearly knows nothing of his work. Beethoven appears behind Barenboim moaning that he couldn't hear a bloody thing when composing the sonatas, and that Barenboim's got it all wrong. But now dead, Ludwig hears everything though can't see a f***ing thing and that Barenboim sounds like such a genius whatever he does is fine by old Ludwig. Stranger things happen in Alaska.
Trailer

Or what about the Welsh who escaped to Patagonia in the late 1700's? The doco Seperado! by singer/songwriter Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals) goes in search of René Griffiths, obscure 60s pop star, who sang Welsh ballads a la Argentine cowboy - turns out he was an uncle. Great stuff!

Initially, Ben Chace and Sam Fleischner's Wah Do Dem (Jamaican patois for “What’s wrong with them?”) doesn't seem that promising. Jilted Max (Sean Bones) is vacationing alone on a Caribbean cruise (the filmmakers won the trip in a raffle), but wakes up on a Jamaican beach fleeced of everything. Everyone's worse nightmare as he barefoots it to Kingston's American Consulate 48 hours away. By following life's interesting details, this film is a lesson in just how subliminally powerful cinema can be.