Little White Lies 19 - The Gomorrah Issue

ISSUE 19 SEPT/OCT 2008

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COVER illustration by

paul willoughby GOMORRAH REVIEW BY

matt bochenski

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“Are we meat for the slaughterhouse?”

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Matteo is an and

Garrone’s intelligent important statement for new Italian

DIRECTED BY Matteo Garrone STARRING Salvatore Abruzzese, Gianfelice Imparato, Marco Macor

adaptation for Italy cinema.

RELEASED October 10

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Gomorrah is not a mafia film, and with good reason. What can possibly be left to say about the Mob that hasn’t been said a thousand times before,

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from high-style violence to lowbrow laughs? After The Sopranos, the gangster has been psychologically wrung dry, deconstructed, dismantled; the slow, silent fade-to-black that announced Big T’s departure was an ending in more ways than one.

And yet… If Gomorrah isn’t a mafia film, what is it? Because here are crime families, corruption and blood-soaked feuds; all the trimmings of a tired genre. But this is Naples, not New York. This is the story of the Camorra, and the story of the Camorra is a snapshot of Italy.

Gomorrah is the telling of an untold history – a social evolution of Italy written in charge sheets and prison records, but one whose tale shadows the classroom textbooks. In a country where criminal emperors wield more power than politicians, these histories – official and unofficial – sit side-by-side, two chapters of the same story.

breakthrough for investigators, proving what they’d long feared: the Camorra wasn’t just a violent drug gang, it was a twenty-first-century criminal conglomerate whose economic interests spanned everything from construction and tourism to textiles and banking. Its combined turnover was estimated at £150 billon a year, making it one of Italy’s most profitable businesses.

What is Gomorrah? A statement, perhaps. But of despair or defiance?

The Camorra is a criminal network in the Campanula region of southern Italy whose roots are said to date back to the eighteenth century. It’s only in the last 30 years that they’ve stepped out of the shadow of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, thanks largely to a surge in violence that has seen them murder over 4,000 people, and the staggering wealth that they’ve accumulated along the way.

Details began to emerge during the decade-long ‘Spartacus’ trial that saw 16 ringleaders sentenced to over 700 years. It was a major

Five people were murdered during the course of the Spartacus trial, and threats were made against a sixth: Roberto Saviano. Saviano was a native of Casal di Principe who grew up in a climate of fear. He saw his first murder victim at 13, and at 18 his father, a doctor, was badly beaten for saving the life of a man the Camorra had tried to kill. In his twenties he worked as an assistant photographer at Mob weddings, getting to know ‘The System’, as the Camorra call the socio-economic expanse of their business. In 2006 he published Gomorrah, an explosive account of the emotional and physical devastation that organised crime had inflicted on Naples. He now lives under police protection. ▼

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Clearly, any adaptation of Gomorrah bears a huge weight of responsibility, but director Matteo Garrone has handled the pressure. “The raw material I had to work with when shooting was so visually powerful that I merely filmed it in as straightforward a way as possible,” he has said. “As if I were a passer-by who happened to find myself there by chance.”

‘There’ is the province of Caserta, a place of crumbling tenements edged with the rust and ruin of decay, where every aspect of people’s lives is controlled by the Camorra, from the money in their pocket to the roof over their head.

In among the drug pushers, housewives and urban poor, Garrone focuses on five disparate stories, each of which tells its own tale of life’s cold reality. Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) is the ageing accountant responsible for running money in the ghetto for the wives and parents of jailed Camorristi. Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese) is a 13-year-old boy infatuated with the lifestyle of his older friends. Roberto (Carmine Paternoster) is a university graduate looking for work, happy to take a job in a waste management company. Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is a dressmaker, a maestro, seduced by the respect of the Mob’s Chinese rivals; while Marco and Ciro (Marco Macor and Ciro Petrone) are loose cannons, little more than kids still playing Scarface, but with dreams of carving out their own piece of the action.

Few of these stories cross paths directly, but taken together they offer a bleak, if compelling, portrait of an entire community sucked into The System, and each is a tragic lesson in itself.

Don Ciro may be a resolutely non-violent man, but he is a footsoldier in a war, and though he has no wish to fight he will be forced to compromise his own sense of himself – his friendships and decency – if he wants to survive.

Marco and Ciro are the dark heart of southern Italy, where the cycle of brutality breeds a cruel kind of nihilism. They steal guns from the mob, toting M16s, quoting Tony Montana. They laugh and joke, but with an edge of desperation. They’re all animal instinct; grappling clumsily with a pair of strippers after a score, with no thought for thinking, just touch and taste – the instant pleasures that can be caught on the fly because there’s a clock tick-tick-ticking somewhere and soon their time will run out.

Roberto, by contrast, is the corporate face of criminal violence – sharp suits and sunglasses, and yet even more dangerous than the punks with guns. The Camorra’s control of toxic waste disposal has wreaked havoc in Italy, silently murdering generations of villagers. And yet Roberto offers something all-too rare in Gomorrah: redemption for a troubled conscience. But standing shrunken against a vast quarry in which young boys drive lorries filled with industrial slime, Roberto is put in perspective. He is nobody. His loss of faith changes nothing in the face of this engine of chaos.

It’s the dressmaker, Pasquale, who offers perhaps the most poignant example of the Camorra’s impersonal and destructive nature. The tailor is punished for his ‘betrayal’ of the Mob’s business interests – his new friends murdered, his profession taken away – but when he sees one of his creations on the television, he smiles. It speaks of vindication, of a glimmer of happiness and even hope. ▼

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But if Pasquale offers the film’s most human moment, Totò is its grim tragedy. In The Washington Post, Roberto Saviano wrote of the Spartacus trial, “Night may have ended in southern Italy, but morning is not yet here.” Totò is that uncertain future, a child of violence, inducted and indoctrinated in a brilliant scene set deep in the hellish bowels of the ghetto where each new recruit is strapped to a bullet-proof vest and shot. “Now you are a man,” he is told, but Totò is still just a boy with choices ahead of him.

That gunshot only opens the door to manhood – to the point where he must take responsibility for himself. It is not until later, until he makes a heart-breaking decision, that the door is slammed shut behind him.

Garrone and Saviano’s message is one of complicity. The greatest violence committed by the Camorra isn’t on the body, but on the soul. The cycle of brutality suffuses the community. There is no

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escape and no excuse: everyone is implicated somewhere along the line. This is a psychic violence inflicted on everybody, all the time – the cruel knowledge that you can’t absolve yourself of blame because the Camorra is your society. The System is everywhere, and everything is The System.

This message rings out in the tone and texture of the film, expertly assembled by Garrone and his editor, Marco Spoletini.

While explicit action only occurs in sporadic, unglamorous stabs of noise and confusion, an air of ugly, imminent violence permeates the frame. Garrone uses the landscape to his advantage, his shots dark, tight and claustrophobic, or opening up in subtle and subversive ways – here the beach becomes a place of death, and the only open skies are bruised and grey. Roberto’s ‘defection’ under brooding purple clouds is a master class of understated menace: always the ticking, never the bomb.

If there’s a flaw in Garrone’s style, it’s that he’s almost too focussed on keeping it real. So committed is he to avoiding the clichés of the genre that his obsession with minutiae comes close to overpowering Gommorah’s narrative drive. We’re pitched in to these personal stories with very little sense of the big picture, of who these people are or why they matter. In its own way, this is sophisticated filmmaking: these people are nobodies caught in a pointless, endless war; it doesn’t matter which war, or who started it, or even who’s fighting it, what matters is that it exists and is a cause of suffering. Suffering is all we need to know – or all we should need to know – to care. Fine theory, but it still makes parts of the film confusing to a non-Italian audience, with all its talk of clans and business and secession, but no real time taken to explain which clan, or what business, or secession from where.

Perhaps that, in effect, simply puts us in the same shoes as the film’s protagonists: confused and manipulated, only able to see a tiny piece

of a picture whose complexity is beyond our grasp. Caught in the middle of a violent upheaval, they and we can only wonder where the next bullet will come from, and who, this time, will be the victim n

Anticipation. A seminal book in a country awakening to its violent past and present gets a serious cinematic treatment. Four Enjoyment. An uncompromising adaptation

that reflects the intelligence and courage of its source material. Four

In Retrospect. Gomorrah carves out a place for itself in an overcrowded genre. Four See page 44 for an interview with Matteo Garrone

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The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered unto Zoar. Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.

But Lotâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

And Abraham got up early in the morning to the place where he stood before the Lord and he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.

Genesis XIX, 19-28

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LETTERS This issue: everybody’s been feeling Film Knights, and yet more words of wisdom. Keep posting on www.littlewhitelies.co.uk or e-mailing editorial@littlewhitelies.co.uk. Every letter we print will receive a pair of tickets to see a film of their choice at The Barbican, London’s most diverse cinema. www.barbican.org.uk/film.

SAVAGE REVIEW

After reading your review of Savage Grace in Issue 18, I felt as though readers may have been dissuaded from exploring the realms of what, contrary to the views expressed in the review itself, I found to be one of the most severely unnerving contributions to recent US cinema.

Both Julianne Moore and Eddie Redmayne were more than adequate in their portrayal of both the external and inner turmoil inevitable in such a painful motherson relationship, and the “rambling and hysterical” nature of the film perfectly complemented and echoed the unstable behaviour of Barbara Baekeland and her all-too adoring son Tony. Cinemagoers who aren’t afraid of a bit of uncomfortable viewing should certainly not overlook Savage Grace, and while the film has received mixed responses, it seems apparent that Tom Kalin has achieved what he intended – placing his audience in an uncomfortable position, which resonates with the experiences of the film itself.

Laura

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FROM THE BLOG

Re. Marsh & Petit Rock Up to Film Knights 04 I love the crazy little Frenchman – I kissed him twice. Thank you LWLies, ace film.

Jason R

Another dandy event!

Great film. The clink of alcohol-filled glasses.

Good conversation. Tres magnifique! Now we’ll have to sit back and see what type of reception the film gets in America.

Will this be the film that helps America to move on and have a triumphant reminder of the Twin Towers’ glory by witnessing Petit as he sought his own glory via the towers? Wait and see.

Can’t believe this bloke has yet to fall.

Deirdre

I have to say it was a coup d’état for LWLies getting Man on Wire ahead of release and for free. Good job. Wonderful documentary as well.

Re. The Dark Knight: Review Number 2 Batman smacks bad criminal, Batman smacks good cop, good cop becomes bad cop, Batman smacks him. Good, bad, who gives a shit? Just keep this hollow, shapeless mess rollin’.

No amount of Hans Zimmer fuelled crescendo could make us give a shit about anyone in this film, apart from a sad-sack Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Batshit

Re. Bond, Babes and Beautiful Typography Bond has always been about flogging merchandise. Even on You Only Live Twice – pretty much the best Bond film ever – Bond was watching the activities of super villain Blofeld’s henchmen on a natty seven-inch Sony screen. Just before he switched over to Debbie Does Dallas…

Hugh Foster

Sean

Many thanks for all the feedback you’ve been giving us for our Film Knights events. We love doing them, so make sure you keep coming along if you’re in the London area.

Also, at the end, when the control room starts exploding the cat carried

by Donald Pleasance gets scared and scratches the hell out of his arm. Ace. Garbo

Hitting its stride and knocking screening events out of the park, LWLies and Suso are proud to announce the continuing world dominance of Film Knights! With a clear commitment to imagination, creativity and determination, Film Knights will celebrate the best in modern movie-making from big name directors to hungry young guns.

After a packed-out screening of Lucy Walker’s inspiring documentary Blindsight on August 4, the next special event will be taking place on Monday September 1 at the Rex Cinema in London’s Soho, then again on Monday October 7 at the same location. Keep an eye on the website for exact details of the screenings, which at this point are a closely guarded secret. Okay, we haven’t decided yet what they’re going to be, but we can guarantee that they’ll be awesome.

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Author and academic John Dickie deconstructs the Mafia, movies and Mob mythology. interview by Matt Bochenski

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Hard to believe, but when John Dickie’s Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia was published in 2004, it was the first scholarly account of the world’s most famous organised crime outfit available in English, ever. Think about that. Twenty-five years after Mario Puzo had everybody thinking they were down with this Mob stuff, along comes Dickie, a Professor of Italian Studies at University College London, to tell us, ‘No, actually, you aren’t.’

What makes him so sure? One tiny but important detail: the Mafia (specifically, the Sicilian Mafia) wasn’t legally recognised until 1992, when Italy’s highest court finally held up its hands after a century of prevaricating and said, ‘You know what? There might just be something in this organised crime talk after all.’ ‘Durr!’ said the rest of the world eyeing its collection of gangster movies, from The Godfather Trilogy to Donnie Brasco. ‘Damn!’ said the Mafia, immediately embarking on a bombing campaign that killed the two magistrates – Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino – responsible for the breakthrough.

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For Dickie, the aftershocks of that ruling were enormous: “Once you know what the Mafia is, writing its history becomes a different exercise,” he explains. “In 1992 the judgment effectively said, ‘The Mafia exists – all of this stuff about a boss of bosses and a Commission and initiation ritual is judicially proved beyond doubt.’ That means you move out of the terrain of speculation.”

Armed with this new certainty, Dickie went digging through a mountain of archival material, tracing the official history of the Mafia back across the century – no longer looking through the lens of hokey Sicilian novels or arms-length transatlantic romanticism, but land registers, business records and the other cold realities of academic research.

The picture he paints is compelling, devastating and at times dramatically at odds with the conventional wisdom of Mafia lore handed down through the movies. Over the next six pages, Dickie debunks some of the Mob’s long-standing mythology, and explains its place in Italy’s fractious social landscape.

Between 1871 and 1913, Giuseppe Pitrè, a doctor, ethnographer and ‘folk psychologist’ based at the University of Palermo in Sicily, published his 25-volume Library of Sicilian Popular Traditions. This monumental work was the first pseudoacademic study to weave folklore, history and anthropology into a portrait of the Sicilian ‘soul’. For over a century, defenders and apologists of the Mafia explained away the activity of organised criminals as a manifestation of this soul: of the honour and tradition at the heart of Sicilian society.

“Absolute rubbish,” says Dickie.

Dickie: “The myth that the Mafia has propagated, quite consciously, in the form of its lawyers, sympathetic politicians, and in the form of Pitrè, is that the Mafia is nothing more than a mentality; a kind of typical Sicilian attitude of wanting to sort

your problems out for yourself without wanting to get the law involved; a certain kind of haughty arrogance that people have dated back to the Arab invasions of the ninth century and all this kind of nonsense. That myth, that blurring the line between a self-conscious criminal brotherhood and the rest of society has obviously served the Mafia’s interests very well over the years.

“In Italy there was also this myth of the Mafioso as the local authority figure; he wasn’t part of an organisation. To quote Meadow Soprano, the Mafia was just, ‘A method of conflict resolution in Mediterranean societies.’ There’s that fantastic episode of The Sopranos where she spouts a bit of pat sociology about the Mafia, which completely justifies it.

So there is this mythology of the Mafia as a form of conflict resolution in Italy.” ▼

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Digging into the real history of Italy, Dickie was able to take a new view of the Mafia story, and the way its legend has been manipulated. Even in the earliest days of the Mafia in the mid-nineteenth century, its history was being deliberately obscured by the outfit itself, aided and abetted by public sentiment. Indeed, the word ‘Mafia’ is sometimes traced to the 1863 play, The Beautiful People of Vicaria by Giuseppe Rizzotto and Gaetano Mosca, adding a little local flair to a hopelessly romantic tale of Palermo prison gangs.

Dickie: “The shocking thing about the history of the Mafia is that it’s been public knowledge – it’s been a secret hidden in the open right from the very beginning. But Italy has always struggled to convert knowledge into action.

“What you discover when you look back is that many, many aspects of the Mafia’s methods of operating have existed right from

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the very beginning – the initiation rituals and so on. The idea that there was once a simple, rural Mafia or a bunch of peasants who believed in family and honour and then at some point it got all modern and commercial and so on, is a myth. It’s been pretty much the same over the years – although it’s not always been quite as centralised as it is now.

But the Mafia has been pretty much the same from the word go.

“At first, the phrase ‘Cosa Nostra’ was thought to apply only to the American Mafia – people thought that they were maybe more organised, more businesslike and more sophisticated. You still get that assumption in a lot of pat American histories of the Mafia.

They sort of start off with a few peasants who believe in order and family, and then a volcano goes off and they all go to America and then they become businesslike. We now know that isn’t true at all. The Mafia has been a sophisticated criminal organisation from the outset.”

If Italy has failed to act on its knowledge of the Mafia, perhaps it is because the Mafia is merely a symptom, not the cause, of Italy’s social malaise. One cannot be understood without the other.

Dickie: “The big theme in Italian history, the one that text books are written about and that, in some ways, all the great issues of Italian history come back to, is the problem of the state’s right to rule, its legitimacy, and how it’s completely failed to do that; failed to establish its authority, whether it’s adequately enforcing the tax collection, getting people to wear seatbelts, getting people to fight in wars or simply getting people to obey the rules of what we consider normal political contest. That’s the big theme of Italian history, and the Mafia is perhaps the most extreme, and to our eyes the most exotic, manifestation of that problem.

“You can compare it to the Balkans and Eastern Europe, where you’ve got a weak, corrupt state that has lost the ability, particularly after the fall of communism, to establish a monopoly of legitimate violence.

That’s what the state does – it’s the definition of the state – it’s what has the right to wage war and punish crime. And if it can’t do that effectively, if it can’t enforce its monopoly, then it becomes an open field and you get entrepreneurs of violence; people who are able to use guns, and are organised to do what the state does, but do it in an obviously much more selfish way.

“There’s one key figure that you really need to think about when it comes to the way Italians tell stories about the Mafia, and that’s Leonardo Sciascia. He’s the novelist who first wrote about the Mafia in the ’60s, and his novels kind of twist the detective form to fit conditions in Sicily.

In your classic Poirot scenario, nobody knows who the criminal is except the criminal, and it’s Poirot’s job to find out.

And the story ends in the drawing room when the truth is revealed – the revelation of the truth, the uncovering of the hidden mystery, is the end of the story, and we take it for granted that the police come in and escort the character away. Those are the rules of the classic detective story, but

what Sciascia said was actually those rules don’t apply in Sicily. Everybody knows the truth; everybody knows who’s responsible; everybody knows the crime but they won’t tell. The person who is isolated, the only one who doesn’t know, is the detective. And the moment the detective finds out is usually the moment he dies, or fails in some way, rather than the moment of truth when the police come in and escort the guy away.

So the rules of truth and transparency and who knows what that underlie the detective story reflect a society that’s working well.

What Sciascia thought was that you couldn’t tell a conventional detective story in Sicily because those rules just don’t apply.

“Authoritative sources put the financial figures for organised crime in the area of seven, eight or 10 percent of Italy’s GDP. If you lump together all the criminal organisations, they’re Italy’s biggest company. Police themselves estimate that 80 per cent of the businesses in Palermo pay protection money to the Mafia. In cities like Calabria and Naples, it’s not thought to be too far below that.” ▼

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Thanks in part to Roberto Saviano’s bold and brilliant novel, Gomorrah, the Neapolitan Mob is beginning to step out of the shadows where it has been allowed to operate for so long. In doing so, it has begun to yield its own secrets.

Dickie: “The Camorra is an interesting example in that it’s older than the Mafia – we think that the Camorra goes back to the 1820s – and in the nineteenth century it was organised in a way that is reasonably comparable to Cosa Nostra today. It had initiation rituals, other rituals like ritual knife fights that were part of the admission, a division of jobs and a hierarchy in the organisation, a recognised overall boss in Naples, that sort of thing.

“It has traditionally been more a proletarian organisation – it recruits from the streets. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t deal with politicians and people in suits and so on, but Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, right from the beginnings of its history has been a sort of criminal bourgeoisie. It also recruits from the lowest echelons, but they are the middle-class with guns, and they have much more long-standing, integral links to the Sicilian ruling class. One of the main reasons to be organised is so

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that you can dialogue successfully with the state; so that you can keep a certain level of respectability. You act as a shadow state much more successfully if you’re not killing each other the whole time.

“The Camorra today is much more anarchic; it’s a sort of archipelago of gangs that come and go. Most of them don’t really give a toss about initiation rituals and all of that sort of thing. Except for the ones who are affiliated with Cosa Nostra – they obviously take that sort of thing more seriously.

“The problem with the Camorra is making the public aware of the problem because it’s messy. In Sicily, you have the figure of the boss of bosses to concentrate on so it makes it an easier story to tell for journalists. Whereas with the Camorra, viewed from outside, it seems endless and confusing. Nothing ever changes. The gangs just kind of pullulate and rise and fall and disappear, and it seems like a mess with no beginning and no end. One of the great things about Gomorrah is it managed to find a way of making that picture important and real, giving people from outside Naples some kind of real purchase on it, and in turn a sense that it was important, and could be grasped, could be felt, could be identified with.”

If Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Gomorrah is finally engaging with the reality of organised crime in Italy, how do we reflect on cinema’s other so-called gangster greats?

Dickie: “I actually find it difficult to work up a great deal of moral indignation about the way the Mafia is represented on film. But in Italy, there’s a much, much tenser climate about them because those people are out there killing children – they’re a much more powerful reality.

“Films like The Godfather don’t go down very well in Italy. Even The Sopranos, despite the fact that I’ve heard magistrates in Sicily say that it’s really great, doesn’t go down particularly well in Italy. In film terms, Italian mafia films tend to be much more morally serious – there’s much more of a sense of, ‘This is a problem, what are we going to do about it?’ Whereas in America, it’s Italian-American filmmakers’ access to the mainstream; it’s their way of telling the American story. And there’s an inevitable element of ethnic pride almost in the Mafia story, kind of, ‘Look how glamorous and dangerous we were’.

“There isn’t that angle in Italy. Nobody is embarrassed to slag the Mafia off – there’s no sense that you would be ‘getting at’ the

Italians. A good example is a film made in the ’90s, Ricky Tognazzi’s La Scorta [The Escort]. This is a period when the Mafia was waging war on the state, and the policemen and women who escorted the magistrates were obviously in grave danger. Any number of them were killed – I think three with Falcone and five with Borsellino – and this is a film from the escort’s point of view, where the Mafia is shown to be sinister and not at all glamorised. We follow the human drama of the people involved in the day-today fight against the Mafia. That’s the story throughout the history of Italian cinema and the Mafia: nobody makes films that could really be accused of glamorising the Mafia.

“The exception is just recently. Last year there was a dramatisation of the life of Totò Riina, the boss of bosses, the man who murdered Falcone and Borsellino. It was a six-part dramatisation of his life, from his youth, when his father was killed tampering with an unexploded Allied bomb, up to the moment when he’s captured in ’93.

And there was a lot of controversy. Andréa Camilleri, a very popular writer of detective fiction, wrote this whole article saying that this was glamorising the Mafia; various magistrates intervened and said, ‘Look, this is turning him into a charismatic figure’;

another journalist called it, ‘One big advert for the Mafia’. That’s the first time that kind of controversy has happened in Italy.

“Camilleri says that he never wants to write about the Mafia. He says that the Mafia should only be written about in history books and magistrate reports because you instantly glamorise them. I happen to think that’s rather a purist position because for all that the Mafia has been arguably glamorised in American cinema, America as a whole has done a lot better job of fighting Cosa Nostra than Italy.

“The point since the 1970s when the Mafia film really begins to supplant the western in American national mythology coincides with the point when the American state ratchets up its judicial response. In the 1970s that’s when they really come down hard on the Mafia and the federal authorities start dealing with organised crime. They institute witness protection programs and the Mafia in America starts to enter a serious decline. That coincides almost exactly with the point in cinema history when the Mafia films are establishing themselves as a kind of particular genre. There are ironies in this that make it a bit simplistic to think in terms of, ‘Is the issue whether they glamorise the Mafia or not?’” ▼

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And yet the relationship between the Mafia and the movies cuts both ways. A standard cliché of the genre is the image of (fictional) gangsters watching other (fictional) gangsters on screen, and adopting the habits and catchphrases of these nebulous alter egos.

This is art imitating art, but, according to Dickie, life has long been in on the action too.

Dickie: “There’s nothing new about the Mafia looking for representations of itself. In Sicily many Mafiosi were told, they may even still be told, in initiation that their organisation was a direct descendant of a Medieval brotherhood that helped the weak and fought the strong, and fought for Sicilian independence. And that’s a myth that comes from a novel, one of these serialised things that sold tons of copies in Sicily in the early twentieth century, and this became their kind of official mythology from that point on. There’s loads of evidence, particularly in the cinema industry, where Mafia money is going into cinema and actors are emulating gangsters – James Caan liked to hang out with gangsters, so did George Raft, who was big pals with Bugsy Siegel: they imitated each other’s dress and stuff like that.

There’s a long history of culture’s fascination with organised crime and vice-versa.”

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That fascination is what keeps the Mafia’s mythology alive, even as we begin to understand, thanks to writers like Dickie and Saviano, just how devastating its effects have been on Italian society and the world at large.

Dickie: “In Italy people aren’t fascinated by it in the same way. They want to know about it through a sense of wanting to put things right. There’s a great level of civic commitment behind finding out about the Mafia and campaigning about it and so on.

In the rest of the world, I think the Mafia is where middle class white-collar people go to feel dangerous and clever. It’s about giving the ordinary concerns of work, family, the ordinary dramas of our lives, a kind of lethal excitement and glamour. In some ways, like the blueprint of The Godfather, it’s family and work written in blood. It reflects back some of our most ordinary concerns.” n

Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia is out now, published by Hodder, and is a brilliant read.

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The Beast of the East With the fall of communism, a new frontier of organised crime has opened up in the old Soviet bloc, and the ‘Stans’ have been quick to capitalise.

Words by Sorrel Neuss photography by George Grassie

Hit men lurk in every corner of Central Asia. After five hours traveling in minus

30 degree temperatures in a beat-up Lada from one end of Kyrgyzstan to the other, James Cooper, an American NGO worker, asks the taxi driver to stop in the next village for a warming bowl of rice and kebab. Feigning deafness, the driver puts his foot down, racing past barbecues churning out smoking mutton and careers onto the mountain pass. “There is no way I can stop here, sir,” he mutters. “I murdered two people in this village for ‘my brother’ and they probably won’t be very pleased to see me.”

Former Soviet states close to home are being pressured to fight the Mob. Last month the European Commission suspended EU aid to Bulgaria worth hundreds of millions of euros for failing to tackle organised crime. But out of sight, in an area the size of Europe, Central Asia is being left to fall headlong into lawlessness.

Once part of that vast red bloc that took up six pages in The Times Atlas, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan gained independence in 1991. Since then, each country has managed to take the corruption, drug running and

swindling that gathered momentum during the last decade of communism and kick it up a notch.

Under Soviet rule, Central Asian republics were tightly controlled by communist leaders appointed by Moscow – three of which are still their nation’s presidents. They relied on a network of local state farm and provincial bosses, and today these same men head territorial mafias that control jobs and government benefits. Virtually all Central Asia’s strongmen favour a particular mafia or clan, which is crucial in countries where such ties determine who gets rich.

Wholeheartedly bent from top to bottom, the Secret Service, government ministers and the Mob are so closely intertwined that it is almost impossible to firmly point the finger when bankers are kidnapped, opposition politicians ‘disappear’ or sound businessmen lose their trading licenses.

Unlike the Mafia in Russia, which took control of the country’s fragile banking system and newly privatised industries when communism fell, traditional mobsters in the ‘Stans’ focused largely on trafficking drugs and humans, leaving white-collar crime to the president’s friends and family. ▼

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“NGOs ESTIMATE THAT 3,000 PEOPLE FALL PREY TO MOB TRAFFICKING EVERY YEAR.” Most key industries in oil- and uranium-rich Kazakhstan, for instance, are owned by those loyal to the president’s party, while anyone outside the circle that vies for a sizeable share of the petroleum pie finds themselves slapped with a hefty fine for ‘evading taxes’ or stripped of their operating license for ‘breaking environmental legislation’. But nepotism has its downside, as Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev’s (now ex-) son-in-law found out last year.

Until May 2007, Rakhat Aliyev, who was married to Nazarbayev’s eldest daughter, served as deputy director of the KGB (now called the National Security Committee) and ambassador to Austria. On top of his political career he amassed a fortune through control of a network of sugar businesses, a powerful media holding including a popular television channel, and Nurbank, the seventh largest bank in the country.

Suffering from small-boot syndrome, chubby-cheeked Aliyev announced that he was running for president in the next election, and now probably wishes he hadn’t. On January 18 last year, the former Chairman of the Board at Nurbank and his deputy were bagged and bundled into a jeep, never to be seen again. Aliyev was

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quickly accused of kidnapping the pair and bullying them into selling the bank’s headquarters and their business assets for a measly sum.

Divorced within days and transformed into Public Enemy Number One by an intense media circus, Aliyev was put on the wanted list and fled to Vienna with his wads of cash. The louder he protested his innocence, saying that the allegations were a conspiracy to get him out of politics, the thicker the plot became.

He and the former head of the National Security Committee were subsequently accused of masterminding a coup with the help of an organised crime ring and sentenced to 20 years in absentia.

“There’s really no point trying to figure out who to believe,” says Olga Dosybieva, Kazakhstan editor at Reporting Central Asia. Judges are notoriously bent and the National Security Committee often submits sketchy evidence to get the desired verdict, but then Aliyev did have the connections to pull the hit off, she argues.

Over the border in Uzbekistan, organised crime is even murkier. President Islam Karimov has proved to be one of the most authoritarian leaders in the region, bar the late Turkmen president Saparmurat Niyazov, who banned pop music and beards, and forced schoolchildren to learn his personal philosophy on life instead of

maths and chemistry. Under Karimov’s regime, the brutality inflicted on political dissidents has been so horrific that even the Krays would have a hard time topping it. Craig Murray, who served as British ambassador to the country from 2002 until he was unceremoniously sacked in 2004 for being painfully undiplomatic, compared Uzbekistan to Iraq under Saddam Hussein, claiming that prisoners were boiled alive.

Nasty pieces of work can murder or maim pretty much whoever they want, and the powers-that-be are not averse to sending out the Secret Service to kill rivals. Outspoken independent journalist Alisher Saipov, a 26-year-old Uzbek living in southern Kyrgyzstan, was shot three times at close range in broad daylight as he left his office last October, and both Uzbeks and Kyrgyz know that a proper investigation into the killing will never be launched.

Living under a corrupt government with little regard for human rights, criminals don’t find it hard to sell hundreds of women to the Middle East, Russia and South East Asia as sex slaves, and men to Kazakh construction firms. According to the US State Department, recruiters often hang out in nightclubs

looking for unsuspecting youths keen to travel. Cruising the party scene in the capital Tashkent is more laborious so the Mob there place ads in the local newspaper saying ‘Hot Uzbek wanted for loving marriage to Arab’, or ‘Building company willing to pay $500 a week to skilled brickie’. Travel agencies promising tour packages and work in Turkey, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates are also used to recruit victims. In most cases, people don’t know what has happened to them until their passport is ripped from their hands at the airport.

More than a few local officials at the Ministry of Information, Customs and Border can be bribed to fake documents or ignore orders to prevent young women suspected of being sold into slavery from leaving the country. Tajikistan has the same problem – NGOs estimate that around 3,000 people fall prey to Mob trafficking every year, but their biggest trade doesn’t scream or have to be fed, and is wholly more pleasurable to abuse.

Abakhon Sultonnazarov, a Tajik accountant living in Kyrgyzstan, leans out of his newly polished Hummer and whispers, “When I drive around in this back home, my mother slaps me about convinced I’m junkie scum.” ▼

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“THE LACK OF BARRIERS BETWEEN PRISONS AND POLITICS IS A TIME BOMB.” Even though most people in Central Asia live in poverty, Hummers transporting politicians’ princess daughters or kilos of heroin are everywhere. On the Tajik-Afghan border, low-level smugglers swap Kalashnikovs for opiates, then drive north to a pick up point where the Russian Mafia is waiting.

One Tajik smuggler at a bazaar on the Panj River told independent reporter Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, “Our job is just to get the sacks of heroin across the border, then the Russian Mafia come with their vehicles, many of which have police insignia. They take the heroin and give us the guns. Then they take the drugs to Europe.”

This highly lucrative trade has to be carefully watched over, and most of the crime bosses in Central Asia are appointed

by Moscow. James Cooper, whose job is (to attempt) to tart up squalid prisons, met one of them when he was unblocking a drain in Colony 31 just outside Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

Slopping around in piss, crap and dishwater, Cooper felt his shovel hit a hard, bloated corpse that let out a stomach-turning fart of noxious gas. Idly standing by smoking a Sobranie, 28-year-old Baktyar Damirovich Beyshenaliev piped up, “Oh dear, I didn’t

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dispose of that one properly, I totally forgot about him.”

With access to just a few pairs of handcuffs and a couple of guns to control around 400 inmates, the prison guards in Colony 31 have no choice but to let Beyshenaliev run the show.

His reach stretches far beyond his cell. In a 2006 report, the International Crisis Group expressed grave fears that the lack of barriers between prisons and the outside world, including high-level politics, was a ‘time bomb’.

Keen to get its hands on Central Asia’s natural resources, the EU has made some attempt to suggest that the region combat corruption and organised crime, but given that the Stans’ closest partners are Russia and China, the beast looks set to roam free  Sorrel Neuss has been living in Kyrgyzstan for the past 18 months, working as a freelance journalist; editor of News Briefing Central Asia, an online daily news service run by the Institute of War and Peace Reporting; and editor of The Times of Central Asia, the only English language newspaper that covers all the Stans. From her base in Bishkek, she has travelled to Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and China to find, investigate and analyse stories of organised crime.

WE LIKE TO BELIEVE THAT THE WORLD IS GETTING SMALLER, BUT CRIME HAS ALWAYS BEEN A GLOBALISED BUSINESS. ILLICIT ACTIVITIES CROSS CONTINENTS LIKE CREEPERS, OVERCOMING NATIONAL BORDERS AND ECONOMIC BOUNDARIES. THIS AT-A-GLANCE GUIDE TO ORGANISED CRIME OUTFITS AROUND THE WORLD SHOWS THE BREADTH OF THEIR PRESENCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.

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a wish Mafi Name: Je a c i r e m : A h Location ineteent n e t a L : d e d n u o F century es: activiti Criminal egging, s, bootl Narcotic itution t n, pros extortio ce: n e u f infl Sphere o Russia, , l e a r Is America, a Australi pon : Once U Watch it a, Billy c i r n Ame a Time i Casino , Bugsy, Bathgate ish Mob Name: Ir a : Americ Location eteenth n i n d i M Founded: century es: activiti Criminal gging, e l t o o b s, ng Narcotic trafficki n, drug o i t r o ica, t r x e ce: Ame f influen Sphere o a Australi nt, Europe, Waterfro e h t n O : t i h c Wat , Gangs Crossing Miller’s Departed e h ork, T of New Y Name: Jamaic an Pos Locati se on: Ne w York Founde City d: Mid 1970s Crimin al act ivitie Narcot s: ics, g un run Sphere ning of infl uence: Americ a, Kin gston, Watch UK it: Marked For De ath

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043

Matteo Garroneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gomorrah shines a light on Italyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s murky reality. He takes us beyond the tourist brochures into the ugly underbelly of a society in crisis.

Words

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by

Ellen

E

Jones

Naples is still a beautiful city.

The spaghetti alle vongole still tastes as good, the moon still shines as bright, and the Michelangelos in the Museo di Capodimonte are still as spectacular as ever, but beyond all that there’s another Naples. In this second city, 4,000 known Cammoristi turn over an estimated €30 billion a year and the murder rate has skyrocketed to almost double that of most other Italian cities. This probably isn’t what Goethe meant when he wrote, ‘See Naples and die’.

It’s this city and its provinces that are the setting for Gomorrah, one of two Italian films to win over the jury at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Il Divo, Paolo Sorrentino’s unflattering portrait of Mafia-connected former Italian PM Giulio Andreotti won the Prix du Jury, while Gomorrah received the Grand Prix.

And they aren’t the first films to delve into Italy’s murkier side.

Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother is an Only Child (2007) explored the political extremism that still has a foothold in Italy, while Mob epic Romanzo Criminale (2005) was a big success internationally.

The Italians could be forgiven for holding emergency talks on the future of tourism. Instead they’ve taken the enlightened step of heralding a new golden era in their cinema. Forget the sentimentality of Cinéma Paradiso (1988) or La Vita è Bella (1997).

Now, 60 years after Rossellini and De Sica put poverty on screen, there’s cause to add another ‘neo’ to Italian neo-realism.

Or so say the critics. Matteo Garrone, the director of Gomorrah, claims to be utterly oblivious. “The fact that my film coincided at Cannes with Sorrentino’s film and that both films were very well received is just a coincidence,” he says from his home in Rome. “Personally, I always start from reality. I try to find stories which can explain something about Italy, but which also have something universal to say. Certainly there are other

directors now who are looking beyond the national boundaries – Sorrentino, [Giovanni] Veronesi – but I can’t say more than that.”

This might also be Garrone’s gruffly modest way of refusing credit for the massive impact his film has already had in Italy, where it was released shortly before Cannes. And in truth, at least part of that credit must go to Roberto Saviano, the author of the book on which Garrone’s film is based. As a young man, Saviano’s father, a doctor, was savagely beaten by members of the Camorra, a Mafia-like crime organisation, for saving the life of a man they’d shot. Saviano Jr waited decades to exact an elegant revenge, but it was worth it. He infiltrated the Camorra and in May 2006 exposed their workings to the world.

Based in the Campania region of southern Italy (of which Naples is the capital), the Camorra is made up of several, often warring clans. Following the Irpinia earthquake of 1980 many Neapolitans were displaced to the housing estates in Scampia and Secondigliano, poverty-stricken suburbs which soon became the bloody centre of Camorra operations. “That area became known as a symbol of the national and international drug trade,” says Garrone. “€500,000 a day is traded in drugs there. It’s enormous.”

Announcing the existence of powerful crime organisations to Italians is as newsworthy as calling Australia’s attention to their kangaroo population, but Saviano’s courageousness extended beyond that. His achievement was to publish in clear, logical detail the machinations of this organisation from lowliest street dealer to highest-ranking politician and, moreover, to name names. The recipient of several death threats, Saviano is now under 24-hour police protection.

Among the rackets exposed by Saviano’s book was the Camorra’s involvement in waste disposal – although ‘disposal’ ▼

045

“i try to find stories which can explain something about italy.” might be putting it strongly. Instead, the Camorra charged to collect waste from big businesses before dumping it illegally all around southern Italy. The situation culminated this year in the Naples Rubbish Crisis, around the same time as the film version of Gomorrah was released. Whether cinema goers were seeking an explanation for the 20 foot mountains of rubbish, or merely hoping to escape the stench is moot – audiences for Gomorrah topped half a million in a single week.

But Garrone’s film does more than slap Saviano’s book on screen. From a complex plot he’s selected five loosely interwoven strands and applied a war reportage style which suits the subject matter only too well. The scope is comparable to Soderbergh’s Traffic, taking in two teen hoodlums with more ambition than sense; a corrupt local official and a young boy’s first taste of Camorra-style justice. Gomorrah might be a gangster movie, but it is a gangster movie free from all the wiseguy mythology and stripped of even the thinnest layer of glamour.

The dons live in concrete housing blocks instead of gaudy Long Island mansions, and the sharp suits have been replaced by stained vests and crumpled board shorts. The look is more Rab C Nesbitt than Al Pacino.

In an early scene Camorra up-and-comers Ciro and Marco are seen play-fighting in a derelict villa while quoting lines from De Palma’s Scarface. It was shot in a villa built by a real-life Camorra boss, Francesco Schiavoni, who, legend has it, asked the architect to build him a home just like Tony Montana’s. “I admire Scorsese and Coppola immensely,” explains Garrone, “but this was an opportunity to make a film which described characters who were formed on that cinematic idea. As Saviano said very clearly in his book, the malavita [underworld] takes the idea of how they should be from the cinema rather than the cinema taking the idea from real life.” The Gomorrah shoot even had it’s own example of this strange symbiosis: Camorrista and budding thespian Giovanni Venosa was so keen to have his wrongdoing on screen that he proposed himself for a part in Garrone’s film. He was arrested after Gomorrah was shown in a prison and some former associates identified him to the police.

Garrone chose not to compose yet another celluloid love letter to organised crime. Instead, the erstwhile documentarymaker has created something impressively and unusually authentic. The characters speak in a Neapolitan dialect so thick, the film had to be subtitled even for its Italian release; it was shot in a real Scampian housing estate and several of the actors

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were non-professionals plucked from the location. Garrone even boasts that his focus on faces when casting has given his film “a sort of anthropological value”, and Gomorrah is indeed home to several noses Roman enough to conjure images of distant centurion ancestors. As for the structure, you can forget the rise and fall momentum of Goodfellas or The Godfather; Garrone’s film is populated by characters who neither rise nor fall, remaining instead in the same patch of dirt for generations, however many bodies pile up, or bags of heroin get sold.

Most of the film was shot in Camorra heartland, but Garrone, unlike Saviano, seems to have escaped any reprisals.

“We certainly had no experience of any blackmail or underhand payments,” says Garrone of the shoot. “But undoubtedly we must have been monitored, as is everything that goes on in the provinces of Naples.” Did he have any direct contact with members of the Camorra? Garrone pauses before responding.

“If, in the numbers of people that we had dealings with, there were people who were directly connected with The System,” he says, putting particular stress on ‘if’, “their advice can only have been useful to us.” It’s hard to tell whether he’s being cautiously vague about identities, or whether in fact, he simply doesn’t know for sure. One of the things Gomorrah makes clear is that in the world of the Camorra, the line between citizen and criminal is difficult to draw. Gomorrah’s aerial shots of the massive concrete housing blocks reveal labyrinths that might have been designed by Escher.

Escape is impossible here and many find themselves caught in the mechanisms of organised crime, without even knowing it.

Garrone’s achievement is to make his audience understand that truth as surely as the people he portrays understand it. “We wanted to give to the audiences watching it that same sensation, that same impact that we had felt when we found ourselves in these places,” he says. “To carry this out, it was necessary to become as invisible as possible, so that the audience should have the feeling of being there, so that there was no sense of the business and the structure of filmmaking around it.” It’s this stylistic transparency – not the bent politicians or the run-down housing or the casual violence – that carries Gomorrah’s real political message. Or as Garrone puts it: “Any subject can be interesting, but in art it is the expression that creates the strength and purity.” In a country where the hidden power structures are the most influential, a country where so many important decisions are made off-screen, it’s not the content of Gomorrah that matters, but the openness and honesty with which it’s communicated n

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e f i l r u o y e g n a h c o t

If the Mob want to send a message, theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not going to text.

Recognising these calling cards might just save your skinâ&#x20AC;Ś illustrations by paul willoughby

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1.

Placing the second finger of the right hand between own teeth.

During the trial of Joseph Ferrano in 1912 for the murder of his wife, this Mafia death sign was used by both Joseph and his brother against witnesses. The sign had such an effect that the judge ordered that anyone seen giving any hand gestures was to be arrested.

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2. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Take the stone from my shoe.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; A traditional Sicilian death threat, allegedly uttered by Carlos Marcello in reference to John F Kennedy, a year before the then-president was assassinated.

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3.

A letter containing bullets.

This less-than-subtle message was most recently received by a southern Italian mayor who opposed the building of a bridge between Sicily and mainland Italy.

051

4.

Fish wrapped in an article of clothing, then in newspaper.

Delivered to the Capo of a Family, this signifies that a made guy has been murdered, and is at the bottom of the sea. It’s a Sicilian message – he sleeps with the fishes – from The Godfather.

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5.

Shot through the mouth.

Sending a message by killing someone with a shot through the mouth indicates that this person was a rat.

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Generation Gangster From sympathy for the devil to greed is good, every era of cinema gets the gangsters it deserves.

Words by James Bramble 054 THE man gomorrah on wire ISSUE ISSUE

In the famous climax to Edwin S Porter’s 1903 masterpiece, The Great Train Robbery, a robber stands square-on to the camera, framed from the chest up, looks the audience in the eye and fires a shot – point blank. That shot symbolically announced the arrival on cinema of something complex, compelling and dark. No longer would audiences jump from their seats at the simple sight of a train entering a station. It was the coming of the criminal and the crime genre.

It was the coming of the gangster.

gangsters, Dillinger included, were dead.

When Cagney met Bogey in The Roaring Twenties (1939), cinema turned its attention to the cops and started its fade to black. Noir portrayed the law as dirty, violent, amoral.

Cagney became a Fed in G Men (1935) without so much as changing his hat. A new nightmare of neuroses absorbed cinema, and while the product of Hays, it was more febrile, sexualised and intoxicating than anything the brief golden era of the gangster had produced.

By the late 1920s Warner Bros was looking to exploit their newly developed sound technology with something more substantive than Al Jolson’s Toot Toot Tootsie. They turned instead to Al Capone. Capone’s notoriety and the public appetite for sensational tales of Mob exploits inspired Warner-owned First National to produce Little Caesar (1931) in which Edward G Robinson’s quick, clipped, nasal delivery set the mark for the mobster method. Warners followed it with The Public Enemy; James Cagney’s Tom Powers – babyfaced, mad and bad – making him a star.

Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, his 1958 paean to noir, was its swansong. A ‘new wave’ of French filmmakers raised on the gangster film’s vision of America, dark and smart, tired of cinematic conventions and inspired by the possibilities (and later constraints) of De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, turned the gangster into a hypertextual warrior, subverting narrative and genre and asserting the individuality of the criminal, the street-smart anti-hero, the auteur of his own universe.

Gangster films, with their dramatic, quick-fire dialogue, screaming tyres, screeching dames and gun-shots, leant themselves easily to the era of sound cinema and scared the bejeesus out of a nervous America feeling its way out of economic bankrupty and social collapse. The Hays code, drafted by a Jesuit priest, entreated that, ‘The sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin’. When moralising epilogues no longer sufficed, gangsters were reduced to whimpering cowards. In Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Cagney’s Rocky Sullivan cries like a baby on the way to the chair. But his whimpering inspired more sympathy than contempt.

In a time of crisis, gangsters offered a lucid response to the failures of capitalism, where, for every winner, some sucker’s got to lose.

The gangster is the inner child, bawling out for recognition in a bitter world. His death is our inevitable failure. “I ain’t so tough,” says Cagney in The Public Enemy, surprised and pained, before dieing face down in the rain.

In 1933, the Production Code banned films on bank-robber John Dillinger and, by extension, gangsters as a whole. By 1934 most

Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (1960), and Melville’s Bob Le Flambeur (1956) were playful and ironic, teasing, with a mixture of ridicule and reverence. In Truffaut’s Tirez Sur Le Pianiste (1960) gangsters named Chico and Fido chat about scarves made of Japanese metal. The films flaunt the chic sensualism of French libertarianism, and the wise-ass confidence of American pop. Never in cinema had there been such a harmonious, bewitching marriage of styles that would otherwise seem poles apart.

The Nouvelle Vague blew back on America at its time of greatest post-war crisis. While the gangster film was revived by its new artistic legitimacy, the spirit of optimism and youth that the New Wave founded seemed inappropriate to America’s anxiety. American cinema’s rediscovery of the golden-era gangster took it back to the dark heart of the ’30s: The Untouchables, Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown, The Godfather Parts 1 and 2.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) best embodied the full circle of the gangster film’s genealogy.

Faye Dunaway’s depression-era chic captured Bonnie Parker’s Parisian style via Brigitte Bardot – complete with beret and bob. The film’s stylised violence and dreamlike surrealism drew from the wistfulness of the French but harshly juxtaposed it with American realism. ▼

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Director Arthur Penn had said, “We’re in the Vietnamese War. This film cannot be immaculate and sanitised bang-bang. It’s fucking bloody.”

In 1972, The Godfather portrayed the anxieties of an America faced with challenges to its power. The Corleones are the embodiment of the American myth – patriarchy, work, justice.

The Godfather is protected by a ‘family’ that extends to a business. He has learnt to play the system to his benefit. He has won and America has provided his victory: “I believe in America, America has made my fortune,” says Vito Corleone. The Mob offers a clear moral nexus, a system of justice and financial reward. This was Catechism and Commandment versus the convenient vagaries of the secular as espoused by lapsed Quaker Nixon, who pronounced: “When the president does it that means it’s not illegal.”

Unlike Rocky Sullivan or Tom Powers, Vito and Michael Corleone’s failures to achieve peace and honour are not personal tragedy.

Instead, they mirror the failure of America to live up to its aspirations and self-image; to act as a bridgehead against the amoral chaos that threatens to engulf it. Hence, while containing the generic staples of moral ambiguity and corrupt law-enforcement, The Godfather can be seen as one of the most conservative films ever made – light-years from the ’30s gangster who survives in a moral vacuum, necessarily but fatally alone.

Pacino’s inner struggle as Michael Corleone was given stark counterpoint by his role as Tony Montana in De Palma’s Scarface (1983).

With its synth-soundtrack, chainsaws, cocaine and polyester, Scarface takes Howard Hawks’ Tony Camonte to extremes of amorality and excess. Montana may be Reagonomics with a coke-habit and ‘little friend’, but in spirit he is a return to the ’30s, back down from The Godfather’s conservative heights. ‘The World is Yours’ announces the neon sign in Hawks’ 1932 version, like a siren calling Camonte onto the rocks. And ‘The World is Yours’ mocks the legend on a statue as Tony Montana lies dead from a bullet in the back.

Britain’s own era of excess offered obvious opportunities for the genre. 1980’s The Long Good Friday captured the cusp of Thatcherism, with an entrepreneurial class railing at national

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decline – Bob Hoskins’ Harold Shand under siege from Yanks and Provos but trying to keep the ship afloat. As Thatcher announced the end of society, Brit gangsters filled the void with what has been called the ‘homosocial economy’, a terrifying microcosm of Thatcherism. In The Krays (1990), the nurturing, mythical mother provides the moral foundation for a traditional micro-society but is also inspiration for the system’s inherent brutality. The sensitivities of other female characters, which threaten the political infrastructure, are sidelined, destroyed or rendered irrelevant to the male enforcers – most obviously by Ronnie Kray’s homosexuality.

The rediscovery of the gangster in recent times, most obviously Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), can be dismissed as a triumph of style over substance, of reinterpretation by a generation driven by a desire for change yet – unbound by ideological certainties – forced to rediscover past glories for cultural authenticity. During Euro ’96, football crowds sang ‘Self-preservation Society’ from 1969’s The Italian Job in the ironic yet heartfelt hope that reincarnating the spirit of the ’60s would bring sporting success. And filmmakers reinvented Get Carter’s bleak, counter-Carnaby Street ’70s through a string of gangster flicks: Snatch, 51st State, Gangster No 1., The Limey.

But while such films embodied the Loaded generation’s self-conscious cool – and drew on a rich seam of British success – they mostly succeed only as parody. It took Tarantino to make something meaningful from all this anchorless irony, turning Bonnie and Clyde into Micky and Mallory, naming his production company after Godard’s gangster-chic Band à Part, and turning the ironic, wise-crack dialogue of the Nouvelle Vague back on the French: “A Royale with cheese…?”

The gangster film lives on, reinterpreted and redefined particularly in the new Asian cinema of Hong Kong and South Korea, where the self-destructive loser has accentuated meaning in ultra-modern societies with new conformist pressures. But the gangster film’s apogee came with the poetic symmetry of Scorcese’s tribute to The Great Train Robbery’s point-blank gun blast, in 1990’s Goodfellas.

Much has changed since that first fatal shot, and yet we all still want to be wiseguys n

FROM 12TH SEPTEMBER AT AND SELECTED CINEMAS ACROSS THE UK VISIT WWW.HEAVYMETALINBAGHDAD.COM/UK FOR UPDATES

A LWLies review will not be inhibited by any perceived rules.

Just as movies are about more than the two hours you spend sitting in the cinema, our reviews are a chance to talk about much more than the immediate experience of the film in question.

There are many different aspects of the movie-going experience and we will embrace them all.

Anticipation

Ever waited six months for a boxoffice behemoth? Read a book that you loved and nervously watched the adaptation? Been pleasantly surprised by an off-the-radar independent? Anticipation plays a crucial role in your reaction to a movie. Rather than ignore it, we think it should be measured and acknowledged as part of the movie-going experience.

Marked out of 5.

Enjoyment

All other things aside, how did you feel for those two hours?

Were you glued to your seat?

Did the film speak to your soul?

Was it upsetting, disappointing, or just plain boring? Were you even awake?

Marked out of 5.

In Retrospect

Great movies live with you; you carry them around wherever you go and the things they say shape the way you see the world. Did this movie fade away or was every moment burned into your retinas?

Was it a quick fix action flick, good for a rainy Sunday afternoon? Or the first day of the rest of your life? Did you hate it with a fury only to fall in love with a passion?

Or did that first love drain away like a doomed romance?

Marked out of 5.

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Linha de Passe

DIRECTED BY Walter Salles, Daniela Thomas STARRING João Baldasserini, Vinícius de Oliveira, José Geraldo Rodrigues

Linha de Passe is one of those strange and rare movies that’s easier to love for what it does rather than what it is. Like Citizen Kane defying the formal conventions of classic Hollywood filmmaking, or À Bout de Souffle sticking it to the establishment auteurs of ’60s France, Linha de Passe is a stinging riposte to an increasingly established tendency in Brazilian cinema to glamorise extreme violence and crushing poverty as little more than giddy sensual motors to Boys’ Own action adventure.

Directed by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, it’s set almost exclusively in the dirt-poor favelas of São Paulo, amongst four penniless brothers desperately fighting their way through the system. And yet unlike the leering gung-ho machismo in recent favela-set smashes such as Elite Squad, City of Men and City of God, this movie refuses to

RELEASED September 19

fetishise gun crime and torture and dizzy de rigueur camera spasms for the sake of a visual punchline. Instead, Linha de Passe builds slowly and gracefully on character and mood, creating an intimate portrait of four young men – Dênis (Joao Baldasserini), Dario (Vinícius de Oliveira), Dinho (José Geraldo Rodrigues) and Reginaldo (Kaique Jesus Santos) – who are all struggling with self-doubt, and with the question of how far they’re willing to go to beat the poverty trap.

Here Denis, a motorcycle courier, needs to support his child and a string of girlfriends; soccer hopeful Dario needs a $3,000 bung to pay off a corrupt recruiter; born-again Dinho needs a faith injection to counter his doubts; while youngest Reginaldo simply needs a father figure. The boys are raised by a pregnant, chain-smoking, heavy-drinking and mildly violent single mum

called Cleuza (Sandra Corveloni).

Even when one of the brothers eventually resorts to street crime, Salles and Thomas deliberately downplay the possibility of high-octane favela action, and underscore instead the moral implications of the act itself (the brother is left crying and bewildered on a patch of urban scrub).

Of course, all of this doesn’t mean that Linha de Passe is flawless. Or, at times, that it’s even any good. It drags interminably in the mid-section, where the boys shout a lot, bang doors and get slapped by their mother. And it’s hardly surprising to learn that much of this was improvised on set – there’s certainly a vague repetition of feeling here that seems like the work of eager actors rather than muscular screenwriters.

Yet, again, it’s what the movie does that matters. And

the gloriously optimistic final reel, sweetly engineered around four separate epiphanies, is boldly counter-intuitive to both favelaset dramas and contemporary independent cinema in general, right across the globe. And for this alone, you’ve got to love it.

Even if you don’t. Kevin Maher

Anticipation.

Walter Salles is finally back in Brazil, three years after Dark Water.

About time too. Four

Enjoyment. Family

life in the favelas? It’s not grim. It’s not überviolent. It’s just kind of, well, poetic. Three

In Retrospect.

Smart, important and affecting filmmaking.

Just don’t make us watch it again. Three 059

An interview with Baltasar Kormákur, director of Jar City.

LWLies: How did you come upon Arnaldur Indridason’s novel, Jar City?

Kormákur: It was around 2000. I heard that finally a believable Icelandic thriller novel had come out – we never believed we could make thrillers in Iceland because of the lack of crimes. I was really fascinated by its premise: a company that is digging into our grandmothers’ secrets, that’s fantastic. It was a tricky adaptation because the novel seems so easy to adapt but when you come to it, it took me some time to find the key to it, changing the timelines so it wouldn’t become like a TV show.

Jar City

RELEASED September 12

DIRECTED BY Baltasar Kormákur STARRING Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson, Atli Rafn Sigurdsson, Björn Hlynur Haraldsson

Iceland native Arnaldur Indridason caused quite a buzz when he broke into the English-language crime scene a few years ago with his novel, Jar City (now translated as Tainted Blood). In it, he uses the apparently motiveless killing of a middle-aged loner to examine a hot topic in his homeland; because of its small and largely homogenous population, Iceland has become something of a real-life laboratory for DNA research.

It’s not always easy to transform a novel of ideas onto the big screen. Baltasar Kormákur succeeds thanks to the simple recourse of sticking faithfully to the book, which will come as something of a thrill to Indridason’s ever growing number of fans.

Kormákur is bold enough to capture a sense of the larger picture with stunning overhead shots, both of the countryside and row-upon-row of box-like houses, as if assembled in some genetic code of their own. The

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plot’s darkness is exacerbated by a grim humour, notably linked to food (even in Iceland cops drink coffee and eat doughnuts on stake-outs, it seems).

That the main investigation proceeds on a straight narrative line makes Jar City, the film, resemble a high-end, one-off TV drama of the sort we so rarely see these days. It’s a simple approach that offers admirable pay offs, not least in the unusual casting of Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson as the crabby lead, Inspector Erlendur. However, it also makes for a relatively dry kind of storytelling that might not be enough to satisfy non-crime aficionados. Jonas Milk

Anticipation. The

big screen version of an excellent novel. Three

Enjoyment. Grimly fascinating. Three

In Retrospect. Will put you off going to Iceland for life. Three

LWLies: What did you think of Inspector Erlendur?

Kormákur: He’s such a true Icelandic character, the type of man who has moved from the countryside and never really found ground in the city. That’s why I emphasised the mountains: when he’s out smoking, I pulled the mountains in. This man took the mountain with him to the city. There’s a lot of those people; they bring horses to the city and they have a country life in the city but it doesn’t fit. For me, he is like a missionary trying to correct the world by going from house to house. I liked that part of having him drive through the lava fields and being alone in this humungous country – it’s very big with very few people – and also emphasising not the beauty spots but the spots that are more real to me.

LWLies: Was Erlendur difficult to cast?

Kormákur: It was very controversial – it was like when James Bond is cast – because the novels are well known. There was a competition in the papers without my permission polling who should be Erlendur. None of them suggested this guy [Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson], he wasn’t even in the competition. When I came out with that, I had to go through endless interviews and explain why I chose him. People didn’t like the idea – he was too young, he was too thin – but age or weight do not explain character to me, that’s just the physical state. The tone of this actor, the loneliness that this person has in him, that was more important to me. He was the only one who could pull this off with no effort and keep you interested – he got fantastic reviews and everyone loved him.

LWLies: How is Run For Her Life going with Sam Shepard?

Kormákur: In a way the story is not far from Jar City.

It’s about organ tourism and it’s a dramatic thriller.

Probably the reason I was offered this is Jar City I was very lucky. I had to fight for the script a little bit as I really wanted it. I’d been sent so much shit: haunted houses or horror stories. It’s fascinating how people can see Jar City and say, ‘Yeah, this is the right guy to make a bloody horror movie.’ Jonas Milk See the whole lot online at www.littlewhitelies.co.uk

Eden Lake RELEASED September 12

The reactionary, right-wing tabloid agenda has found an outlet in Eden Lake.

It’s here that Marks & Spencer catalogue couple Steve and Jenny (Michael Fassbender and Kelly Reilly) head off for a romantic weekend in the countryside, only to be taunted by a gang of loutish youths. After a scuffle results in the gang’s dog being stabbed, they’re soon fleeing for their lives as the coked-up yobs hunt them through the woods with murder on their minds.

While the resulting torture and gore is itself unpleasant, the most sickening aspect of Eden Lake is writer/director James

DIRECTED BY James Watkins STARRING Kelly Reilly, Michael Fassbender, Jack O’Connell

Watkins’ obvious pathological hatred for ‘chav scum’. From the off, every lower income person that the nauseating, middle-class couple encounter is coarse, aggressive and immoral. The single mother shown belting her kids while out binge drinking is just one textbook example in this cinematic equivalent of a Daily Mail op-ed.

Indeed, the vicious gang of kids ticks every box on the poisonous tabloid’s long shitlist of hatred; they habitually spit, swear, take drugs, play loud ‘urban’ music and, of course, carry knives. It seems that the film’s central message is that

the working-classes are a bunch of vile scumbags who are just one step away from lynching decent, law-abiding tax-payers.

But prejudices aside, for a mechanical horror film, it’s actually rather well executed.

Watkins has a knack for creating a chilling sense of peril, and Jack O’Connell is exceptional as the gang’s sadistic leader Brett – at one point bullying the other members into mutilating a stricken Steve with utterly convincing menace.

Thomas Turgoose makes a brief appearance in a familiar This is England guise, but is overshadowed by an imperilled

Kelly Reilly clawing her way through the undergrowth in various states of agony.

As a slice of survival horror, it’s both frightening and disturbing, but the nasty, bigoted agenda of Watkins is ultimately far more unsettling. Ed Andrews

Anticipation. People getting killed in the woods. How original. Two Enjoyment. A terrifying if sour experience. Three

In Retrospect.

A hateful perpetuation of prejudice. Two 061

Import/ Export RELEASED October 3

Nothing shouts ‘bleakness’ quite like snow.

It’s a cinematic trait that’s been heavily employed recently, from the snow-covered minarets of Istanbul in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak, to the white urban canvas of Rafi Pitts’ It’s Winter.

Ulrich Seidl’s Import/Export opens in blizzard conditions over a particularly desperatelooking corner of the Ukraine.

Olga (Ekateryna Rak) is a single parent working as a nurse in the local hospital. Living in a freezing, run down flat with her mother, and battling with pitiful wages, she’s forced to do internet sex work on the side.

Meanwhile in Austria, Pauli (Paul Hofmann) breaks up with his girlfriend, loses his job and is mishandling spiralling debts.

When you’re part of Europe’s economic underclass, it doesn’t matter where you are; life is a struggle and Austria – the idyllic

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DIRECTED BY Ulrich Seidl STARRING Ekateryna Rak, Paul Hofmann, Michael Thomas

‘West’ migrant workers envisage – is certainly no El Dorado.

Pauli and Olga end up moving in separate directions – passing each other but never meeting.

Pauli decides to stay in the Ukraine, refusing to travel back to Austria with the sex-obsessed stepfather with whom he’s been working; Olga tries to make a new life for herself in Austria.

It’s an interesting idea, exploring how workers become de-humanised – commoditised almost – in the search for stability. Topical, certainly, given Europe’s disagreement over its open border policy and populations increasingly on the move in search of the most basic of economic rights.

But ironically it’s the film’s humanity that stands out.

Admittedly, in Austria Olga is mistreated by everyone from a mother whose children she looks after to a jealous nurse

at the hospital where she cleans.

But it makes the fleeting moments of harmony all the more touching, especially the friendship she strikes up with an elderly patient, sneaking him into a basement room for a dance as a treat.

It’s believable filmmaking.

Scenes may often appear protracted to the point of being painful, but that’s because Seidl has allowed them to run their natural course. The viewer is subjected to Pauli’s stepfather humiliating a prostitute in a seedy hotel room, and a wince-inducing scrap between Olga and the jealous nurse.

As in Seidl’s previous film, Dog Days, the two protagonists are played by non-professional actors whose work taps into something quite genuine. The film is also painstakingly shot in a real geriatric ward, where the clicks, screams, prayers and incoherent ramblings create a tragicomic air.

The close-ups of patients in make-up and hats for a ward party frankly portray the gracelessness and inverted childhood of old age.

So yes, Import/Export is bleak, but this isn’t a film that judges – it presents a story. And while the characters’ lives are tough, what remains with the viewer is their very human element of perseverance. They’ll take what life throws at them and somehow you know they’ll be okay. Ed Stocker

Anticipation.

Eastern European grimness. Let’s go! Three

Enjoyment. Moral clarity and great performances result in a powerful piece of cinema. Four

In Retrospect.

Refreshingly real and, yes, perhaps just a little bit bleak. Three

The Duchess

RELEASED September 5 DIRECTED BY Saul Dibb STARRING Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Charlotte Rampling

The Duchess is as breathtakingly beautiful as Keira Knightley. And it’s not simply a structure, an edifice. Every time you feel disposed to write it off as just another eighteenthcentury costume drama, not only does it visually stun but its raw wit (exemplified by Ralph Fiennes’ insensitive, sexist Duke) and emotion (as expressed in Knightley’s moving performance – a turn of real range) make it more than a tad confounding.

There’s something odd and rather wonderful about The Duchess. It’s like Marie Antoinette without the boredom. It’s like The Edge of Love, sapphism and all, with Hayley Atwell seducing Knightley. It’s strangely contemporary and it’s directed

by Saul Dibb, best known for urban drama Bullet Boy. Maybe he’s the explanation.

His take on the story of the Duchess of Devonshire tells her

tale without turning the film into either Georgette Heyer (her of the Regency romance novels) or heritage cinema.

For all that there is a visual reverence, The Duchess is both psychologically and sociologically modern in its outlook.

Georgiana Spencer was married as childbearing chattel to the Duke of Devonshire. As she was unable to give birth to sons, however, the Duke sought pleasure elsewhere, namely with her best friend Bess (Atwell), who he moved into their home as his mistress, together with her three sons. He was, notoriously, ‘the only man in England not in love with his wife.’

The Duchess, meanwhile, gave her support and love to eventual Prime Minister Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper, who still hasn’t proved he’s the real deal), but was ultimately forbidden him because she was a married

woman. Not all is fair in love and the eighteenth century.

This is one of the film’s most obvious observations; being a woman at this historical juncture wasn’t great, and the point that women accepted their social corsetry – however much they kicked against it – is well made. More modern is the depiction of the titled as celebrity; the talked about, the fashionistas of their day – Knightley, drunk and setting her hair alight, reeks of Amy Winehouse. And though we like to think that the idea of three people in a marriage is wholly contemporary in our era of multiplicity, it’s clear we didn’t set the precedent. It just happened behind closed doors rather than out in the open air.

Inside and outside – that’s the clearest metaphor in The Duchess. At the beginning Georgiana is outside in the garden, gambling with her

girlfriends on their male companions running a race.

Inside her mother negotiates her marriage to the Duke. By the end of the film, husband and wife sit inside, while their children and his mistress play freely in the garden.

She’s been tethered, reined in, but the fact that her story is still being told is welcome proof that her spirit lives on. Lorien Haynes

Anticipation. If the poster’s anything to go by it’ll be endless shots of Knightley looking gorgeous. Yawn. Two Enjoyment. Unexpected for exactly the kind of reasons that make a great film. Four

In Retrospect. Curious to see it again to see if the initial diagnosis stands up. Three

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Good Dick

RELEASED October 3 DIRECTED BY Marianna Palka STARRING Marianna Palka, Jason Ritter, Eric Edelstein

Between the lighthearted title and the video-storegeek-falls-for-porn-obsessedoutcast narrative, you could be forgiven for expecting a film somewhere on the comfy side of an indie cult comedy meets American Pie. Don’t. Marianna Palka’s first feature is an intense study of the dysfunctional relationship between a clueless video store clerk who lives in his car (Jason Ritter), and a traumatised, isolated young woman who rarely leaves her apartment (Palka herself) – except to pick up more porn.

But although an impressively risky first film, Palka (who writes, directs and produces as well as taking lead acting duties) keeps the audience at arms length throughout, never really giving enough access to

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the characters to truly make the bizarre relationship believable.

Perhaps if Palka had taken a step back, she might have afforded the audience the opportunity to take a closer look.

Instead, we are left feeling entirely detached from the complexities of the relationship between the characters (who go resolutely unnamed). Is he a patient knight in shining armour who wants to help the woman he has fallen in love with? Or is he a sleazy no-hoper who stalks a damaged young woman, lies his way into her life and relentlessly pushes her into accepting him? Even at the seemingly happy ending we’re left in the uncomfortable (if admirably ambivalent) position of being not quite sure.

There are, however, humorous moments, which

naturally come with the setting – the video store employees discuss the location of the clitoris, and Ritter’s character watches porn with his crush for the first time; with the understanding that he doesn’t speak, look at her or get an erection. These laughs are uneasy, particularly when they are casually interspersed with the more uncomfortable subject matter.

The problem here is that the film isn’t quite sure what it is.

Should we find the situation funny, or should we find it shockingly disturbing? Regardless, both actors make a heartfelt effort with the flawed script, and the interaction between the two is intriguing. It’s just that there’s something about the relationship that never quite convinces.

At times the situation seems

like a crass stereotype of an unhealthy sexual interaction.

Even when light is shed on Palka’s condition, the confrontation with her past seems half-hearted and misplaced after a film that skirts around the issue up until the last five minutes. Ambitious and elusive to the last, Palka’s debut isn’t quite handled with the skill that the subject matter demands. Kat Halstead

Anticipation. Romance, comedy, geeks and porn.

Surely an all-American laugh-fest. Three Enjoyment. What exactly

are we looking at here? Two

In Retrospect. The potential is there if you go along with it. Three

Tropic Thunder DIRECTED BY Ben Stiller STARRING Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr, Jack Black

An unsubtle swipe at Hollywood vanity, Tropic Thunder is a war comedy that packs in as many star cameos and industry jokes as it possibly can. Perhaps writer/director Ben Stiller thinks that if you throw enough shit jokes at a movie audience some of them will stick. Sadly, we’ve seen it all before. And the sheer density of lazy gags makes the whole film seem slightly desperate; any comic timing is lost in the relentless stream of ‘funnies’ ranging from the absurd to the even more absurd.

The slight plot is little more than a line from which jokes about ego-driven celebs can be hung.

It sees a group of dumb-ass actors – Stiller, Jack Black and

RELEASED September 19

Robert Downey Jr as a black man – filming the titular overblown war flick in Vietnam, unknowingly crossing over the border and ending up in conflict with a local teenage warlord. A couple of inspired moments aside – Stiller being warned by Downey Jr that you can never go ‘full retard’ – this is as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face.

But Tropic Thunder’s saving grace is, ironically, its one genius, genuine star turn. Not Stiller.

Not Black. Not Downey Jr. We’re talking about Tom Cruise, popping up as a Sumner Redstone-esque movie mogul complete with paunch, bald head and grotesque, hairy, sausage-fingered hands.

With The Missile launching into tirades of swearing at anyone unlucky enough to be in his vicinity, it’s a brave, brilliant, self-deprecating performance from one of the best representatives of Hollywood’s mainstream megabucks movies.

Cruise hurls himself at the role, and Stiller realises he’s hit on something special – extending the cameo and letting him boogie the movie to the final credits. Andy Davidson

Anticipation.

Stiller, Black and Downey Jr – could be special this. Four

Enjoyment. Lazy

gags thrown around like confetti… But wait – is that Cruise?! Two

In Retrospect.

Slack comedy redeemed by a weapons-grade Missile strike. Two

Osamu Tezuka: Movies into Manga 18–24 Sep 08 A major retrospective of the work of the man referred to as the ‘God of Manga’: Osamu Tezuka. The season includes TV classics, adult features, family films, an exhibition of Tezuka’s drawings and a unique performance of Kamishibai Theatre.

The Barbican is provided by the City of London Corporation

Waxing philosophical with Russia’s smartest director, Aleksandr Sokurov.

Alexandra

LWLies: Why did you decide to take the risk of shooting on location in Chechnya?

Sokurov: We needed to be inside of this story, inside of this environment; we needed some point of reference.

We wanted partly to be shaped by where we were – we didn’t build any sets and we filmed real people as well, real soldiers, which was very important, real Chechen young men and women.

RELEASED September 26

DIRECTED BY Aleksandr Sokurov STARRING Galina Vishnevskaya, Vasily Shevtsov, Raisa Gichaeva

With all the physical trappings of the genre – the young grunts and cratered landscapes – but none of the emotional baggage – the combat scenes, the heroic sacrifice – Alexandra reveals itself as a war movie without the war. Instead, Aleksandr Sokurov’s film is a contemplative study that bears sad, silent witness to the destruction of Chechnya and the Russian soul.

Galina Vishnevskaya is the elderly Alexandra, making her way to the war zone to visit her grandson. She is Russia made flesh, her eyes fathomless and skin creased over the vast steppes of her body, like a tree trunk whose roots stretch deep into the soil of her homeland. And yet she’s no idealised peasant: “What ‘Fatherland’?” she asks one of the young soldiers who explains his patriotic duty to fight.

Alexandra is too old and too wise to fall for these illusions.

The commonality of suffering has been imprinted on her generation. It isn’t the soldiers but the Chechen people with whom she makes the most telling connection, though they find themselves on opposite sides of a war. In the home of an old market seller, two women grumble about men and the tragedies they have borne. Sisters of experience, it’s in their small kindnesses that Sokurov comes as close as his

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rigorous cinematic intelligence will allow to making a clear statement about the nature of this conflict.

Vishnevskaya is a formidable presence. A survivor of the siege of Leningrad and a former Soviet operatic star who relocated to America in the ’70s, she is both an icon of Russian patrimony, and a woman who dared to bridge cultures. For his part, Sokurov marries his technical mastery with the bold decision to shoot entirely on location in Chechnya. No studio could evoke the light and dust of this landscape, somehow timid and fragile, as if the air itself has been drained of life.

Alexandra is Sokurov’s riposte to the new strain of aggressive masculinity in Russian filmmaking. At a time when nationalism and war have created a belligerent Russian state, Sokurov has questioned the consequences of this alliance.

And though he does so subtly in Alexandra, it is with an iron resolution. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation. Sokurov is one of the smartest directors around. Three Enjoyment. Thoughtful if occasionally heavy going. Three

In Retrospect.

Reveals layers of meaning over time. Three

LWLies: What kind of precautions did you have to take?

Sokurov: Everyday when we would go to our locations we would use different vehicles, we would change number plates and we would always take a different route.

There were several locations where Vishnevskaya could only be filmed for seven or eight minutes, and then she would have to go back into the armed vehicle and be taken away. We would rehearse it with her in advance and the director of photography and myself would rehearse it on location just before filming, we would stand in for her, and then when we knew that we were ready, we would say through walkie-talkies that she should be here and they would bring her.

LWLies: How did she cope with that? That’s not a young lady’s game.

Sokurov: She’s an exception; she’s a very brave person.

She has experienced many things in her life – she has survived the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War, she lost a son there, she saw the bombs falling.

She wanted to play this role so much she didn’t care about anything; she just wanted to work.

LWLies: There’s a sense that the generation who survived the Second World War are almost bearing witness to the new war and the new generation, but there’s a tension between experience and understanding. Is that something you find in Russian society now – the tension between young and old as things change so rapidly?

Sokurov: There’s no tension, they live in completely different social and cultural niche environments. What is scary in Russia is that a form of Nazism is being born and maturing in Russia – that is really scary.

LWLies: You’ve said in the past that film isn’t an art form – it has to rely on art or literature for its own relevance.

That seems like a strange statement for a director to make.

Do you stand by that?

Sokurov: It’s my opinion. That’s how I developed; I’m not saying that I’m right when I say that. I believe that cinema is a secondary kind of phenomenon. The most serious, profound, thought-through and masterfully executed works of art are art and literature. All ideas and all possible plots have already been dealt with in literature. Matt Bochenski Check out www.littlewhitelies.co.uk for more of this chin-scratching chat

Step Brothers RELEASED August 29

Men behaving like children has been a comedic staple in the work of both Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow. Think of Ferrell’s streaking frat boy in Old School or the stoner geeks in Apatow’s Knocked Up. It makes sense, then, that the star and producer of Step Brothers have made the most literal movie about arrested development yet.

The plot follows Brennan (Ferrell) and Dale (John C Reilly), two middle-aged men who, for reasons that are never fully explained, still live with and depend upon their single parents.

When Dale’s retirement-age father and Brennan’s well-preserved mother (veteran character actor

DIRECTED BY Adam McKay STARRING Will Ferrell, John C Reilly, Mary Steenburgen

Richard Jenkins and Mary Steenburgen, aka Mrs Ted Danson, respectively) decide to get married, the two are forced to live together.

But here's the twist: while the men in Apatow’s films have to this point behaved either like drop-out teens or horny losers, the two heroes of Step Brothers take it one step further – or one step back, if you like – and act like spoilt 10-year-olds. Even though they're in their forties.

And that’s the gag. And no matter how many times Ferrell rubs his testicles on Reilly’s drumkit, or Reilly hits Ferrell with a bicycle, it's still essentially the same joke that Harry Enfield came

up with for Kevin the Teenager all those years ago: men acting like children, repeated ad nauseam. That said, this is no Kevin and Perry Go Large. Ferrell and Reilly are talented comedians, and their surreal improvised insults and well-timed slapstick keep the laughs coming.

Still, it’s hard not to feel as if Ferrell and co are phoning it in.

Where Anchorman and Talladega Nights hinted at an interesting middle chapter in Ferrell’s career, this noisy, nonsensical comedy is just one more disappointment after Semi-Pro. Watching yet another ironically choreographed fight scene, or Reilly marching about in his Y-fronts, it strikes

you that it’s not just Ferrell and Apatow’s characters that are suffering from arrested development. Dan Stewart

Anticipation.

Ferrell plus Apatow plus John C Reilly equals hilarity. Four

Enjoyment. Slapstick plus shouting equals a few good laughs. Three

In Retrospect. Forget the maths. If you’re a fan of what these guys do, you’ll laugh – but the gag is wearing perilously thin. Two 067

La Zona RELEASED October 17

A taut social thriller from Uruguayan-born director Rodrigo Plá, La Zona is ostensibly the story of an armed robbery and a brutal manhunt. But as well as delivering the prerequisite tensions of a thriller, Plá’s impressive film also holds a mirror to a broken, divided society made up of two worlds that fear and hate each other.

Residents of an enclosed and exclusive estate known as ‘The Zone’ in an upmarket area of Mexico are shocked by a violent crime gone wrong that is committed by three impoverished teenage youths from the wrong side of the tracks. Horrified that the high gates and private security guards are unable to keep the poverty that surrounds the estate at bay, its inhabitants decide not to report the incident to the authorities but instead to track down the perpetrators themselves. With one thief,

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DIRECTED BY Rodrigo Plá STARRING Daniel Giménez Cacho, Maribel Verdú, Daniel Tovar

Miguel (Alan Chávez), so far unaccounted for, tensions further mount when one of the wealthy inhabitants, young Alejandro (Daniel Tovar), encounters the fugitive and finds his loyalties torn as an uneasy complicity develops between the boys.

Assembling an impressive roll call of veteran actors familiar to admirers of recent Spanishlanguage cinema including Daniel Giménez Cacho (Cronos and Bad Education) and the increasingly assured Maribel Verdú (Y Tu Mamá También and Pan’s Labyrinth), Plá also succeeds in coaxing committed and gritty turns from his younger, less experienced cast. The effect is a disturbingly authentic frisson between the classes and the generations.

This divide is further emphasised by a meticulously orchestrated mise-en-scène and the shadowy exploration

of the tunnels, nooks and crannies that surround ‘The Zone’, encroaching upon its fragile sense of detachment from crime, desperation and degradation. Plá also effectively exploits the prevalence of CCTV in gated communities and in modern society in general, creating an impression of permanent surveillance, and reinforcing a prevailing atmosphere of paranoia and fear of ‘imminent’ attack.

Compared somewhat erroneouslywhen it first screened at international festivals to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, Plá’s film is not without its flaws. The majority of these can be attributed to the need to fulfil certain genre criteria and to populate the narrative with character types (the conflicted father, the criminal with a conscience) while also providing a social and political

critique. At times the alliance is uncomfortable. However, as a warning of the potential dangers of segregation La Zona packs an undeniable punch, and the tone of fear, bitterness and frustration is admirably unsweetened. The director has stated that he intends for the film to act as a warning to the audience about the shape of things to come; he has certainly succeeding in alerting us to a way of life that is drawing ever closer. Jason Wood

Anticipation.

Festival hype has this as a stylish drama with urban noir overtones. Four

Enjoyment. A prescient,

multi-character drama that grips like a vice. Four

In Retrospect.

Flawed but fascinating, it’s a chilling vision of the future. Three

Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot

DIRECTED BY Adam Yauch STARRING Robert Garcia, Kevin Love, Lance Stephenson

RELEASED October 10

Elitism is a weird concept. Not because its very existence relies upon subjugation, but because some people still consider it a good thing. In the world of American high-school basketball, elitism isn’t a good thing – it’s the only thing. You’re either an elite kid, or you’re not.

And if you’re not, well then, you’re nothing.

It’s a social reality your average docu-maker would be eager to get stuck into. How does it feel to see yourself on the cover of a magazine under the word ‘Phenom’ while you’re still fighting puberty and a borderline case of gigantism? Was Jerry Maguire’s odious sports agent actually the most underrated moment of box-office realism? Do these kids

Heavy Load

really ‘just wanna play ball’, or do they just wanna see their name on a pair of sneakers? And, when you do finally become the 0.01 per cent of the elite who make it into the NBA, do you spend your days sniffing your multi-million dollar contract and praising The American Dream? Or does a little piece of you secretly want to vomit all over its elitist ideals?

These are the questions roused by Gunnin’ – then deftly ignored. Following eight of the country’s premiere high-school basketball players in the build-up to the Elite 24 game at the legendary Rucker Park, New York, Gunnin’ doesn’t so much analyse the celebrity incubator that turns these man-children into national heroes as it does reinforce it.

DIRECTED BY Jerry Rothwell STARRING Simon Barker, Jimmy Nichols, Mick Williams

“George Michael is gay at the weekends… and in the week too.” That's just one of the lyrical gems of Heavy Load, stars of this rockumentary with a twist.

As a welcome relief from that tired formula of egos, girls and guitars, we get learning difficulties thrown into the mix. The compelling cast of characters ranges from frustrated drummer (aren't they all?) Michael, who yearns to go solo and jumps through endless hoops in his care home, hoping to gain independence and “become socialised” (as he puts it with admirable objectivity), to guitarist Mick, whose priority is his young family.

The band’s trajectory is inspiring: from solely playing nights for audiences with learning disabilities to securing billing

Back-stories of the humble prodigy done good; slo-mo courtside footage; a rolling hip hop soundtrack – Beastie Boy Adam Yauch has created the kind of hype that keeps lil’ bros in grade school dreaming of the big time. But if your heart doesn’t soar at the marriage of bling and b-ball, chances are you’ll leave with more questions than you came with. The bright lights of elitism – it ain’t everyone’s cuppa tea. Andrea Kurland

Anticipation.

A Beastie Boy on basketball? Makes sense. Three

Enjoyment.

Where’s the insight?

Where’s the grit? Do we really care ‘Who Will Be Next?’ Two

In Retrospect. If you don’t like b-ball, this one’s gonna drag. Two

RELEASED October 3

alongside the likes of Badly Drawn Boy at the Wychwood Festival; from spear-heading their ‘Stay Up Late Campaign’, which supports those whose nights out are cut short by care-workers’ clocking off times, to receiving Kylie's blessing to record their liberal interpretation of ‘Can't Get You Out of My Head’. It’s better than Shine A Light any day.

Sadly, filmmaker Jerry Rothwell’s own frame-hogging tendencies more than match the egocentricity quota of your standard rockumentary. He directs like an overly loquacious taxi driver, regaling you with unwanted personal details and offering gratuitous commentary on the traffic by bookending the film with solipsistic, superfluous meditations on his private

circumstances and overlaying it with such banal codphilosophising as, “They say the camera steals part of your soul… You can't film something without changing it.” That’s some deep shit right there.

Still, the story tells itself, and the story is that Heavy Load are really no different to any other rock band. All they want, as bassist Paul summarises, is to “stay up late, get pissed, get shagged.” Sophie Ivan

Anticipation. A punk rock outfit with learning disabilities: certainly intriguing. Three Enjoyment. Minus

points for Rothwell, but you gotta give it up for his subjects. Three

In Retrospect.

Gives the rockumentary a welcome lease of life and sense of purpose. Four 069

Fear(s) of the Dark

RELEASED October 3 DIRECTED BY Blutch, Marie Caillou, Richard McGuire, more STARRING Aure Atika, Guillaume Depardieu, Nicole Garcia

It’s a simple brief: restricting yourself to black-andwhite, create a piece of animation that explores our primordial fears.

But in the hands of six of the world’s hottest graphic artists, the result is an innovative twist on the horror genre that burrows deep into the unconscious to create an atmosphere of sickly unease.

Fear(s) of the Dark is a collaborative effort from artists and graphic designers drawn from different disciplines across Europe, whose work and reputations have a global reach.

It includes the likes of French comic artist and New Yorker illustrator Blutch; Marie Caillou, whose sharp, Japaneseinfluenced designs have been used by Sony; and Richard McGuire, the British designer, author and children’s illustrator.

These three, alongside typographer Pierre Di Sciollo, artist Lorenzo Mattotti, and

070 THE gomorrah ISSUE

cartoonist Charles Burns, were brought together by artistic director Etienne Robial, whose passion for black-and-white and taste for the unconventional brought Fear(s) of the Dark to life.

What he got was a number of films, linked by a recurring narrative, that explore various facets of our nightmares. From Caillou comes the story of a Japanese girl bullied at school and possessed by the spirit of an evil samurai; Mattotti’s lush, evocative style lends itself to the tale of a beast terrorising an African community; Charles Burns’ high-contrast tones give a hyper-real edge to a weird fable of sex and transformation; Richard McGuire devises a near-silent haunted house drama; while Blutch contributes an episodic account of pure evil in the guise of a cackling maniac and his slavering dogs.

Each film is visually and

thematically distinct. Caillou favours a faux-naïve, almost CG flavour that has more than a hint of a demonic South Park; Blutch is all anarchic lines and heavy shading; Mattotti’s fine art background is clear in the depth and fluidity of his composition; while Burns and McGuire favour cleaner, more rigid lines, although McGuire’s manipulation of light and dark has an altogether different aesthetic purpose than Burns’ aggressive, uncomfortable characterisation.

As to the content, each of the films possesses a queasy power to shock: McGuire’s in its intense examination of claustrophobia and the psychological terror of the unknown; Mattotti’s parable of a community exorcising its anger in a time of anxiety is a subtle allegory; Caillou and Blutch ramp up the violence; but it’s Burns who gets (literally) under the skin.

What’s great about Fear(s) of

the Dark is that it doesn’t come across as some kind of cool kids’ class exercise. For all that it’s stylistically impressive, it also works as a dramatic edifice, backed up by a pounding soundtrack from Laurent Perez Del Mar. If you’re sick of slick teen horror, Fear(s) of the Dark is a chilling antidote. Matt Bochenski

Anticipation.

Intriguing prospect, but collaborations are tricky things to nail. Three

Enjoyment. A horror

original of distinct but complementary parts that will play just as well for non-aficionados of the genre. Four

In Retrospect.

Passes the acid test of scary movies: you’ll be sleeping with the light on. Three

Whatever the project, there’s nothing to fear when French composer Laurent Perez Del Mar is on the job.

LWLies: Are you a fan of the horror genre? What’s your favourite horror film?

Del Mar: I love horror films when they tell a believable story. I like thinking it can occur in real life – that is really frigthening for me. Then I can spend nights and nights thinking about it. My favorite films and scores are Psycho and Red Dragon. Psycho for the way [Bernard] Herrmann wrote his music, and Red Dragon more for the exceptional mood [Danny] Elfmann has been able to create through his music.

LWLies: How did you go about the process of creating the soundtrack? What difficulties did you encounter?

Del Mar: I didn’t really have time to think about it because the producers told me that they wanted the music three days later in order to make their opinion whether we could work together. So I had to work in a very short period of time to give them an idea of the colour of the music, of the orchestration I proposed. I did all at the same time – the theme, harmony orchestration and recording of my musicians.

I was happy as I have been totally free. They didn’t restrain me with some limits; they just wanted to be scared hearing the score.

LWLies: Do you have a favourite section of the film, or one that you found particularly easy to score?

Del Mar: The part of the film I preferred to score is the beginning, on Etienne Robial’s work, because music has a great importance there; it tells people that they are going to freak out. The music is a way to get them deep into the film before it has really started. I had to adapt the beat of music to the broken rhythm of the générique, and that was a great challenge.

LWLies: How did this process compare to working on shorts?

Del Mar: Working on shorts, ads or feature films is quite the same for me. I’m most of all interested in traducing the director’s or producer’s feelings with my music. On Fear(s) of the Dark, Christophe [Jankovic], the producer, wanted a big orchestra with a lot of violins, so I did it that way. But I could also create an enormous tension with one single violin, or with the voice of a child. There are no real rules. You just have to be inspired!

My music should still make sense by itself too.

LWLies: What scares you the most?

Del Mar: Losing people I love. Madness. Extremism.

Matt Bochenski

See the full transcript at www.littlewhitelies.co.uk

Silent Film & Live Music Series Sep–Dec 08 Another brilliant selection of silent cinematic classics, accompanied by live music from pianists, bands and DJs. Expect Buster Keaton comedy shorts, a mini-season of landmark horror films from the silent era and the first full-length animated feature film in the history of cinema.

The Barbican is provided by the City of London Corporation

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon RELEASED September 12

French director Eric Rohmer’s latest offering is a studiedly naïve portrayal of young love, which is perhaps surprising given that Rohmer is just shy of 90 himself. With his track record for engaging with literary heavyweights, however, it’s no surprise that he should plump for a highly stylised adaptation of Honoré D’Urfé’s Renaissance novel, L’Astrée, observed in all its anachronistic glory. Written in the 1600s, the story is set in ancient Gaul, as imagined through the prism of D’Urfé’s contemporary philosophical and religious concerns.

This film shares with Rohmer’s earlier work both a fabulous quality and a preoccupation with moral codes.

Put simply, The Romance of

The Chaser

DIRECTED BY Eric Rohmer STARRING Andy Gillet, Stéphanie Crayencour, Cécile Cassel

Astrea and Celadon is a study of fidelity. When shepherdess Astrée’s misguided jealousy leads her rash young lover Celadon to throw himself into a fast-flowing river, a panoply of pastoral plot points are deployed – from Carry On-worthy cross-dressing to reed-playing shepherd’s laments.

Celadon, presumed dead, is in fact rescued and nursed back to health by a bevy of attentive nymphs from whom, Odysseuslike, he must tear himself away in order to make amends with his grieving beloved. Well, these things happen…

The unashamedly contrived dialogue (which retains much of D’Urfé’s original text, including sung debates and philosophical digressions) should, in theory, leave the viewer, much like

Celadon, ready to drown themselves in the nearest body of water. Its effect is, however, both charming and refreshing, complemented by the gracefully pared down production.

Rohmer’s characteristic aversion to non-natural sound and audio-dubbing serves here not only as an aesthetic, but a narrative masterstroke: the raw soundscape of birdsong, rushing currents and breezeblown grass aptly renders nature itself as vital a character as any in the film. Indeed, his exquisitely realised world is pretty much a dream come true for suckers for

pastoral arcadia from Sidney to Spenser. For others, the phrase ‘acquired taste’ springs to mind, but anyone willing to suspend their disbelief will be handsomely rewarded. Sophie Ivan

Anticipation.

New Wave meets ancient mythology. Three

Enjoyment. Studiedly naïve but studiously effective. Three

In Retrospect. An engaging romp if accepted on its own terms. Three

RELEASED September 19 DIRECTED BY : Na Hong-jin STARRING Kim Yun-seok, Ha Jung-woo, Seo Yeung-hie

“Sir, I made a mistake, I should make up for it.” So says Joong-ho (Kim Yun-seok) after accidentally denting the car of Young-min (Ha Jung-woo). Joong-ho is a debt-ridden ex-detective pimp whose ‘girls’ keep disappearing, and he is scouring Seoul’s streets for the mystery client who he believes has been selling them on. Young-min is a softly spoken man who likes to murder hookers with a chisel. These men’s paths will cross several times during the night – the one racing to save mother-and-whore Mi-jin (Seo Yeung-hie), the other to finish her off – in a city that seems to care little about her fate.

With its rain-swept streets,

072 THE gomorrah ISSUE

its gutter-level corruption and its sullied protagonist on a mad dash for redemption, Na Hong-jin’s feature debut is a bleak and frantic psycho-noir, furiously edited and ferociously performed. Like Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 Memories of Murder, it uses the frame of a serial killer investigation to expose systemic flaws in Korean society. Like Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (also 2003), its main character is a monstrous man racing against the clock (and at one point even wielding a hammer). And like so many films to emerge from Korea’s ‘new wave’, it wears the trappings of genre merely to confound its viewers’ expectations.

Unfolding with an economy

to match its relentless pace and hyper-realistic style, The Chaser never stops pounding away at the viewer’s skull. Indeed, it’s only in the breathing space after the final credits roll that its melancholic morality sinks in. Here, hunter and quarry may not be so very different, but by the end, in this collision of uncomfortably similar values, at least one party is trying to make up, too late, for his mistakes. Anton Bitel

Anticipation.

Not another serial killer movie. Two

Enjoyment. Your first

thought will be to catch your breath. Four

In Retrospect.

A muscular noir that gets the blood pounding, but equally haunts the mind. Four

I’ve Loved You So Long You’ve got to admire the pluckiness of French cinema. What other nation, when presented with the feline masterpiece that is Kristin Scott Thomas, would have her opening a film looking thoroughly washed out, wearing minimal make-up and dragging on a cigarette?

No saturated colours, no concealer – this is filmmaking about as far from Hollywood fanfare as you can get.

I’ve Loved You So Long is the debut directorial feature from Philippe Claudel, a well known French novelist who also wrote the screenplay. It’s a family drama about two sisters reunited after 15 years. Léa (Elsa Zylberstein)

DIRECTED BY Philippe Claudel STARRING Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge Hazanavicius

RELEASED September 26

has had no contact with sister Juliette (Scott Thomas) because the latter has been in prison. The crime is serious and her story takes much of the film to unravel.

Scott Thomas is excellent.

It’s a challenging role – all emotionally repressed, fingertrembling trauma – but she never crosses that fine line into over-acting. How long ago her supporting role in Four Weddings and a Funeral seems. What’s particularly enjoyable is watching the evolution of Juliette. At the beginning the scenery is drab, the colours muted. Juliette looks moribund – lifeless even. But she thaws and mellows over time and the camera responds accordingly.

The only criticism is that although there are genuine moments of emotion and anxiety between the sisters, the family fold into which Juliette is welcomed is just a bit too idyllic.

Léa is happily married, has two adopted Vietnamese children and a group of intelligent friends.

French cinema loves to promote a certain type of person – middleclass and bookish – and there’s no shortage of them here. Even Juliette, the putative outcast, falls into the same bracket.

But this is a competently put together film, and one that tackles interesting questions about crime, punishment, rehabilitation and family. For much

of I’ve Loved You So Long, the extent of Juliette’s wrong-doing remains unrevealed, and yet the viewer finds themselves complicit in prejudging her, just like the rest of her family. Ed Stocker

Anticipation. You’ve got to love wistful French film titles. Four Enjoyment. Scott

Thomas as you’ve never seen her before. Four

In Retrospect.

Several steps away from greatness, but with much to recommend it nevertheless. Three 073

Burn After Reading DIRECTED BY Joel Coen, Ethan Coen STARRING Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand

The Coen brothers are on fire. After re-inventing the modern western by slamming an action movie up its pipe in No Country for Old Men, they’ve now created a new film genus entirely – call it ‘screwball nihilism’ – in Burn After Reading.

For this quirky A-list comedy ensemble that deals ostensibly with hapless hucksters and wannabe spymasters is really about the nagging emptiness of the human condition.

It stars Brad Pitt, in cheeky charismatic form, as a ‘flamboyant’ personal trainer called Chad (he’s never actually referred to as ‘gay’, but he’s

074 THE gomorrah ISSUE

RELEASED October 17

very, well, touchy-feely), who discovers a CD-ROM of seemingly incriminating CIA-related data on the floor of Hard Body’s Gym. The CD (actually a banal professional memoir) leads Chad and cosmetic surgery-obsessed co-worker Linda (Frances McDormand) to low-ranking ex-CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich).

Cox, an embittered burgeoning alcoholic, is on the cusp of divorce from frosty wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), who in turn is having an affair with ex-Federal Marshal Harry (George Clooney), who himself is about to embark on a secret affair with Linda.

It’s typically labyrinthine

stuff, but it unfolds, as you’d expect from the makers of Fargo, with effortless precision before happily degenerating from comedy threats and misfired extortion into accidental manslaughter and, ultimately, multiple grisly murders (a shocking scene midway through the movie signals the downward spiral).

And yet, it’s not the murders here that make it dark. Instead, it’s the sheer desperation that defines every single character.

Linda’s craving for surgery is near-psychotic. Harry’s addiction to online dating is crippling.

While Cox’s vanity, evinced

brilliantly in the way he refers to his memoirs as “my mem-wah” is heartbreaking. The result is a movie that’s funny, cruel and just the tiniest bit depressing. But in a good way. Kevin Maher

Anticipation. It’s the Coen brothers, isn’t it? And they’ve been back on form. Five Enjoyment. Witty,

smart, laugh-out-loud and disturbing too. Four

In Retrospect. Still stunned by one of those fatal twists. Five

Dennis Gansel may be surfing the crest of The Wave, but he took time out to shoot the breeze with LWLies.

LWLies: Did you have any kind of agenda with the film?

What was your intention?

Gansel: When I was a little kid I was always asking myself, ‘Would a dictatorship be possible again in Germany?’ And I always asked myself, ‘If it is possible, what would be my part in it? Would I be in the Resistance or would I go with the masses?’

So it’s really a good question because in Germany or Great Britain or France or wherever, in Western democracies, they say, ‘It will never ever happen again because we learned our lesson.’ I am not so sure, so I really wanted to make a point, or tell a story, and carry on with the question, ‘What if?’

What if you have a very charismatic teacher? What if he is just playing around with these very fundamental rules of psychology? What if you have a classroom full of people who are talking about, and who are thinking in ways that German people and German students are now thinking? And that was really a point of starting for me.

LWLies: Is that why you relocated the story to Germany?

Gansel: In Germany, especially with the younger generation, there are some people with the idea that it will never happen again in Germany because of our past. And it’s the same in Israel, where people say, ‘Our two countries are so haunted by the experience, it’s not possible again’. But it’s not about politics or history, its about psychology; its about the need to belong to a group and group pressure. So I thought, ‘It’s possible again in Germany,’ therefore I relocated it to the country. As I am German, I know a lot about German psychology, but also I wanted to relocate to a country which had this very dark past to see if it can happen again. Because if it can happen in Germany, I think it can happen everywhere.

LWLies: Is the film imbued with good memories or bad memories of school for you?

Gansel: It’s how we felt high school was. It had fantastic times; you had a laugh; you really hate people; you really bond with people. For me, high school was always a miniature, a kind of life in a small bowl. I always thought it was really interesting. I remember it as a very, very interesting and intense time. Not always happy. So I found it a fascinating setting, and when I started to write the screenplay I instantly remembered situations and dialogue [from my school days].

LWLies: What does the future hold for you?

Gansel: I want to make something about state terrorism.

That’s really something I am into. Tiru Thiruvilangam Check out the full, unabridged transcript at www.littlewhitelies.co.uk

The Wave

DIRECTED BY Dennis Gansel STARRING Jürgen Vogel, Jennifer Ulrich, Frederick Lau

RELEASED September 19

Dennis Gansel’s The Wave is a fascinating retelling of a fascist uprising within a high school that (with due irony) all students should be frogmarched into theatres to see.

Set in an unnamed German city, this tightly focussed film occurs over a single week, during which a teacher, Rainer Wenger (played with easy charisma by Jürgen Vogel), comes up with an experiment for his class to explain the workings and effects of an autocratic government.

The role-playing game, which transforms Rainer into an all-powerful figurehead, brings out an unprecedented enthusiasm from his students, which morphs inexorably into fascist groupthink.

Though based on the real life case of Ron Jones, an American history teacher who conducted the same experiment in 1967, the idea that children have an innate tendency to adapt to extremist ideology is far from new. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is an obvious forebear, and indeed, The Wave has its very own ‘Piggy’ – a bespectacled source of amusement who seems destined for a jack-booted shoeing. Where Golding was writing in a climate of British imperialism, however, Gansel has a very modern take on youth psychology and our political climate.

If the screenplay initially seems too lean, giving little or no background on the personalities involved, this lack of characterisation eventually

works in the film’s favour, as it becomes clear that it’s only in the rise of the collective that these teenagers find an identity.

And yet The Wave is a powerful movie, not least because the filmmakers have relocated the story from America to Germany. This simple sleight of hand adds an even darker undertone to what is, effectively, a German-made indictment of the country’s difficulty in engaging with its awkward history.

Gansel seems to suggest that this embarrassed silence should make way for acceptance; that the horrors of that period should be seen as an outcome of basic, universal human failings, not as the result of a unique set of economic and social circumstances. In other words, it could happen again, anywhere, at any time. If that sounds like an extremist position in itself, however, it is one whose potential consequences are clearly caught in Rainer’s face, flushed with horror, as he stares bleakly into the camera and the film fades to black. Tiru Thiruvilangam

Anticipation. German kids and fascism. Could get messy. Three Enjoyment. Tight script but occasionally flawed execution. Three

In Retrospect. As a condemnation of apathy, it does the trick. Three 075

Taken DIRECTED BY Pierre Morel STARRING Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen

In one of the opening scenes of Taken, ex-‘Dark Ops’ agent Bryan (Liam Neeson) reveals to daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) that his topsecret career as a government ‘Preventer’ meant that he was charged with stopping “bad things from happening”. Sadly, this job description didn’t extend to covertly assassinating director Pierre Morel – a fact demonstrated by the ensuing 90 minutes of cinematic purgatory.

Neeson plays the overprotective dad whose hushhush job may have strained his daughter’s affection (yawn) and destroyed his marriage (y’don’t say), but it sure as heck schooled him in the art of blazing a trail of indiscriminate violence in pursuit of any kidnapper who dares to prey upon his loved ones. Cooked up with a soupçon of wit and a splash of irony, this creaking set-up might have

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RELEASED September 26

provided sustenance for an update of the vigilante B-movie.

With neither of these ingredients to hand, Taken is quickly reduced to a lumpen mess of a film, as simplistic as it is morally shameless.

From the moment Bryan’s wide-eyed daughter sashays aboard a Paris-bound jet against her father’s wishes, the film’s message is clear: LA is safe, but do not, under any circumstances, let your daughter leave the confines of the West Coast of America, or she will be plucked from the pavement by a rabid gang of Eastern European pimps before her jetlag has worn off.

As if to confound his staunchest supporters, co-writer Luc Besson bafflingly allows his name to adorn a script so replete with automatic writing that it might have been conceived at a séance. Indeed, by the time the ‘action’ shifts to Europe,

the cliché-ometer is measuring readings so high that you start to wonder if Taken is in fact an ingeniously disguised work of post-modern satire. How else could Morel – himself a fully paid-up Gaul – get away with introducing (no word of a lie) a baguette-wielding French agent by the name of Jean Claude?

Characters aside (this, it seems, is certainly the director’s wish), the film’s progress is so predictable that impatient audience members will be sure to shout out dialogue before the actors on screen are able to deliver their lines.

Cries of ‘Save the rainforest!’ might be more appropriate, given the amount of timber it must have taken to construct a central performance as excruciatingly wooden as Neeson’s. Harrison Ford at least cashed a large cheque on the way to proving that action movies ought to be the

preserve of actors with a full set of their own teeth. As if the point needed hammering home, Morel’s prosaic direction only heightens the sense that his lead man’s acrobatic antics are more likely to end in a dislocated hip than a fatal blow to his assailants.

In a post-Bourne world, such low-octane fluff is neither entertaining, credible, nor – let’s hope the studios heed the deathly silence of empty cash registers – commercially viable. Mike Brett

Anticipation. Revenge.

Explosions. Fast Cars.

Dig the trailer. Three Enjoyment. In one

scene, there’s an Eastern European gangster who looks amusingly like Jake Gyllenhaal. That’s it. One

In Retrospect. Taken for a Ride, more like. One

Partition RELEASED September 12

In August 1947, as British rule was coming to an end, the British Indian Empire was divided into the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India. The partition was both a response to and an entrenchment of tensions between Muslims and Hindus that led to the displacement of 18 million people – and the death of an estimated 500,000.

There have been at least five feature films in the last 10 years that have used the historical fissure of partition as a dramatic backdrop, including the second instalment

DIRECTED BY Vic Sarin STARRING Jimi Mistry, Kristin Kreuk, Neve Campbell

of Deepa Mehta’s ‘Elements’ trilogy, Earth. So why make yet another one?

Director Vic Sarin has said that he made the film, “Not to educate audiences.

I'm not out to recreate the bad dream. I'm not into politics…

The film is not a history lesson, it is at its heart a love story.”

That it is, but nothing else.

A tale of forbidden love between a Sikh and a Muslim, Sarin’s film not only offers little insight into the social or political context of partition, but fails even in its primary function as a romance – to

engage us in the plight of its star-crossed lovers.

This is largely the fault of some TV-drama production values, clunky scripting and over-acting. But there’s also something distasteful about Partition’s raison d’ être; about the very notion that we would ever need a shallow piece of melodrama to help us comprehend such obvious tragedy. James Bramble

Anticipation.

Could it be a moving, thoughtful addition to the canon? Three

Enjoyment. No it

couldn't. Dull, unengaging and melodramatic. Two

In Retrospect.

If you're interested in the period, look elsewhere. Two

Cinema of Brazil: Afro-Brazilian Perspectives 9 –15 Oct 08 A season of films celebrating the nation’s foremost Afro-Brazilian actors, directors, intellectuals and musicians. Including awardwinning features, documentaries and talks, the festival presents a diverse picture of Afro-Brazilian history and culture.

The Barbican is provided by the City of London Corporation

QUIET CHAoS

DIRECTED BY Antonio Luigi Grimaldi STARRING Nanni Moretti, Valeria Golino, Alessandro Gassman

After the sudden death of her mother, Claudia Paladini spends her first day back in primary school attending a lesson on palindromes. Her mind made malleable by recent events, her teacher’s words resonate with the universal truth that, in life as in literature, some things are reversible. Others – like the tragic loss of a parent – are not. So director Antonio Luigi Grimaldi conjures up the first of many philosophical undercurrents swirling through his mature and insightful adaptation of Sandro Veronesi’s novel, Quiet Chaos.

At the centre of the titular storm of emotions is Claudia’s father, Pietro (Nanni Moretti), a

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RELEASED October 24

high-flying TV executive whose response to his wife’s death is anything but typical. Seemingly stunned rather than griefstricken, Pietro decides to jack in the nine-to-five and while away his days outside the gates of his daughter’s school.

Notwithstanding his flirtatious eyeballing of unfeasibly goodlooking dog-walker Jolanda (Kasia Smutniak), Pietro’s life takes on a monastic and meditative air as he voluntarily casts himself adrift on a tiny patch of suburban parkland.

The further he surrenders himself to the comforting banality of his new daily routine, the more his life takes on a benignly Beckettian aspect – a timeless bubble of

reflection set against the insanity of modern life.

The scene of much of the film’s drama, Moretti’s face is like an antique canvas; weathered, authentic and subtly etched with decades of emotion. Alongside him, the mahogany-hued Alessandro Gassman defies the density of his tan to deliver a warm and nuanced performance as Pietro’s brother, Carlo. Further convincing support comes from sister-in-law and ex-lover, Marta (Valeria Golino), while Eleonora Simoncini chips in with an athletic performance in the controversial sex scene said to have thrown the Vatican into apoplexy.

Such explosive copulation

belies the fact that Quiet Chaos is as unspectacular a film as its name suggests. For all that, it is a subtle and rewarding study of the human condition, set apart from the usual multiplex fodder by its emotional candour and implicit love of life. Mike Brett

Anticipation.

Existential angst and torrid sex. Sounds like a winner. Three

Enjoyment. Leaves you pleasantly disorientated. Three

In Retrospect.

A definite grower. Three

What Just Happened?

RELEASED October 10

Films about Hollywood face an immediate danger of appearing selfindulgent and smug; in fact, they’ve forged something of a unique micro-genre. Robert Altman’s The Player, for instance, is a masterpiece of crafting – achieving both critical distance and insider insight. Its indie stylistics allows the audience to laugh at the LA filmmaking community while its industry in-jokes and celebrity cameos offer sustenance for film-nerd and general public alike.

What Just Happened? shares some similarities with The Player. It too has an independent feel (it was shot in 33 days),

DIRECTED BY Barry Levinson STARRING Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis, John Turturro

some celebrity cameos (Bruce Willis and Sean Penn) and a smattering of accessible in-jokes.

But in other respects, What Just Happened? offers a fresh approach. It’s even slightly brave.

Robert De Niro plays Ben, a middle-aged producer more Larry David than David O Selznick.

Ben is an unexceptional everyman caught up in an exceptional world – juggling the competing demands of teenage daughter, ex-wives, studio bean-counters and the ‘artistic temperaments’ of stars and directors.

The film treads familiar ground in portraying a Hollywood peopled with superficial monsters and oiled by the routine use and

abuse of pretty girls and drugs. But its emphasis is on another Hollywood that is, presumably (the film is based on the memoirs of producer Art Linson), more realistic.

Rather than sharp suits, flash restaurants, tiny mobile phones and multi-million-dollar deals, this environment is more mundane, even tawdry – late-night massage parlours, cinema foyers, editing suites, film sets and sparsely furnished homes with a certain faded American chic.

The film’s weakest parts are those that rely on cliché: Bruce Willis as Bruce Willis; John Turturro’s nervous breakdown of an agent; or Michael Wincott’s

outlandish director – an undisguised and unconvincing impersonation of Keith Richards.

But in featuring a Hollywood producer who is likeable and sympathetic, it’s an intriguing and enjoyable journey into Tinseltown. James Bramble

Anticipation. De Niro and Barry Levinson: what a team. Four Enjoyment. A likeable producer? What just happened? Three

In Retrospect. It might even make you like Hollywood. Three 079

How To Lose Friends and Alienate People

RELEASED October 3 DIRECTED BY Robert B Weide STARRING Simon Pegg, Megan Fox, Danny Huston

Man walks into a bar. Sees a girl and an empty barstool next to her. He sits on it and shoots her a smile.

“Sorry, my boyfriend’s sitting there,” she says. “Is he?” replies the man. “Well, he’s fucking small, isn’t he?”

That, unfortunately, is the only funny moment in How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. What a shame – particularly for lead-man Simon Pegg, whose immensely likeable and funny persona can’t seem to find a home on the big-screen when not writing his own material.

Pitched as ‘a testosteronelaced Devil Wears Prada’, this comedy is based on Brit writer Toby Young’s memoir about his five-year struggle to survive in

a job at Vanity Fair magazine.

Pegg is Young – Sidney Young, that is. And after mocking celebs and crashing parties as editor of mock-the-week rag Post-Modern Review, he’s inexplicably hired by Vanity Fair proxy, Sharps magazine, and jets to the cutthroat glitz of New York.

But forget serrated wit and piercing satire. Instead we get pratfalls, worn-out sketches and showy bad language, all hung off the predictable arc that sees Pegg flapping like a fish out of water, selling his soul to climb the greasy pole and finally getting it back again to win the heart of co-worker Kirsten Dunst.

Thank goodness, then, for the Hollywood names – all class acts – who lift every scene they’re

Triangle RELEASED August 29

Three main characters and three tightly interwoven plot strands – and that’s just the first third of Triangle, made

by Tsui Hark with a frenetic pace to match its convolutions of cause and effect, before director Ringo Lam picks up the ball for the next section.

Spurred into action by a mysterious man, three cashstrapped drinking buddies – Fai (Louis Koo), Lee (Simon Yam) and Mok (Sun Hong Lei) – execute a plot to break into a tunnel beneath Hong Kong's Legislative Council to steal a hidden treasure chest.

At the same time, Lee’s wife Ling (Kelly Lin) tells her lover, the cop Wen (Lam Ka Tung), that her impotent husband is plotting to kill her. Meanwhile, triple-dealing Fai struggles to keep his

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in: Jeff Bridges as Sharps’ jaded editor; Gillian Anderson as the ball-breaking publicist; and Danny Huston as the arse-licking star writer. But the surprise winner here is Transformers rent-ababe Megan Fox, pulling out a self-deprecating, funny turn as the bimbo starlet that Pegg’s sleazeball has eyes for.

It’s worth staying until the end, though, if only to see Pegg and Dunst struggle through the most uncomfortable, least

passionate final kiss in the history of cinema. Jonathan Crocker

Anticipation. Great cast, the promise of spiky wit and Pegg’s best shot yet at leading-man status. Three

Enjoyment. Oh no! It’s not funny. One

In Retrospect. Still not funny. But Megan Fox is talented. Who knew?! One

In Triangle, three of Hong Kong's best known directors are unleashed onto cinema's conventional three-act structure, with unexpectedly vibrant results. Their filmmaking tastes and styles certainly contrast, but also prove complementary, delivering an overall coherence that’s never sacrificed to variety or vanity. Everything is wrapped up satisfactorily with an ending that’s more circle than triangle. Anton Bitel

Anticipation. Three masters of Hong Kong cinema together might make for one confused film. Two

DIRECTED BY Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Johnnie To STARRING Louis Koo, Simon Yam, Sun Hong Lei

involvement with Wen and some Triad gangsters separate from his friends.

Characters and chronology remain the same, but the mood is now darker, and there is a new privileging of psychology over action as the bizarre love triangles between Lee, Ling and Wen (not to mention Lee, Ling and Ling's dead first wife) come into noirish focus. Then, an hour in, director Johnnie To takes over – and so does a sense of what might be called ‘cosmic farce’. Multiple characters race in and out, parcels are passed in the dark, and amidst such contrived chaos (reflecting the film's unusual method of construction), our three anti-heroes at last define who they really are, and the ethical beliefs that underpin them.

Enjoyment. Actually,

it’s vibrant, multifaceted and surprisingly unified. Four

In Retrospect. A convoluted crime caper that supports many moods and styles. Four

INCENDIARY DIRECTED BY Sharon Maguire STARRING Michelle Williams, Ewan McGregor, Matthew Macfadyen

An eerie scent of death hangs around this adaptation of Chris Cleave’s controversial novel. For starters, the story about a terrorist bomb attack hit bookshelves on July 7, 2005 – tattered posters for it can be seen hanging off the walls of victimised London tube stations. The big-screen version, starring Michelle Williams as a woman who loses her husband and son, then premiered at Sundance during the aftershock of Heath Ledger’s fatal overdose.

Unfortunately – and almost predictably – these doomy coincidences are way more interesting than the film itself.

Sharon Maguire, director of

RELEASED October 24

Bridget Jones’s Diary and a former BBC documentary-maker, is an odd choice as writer/ director, and Incendiary duly struggles to convince as either a romance or a thriller. Film is the art of showing not telling, but from the first minutes Maguire pours on the voiceover – a dead giveaway of an uneasy book-toscreen adjustment.

But what Maguire does have are three extremely capable actors: Michelle Williams as the young working-class mother whose husband and son are killed by suicide bombers at Arsenal’s football ground; Ewan McGregor, roguish and convincing as the dirt-digging journalist she’s

shagging when the bomb goes off; and Matthew Macfadyen, bearded and bespectacled as the nerdy colleague of her dead husband who completes the three-way love triangle.

Way too clean to be the “chav” or “slapper” she claims to be, Williams is nonetheless excellent, perfectly nailing the accent and emotion. The performances, though, are far better than the script, which is by turns unbelievable, sentimental and underdeveloped. And, oh, that voiceover – at its grating worst as Williams’ character narrates a naïve open letter to Osama bin Laden. “London is a city built on the wreckage of itself,

Osama. It’s had more comebacks than The Evil Dead. Londoners just took a deep breath and…”

Enough already. Jonathan Crocker

Anticipation.

Terrorism, adultery, Michelle Williams losing her husband again… Plenty of intrigue here. Three

Enjoyment. Involving

until the bomb goes off, and then rapidly fades into an unconvincing muddle. Two

In Retrospect.

Three strong performances; all of them better than the film. Two 081

Then She Found Me

RELEASED September 19 DIRECTED BY Helen Hunt STARRING Helen Hunt, Colin Firth, Bette Midler

Helen Hunt’s directorial debut is a truly impressive achievement – she can take her place alongside Ben Affleck in the new pantheon of actors who can actually direct.

And there’s more in common; like Gone Baby Gone, Then She Found Me is raw – too raw to be a rom-com. It’s funny, it’s romantic, yes, but the too-realistic sex between Hunt and husband Matthew Broderick, and Hunt’s ability to utterly deglamorise herself, have nothing to do with any commercial genre.

What this achieves are moments of discomfort, but also elsewhere of realism and emotion that are utterly honest and affecting. Then She Found

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Me subsequently stays with you; it has real heart, real perception.

Hunt directs herself sans physical sympathy as a 39-yearold Jewish schoolteacher whose husband (Broderick) leaves her and whose adoptive mother dies at the very point she decides she wants a baby. While she contemplates the fast fading prospect of motherhood, two people come into her life – her birth mother, Bette Midler, a self-help chat show guru (totally ghastly) and Colin Firth, a single parent (totally gorgeous).

What pans out is the anti-rom-com. Knee deep in turmoil, Hunt’s life tumbles like clothes in the dryer; all on top of itself and in a muddle. While

she fends off Midler, the first date with Firth ends up on a street bench next to his sleeping child; the second on the floor in the nursery. It’s this warts-and-all approach that makes you care for her. Firth too is at his best – the embodiment of what it means to be left with two kids, unable to be free of responsibility.

There are sticking points: some of the aforementioned rawness grates, and there’s the fact that, visually, the film is as unmade up and badly lit as Hunt herself. Ditto the areas of silliness – Steve McQueen as her birth father and Salman Rushdie as her obstetrician – but the over-riding quality means you’ll forgive its various quirks.

Here’s hoping that this

small film about the big stuff won’t get lost simply because it doesn’t fit in a genre box. This is a film that’s taken Hunt 10 years to make and the result is definitely worth the 100 minutes it’ll take you to see it. Lorien Haynes

Anticipation. Helen Hunt directing? Bit of a worry. Two Enjoyment. Endlessly

surprising and funny. Four

In Retrospect.

Continued to ring true after the event. Don’t let anyone call it a ‘rom-com’. Three

François Ozon explores the twists of his latest layered romance drama.

LWLies: What was your aim with the film’s shift in tone?

Ozon: For me, the idea was to create a rise and fall, to play with the genre. In the first part especially, I wanted to show Angel’s vision and to show her life as being like her books, using special effects of the same bad style she uses in her writing. I wanted to follow her, to be with her – and at the same time I wanted to have some balance with those moments where there is more distance and irony.

LWLies: And in the second half?

Ozon: In the second part of the film you have the comeback of reality. The first half is all the things Angel has dreamed of – success, fame, love and being the charming princess with the charming prince. In the second, when she has everything, she thinks she will control the world. I wanted to show how she reacts to her new situation, and how she tries to escape reality.

LWLies: Were you concerned at all about the film resting on an initially unlikeable character?

Ozon: I didn’t really care because I love monsters!

Angel is a kind of monster, she’s a very childish character – her drama is that of a spoilt child.

Even though she grows up in a grocery store, she never suffers. She always thinks she’s right – but the real mistake comes from the publisher, her mother and the other people around her who cannot resist her. She becomes successful, but her books are shit.

So she thinks, ‘People like me!’ It’s the public’s fault if you’re successful when you make shit. So Angel’s problem is that she never changes, never deals with reality.

LWLies: You seem to have a lot of sympathy for her.

Ozon: I was touched by her drama, because it’s a condition of all artists when they are successful.

You think you are the master of the world, but in fact you must always adapt and critique yourself.

I think Angel is trapped by her success, by her dreams.

She gets all the things she’s ever wanted and when she has them, her paradise becomes a prison. I wanted it to be the case that the more the film advances, the more you are touched by and understand her.

LWLies: Much of the film relies upon the great performance given by Romola Garai. What were the qualities that persuaded you to give her the part?

Ozon: She was very young but not at all afraid of the character – and I needed someone who… You can’t really get behind a character who you don’t like.

It’s true that Angel can be quite unlikeable, but Romola was clever because she said to me, ‘She’s an actress, she’s acting her life’. She was young enough that she wasn’t afraid to be ridiculous sometimes, and that was important to me. Neon Kelly

Angel RELEASED August 29

Post-modernism can be a tricky beast to handle.

For the first 20 minutes or so of François Ozon’s reflective costume drama, it’s hard to know what we’re supposed to be doing.

Curious little scenes perch upon the fence that divides loving pastiche from outright parody.

A precocious young girl verbally savages her doddering aunt; later she gawks at the marvels of a blue-screened London background… Should we be laughing with these characters, or at them?

The answer, to a certain extent, is both. Ozon’s adaptation of an Elizabeth Taylor novel follows the melodramatic rise and fall of Angel Deverell (Romola Garai), a perennial dreamer who yearns to be a famous novelist.

Despite her clear lack of talent, Angel catches a break from a publisher in the city (Sam Neill) whose attention brings success and an escape from the quiet life she loathes. A snowballing career provides wealth, a lavish mansion and the attentions of a devoted acolyte (Lucy Russell) with a devilishly handsome sibling (Michael Fassbender).

During the first act, Ozon strives to give his film a realistic attention to detail – albeit one tempered by the occasional reflexive touch, like the aforementioned blue screen scene. As we progress, however, things grow stranger – perhaps echoing the confused mindset of its imaginative heroine. Garai’s

DIRECTED BY François Ozon STARRING Romola Garai, Sam Neill, Michael Fassbender

Angel is a remarkable creation and the film’s centre of gravity; a monstrously deluded young woman who nonetheless exudes an undeniable magnetism.

It’s a top-tier performance that dominates the film, but it doesn’t hurt that Ozon surrounds Garai with a strong supporting cast. Russell and Neill do particularly well – the latter boasting a great moustache – while Charlotte Rampling is excellent in her few scenes as the only person who sees Angel for what she really is: a misguided little girl whose imagination is both her saviour and her undoing.

This is a rags-to-riches story, but what differentiates Angel is the way Ozon allows the tone to slowly shift, at a speed so subtle it slips beneath your radar. By the conclusion, our attitude to Angel has changed – not due to any sense of atonement or redemption, but rather because we understand her place in the world, even if she doesn’t. The film thus reveals itself to be not just a dissection of costumed melodrama, but a quiet commentary on the nature of celebrity. Neon Kelly

Anticipation. Ozon is always up to something interesting. Three Enjoyment. Smart and pithy. Four

In Retrospect. A film of wit and acuity. Four 083

Times and Winds

DIRECTED BY Reha Erdem STARRING Elit Iscan, Ali Bey Kayali, Selma Ergeç

RELEASED August 29

Pineapple Express

DIRECTED BY David Gordon Green STARRING Seth Rogen, James Franco, Amber Heard

RELEASED September 12

Reha Erdem’s Times and Winds is set in a small

Roll up, roll up for a stoner-action-comedy

Turkish village whose residents tend their animals, nurture their friendships and go to school while the world turns disinterestedly around them. But this is also where emotions fester, where fathers and sons fight a cyclical struggle of anger, envy and disappointment, where relationships come and go, and where adolescents pass resentfully into a world of adulthood that holds no promises for them.

In the story of one boy, Yildiz, who plots to kill his father, Erdem encapsulates the ups and downs of a community’s life, and the bitter passage of maturity. This is a subtle, affectless work with layers of meaning to be mined by the patient viewer. Danny Bangs

produced by Judd Apatow, starring Seth Rogen, co-scripted by Superbad’s Evan Goldberg and directed by… um, David Gordon Green?

The combo of frat-pack reefer madness and the cine-poet behind delicate US indies like George Washington is just one of the surprises in this amusing, bruising bro-mantic comedy. As stoned slacker Dale Denton (Rogen) and lonely pot-dealer Saul (James Franco) witness a murder and go on the run from gangsters and corrupt cops, we get bloody shoot-outs, cartoon fist-fights and touching man-love. Seen sober, it isn’t quite as funny or smart as it thinks it is. But who can knock a film about marijuana that smells ‘like God’s vagina’? Jonathan Crocker

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

DIRECTED BY Mamoru Hosoda STARRING Riisa Naka, Takuya Ishida, Mitsutaka Itakura

RELEASED September 19

A Bloody Aria

DIRECTED BY Won Shin-yeon STARRING Cha Ye-ryeon, Han Suk-kyu, Jeong Kyeong-ho

RELEASED October 24

Mamoru Hosoda’s award-winning and unique

It may feature unhinged behaviour and violence,

animation might just be the one to remove the ‘M’-word from the lips of Western audiences. So heavily does the influence of Miyazaki weigh on our expectations that it’s consistently difficult to judge other styles on their own merits. But this story of a schoolgirl, Makoto, who finds a strange artefact that allows her to travel back in time, and the various antics that ensue, is entirely its own beast. Charming, funny and quietly romantic, it also raises serious issues of the personal responsibilities we assume – often reluctantly and painfully – with adulthood. It’s only let down by some occasionally lax character animation, and a very final scene that doesn’t devastate like it should. Matt Bochenski

but A Bloody Aria is no conventional horror. Rather, its menace and brutality serve to dramatise the insane cycle of masculine hierarchies.

Married music professor Young-sun (Lee Byeong-jun) is a bully in a shiny Merc. On his way back to Seoul, he tries first to browbeat a rural cop (Han Suk-kyu), and then to force himself upon his passenger. But when the two travellers run into a gang of ‘retards’, Young-sun will be taught a lesson in the infectious nature of male power structures, where everyone ends up getting a taste of someone else’s medicine. Director Won Shin-yeon peppers his film with black humour, without ever abandoning his social commentary. Anton Bitel

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Steep

DIRECTED BY Mark Obenhaus STARRING Bill Briggs, Doug Coombs, Seth Morrison

RELEASED September 26

Unrelated

DIRECTED BY Joanna Hogg STARRING Kathryn Worth, Tom Hiddleston, David Rintoul

RELEASED September 19

“Without risk, there is no adventure.” These are

Anna is a middle-aged woman lamenting missed

the words of Bill Briggs, a man who didn’t let an artificial hip stand in the way of becoming the first person to make the legendary ski descent of the Grand Teton in 1971. His achievement sets the tone for this documentary about extreme skiing across the world. Every interview is gripping as you try to understand why someone would venture to untouched areas with no safety net or guarantee of survival. But where the film really shines is in the shots of skiiers hopping along mountains, flying through the air and cascading down slopes against a sunset backdrop that looks so perfect you’d be hard pressed to believe it wasn’t CGI. Catch it at an IMAX if you can. Limara Salt

opportunities while clinging to her fading youth. However, rather than a heady mixture of Pinot Grigio and HRT, Unrelated is a sophisticated tale of one woman’s fears about her future. As Anna holidays with a friend’s extended family, she reflects upon her own childless existence and feelings of isolation. Joanna Hogg’s direction puts the viewer at the periphery of events, and the result is an effective portrayal of an eternal outsider. Though teetering on the brink of self-indulgence, by focusing on the tensions of bourgeois society Unrelated eschews the usual easy life lessons. Hogg’s sensitive approach marks an interesting turn for the Brit flick. Ailsa Caine

The Foot Fist Way

DIRECTED BY Jody Hill STARRING Danny R McBride, Ben Best, Mary Jane Bostic

RELEASED September 26

Ashes of Time Redux

DIRECTED BY Wong Kar Wai STARRING Jacky Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung

RELEASED September 12

Shot in only 19 days, the rugged charm of Jody

Screened to considerable interest at Cannes, Wong

Hill’s fist-com warms the heart, while the David Brent-esque awkwardness of Danny McBride’s portrayal of downtrodden facebeater Fred Simmons makes you cringe with pain and pleasure in equal measure. From our protagonist’s trophy wife’s inevitable infidelity, to Simmons’ hangdog demeanour and his rivalry with arch-nemesis Chuck ‘The Truck’ Wallace, the astute observation in Hill’s portrayal of the out-of-date former-champ clinging to success is a refreshing dose of humour, firmly in the Ferrell mould. Already prophesised to be a cult classic – script catchphrase-ability depending – this is certainly more sure-footed than ham-fisted. Adrian D’Enrico

Kar Wai’s reworking of his sole martial arts film improves on the original.

Loosely inspired by Louis Cha’s four-volume The Eagle Shooting Heroes, Kar Wai takes us to ancient China where swordsman Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) lives the life of a vagabond, hiring others as assassins.

Pitiless and cynical, his heart has long been wounded by a love he neglected then lost. But with the passing of the seasons he begins to reflect upon the origin of his solitude. Investing the project with a clarity of vision and technical precision lacking from the original, Kar Wai adds a major new film to one of the finest bodies of work in modern cinema, while exorcising the memory of My Blueberry Nights. Jason Wood

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There was a point recently when it seemed impossible to avoid Mike Leigh.

There he was giving press interviews, Q&As at the BFI, even talking to Andrew Marr – all the while chipper, if a little brusque.

The man well known for a tendency towards being ‘combative’ even went on a two-day tour of London with Time Out, posing playfully at the locations of some of his films with a cheeky glint in his eye.

Happy-Go-Lucky has unsurprisingly been seen as the greatest indication of this perceived new positivity, and it is therefore striking, perhaps deliberately so, that on the same day that one of his most feel-good films is released on DVD, so too is one of his darkest, 1993’s Naked.

The two films offer a fascinating comparison, not just in their apparent differences but in their similarities.

When it is put to Leigh that Scott, the conspiracy theorist driving instructor from Happy-Go-Lucky might have some parallels with Johnny, the disturbed and disturbing protagonist of Naked, however, he is dismissive. And yet he finds other, more interesting parallels between Johnny and Poppy, Happy-GoLucky’s ever-optimistic heroine.

“If there was a logical, natural and organic comparison to be made,” he explains, “it is between Johnny and Poppy because both of them are idealists, both of them really care about the world and society.

The difference is that Johnny is a bitter, frustrated, disappointed, angry idealist, and Poppy is fulfilled and positive.”

It is tempting to see Johnny and Poppy as the respective incarnations of Thatcher-

era and Blair-era Leigh; valedictory films made as their respective ages ended. If his films are still about ideals and idealism, individuals and individuality, about withstanding the pressures of capitalism, then the changes in his dramatis personae can be seen as a response to changing times.

Indeed, Happy-Go-Lucky seems very much a film of its time; as Leigh concurs, declaring, “It’s a film of now.” But would he agree that it is saying something important in terms of the way the pressures on the individual to conform have changed?

Whereas before there were direct economic pressures and overt political pressure, the emphasis has now shifted to the ‘personal’.

“That is very interesting,” muses the director. “It is kind of hard to respond to that. It’s not the way I perceive the film, to be honest, because apart from anything else I don’t know that I am actually concerned with English or British issues as such; it is a wider thing. I am concerned in doing the film to celebrate a kind of positivism in the face of miserability. The thing about Poppy is that she is not so much an individualist, she is a person out there on the ground who, despite everything, is getting on with it. I have to say that of all the thoughts that went on in my head at every stage of making Happy-Go-Lucky, the notional concept of ‘Blair’ never really entered the equation, whereas when I made Meantime, Four Days in July and High Hopes, Thatcher was very much at the tip of my preoccupation like everybody else’s.”

That Leigh is no longer pre-occupied with politics is itself an important sign of his shifting concerns, but that’s not to say

that he is now only concerned with a simple notion of people on the margins of society. “Is Poppy on the margins?” he asks. “It depends on the context. It’s too simplistic and crude to say, ‘Oh, so what we’re concerned about here is the margins of society’. Scott is definitely beyond the margins and so is the tramp character [in Happy-Go-Lucky].”

Leigh is consistently defiant in the face of generalisation, whether of his characters, themes or style. He refuses to accept that his films have become more ‘glossy’ in recent years, pointing out that All or Nothing was particularly bleak, and Vera Drake was about backstreet abortion.

“Every time I make a film I do something different within the homogenous genre of what I do,” he says. “Each film is very different partly because every time I invite you round for dinner I don’t want to serve you the same dish, and partly because my own commitment to myself, and therefore to my audience, is to deal with a massive amount of different things that I want to work my way around in different ways.”

That ‘homogenous genre’, the recognisable, bittersweet peoplescape of Leigh, continues to garner both critical acclaim and box-office success, with Happy-Go-Lucky having the most successful opening of his career so far. His resistance to comparisons, parallels and other contrivances is perhaps part and parcel of his expectation of intelligent engagement by his audience. But it is also indicative of his need, as an artist, to keep moving. James Bramble Happy-Go-Lucky and Naked are out now on DVD.

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It’s Friday morning and Danny Huston is in the Hollywood Hills, “Right under the third ‘O’ of the sign,” he reckons.

A fitting place for a member of one of the town’s most illustrious dynasties, but watching its exports growing up was somewhat confusing for the 46-year-old.

“One of the first films I saw was The Bible that my father [John] directed, and not only was he the voiceover for God, but Noah too. My mother was playing a character called Hagar, and she had a son in the film who wasn’t me. That was the beginning of my confusion and I don’t think I’ve ever thoroughly recovered.”

Danny is happy to chat about his family, despite it being the first thing everyone asks him, without fail. It almost seems like an obligation for him, though one he’s always happy to fulfil. Growing up with his father in Ireland and Mexico gave him a love of film, but as a young adult Danny became disaffected with the family trade – or to put it more bluntly, fed up, “With the industry bullshit”. Art was his calling, but drinking warm white 090 THE gomorrah ISSUE

wine at gallery openings soon sent him back to Hollywood, where pops helped him get Lauren Bacall for his directorial debut, the forgettable Mr North. “There’s always been a healthy amount of nepotism in my family,” he admits.

But John has been dead for 21 years and Danny has more than made a name for himself in front of the camera as a supporting actor in his own right, more often than not as a bad guy, from arrogant dying Hollywood agent Ivan Beckman in Ivansxtc (an adaptation of Tolstoy’s The Death Of Ivan Ilyich and a middle finger to Tinseltown), to a seriously subservient civil servant in The Constant Gardener.

Danny disagrees, though. “I don’t think of the bad guys I play as being bad.

I feel a great love for Ivan. He’s based on Tolstoy, who’s such a complex writer that it couldn’t be black-and-white. Beckman is all of us, dealing with his mortality.”

Huston is fascinated with Tolstoy: his next films, The Kreutzer Sonata and Boxing Day, both with independent director Bernard Rose, are based on the

Russian novelist’s books. Indeed, it’s impressive he managed to find the time to fit in a studio career as well. Anyway, better ask a token question about his new film, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, to satisfy the publicist. Is the story of Sidney Young (Simon Pegg; Huston is his unimpressed boss) and his disastrous career in New York journalism not just The Devil Wears Prada all over again? “It feels to me more like a Preston Sturges comedy, it has this wonderful satirical nature to it. Initially, Simon Pegg’s character is so awful, but as the story develops you become charmed, and he becomes sweet and likeable.”

Complex characters are everything to Danny; it’s just as well he has the skill to portray them. So when did it first dawn on him that his father maybe wasn’t God? You can’t hear him grinning, but you can tell. “You know what? I still think he is God.” Ben Sillis See page 80 for a review of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

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Morgan Spurlock gets a tough rap.

That stupid moustache; the goofy grin; those big dumb eyes – he’s practically inviting ridicule. Then he goes and gets über famous just by eating McDonald’s.

Hello! That shit’s not fair.

But now, well, he’s just about gone and outdone himself. Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? follows America’s favourite redneck as he schleps around the Middle East haranguing various Arabs about why they don’t like God’s own country, and, oh, by the way, you don’t happen to know where that bin Laden dude is, do you? Only you do all look the same with the turban and everything so, you know, perhaps you’re related…

Critics lined up to take a shot as yet another smug American paraded his ignorance. And hands up, we joined in; taking pot shots at this big, white target blundering around while making icky phone calls to his pregnant missus.

And yet, think about it for a second.

You can stand by the criticism that Where in the World seems facile to anyone with

half an idea about global affairs but, as Spurlock himself points out, we’re talking about Americans here. “Is it that unheard of to think that there are people in the States who don’t know what’s happening in Egypt and don’t know what’s happening in Morocco?” he asks. “We don’t see the people that I had these conversations with on the news in America. That’s the thing: none of those people exist in the media in the States.

What we get in the media are the people who are screaming and vicious and angry and burning flags – that dominates the coverage of the Middle East.”

Spurlock argues that the very things that made a lot of people angry about his documentary – the simplistic tone, the jokes, the trite graphics – are the very things that are going to help him get the message across to the people who need to hear it most – the audience back home.

“I tried to make a film that was accessible, that was palatable, that didn’t make light of the situation but made it engaging and really broke it down into very simple

terms,” he admits. And if the result was a film that seemed childish to some, it was a revelation to others. Spurlock tells the story of a kid at the Sundance Film Festival whose parents wouldn’t let him leave America because the world was ‘too dangerous’; “He came up to me after the movie and said, ‘I’m going to get a passport as soon as I get home because I have to see for myself what’s out there.’”

It’s easy to mock that attitude, but Spurlock would rather accept it – and then try and do something to change it. And before we get back to ridiculing the director as a redneck whose childish insights could do more harm than good, consider this: hands up everybody who’s visited Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestine and Saudi Arabia.

Spurlock has, and if he’s still a ‘redneck’, what does that make us? Matt Bochenski Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? is reviewed on page 103.

See the full transcript of this interview at www.littlewhitelies.co.uk.

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It hardly seems like a year since we were last busting our ass across London, running from screenings to interviews to gala premieres, but hell, it is, so once again it’s time for the London Film Festival to bring an orgy of movies to the capital.

The festival runs from October 15-30, and is set to see the usual parade of top class pictures; a kind of hand-picked ‘best of ’ of the world’s festival circuit. But with the full programme not announced until September 10 (apart from the opening night gala for Frost/Nixon), we’re going to have to make some educated guesses as to what we reckon you’ll be able to see.

Will they show the year’s big festival talking point? And if so, will it be in one part or two? The head says two, as this biopic of the Argentine revolutionary is being released as two films in the UK, but the heart says go for the full four-hour flavour… Please!

The Class Dir. Laurent Cantet Credentials: Cannes Palme d’Or Winner

Frozen River Dir. Courtney Hunt Credentials: Sundance Grand Jury Prize, Dramatic

Cantet’s astute, documentary-style drama is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by teacher-turned-writer François Bégaudeau. Dealing with issues of ethnicity, modernity and, of course, education, The Class was something of a surprise winner at Cannes, but a deserved one nonetheless.

the argentine/guerilla Dir. Steven Soderbergh Credentials: Cannes Best Actor Award, Benicio del Toro 092 THE gomorrah ISSUE

Synecdoche, New YorK Dir. Charlie Kaufman Credentials: In Competition, Cannes

We’ve got no idea if Kaufman’s mind-bending directing debut will make it to London, but we’re going to keep everything crossed that the year’s most unpronounceable film brings its own brand of crazy to the capital.

An outside bet, but if the LFF organisers go for Courtney Hunt’s Sundance awardwinner, it’ll be a clear signal that they’re embracing quality indies as well as the big vehicles that bring the stars to town.

Following two single mothers – one Mohawk, one white – tempted by drug smuggling cash on the US/Canadian border, it boasts excellent performances. Danny Bangs Check out our daily LFF blog at www.littlewhitelies.co.uk.

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If you’re looking for the UK’s most influential movie tastemaker, you could do a damn sight worse than Sandra Hebron, the Artistic Director of the London Film Festival. We asked her to share some thoughts on the role of the festival in the capital’s cultural life.

LWLies Where do you place London in the pantheon of European film festivals?

Hebron I’d say that there is a top three – Cannes, Venice, Berlin – and I’d like to think that London is the next most significant. The fact that London is attracting some World Premieres and a large number of European Premieres means that we are starting to be seen as a festival that can provide a European platform for new films, as well as a UK one. Essentially what I’d like is for the LFF to be seen as the best public film festival in Europe.

LWLies What do you think the ‘purpose’ of a film festival is in 2008?

Hebron I think there are a number of purposes. First and foremost, to contribute to the film culture of the city and the country it finds itself in; to help audiences to make discoveries; to identify where interesting things

are happening; to encourage discussion and debate; to open up access to a broader range of films than would otherwise be seen; to support the home industry by showcasing British filmmakers’ work… To have fun; to celebrate the vibrancy and creativity to be found despite the often-mooted idea that cinema is dying. To provoke and annoy, sometimes, but hopefully to enrich rather more of the time.

LWLies How has the LFF changed over the years?

Hebron The biggest change happened in the mid ’80s when the festival started to have a significant presence in Leicester Square. Over recent years, I think the changes have been ones of evolution rather than revolution.

The profile has definitely been raised, which is partly due to our efforts but is also a reflection of the fact that audiences have an appetite for festivals and the collective experience. I also hope we’re managing to professionalise what we do – to make the logistics of the festival easier to navigate without losing a sense of there being a community of interest. We want the festival to feel like it’s smoothly run,

but that it still operates on a human scale. And that it is inclusive, but takes film seriously.

LWLies How does London manage the relationship between celebrity, and putting film itself first?

Hebron It’s my belief that the celebrities and stars attract profile to the festival, and also attract audiences and in some instances sponsors – all of which are crucial to the survival of the festival.

Let’s face it: cinema and glamour have always had a relationship with each other, and I am very happy if the light that shines on the festival as a result of its ‘starrier’ elements can be used to illuminate everything else we do. As long as we’re retaining integrity in the programme mix, this doesn’t cause me too much anxiety. We haven’t yet been pressured to take a film purely on the grounds that it has big stars attached.

And for me personally, filmmakers like James Benning or Agnès Varda or Jonas Mekas are stars anyway. Matt Bochenski Check out www.bfi.org.uk/lff from September 10 for the full festival run down, as well as info on ticket sales and all that sort of thing. The festival runs from October 15-30 at venues across London.

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Four reasons to love the Toronto International Film Festival: The City

A great Toronto memory is the late start to the North American premiere of My Summer of Love, as Paddy Considine bounded onstage to do the intro, his hands full of evidence for his tardiness. He’d been to the Silver Snail, the comic store that introduced Guillermo del Toro to Hellboy when he was in town shooting Mimic. That’s so Toronto. North America’s sanest city is small enough to discover every cool DVD store, but large enough to party in a sleek or quirky new venue every night of the fest. It’s also home to some seriously old-school rep theatres.

The International Flavour

Toronto has more film festivals every year than any other city in the world.

These mini-fests celebrate cinema from around the globe (over 150 languages are spoken in Toronto), via short films, documentaries and kung-fu movies. TIFF is the one that brings everyone together.

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As Theatre Representative Shelagh Rowan-Legg recalls: “One day there was a big rush line for a Korean film. Some people in line of Korean descent didn’t get into the film. So they decided to stay and catch a movie from Sweden. Then, of course, some people from Sweden who were in the rush line for that film didn’t get in, and decided to see the next film up, which was from somewhere in Africa.

That’s very Toronto.”

The Films

Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Sarah Polley and Vincenzo Natali: Toronto has birthed some weird and wonderful directors, not to mention actors John Candy, Molly Parker, Mike Myers and most recently Ellen Page, whose breakout film Juno premiered at the 2007 festival.

TIFF has also helped make the careers of many directors, not only in its Gala events, but through niche programmes like Planet Africa and Midnight Madness.

Rowan-Legg remembers the moment that torture porn hit the mainstream: “In 2002, Eli Roth’s feature film Cabin Fever debuted. Eli was so nervous that no one was going to see a horror film

in the middle of the afternoon. But the show was sold out. The audience loved it, and I had to cut the Q&A off because it overran. So Eli went from quirky to popular.” There’s a thrill each year in trying to predict which film will follow in the footsteps of Amélie or Roger and Me and get the ‘TIFF effect’.

The Festival

Now that movies can be downloaded almost instantly on release, how do festivals keep audiences coming back?

TIFF’s co-director Cameron Bailey points out that “A festival is also a party. I love it when Deepa Mehta runs into Kathryn Bigelow at a party because they both have films in the festival. Or when fans of the Midnight Madness opening movie JCVD throw their own party afterwards.” And because it’s Toronto, everyone’s invited: “Anybody who wants to join the party can find us in Yonge-Dundas Square, a new venue for the festival, with free screenings, concerts and events,” says Bailey. How can you resist? Sophie Mayer TIFF runs from September 4 – 13, and Sophie Mayer will be blogging daily at www.littlewhitelies.co.uk.

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This year’s Film4 Frightfest prompted reflection on where the genre might be going – but in this most nostalgic, backward-looking of decades, to understand the future of horror, one has first to disinter its connections to the past.

Take, for example, the first half of the decade, in which roughly three ‘new’ movements in horror arrived, each with its roots buried deep in the genre’s history. J-horror (not to mention its concomitants from Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand, and the inevitable Hollywood ‘reimaginings’) nodded towards modernity through the device of haunted cell phones, videos or computers, but really it was only replaying the stuffy old conventions of the ghost story, long since established

by Victorian writers.

Similarly, the so-called ‘torture porn’ subgenre, as enshrined in the Hostel and Saw franchises, emerged in response to the all-too-real torments of Bagram Air Base, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, but also harked back to the mean-spirited sadism of ’70s horror (think Blood Sucking Freaks or the Ilsa films, from Harem Keeper of the

Oil Sheiks to She Wolf of the SS).

More generally, as the problems that dominated America in the ’70s – rigged elections, Middle Eastern terrorism, threats to the oil supply and protracted, unpopular conflicts abroad – resurfaced to haunt the noughties, so too did the horror films of that era, resurrecting those same old anxieties in a bloodily exhaustive orgy of remakes and reverent homage.

And so to the present, and the future. First of all, now that the well of the 1970s has truly run dry (and the Bush era is almost over), Hollywood is moving on with equal relish (and even less imagination) to the following decade’s less political brand of horror.

There have already been recent remakes of The Hitcher (1986/2007) and Prom Night (1980/2008); we are soon to see reworkings of Day of the Dead (1985/2008), Near Dark (1987/2008), Hellraiser (1987/2009), Scanners (1981/2009) and Friday the 13th (1980/2009); while lately that most ’80s of sub-genres the (unironic) slasher has also made a return (Hatchet, Cry Wolf, Reeker, All The Boys Love Mandy

Lane, Cold Prey and Seed ); plus there are films that lovingly celebrate the pre-CG excesses of the Reagan decade (Slither, Doomsday). So it is a safe bet that we can expect yet more regurgitations of the same old, until the lifeblood of the ’80s, too, has been well and truly drained. No doubt the horror of the ’90s will be cannibalised next, and then the genre will be forced to eat itself (which, in a way, it already has).

There is one further future for horror comin’ at ya from cinema’s history of gimmicks. Terror in three dimensions – that mainstay of ’50s sensationalism (House of Wax, Creature from the Black Lagoon) and ’80s sequels (Amityville 3-D, Jaws 3-D, Friday the 13th Part 3) – is making a welcome return.

The Dark Country (2008), Piranha 3-D (2009), Final Destination 4 (2009) and My Bloody Valentine 3-D (2009) are all on their way, while the opening night of this year’s Film4 Frightfest boasted the long-awaited UK premiere of Scar 3-D (2007). So better don those bicoloured glasses for full bloodbath immersion. After all, they are conveniently splatter-proof. Anton Bitel 095

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Inés Efron’s role as a confused hermaphrodite in the brilliant XXY (out on DVD on September 15) clearly got her creative juices flowing. Just check out these exclusive pictures that she drew on set.

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The swimming suit

“Holidays in La Paloma (never saw her again).”

“Happy birthday!”

“I had a strong feeling that everything was going to be like this.”

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The Max Ophuls Collection: Caught (1949) The Max Ophuls Collection: a Ronde (1950) Dir: Max Ophuls Available: September 8 In the sequence that opens La Ronde (1950), a dapper gentleman (Anton Walbrook) walks through a dark, misty urban centre and introduces himself to camera as the film’s allseeing narrator. Passing both an open-air theatre and some film lights, he wonders aloud whether we are on a stage, in a studio, or in a real street, before announcing that we are travelling to Vienna in 1900. He changes costume before our eyes, night suddenly dissolves into broad daylight, and we move on to a springtime carousel where he sings of the film’s theme – love’s merry-go-round – and then gives directions to a character about her part in the next scene.

Max Ophuls has shot this entire prologue in an impossibly fluid five-minute single take, lending an artificial unity to his Brechtian ruptures of time, space, form and genre. For while Ophuls knowingly preserves something of the theatricality of his prime source (Arthur Schnitzler’s scandalous 1897 play Reigen), La Ronde is, from start to finish, an insistently cinematic affair – as well as being a showcase for all the finest qualities of a filmmaker whose outspoken admirers have included Truffaut, Godard, Scorsese, Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson.

La Ronde is a film of miraculous incongruities. It is all about sex, but the act itself is always inventively elided (at one 098 THE gomorrah ISSUE

point, the narrator is shown literally cutting a steamy sequence from the film reel with a pair of scissors, muttering the word “Censorship!” to himself ). Its ensemble characters are merely stock types, but their endless erotic pursuits, displacements and disappointments remain recognisably real. Its whole outlook on human desire is jaded and cynical, and yet the tone is breezily charming throughout. Here, love really is a bittersweet creature.

Caught (1949) shows a side of Ophuls that is formally much more conventional than La Ronde, if thematically no less daring. It centres on two contrasting male characters and an ambivalent woman trapped in her desire for them both.

Pursuing a life dreamt up from the pages of a fashion magazine, self-invented charm school graduate Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes) marries possessive, sociopathic industrialist Smith Ohlrig (modelled on Howard Hughes, played by Robert Ryan), but then flees his prison-like mansion to reinvent herself again as a receptionist for conscientious, hard-working paediatrician Larry Quinada (James Mason).

Amidst Ophuls’ precise, at times deliberately oppressive mise-en-scène, these three characters play out the contradictions of the American dream itself. If Ohlrig emerges a Kane-like tyrant, then Leonora, in all her ambiguous ambitions, proves just as troubling, so that it becomes difficult to tell which is Frankenstein and which the monster. A melodrama shot like a film noir, Caught is without question a Hollywood film, but Ophuls darkens the obligatory happy ending by throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Both films form part of The Max Ophuls Collection, and come with an array of scholarly extras. Anton Bitel

FOUR EYED MONSTERS (2005) DIRS: ARIN CRUMLEY, SUSAN BUICE AVAILABLE: NOW

This is a joke, right? No couple is so self-obsessed that they’d write, star in, edit and direct a feature-length movie based on their own relationship, are they? At some point (as you’re sat in your New York loft giving an extended monologue to camera about ‘the artistic predicament of being stuck in my own mind’, maybe?) surely the irony would have the words sticking in your throat. Crumley and Buice can’t be serious. Perhaps this YouTube darling (it was famously made on an Apple Mac on a budget as big as their overdraft before being debuted on the internet) is a satire of the MySpace generation’s willingness to document every aspect of their lives without discretion.

It must be a joke. But, if it is, it could be on us. Henry Barnes

You, the Living (2007) DIR: Roy Andersson AVAILABLE: NOW

Far from bringing us a conventional, plot-driven film, Roy Andersson shares his vision of ‘the living’ in a succession of loose vignettes. Shots are wide, the palette muted and the camera static. Brilliantly observed tragicomic moments play out to the corny strains of a marching band, or the thunderclaps of an apocalyptic storm, or both.

Detached from their context, these sketches are made surreal and touching. Some are laugh out loud funny.

Watching them feels a bit like observing ants under a magnifying glass, or cells in a petri dish. A genius piece of filmmaking no movie fan should miss. Sally Skinner

THE PRODUCERS (1968) DIR: MEL BROOKS AVAILABLE: NOW

A re-release for Brooks’ classic showbiz farce, which spawned the successful musical adaptation as well as 2005’s glitzy film remake. Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder make a truly memorable double act as the rapacious Max Bialystock, a down-on-his-luck Broadway producer, and the wimpish accountant Leo Bloom. Together, they connive to commit an audacious fraud: conning their gullible financial backers by putting on the worst play in the world. But hilarity ensues (of course) as the play, Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden, becomes a massive hit with New York’s delighted crowd. Nicholas Queree

Under the Bombs (2007) DIR: Philippe Aractingi AVAILABLE: NOW

Made in the immediate aftermath of the 2006 Lebanese-Israeli conflict, Under the Bombs is a provocative blend of war reportage and fictional narrative. Zeina, recently returned from self-imposed exile, is searching not only for her abandoned child but also the Lebanon she left behind. The camera traces her frantic journey amidst the country’s ravaged towns and rubble-strewn highways, occasionally pausing long enough to nostalgically ponder the beautifully parched landscape. Filmed as if Zeina’s loss were real, interactions with foreign journalists and other ‘characters’ tread a fine line between horrific actuality and the film’s conceit, leaving you embedded in the moral ambiguities of a war. Ed Owles 099

Persepolis (2007) DIRS: Vincent Paronnaud, Marjane Satrapi AVAILABLE: NOW

Despite its offbeat subject (Satrapi’s animated autobiography set in Iran, Vienna and Paris), Persepolis is perfect. It didn’t take the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes and make a LWLies cover for nothing, no sir. Marjane’s memories zoom up and down the emotional barometer, stretching time and space. We see her mosh to blackmarket Black Sabbath tapes, sleep on a park bench, learn her grandma’s beauty secrets (dip boobs in ice-water daily) and watch her friends and family die. The brave, downbeat ending comes as a genuine surprise, confirming that Satrapi has brilliantly made a potential minefield a moreish, almost guilty treat. Georgie Hobbs

DECEIT (2006) DIR: MATTHEW COLE WEISS AVAILABLE: SEPTEMBER 15

When erotic crime thrillers fail to be erotic or thrilling, you have a problem. Pull off either of those, and it’s amazing how forgiving an audience will be of a loose plot, poor acting and negligible character development.

Deceit suffers the lot. An affair with a best friend’s wife; a massive inheritance; and various accidental murders dominate the storyline until the film’s climactic twist. Which is so vastly separate to the film’s plot, the characters may as well have turned into cannibalistic Moomins and eaten the Queen on live television. Which, at least, would be a great watch – unlike this. Tom Howard

In Memory of my Father (2005) Dir: Christopher Jaymes AVAILABLE: NOW

With a soundtrack by Scottish indie darlings Belle and Sebastian, this lo-fi American effort is a refreshing comedy of family ridicule. The film follows a Hollywood big cheese who bribes his son to document his death under the assumption that it will be an event of deep historical importance. Things unravel with madcap aplomb as the extended family gather to mourn the patriarch. Having won the Grand Jury Award at the CineVegas Film Festival, Jaymes’ film is a deliciously irreverent piece with some subtle Larry David touches. A neatly executed flick that feels like Fawlty Towers in über-morbid mode. Craig Driver

IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS (2007) DIR: Alex holdridge AVAILABLE: October 6

Alex Holdridge surprised almost everybody with this lyrical black-and-white tone poem to that most unloveable of cities, LA. Where previously the town’s onscreen persona had been as an ugly backdrop to tales of crime, violence and alienation, here it is transformed into an achingly romantic locus of young love. Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds are the ships passing in the night, celebrating New Year’s Eve on an extended sojourn that certainly recalls Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, but manages to be charming as well as cool. Danny Bangs

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As The Edge of Love gears up for its October 6 DVD release, we sat down with its frazzled director, John Maybury (fags, Red Bull, caffeine shakes), to talk press conferences, poetry and paparazzi.

LWLies You’ve got a bit of a reputation when it comes to press conferences, haven’t you?

Maybury I did a really full day on The Jacket when I was in Hollywood, and then knocked back a couple of vodka Red Bulls and did an internet press thing where I just mouthed off. Basically I just told the truth about my experiences – ‘They’ve promoted this film wrong, it’s not a teen horror movie, it never was, it’s meant to be a psychological thriller!’ – and I ended up on page six of The New York Post and got into a lot of trouble with Warner Bros. It was a bit of a fiasco.

LWLies But a good story.

Maybury Kind of, although, frankly, I’m better than that. I should have treated myself with a bit more respect, but I’d just had a long day, I was knackered, and I fancied a drink. Also, being slightly naïve, I was thinking,

‘Oh, it’s just the internet!’ And of course it went all over the fucking world.

LWLies What role does poetry play in your own life?

Maybury I love it. Believe it or not, I’m a real saddo; I read Horace and Catullus for pleasure. I grew up reading Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was a nineteenthcentury Victorian poet who influenced people like Ezra Pound and TS Eliot.

But I also love pop music – there’s that stupid argument: ‘Who’s better, Dylan or Keats?’ – and I think there is great lyricism in some pop music.

LWLies It would have been easy to indulge the idea of Dylan Thomas the bohemian, but you deconstructed the myth – you were more cynical about it.

Maybury I think the reality [of that lifestyle] is that there are consequences, there are repercussions and it doesn’t matter who you are, however bohemian you might think you are, your emotions can be shredded by somebody’s behaviour. I’m interested in damaged, dysfunctional people.

LWLies This idea of consequences, is

that something that comes out from your own experiences?

Maybury Well, I lost a dozen or more friends to AIDS, but prior to that, in the ’80s, I lost three or four friends to heroin. And we thought we were living the bohemian, groovy life. But yes, I’ve seen a lot of very beautiful, a lot of special people, disappear and not always through any fault of their own.

LWLies How did the pairing of Keira and Sienna work out?

Maybury Sienna and Keira got on like a house on fire. In a funny way they were able to bond over the things that make their lives a misery – like being pursued by paparazzi, by getting the attention they don’t need or want.

LWLies Did it give you pause for thought casting them because you must have known you’d be dealing with the tabloid interest?

Maybury I didn’t think it would be quite as insane as it was. I thought, naïvely, because we were all miles away in the middle of nowhere in Wales there wouldn’t be quite as strong a showing as there was. Stupid me. Matt Bochenski 101

Walter Hill: the COLLECTION (1978 – 1989) DIR: WALTER HILL AVAILABLE: SEPTEMBER 1

of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford with a few harlots thrown in for fun. It shows the James and the Youngers fighting corrupt cops in an all-out street fight smeared in Peckinpah-esque blood and guts, and gloriously icky sound effects. Oh, and fun fact: it also happens to be a truly family affair both on and off screen, with three Carradines, two Keachs, two Quaids and two Guests filling out the films’ familial roles.

The Warriors, filmed the same year Hill produced Scott’s Alien and 10 years before Spike Lee did the right thing, makes you long for a Manhattan-bound time machine. Oodles of tough-guy machismo sees one Coney Island street gang make a Molotov cocktail with nothing but a whore’s skirt and beer bottle.

What more does a mean man need? A dose of Southern Comfort, perhaps, which, despite the hokey title, offers everything but comfort, since it tracks the fate of a mega-tough squad of National Guards marooned in Cajun country without their guns. Vietnam comes home, baby!

Extreme Prejudice, starring Nick Nolte, is in a similar vein to 1989’s Johnny Handsome, only with a (marginally) sillier title.

Both are bitter revenge tales, lending weight to Hill’s personal belief that if you just swap the settings, all his films are westerns.

That, or dated fairytales for boys. You decide. Georgie Hobbs

The Liar (1981) Zombie and the Ghost Train (1991) Dir: Mika KaurismÄki AVAILABLE: September 22

which in turn rely upon a string of increasingly improbable lies. The film itself has very little in the way of substance or entertainment value, but achieves its clear goal of apeing the style of the early French New Wave. Fans of (faux) Gallic posturing can fill their boots; everyone else should move along swiftly.

Zombie and the Ghost Train (1991), the second of Mika’s films to receive a re-release this autumn, is a far more successful endeavour.

This time our hero is an alcoholic bass player who returns to Finland after dropping out of the army, mooching his way through dead-end jobs, down to the bottom of an empty bottle. As with The Liar, it’s minimalist fare – but this time Kaurismäki delivers a neat balance of bleak humour and outright tragedy, something far more worthy of your time. Neon Kelly

For all you boppers out there in the big city/hill/dale/well-lit suburban lanes – and really anywhere that plays Region Two DVDs, writer-director-producer Walter Hill has nabbed himself a box set. A somewhat unsung filmmaker typified by an output best described as ‘late ’70s ultra-macho’, Hill made his name with The Warriors (1979) and cemented it with Palme d’Or-nominated revisionist western The Long Riders (1980), both of which make up a third of this six-film set alongside The Driver (1978), Southern Comfort (1981), Extreme Prejudice (1987) and Johnny Handsome (1989). These days, Hill seems to have busied himself with TV work, but rumours abound that he’s writing the script for a new Warriors movie due in 2010.

So, yes, seems like he got a little less exciting over time, but at least this well-compiled collection, spanning 11 good years of movie history, offers a decent look at his salad days.

The Driver, starring Ryan O’Neil and Bruce Dern, was penned

by Hill and marks his entry into cult territory, simultaneously kick-starting a series of stories about ‘good’ guys making a go of it in the underworld. The Long Riders is basically The Assassination

While Mika Kaurismäki and his younger brother Aki are heroes of Finnish cinema, much of their work remains unknown and unavailable to Western audiences. Aki has the higher public profile, having won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes for The Man Without a Past in 1992, but it was Mika who kick-started the siblings’ careers, with 1981’s The Liar.

Here Aki stars as a floppy-haired wastrel, a failing writer who devotes his life to smoking cigarettes and chatting up random women. These activities are funded entirely by loans from friends, 102 THE gomorrah ISSUE

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS OSAMA BIN LADEN? (2008) DIR: MORGAN SPURLOCK AVAILABLE: SEPTEMBER 1

If only Morgan Spurlock had decided what he wanted to make this post-Super Size Me documentary about before he went to all the effort of flying out to the Middle East. Instead, we see Spurlock – under the pretence of securing the world for his unborn child – gadding about Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, with faux computer game graphics and Michael Moore-esque voiceovers. Is it a pro-Muslim piece of leftist propaganda trying to scoop up the last dregs of the redneck audience? Is it an excuse for Spurlock to escape the flatulence, stretch marks and constant urination of his pregnant partner? Maybe it’s both. In the end, it’s a documentary with great potential that sadly doesn’t deliver on its title. Nell Frizzell

Unearthed (2007) Dir: Matthew Leutwyler AVAILABLE: NOW

After treating us to the supernatural horror of Dead & Breakfast in 2004 (the title was the only snappy thing about it) some suited idiot has unwisely given Leutwyler another bucket of pennies. This time around his stunted mind has concocted the story of an unknown creature terrorising an archaeological dig in a desolate New Mexico town. Emmanuelle Vaugier, veteran of not one but two Saw films, takes the lead alongside ’80s boy band yuppie-turned-budget-horror-freak Luke Goss.

The effects resemble the contents of a baby’s bib and the acting from both leads is confused and idle. This shit should have been left unearthed. Craig Driver

LOVE IS THE DEVIL: STUDY FOR A PORTRAIT OF FRANCIS BACON (1998) DIR: JOHN MAYBURY AVAILABLE: NOW

Focusing on Francis Bacon’s (Derek Jacobi) tempestuous relationship with George Dyer (Daniel Craig) – a mentally fragile, working class thief whose suicide had a huge influence on the artist’s late work – John Maybury’s partial biography of one of Britain’s finest artists is a superb portrayal of the power of love to create and destroy. Bacon is done no favours – he’s mostly shown braying with the Soho art-set or bitching at the increasingly fragmented Dyer – but the film is hugely respectful to the painter’s dedication to his art. Art born of a life in which paint and blood splattered equally as heavily. Henry Barnes

Awake (2007) Dir: Joby Harold AVAILABLE: NOW

This flighty medical thriller is a strong contender for most nauseating cinematic experience of the year. Directed by Joby Harold – previously known for his sterling work as Assistant Director on the 2001 short Bacon Wagon – the film picks up on the phenomenon of ‘anaesthetic awareness’, in which surgery patients, though completely paralysed, remain conscious. Star Wars misfit Hayden Christensen plays a rich tycoon who overhears a plot to have him killed while in surgery. Clichés quickly follow as Jessica Alba joins in with her play-dough pout, Terence Howard blindly cashes in his Academy Award nomination, and Lena Olin makes Ingmar Bergman turn in his still-warm grave. Craig Driver

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THE DAVID LYNCH COLLECTION (1980 – 2006) DIR: DAVID LYNCH AVAILABLE: NOW

are some distance from their companion. Each explore the very nature of Hollywood; Lynch’s camera following actors on and off set, unpicking everything from their names to their relationships with both each other, and the story itself. The dozens of characters and episodic structure of Mulholland Drive can, in part, be explained through the film having been initially intended as a TV pilot – one soon dropped after studio executives insisted on viewing the rushes. Rescued by a sympathetic production company and completed a year later, the labyrinthine mystery is most striking in the manner with which camerawork, sound and script collude in an allegory of the fragmented, transitory and illusory nature of filmmaking.

Inland Empire extends upon both the premise and promise of Mulholland Drive in its fevered exploration of identity and, though Lynch has repeatedly expressed a reluctance to explain his films, this only serves to further engage the attentive and active viewer, who is encouraged to piece together the story for himself. The result is a thrilling and sensuous cinematic experience. Kingsley Marshall

The Satyajit Ray Collection: Volume one (1963 – 1966) Dir: satyajit ray Available: September 8

neglected by her principled, ambitious journalist husband who devotes more time to his political newspaper, which he uses to uncover the injustices of the British Raj, than to her. She forms a close bond with her husband’s cousin Amal, who fosters her writing talent, and her feelings develop into unspoken love.

An aesthetically beautiful, dreamlike film, Ray’s tenacious shots, angles and pauses create pure cinematic poetry.

Nayak (aka The Hero), made in 1966, is the third film in the collection, and it aptly displays Ray’s ability to move comfortably between social classes and time periods. A famous and arrogant Bengali movie star makes a journey to Delhi on a cross-country train for an awards ceremony. But when he meets a cynical young journalist en route who challenges him to reflect on his career, he is forced to face up to the emptiness of his existence through a series of otherworldly visions. Instead of capitalising on the star’s rare state of vulnerable candour, the journalist decides to keep his admissions to herself, thereby allowing him to remain the hero his public want him to be. One of Ray’s earliest screenplays, this sensitively observed character study still resonates today in its examination of the deification and ultimate hollowness at the heart of celebrity. Natasha Hedge

Since making his feature debut with the still-striking Eraserhead in 1977, David Lynch has enjoyed over 30 years of big screen subterfuge. The signature for much of his work has been an unsettling coupling of surreal sonic and visual components, and a playful approach to narrative; this combination having long since cemented his status as one of the most consistently interesting directors of his generation. This set gathers together three of his critically and commercially successful films; The Elephant Man (1980), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006).

The first of these, a biopic of John Merrick, was lauded for its striking monochromatic photography and rich score on its release, both of which remain a delight today – though it is the strong performances which stand out, particularly John Hurt’s hunched and lisping protagonist.

Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, in comparison,

Made in 1963, but set in ’50s Calcutta, Mahanagar (aka The Big City) is a mildly humorous introduction to Ray’s world, although it still contains powerful social messages. Madhabi Mukherjee stars as Arati, a housewife whose husband Subrata’s meager banker’s income is not enough to support his extended family. So Arati decides to get a job as a sales girl, inviting the scorn and shame of her family and peers. When her husband loses his job, Arati, who is doing very well at work, becomes the sole breadwinner, which predictably leads to Subrata’s feelings of inadequacy. However, Mahanagar is ultimately a portrait of a strong and progressive family whose close ties allow them to weather a period of changing social values.

Charulata (aka The Lonely Wife) (1964) is regarded by many critics as Ray’s most accomplished film and was a favourite of the director himself, who claimed that it contained the least flaws of all his works. Adapted from a novella by Rabindranath Tagore, Mukherjee stars this time as Charulata, a caged housewife who is 104 THE gomorrah ISSUE

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Starring Clint Eastwood Burt Reynolds Rip Torn Box Notables The promise of ‘Adult Action’ Tagline ‘Take Clint the street-smart cop…

Take Burt the wise-guy private eye… then take cover!’

Trailers Pale Rider (stills-and-voice-overonly arrangement); Notable lack of commensurate Burt vehicle.

Proving that the big boys can get it just as wrong as the knuckle-headed noobs that represent the talent behind most of the more canonical Ex-Rent Hell entries, 1984 saw tax-evading porn addict Burt Reynolds and squinty right-winger Clint Eastwood pumping out this nonsensical, big-budget Kansas City jazz that finally consigned the term ‘comedy thriller’ to

the status of oxymoron.

City Heat is an attempt to usher us back to an age of lavish production values, star power and good old-fashioned story telling. What comes out the other end is the pitiless spectacle of two old codgers with faces like dried fruit lost in a maze of plot canyons and filmed through the mouldy lens of a proto-US Goodnight Sweetheart.

Clint’s stony-faced cop and Burt’s sharp-assed, wise-dressing PI plod from place to place on a permanently rainwashed set, inherited from an Earthbased time-travel episode of Star Trek, in search of some-fucking-thing or other for as long as cast or viewer can resist the miasma of boredom coiling around them.

The filmmakers’ meta-joke soon becomes obvious: you will watch anything we put out. The comeback as damning as it is meekly inevitable: yes, we will.

One can almost hear the stars’ agents hastily arranging meetings with John Candy and Rick Moranis, while tyro directors like John Landis, Harold Ramis and John Hughes grunt and whoop their way through a parallel ’80s orgy of coke, cash and clusterfucks. Let the good times roll? Fellas, the train has already left the station.

With both stars high on the success

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of their respective blue-collar monkeywrangler and good ol’ boy-racer personas, the decision for these redneck Romeos to move away from their comfort zone may initially appear perverse. But as Reynolds points out in his autobiography, Burt Rising, “The hillbilly with a heart of gold was getting stale. How many times can you jump a Trans Am over a courthouse?

The world was changing.” Eastwood was characteristically less outspoken, but in a short interview given to Handgun magazine during the making of the film, he tellingly used the phrase ‘Taking out the trash’ no less than 23 times… Laudable though this change of direction may have at first sounded, however, any such highfalutin’ ideals are all too swiftly abandoned.

With lesser lights such as Roy Scheider rattling the window-frames of LA with his Blue Thunder, and Tom Selleck busy prepping his futuristic robotspider flick Runaway over at Fox, it must have been especially galling for Eastwood to limp back to his Nazi revenge westerns, and for Reynolds to climb back into that Pontiac one last time for Smokey Joins the Bandits. But – as ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan was all too fond of reminding us – a man should know his limitations.

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We’ve all been there: while relieving your bladder of a megabucket of Diet Sprite, the film you’ve left behind rolls mercilessly on without you. But in the case of these beauties, you might wonder if you haven’t returned to a parallel cinematic dimension, watching an entirely different feature altogether. They are the small canon of celluloid Battenbergs that take such cavalier narrative swerves that if your reaction isn’t, ‘What the frick?!’ you are either the writer or asleep.

The genre’s defining modern moment was Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), seemingly a solid heistgone-wrong road trip, sweaty with the promise of Leone doing The Desperate Hours. There are strong overtones of Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer and a bona fide narrative, but it stops dead the moment Salma Hayek writhes her way across a road-house stage and we lurch from desert noir to discontinuous Satanic shoot-’em-up in the time it takes to work the hand-dryer in the lavvy. But then, fast work and sleight of hand are the defining characteristics of this most subversive of sub-genres.

There’s desert madness too in 1969’s The Valley of Gwangi, which kicks off as a comic-book adventure down Mexico way. It’s the last days of the Old West, and a travelling show is south of the border hoping the illiterate locals might

mistake their shoddy gimcrackery for authentic cowboy adventure. The bad guys, in radical ’60s style, are the bloated corporate pigs at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, out to swallow up another independent, albeit wholly rubbish, operation. With a splash of dusty sexual tension, some verbal jousting and flagrantly stunt-doubled horsey games, things soon get hotter than a trail-chef ’s crotch rivet. Like all ‘Frickers’, that’s a story right there: take the day off, Dept of Cumbersome Plot Devices.

But the sudden appearance of a tiny prehistoric pony yanks us onto the overgrown bridle path to Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. In a doomed attempt at segueing the two halves of the film, some wailing gypsies are drafted in. Then English dinosaur boffin Professor Horace Bromley turns up in a brown derby and gumboots. Moments later, the cowpokes are wrangling plastiscine Triceratops, Ray Harryhausen’s dabs are everywhere and an Allosaurus is running amok through adobe villages gobbling down ‘Ai caramba!’-ing peons. So long, wild west Howard’s Way; hello cowboys versus dinosaurs on your 10-year-old self ’s bedroom carpet.

Something more restrained seemed on offer in The Beast Must Die (1974), apparently a classic country house mystery in which a wealthy big-game hunter

invites the usual gaggle of victims to his up-state pile for high tea and murder. Our host, posho poacher Tom Newcliffe, is so jaded with blasting angry, endangered species that he craves a new challenge.

Anyone familiar with RKO’s cheapskate Most Dangerous Game (1932) – knocked out on the King Kong set while the night watchman tucked into his second quart of bourbon – might have an idea where this is going. But where MDG settled for man hunting, Beast takes a further leap into the untenable. One of the houseguests, it transpires, is a werewolf, and Newcliffe plans to sit out the inevitable bloodbath until he can tally-ho through the woods with a silver-shot elephant gun and bag himself a monster. The transition from blaxploitation Agatha Christie to throat-ripping supernatural actioner is accomplished with such aplomb that even Peter Cushing’s spectacular Euro-accent can be overlooked.

Are they brave or foolhardy, these writers and directors for whom the burning desire to trample good sense in the name of originality fits sweetly with unused stock footage and studio scripts available for a short time only at knockdown prices? Perhaps they are both: narrative test pilots pushing the envelope and, like Scott Glenn in The Right Stuff, looking the audience right in the eye and bellowing, “I’m tired of monkeys!”

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Broken Embraces.

Dir: Pedro Almodóvar

Public Enemies.

Dir: Michael Mann

Blindness.

Nailed.

Dir: David O Russell

The public has heard little from David O Russell over the past four years, apart from that delightful YouTube footage that showed him screaming at Lily Tomlin during the making of I Heart Huckabees. Next year should see the delivery of Nailed, the story of a waitress (Jessica Biel) who develops a rampant sex drive after being accidentally shot in the head with a nail gun. Jake Gyllenhaal is the lusty Congressman who assists her fight for compensation while attempting to mount her petition.

A lack of funding halted filming on several occasions but the project has now wrapped and entered post-production; let’s hope it survives long enough to get a proper release. ETA: Late 2009 NEW

UPDATE

Dir: Fernando Meirelles

Despite being the opening night gala screening, the Cannes Festival crowd mustered precious little enthusiasm for Fernando Meirelles’ ocular-malfunction thriller. Nonetheless, the film’s second trailer shows a few signs of promise – engineering a creepy sense of panic as a mystery disease blinds Mark Ruffalo and the population of a US city. The washed-out cinematography and post-9/11 subtext (prison camps ahoy!) smack of Children of Men – a similarity that may ultimately lead to unhelpful comparisons. Early reviews suggest that a sluggish pace may have blunted the concept’s sharp edge, but come November we’ll see for ourselves. ETA: November 2008

NEW

Crime films and Michael Mann go together like John Leslie and unfounded allegations. They tend to generate a similar volume of media interest too, so expect a three-ring circus for Public Enemies - a Depressionera gangster epic that details the formation of the FBI. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale will share screen space for the first time as John Dillinger and Agent Melvis Purvis – an explosive pairing that could potentially out-class the Pacino/De Niro match up that Mann pulled off with Heat. Billy Crudup will appear as J Edgar Hoover, while This is England’s Stephen Graham will play Baby Face Nelson – a promising cast, indeed. ETA: July 2009

NEW

After the uplifting spirit of Volver, Spain’s director number one has returned his attention to the darker side of life. Broken Embraces is a revenge tale in the style of 1950s noir, focusing on the fate of a rapist who attacks the daughter of a plastic surgeon. To reveal more about the plot here would be unfair to all concerned – after all, Almodóvar is one of those rare filmmakers who is capable of regularly surprising even his most loyal fans. Suffice to say that Penélope Cruz will return, but in a role unlike anything she has played before. Mark our words: this will be something special. ETA: August 2009

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Ponyo on the Cliff.

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Dir: Hayao Miyazaki

Try this statement on for size: Hayao Miyazaki owes his fans a half-decent film. To many, the Japanese master can do no wrong, but if we’re being honest, Spirited Away indulged his mawkish side at the expense of an interesting narrative; Howl’s Moving Castle was an amorphous mess; and after the shit he put his own son through on The Tales From Earthsea adaptation (see Issue 12), you have to question whether, beneath the cuddly exterior, he isn’t just a total bastard.

But if Ponyo on the Cliff, the story of a five-yearold boy and a goldfish princess, delivers on the truly insane levels of oddness first seen in a YouTube trailer, and soon to be unveiled at the Venice Film Festival, then all will be forgiven. ETA: April 2009

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The Wrestler.

Dir: Darren Aronofsky

As regular readers of this magazine will know, Aronofsky’s last film, The Fountain, caused a major rift within our ranks. After several arguments and a narrowly avoided knife fight, we ran two opposing reviews and agreed to disagree. Dazza’s next flick stars Mickey Rourke as Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, a retired Hulk Hogan sort who decides to confront his arch-rival in the ring, one last time. It’s a bemusing premise but one can hardly accuse Aronofsky of retreading old ground. The key question, of course, is whether he’ll retain his trademark fetish for hyperactive editing – and whether it will be a work of visionary genius / a pile of old toss (delete as appropriate, depending on your allegiance). With a first look looming at the New York Film Festival next month, now’s the time to grab a seat ringside. ETA: December 2008 NEW

Dir: Jamie Thraves

While the title may not sound particularly threatening, Cry of the Owl stems from the sinister pen work of Patricia Highsmith – the author behind Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. This adaptation will cast Paddy Considine as a lonely, divorced man who develops a taste for spying upon a young woman (Julia Stiles). Needless to say this pastime proves not to be a good idea, as Paddy’s stalker reputation results in him becoming the prime suspect for a series of local murders. It’s a role that seems tailor-cut for Considine, while Thraves’ previous work includes the video for Radiohead’s ‘Just’. Remember that? It was the one with the bloke lying on the floor.

Classic. ETA: Mid 2009

The Fantastic Mr Fox. Dir: Wes Anderson

Forget about Danny Ocean and Michael Clayton: George Clooney was born to play Mister Fox – one of Roald Dahl’s finest creations and the second most important example of vulpes vulpes within modern pop culture, after Basil Brush. Clooney will be joined by a spread of established Anderson allies for the director’s first foray into feature animation: Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Angelica Huston and Cate Blanchett will all lend their voices, while pop pale-face Jarvis Cocker will handle the tunes. The script comes courtesy of The Squid and the Whale director Noah Baumbach, so expect Mr and Mrs Fox to undergo a screaming divorce halfway through the show. ETA: November 2009 UPDATE

Cry of the Owl.

Dir: Werner Herzog

NEW

No, we couldn’t believe it either: Werner Herzog, the German mastermind behind Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: Wrath of God, is remaking Abel Ferrara’s notoriously unpleasant cop shocker – and he’s setting it in New Orleans. The original film followed Harvey Keitel’s naughty policeman as he cruised New York, smoking crack and wanking into the faces of underage girls.

What Herzog will do with the character is anyone’s guess but it’s bound to make for interesting viewing.

The new location suggests a socio-political angle but we’re more concerned with the casting of Nic Cage in the lead role. Let’s hope he brings his ‘A’ game – if it still exists. ETA: Late 2009

UPDATE

Dir: Kenneth Lonergan

Margaret occupies a curious position. On the one hand, it’s a project with ingredients of an undeniable pedigree: a cast list which boasts the names Paquin (Anna), Damon (Matt) and Reno (Jean); a director who wrote You Can Count On Me; and the legendary, latedeparted Sydney Pollack in his penultimate producing role. And yet… where is it? The first preview screenings happened in the middle of last year and the intervening pause suggests that someone wasn’t happy. Following a spate of reshoots, the latest word is that we’ll see something next year. Anna Paquin will lead the pack as a 17-year-old who mentally unravels after witnessing a traffic accident, setting out on an idealistic quest to find the truth behind the tragedy. ETA: 2009

Come Night Shadow.

Dir: John Maybury

John Maybury clearly has a thing for artists and writers. After Francis Bacon and Dylan Thomas, The Edge of Love director has both Jane Austen and William Shakespeare in his sights. Wuthering Heights will probably be up first if it can recover from losing Natalie Portman in the lead role, but Come Night Shadows, an adaptation of Macbeth, is the more intriguing prospect. It was written specifically for Tilda Swinton to chew some scenery as the Thane’s Machiavellian wife, but there are problems.

According to Maybury, the producers want to get it fasttracked, and with his schedule in doubt, he might not remain attached. “With all of this, it could fall apart tomorrow – I’ve had that happen to me before,” he says.

“You just have to be philosophical about it.” ETA: TBC NEW

Miracle at St Anna.

Margaret.

NEW

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

Dir: Spike Lee

Open the oven door and have a good sniff: that’s the smell of Spike Lee’s return to form. That’s a metaphor, okay? We’re not suggesting that Spike Lee should be baked alive. And yes, Inside Man was quite fun but it was hardly Do The Right Thing, was it?

In the past, Lee’s critics have questioned his portrayal of Italian Americans, so it will be nothing less than fascinating to see how he portrays one of Italy’s darkest moments – a World War II massacre that claimed the lives of 560 villagers. The trailer is up now, so go take a gander. ETA: Late 2008

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Sin City creator Frank Miller invites LWLies to take a look at his groundbreaking new comic book adaptation The Spirit.

ON SET

We’re standing outside The Orphanage. Not the creaky Spanish house with dead children stuck in the basement, but the San Francisco special effects studio responsible for pretty much everything that’s burned your eyeballs at the cinema in the last 10 years. Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man combat suit; Bruce Willis’ ding-dong with a fighterjet in Die Hard 4; Davey Jones’ writhing tentacle-face in Pirates Of The Caribbean; Brandon Routh’s game of catch with a flaming airplane in Superman Returns…

And at the doorway to greet us is the man in black.

Graphic novelist Frank Miller looks like he’s just stepped off the streets of Sin City: black jacket, black fedora, wry half-smile, glint in the eye. He’s invited LWLies to take a look at his directorial debut, The Spirit. First question: “The who?”

Created in 1940 by visionary young comic-strip writer Will Eisner, The Spirit (played by Gabriel Macht) is a murdered cop who mysteriously comes back from the dead. As you do. Dressed in a black jacket and a black hat – sound familiar? – he’s become a masked crime-fighter trapped between life and death, ghosting through Central City, listening for cries for help and clues to his identity. The Spirit uses his bare knuckles to clean up the streets. No guns and knives for this guy – the city itself is his weapon.

Combined with the fact that The Spirit’s livingdead status allows him to soak up shocking amounts of punishment, we’re in for some thumping fistfight action.

In short, the Raymond Chandler quote hung on the wall in Miller’s office tells you everything you need to know: “’He is the hero, he is everything,’” recites Miller. “We wanted to make The Spirit an urban Zorro.

He’s a good guy. And above all, he’s a gentleman.

Although he does however have an extraordinary libido!

He falls in love with every woman he meets. You come back to life, what do you wanna do?!”

Hard to blame him. Miller has packed his film with the hottest women in Hollywood: Scarlett Johansson is ‘Silken Floss’. Eva Mendes is ‘Sand Saref’. Paz Vega is ‘Plaster of Paris’. Jaime King is Death herself. But they’re only part of what makes The Spirit a potentially sexy piece of cinema.

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Having seen his blood-spattered graphic novels Sin City and 300 taken to the big-screen in revolutionary style, Miller is looking to lift comic book adaptations to a whole new level. Shot on green screen in just 48 days, The Spirit is coming to the end of a year of groundbreaking post-production magic at The Orphanage.

And the footage Miller shows us looks stunning: noir style colliding with comic book violence, silhouetted visuals spiked with colour flashes. In short, another tale of sin, sex and violence. “But it’s not Sin City,” says Miller, seriously. “For a start, this is a full-colour movie. And in The Spirit, I’m using colour to express emotion and tone more than reality.”

Miller’s secret weapon is a newly invented camera

called The Phantom. Shooting up to 1,000 frames per second, it turns one tenth of a second into a minute of footage. It’s allowed Miller to film a revolutionary new kind of action – in particular a series of extraordinary slo-mo underwater sequences that would be impossible with a water tank and a spluttering actor. “From Sin City to 300, we’ve learnt each time. My experience with Robert Rodriguez trained me for this,” says Miller as we take a seat with him in the editing suite of his post-production offices. “Now we’re going to show you some things you’ve never seen before.”

One of those things is Samuel L Jackson as The Octopus – a criminal mastermind, mad scientist, master

of disguise and The Spirit’s nemesis. “All I said to him was, ‘Sam, you’re a nuclear bomb, I know that,’” recalls Miller of their first meeting. “’I only want you to go off twice.’ And he said, ‘Where?’ And I said, ‘Here. And here.’ And he went, ‘Okay.’ What he does is beyond charismatic. It’s a spectacular performance.”

Boasting near-invulnerability like The Spirit and an army of bruising henchmen grown in his lab, Jackson’s Octopus must destroy the superhero to march on with his plan for world-domination and… Miller doesn’t want to say too much more. But there is one more thing he can’t wait for us to see when the movie hits cinemas in the New Year. “Ah yes,” he grins. “The soon-to-beinfamous Nazi scene…” ETA: January 2009 113

LWLIES 20, BIRTHDAY SPECIAL ON SHELF NOVEMBER 1 FILL IN OUR READER SURVEY AT WWW.LITTLEWHITELIES.CO.UK FOR THE CHANCE TO WIN A SANYO HD700 MOVIE CAMERA, BE PUBLISHED IN OUR NEXT ISSUE, AND FOR YOUR INVITE TO OUR 20TH BIRTHDAY PARTY

“Dedicated to Thomas Oscar Medeiros, July 28, 2008.”

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