'War Horse' and next year's awards season

The first trailer for Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's award winning novel 'War Horse' (also a hit West End play) made its debut last week. I obviously haven't seen it yet and, to be honest, it looks like sentimental mush (co-written by Richard Curtis), but I fancy it's the year's first serious Oscar contender. Consider the facts: it marks the return of a prestigious (perhaps the most renowned living) director; it looks glossy and replete with period detail; and it's a war film - and don't forget that both of Spielberg's Best Director wins have been for war films ('Schindler's List' and 'Saving Private Ryan').

This logic is certainly reductive and open to criticism. After all, 'Empire of the Sun' didn't even garner the director a nomination. Yet I'm confident, however it turns out, 'War Horse' will at least be nominated for the major prizes next February. Part of the reason is that there is almost nothing else.

Seeing as it's still the summer of 2011 it may seem a little premature to start going on about the Oscars of 2012. Yet it struck me the other day that we've had something of a lightweight year so far in terms of potential Academy Award winners. There have been plenty of good films, but then again something like Golden Bear winning Iranian drama 'A Separation' (released in the UK today) is not likely to contend for Best Picture, being foreign language and having limited commercial appeal.



You know an Oscar film when you see one and we've arguably not had many of them yet in 2011. This might not be a surprise, after all many of the big hitters won't be released until the winter. For instance, this time last year 'The King's Speech' had not yet even played Toronto and 'The Social Network' was still just that "film about Facebook" everyone dismissed out of hand.

Yet this time last year, of the ten Best Picture nominees, 'Winter's Bone' and 'Toy Story 3' had already been released, whilst 'Inception' and 'The Kid's Are All Right' would be out within weeks.

I talked this over with some journalists last week and a few people mentioned 'Source Code' as this year's smart blockbuster breakthrough in the mould of 'District 9' or 'Inception'. But whilst that film was well received and did decent business, it grossed half as much as the former and around an eighth of the latter. Oscar movies have to do outstanding business. In this respect the awards are as much about industry as they are art. What exactly is this summer's huge critically acclaimed blockbuster? There isn't one.

As for the animated vote, Pixar's 'Cars 2' is currently generating middling scores from critics and I can't see the likes of 'Rio', 'Rango' or 'Kung Fu Panda 2' making an impact with voters. Especially as a modified nomination process means that next year's field may be back down to five films, with any other films (up to ten) having to receive 5% of the total votes to be nominated.



So, aside from 'War Horse', what else could be generating awards buzz this winter? Well, Lynn Ramsey's 'We Need to Talk about Kevin' (above) was certainly the talk of Cannes Film Festival. It depends how widely it is distributed, but if the Academy gets wind of it that could garner a nomination at least. Woody Allen is no stranger to Oscar nominations and 'Midnight is Paris' is pretty good and has been one of his best received films of the last decade in the usually indifferent US. Meanwhile, Terrence Malick's Palm d'Or winning 'Tree of Life' is presumably a certainty for a few nominations if not a contender for the top prize. I'd bet against Lars Von Trier and 'Melancholia' being invited at this point.

Right now though, I'd hesitate to bet against Spielberg and his 'War Horse'.

'Bridesmaids' review:

"It's coming out like hot lava" screams a character in blockbuster comedy 'Bridesmaids' as they unleash a torrent of diarrhea into the sink of a plush public bathroom. It's a line, and indeed a scenario, that wouldn't be out of place in any other Judd Apatow produced comedy, where it might just as plausibly have been shouted by Seth Rogen. Here however, the difference - and the selling point - is that this line is shouted by a woman, Megan played by Melissa McCarthy.

Co-written by and starring Kristen Wiig, 'Bridesmaids' is about Annie, a woman in her thirties who is watching her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) get engaged and wondering how life has passed her by. Her car is rusty, her cake shop closed down in the recession and she lives with a couple of creepy room mates (one of whom is played by Matt Lucas). Worse still, the elegant, high-society Helen (Rose Byrne) seems set on supplanting her as Lillian's maid of honour.



'Bridesmaids' is a rare comedy that gives women permission to be funny, to pull ugly faces and to fart in public. Unlike the majority of comedies which relegate female characters to disapproving shrews and the perennial, sighing babysitters of giant man-children, this is a film in which the few male characters play it relatively straight whilst a female ensemble carries all the crass, sweary jokes. In this way it both subverts and conforms to the lucrative Apatow comedy model.

It's hard to recall another film comedy in which women take centre stage (perhaps the Tina Fey penned 'Mean Girls'?) and 'Bridesmaids' should definitively put to bed the myth that women aren't funny, with a first half hour as solidly amusing as that of any comedy made in the last decade. Yet sadly the rate of laughs is not sustained beyond the opening minutes and for most of the two hour running time 'Bridesmaids' seems to forget that it's a comedy, getting bogged down in Annie's inevitable fall-out with her friends and with her mild-mannered love interest (Chris O'Dowd).



It's also disappointing that some of the laughs are so uninspired, desperate and lazy, for instance when Wiig plays drunk and cringingly mimics Hitler, asking an air steward if he's German. Or when we are asked to laugh as an overweight person runs towards some food. The more manic and exaggerated the film gets in pursuit of easy laughs, the less funny it becomes. These moments are made more disheartening by the early promise offered by a laid-back and naturalistic lunch scene in which Wiig and the ever-excellent Rudolph effortlessly convince as best friends, showing that Wiig as a writer and a performer can offer so much more.

'Bridesmaids' is far better than its only real summer comedy competition, 'The Hangover: Part II', and must therefore be considered the year's best out-and-out comedy. At times it certainly lives up to that billing on merit, but mostly the fact this is what currently passes for above average just highlights the dearth of quality comedy films being made right now. But at least the long overdue emergence of this film, and its subsequent commercial and critical success, should ensure women are allowed to keep on being funny on film. David Brent once said "women are as filthy as men", but it's taken until now for Hollywood to make a feature of it.

'Bridesmaids' is out now in the UK and has been rated '15' by the BBFC.

'The Tree of Life' review:

With only his fifth feature film in just over thirty years as a director, elusive American auteur Terrence Malick continues his fixation with now familiar motifs: images of white picket fences, long grass and sunlight flickering through the trees accompanied by softly spoken classically American narrators pondering existential themes. Discussions of God, nature and morality rendered poetic and lyrical in movies which liberate this visual medium from dialogue and even go some way towards rejecting conventional narrative form.

'The Tree of Life' stars Brad Pitt as an authoritarian father - a middle American salesman in the 1950s - and the bulk of the film follows his interactions with wife Jessica Chastain and three sons, one of whom is played by a haggard-looking Sean Penn in infrequent glimpses into the future. It's a series of moments and a prevailing mood rather than a complex, three-act story: a father and son tale which sets its characters in the context of a vast universe, pre-historic life and the end of time itself. A slow and deliberately paced "nothing happens" movie in which literally everything happens. There are even dinosaurs.



Yet for all the breathtaking cinematography and fine performances (especially from Pitt), 'The Tree of Life' is undermined in its scope and grandeur by the existence of the less literal and more abstract '2001', and also by the Charlie Kaufman written 'Adaptation', in which a pretentious screenwriter seems to pre-empt the film (suggesting a movie which shows the creation of all life from small organisms to human beings for the purposes of parody). It's ripe with "meaning" and each whispered piece of narration is clearly supposed to be incredibly deep. Yet the philosophical aspect of 'The Tree of Life' is disappointingly simplistic.

As ever, Malick's depiction of female characters leaves a lot to be desired. In his films - with the possible exception of 'Badlands' - women are made of fine porcelain and (presumably because of the womb) are depicted as pure parts of nature to be negotiated and understood by male characters. I'm sure Malick means this as a positive - praising mothers upon a pedestal in the Catholic tradition - however it is deeply patronising and this inherent female closeness to nature and, by proximity, God prevents Chastain's character from being any more than a romantisied cipher. By contrast the father and his sons are allowed to show more emotional range and are given permission to change and grow over the course of the narrative.



'The Tree of Life' offers a simplistic and idealistic version of nature and of our place within it, where spirituality is unchallenged from its dominant Hollywood position where it stands for "depth" and "truth". In this way Malick has made a movie which supports the dominant ideology almost wholeheartedly, however ambitious it might be in scale. It's a seductive tapestry and, in a few instances, it is genuinely heartfelt, yet something is missing. The anti-war sentiment of 'The Thin Red Line' and its critique of capitalism ("the whole thing's about property") or the nihilistic, satirical edge of 'Badlands', seem like they come from a very distant place from 'The Tree of Life', which unambiguously advocates an intelligent design view of life on our planet. Religion has always formed a large part of the sub-text, and even the text, of Malick movies - but never to the same extent as this passionate hymn.

That is not to say that 'The Tree of Life' is not one of the best films of the year so far. The simple fact that it is in any way comparable to something as seminal as '2001', and that the director has constructed something so intimate yet epic, is enough to cement its place as one of the year's best films and a likely Oscar contender for next February. In terms of imagery and sound design it is almost peerless and the use of digital effects is wondrous and inspiring.

'The Tree of Life' is rated '12A' by the BBFC and released in the UK on July 8th.

Airline Food

I've not been able to update here for a little while, thanks to a recent trip to sunny San Francisco where I visited the offices of Pixar - as the Disney press machine prepares the world to receive 'Cars 2'. But before the fruits of that trip - including interviews with the likes of John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton - are be published over the coming weeks, I thought I'd unleash some mini-reviews of the rag-tag (and fairly recent) selection of movies to which I was treated whilst airborne.



'The Adjustment Bureau' is a Phillip K. Dick adaptation about a New York politician (Matt Damon) who falls desperately in love with a ballerina (Emily Blunt) following a chance encounter on a bus - changing both their pre-determined fates. It's then that the shady, besuited and seemingly omnipotent Adjustment Bureau pop in, with Terence Stamp and 'Mad Men' actor John Slattery among their ranks. They try to dissuade the loved-up couple from utilising this new found free will, but find Damon is not about to give up on love so easily.

It's undeniably slick and the leads are likeable, yet the film just never builds up any forward momentum until the final minutes. Instead we are taken slowly through a story which covers years of its character's lives, without much feeling of threat along the way. As a result it's hard to feel to involved in what's going on. Though there are some interesting ideas at play here, mostly concerning our desperate need to believe we have control over our lives even if we don't.



Probably the most entertaining film I saw on the flight, 'The Eagle' is the story of a Roman officer (Channing Tatum) and his Gaul slave (Jamie Bell) as they traverse the unclaimed lands north of Hadrian's Wall in search of a stolen standard - a golden Eagle lost by a massacred company of soldiers under the command of Tatum's father whose reputation has been shamed. What follows is a sort of occasionally violent road movie as two disparate individuals relate their different experiences of life, honour and war whilst fighting woad warriors and rolling around in mud.

Most intriguing is the film's casting of Americans as Roman soliders and British people as local Gauls - a fact flagged up as all the more deliberate when we hear the English Mark Strong also doing an American accent as a Roman. This not only sets up the Romans as invading foreigners and reverses the traditional movie role of the square-jawed American hero, but also opens the film up for potential reading as a critique of US foreign policy - a reading which holds up thanks to a degree of nuance and sophistication lacking in many more direct contemporary war films.



Director Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp extended their 'Pirates of the Caribbean' friendship into the animated realm with 'Rango', a Spaghetti Western about a domesticated, big-city chameleon (Depp) who convinces a hayseed town of assorted desert creatures that he is a notorious gun-slinger rather than an actor - soon becoming entrusted as the town's sheriff (a similar premise to that of 'A Bug's Life' or 'The Three Amigos').

Boasting a distinctive look, brilliant character designs and an edgy tone, 'Rango' takes a great many risks for a mainstream animated adventure film: the imagery is often a little dark (such as when Rango talks to a roadkill armadillo) and the dialogue isn't far off that of the genre's earnest live-action equivalents. Frequent references to Clint Eastwood or Western genre tropes (and even a nod to 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas') will pass over the heads of younger audience members, but it's still a blast for those in the know. Nicely animated too - 'Rango' is probably the most technically impressive computer animation yet seen outside of Disney/Pixar.



Before the popular emergence of Judd Apatow, the masters of all that is crass and disgusting were the Farrelly Brothers ('There's Something About Mary', 'Dumb and Dumber', 'Me, Myself & Irene'). But their latest tasteless gag-fest 'Hall Pass' fares much less well than either its predecessors or the current crop of American lad comedies. A likeable cast of Owen Wilson, Jenna Fischer, Jason Sudeikis and Stephen Merchant can not save what is an unfunny and desperate affair, which just tries far too hard to shock and ends up feeling tame as a result.



'Cedar Rapids' is very much an "offbeat, indie comedy" in the Fox Searchlight style, this time starring the third banana of the 'Hangover' films, Ed Helms. Directed by Miguel Arteta ('Chuck and Buck', 'The Good Girl', 'Youth in Revolt'), 'Cedar Rapids' wears its quirkiness on its sleeve, with overbearing, foul-mouthed characters straying into "wacky" territory at every turn. Its saving grace is that John C. Reilly is genuinely very funny whenever he's on-screen, though not enough to distract attention from the predictable and sanctimonious ending (you can smell a closing speech about "integrity" forming somewhere before the end of the first act). At the very best 'Cedar Rapids' should be considered an inoffensive and middling comedy from a director and cast who can do much better.



The less said about this one the better. 'Just Peck' is an "R-rated" teen comedy which looks and feels like a hideously misjudged Disney channel sitcom. There are moments when it becomes clear that the film is supposed to play as satire, such as when the "why are we here" duo of Adam Arkin and Marcia Cross threaten to sue the school principal if she disciplines their son for smoking drugs at school ("are you questioning our parenting?"), but generally it is hard to tell where the sappy, high school drama ends and the joke begins. It's like watching an episode of 'Hannah Montana' full of crude jokes about rape, incest and self-abuse (and often all of the above). It just doesn't make any sense. Who is this movie intended for?

'Kaboom' review:

There is something infectious and even alluring about 'Kaboom', the latest exercise in sardonic camp from veteran of the "New Queer Cinema" Gregg Araki, best known for his mid-90s "Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy". It's possibly the film's playful tone which knowingly assures the audience that nothing is to be taken all that seriously. There is a deceptive air of effortlessness to 'Kaboom', which could smack as the work of a director barely breaking into a sweat. Above all it's a shameless so-called "guilty pleasure" of a movie - a less kitsch version of the sort of thing you might expect from John Waters - a large portion of which consists of attractive young people having lots of sex, all of which feels somehow explicit, in spite of the fact that it really isn't.

'Kaboom' is one of those movies almost designed to frustrate the film reviewer, in that it isn't especially easy to define along the lines of any given genre. It isn't an all-out comedy, though many of the lines and characters are played for laughs, but it isn't anywhere near earnest enough to be considered so hallowed an animal as the word "drama" would suggest. It's certainly got a toe or two in horror movie genre at various points, though there are also elements of the thriller, the science fiction film and even the police procedural at work here. In fact it often feels like a complete mess. Yet it's fun to sit back and watch something that isn't asking you to congratulate the filmmaker for his vision, or yourself for your discerning high-taste.



Before the snowballing madness of the third act, which culminates in a final shot that more than echoes Takashi Miike's 'Dead or Alive', 'Kaboom' plays out like some sort of hitherto unseen pilot for a 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' style US TV series that never got the green light. It sees a cast of twenty-something actors (Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett and Juno Temple), playing teenage college kids and speaking in a sort of Joss Whedon-esque high school patois (albeit with a far greater level of sexual frankness and coarseness), as they embark on a serious of casual sexual encounters and discuss, for instance, the practical implications of autofellatio. It's like a bumper episode of a post-watershed 'Hollyoaks', only with a creepy murder mystery dimension and a touch of the supernatural (so in fact it's closer to Channel 4's 'Misfits').

The acting is fairly rotten, the dialogue forced and often clunky, and the lighting looks cheap for the most part. It's crass, exploitative and has all the nutrition of bubblegum, but it's hard not to smile through it nevertheless - probably because of these things rather than in spite of them. And not in some tiresome "it's so bad it's good" kind of a way, but because the filmmaker is so clearly not vying for your approval that it's sort of refreshing. Araki isn't asking to be taken seriously and isn't expecting you to love him. He isn't even chasing box office. Like his sexually liberated characters, he seems comfortable taking his passion where he finds it. I'm not sure it's a film I'll ever return to - and, in honesty, I'm not even sure it's any good - but it does posses a rare amorphous quality all of its own.

'Kaboom'is out now in the UK and rated '15' by the BBFC.

DVDs in Devon: 'Julie and Julia' + 'How to Train Your Dragon'

I've been visiting my grandmother in sunnyish Devon with my girlfriend this week, but I have managed to see a couple of films on DVD - giving me something to write about now as everyone takes a midday nap.

On Monday, at my nan's insistence, we all sat down to watch Nora Ephron's last film, the 2009 culinary double-biography 'Julie & Julia' starring the dependable Amy Adams and the legendary Meryl Streep. I was pleasantly surprised.



'Julie & Julia' acts as both the story of US TV cooking legend Julia Child, as she learns how to cook as the middle aged wife of a US diplomat in 1950s Paris, and of Julie Powell - a popular New York-based cookery blogger who became famous after tackling every recipe in Child's mighty Mastering the Art of French Cooking within one year.

An unashamed "feel-good movie", it feels like a bit of a whitewash, as it nakedly celebrates both women with little scrutiny of either character. It's also a little predictable and sloppy the way that Julie's moment of crisis comes courtesy of an unconvincing fall-out with her husband, rather than say, as a result of online criticism or the pressure of balancing her new celebrity with her mundane job in an insurance call centre. But this is my only serious gripe against what is overall a charming and polished film.

Both Adams and Streep make their characters fun and the film enjoyable. Especially the latter, as she impersonates the beloved cook, taking on her odd mannerisms and bizarre speech pattern perfectly. Stanley Tucci is also worth a mention as Child's loving husband.

As a point of curiosity, it was interesting to note how Ephron shot at many of the same Parisian locations as fellow New Yorker Woody Allen would later use for his 'Midnight in Paris'.

Tuesday night we watched the Dreamworks animation 'How to Train Your Dragon', which entertained me far less.



I confess, I'm not a fan of the Dreamworks house style anyway, but 'How to Train Your Dragon' did nothing for me. The story is exactly the same as that of so many other cartoons (notably the superior 'Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs') as a young schlemiel (always an inventor) struggles to fit in with a society that doesn't understand his individuality. In this case a whiny young Viking lad (Jay Baruchel) struggles to embrace the family business of killing dragons. Instead he befriends one of the creatures and alienates himself further from his horrifically unsympathetic father (Gerard Butler), before saving the day and changing the world.

The character designs and animation are far superior than any of the other Dreamworks movies, and it's also less of a crass, celebrity-filled gag-fest, but it still lacks the nuance and artfulness of a Pixar film. There is some pleasure to be had looking at the imaginative and varied dragon designs, but the movie is clumsily written and goes to all the obvious places in perfunctory fashion.

It also struggles under the weight of a third act that makes no sense, narratively or thematically, as the film has its cake and eats it too. The "love not war" morality of our dragon-training hero is here undermined by the film's generic need for a massive climactic dragon fight and a conventional villain, as a huge dragon-shaped deus ex machina emerges as the cause of all the Vikings' troubles and is destroyed without damage to anyone's conscience.

Tonight we're due to watch 1981 rom-com 'The Four Seasons', written and directed by its star Alan Alda, apparently one of my late granddad's favourite films.

'Senna' review:

It was a forgone conclusion that I would cry by the end of 'Senna', the biographical documentary about the Brazilian three-time Formula One world champion who died after crashing his car during the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. I'm easily manipulated and knew that, by the time the film got to covering the event of his premature death, I would have been rendered helpless by endless earnest accounts of the subject's greatness aided by elegiac, probably string-driven music. I was expecting to feel moved, if for no other reason than it is sad to hear about the accidental death of a relatively young person. But 'Senna', directed by Asif Kapadia, rises above cloying sentiment to provide a portrait of the icon that is as tragic as expected, yet equal parts exciting, joyful and insightful.

Mostly avoiding the driver's personal life, beyond frequent references to his devout Catholicism, the documentary does well to maintain a solid focus on Senna's career - showing us his development as a go-kart racer in his youth and following his F1 years season-by-season right up to his death. The relationships that become a part of this narrative include Senna's notorious rivalry with McLaren teammate Alain Prost, his friendship with team boss Ron Dennis and his unhappy experiences dealing with the political side of the sport - as personified by FIA President Jean-Marie Balestre. This narrative, which plays out like the best dramatic sports movie, is allowed to play out using only stock footage and candid shots of life behind the scenes. The fact that those who have been interviewed especially for the film are heard but never seen keeps the focus on the amazing racing footage and ensures the film keeps its forward momentum.



A film about the triumph and tragedy of the attractive, charismatic Ayrton Senna is not a hard sell, even for myself - as someone with next to no interest in F1 racing. But what is surprising is that the racing itself is incredibly exciting to watch, especially those shots which are taken from the perspective of Senna as he whips around corners at immense speed. Through the cinema, even those allergic to sport are made to appreciate Senna's art and his daring desire to win at almost any cost. We witness high-speed overtaking and marvel at his aptitude for driving in the rain - a condition under which he seemed simply unbeatable. Watching him race, it isn't hard to understand why so many millions of Brazilians looked to him for inspiration during some of the country's poorest years.

Audiences have been reported as staying until the very end of the credits before leaving showings of 'Senna' - a practice usually reserved for those expecting a brief epilogue at the end of a superhero movie. They'll tell you they were enjoying the montage of still photographs, though I suspect this is a convenient smokescreen for those weepy souls battling to compose themselves before re-emerging into the outside world. Yet 'Senna' is not an on-screen funeral for those looking to re-acquaint themselves with grief almost two decades old: this is ultimately a celebration and an invitation for those of us who missed it all the first time around to see what made him so undeniably special.

'Senna' is on a wide release now in the UK and has been rated '12A' by the BBFC.