Martin Cuff Consulting

A silver dollar moon, flanked by wild, apocalyptic, Dali-esque clouds emerged over Sarajevo Film Festival’s famous outdoor cinema yesterday; an apt counter-point to Woody Allen’s more mundane, kitchen-sink comedy “You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger” appearing on the massive screen.

It’s an ensemble piece about a group of disgruntled Londoners. These are all glass-half-full kinds of folks (maybe that’s what comes of living in London?) but they’re driven by some new-agey persuasion that they deserve better. So they try to change their lives, mostly by ditching hopeless and uncooperative partners along the way. In doing so, however, not one of them gets what they want and few of them even get what they need. Actually, in spite of the last part, it sort of reminded me of real life, except with Woody Allen narrating. And since it is in fact a Woody Allen film, it’s quirkily and steadily entertaining enough. Smiley rather than laugh-out-loud. I doubt anyone other than Woody Allen could have gotten this film to the big screen though, or attracted such an all-star cast.

Cleveland Square and the Notting Hill areas were external locations, but London itself also seems like a bit of an unloved spouse here; it’s always present but not much is made of it.

Last night at the Sarajevo Film Festival, the Fairies and I took ourselves off to Novi Grad to see The Ghost Writer, a middling-to-good film based on a captivating premise: what the hell was Tony Blair thinking when he took the UK to war?

Based on Thomas Harris’s novel, here it’s a fictional former Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), who’s holed up in a borrowed house on a wintry barrier island. He hires a ghost writer (Ewan MacGregor) to re-write his non-threatening, non-controversial but eagerly awaited memoirs. But there’s foul play involved, a pending War Crimes trial, the CIA, extraordinary Rendition, Iraq, murder, the whiff of an affair, an evidently more shrewd, capable and ruthless wife. Olivia Williams once again just acts every one else off the screen, she’s transcendent as the brainy, brittle, forthright former First Lady.

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Robin Hood was by far and away my favourite childhood hero: the gang of mates hanging out in the woods far away from adult supervision, singing lewd ballads, cooking bangers over an open fire, the being super cool with the bows and arrows business, and making a living beating the crap out of the King’s men. And all the time wearing a fetching green: bonus!

So I eagerly awaited this latest rendering of the Robin Fable – this time by master revisioner, Ridley Scott. Think of it as “Robin Begins”, a reimagining the whole “before Robin Hood was Robin Hood” thing – (which I guess kind of misses the point of bothering retelling a much loved story? I refer to Tim Burton’s Alice as a yet more criminal version of this trend.)

I won’t even bother explaining the plot. Not that it’s unengaging, it’s just frakkin convoluted. But it’s Ridley Scott – and (grudgingly) Russell Crowe – and they still hold it all together in a compelling and really rather enjoyable way. The battle scenes are brutal, the detailed portrait of Medieval life is remarkable, the cast is stalwart and universally fine. If you’re wanting japes-ing, wisecracking, thigh-slapping Merry Men, watch Bad Boys. But otherwise sit down, shut up and hang on. (more…)

Endgame : crikey. In the post-World Cup euphoria, it really is just too easy to forget quite how far we’ve come.

Endgame is a real-life political thriller that charts the efforts of Michael Young, unlikely hero, to facilitate secret talks between the bitterest of enemies: the ANC government-in-exile and members of the Afrikaner elite. Against a backdrop of brute violence, thuggish intimidation, smuggled correspondence, surveillance, counter-espionage, and the bullish extremism of members of both groups, Young’s idealistic negotiations uncovered a mutual sense of humanity and respect that ultimately resulted in the unbanning of opposition parties, the release of Nelson Mandela (belated happy bday, Madiba), dismantling of apartheid and the birth of the miraculous, unlikely, vibrant nation of modern South Africa.

So: “crikey” was what went through my mind all the way through the film. I kept wanting to grab the air stewardess and say “Did you see this? Have you seen this?” and share my amazement and excitement. I’m not sure if it’s actually great cinema, but I found it powerful, personal and passionate – and I’m increasingly believing that that is in fact what great cinema’s about. If you’re South African, it’s a must-see.

Endgame – shot and beautifully brushstroked in drained, grainy, 80’s home-movie style – jumps from South Africa, to the ANC hq in Lusaka, to London, with the stand out location being the elegant Mells Park near Frome in Somerset, where the meetings took place (though this was actually shot somewhere in Berkshire – I’m trying to find out where.) There’s a scene on the rugby field at Stellenbosch High School too; that one I recognised for myself.

I’m not, generally speaking, a huge fan of politicians. My encounters with them – real or fictional – always leave me feeling a little bit tainted by all the spin and hypocrisy. State of Play, then, (starring portly Russell Crowe and flobby Ben Affleck) buys neatly into all of my wildly pre-conceived notions of political conspiracy and personal sleaze: hence I loved it.

Based on an old Beeb mini-series, the movie is a taut thriller about a curmudgeonly reporter who tries to protect his college roommate. That roommate now happens to be a congressman who’s heading a committee uncovering massive graft – and who happens also to be screwing his secretary. Twists, turns & thrills aplenty are driven relentlessly forward by a truly stellar cast (Rachel McAdam stands out).

And as the charmin’ly genteel southern home of all that Vice and Corruption, Washington DC is almost a character in itself. Even the Watergate Building plays a part. I found myself wanting to visit – which, given my opening gambit of this post, seems almost perverse.

I know I’m supposed to love Pedro Almodovar, and I’m meant to have a man-crush on Penelope Cruth. But with Broken Embraces, honestly, I just can bring myself to. It is of course a beautifully made masterpiece of happy beginnings that implode erratically, of loves and jealousies and secrets and simmering Spanish passions in a film that is, typically, passion-less; here blind filmmaker Mateo Blanco revisits the story behind the loss of his sight, and his tangled love-triangle with an actress and a Chilean gazillionaire.

Yet even the Almodovar touch and the Cruth delivery can’t save it from being choppy, uneven and frankly a bit boring. Some of the “action” takes place on the black sands of Lanzarote.

The political awakening of my teenage years coincided with growing pushback against Nuclear Weapons in Britain. Greenham Common, CND, Fred and Hilda Bloggs in When the Wind Blows, that horrific documentary about radiation sickness: these were all vivid, naked fears, and Nuclear Winter was an oft-imagined dread.

Although it doesn’t ever express what’s actually happened, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, nevertheless reveals a scarily familiar landscape of post-apocalyptic horror. Scraggy Viggo and his boy child are struggling across country, away from vicious cold and yet more vicious humans. Everything has collapsed; society, agriculture, humanity. It’s dystopian, tragic and (I felt) hopeless – in spite of the small act of kindness in the closing scenes. I’m not sure, really, what value such a movie brings – well made and faithful adaptation though it is.

Anyway: so where do you go when you want to film society’s total disintegration? Pittsburgh, apparently (ah, the mysteries of Pittsburgh….) “It’s a beautiful place in fall with the colors changing, but in winter, it can be very bleak. There are city blocks that are abandoned. The woods can be brutal,” said Director John Hillcoat of his choice of location. Filmmakers also shot scenes in parts of New Orleans that had been ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and on Mount St. Helens in Washington, which of course was flattened and burned by the deadliest and most catastrophic volcanic eruption yet on American soil. The Road itself is the Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike – 13 kilometres of bypassed roadway.

I’ve tried writing this review for Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air a number of times, but it keeps coming back to this one singular fact: it’s really excellent.

George Clooney is Ryan Bingham, a cool, charming corporate axeman who flies from city to city firing people for a living. He’s very good at it, this firing business (and he’s surprisingly not entirely without compassion) but the very best part of the job is that it keeps him moving virtually year-round. This way he doesn’t have to deal with family, relationships or any other personal baggage. It all seems quite ideal. Yet his assumptions are challenged by a perky new co-worker, a sexy fellow-traveller and the obligations of a family wedding that just will not go away…..

So: imagine a movie where almost every one of the notes are hit with perfect pitch and clarity. A movie where the lead characters are perfectly painted and then shaken from the positions in which they have been established, almost without missing a beat. A movie where there is bleak sadness and significant humour, sunshine and snow, tenderness and brusque dismissal. It’s got George Clooney too, who must be the leading man of his entire generation. I loved it, and I can’t find a quip witty enough to do it justice.

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Legion starts off with such promise: a small group of mismatched (but well cast) strangers gather in a run down (but carefully art designed) desert truck stop. An unusually massive storm is rolling in from all sides, and suddenly the TV, the radio and telephonic contact is cut. They’re completely isolated. This is all painted so broodingly and so ominously, it’s almost Stephen King….

But then, then, Legion goes badly wrong. Like off-the-rails-head-on-speeding-train-smash wrong. It doesn’t help that after laying such interesting foundations, the unfolding plot is complete baloney – snitty God sending Legions of Angels to wreak an apocalypse on hopeless humans. (Legions are associated with Demons, surely, and Demons, not Angels, have the bad attitudes and the pointy, rippy incisors? – there’s only so much myth-revisionism you can swallow before the ability to suspend disbelief is choked.) It also doesn’t help that much of the action unfolds at night, and it’s all so badly lit that you just can’t tell what’s going on. But by this stage, neither do you care.

Incidentally, the deserted truck stop was purpose built for the movie in a place called Galisteo in New Mexico – one of those really-small-town-USA’s which has a stonking great population of 265. The filmmakers were searching for a location that looked like an iconic truck stop in the Mojave Desert, so they built it in New Mexico. “This was one of the first locations I saw,” says the Director. “And I knew that this was the spot. It had great vistas in all directions and a physical concavity that suited the situation. If you filled this area with water, it would pool at the diner and that’s kind of what happened to our characters.”

More on the Making of Legion at the SciFiTVZone.

I knew someone once who was a prolific and inventive liar. When he came to South Africa to visit, he was so busy dishing out the whoppers about his relationship with a certain Royal that the whole story ran away with itself for a while. I didn’t follow the fall out – I’d drifted away in embarrassment by then – but all I can say is that I didn’t find being press-ganged as an enabler of someone else’s fantasy life very amusing at all. I added no exclamation mark whatsoever to that experience….

All this is probably why I found The Informant! so troubling. Matt Damon plays chubby Mark Whittacre, a bumbling, haphazard, self-destructive senior manager at a food production plant who seems to lie for the hell of it. He becomes a snitch about the company’s humungous price fixing tactics, but at the same time he’s ditching dirt to the FBI, he’s simultaneously defrauding the business of millions of dollars on his own count. All very uncomfortable.

The movie shot in Decatur, Illinois – the actual location of the true-life drama. It also filmed at Whitacre’s own family “compound” just outside the village of nearby Moweaqua (pop. 1923).