mainlymovies' Best of '06: pressing on...

Best Sound

Inland Empire

The Fountain

Miami Vice

Monster House

United 93

Best Costume Design

Patricia Field (The Devil Wears Prada)

Nancy Steiner (Little Miss Sunshine)

Robert Lever (MirrorMask)

Catherine Marie Thomas (A Prairie Home Companion)

Margot Wilson (The Proposition)

mainlymovies' Best of '06: Cinematography

First sort out that mullet, then we'll tackle the cartels

Emmanuel Lubezki (Children of Men)

It’s not just those unbelievable, digitally aided long takes in the skirmishes, but the grey dawns, bleached landscapes and searching close-ups which made Cuaron’s film the grimly virtuosic and harrowing exercise it is. Lubezki gets the larger share of the credit, for me.

Andrei Butica, Oleg Mutu (The Death of Mr Lazarescu)

Not a pretty movie this, but the way the camera hovered sympathetically on the edges of Lazarescu’s worsening condition — never invasively close, anything but detached — gave it a huge portion of its humane grip.

Dion Beebe (Miami Vice)

Beebe could shoot a poncey deodorant ad and make it look like a shivery poem to the urban night, which is very often just what Miami Vice demanded of him. The film’s starstruck hi-def texture was nothing if not intoxicating.

Robbie Ryan (Red Road)

Ryan made this low-budget triumph the best-looking British feature in years, with his immediately arresting combination of extreme close-ups on Kate Dickie and distanced, wary reverse shots as she prowls the estate. Glasgow, viewed through a lava lamp, has never seemed so infernal.

Chris Menges (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada)

Ravishing work, in a year when Menges’s cinematography was also the best thing about the underrated North Country and valiantly resisted the usual Richard Eyre agoraphobia in Notes on a Scandal. Here he dazzled equally with sunsets and striplights, blinding dunes and craggy faces.

mainlymovies' Best of '06: Production Design

No, this is the post-millennial angst dome

Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland (Children of Men)

Easily the year’s most ambitiously designed picture, a gobsmackingly detailed panorama of social collapse circa 2029, wowing us on a huge scale with the bombed-out hell of its immigrant zone, but also on a tiny one, with the keepsake minutiae in Michael Caine’s hippie hideout.

Teresa Mastropierro (Forty Shades of Blue)

Not the first thing you might single out for celebration in this beautifully acted character piece, but I found the sets — from Torn and Korzun’s chilly, MC Escher-like Memphis pad, to the dilapidated manse where they attend a garden party as the relationship’s crumbling — astonishingly apt and memorably furnished.

James Chinlund (The Fountain)

On a severely constricted budget, Chinlund makes the film's cosmic transitions work by keeping things carefully confined — and allowing us to house the movie inside its characters' headspace, if we so choose. His mini Mayan civilisation is ten times more evocative than those chintzy edifices in Apocalypto.

Dave McKean and crew (MirrorMask)

The design for this film kicks all known ass, and though there’s a fair bit of animation, the digital effects actually impress less than the surrounding collage of sets, painted backgrounds and bric-a-brac props, not to mention a wonderful half-real circus, and the haunting choice of the grimly palatial Embassy Court in Brighton (now renovated, I gather) as the heroine’s home turf.

Ed Verreaux (Monster House)

Responsible — along with the reliably raspy Kathleen Turner — for one of the year’s best characters: The House, which from attic to basement had a marvellously forlorn aspect and vicious, groaning, cackling personality bursting out from under its floorboards.

mainlymovies' Best of '06: Editing

Borat: well-edited, but doesn't cut the crap

Craig Albert, Peter Teschner, James Thomas (Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan)

Many hands made light work of the visual and verbal punchlines in this carefully-spliced-together guerrilla comedy. Remember Bob Barr’s expression when he’s just been told he’s munching human breast cheese? Split-second comic timing, and all their work.

William Goldenberg, Paul Rubell (Miami Vice)

One of many factors in Miami Vice’s paradoxical status as the most technically brilliant dud of the year, the film’s ambient montage was, as they say, trippin’, even when the dialogue, plot and performances were just tripping over each other.

Dan Zimmerman (The Omen)

This amusing and snazzy remake got all of its best jolts from Zimmerman’s whiplash-quick, adrenalised action — Satan’s pooches are on top of you in the graveyard before you know it. His first credit as editor and I’ll be looking out for more.

Roberto Silvi (Three Burials)

Silvi cut smartly between characters and timeframes in ways which enriched the story rather than obscuring it (21 Grams) or revealing its mechanical essence (Babel). In a film which takes its sweet time, there was barely a sequence here which seemed to drag.

Clare Douglas, Richard Pearson, Christopher Rouse (United 93)

Editing is all in a Paul Greengrass picture. It took two of his Bourne collaborators and one from Bloody Sunday to build force and momentum from all that air-to-ground cross-cutting, and to shred our nerves to pieces in the hideous, arrythmic climax.

I'm Killing You, I Know

So. I've got my entire list of personal film awards for the year gone all worked out and stuff, but it's driving me nuts trying to explain it all. I want the lists to mean something, you know. It's the eternal problem: to blog properly, or not to blog at all. To post all this stuff up and grade it and rank it and let it smugly sit here, bald and unjustified, or to actually get a conversation going. I'm determined to do the latter, but it's going to take time. In so many ways I'm just too lazy and slow and have exactly the wrong temperament for this.

Anyway, Nick is inevitably and shame-makingly setting a gold standard over at his place, building up a head of steam with Oscar predictions and keeping us tantalised with a Jan 30 deadline for his own honorees. Before I start working my way up the technical achievements from last year — yes, those mainlymovies best make-up citations that keep Hollywood's leading prosthetics experts awake at night — I want to throw out just a couple of my own Oscar Thoughts before tomorrow's announcement.

Fingers crossed for:

Ryan Gosling (Best Actor, Half Nelson). I hope he hasn't lost traction because of the film's early release date. He's tremendous, and this will be the most heartening nomination of the day if it happens, but it's touch and go. Forest Whitaker, Peter O'Toole and Will Smith aren't going to be dislodged, but I think Leonardo DiCaprio might be, much as I liked him in The Departed, and that would leave Borat and Bond to fight it out for the final slot. I give Borat the edge, certainly if it came down to nude wrestling, and I suspect there aren't many Daniel Craig fans around here who would cry foul at that, right?

Fingers crossed against:

Babel and The Queen. I'm not averse to the acting nods here — knocking Mirren, who appears to have far more widespread global support than the actual Queen, is hardly worth it, I'd be pleased to see the diligent and skilled Michael Sheen ride his film's coattails to a supporting nod, and Kikuchi and especially Barraza find an emotional urgency in their stories that impressed me enormously even as I was gritting my teeth, on a second viewing, through the crazy-making manipulations of Guillermo Arriaga's screenplay. But these are the two likely Best Picture nominees I'd least like to see crowned on the big night, for various reasons. A few snubs tomorrow in some key categories — one or other director missing out, say, to an Eastwood or Del Toro — would get the backlash in motion.

Why not swap:

...Cate Blanchett (Supporting Actress, despite being a miscast co-lead in Notes on a Scandal) for the brilliant-in-a-stock-role Vera Farmiga (The Departed)?

...Happy Feet (Animated Feature) for the far wittier and more inventive Monster House?

...Gustavo Santaolalla (Best, though I'd say least, Original Score, having lazily reprised his "Iguazu" theme from The Insider in Babel) for the man who poured all his talent into The Fountain, Clint Mansell?

More, very soon, I promise.

My next post will be the '06 roundup...

...once I've clambered out from under a big pile of work this week. Keep a lookout!

For Your Consideration: Grace Zabriskie

I'm unforgivably late for this — stinkylulu's web-wide celebration of actressing at the edges, circa 2006. But I still want to chip in, if that's OK, by mentioning the brief but unforgettable work of Grace Zabriskie — yes, Laura Palmer's mother from Twin Peaks — in my film of the year, Inland Empire. Though the lead performance of Laura Dern has been raved about in many quarters, I've seen hardly any attention paid to the smaller contributions, and the truth is: Zabriskie is structurally crucial to the picture, bookending it with her appearances, and representing our sinister oracle as we plunge into the dank and twisty rabbithole of Lynch's imagination. Her character has no name — she's listed as Visitor #1 in the credits. She has the first major dialogue scene, when this total stranger invites herself in, unannounced, to Dern's LA mansion, takes a pew on the sofa, and proceeds to forewarn Dern about what's going to happen some two and a half hours later in film-time. In a movie full of self-conscious cross-referencing, to Mulholland Drive in particular, the performance Zabriskie's most resembles is a tiny but terrifying one: Lee Grant as the insane Louise Bonner, turning up at the door of the apartment Diane and Betty are sharing in that film. ("I'm Betty". "No, you're not. Something's wrong...") Lynch loves casting older actresses and having them lose their marbles — remember Diane Ladd going lipstick-crazy in Wild at Heart? But what's chilling about Zabriskie's character is her utter, alien composure, and the way her neighbourly interest in Dern is pitched so unnervingly between knowing solicitousness and something like malice. It's the comic trope of the busybody across the street turning up uninvited and outstaying her welcome, given the creepy Lynchian twist that she knows far more about what's going on than anyone else. (Certainly us, in this early stage of a voluptuously baffling movie.) Zabriskie's face, a basilisk mask with wide-apart eyes, inspires Lynch's camera to lock onto it, fascinated and almost trembling, as she cryptically divulges several of the film's key secrets, takes her leave, and has us wondering if we'll be ready for her next visit. It may well be in our nightmares.

Q: Is it two-timing if there's more than one of you?

A: Ask David. I'm leaving off for the Christmas break with this extraordinary film rattling around inside my head. It's certainly hard work, but exhilarating with it. It's also exactly why I love David Lynch, and, pending a second viewing at the very least, my film of the year. A

Back in a week with end of year round-ups, once I've seen The Death of Mr Lazarescu (high hopes) and The Wind That Shakes the Barley (dreading it, but I'm a completist like that). Also a look ahead at the films I'm determined to catch up with in 2007, like most of Pasolini, and a lot more Buñuel. I'll welcome anyone's tips. Merry Christmas!

Truth in advertising

I'm fond of movie taglines that accidentally hit the nail on the head. Here are three:

"Whoever wins, we lose" — Alien vs. Predator (2004)

"Nine men are about to change history" — U-571 (2000)

"One taste is all it takes" — Chocolat (2000)

Any more, anyone?

Reeling around The Fountain

I'm still turning The Fountain over. I like it. I like Hugh Jackman in it. I like the movie's swooning ambition, the tactile ways it teleports itself through the centuries. I admire the feverish quality of its overlapping certainties, and the ways Aronofsky wants to both conjure and unlock some essential mysteries here.

But I don't love it yet, or exactly feel it. I think the film organises itself around ideas too high-handedly to flesh them out in human terms, beyond the Cronenberg-worthy sexual imagery. (You're missing out until you've seen Jackman gulp down spunk — sorry, sap — from the Tree of Life.) I can intellectualise this odyssey and make it sound organic but I'm having to do too much of the work myself. The phrase "transcendental kitsch" occurred and kept clogging my thoughts, and my response to Aronofsky's overprocessed visuals, in the late going. I want the movie to be simpler, really: I want fewer pyrotechnics, more of a spare ascent. A honing to a point. Some kind of white-out.

But I'm dying to see it again, and there's one thing in it I genuinely adore. Clint Mansell and Mogwai's music is a thing of wonder: I've had little else playing in the flat for the last two days. I wonder what The Fountain would be without it, actually — a far lesser achievement. (Aronofsky seems to think with his scores.) Mansell's searching cellos, in love with their own melancholy, washed ashore by a tragic tide of expectant violins, will fuel my own obsessions, dreams, and longings for weeks yet. It's not just the soundtrack of the year, but one of the most beautiful I know.
The film: B
The score: A+

When Leading Ladies Need Throttling

I hate how negative I can sometimes be. I really really hate it, you know. But how else is a critic meant to carry on when his week's viewing has included this vicious and wrong but infuriatingly well-executed genocidal rumble in the jungle, this sad, stunted and waddling half-stab at a genuinely ambitious children's 'toon, this slice of pure Yuletide cheese, so pornily predictable as to defeat criticism altogether, and this other slice of pure Yuletide cheese fermented at source 2006 years, 11 months and about 18 days ago?

Enough for one week, you'd hope. But there I was, all but ready to pronounce Cameron Diaz's excruciating performance in The Holiday the worst by a leading actress in 2006, and I had to go and blunder like a complete idiot into this shit: courtesy of a wretchedly uninteresting "literary romance" and its puckered-up little Renée doll, so winsome you could drown her in the village pond, we suddenly have a tie on our hands. I will make the admittedly extreme claim that I'd happily not see either of these actresses in another film again for about a decade, or five years if they behave themselves. Consider this a public health warning, and be very, very afraid.

Crimes of the Heart

Don't ask me why I bothered — well, OK, blame a pile of ironing — but does anyone else think this film plays like a batty parody of early Tennessee Williams? I do declare...

Supporting Actress Smackdown: 1974

A shout-out once again to StinkyLulu, the web hostess with the mostest and our monthly go-to-gal for debating the issues that really matter. In this case it's who deserved Best Supporting Actress in 1974, when by unanimous consensus Ingrid Bergman pulled a Zellweger and defeated four better rival performances than her own (in the stuffy and smug Murder on the Orient Express). By no one's reckoning was it a great year for the category — co-smackdowner Nick thinks it might even have been the worst ever — but I differ in having enjoyed the comic va-va-voom Madeline Kahn injects into the otherwise rancid Blazing Saddles, the blowzy vitality of Diane Ladd as a harassed diner waitress in Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and the touching, flavourful work of Valentina Cortese (the overall favourite) as a diva crumbling on set in Truffaut's faintly disappointing film-about-filming Day for Night. Plus, I was the only one who had much time for Talia Shire in The Godfather, Part II, debate about whom still rages in the comments below. Do you hate her or rate her? Post away. Mention has been made of the unnominated, as ever: Karen Black, who I dimly remember being marooned and miscast like almost everyone in The Great Gatsby, Kahn and the hysterical Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein, and, my personal picks, the even more memorable double-act of stay-at-home girlfriends Ann Prentiss and Gwen Welles in Altman's fantastic California Split. (Pic above, and a tip: Altmaniacs wanting to commemorate his passing in some way could do a lot worse than tracking down this underappreciated flick. I think it's one of his very best.) Next month: 1975, and another one.

Review: Stranger Than Fiction

Or: A Little Bit of Literary Theory is a Dangerous Thing. I’ve seen worse films in 2006, but few have made me physically squirm so often with the shallow and stretched quality of their core conceit: that glum IRS accountant Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), insofar as he’s a human being at all, exists in the imagination of a highly annoying, chain-smoking and we suspect not very talented author of death-obsessed novels about The Way We Live Now (Emma Thompson, frankly all over the place). Stranger Than Fiction is perilously pleased with itself and has almost nothing to say, but I was at least hoping for a little charm and deftness of tone, some effective comedy, from such an obviously featherweight effort. In the event, Zach Helm’s debut screenplay, which I have a nasty feeling will pick up this year’s easily-pleased Match Point Oscar nomination, is the precise opposite of good Charlie Kaufman (heavy concepts, light touch) in that it handles its wafty, overfamiliar ideas with great clumsy gauntlets by way of pretending they add up to something. Ferrell is fine as a flummoxed nobody, but as Harold runs around trying to decide if his life conforms to comedy or tragedy, we’re yanked from the film’s nominal comparison-points Adaptation or The Truman Show (as if!) to altogether less inspiring memories of Melinda and Melinda. As for Marc Forster, he’s hired the same d.p. and production designer who made his barely-seen Stay (2005) a gruellingly pretentious watch: they’re evidently much bigger fans of art, books, modernist architecture and psychoanalysis than they are of, say, tax officials, which means that while Harold’s apartment and office are of the low-ceilinged, airless variety of your typical drone worker, everyone else’s look almost dangerously hip and urban. (I bet their next film’s some kind of trippy psychological thriller about a boutique hotelier.) Naturally I wanted to like Maggie Gyllenhaal, who played a gold-digging rebel to utter perfection in Don Roos’ Happy Endings, but even her performance as a seditious baker (!) goes instantly wrong here — how does Forster bungle so much, with a cast of this calibre? After this and Stay I’m almost ready to mount a rearguard defence of the admittedly twee Finding Neverland as its director’s least precocious, fussed-over project, but every one of us has more of a life than Harold and, fingers crossed, better things to do with it. C—

Review: Hollywoodland

The wacky miscasting of Adrien Brody as a dissolute gumshoe, which almost every review I’d read, good and bad, had suggested was this film’s biggest mistake, turns out to be not only the least of its problems but, to me, its sole point of peripheral interest. I’m certainly not going along with the “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Ben Affleck acting!” wave of praise, since the latter’s job — playing 1950s TV Superman George Reeves, found dead at the film’s start, as a tragic washout — is just the easiest excuse ever for an obviously limited star to cash in on his shortcomings. Nor did I have much time for an ineffectually brittle Diane Lane as his mistress, the wife of a sinister studio chief (Bob Hoskins), because director Allen Coulter has even less, virtually complicit with faithless George in his decision to underlight her big woman-spurned monologue, quite brutally, and thus deny her an affecting sign-off of any kind. The movie achieves no pathos for Affleck or Lane’s characters even when it thinks it does, and its aim — to dredge up and make us really feel the linked tragedies of a couple of has-been celebrities — is undone by your discovery, within minutes, that it’s a has-been in itself, lifeless and grey on the slab.

No, the only spark of curiosity for me was watching Brody collude in the flimsy pretence that he’s in some way “investigating” Reeves’s death, when the interspersed flashbacks bear little or no relation to any clues he’s actually finding, conversations he’s having, or anything much in the framing sequences at all. What’s the point of his case? I couldn’t find one, until — wait for it, fans of tenuous metatextual games for critics with nothing better to do — the suggestion that Reeves had his role in From Here to Eternity snipped to shreds put me in mind of Brody’s similar fate on The Thin Red Line, another James Jones adaptation. I’m not done: Brody’s dismissive treatment of sheepish cop Dash Mihok, who beat him with a larger if still minor role in Malick’s film, encouraged me yet further in my utter boredom to read Hollywoodland as in fact its misplaced leading man’s smirking idea of comeuppance, now that he’s got his Oscar. The film is devoid, after all, of plausible notions elsewhere about how movie stars are meant to manage their careers, and try as I might I could find no other workable point of connection between Brody’s Louis Simo and the pitiful Affleck-as-Reeves. If Brody keeps signalling his superiority to the material, as I’ve read in plenty of other reviews, it’s because he is superior to it, and heaven knows I’d rather be watching him flirt gamely with his own miscasting than anyone — Daniel Craig? — trying on a Ralph Meeker impression in a manner you could call apropos for such a silly part. I can’t recommend Hollywoodland in the slightest, really, but I have a feeling I’ll always look back on this particular inglorious moment as Brody’s graduation to fully-fledged stardom. Stardom and all the lunacy and industrial compromise that term entails — not because he's very suitable for this non-role in an insultingly drab period mystery, but because he’s so unmissably wrong and steals it anyway. D

Doubly deflowered

I had a free afternoon today, so went to catch a bargain screening of Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia at the West End's only real second-run venue these days, the wonderfully (and, for this movie, aptly) disreputable Prince Charles Cinema. With its voluminous red curtains, upwardly sloping floor and old-fashioned instruction that patrons might want to contemplate shutting the hell up for the next two hours, the Prince Charles fosters a sense of hushed, dirty occasion even at 3.15pm on a cold and darkening Thursday, and it's one that this much puzzled-over movie met deliciously. I like the fact that I like The Black Dahlia, quite a lot — I like the fact that I'm not supposed to. No one could argue that De Palma's film was more satisfying, shapely or in any conventional way better than Curtis Hanson's LA Confidential, but I think I could have a good stab at positing it as a truer, more faithful distillation of James Ellroy's prose, in that's it's sleazy, not classy, jagged not smooth, and that, not to put too fine a point on it, large chunks of the thing simply don't add up. In all the ways that Hanson and Brian Helgeland's screenplay for the earlier film "improves" on Ellroy, I think they're also doing him a vague disservice, and it's one which De Palma, like the scuzzball voyeur he is, intuitively rectifies.

The truth is, though there have been several (not many) better American movies this year, there have been very few which not only warrant but actively demand a second viewing like this does, and many of the things that might have failed to work for you first time round simply don't matter on a return visit. I still don't get the whole business with Blanchard's ill-gotten gains at the end, for instance, perhaps because De Palma's direction (or my attention) were at their least focused on both viewings when major plot points were being wrapped up, but who cares? Of the lead quartet, only Scarlett Johansson strikes me as completely wrong for her part, I still have a whole load of time for the faintly affected stylings of Hilary Swank, whose peculiar look and accent could only belong in this movie, and Josh Hartnett's weary, sexy, inwardly and outwardly scarred embodiment of Bucky Bleichert is not only easily his best work to date but my pick for the most underrated male performance of the year. It's telling how much of Mark Isham's propulsive score is cued directly into tiny movements of Hartnett's face — he can blink, without a word, and send the film barreling down whole new avenues of intrigue on a hunch. I need hardly add that Fiona Shaw and Mia Kirshner continue to amaze in small parts of such rich, distinct colouration that it felt like going back in to watch them carry on those performances rather than repeat them. All told, whatever, it's still a mess of a movie in some crucial ways, but I think it's a good mess. A fine mess. I stand by my original grade and then some. B

PS. Do comment. Who else has seen a movie twice this year and what changed?

Maxie on breasts

I don't link to my flatmate's bloggy activities nearly enough. Here's a corker.

Review: This is England

Shane Meadows could be British cinema’s best-kept secret — a poet of pratting about, lippy banter, and boys doing what they’re best at, which is being hopeless. For a good 45 minutes, This is England — Meadows’s first attempt at a period piece, and certainly his most ambitious movie to date — seems such safe ground for this talented dosser that we’re lulled into a false sense of security: the movie’s joshing ensemble and bang-on Thatcher-era detail are confidently interwoven, the young actor Thomas Turgoose is a tremendously natural and cheeky find as the 11-year-old adopted as a mascot by a gang of skinheads, and the Falklands war is sensibly submerged by way of backdrop to the point where more tellies are tuned into the vintage ITV quiz show Blockbusters than the tank-and-plane-filled news broadcasts. (Sadly, adorable host Bob Holness is only heard, not seen.)

If we have some inkling that the film’s going to tip over into something darker, it could be that we’ve seen Meadows’s marvellous A Room for Romeo Brass (1999), still his best feature to date, and one which the debuting Paddy Considine practically broke in half with an unanticipated and terrifyingly casual outburst of mid-movie sociopathy. This is England wants to make a similar shift, and also to use a single intervening personality to get us there, which is to say from laddish comedy to race-baiting melodrama. That person is Combo (Stephen Graham), recently paroled and a skinhead with issues, unlike the gregarious and welcoming Woody (Joseph Gilgun), the chubby, put-upon Gadget (Andrew Ellis), his ironically-named West Indian comrade Milky (Andrew Shim) and the rest of the gang.

From Combo’s arrival onwards, Meadows’s previously sure direction starts to falter in small but damaging ways, and the more the picture strains for controversy and impact, the less it ends up having. Two big transitional scenes misfire, back to back — first an accidentally soothing blanket of string score, welling up on top of one of Combo’s screeds, fails to highlight the tensions within the group and instead all but papers over them, uniting the rest of the gang and ourselves in a sort of head-shaking compact of awkward awareness. This mistake carries over into the next, crucial Combo scene and contrives to disable his rhetoric so fundamentally we can’t believe anyone, let alone Turgoose’s previously hard-to-kid Shaun, is actually talked round.

The moment the appalled Woody and pals leave the scene, there’s a dismaying sense that Meadows has transferred all his eggs to the wrong basket, and the absence of the decent and appealing Gilgun from pretty much the whole of the rest of the movie is painfully felt. We get big sequence after big sequence from here on, starting with a nationalists’ convention addressed by Meadows regular Frank Harper in the manner of a village butcher in his Sunday best, and then numerous confrontations between Combo and his cohorts, but big sequences aren’t really Meadows’s forte, and the shortage of interstitial bits of comic business or even many Turgoose close-ups during the film’s second half compounds its schematic crudity. The scenario works if and only if Shaun is convincingly persuaded to be a racist, but not from Graham’s Combo are we going to get the chillingly charismatic advocacy of, say, Edward Norton in American History X: he’s just a thug, emotionally stunted and patently troubled, and the performance isn’t multi-layered enough to disguise or underplay these traits until their explosive revelation, in a powerfully acted scene with Milky, later.

However we slice it, the force of Combo’s personality is less than enough to get Shaun on side, so there’s also the memory of the boy’s dad, a Falklands casualty, to get him thinking, and it’s here that Meadows wishes to make an uneasy equation between violence at home and the sputtering legacy of British military imperialism overseas. Thomas Clay’s critically panned The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael, intercutting its savage rape with images of Churchill and the Gulf War, took this same line of thinking to a notably senseless extreme, but while there’s nothing comparably pretentious in Meadows’s picture, what he’s actually trying to say remains disappointingly woolly and ill-thought-through. As a state-of-patriotism bulletin, This is England just seems to be going through the motions, and Shaun’s apparent conversion away from a racist mindset, mainly through a bloody kicking administered to Milky, by Combo, in a fit of self-pitying jealousy right near the end, is just as sudden and dramatically convenient as his lapse into it. This in itself might work if we felt impressionable little Shaun (shorn!) was still under the sway of mercurial, daily-shifting playground allegiances, which the early part of the film auspiciously suggests he is, but not many 11-year-olds have to carry the symbolic burden of a St George’s flag around or make a life decision using it, and the fact that Shaun is required to as part of his steep late-in-the-picture learning curve is a clear indication that we have Bigger Fish To Fry. Despite all the problems I’ve outlined, the movie is well worth wrestling with, and I don’t for a second regret that Meadows has attempted to make it, but I think his canvas is too small for the points he wants to get across, those points actually obscure the character detail he really excels at, and if he’d given Shaun slightly fewer of his big fish to cart around, the little ones might have made a filling meal all by themselves. B—

Cool Hollywood Couple no. 472

I love Annabella Sciorra, and I didn't know she was seeing Bobby Cannavale. That makes me wildly jealous of them both. I can't wait to see her in Twelve and Holding, and him in Cuban-Italian-American Studs' Wild and Wacky Jockstrap Party. Oh wait. That's not a film.

Let's leave the kid out of it, OK?

Why I Don’t Get The Departed

Read more than a handful of the glowing reviews for Scorsese’s latest and you may detect — beneath the rote praise for Thelma Schoonmaker’s slightly uncertain editing, the justified plaudits for what DiCaprio’s doing, and a whole load of starstruck raving about one of the least disciplined performances of Jack Nicholson’s career — a heavy sigh of relief. He’s pulled it off, is the implication: the movie’s no masterpiece, but it works.

Think about that for a second. Which other great American director has reached a point in his career where we’re this damn grateful for a half-decent movie? Who else labours for two years or more, from script to shoot to famously arduous post-production, on a piece of cinema whose unveiling isn’t the cause for celebration but its very opposite — apprehension? Scorsese is personally complicit, of course, in the prickly air of worry that now seems to hang over every Scorsese project. He guards his secrets like a paranoid magician: only the most trusted and friendly of journalists is allowed access to his sets. And he’s constantly described as “wary” about his films’ reception, stung so often in the past by even minor criticisms of his best work, continually a disappointment to his studios, pipped to that Best Director Oscar by idiots. Actors! Who wouldn’t get butterflies?

The real problem arises when the movies themselves seem nervous. The Departed, for me, isn’t decent but exactly half-decent — about half the film it should be, which is an odd thing to say about a picture that feels 30 minutes too long as it is. The structure isn’t there and the movie’s a shouty scrummage, albeit an often pretty entertaining one, of big scenes, flashy riffs and see-what-sticks showboating. It doesn’t quite know how to contain itself or many of its core elements — certainly not Nicholson, who barges in right from the start and upsets, not subtly, but with shoulder-blows, the yin-yang symmetry this plot is crying out for. There just isn’t room in the movie for three lead performances and Matt Damon, who’s perfectly promising in a blunt sort of way, traipses out of the saloon door with his tail between his legs.

Then there’s the half of the movie that works a treat, which is almost every scene Leo gets that isn’t opposite Jack, all the stuff with Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, and Ray Winstone, and a surprising amount of the love-triangle subplot (see what I mean about scrummage?) in which Vera Farmiga acts the hell out of a nothing role. The truth is that Infernal Affairs was just as patchy and nearly as wasteful of its terrific genre conceit. Instead of cat-and-mouse intrigue — we want these guys to have each other’s number, early on, and each to be working at full tilt to outwit and dislodge the other — both movies give us straggly threads of subplot that go nowhere, and tie things up in frankly desperate fashion with the intervention of third-tier characters whose corruption (meant, sure, to be emblematic of a wholesale, institutional rottenness) is in narrative terms a shrug and a cop-out. I can think of so many cleverer, more grabby, and more subversive ways that this plot could have been worked out: it was begging for a top-to-tail restructuring, not just a relocation to Boston, a locale neither Scorsese nor most of his cast nor screenwriter William Monahan (who was actually born there) nor even great d.p. Michael Ballhaus (if we compare, say, Tom Stern’s work on the otherwise iffy Mystic River) ever seem fully comfortable in.

What I mean by nervous is that I think The Departed risks being a self-conscious recycling of pet Scorsese tropes, one that keeps looking over its own shoulder and courting approval like some kind of ageing jester. That guitar intro to “Gimme Shelter” again, for instance? And it comes particularly unstuck in the trotting out of needlessly thuggish set-pieces that break free of all psychological credibility in their attempt to gain the blackly comic edge of Mean Streets, Goodfellas and the massively underrated Casino. Not even the hard-working DiCaprio can sell his character’s ability to go tactically apeshit in a bar here: it’s just Scorsese giving us what he thinks we want. Ditto the unrelenting and exhausting stream of homophobic abuse. Pauline Kael said Goodfellas was about “being a guy and getting high on being a guy”; The Departed is about not being a faggot and getting high on calling other guys faggots. Is this authentic Boston man-speak? I don’t care. They’re all enjoying it too much. C+