1964: Kiss Me, Stupid

Kiss Me, Stupid (Wilder, 1964) 9/10

With his renowned variety show, Dino (Dean Martin) is the star of the Las Vegas strip. He croons, he jests, he acts, he sings. He is a complete entertainer and an attractive draw for both sexes. The bright lights of Vegas however cannot mask Dino's blazing Hollywood aspirations. Placing his Sands' revue on hiatus, Dino absconds from the legions of beauties wanting "one for the road," hops in his Italian convertible and roars away to Hollywood for a profitable season of film shoots and television specials.

Along the desolate desert highway, Dino detours through the craggy hovel of Climax, Nevada. In this lifeless hamlet, two local struggling tunesmiths-paranoid piano teacher (Ray Walston) and sloven gas attendant Barney (Cliff Osmond)-sabotage the lounge lizard's sleek ride in order to peddle their infantile romantic ditties such as I'm A Poached Egg and I'm Taking Mom To The Junior Prom, Cos' She's A Better Twister Than My Sister. Adrift from the glitz of Las Vegas' bounty of casinos and his endless cache of booze and birds, the sleazy Dino salivates for some interim "action" to temper his cravings. Prowling for sex, Dino's arouses Orville's marital fears that his attractive wife Zelda (Felicia Farr) will soon be added to the crooner's bevvy of conquests.

Released in 1964 as the Production Code's moral leash began to slack, Kiss Me, Stupid acquired notoriety for its risque humour and moral ambiguities. Although tame by contemporary standards, Wilder's film, alongside Elia Kazan's Babydoll, was bestowed with a rare "condemned" rating by the Catholic League of Decency. Reviewers were scathing in their distate for Wilder's vulgar humour, theatre owners refused to run the film and audiences shunned United Artist's tacit release on its artsy Lopert imprint.

Viewed almost forty-five years after its brief original run, Kiss Me, Stupid emerges as a forward-thinking picture; a classic farce ahead of its time and its audience. British poet Philip Larkin may have chimed sexual intercourse began in 1963,but by 1964 it was openly visible. Unlike, the "safe" sex comedies of Doris Day and Rock Hudson, Wilder's film does not linger around the bedroom door,but rather breaks the door down. The repetoire of double-entendres at Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond's disposal are not disguised in coded layers; they operate with liberated abandon.

Sexual witticisms drench Wilder and Diamond's script in a manner akin to the innuendo adorned flavourings of Moliere and Shakespeare. Like the latter's Comedy of Errors,Kiss Me, Stupid hinges upon mistaken identities, infidelity and bawdy sexual humour to enliven the film's discourse on love, sex, greed and marriage. Furthermore, Wilder's film exploits Dean Martin's offscreen persona to create a credible early example of a celebrity engaging in cinematic self-parody.

In a role originally intended for Peter Sellers, Walston plays Orville Spooner; a nervy, suspicious eccentric whose wife Zelda is deemed the most beautiful woman in town. After five years of marriage, the wiry and disheveled Spooner still remains stunned that Zelda accepted his marriage proposal. Therefore, Orville treats Zelda's every word and decision with mistrust; fearing she will leave their penurious and rural homestead. The arrival of the sex-hungry and leering Dino emboldens Orville's selfish practices.

Isolated in a backwater desert community, Orville lusts for wealth, primarily as a security mechanism to ensure Zelda remains his. These chauvinistic and greedy attitudes shape Orville's conception of marriage. His worries about being able to provide for Zelda are informed by the material culture Dino represents, rather than the romantic notions his loving wife adheres toward; whilst his controlling nature strengthens his unconscious desire to be a strict patriarchal figure. Therefore, Dino is viewed as an antithetical figure representative of the carefree glamourous playboys viewed in other films of the period such as Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

Orville's response to local prostitute Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak)- whom he and Barney hire to placate Dino's urges-is interesting in that whilst the local piano teacher preaches devotion to his wife, he increasingly appears attracted to the doting, flu-rattled Polly, whose failed ambitions and eagerness to please appear better suited to Orville's clingy personality and brittle self-confidence.

Written by Wilder and his frequent collaborator I.A.L Diamond, Kiss Me Stupid is a raw, layered farce. Concocted as a comedy of errors, Wilder's film is a sharply tuned comedy of errors; cooly constructed around Orville's personality flaws which fate him to the collapse of his selfish web of deceitful ideas and plans. In using black and white cinematography, rather than colour, Wilder enhances the picture: capturing the drained, monotone environment highlighted by an unimaginative and dreary populace who spend their evenings crowded around the colour televisions in a local hardware store.

Walston's solid performance captures his character's hyperactive desperation and frenzied ways. Dean Martin simply adopts a cool demeanor in a role that requires the singer-cum-actor to simply be himself: allowing Wilder's stinging humour to poke fun at Martin and the Rat Pack's popular image. Yet, the genuine star of the film is possibly Kim Novak, who demonstrates a breadth and diversity often lacking in colder efforts such as the character of Madeline in Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Almost half a century from its initial release, Kiss Me Stupid appears not as a moral corrupting force, but as a wonderfully biting examination of modern values and ideas with regard to love, sex and marriage. Like in other Wilder films such as Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole and One, Two, Three, the famed director demonstrates the shallow material desires and internalized greed of humanity. In doing so, Wilder formulates an investigation into the emptiness and disparity of modernity; themes often found in the 1960's Italian cinema in the films of Visconti, Fellini and Antonioni. But unlike the latter directors, Wilder's film adopts a less serious outlook, preferring to exercise his message and his analysis through comedic terms. The result is an overlooked comic gem.

* Kiss Me Stupid is available through MGM Home Video and is released in their Billy Wilder Collection box set.

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1961: One, Two, Three

One, Two, Three (Wilder, 1961) 8/10

Coca-Cola is arguably the most recognized and culturally divisive American brand in the world. Originating in late 19th century Atlanta as a pseudo-medicinal beverage, Coca-Cola rapidly transformed itself into one of the world's most recognizable companies.

Over the past sixty years, Coca-Cola has become a political and cultural embodiment of Americana. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the company’s emphasis on mass advertising, pervasive consumption and global marketing acquired Coca-Cola the ire of post-World War II Europeans on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

As addressed in Richard F. Kuisel’s article “Coca-Cola and the Cold War: The French Face Americanization, 1948-1953,” Coca-Cola’s systemic growth in post-war Europe alarmed both communist and anti-communist forces. Coca-Cola became stylized in anti-American propaganda as a demagogue threatening the health of children and the economic survival of regional beverages. Lawsuits and legal discussions in Denmark, Switzerland and France attempted to stop the sale of the drink.

In Communist circles, the sweet-tasting drink soured the tastes of officials and intellectuals who viewed Coca-Cola as a capitalist elixir designed to turn Europe into a series of coca-coloniés. The term "Coca-Colonization" gained prominence amongst intellectual scholars in the Cold War to identify the spread of American cultural and economic practices abroad; attitudes held and expounded upon by Cold War era Coca-Cola executives.

Positioned during the Cold War as the ultimate commercial signifier of American culture and capitalism, Coca-Cola was subsequently the perfect economic institution to be employed by the legendary Billy Wilder in his superb 1961 Cold War farce One, Two, Three. Filmed in Berlin and Munich during the construction of The Berlin Wall, One, Two, Three is a rapid fire comedy eagerly praising and ridiculing America's cultural and economic expansion into Europe. The film stars James Cagney in his purported final role (he came out of retirement for 1981's Ragtime) as C.R MacNamara, a lifelong Coca-Cola executive, who has traversed the globe for the company: tapping uncharted markets and expanding the brand from the Andes to the Alps.

Stuck in Berlin, MacNamara sees an audacious opportunity to sell Coca-Cola in the Eastern Bloc nixed by his patriotic boss in Atlanta. Desperate to garner greater influence in the company, MacNamara reluctantly accepts Hazeltine's (Howard St. John) request for MacNamara to look after his teenage daughter Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin) when her whirlwind tour of Europe hits Berlin. Scarlett's arrival exacerbates the fractures in MacNamara's marriage to his undersexed loyal wife (Arlene Francis) and his affair with his lurid German secretary Ingeborg (Lilo Pulver). Furthermore, MacNamara's plans for his long-awaited promotion are put on hiatus, as Hazeltine's southern daughter reveals herself to be a sexually promiscuous, intellectual simpleton, who secretly elopes with an ideologically wooden East German Communist youth.

Released after the successes of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, One, Two, Three was a brief return to the more caustic channels Wilder had previously explored in dramatic masterpieces such as Ace in the Hole and Sunset Boulevard. One, Two, Three operates a hyperactive comedic critique of both capitalist and communist cultures with plenty of Wilder's trademark snarl, but without the acidic bite. Sadly, the film was not a great box-office success.

Contrary to recent critical studies of One, Two, Three that have argued the film was a critical disaster, it should noted that upon the film's release Wilder received mostly positive reviews from major publications such as Time, The New Yorker and the New York Times. Most of the negative feedback customarily associated with One, Two, Three primarily came from later sources such as Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael and the staff at Cahiers du Cinema

Their critiques have mostly focused on the perceived "vulgarity" and tastelessness of Wilder's humour. According to Wilder biographer Maurice Zolotow much of Kael's criticisms stemmed from Wilder's exploitation of unsavory characters and situations for comedic purposes. Yet, it is through his boundary pushing witticisms that Wilder demonstrated humanity's self-serving attitudes and practices. Like Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove three years later, Wilder's film attempts to show the absurdity of Cold War politics, yet in Wilder's case it is through quotidian individuals. In One, Two, Threeboth systems, regardless of their ideological leanings,feature arrogant figures desperate to advance through their respective system through bullying, conniving and favours.

The character of MacNamara is a playful interpretation of the "Ugly American." MacNamara's main desire is to increase company profits and sales, which in turn will increase his own greed and opulence. His tactics are aggressive and disregard the sanctity of foreign cultures. MacNamara even goes so far to proclaim he wishes to ensure each German has a Coke to drown down his Knackwurst. MacNamara's cultural insensitivity is only rivaled by the ignorant buffoonary of Soviet officials, who share MacNamara's fondness for sex, materialism and personal gain.

The casting of Cagney in particular is extremely interesting. Cagney's character is certainly a self-reflexive tribute to his image and iconography in the gangster genre. Noted for his career-shaping roles playing a gangster and a hoodlum, Cagney's portrayal of MacNamara is an extension of his earlier gangster entrepeneurs, who try to expand their market and protect their interests via whatever means necessary. One, Two, Three even features visual references to such gangster classics as The Public Enemy and Little Caesar. Naturally, unlike The Public Enemy's Tom Powers or White Heat's Cody Jarrett, violence is not a viable option. Instead MacNamara uses his cunning sensibilities to place Scarlett's lover Otto into the hands of the East German Secret Police, the Stasi. Violence is not a sensible business tactic, but as MacNamara continually notes neither is displeasing your employer.

In One, Two, Three, Wilder also investigates the labyrinthine and inefficient layers of Communist bureaucracy. He takes swipes at East Germany's informant culture and the lack of freedoms in the Eastern Bloc highlighted by MacNamara's commentary about East Germany's collection of unreturned Coca-Cola bottles in relation to the masses defecting to the West: black market Americana is in, whilst personal freedom is out along the nefarious Iron Curtain.

The director's sublime capabilities even allow a torture sequence involving repeated listening sessions of garish American pop music to retain a comedic touch. The wealth of cultural misunderstandings solidify the bursting humour of One, Two, Three. Even West Germans are not spared, as Wilder and co-writer I.A.L Diamond offer comedic jabs at the failures of social denazification and the rise of West German material culture. Ironically, the film gained a cult following in West Germany following its belated release in the 1980's.

Working within a brilliant, punch-line intensive script, One, Two, Three becomes more than a series of visual jokes and puns about cuckoo clocks, sex-starved wives and lingering Nazi habits through Wilder's manic direction. Even as One, Two, Three seemingly stalls in its final third, the film is further held together by Cagney's illuminating skills and his fervent energy; as MacNamara becomes a Henry Higgins to Otto Piffl's Eliza Doolittle: shaping Scarlett's lover from a stubborn communist into a stubborn capitalist through flashy clothes.

Yet in his denouement, Wilder skillfully denotes that material trivialities do not define one's character or content. One can simply not switch allegiances through consumerism. Rather, it is the spiritual and moral essence of individuals that determines and shapes their practices and perspectives. Only through an understanding of these terms, do characters such as Piffl and MacNamara realize the true Cold War is not between their souls, but within their own frosty hearts.

An underrated farcical gem.

* One, Two, Three is released through MGM Home Video and is available in their Billy Wilder Collection box set

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1998: Velvet Goldmine

Velvet Goldmine (Haynes, 1998) 8/10

"He was elegance walking arm-in-arm with a lie"

Since his controversial debut short film Superstar, American director Todd Haynes has been fascinated with pop music and its surrounding subcultures. In 2007, Haynes released I'm Not There, a film in which the director transmutes Bob Dylan into an array of fictional forms. While I'm Not There has received widespread critical acclaim, Haynes' earlier attempt at establishing a rock n' roll parallel universe Velvet Goldmine received lukewarm and tepid responses.

Almost a decade removed from its initial release, Haynes' study of glam rock and its cultural effects has emerged as a neglected gem. Slant Magazine even named it in a 2004 list of 100 Misunderstood or Overlooked Films that includes such reappraised classics as Billy Wilder's Ace In The Hole and Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West. Ten years onward, Velvet Goldmine deserves a critical re-think.

Lost somewhere in the flurry of independent pop culture flicks of the mid-nineties such as Mark Christopher's 54, Mary Harron's I Shot Andy Warhol and Julian Schabel's Basquiat, Haynes' film has surprisingly become a forgotten chapter in a career that has included the similarly constructed I'm Not There and his award-winning Far From Heaven. Yet, Velvet Goldmine reveals itself to be more than simply a footnote in a burgeoning career. Nor is the film merely a mythicism of glam rock and its heroes. Instead Velvet Goldmine explores the creation of cultural mythologies and their effects on not only impressionable young minds, but on their creators as well.

In Haynes' alternative rendering of the history of popular music, real-life glam rocks superstars such as David Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music and their influences The New York Dolls and The Stooges are non-existent. Yet, this is not necessarily problematic, as the director skillfully weaves the central themes and stories of figures such as Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop into a Citizen Kane-esque search for truth. Set primarily in the mid-Seventies, Haynes' film focuses on rock superstar Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers: a fluorescent and flamboyant amalgamation of David Bowie, Marc Bolan and Brian Eno.

Like Welles' titular character in Citizen Kane, Brian Slade is an indirect participant in his own story. In Velvet Goldmine, Christian Bale's gay journalist Arthur Stewart fulfills the duties of Citizen Kane's Mr. Thompson in servicing a multitude of perspectives. Unlike Mr. Thompson, Arthur Stewart is not a detached participant, rather he holds a personal attachment to Brian Slade. He was an ardent fan of the latter's music, image and pan-sexual identity.

In 1984, Stewart, a young journalist for the New York Herald, is assigned by his editors to create a piece about Brian Slade. A decade earlier, Slade was a universally popular recording artist whose career imploded after his onstage assassination turned out to be a publicity stunt. High on cocaine and low on album sales, Slade's quickly career plummeted. According to Stewart's editors, his present-day whereabouts are a mystery.

What begins for Arthur as a routine assignment, turns into a deeply personal quest; unearthing long-forgotten memories about his tumultuous teenage years spent poring over copies of the New Musical Express and questioning his own sexuality. Haynes' film subsequently operates as a parallel study of both Slade and Arthur. Through interviews with Slade's estranged ex-wife (Toni Collette), his original manager (Michael Feast) and musical associate Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) among others, Arthur Stewart begins to realize the problematic extent of his assignment. Not only are Slade's former confidantes unaware of his present status, but Arthur soon discovers they never felt they truly knew Brian Slade.

One could say the same about critical opinions of Velvet Goldmine. With its overt references to David Bowie in the character of Brian Slade and Iggy Pop in McGregor's Curt Wild, far too many critics misunderstood the film as simply an unauthorized fictional retread of Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie. Certainly, the Slade character bears striking similarities to Bowie, however Velvet Goldmine is not The David Bowie Story, nor is it simply The Brian Slade Story.

In Brian Slade, Haynes supplies a moderately talented vehicle through which to study the cultural legacy of the era. Slade is not a chameleon-like musical visionary in the vein of Bowie or Eno, because he is neither Bowie or Eno. Rather, Slade is a fictional operative allowing for Haynes to study not only the effects of stardom upon famous individuals, but also the sociological effects of personas and movements upon the masses and youth.

In Slade, Haynes creates a typical rock superstar who reaches his critical and commercial zenith, only to burn out and fade away. In the case of Brian Slade, the release of his album "The Ballad of Maxwell Demon"- a play on Bowie's similarly themed Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars propels the musician into the cultural stratosphere. Quickly, a combination of critical pressures, personal relationships, fan expectations and cocaine-induced paranoia takes hold of Brian Slade. As Arthur Stewart's interviews note Slade was no longer able to discern from the Maxwell Demon character and himself.

Interestingly, Haynes parallels Slade's evolution with that of Bale's Arthur Stewart. Both flirt with bisexuality and alternative sub-cultures.The painful difference here is that for Slade, bisexuality becomes a fashion accessory for the period, whilst for Arthur it is his life. In the Seventies, glam rockers extracted the sexual revolution of the prior decade for their personal, artistic and commercial benefit. Slade toys with his sexuality to advance his record sales, stir up controversy and enhance his orgy-filled after-parties. As a naive youth, Arthur Stewart misinterprets these declarations. Brian Slade's "admission" of his bisexuality offers Arthur Stewart an outlet to express his own sexual nature. Whilst Slade expands his marketability, Arthur suffers humiliating abuse from his parents and friends.

The spectre of truth in Velvet Goldmine subsequently plays an important facet in Haynes' film. Arthur Stewart's search for the truth intensifies his personal memories involving his factual revelations. Yet, Brian Slade is a figure who has never represented the truth. He has always hidden himself behind a mask of characters befitting the social codes and mores of the period. Similarly, Slade's wife (Toni Collette) embodies the artificiality of the decade with her fake English accent and her closeted personal feelings about her husband's sexual behaviour. Thus, Haynes' film also denotes the failure of glam to fulfill its promises of a complete socio-cultural revolution.

While, artists pressed social buttons and allowed for a growing cultural acceptance of gay subcultures, their legacy is not one of social change but of hedonistic excess. Setting the film in 1984, Haynes expresses the Orwellian nature of the corresponding decade. No longer is the homosexuality of the glam and disco era a viable commercial identifier. Rather in the figure of Tommy Stone, Haynes represents glam's continued material consciousness wrapped in heterosexual clothing.

Unfortunately, like the majority of musical movements, Velvet Goldmine fizzles out as it reaches its nadir. The fragmented buoyancy, Haynes displays in the film allows for a overflow of ideas and images, which do not always resonate or neatly fit together. Yet, it can be argued that the director is simply providing a critical mythology of the decade: an era featuring a surfeit of glitter, glamour and perceived Godliness. Using zooms and a muddy palette, Maryse Alberti's cinematography is an astute stylistic representation of 70's cinema. Haynes also increases the authenticity through a series of garish music videos and a soundtrack featuring an appropriate mixture of commendable and noxious songs.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is commendable as Slade, an inferior Bowie-like artist who acquires celebrity through notoriety, than-unlike the real Bowie- via any existence of talent. Toni Collette is also solid as Slade's gnawing wife. Christian Bale provides an introspective performance as Arthur Stewart, for whom music has personally transformed his life. Yet,the real two stars of the film are Ewan McGregor as American garage rocker Curt Wild and Eddie Izzard as Slade's manipulative manager. Izzard oozes a sense of a young Oliver Reed in his visual appearance and attitude; whilst McGregor is dynamic as the Iggy Pop-like Wild.

Vividly expressive and trashily portrayed, Velvet Goldmine is an underrated diamond in the rough. A critical and commercial flop upon on its initial release, Todd Haynes' film is an assertive critique of glam rock, its excessive commercial triumphs and spiritual social failures. Velvet Goldmine is not purely a film about a rock star. Rather, Velvet Goldmine is a fictionalized study of musical movements in general and how they change individuals. Moreover, Haynes' film is a study of glam's social failures, primarily in its willingness to shift according to commercial tastes; resulting in its subsequent eschewal of its sexual fabric. Additionally, the importance of youth is fittingly addressed in Velvet Goldmine through suburban teenagers dreaming of a personal freedom that only exists in concept albums, music magazines and the alien world of superstardom.

* Velvet Goldmine is available on DVD through Miramax Home Video

Other Todd Haynes films reviewed:
I'm Not There (2007) 9/10

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

2007: Sunshine

Sunshine (Boyle, 2007) 7/10

In 2057, global warming has yet to occur. The sun rests in space as a fossilized vessel: a dying star enveloping Earth in an everlasting state of winter, a new Ice Age. In a last grasp of fate and destiny, a crew of astronauts, psychologists and scientists has been assembled with the task of re-igniting the sputtering flame through the detonation of a nuclear payload in the solar core.

This is the backdrop to Sunshine, the latest effort by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting; 28 Days Later) and his frequent collaborator author Alex Garland. Beginning in media res, Sunshine introduces us to Earth's saviors as they are slowly inching past the planet Mercury. After the failed mission of the original Icarus, the crew of the Icarus 2 represent the last attempt to salvage Earth. Under the planet's present conditions, there are no more materials for armaments.

Therefore, through conservation and recycling techniques, the crew has managed to maximize the potential of their water and food rations with the intent of jettisoning their payload and returning home. As their ship the Icarus 2 sails closer to the sun, the once placid crew relations begin to fragment; the loss of telecommunications with Earth intensifies tensions within the claustrophobic surroundings.

Interactions further sour, when a distress signal from the previously missing Icarus 1 emerge outside the sun's exterior. Schisms develop as crew members bicker about responding to the calls, whilst fears arise over the success of the virtually suicidal mission and the safety of the ship. Soon disaster strikes and despite the crew's disconnection from Earth, their basic human emotions are in full-force at the expense of the mission itself.

In its first two-thirds, Boyle's multi-faceted sci-fi film channels earlier "thinking-man's" sci-films such as Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Debates rage as crew members testify their raw feelings about life's necessities and responsibilities. From these philosophical and intellectual actions the value of life and the notion of mankind emerges at the forefront. Human self-interest and a lust for power take over in a situation that requires full-fledged co-operation; democracy itself is abandoned in preference to an intellectual autocracy.

In these segments, Boyle's film is a wonderful meditation on humanity and life: a realistic study that presses greed before selflessness. Together Garland and Boyle, create a dynamic basis for a film, yet it is a narrative that rapidly unhinges by the film's denouement. Rather, than continue with a salubrious study of unconscious destruction, Boyle's film swerves into the cozy confines of the horror film. Despite creating a brilliant framework for a conclusion involving unmitigated psychosis or the over-reliance of technology, Boyle's film chooses to utilize the Alien model of attrition through separation; making the latter-third of Sunshine feel uncomfortably chaotic.

Despite adept performances by an international cast including Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans and Cliff Curtis, Garland's script offers little information beyond improportionate offerings to the character's histories and intentions. With deftly rounded characters, Boyle's film could have continued on a trajectory of continual destruction due to internal human causes, rather than engaging in the myopic and hazy inclusion of external causes. Certainly the former path could have been compatible with Boyle and Garland's interest in the fate of humanity resting on a single shoulder.

Nevertheless in spite of its flaws, Sunshine is an interesting, often beautifully constructed cinematic experience. Alwin H. Kulcher's cinematography is masterful, particularly in his utilization of slow motion and the sharpness of his colour patterns. In a film that relies heavily on darkness and light, Kulcher's cinematography enhances the underlying motifs within Boyle's film of characters who are blinded by the battle between their external responsibilities and internal conflicts. Furthermore through Mark Tildesley's production design, Sunshine is gifted an artificial environment that furthers the mental fissures of characters, yearning for an end to nights plagued by fateful dreams and days spend in cramped working quarters.

Set a mere fifty years in the future, Sunshine is not to be taken necessarily as a realistic study of Earth's impending future. Rather in its socio-political undercurrents, the film is a steady indictment of humanity's inability to co-operate in times of despair. All though the film's latter third engages in genre trivialities, Sunshine is an astutely-paced sci-fi thriller, which appropriately builds suspense and yet manages to espouse philosophical questions that ultimately shape humanity on a daily basis.

* Sunshine is available on DVD through Fox Home Video

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

2007: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Burton, 2007) 9/10

"I Will Have Vengeance! (Sweeney Todd)

Since the days of the "penny dreadfuls," Victorian London's dank and dark narrow streets have offered us a cornucopia of thieves, swindlers and murderers. From Dickensian workhouses to Jack the Ripper, 19th century London has been mythologized as a sordid terminal for criminal activities; subsequently branding a series of gloomy images into our minds and cultural impressions.

Whilst the age brought us scientific advancements by Charles Darwin and Alexander Graham Bell, it is the bloodlust, exploitation and deviousness lying within the belly of an elephantine empire that modern culture remains most interested in.
Recorded in the literature of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens, these themes and motifs have been extended and preserved by Hollywood.

In 1980, David Lynch directed the masterful The Elephant Man about John Merrick, whose disfigurement was showcased for commercial profit; in 2001, Johnny Depp entered these quarters as an opium-addled detective in From Hell a stylish, underrated period thriller by the Hughes brothers. In 2007, Depp once again forayed into the seedy underbelly of Victorian Britain in Tim Burton's adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's 1979 musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

The title character is an amalgamation of fact, fiction and urban legend: a serial killer driven to madness and obsession after his true love is taken away from him. In the film, Johnny Depp stars as Benjamin Barker, a renowned and happily married Fleet Street barber, who is sent to fifteen years of hard labour in the colonies on false charges by Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman); a sinister figure who lusts for Barker's young wife. Rescued by sailor Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), Barker returns to London vowing vengeance on those who stole his life from him.

Upon re-emerging in London, Barker finds his former home is now a rundown restaurant owned by Nellie Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) who gleefully serves "the worst pies in London." Hearing that his wife has poisoned herself and his daughter is now a ward of the Judge, Barker re-fashions himself as Sweeney Todd and along with the smitten Lovett plots his revenge. He is further assisted in his plans by Anthony Hope who, after catching a glimpse of Todd's daughter Johanna (Jayne Wiesner), yearns for her heart.

While Nellie Lovett lusts for Todd's broken heart, the brooding and impatient barber begins to utilize his profession for barbary, rather than barbering. To placate his embittered soul and cravings for cruel justice, Todd begins to transform his acts of violence into a singular and calculated act of reprisal, but into a random outburst against a society at large that has allowed for the destruction and wasted hours of his life.

The specter of obsession dominates Burton's film. These obsessions are usually of the heart, in the hope of obtaining a desired figure. Yet, these possessive lusts are often one-sided and selfish: lacking a reciprocal beating of hearts. The one-dimensional nature of these overriding infatuations is ultimately crushing. Only those with a mutual love obtain the happiness they desire. For others, their compulsions hasten their downfall and the destruction of their facile minded souls.

Similarly, the film's sub-narrative regarding the content of Lovett's pies is also indicative of a society that gorges upon violence and is willing to accept murderousness as a necessary component. As Lovett changes the ingredients in her pies, she gains a previously absent degree of fame and fortune, in spite of the macabre composition of her creations. Yet, as Burton's film and Sondheim's musical note, only one figure begs to question the morality of those consuming Lovett's pies. Interestingly, this character is an insane homeless woman, whose own fractured sense of scope is able to see through the advertising and falseness associated with Lovett's mini-enterprise.

Throughout his career, Burton has not been a director associated with extensive socio-political commentary in his films and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is no exception. Rather like Vincente Minnelli before him, Burton is an aesthete: a visual artist who creates fantastic images imbued with the grotesque and maligned in society. Like Sleepy Hollow and Edward Scissorhands, Burton channels the familiar Gothic tones of his filmography into a stylish, blood-soaked musical that never descends into parody.

Burton and his cast do not turn the picture into an excessive pantomime. Both Depp and Bonham Carter are perfectly cast in their roles. The actors sing in naturalistic tones that fervently express their frenzied emotional states. Depp's character is reigned in not through visceral bombast, but the sulking anguish within his soul. His frantic hair and melancholy blackened eyes are those of a man suffering from an incurable insomnia brought upon by tragedy and extirpation. Despite, her gloomy appearance, Bonham Carter's Nellie is a wonderfully naive figure, driven by her salacious attitude toward the barber; a point exemplified in an imaginative sequence in which Lovett daydreams about their future.

Alan Rickman is deftly cast as the imposing Judge. While Rickman is usually selected for his deep vocal tones, his seething eyes and imposing figure are perfectly suited for his character. The villainous supporting cast including Sascha Baron Cohen as the faux-Italian rival barber Pirelli and Timothy Spall as the Judge's henchmen Beadle Bramford offer deliciously poisonous vehicles for Todd to act out his revenge.

Utilizing the sadness and hate within his characters, Burton crafts an internalized musical. Unlike traditional Hollywood musicals, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is not a bombastic colourful romp. Rather it is a bitingly dark disclosure of the soul. Under the auspices of another director, the feelings and emotions divulged through songs of rage could easily have turned into extraneous feats. Yet, in Burton's hands, these sentiments are closeted entries into the private enclaves of humanity. The result is a rich, blackened musical of the human spirit and the raw obsessive reactions it emits.

One of the best films of 2007.

* Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is released by Warner Brothers

Other Tim Burton Films Reviewed:
Big Fish (2003) 9/10

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

2007: Across The Universe

Across The Universe (Taymor, 2007) 1/10

In the past decade, two strongholds of twentieth century popular culture, The Beatles and the Cinematic Musical have reveled in a renewed popularity. In 2000, The Beatles released the popular greatest hits collection 1 and followed it up with a Fab Four-themed Cirque de Soleil show.

Around the same period, the extinct cinematic musical genre staged an unforeseen return into popular consciousness with the critical and commercially successful releases of films such as Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and Rob Marshall's Chicago.With both The Beatles and the Musical enjoying deserved revivals over the past decade, the implementation of a Beatles-themed musical would appear to be a creative synthesis, especially when helmed by Frida director Julie Taymor who first gained fame for her successful adaption of The Lion King to Broadway.

Instead as Peter Frampton and Bee Gees fronted Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band learned thirty years earlier, Beatles-related films sans Paul, George, John and Ringo are a recipe for disaster. Across The Universe is no exception. With a "plot" loosely fabricated from the remnants of butchered Beatles cover songs, Across The Universe is a emotionally vapid, cartoon parody of the 1960's. Utilizing embarrassingly literal interpretations of Beatles songs and a string of stereotypical Sixties moments and characters, Taymor's film is more Forrest Gump: The Musical than Magical Mystery Tour.

Beginning in a parallel version of mid-Sixties Liverpool filled with an endless array of dock workers, but no Beatles, the film follows idealistic artist and dreamer Jude (Jim Sturgess) who leaves his mother to head to America in order to find his long-lost biological father. Along the way he meets up with naive love interest Lucy (Rachel Evan Wood) and her mischievous brother Maxwell (Joe Anderson), with whom he eventually shares a Greenwich Village loft. The fact they reside above a store called Psychedelicatessen clearly distinguishes Taymor's emphasis on an urban counter-cultural perspective.

Alongside, their Janis Joplin cut-out landlord Sadie (Dana Fuchs), Jimi Hendrix replica Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) and former cheerleader Prudence (T.V Carpio), the characters participate in a myriad of stock Sixties moments- burning draft cards, doing drugs, sticking it to the man- against a pastiche of the decade's most iconic moments from race riots in Detroit to Martin Luther King's assassination.

Yet, throughout Across The Universe their moments and actions are insignificant, not only because of their ineffectiveness on the world at large, but also due to the paucity of a genuine filmic narrative constructed outside the iconic melodies of a compilation of Beatles melodies. While The Beatles were the soundtrack for many lives during the era, Taymor's absurd reality has these songs as the pre-eminent force in shaping the characters' actions.

In Taymor's narrow "For Dummies" conceptualization of the Sixties, the screen is bombarded with heavy-handed images of protests, radicals, bohemians and anti-corporate and anti-American sloganeering: each outdoing the other in degrees of contextual emptiness and excessiveness. Sequences often emerge not because of their importance to the story, but for their ability to utilize yet another familiar note from The Beatles canon: a concept evinced in particularly dreadful workings of Beatles' classics such as Helter Skelter, A Day In The Life and Across The Universe.

Overflowing with flat caricatures, dreary musical arrangements, dreadfully cliched dialogue and a grandiose sense of self-importance, Across The Universe is a film that attempts to utilize its orgastic bounty of colours and psychedelic imagery to capture the spirit of period. Yet, for all its anti-establishment and anti-commercial rhetoric, Across The Universe is an endemically hollow corporate conception of the decade, tie-dyed shirts and all. Only a somewhat vivid number built along I Want You (She's So Heavy) awakens the rubber souls from their slumber.

Minus an actual feasible storyline that does not need to adhere to a Beatles iPod playlist, Across The Universe is simply a dreadfully misguided mistake. The poor acting, lifeless images, forced script and the failure to develop workable themes and messages within the film is the collective fault of cast and crew. Worst of all, Across The Universe is simply a film without a heart and subsequently without a pulse. Despite all its opulent colour and fanciful sequences, the film is an emphatic bore: a stagnant attempt to re-fashion Ken Russell's sub-Fellini-esque Tommy into the twenty-first century.

Given Taymor's Broadway background, one wonders if Across The Universe would be better suited to the stage rather than the screen. Then again after simply witnessing Bono's cosmically misaligned cameo as Dennis Hopper meets Timothy Leary drug baron Dr. Robert, it is clear cut that Taymor should have not cinematically gone down this long and winding road.

One of the worst and most disappointing films of 2007

* Across The Universe is available on DVD through Columbia Home Video

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

2007: The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner (Forster, 2007) 7/10

Since its publication in 2003, Afghan-American author Khalid Hosseini's The Kite Runner has been a critical and commercial favourite of book clubs, due to its topical look at Afghani history and politics. Directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland; Monster's Ball), The Kite Runner is a emotionally inductive affair that rides upon a wave of nostalgia and the poignant remnants of a fractured childhood relationship.

Traversing between 1970's Kabul and contemporary San Francisco, The Kite Runner focuses on Amir (Zekiria Ebrahimi) a reticent and apprehensive boy from an affluent, westernized family. When not writing stories in his room, Amir spends most of his days playing with his friend Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada). Under the curious caste-like cultural circumstances within Afghanistan, Hassan and his family have long acted as household servants for Amir's secularized and widowed intellectual father Baba (Homayoun Ershadi). Thus, while their time spent together includes outings watching classic Hollywood films and flying kites, the pair also must engage in a split relationship that involves Hassan's docile servitude toward Amir.

Despite his moody outbursts, Baba is a loving individual who treats Hassan as though he is his own son; perhaps even viewing the brash and assured boy as a figure more akin to his own masculine image. Yet, tragedy soon strikes as Hassan is viciously attacked by a sexually sadistic teenager. Rather than informing his father of the event, Amir responds in anger towards Hassan: shunning his friend and engaging in a series of manipulative acts that ensure the split of their long-standing friendship.

Within Kabul's vibrant walls, an undercurrent of intolerance and violence begins to ferment with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, resulting in Baba and Amir's flight from Afghanistan to America. It is here that Forster's film shifts gears and what initially became a study of the loss of childhood innocence and friendship, instead emerges as a study of cultural dislocation and a rather vapid tale of personal redemption. Forster's hefty application of binary opposites steadily loosens the cultural and historical complexity of Hosseini's narrative as characters sink into simplistic stereotypes of good and evil.

The chronological elaboration of Amir's character is particular telling. Despite his guilt and ultimate redemption, Forster's film never offers an extensive insight into Amir's psychological consciousness. The culpable nature of his acts- resigning Hassan to his eventual fate- are not provided a greater insight. As the film moves across time and space, it is surprising to note that Amir's contrition is steadily posited away from the central narrative. Subsequently, this eliminates the entangled ramifications within his character as Amir's moments of cowardliness are pushed further into the background, rather than being a central catalyst in the foreground plot.

Consequently, The Kite Runner steadily embosses a syrupy sentimental vibe imbued with layers of nostalgia. Thus, the nascent opportunities for Forster to attempt a Neo-Realist interpretation of childhood give way to eventual images of happy families and undeserved emotional resolution. Through Forster's perspective pre-Soviet invasion Kabul bears the hallmarks of a paradisal community. Yet, such a viewpoint undermines and neglects the real historical ethnic and class divisions within Afghanistan, in addition to the exterior social conflict surrounding the insulated world Forster creates for Amir and Hassan. Disturbingly, the vast majority of the film's characters appear blithe toward the socially and economically restrictive template of their lives.

Even when the film returns to contemporary Afghanistan, Forster's rendition of history is skewed: placing Afghanistan's tragic present as a consequence of Soviet imperial expansionism, rather than a product of a myriad of sources. The ensuing historical gap in Forster's film hurts his transition from past to present in showing Afghanistan's post-Cold War emergence as a "failed state." Furthermore, the film's forays into the action-film genre are a mystifying artistic selection, whilst the attempts at crafting a viewpoint from that of the outsider in America lacks cohesion to the film's opening third.

Yet, despite Forster's attempts at emotional manipulation, the film is an often fulfilling experience in part to due its fine acting from its two young stars, a scintillating supporting role by Shaun Toab as Baba's associate Rahim Khan and an exquisite performance from Iranian actor Homayoun Ershadi as Baba. Additionally, Forster makes ample use of the film's locations- shot in China as a substitute for war-torn Afghanistan- as well as its extensive use of a foreign language to convey the story . In doing so, Forster is able to imbue the picture with a greater sense of realism and native authenticity.

But as with his earlier film Finding Neverland, Forster is unable to relinquish his willful incursions into sentimentality. Rather than allowing the performances of his actors to emotionally connect with the audience, Forster's film supplies unprescribed doses of evocative music alongside David Benioff's melodramatic script to tug at our heart strings, rather than assertively thumping both the audience and the manipulative main character in the gut.

* The Kite Runner is released by Paramount Vantage

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

2006: The Good German

The Good German (Soderbergh, 2006) 6/10

Dating as far back as Lillian Gish and D.W. Griffith, associations between stars and filmmakers have become noted in cinematic lore. From Anthony Mann's collaborations with Jimmy Stewart to Martin Scorsese's outings with Robert De Niro, these relationships have been long feted as a special artistic bond emerging from cinematic circles.

And while today, viewers are quick to note the six films of Burton and the three outings between Depp and Scorsese and DiCaprio, the frequent partnership between George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh has been surprisingly underrepresented.
Beginning with 1998's Out Of Sight, the pair have worked together on no less than six films as actor and director, as well as a multitude of collaborations through their joint production company Section Eight Productions including Christopher Nolan's remake of Insomnia and Clooney's sophomore film Good Night and Good Luck. The pair's most recent outing outside of the successful the successful Ocean's Eleven franchise was 2006's The Good German.

Adapted from Joseph Kanon's novel, Soderbergh's film is an experimental homage to the noirish Hollywood thrillers of yesteryear. Featuring odes and references to films such as Casablanca and The Third Man, The Good German stars George Clooney as Jake Geismar a war correspondent for the New Republic who lands in post-war Berlin to cover the realignment of Europe's post-war map underway at the nearby Potsdam Conference. Upon his arrival, Geismar is gifted a brash young driver named Tully (Tobey Maguire) to drive him from one location to the next.

Despite his boyish looks and enthusiasm, Tully is a con artist and violent manipulator; engaging in black market profiteering with the help of the Soviets, in order to assist his prostitute girlfriend Lena (Cate Blanchett) in her quest to leave Berlin. Unbeknownst to Tully, Geismar is already familiar with the mysterious Lena, as he too had once had an extended affair with her. Yet, Lena is not only the object of their obsessions. Her estranged husband Emil (Christian Oliver) is wanted by both the Russians and the Americans for their post-war rocket programs; leading both Tully and Geismar into an even deadlier and murkier world of murder, deception and Cold War politics.

Thematically, the film focuses on two concepts: obsession and guilt. Both Tully and Geismar are besotted by Lena. Their mutual infatuation with her is one that is sexually driven. Each either consciously (Tully) or unconsciously (Geismar) view Lena as belonging to them. Yet, Lena herself is a being easily detached from others. Her commitments and loyalties belong to Lena and only Lena. She is a selfish, brooding manipulator of men: using her sexuality for self-advancement in a world with restricted socio-economic mobility for women, particularly those with familial links to Nazism. Survival is her one true obsession.

Thus, Lena almost becomes a fusion of the numerous fictional German women that flooded post-war German literature and cinema. Prostitutes such as Fassbinder's Maria Braun- herself played by Hanna Schygulla in the spirit of Dietrich- whose central purpose becomes the necessity to survive. Amidst, the chaos of the wartime era, their black-market offerings ensure some stability in uncertain economic times. Yet, perhaps in part due to the untold levels of death and destruction, it is a guiltless tactic.

The theme of German guilt and complicity in the atrocities of the Nazi era is also central to the film. Lena repeatedly insists her husband is a good human being, literally a good German. Frequently during The Good German, Clooney's Geismar comes into contact with American officials at OMGUS, who are rummaging through libraries of files and documents in an attempt to separate the victims from their victimizers. Geismar's assertions that placing the entire country on trial is wrong may have come to fruition, but Lena's lack of remorse and guilt toward her actions in the film is an interesting concept that unfortunately Soderbergh does not explore to its full potential.

The Good German is an both an exercise in style and in homage. Shot in colour and then converted to crisp black and white, Soderbergh replicates the style of classic Hollywood thrillers of the Forties and Fifties through the extensive use of editing wipes, rear projection and stock footage. This ode to Hollywood's Golden Era extends into the acting as Clooney channels Bogart and Cary Grant; Blanchett mirrors Dietrich and Tobey Maguire adopts the clipped dialogue of an endless array of wiseguys. Yet, like most tributes, the film lacks the dynamics of the original.

The inclusion of sex scenes and swearing dilutes the potential for a complete deferential treatment, even if Soderbergh believed mimicking the last shots of Casablanca would merely suffice. While Blanchett's cold performance is a beautiful replication of Dietrich's finest work, Maguire is completely miscast. Appearing in monochrome in Pleasantville may have advanced Maguire's physical adaptability to black and white cinematography, but his ability to reach into the style of the era is severely limited and one-dimensional. Certainly, Ryan Gosling procuring the spirit of William Holden would have been a far better choice. Clooney suffices in a decent, if unmemorable turn as a lovelorn journalist.

Without question, the film's weakest element is Paul Attanasio's screenplay, which convolutes itself with a myriad of cloudy, twists that are often neglected and unresolved. Yet despite the lack of structure in its frail narrative, The Good German is still an interesting film for the curious filmgoer. Whilst the partnership between Clooney and Soderbergh fails to create the creative masterpiece the pair potentially strove toward, the film deserves to be watched for Cate Blanchett's scintillating performance alone.

* The Good German is available on DVD through Warner Home Video.

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

2007: Juno

Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007) 7/10

In 2002, the UNFPA conducted a study of births amongst women aged 15-19. The results were startling. Among all nations the United States resided in 58th, tied with the island states of the Maldives and Micronesia and the landlocked African republic of Lesotho with 53 of every 1000 recorded births being born by teenage girls.

Maintaining the highest place among western industrialized nations, the United States bore a teenage birth rate higher than some of the world's poorest nations including Kyrgrzstan (33), Tajikistan (25) and Myanmar (24). While the study itself contains flaws in its statistical methodology, such as the failure to recognize cultural and socio-economic factors as well as abortions, the research undertaken by the UNFPA does demonstrate the prolificacy of teenage sexual activity and pregnancy in the United States.

Yet, surprisingly, this subject has been a social taboo for Hollywood cinema. However in 2007, Hollywood produced not one, but two films detailing unplanned pregnancy. The first Judd Apatow's Knocked Up offered a comedic twist on a one-night stand gone awry, the second Jason Reitman's low-budget $2.5 million dollar sophomore effort Juno provided a risible examination of irreverent spunky teenage girl Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) becoming pregnant on her solitary sexual experience with her nerdy (boy)friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera).

Upon realizing she is pregnant, Juno journeys to the local abortion clinic. However, she is persuaded by a combination of a pro-life classmate's pleas, guilt and nerves to have the baby and give it up for adoption to a willing and respectable couple. Whilst scanning the local Pennysaver, Juno and her friend Leah (Olivia Thirlby) come across Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner). After breaking the news of her pregnancy to her father Mac (J.K Simmons) and stepmother Brenda (Allison Janney), Juno offers to give her baby to the affluent Lorings.

Juno's pregnancy subsequently shapes and effects the lives of the film's central characters. The nervy Paulie distances himself from Juno, despite her love for him; Vanessa's joy at receiving Juno's child is tempered by the teenager's sarcastic personality; and finally Juno fosters a bond with Vanessa's composer husband Mark, who has been forced to closet away his eclectic cultural tastes in order to blend into her conception of bourgeois domesticity.

Unlike Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, Juno offers an intelligent comic reading that purloins its style from some of cinema's more witty and inventive traditions. While Apatow's film interjects "stoner comedy" mannerisms and Animal House hijinks, Reitman's film adapted from first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody's hyper-kinetic script swerves through hefty dollops of alternative chic and screwball comedy. At times one wonders whether Reitman is attempting to replicate the witty postulations of Wes Anderson's Rushmore with its cultural name-dropping and Bohemian spirit: found in its animated credits, its nods to Sonic Youth, Patti Smith and Dario Argento and its utterly annoying indie-pop soundtrack by Kimya Dawson; the latter sounding like an irritating cutesy pastiche of the acoustic-folk offerings routinely shopped by The Shins, Feist and Peter, Bjorn and John.

Despite the catchy, quotable sweetness of Diablo Cody's script, the insular world Reitman elicits from her text feels miasmic and exceptional. The quirky hip language Juno regularly employs, whilst funny, lacks authenticity. Ellen Page's fantastic performance fills the character of Juno with exuberance and vitality, yet her teenage heroine is a sprightly uncommon fixture with her endless wise-cracking wit and hipster vibes. Rather, the character of Juno herself embodies both the strengths and weaknesses of Reitman's film and Cody's script, which feels self-congratulatory in its cleverness and referential capabilities.

From a high school devoid of social fissures to Juno's parents' lenient response to her pregnancy, the film appears to be detached from reality; instead offering an overly optimistic environment were personal happiness and goodness ultimately triumphs and past aberrations are quickly and easily forgotten. Perhaps the only truly genuine space in Juno is the Loring's upper-middle-class home, whose picaresque material perfection disguises their fractured relationship and the social demands that unconsciously shape their lives.

Interestingly, Reitman's film never addresses the external social pressures which may have influenced Juno's decision to lose her virginity to Bleeker. Furthermore by film's end, Juno's pregnancy appears to have had limited negative repercussions, as a sense of normalcy returns to all those involved. The messaged extracted from Juno is ultimately a mixed one. While Juno's pregnancy offers a vehicle for the realization and fostering of personal truths, her spontaneous decision to engage in unprotected sex has little or no drawbacks.

Juno is not forced to quit school or banished from her home; she is not financially stricken or mentally depleted. Her post-pregnancy life is perhaps even more beneficial due to the romantic affections she acquires. The real consequences of unplanned pregnancy are not evident in Juno, nor in Knocked Up. Instead the central protagonists of both films end up engaging in fuller, richer lives. The popularity of both films has demonstrated the general public's interest in the topic, yet it is an attraction connected to the comedic circumstances of the subject matter.

Featuring a strong collective cast including Cera, Bateman and the idiosyncratic Ellen Page, Juno is an easily likable and enjoyable comedy. Running about twenty minutes too long, the film is another unique and sardonic film from Jason Reitman, whose films flavorful lead performances and unorthodox plots tend to compensate for his lack of aesthetic panache.

While Juno easily betters Knocked Up, one wonders how engrossed audiences would be if either film focused on genuine pregnant teenagers from destitute and poorly educated homes, rather than college-educated working women with jobs at E! or pop-culture spouting teenagers from white surburbia?

* Juno is released through Fox Searchlight.

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

2007: Control

Control (Corbijn, 2007) 10/10

The past is part of my future, the present is well out of hand (Heart and Soul)

Upon a brief inspection, premature death and art appear to be cosmologically entwined entities. A quick perusal through the past three hundred years exposes a wealth of artists who died in the hallowed visages of youth.

Whether it be through accidental circumstances or premeditation, scholars and followers have canonized those who perished in their prime: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Arthur Rimbaud and Charlie Parker all died before their fortieth birthdays; Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain never reached thirty. And then there is the case of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis.

While the likes of Charlie Parker and Janis Joplin succumbed to excess, Ian Curtis' demise is particularly tragic, yet quotidian in comparison. Curtis' suicide at the age of 23 was not the product of senseless drug abuse or rock n' roll decadence, but the result of variegated factors ranging from severe depression, his declining health due to epilepsy, the collapse of his marriage and the pressures of fame. It is elements such as these that Dutch photographer and music video director Anton Corbijn explores in his beautiful and haunting analysis of Curtis' life in his stunning debut feature film Control.

Primarily based upon Curtis' widow Deborah's memoir Touching From A Distance and interviews, Corbijn's film is a unique entry into the music film canon. Despite, Corbijn's acknowledged devotion to Joy Division and his noted work with them as a photographer and director of their 1980 single Atmosphere, Corbijn's film is not a biased martyrdom of Curtis, but rather a balanced and critical study of the singer's life and fate.

Beginning in the industrial Northwest town of Macclesfield, Corbijn's film tracks Curtis' life from the solitary introspective years as a teenager stealing prescription medicines, listening to David Bowie records and reading the works of J.G. Ballard. There Curtis (Sam Riley) meets his future wife Deborah (Samantha Morton) whom he quickly marries as a teenager. Settling into work as a civil servant, Curtis soon absconds married life to return to his teenage practice of locking himself away with his books, music and writing materials.

After witnessing the Sex Pistols perform in Manchester, Curtis meets the future members of Joy Division Bernard Sumner (James Anthony Pearson), Peter Hook (Joe Anderson) and Stephen Morris (Harry Treadaway). Operating under their tentative name Warsaw, the band acquire a record contract with Manchester media mogul Tony Wilson's (Craig Parkinson) Factory label and begin to record. With Deborah now pregnant, Ian struggles to fulfill his marital duties, as well as those in his civil servant position and touring.

However, the sudden realization that Curtis is an epileptic further hinders his daily regimen, as he is prescribed an array of experimental drugs that affect his mood and personality. Avoiding doctor's orders to abstain from alcohol and late nights, Curtis engages in the weary trappings of the road, including an affair with a Belgian fan Annik Honore (Alexandra Maria Lara). His relationship with Deborah and his newborn child become increasingly strained, as his mental and physical health deteriorates.

In Control,Corbijn presents an engaging, bleak, yet surprisingly amusing portrait of Ian Curtis that feels authentic in its complexity. Utilizing real locations and unfamiliar actors, Corbijn avoids the cliched structures of traditional music cinematic biographies by presenting the film in the minimalist fashion of the British "Kitchen Sink" cinema of the 1950's and 1960's. The crisp and sharp black and white cinematography by German cinematographer Martin Ruhe superbly captures the period in its haunting photographic quality, which culminates in the film's superb tracking shot that captures Curtis' two minute walk to work and the film's devastating finale.

Set to the music of early Joy Division incarnation Warsaw's No Love Lost, the former sequence astutely ensnares the mood of the punk period, as Curtis troops to work past decaying houses, elderly citizens and diminutive cars, whilst wearing a jacket emblazoned with the self-painted legend "HATE" on the back. This segment is also interesting in its circadian nature. While most rock stars are envisaged as spending countless hours in chic lofts spectacularly wasted or composing music, Curtis is viewed in Control as an everyday figure going to work and an informal member of the array of autodidactic working class pseudo-intellectuals that populated post-punk music during this era such as The Fall's Mark E. Smith, the Gang of Four and John Lydon.

Corbijn also arrestingly posits Curtis within the theme of control. Throughout the film, Ian Curtis is pictured as a control freak, desperately trying to utilize others to his specifications. Yet, through his bouts with epilepsy, the failure of his marriage, his hyper-impulsive personality and the myriad of prescriptions he is forced to consume, Curtis quickly embodies a figure rapidly losing control over his life and his health. Prone to volcanic outbursts and recoiling introspection, Curtis becomes increasingly detached and alienated from those around him as the film progresses.

The pressures of fame produce another interesting theme within Corbijn's film. The strain of a multitude of commitments and demands results in Sam Riley's Curtis pleading for a return to earlier times, when the band were a local phenomenon. Yet, fatefully despite his increasingly personal lyrics meditating on suicide, death and his loss of control, we witness those around him shrug off his suffering words and cries for help as mere examples of his genius and his art.

In the decades since Curtis' death, the suicides of morose figures such as Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith demonstrate the continued failure of the media and record companies to identify such traits beyond the realms of art. Control subsequently offers a warning from the past about the realities and pressures of fame. With Sam Riley's astutely breathtaking turn as Ian Curtis, these traits are brought to life in all their warm and cold tendencies. Samantha Morton's role as Curtis' long-suffering widow Deborah achieves a full-bodied performance that feels representative of her character's repressed desire to step out of her dour loveless life.

Coolly directed, superbly acted and stylishly shot, Control is a fantastic, breathtaking and melancholy paean to Ian Curtis' troubled life and legend. In Control director Anton Corbijn creates an axiomatic portrait that avoids genre cliches in favour of documentary minimalism. Although Corbijn could have offered more insight into Curtis' childhood and relationship with his parents, the director's decision to break with hackneyed portrayals of Curtis as simply a brooding and insular being is refreshing.

Thus, the Ian Curtis of Control is subsequently a detailed, multi-dimensional figure inlayed with paradoxes and doubts, yet also an extremely spontaneous, caring and humorous young man. Thus, the mythical character apotheosized in books and articles becomes effortlessly human and genuine under Corbijn's careful eye and Riley's superlative-inducing performance. Featuring a star making effort by newcomer Sam Riley, Control is an indie masterpiece and a perfect example of how cinematic biopics should be constructed aesthetically and contextually.

The best film of 2007.

* Control is available on R2 DVD from Monumental on February 12th

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque