Inside Llewyn Davis.

The Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre’s screening of the melancholic Inside Llewyn Davis (2012) was shown as part of the cinema’s Film Club season. Introduced by Rachel Findley she told us that the film was about a week in the life of a singer who is active in New Yorks folk scene in 1961 just before Bob Dylan exploded on the scene and ‘folk’ music was changed forever.  The inspiration for this latest Joel and Ethan Coen written and directed vehicle is the music and memoir’s, (The Mayor of MacDougal Street), of Greenwich Village folk legend Dave van Ronk and the muted hues of the front cover of Bob Dylan’s second album released in 1963 The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It shows Dylan with Suze Rotolo at the corner of Jones Street and West Village New York City with critic Janet Maslin summing up the iconic impact of the cover as "a photograph that inspired countless young men to hunch their shoulders, look distant, and let the girl do the clinging".

 

The Bob Dylan album.

Llewyn Davis (  When Davis hitches a ride to Chicago to audition for producer Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham) he meets jazzman Roland Turner (John Goodman) who OD’s on the journey but recovers with the help of his valet Johnny Five (Garret Hedlund). The audition is not successful but Grossman does offer him a chance to form another duo but he turns it down deciding instead to go back into the merchant navy. Yet another plan that did not come to fruition!

Oscar Isaac), an unreadable character, is a self pitying loser who had made a name for him self as part of a singing duo until his partner throw himself off of the George Washington Bridge and he now spends his time looking for singing gigs around the folk clubs of Greenwich Village and bumming free board and lodging from friends and intellectuals that want to show him off to their friends as their ‘pet folk singer’. Other characters in his life are the married folk singing duo Jean and John Berkley (Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake) Jean is pregnant and it could be Davis’s child, but as most of Greenwich Village fancies Jean so it could be anybody’s. All the same our wandering minstrel has to raise the $200 for an abortion!

 

The Peter, Paul and Mary type duo. 

Scraping together the abortion money!

Like the tracks on a lot of music albums from that period, the film itself is a little uneven at times, with high and low points. More like the rather disappointing A Serious Man (2009) than the brilliance of films like True Grit (2010), O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), Fargo (1996) or my own personnel favourite The Big Lebowski (1998). But a Coen Brothers release is always appreciated and this one is very well constructed, the cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel is superb highlighting the period detail and as usual the acting is first rate but what worries me is the brothers reliance on a cute animal to under right this movie for no real reason which is not usually the case!  The music that forms a large part of the narrative is under the direction of T Bone Burnet with some input from Carey Mulligans husband Marcus Mumford and unusually the numbers in the film, which contextualise the era, are complete which has the tendency to slow the narrative down. It has been suggested that this film is not about the failure to make money but the failure to be connected to others, now theirs something I know about?

The Great Gatsby

Jay Gatsby.

Disappointing is not how I would normally describe the Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s movies, in fact quite the reverse. His Moulin Rouge! (2001) rates amongst my all time favourite’s, I thoroughly enjoyed the epic Australia (2008) and his debut film Strictly Ballroom (1992) was a comic breath of fresh air.  But his latest cinematic outing The Great Gatsby (2013) is the disappointment I refer too.

 

Daisy Buchanan.

The story, as your probably aware, follows the life of millionaire Jay Gatsby (  As you can probable gather Fitzgerald’s sad and malevolent story concerns wealth and privilege and how life has no meaning unless you have these two commodities. Leonardo DiCaprio) a self made man seeking to emulate high society. Adapted for the screen by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce from F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of the same name. It’s narrated by Nick Carraway (a miscast Tobey Mcguire) who when the film opens is resident in a sanatorium where his alcoholism has lead to depression and dissolution with life. Nicks story starts in New York in 1922 and basically tells of a love affair between Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan). When the two of them first meet Jay Gatsby is a poor man and asked Daisy to wait for him to make his fortune and then they could be married and live a life of greed and excess.

 

Nick Carraway.

Luhrmann adaptation is as an outlandish spectacle, its beautiful to look at, its got a great soundtrack co-produced by Jay-Z, the acting is not exceptional, all except DiCaprio who plays the enigma that is Gatsby with the indulgence that comes from being an experienced actor. But the story is dull, dull, dull, bordering on the tedious, we’ve got a bunch of nasty people that will do any thing to maintain their wealth and power. The main female character is a woman who can’t be trusted and would only fall in love with a man if he has an abundance of money to shower upon her every whim. Why did Luhrmann choose to film this dreadful tale that’s already been adapted four times? A blemish on the Australian’s oeuvre.

Shame.

Portrait of a self loathing man.

On our RBC Film Club nights there’s always a lot of comment on what constitutes a good Monday night film. My own definition is that it must be a challenging watch and invoke a good follow on discussion (and preferable one that does not have a happy ending!)  This week’s film certainly fitted the bill. Shame (2011) described as a sex-addiction drama it was bravely introduced, at very short notice, by Rachel Findlay who started her verbal presentation by giving some background to tonight’s director. 

43 year old Steve McQueen was born in London and studied art and design at the Chelsea College of Art and Design moving on to study fine art at Goldsmiths College, it was here he first become interested in film and made his first short’s. After leaving Goldsmiths in 1993 he travelled to New York and studied briefly at the Tisch School of Arts but left because he deemed it not experimental enough. Citing his influences as the French New Wave and Andy Warhol his first major work was Bear (1993) although one of his best-known short films is Deadpan (1997) a restaging of the famous Buster Keaton movie where a house collapses around him leaving him unscathed, for which he won the Turner Prize in 1999. Both these films were in black and white and silent. He has also exhibited sculpture and photographs. In 2006 he went to Iraq as the official war artist. The following year he presented Queen and Country, a piece that commemorated the deaths of British soldiers who died in the Iraq War by presenting their portraits as a sheet of stamps.

Fassbender with Steve McQueen.

Rachel went on to tell us that McQueen’s first feature film was the award winning Hunger (2008) it starred Michael Fassbender who played Bobby Sands, a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who participated in a ‘no wash’ protest and led a hunger strike to apply pressure on the British government to grant the Maze prisoners political status. A story of a man that pay’s the ultimate price for his beliefs. 

Which brought us nicely to tonight’s film which like Hunger stars Michael Fassbender, whose debut was the award winning TV mini series Band of Brothers (2001) and has appeared in many feature films including 300 (2007) Angel (2007) Eden Lake (2008) Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Andrea Arnolds Fish Tank in 2009. His co-star is Carey Mulligan whose feature film debut was only 7 years ago as Kitty Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Her best-known film to date is An Education (2009) for which she won various Best Actress Awards you may also have seen her in And When Did You Last See Your Father (2007) Public Enemies (2009) Never Let Go (2010) and the brilliant Drive (2011) with Ryan Gosling.

Carey Mulligan comes of age.

McQueen’s second feature film Shame co-written by Abi Morgan (Sex Traffic 2004, Brick Lane 2007) is set in New York City and relates the tale of alienated loner Brandon (Fassbender) whose life revolves around sex without commitment, he’s a man that cannot form relationships feeding his fetish with prostitutes and porno from his laptop. He lives in a minimalist impersonal apartment in Manhattan. But his mundane existence is jarred by the arrival of his uninvited fragile sister who has nowhere else to stay at present. A larger than life character, Sissy (Mulligan) unwittingly changes Brandon’s masturbatory habits throwing his very existence into turmoil.

"New York, New York"

Following our normal break for refreshment a larger than normal group of audience members returned to the auditorium to participate in the discussion. It was generally agreed that McQueen’s film was about addiction and not about sex and was a particularly challenging watch, being both disturbing and graphically realistic. I was impressed with the acting from both our leads particularly Carey Mulligan who really came of age in this movie with Fassbender giving a great portrait of a self loathing man that was trapped inside himself. The cinematography by Sean Bobbitt (Hunger) was brilliantly executed with some exceptional long shots including Brandon’s midnight run across Manhattan from the East River along 28^th Street in a single shot of extraordinary beauty. McQueen is a very clever director that encourages us to connect with the characters by drawing inferences from the clues he assembles, acknowledging the intelligence of the audience unlike many films. Coming away from the theatre I was unsure about this film with it’s depiction of joyless sex and its lack of humour, but on reflection I believe this to be a benchmark in British film making and can’t understand why it has not been nominated in this years Academy Awards?

Drive

Driver.

Let me get two things out of the way. One: Drive (2011) is a great “American” film highly recommended for intelligent film lovers that enjoy a good strong slice of adult entertainment. Two: Its has an 18 certificate which means that the film may include scenes of hard drug use, supernatural horror, explicit sex or in the case of the film under discussion, very strong gory violence. Where’s he going with this you may well ask? Well I’ll tell you, when you attend a cinema to view an “18” film you relinquish the right to complain about the films content, knowing full well that it will probably upset you if you have a weak disposition. Even so, in my opinion the film includes no more violence than your standard child’s fairy story where the wicked are always punished in what can be violent and extreme ways, preserving innocence and purity against evil.  I would suggest however that cinema goers take due account of the certificate that the BBFC award a movie before shelling out their well earned pennies. Enough of this rant, on to the business in hand.

Irene.

As your now aware the RBC Film Club featured Drive on Monday night. The evening began with a short but precise introduction from our resident film scholar Connor McMorran. Described as 2011’s coolest movie it tells a story about a man who is known only as Driver. An outsider, a skilled mechanic and a movie stuntman by day and a getaway driver by night, whose life appears to be managed by garage owner and cripple Shannon. When Driver meets Irene, a waitress in a local diner and mother of a young son Benicio, he suddenly finds a mission in life. Irene’s husband comes out of jail with outstanding financial obligations to the local mob, our wheelman decides to throw his weight behind the ex-con to allow him to pay his dues and retire to a life of domestic bliss with his young family. Nothing goes to plan and subsequently throws Drivers life into an ever-increasing violent spiral.   

The discussion that followed the screening raised some interesting points. Firstly how American was this movie? Its director Nicolas Winding Refn, known for violent movies including the Copenhagen based Pusher trilogy and the British movie Bronson (2008) (that elicited such a great performance from Tom Hardy), is Danish so the whole thing is filtered through the eyes of a budding auteur with a European perspective. Hossein Amini an Iranian wrote the screenplay adapted from the 2005 novel by James Sallis. In particular the lighting and the camera work gave it the feel of a European art house movie and along with the sudden intense violence of a modern South Korean film injected a edgy tension in to this very well made movie. Another point was the film influences. The director has acknowledged that both Peter Yate’s Bullitt (1968) and John Schlesinger’s 1975 movie The Day of the Locust were an influence. But I would suggest that Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western characters inspired the personality of Driver: an outsider, no background or past, no real name, lack of the spoken dialogue and like the cars he drives, has an unremarkable facade that deliberately masks the fearsome capability beneath the surface. I would suggest that the “coolness’ could be based on a certain Mr Steve McQueen, some of the characters he played in the sixties and early seventies display similar characteristics.

Driver gets to know his neighbour.

Something else that was discussed was the cast. Our stunt man was played by the very promising Ryan Gosling, a London born Canadian whose best work to date has been Half Nelson (2006) Lars and the Real Girl (2007) and a film recently shown at the RBC Film Club Blue Valentine (2010).  Irene, an under written part which does not allow the 26-year-old British BAFTA winner Carey Mulligan any real acting scope. Mulligan made her feature film debut only 6 years ago in Pride and Prejudice (2005), since then I have seen her in And When Did You Last See Your Father (2007), Public Enemies (2009), her big break came with the award winning An Education (2009) and the highly acclaimed Never Let Me Go (2010). The mob connected Shannon is performed by Bryan Cranston an American TV and film actor who grew up in Los Angeles where the film is set. Shannon’s mob connections are played by comedian Albert Brooks and Hell Boy himself Ron Perlman. Irene’s husband is acted by Oscar Isaac who indecently was King John in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (2010). The mysterious Blanche, involved in the robbery that when wrong, is portrayed by Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks. It was agreed that it was a very interesting and inspired cast who all played their part in making this stylish film one of the ever growing list of impressive American films. And don’t forget to order the Chris Martinez soundtrack you won’t be disappointed.