(500) Days of Summer (USA, 2009)
Directed by Marc Webb
Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Chloe Moretz, Clark Gregg

As a film enthusiast you're always on the lookout for innovation in films - not specifically for films which move the goalposts and redefine our notions of cinema, but for those which take something well-worn and familiar and challenge it for a new audience. With this in mind, there is nothing that can get one's gander up more than a film which claims or thinks that it is being inventive, when in fact the merest glance beneath its surface shows that it is nothing of the sort.(500) Days of Summer comes at you with claims of being a genuine postmodern love story, an Annie Hall for the Twitter generation, or a rom-com for people who genuinely hate rom-coms. While it may not have the putridly glossy veneer of Sex and the City, the film ultimately shoots itself in the foot by being too kooky for its own good, and too structurally self-conscious to feel genuine. While there are still ideas and moments which sparkle, for the most part it feels disappointingly hollow.There's no denying that the makers of (500) Days of Summer had their hearts in the right place when setting out. In an age where cinema is increasingly and ever more cynically geared to the interests of teenage boys, romantic comedies or dramas with believable female protagonists are harder and harder to come by. The majority of contemporary romantic comedies are either predictable rehashes of stuff from the 1980s and 1990s, or vacuous vessels for product placement, offering women supposed material satisfaction in place of some more permanent form of happiness or self-esteem.Marc Webb's film is at its strongest when it attempts to puncture that self-contained, pre-packaged form of contentment. Joseph Gordon-Levitt writes greetings cards for a living, and struggles to remain optimistic or positive about the prospect of love in generalr. In one of the film's best scenes, he stands up in the middle of a meeting and lets rip about how hollow and meaningless love and happiness have become. Our culture has become so orientated around 'events', seeing emotion as something to be conveyed through commerce, that we are losing our ability to genuinely feel affection or understand each other.Somewhere within (500) Days of Summer, there is an edgier, more adventurous film which wants to use this premise to completely deconstruct the modern notion of love and romance. There is the potential within this material for something as scabrous and poisonous as Heathers, a ferociously funny film which ripped into the John Hughes view of high school by making you both squirm and howl with laughter. But try as he might, Webb can't seem to bring this desire to the surface for more than a few moments at a time. For all its claims of being left-field, indie-spirited and unconventional, (500) Days of Summer is structurally all too similar to the films whose clichés it claims to subvert.The single biggest problem with the film is that its structure of shuffled timeframes doesn't work. The film occupies the same kind of ground as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, trying to depict or capture the seemingly random way in which memory works within the context of a failed romantic relationship. But where Michel Gondry used the shuffled structure with great intelligence, confounding our expectations and getting us to question our own memories, Marc Webb treats it as a gimmick, as little more than a device to distract from the conventional elements of the story.This lack of confidence in the use of non-linear narrative is shown by the presence of a narrator. Having a narrator in any kind of story gives a feeling of certainty to the direction and outcome of the plot. This is even true of film noir, where an unreliable narrator makes us certain that we should not trust anyone. When you have a film which sells itself on being free-spirited and unpredictable, you don't want any creative element which would suggest otherwise. The narration here is as pointless as the narration in The Big Lebowski; it cheapens the experience by introducing choreography into an atmosphere of spontaneity.In terms of the central relationship, there isn't a great deal about either Tom or Summer which hasn't been covered in some depth before. Dynamically they're very similar to the main characters in Annie Hall: Joseph Gordon-Levitt may not be as neurotic or self-hating as Woody Allen, but Zooey Deschanel is frequently as off-the-wall (and as annoying) as Diane Keaton. The idea of the relationship being important despite the fact that boy and girl do not end up together has been handled more conclusively in several other films. I don't recall either Annie Hall or Gregory's Girl having such a clunker of a final scene.The familiar elements of (500) Days of Summer keep coming to the fore as the film moves forward (and backward). The conversations surrounding musical taste are essentially the same as the arguments in Stephen Frears' High Fidelity, but with an indie gloss on top (in other words, substitute any other band for 'The Smiths' and you're home free). Summer may claim that romance is dead like it's a novel concept, but she is essentially playing the Billy Crystal role in When Harry Met Sally..., being the sceptical side of a relationship which treads on the edge of friendship. There's nothing wrong with making a love story with familiar scenes and plot points, but it helps if the film is happy with admitting this, rather than constantly avoiding the issue so that it can continue claiming to be original.One of the problems with the indie genre is that it attempts to compensate for the ordinary, often dull nature of its stories with unbridled levels of kookiness. While (500) Days of Summer isn't exactly off the radar, it contains any number of moments which will send the less tolerant among us running for cover. Some of the sillier romantic scenes are funny, like Summer's quip about her high school nickname, or the couple frolicking around in Ikea and remarking that "there's a Japanese family in our bathroom". But Deschanel's impromptu singing and the drunken karaoke scenes which follow are a clear sign of the plot running out of steam. And that's not to mention the completely misjudged musical number, which is closer to High School Musical than Singing in the Rain.The final, and most surprising, problem is the film's lack of interest in the motivations of its female character. While Tom gets his fair share of backstory about failed relationships, and those of his male workmates for comparison, we get no real indication of what has made Summer who she is, and why she behaves towards men in the way she does. One could argue that this is symptomatic of the genre as a whole, with the film becoming less of a rom-com than a bromance that happens to have girls in. But that does not excuse the lack of intrigue surrounding Summer, for which Zooey Deschanel must take some of the blame. Regardless of how underwritten she is, you cannot make us care about someone by staring doe-eyed into middle distance for two hours.The other performances in the film are a little more promising. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has proved his action chops in Brick and Inception, and he does the best he can with a role which requires him to be constantly either in a mood or blank-faced wonder. A pre-Kick-Ass Chloe Moretz is thoroughly impressive as Tom's worldly-wise younger sister, with both actor and character having wisdom beyond their years without looking like they are trying to play younger than themselves. And Clark Gregg is convincing as Tom's boss, coming across as creepy and unsettling without going over-the-top.(500) Days of Summer is a disappointing and deeply overrated addition to the rom-com genre. When stripped of all its hype and kookiness, it is essentially Annie Hall with shuffled timeframes, half the brains and less than half the conviction. Had Marc Webb the guts to risk being unpopular, and deconstruct the notion of modern love head on, it might have been more memorable, distinctive and enjoyable. One hopes that he will do a better job when dealing with Peter Parker.

Rating:
Verdict: Overrated and overly kooky

Adaptation (USA, 2002)
Directed by Spike Jonze
Starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Tilda Swinton

Although authors in general have pretty interesting lives, the physical act of writing is not particularly cinematic. Numerous filmmakers have tried to put writing on screen, but more often than not their efforts resemble po-faced versions of Monty Python's writing sketch, in which Michael Palin commentates on Thomas Hardy beginning his latest novel to a soundtrack of hysterical football supporters.

Adaptation is among the more successful attempts to put pen to paper on the silver screen. The reputation that Charlie Kaufman has accrued over the last decade leads us to expect the very best, and his screenplay is refreshingly loopy and intelligent. But it is not an unqualified success, being neither as tolerably quirky as Being John Malkovich nor as accessible in terms of characters as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.The first hurdle which Adaptation has to overcome is the dangers associated with being self-reflexive. There is a very thin line between being self-aware and self-obsessed, and the more one points out how much what we are seeing is a construct, the greater the risk of a film becoming more of an academic discussion than an exercise in drama.There have been writers who have sought to deliberately exploit this alienating effect. Bertolt Brecht wrote plays whose characters constantly remind the audience that what they are seeing isn't real, so that they would ask deeper questions about the world around them. In a similar way, Kaufman wants to demonstrate the relationship between art and reality while giving the audience some form of artifice to pull them through. In wanting us to both unpick every line and enjoy the story in itself, he succeeds wholeheartedly on the first part and partially on the second.Adaptation is really two films running side by side. One is about a screenwriter struggling to adapt The Orchid Thief, and the other is about Charlie Kaufman struggling to be Charlie Kaufman, who also happens to be adapting The Orchid Thief. The film mixes personal insight into Kaufman's condition with more general ideas and comments about writing. It's hard to tell whether the Charlie Kaufman on screen is Kaufman himself, or a subtly exaggerated version as in Being John Malkovich. But in the end there is enough in the way of drama to prevent us expending all our energies on such restrictive lines of inquiry.

With this double-barrelled structure in place, Adaptation can begin to explore a number of themes, all of which use writing as a metaphor for modern life. The first of these is the classic conflict between creativity and commercial success, something which has been previously explored in films like Barton Fink. But where the Coen Brothers explored this in a contrast between John Turturro's character and the industry oddballs surrounding him, Kaufman and Spike Jonze try something a lot more introspective.Using seamless split-screen shooting, Jonze has Nicolas Cage playing both Charlie Kaufman and his fictional brother Donald. Charlie is the creative genius who believes in his principles and pushing the envelope of his art form - and who as a result is neurotic, depressed and exhausted. Donald, on the other hand, is a hack writer who is content to play the industry game and wants to be happy above everything else.The conventional thing to do would be to wage war between the brothers with Charlie coming out on top in a definitive triumph of art over money. It's a corner that Kaufman is entitled to fight, but he knows that being a screenwriter is not that straightforward - and he knows that we know it too. Instead of being constantly at loggerheads, Charlie and Donald begin to take on each other's traits, from Donald using Charlie's facetious suggestion in his script to Charlie attending a Robert McKee seminar.The point that Kaufman is trying to make is not simply the need to balance artistic purity with a sense of realism, but about how obsessing with one's art can lead one to lose sight of what really matters - the audience and happiness respectively. Charlie receives a drubbing from McKee for claiming that there can be no inspiration in ordinary life: in pursuing purity he has lost sight of whom he is serving as an artist. Donald is the device through which Charlie learns to adapt to the needs of the book, the needs of his audience and thereby to the needs in life in general.

Within this there is an existential comment about our perception and creation of personal realities. When asked by his agent what the problem with the book is, Charlie blurts out that it has no story, to which his agent calmly responds: "Make one up." In the absence of a defined progression from A to B in our lives - or at least, one that we can plainly perceive - we invent metanarratives and motivations for ourselves, if nothing else so that we don't have to spend all our time staring at a blank page.Adaptation also refers to evolution, which plays out in great detail in one of Charlie's early drafts. There is a discussion as to whether such change is mandatory, and if it is, then whether the need to show anyone is also mandatory. Meryl Streep's character begins as a clearly-drawn journalist, but as the film moves on we see the various changes which have occurred and how she has attempted to conceal these adaptations. There is a comparison with her character in Plenty, insofar as both women have their lives changed by chance encounters with men and spent the remainder of their lives becoming slowly disillusioned by a world which does not accept their new ideals.Some of you may have noticed that, in this review so far, I have devoted very little time to the director. That is less an indictment of Jonze's abilities than a reflection of the film's nature. Adaptation is a film in which the screenplay is the main player; it governs and determines everything, and Jonze's direction is appropriately understated to facilitate this. One could almost argue that Adaptation is the 8 1/2 of screenwriters, challenging both the auteur theory in which the director is king and audience perceptions that films are driven or dominated by actors.

But Jonze's stand-offish approach also hints at the flaws with Adaptation. Despite the best efforts of both writer and director, whole sections do feel academic, with too much voiceover and too little drama. There is an argument that this is deliberate on the part of Kaufman to show how we dramatize so much of our lives, writing ourselves into clichés and conventions. But this jars with the film's message that this is an inevitable process which should be accepted, and as the later work of Woody Allen shows, neurosis and self-hate are not enough on their own to pull us into a story.

On top of this, most of the characters are in one way or another very irritating. Nicolas Cage is very good as both Charlie and Donald, but you end up wanting to strangle the former for being so pathetic - particularly when he goes all the way to New York, stands in a lift with Meryl Streep and doesn't have the guts to speak to her. Streep starts off well, but eventually she becomes too showy and her breakdown seems overdone.Then there is the group of New York intellectuals whose company Streep keeps; the dinner party sequence veers so close to the work of Noah Baumbach that had it gone on any longer, you would lose all patience with her character. The best performance by a mile is Chris Cooper, who genuinely inhabits John Laroche. You can almost smell the manky clothing and un-brushed teeth, and his rambling swathes of dialogue are both insightful and broadly comedic.Adaptation is another intelligent effort from Kaufman which is partially hamstrung by its character construction and Jonze's unwillingness to be more commanding with his camera. The ideas which the film raises are fascinating, and even Kaufman at his weakest is more insightful and engaging than half the screenwriters working in Hollywood today. But ironically for a film about writing, it would have benefited most from a director willing to put his foot down and create something a little less didactic.

Rating:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (France/ USA, 2007)
Directed by Julian Schnabel
Starring Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josee Croze, Max von Sydow

Given that it is common practice to praise a filmmaker by describing them as an artist, one could assume that all artists would make great filmmakers. In fact this is very rarely the case, with many artists who dabble in the medium producing works which are closer to installations than actual films. Sometimes the works are so personal that they collapse into narcissism; other times, as with the work of Douglas Gordon, they display such overt contempt for the medium that no sane person would sit through them.In his first two films, Basquiat and Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel fell into the first of these two traps. Both were billed as biographical tributes to artists whom Schnabel admired, but the former especially quickly morphed into a self-serving promotion of his own art and experiences, to the point at which the central character was completely marginalised. But with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Schnabel has overcome this considerable hurdle to produce an awe-inspiring film which truly makes us appreciate every living moment we have.Much film scholarship has been devoted to the director's relationship to the subject of their films, and to whether it is a good thing to put such a strongly personal or autobiographical stamp on one's work. Schnabel said that he was drawn to the project having cared for his elderly father in the last years of his life, drawing inspiration from the life of Jean-Dominique Bauby which resonated with his own circumstances. He has expressed this by making a vivid first-person account of what initially seems like a tragedy, but with the focus very much on the characters rather than the puppeteer pulling the strings.This is evident from the opening shot, where we see the outside world as if we are inside Jean-Do's head. Although this shooting approach has been used before (most notably in Being John Malkovich), this time the focus is less on what we see as how we see it. Schnabel and his cinematographer Janusz Kamiński used 'tilt-and-swing' lenses, in which only a small part of the frame is ever in focus and this part can be easily manoeuvred to match the movements of an eyeball. This simple creative decision goes some way in establishing both the disorientation of the central character and the immediate claustrophobia that comes from observing his condition.

For the first twenty minutes of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, we feel like we are trapped inside someone else's body, like John Cusack at the end of Being John Malkovich. Before any of the fantasy sequences or the flashbacks to his life leading up to the stroke, we are forced to confront the bleak and depressing scenario of a man whose body has genuinely become a prison. When the doctors sew up his right eye to stop it becoming infected, we see everything so up close that we squirm and flinch, desperate to look away while knowing full well that he can't.Because the sense of claustrophobia created is so real and so intense, we begin to understand and share in the character's despair. Our limited perspective matches his own, so that we experience the same frustrations, from the trial-and-error of blinking out sentences to the feeling of blind panic as more information comes to light. When his speech therapist misunderstands Jean-Do, thinking he has said he wants to die and storming out of the room, we feel genuinely helpless. Schnabel puts us so close to the experience that we are forced to abandon all our misgivings and hope that there are better things in store.Thankfully, we do not spend the entire film as trapped observers. The title of the film summarises the contradiction between body and spirit which is central to Jean-Do's predicament. His body is a diving-bell (or in this case an old-fashioned diver's suit), which is cumbersome and through which one can only observe rather than influence the world around them. His spirit, on the other hand, is a butterfly, emerging from the grim exterior of the cocoon as something fragile yet beautiful, and most of all free.

As the film moves on, our perspective broadens out at the same rate as the central character. We begin to see flashbacks of Jean-Do's previous life, from his presence at a photo shoot for the cover of Elle to a sequence of him sharing oysters with a girlfriend. These scenes, coupled with the character's soul-searching internal monologues, depict a life which, while wealthy and affluent, was not rewarding or fulfilling in any way. Mathieu Amalric, best known as the villain in Quantum of Solace, gives a beautifully layered performance, walking through these scenes with a sense of existential frustration even when his life seems most exciting.The strength of the film's initial section means that when our vision broadens out, it doesn't simply collapse into yet another triumph-of-the-human-spirit-over-adversity story. For starters, we don't have to put up with our central character spouting off a lot of cheesy speeches about overcoming adversity. Then there is the personality of the characters and the extent of their physical transformation; you don't get the sense of people pretending to be ill so they can still look cool in the bar afterwards. Finally, there is the ending, which although it contains elements of triumph is also profoundly melancholic. We still leave on a hopeful note, but the film makes no attempt to sanitise or compromise its story for fear of undermining said optimism.

If the film has a message beyond its appraisal for life and love, it is to do with the difficulty of communication and the process of dealing with regret. One of the best scenes come when Jean-Do's father, played by the ever-reliable Max von Sydow, calls his son and breaks down over the phone, out of sorrow, frustration with his fading memory and anger that both are physically incapable of helping each other. Ronald Harwood's script is rich with these kinds of pathos-ridden exchanges which at their best are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett.The fantasy elements of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly represent both the film's greatest strength and its first of two problems. The images Schnabel conjures up are ravishingly beautiful, with scenes from Jean-Do's past intersecting and criss-crossing at the same breakneck speed as Joel's memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But there are occasions when we linger too long in the imagination, when what is really interesting is the day-to-day physical struggle of the central character.

Similarly, the film shifts rather uneasily from one central relationship to another. In the opening section we see Jean-Do's speech therapist (a great performance from Marie-Josée Croze) teaching him slowly and painfully how to communicate. We develop a great affection for her character, so that when the film moves to focus on Jean-Do's partner and children, we are frustrated and disappointed that we don't see more of her. Schnabel deliberately shot the film in the same hospital and ward in which the real life Jean-Do was treated, which makes it all the more unusual - if not slightly ungrateful - for the staff to become marginalised as things progress.In the end, however, these little problems are easily forgivable. For The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is that rarest of things - a film about the triumph of the human spirit which is genuinely uplifting and emotionally gripping. Unlike Rob Reiner's The Bucket List, it doesn't approach death or illness with stultifying schmaltz, and it really does make you value your life, health and well-being. While not quite a perfect film, it is by far and away Schnabel's best work, with enough vivid imagery and emotional heartache to stay with you for years.

Rating: 4/5
Verdict: A genuinely uplifting biopic

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (New Zealand, 2002)
Directed by Peter Jackson
Starring Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Bernard Hill, Andy Serkis

In the words of actor John Rhys-Davies, "Part One was a damn wonderful film. You ain't seen nothing yet." The Two Towers is every bit as brilliant, if not slightly better than its predecessor. The stakes are raised and the story is darker, but it's also a film which demonstrates Peter Jackson's knack for balancing multiple storylines, serving up eye-popping spectacle while keeping an unshakeable grip on the substance he introduced in The Fellowship of the Ring.Where Fellowship took its time to set up the world of the hobbits and flesh out the backstory surrounding the ring, The Two Towers doesn't have any kind of initial exposition or recap to pull us back into the story. It doesn't need to: the opening sequence, which takes us back into Moria and shows us what happened next, is as heart-in-mouth as you could possibly want. It pulls us back into Middle Earth without simply retreading old ground, so that by the time that Frodo awakes from his dream, we know exactly where we are and are raring to go.

A common claim made about trilogies is that the second and/ or third instalments do not stand up as films in their own right. But Two Towers defies this, feeling every bit as well-crafted and distinctive as the first film. 'The Lord of the Rings trilogy' is a misnomer, since Tolkien wrote it as one book which was then split into three by the publishers. This is not a trilogy of one film with sequels, like Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia. It is the second part of one story, and all three parts blend together seamlessly.It is this seamless progression from one book to another which made it sensible to shoot the films simultaneously, and is also this quality which allows Jackson's more obvious creative decisions to work. The single biggest change is that Frodo's death-defying encounter with Shelob is delayed until the start of the third film, confounding expectations of those who had read the book. In other circumstances this would have been a costly error, but the level of skill present on screen leads you to implicitly trust the filmmaker, so that even when there are noticeable alterations they remain within the tone of the film as a whole.As before, the film's production values are superb. Every prop, costume and item of set is meticulously detailed and beautifully ornate, absorbing you as a spectator and making you feel immersed in the cultures of Rohan and Ithilien. The difference is that these designs now have to contend with far more kinetic and larger action set-pieces than anything in the first film. If Fellowship laid the groundwork for both the story and the scale on which it would take place, the second film builds on these foundations and flexes its muscles to show what can be achieved.

To create the Battle of Helm's Deep, Jackson and his production team created a computer program called MASSIVE, which entails creating hundreds of individual CGI figures capable of independent thought. This makes the battles more believable, with battalions of otherwise faceless armies taking on individual qualities, if only for a moment. The merging of CGI with reality is every bit as convincing as the amphitheatre scenes in Gladiator, but the organic effects are also terrific. Treebeard has all the physicality which comes from animatronics but none of the jerky drawbacks, and the continued use of forced perspectives works as well as anything on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.Two special effects stand out more than any. The first is the de-ageing of Theoden, where the zombie-like King of Rohan loses 40 years in a single shot. Not only does his hair recede and change colour, but the entire structure of his face is subtly altered, and yet it feels as tactile as the make-up he wears at the beginning. The other, of course, is Gollum. Like the introduction to Hobbiton, this was a death-or-glory moment for the trilogy; since Gollum is one of the connecting pieces in the story, if we did not accept this portrayal than all would be lost. But Andy Serkis succeeds with effort to spare, putting in a tireless performance and truly inhabiting the character.The Two Towers is a darker, more threatening film than its predecessor, a mood which is brilliantly conveyed in its battle scenes. Being a 12 certificate film, we are still in fantasy violence territory; the focus is on the suggestion of injury rather than lingering on blood like Gladiator or Braveheart. For all the spearings and decapitations, which again hint back to Jackson's horror past, the focus on violence is briefer and when individual pain is addressed (as with Haldir), it is largely implied. But despite the scale and the huge number of characters, we still feel a huge emotional attachment and so the pain and fear is very real.Although Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings as a mythic pre-history of Europe, The Two Towers brings out its allegorical connotations which are embedded in the author's experiences of war. Tolkien served in WWI and wrote the bulk of the story during WWII, and there is an obvious comparison between the battle for Europe and the battle for Middle Earth. The union of the two towers is analogous to the war-time union between Germany and Russia, moving like a pincer on Eastern Europe - or perhaps Germany and Italy, since one power is overrun part way through the story.The film places a twist on the theme of nature and machines clashing for the future of humanity. In the first film, the machines had it all their own way, but with the arrival of the Ents, the "shepherds of the forest" who in turn control the trees, nature is beginning to fight back. However, as the war turns the way of greenery on one front with the flooding of Isengard, at the other end the machinery of Mordor is making mincemeat of the divided forces of Gondor.

In the middle of both these conflicts, you have man and machine locked in combat for control of the world. The central battle, between Frodo and the ring, stands on a knife-edge, and it is increasingly unclear as to who is controlling whom. As before, the beauty of The Lord of the Rings is its harmony of the epic and the personal, with all parties caught up in a conflict which is both physical and metaphysical.As with Fellowship, what really sticks with you after many viewings is the film's note-perfect marriage of darkness and light. In light of its imitators (some pleasant, some not), we depict it as wholly dark, bleak and brooding in a bid to drum up its heft and credibility. But there is a lot of humour laced among even the darkest scenes. The rivalry between Gimli and Legolas is beautifully judged, and the scene of the latter killing soldiers while using a shield as a skateboard is straight out of Bad Taste. Even Sam's speech at the end about the 'great stories', which teeters on 'message moment' schmaltz, works as an expression of hope amidst a gathering storm.The Two Towers is every bit as magnificent as its predecessor, if not slightly moreso. Like Mad Max 2 or The Evil Dead 2, it builds on everything that was brilliant in the first instalment while carving out its own identity. Howard Shore's score is brilliant, especially in the dream sequences with Arwen, and Jackson's direction is note-perfect, beautifully judging the emotional impact of every last shot. Whether as a brilliantly constructed epic or an intimate story of struggle and temptation, a frightening allegory or a fascinating fantasy, there is something in The Two Towers for absolutely anyone.

Rating: 5/5
Verdict: The perfect trilogy continues

Mr. Nice (UK, 2010)
Directed by Bernard Rose
Starring Rhys Ifans, Chloe Sevigny, David Thewlis, Crispin Glover

Western cinema is often accused of presenting a 'Hollywood version' of reality, glamorising the gritty and turning the important into the frivolous. While the truth of this statement varies from film to film, there are two subjects which have been unduly 'Hollywood-ised' more than any other: drugs and pornography. For every Boogie Nights, there are a dozen films like The Moguls and I Want Candy which have little or no credibility with regard to their subject matter. And for every Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream, you'll get a dozen films like Mr. Nice.
Bernard Rose's take on the autobiography of drug baron Howard Marks should have made for quite an interesting film. Quite apart from his prolific career running hashish to Britain and the US, Marks was apparently approached to spy for MI6 and got himself involved in the dark dealings of the IRA. But as Marks' remarkable story plays out, you find yourself becoming slowly disconnected from what is happening, becoming frustrated by the performances and the film's opinion of this Welsh rogue.

On the good side, Mr. Nice has some interesting visual touches which set it apart from the likes of Blow and Alpha Dog. Rose has always been a strong visual artist, and in this he uses digital technology to insert the characters into stock footage of Britain in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. This practice may be relatively common, but it's done so seamlessly that you can't help wondering whether it was done digitally, or whether Rose managed to find a few lost corners of London and then shoot them on deliberately degraded stock. In an added twist, the central character remains roughly the same age throughout - we see him inhabiting his past selves in the classroom and playground, in the manner of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.There are also a number of moments in which the comedy works, the best of these being where Marks is stopped by customs and his car is taken apart to be searched. After a bit of banter with the customs officers, Marks looks around as it emerges that they won't find any hashish in the lining of his car. He makes eye contact with an elderly lady who is waved through; she tips her passport to him, and we realise where the stuff is really hiding. Scenes like this and the confusing codenames for the drugs are pleasant, knowing riffs on The French Connection and its successors.

The structure of Mr. Nice is not that of a standard biopic. It may proceed in a linear fashion, beginning with Marks winning a place at Oxford and ending up with his release from prison, but it doesn't feel like a straightforward adaptation of a memoir. Like the recent Ian Dury biopic, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, Mr. Nice is told in more of a cabaret style, a collection of anecdotes and fragments from an insanely eventful life. The film is bookended by Marks walking out on stage at an unnamed theatre to do a gig, and asking: "Are there any plain-clothed policeman in tonight?"But it is here, in this device, that the flaws with the film begin to come to the surface. Even as biopics go, Mr. Nice is massively hagiographic, relying so heavily on the charm of the central character that the second our sympathy wavers we never properly settle back into the story. Regardless of how he was in real life, the Howard Marks presented in Mr. Nice is a lovable rogue, whose involvement in drugs began almost by accident and whose career was apparently motivated by little more than wanting to provide for his loved ones.

Having the cabaret set-up gives the distinct impression that the version of events that we are seeing has been cleverly rehearsed. Like a stand-up comic perfecting his routine, Marks talks up the bits that get our sympathy, glosses over the ones that don't and always goes for a laugh over something more shocking or substantial. What we are seeing is a character, not the man himself, just as Peter Sellers would constantly slip into different characters while being interviewed. The difference is that Sellers genuinely didn't know who he was: the fact that the act was not voluntary made him emotionally compelling. Marks, meanwhile, knows full well who he is but is reluctant to tell you anything. By keeping his cards so close to his chest, he puts up a barrier between us and him, and eventually we give up trying to understand him.The film merits a very unflattering comparison with Notorious, the biopic of rapper Notorious B.I.G. (as opposed to the Alfred Hitchcock film). Both films focus on characters with some involvement in drugs, but present them as being so bizarrely innocent and unfortunate that they became little more than pantomime caricatures of 'good citizens'. The problem is not that the real life Howard Marks or Biggie Smalls weren't perhaps victims of circumstance - the problem is that the film conveys this in such a suspect way, that we start to question the credibility of their story.

The film's biggest failure, like Notorious, is that it fails to present a solid moral case, one way or the other. There are numerous lines where Marks complains that "the law is wrong" and that cannabis shouldn't be illegal. And the film doesn't entirely demonise the police as being backward, uptight, sexually-repressed fascists, who want to take the country back to the days of wartime discipline. But this viewpoint is never properly developed into a coherent case. Most of the time the film is a carefree romp full of people rolling around getting stoned and having sex; perhaps a more fitting title would have been Carry On Dealing.This light-hearted tone becomes so overbearing that it prevents the film from being dark enough when it really needs to be. The scenes of Marks hitting rock bottom in prison, getting shingles and having his teeth pulled out, are shot in the same gruesome, full-on style that worked so well on Candyman. But they feel tacked-on, like Rose had forgotten to show the downside to Marks' lifestyle and was attempting to cut his losses. Even the scene where Marks is about to be kneecapped by an IRA gunman is poorly done: it's briefly tense, but it then transpires it was all a joke, and everyone walks away laughing, except for us.The performances are also a complete mixed bag. Rhys Ifans can be a good actor - think of his performance as Peter Cook in the TV film Not Only, But Always. But his performance as Howard Marks, as a Welsh, womanising vagabond who enjoys a smoke and a drink, is not that much of a stretch. Chloe Sevigny's character is very underwritten: she spends most of her time telling Ifans to stop dealing drugs, and yet she never has the courage to leave him. On the up side, Christian McKay is very good as the MI6 operative, and Crispin Glover makes the best he can of the American stoner. But the best performance, by a mile, is David Thewlis as crazed IRA operative Jim McCann. Despite a completely unnecessary shot of his member about an hour in, he dominates the screen, spitting venom and creating havoc wherever he goes.Mr. Nice is a deeply unsatisfying account of Howard Marks' life, which has little of interest to say about either the ethics of drugs or the elaborate means of transporting them. As Bill Bailey once said, marijuana and cogent political debate do not mix; every time the film attempts to get on a pedestal and say something meaningful, it collapses into an embarrassing, giggling heap. Rose has done a decent job with the visuals, and every time David Thewlis is on screen it's worth watching. But otherwise it's a biopic with no real purpose or direction, occasionally entertaining but always underwhelming.

Rating: 2/5
Verdict: An aimless, rose-tinted failure

In over a century of cinema, we have seen a wide variety of artistic and technical innovations which have changed the shape (and size) of the silver screen, from the invention of Technicolour and recorded sound to the advent of widescreen and the steadicam. But in terms of the narrative and thematic conventions of the films themselves, several aspects have persisted long after technology has brought them into question. And one of the most persistent of these conventions is the ninety-minute running time.

Ninety minutes is a figure which crops up over and over again in the history of cinema. As silent cinema became a mass medium through the 1910s and 1920s, American distributors selected 90 minutes at the cut-off point for any film being shown in cinemas. If a film were any longer, they reasoned, people would either lose interest and leave, or be put off and not bother to pay in the first place. They stuck so rigidly to this idea that when Metropolis arrived States-side (having already been butchered by the German studios), it was run through projectors at one-and-a-half times the intended speed in certain cities. By the 1950s, trash maestro Roger Corman and his exploitation partners-in-crime were manufacturing 90-minute films for the drive-in and grindhouse circuits, films that were shown in cinemas of endless double bills, designed to do the rounds and then disappear forever.

Nowadays the average film on screen in a multiplex will last the best part of two hours, not including the mind-numbing 20 minutes of adverts and the patronising warnings about piracy. Many films still fall below this running time, and a great many, both arthouse and blockbuster, will beat it. But why does the figure of ninety minutes still hang like a rusty sword of Damacles over the world of filmaking? And what have we lost (or gained) by the now typical disregard for thisconvention?

I count four possible explanations. The first lies in the three-act structure of filmaking, which holds that all films play out (or at least should play out) in three acts: setup, conflict, and resolution. Take Back to the Future as an example - Marty McFly is a teenager living in 1985 (setup); he is transported back to 1955 and cannot return (conflict); he puts things right in the past and finds a way home (resolution). The French writer Yves Lavandier reasoned that in most dramatic works, half the content is taken up with conflict and both setup and resolution take a remaining quarter. We unconsciously expect a certain amount of time to be taken up with each act, and 90 minutes seems a reasonable average to aim for, giving enough scope for storytelling while retaining some form of restrictive discipline.

Regardless of whether Lavandier's maths were right, the three act structure has been called into dispute by a succession of writers and directors. In the last twenty years we have seen films which play with narrative and character identity to such an extent that a simple linear progression of setup-conflict-resolution simply doesn't cut the mustard. Take David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, one of the very best films of the last decade. There is an internal element of the three-act structure - Naomi Watts is an actress in Hollywood (setup); she has a fateful encounter with Rita who has lost her memory (conflict); they sort-of discover who she is (or do they?) (resolution). But this is not an adequate means of summing up an ingeniously complicated plot in which identities change rapidly and time jumps around. Later efforts like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Prestige raise similar problems.

The second explanation lies in an argument about discipline. Corman famously quipped that no film should be longer than 90 minutes without special Papal dispensation - something which his errant pupil James Cameron swiftly ignored. We can all cite examples of films which are too long - Titanic, Out of Africa and of course Heaven's Gate - but it is extremely rare, if not unheard of, to criticise a film for being too short. If a film is long, it is often seen as indulgent, pretentious or desperately worthy - Mark Kermode once referred to The Deer Hunter (182 mins) as "a cinematic dick-measuring contest". Short films have an in-built modesty to them, a modesty which plays into the film's hands if its story or ideas are remarkably well-told.

This sounds convincing, but one should not simply assume that "short is good, long is bad", to paraphrase the sheep in Animal Farm. While many films are too long, some of the best ever made are well in excess of 90 minutes and most of them justify that length. Imagine trying to cut down Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon to half its length; all the painterly quality which is essential to its success and its unique status would be lost. Both The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile thrive on being slow-burners, giving the necessary time for the drama and spiritual insight to emerge naturally, rather than being forced upon an audience. On the other hand, there are a great many short films that are terrible - look at the Troma stable, or its modern equivalent, Asylum Films. Or if you want something a bit more mainstream, I give you Disaster Movie and its associates.

A third explanation as to the value of 90 minutes comes down, rather cynically, to money. Making short films is quick and cheap - it takes less time to write the script, the production costs are lower, and you don't have to spend months locked in an editing suite trying to piece together different scenes from miles of exposed film (or gigabytes of digital footage). In the days of grindhouse and drive-ins, keeping the films short was the only way in which the individual outlets could make money; the double bills had to run to 3 hours, and had to be changed over rapidly in time for the next lot of paying punters to get their few bucks' worth. Working off a low budget focusses screenwriters and filmakers, getting them to say the most they can in the most concise possible way.

That all seems fine, and there are many examples of great low-budget filmaking still going on in Europe, America and elsewhere, from the latest Ryan Reynolds thriller Buried to horror efforts like [REC] and Paranormal Activity. But most of the films which gain wide release are multi-million dollar blockbusters, with budgets of typically more than $100m and a running time of well over 90 minutes. If the 90 minute rule was so reliable, why has it become the trend to make movies by throwing huge amounts of money at them and to hell with the length? The role of producers has changed as well - instead of standing over directors with a big stick asking them to cut it down, the likes of Joel Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer are more concerned nowadays with demographic targeting, demanding that directors deliver a product that will sell regardless of its eventual length.

The fourth and final explanation is probably the most unfair to us punters - limited attention span. Forget all the articles about ADHD or people talking on phones in the cinema - people, or at least certain kinds of people, are very impatient and can very quickly get bored. Although this may seem like a modern phenomenon, it's one thing that hasn't changed from the silent era. We will still fall asleep in films or walk out of them if they go on too long to sustain our attention, and if a film is deliberately billed as a certain length, we probably won't go. Ninety minutes in this context is a happy medium between being bored out of your skull and not getting your money's worth.

But again, here's a problem. If most people won't pay to sit through films which are more than 90 minutes long, how does one explain the huge box office takings for Avatar (162 mins) or the Star Wars prequels (136 mins, 142 mins and 140 mins respectively)? The answer is not a matter of length, and certainly not one of depth. It is a matter of hype; these are event movies, films which exist to be seen at a certain time to separate the in-crowd from the out-crowd. They are films to be watched as an experience, as an "I was there" moment - e.g. "I was there when everyone realised that The Phantom Menace was one of the worst films ever made!" As for keeping their attention, most mega-length, mega-budget movies are packed with action spectacle and technically outstanding set-pieces, designed to keep 14-year-old boys happy and oblivious to their very thin (or non-existent) plot.

In short, there is no one reason why 90 minutes is (or at least was) a touchstone in filmaking. Each explanation has its flaws, and they don't form a coherent thesis when meshed together. But looking around at the erratic quality of filmaking we see today, from Hollywood and elsewhere, maybe certain elements of this rule could be reintroduced and lead to artistic and commercial reinvention further down the line.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (USA, 2004)
Directed by Michel Gondry
Starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood

Science fiction is one of the most malleable genres around: it can be light or dark, scary or funny, insightful or escapist. Most impressive, however, is its continuing ability to cross-breed with other genres, and in doing so produce great works in cinema and other media. In the past forty years we have been treated to sci-fi horror (Alien), sci-fi comedy (Dark Star), sci-fi action (Aliens) and sci-fi noir (Blade Runner).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the latest addition to this cross-breed family: being equal parts Philip K. Dick and romantic comedy, it qualifies succinctly as a sci-fi romance. There have been previous science fiction films which have dealt directly with romantic love, but precious few have both the tenderness and intelligence which comes from the match made in heaven that is Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman.Because of its romantic elements, the film has been dismissed in some circles as an essentially shallow exercise, something which is visually enthralling but ultimately little more than a Hugh Grant rom-com with A-levels and shuffled timeframes. Some of the most damning criticism came from Rick Kisonak, who described it as “Love Story with frontal lobotomies” and concluded that it was “not a lot more than a thinking person’s 50 First Dates.”Such comments appear ludicrous even before half an hour has passed. For one thing, you never get the sense that Kaufman or Gondry are being overly complicated for its own sake. The visual and emotional tone of the film is not that of two intellectuals desperately trying to show off. The film is profoundly open-hearted and involving, combining existential parables with light-hearted humour and insights into the human condition which at no point feel preachy or pretentious.

One of the great triumphs of Eternal Sunshine is that it manages to be incredibly complicated and readily accessible at the same time. Like Inception after it, there are layers of hidden meaning within each image or scene, but part of the fun is getting lost in events as the plot barrels forward at a frightening pace. Gondry leaves little visual hints lying around, such as Clementine’s changing hair colour, so that if we stop and question where we are, there is a perfectly good explanation. But for most of the time, like Joel and Clementine, we are simply compelled to run headlong from one scene to the next with little care or concern except for the safety and happiness of the characters.In terms of its lineage, Eternal Sunshine is the film to which Kaufman has been working towards for his entire career. Like Being John Malkovich, much of the action takes place within the mind of its characters, and as with Adaptation we find different shades of the same character coming into contact with each other. From a sci-fi point of view, the film resembles Philip K. Dick in its fascination with paranoia and the blurring of identity, and there are clear hints of Total Recall in both the visuals and the film’s dreamlike state. Even the machine used to extract Joel’s memories of Clementine resembles the memory implant machine used in the Paul Verhoeven film.Gondry’s background in music videos gives him a concise and focussed method of storytelling; when you only have four minutes to get a message across, you can’t afford to be baggy or indulgent. You get the distinct impression that he is unflinchingly focussed on the characters and upon keeping Kaufman’s script moving forward. You therefore embrace his visual extravagance and unusual approach to special effect, both of which are defining features of the film.When Christopher Nolan was shooting the dream sequences in Inception, he strove to film as much as possible in-camera with mechanical effects. He did this on the grounds that if the actors were delivering their lines to green-screen, they wouldn’t believe in the world of the dream, and therefore neither would we. Gondry takes the same approach, shooting most special effects sequences in-camera using old-fashioned forced perspectives (or trompe-l’oeils). The scenes of Jim Carrey being bathed in the sink or hiding under the table have a very organic sense of the surreal they make memories physical rather than whimsical, rooting the chase and its flights of fantasy firmly in some form of reality.The film drifts seamlessly from memory to memory and back to the real world, resisting the constant urge to stop and explain where we are. By the time Joel has begun relating a memory to Clementine, that particular section of his mind begins to disappear; lights flicker off, fences disappear, frozen lakes turn into train stations and people vanish into thin air. Certain sections see Joel revisiting old memories which have fragmented. In one scene, he revisits a conversation in which all the characters’ faces have become blurred, resembling the freaky masks worn by the schoolchildren in Pink Floyd – The Wall.

Eternal Sunshine’s central thesis is that all events which transpire in our lives are at some point in time meaningful, and that any attempt to block out such experiences will only lead to recognition of their ultimate importance. The title, which comes from a poem by Alexander Pope, is deeply ironic; in being able to artificially forget bad memories, the characters are just as distressed if not moreso by what unfolds. The first time around, the sequence on the train to Montauk seems normal and straightforward. The second time round, we watch hindsight playing out and the true meaning and power of this scene becomes clear.In attempting to move on from Clementine, Joel discovers that their relationship (and the memories thereof) was the only time he was genuinely happy. He tries to preserve those memories not because he has forgiven her, but because otherwise his life may not have a cohesive sense meaning. One could almost argue that the film is an analogy for Alzheimer’s disease with Joel as the patient, struggling to remember others in order to make sense of himself.

Memories are a vital part of a person’s identity, and the film does an interesting job of showing how identities can be manipulated. Elijah Wood, in an really creepy performance, uses Joel’s memories to seduce Clementine, copying his ‘chat-up lines’ word for word. His character is desperate to be liked by women, and believes that the only way to achieve happiness is to impersonate other people. It is testament to Kaufman’s skills as a writer that scenes like these are not played for cheap, bawdy laughs – nor instead that the scenes of the technicians getting stoned never venture too far into Cheech and Chong territory.The film is anchored by the central performances of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, both of whom are often incredibly irritating. Like The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, Carrey’s wackiness is completely reigned in and he gives a brilliantly well-rounded performance full of pathos and subtlety. Winslet, on the other hand, is allowed to leave her ‘English rose’ image behind and play kooky, wacky and impulsive. But her feistiness and intensity hold our attention, creating a sense of mystery which engages us. The chemistry between these two give us an emotional bond around which Kaufman’s philosophising is anchored. When they decide to give things another go, it feels poignant and meaningful because of the genuine emotional journey we have taken with them.Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a superb slice of science fiction with all the emotional intensity of a Mike Leigh film. It is the pinnacle of Gondry and Kaufman’s respective careers, being proof positive not only of their talents but of the continued relevance of romantic drama. In addition to its exemplary performances, the film is witty, insightful, tragic and humane, often all at the same time. It is one of the best films of the decade, and no amount of selective memory loss is going to change that.

Rating: 5/5
Verdict: Unforgettable