A Line In The Sand

Following his thrilling, troubling Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood takes the almost unprecedented step of showing the same conflict, the WWII invasion of the island of Iwo Jima, from the point of view of the Japanese soldiers defending it. Those who were hidden enemies are now strident heroes, while the brave American troops that stormed the beach are now barbarians to be defeated for the honour of the motherland. It’s a stunning about-face; Letters from Iwo Jima is a film made with sympathy and sincerity, a profound act of cultural humanism.

As before, Eastwood opens Letters from Iwo Jima on the black sands of the island, where a small team of young soldiers, including Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya) and Shimizu (Ryo Kase), (whose stories we follow most closely) are digging defensive trenches in anticipation of the invading American fleet. They are stopped by a new arrival, General Kuribayashi (the outstanding Ken Watanabe), who tells them to dig tunnels through the mountain instead, defending the beach from a distance. Although he must maintain his military demeanour, Kuribayashi knows the battle will be one his 20,000 troops cannot win, despite the courageous talk of his cabinet of advisers. The general meets and befriends a Japanese sporting hero, Baron Nishi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) who has brought his horse and some whiskey to the island. As the story unfolds, we discover that both men have lived and worked in America before the war; Eastwood’s sympathetic reminder of the time before the war and the film’s graceful repository of hope for the future.

The film focuses on the simple humanity of the soldiers, who all dream of their loved ones and yearn to see them and home again. These are simple men, bakers and clerks, huddled together in their hewn caves trembling in the knowledge that the ferocity of the battle and the Japanese military culture of ‘suicide before defeat’, mean they are doomed to die. The film’s unavoidable destiny settles a terrifying mood, even for a war film, of imminent death. The bravery and ferocity of the men that faced their fates is cut with the simple hopelessness of their situation. They have soon run out of food and water, being forced to eat worms and grass. They have little ammunition and, we discover, no hope of reinforcements. Their commanders will not allow them to surrender, and the Americans prove uninterested in taking prisoners.

With the elegance and grace of Japanese masters like Ozu or Kurosawa, Eastwood gradually reveals the stories of these men and how they came to fight for the Emperor on Iwo Jima, emphasising the simple truths of home and family rather than the cynical jingoistic propaganda he uncovered at the heart of Flags. This is intimate, personal cinema, played out against an epic background but filled with simple emotions. Eastwood keeps his camera still and closely focused, dragging us gently but emphatically into the story. That bleached and intimate photography, coupled with the softly narrated letters home and flashbacks to life in Japan, creates a deep empathy with the Japanese soldiers. At the same time, by giving us hints as to their methods, like forced suicide, booby-trapped corpses and the brutal military culture of subordination, Eastwood shows us how inhuman and unknowably cruel these men could be.

Although the two films were made back-to-back, they don’t share characters or storylines. Eastwood shows us again, in the distance at the height of the battle, the Stars and Stripes being raised on Mount Suribachi; a haunting perspective the director introduces and sustains with extraordinary power. Later, he revisits one of the most disturbing scenes in Flags, showing us in an extended scene precisely how a cave filled with soldiers came to be blown to pieces. Both films stand proud on their own merits, if you were one of the few who saw Flags in the cinema, you won’t want to miss the parallel story. One informs and illuminates the other. Together they are some of the finest war films ever made, a horrifying examination of waste and futility.

Some Like It Fuzzy

“What are we doing?” asks Nick Frost. “It’s an interview for a newspaper that has expressed an interest in a film we made called Hot Fuzz”, replies Simon Pegg. “You remember that, don’t you?” “Er”, says Frost, with worrying sincerity. “Doesn’t matter, say what you like”, replies Pegg, the practised straight-man, spinning it out. “If we just talk over one another, it’ll be impossible to transcribe anyway”. “Ah yes,” Frost says, lapsing into Pegg’s clipped accent. “We used to have this thing with our families where I’d phone my mum, say, put the phone onto Simon halfway through and he’d ask her questions about girl’s parts or whatever.” The two collapse into giggles. “She never once twigged”. If their own mothers couldn’t tell them apart, what chance do I have? Add that to the fact the two have been best friends since they met fifteen years ago, speak in the same elaborate language (pop-references, jokes, semi-serious actor-speak) and share a boundless, bouncing enthusiasm, further limits accurate attribution. I did my best to sort out what I could, with the help of a follow-up session with their only slightly less ebullient director, Edgar Wright.

Loosely, the story of Hot Fuzz is what happens when an overachieving cop, Nicholas Angel (Pegg), is forcibly transferred by top brass (“You’re making the rest of us look bad”) from the thick of it in London to the sticks of rural Somerset. In the country village of Sandford (the name comes from the fake town where the real Met train) Angel is partnered up with simple-minded local copper Danny Butterman, played by Frost, Pegg's best friend, as outlined above; best man at his wedding and constant co-star from sit-com Spaced to Shaun of the Dead. Soon after Angel’s grim-faced arrival, a series of grisly accidents rocks the village. Angel is convinced that the villagers are hiding a dreadful secret and as the intrigue deepens, Danny’s movie-inspired dream of an action-filled adventure becomes a bloodthirsty reality. Pegg, who again co-wrote the screenplay with Wright, describes the movie as “a cross between Midsomer Murders and Lethal Weapon”. “We wanted to do something that was an evolution from Shaun of the Dead; taking what we’d done there and run with it a little bit. Edgar had done some amateur cop movies when he was very young (he’s only thirty now) and filmed them where we ended up shooting, Wells in Somerset which is where he grew up. So he had all these unrealised ideas from back then and we wanted to do something that grew out of SotD. Something, you know, bigger”.

“That turned us onto the idea of doing an action film, a traditionally American genre” (“Or Chinese” stage-whispers Frost. “The French have done a few). “OK, a traditionally international genre, but set it somewhere very parochial, in the heart of Middle England. A hybrid of small town cop story and insane action extravaganza”. From there, Pegg and Wright started to think how to re-imagine the idea of the British police service, “making these Dixon of Dock Green characters into Schwarzeneggers, with guns and guts.” Pegg, who has been in a couple of other movies since SotD, including a spot in Mission Impossible III opposite Tom Cruise, found Nick Angel to be the hardest role he had ever done. “Because I have to fight every instinct I have in order to play him. He’s so straight, he’s like a robot. We had this idea of making a super-cop, like the T-1000 of The Met. This guy who is morally uptight, totally hampered by his own belief in proper procedure and it takes moving to a place like Sandford for him to work all that out. He has to learn to be a human being throughout the film, which is what he learns from Danny.”

“That’s the whole journey”, says Frost, “but there are more jokes”. “I came up with the name Danny Butterman ages ago”, the actor explains, rubbing his formidable belly, “because it seemed like such a good fit for a guy I’d play. If I’m a good boy, they let me have things like that”. Much more so than the uptight London super-cop, the unsophisticated, unfulfilled Butterman is the film’s identifiable, every-man character. Frost says he doesn’t mind in the slightest that he’s not involved with the writing process. Before Pegg and Wright finalise the script, the three spend a couple of days going over it. “If I have something to bring to it, and we agree it works, we’ll do it”. Pegg says they spent a long time deciding on how to follow the success of their zombie comedy. “We didn’t want to rest on our laurels and assume that whatever came out of our pens was going to be great. We really wanted to try and improve and evolve as writers and actors and directors. We couldn’t have written Hot Fuzz, never mind making it, before SotD, because everything we learned on one went into the other”.

Part of that learning curve was avoiding the temptation to cash in on a quick sequel to SotD, the cheap and funny movie that wildly exceeded expectations, going from cult to mainstream, especially in the US. The success led to a long courtship from the major studios for Pegg and Wright (Hot Fuzz is a Universal Picture), but the actors are more interested in recalling their cameos in George A Romero’s remake of Land of the Dead, (which both describe as the “ultimate thrill”), than big-money offers. “We were never going to do Shaun 2: Electric Boogaloo”, says Pegg, emphatically. “I think you can retroactively spoil a good movie by making a sequel because when you end it, as you must, you run the risk of ruining the first one. Take Jaws. If you believe in Jaws, you have to believe that at some stage he is going to end up in the Caribbean fighting Michael Bloody Caine”. “The classic one”, says Frost “is going from Aliens into Aliens III. Cameron’s is a great sequel because it turns the whole thing around and goes from a monster movie into an action movie. But in Alien III, the two people Sigourney Weaver has been breaking her neck to save die in the first five minutes. You watch it and think, well, she might as well not even bother. They’ll be dead on that prison planet in a few years. May as well just go back to hyper sleep.” At this point, the two slip into a longish, well-trodden private argument debating precisely how the first Star Wars trilogy was ruined by the second three. In short, Pegg and Frost are nerds. “We don’t use the ‘n’ word, we prefer the term geeks”.

“We have always been aware of our geekdom and have learned to embrace it”, says Pegg. “The whole of Spaced (the brilliant Channel 4 sitcom that was their first collaboration) is basically saying, ‘don’t worry about being geeky, it’s fine’. Being a geek is just about being enthusiastic and having a more developed sense of attention to detail.” The merest hint of a tone has wandered into Pegg’s voice, so I assure him that I wasn’t passing judgement. “The geek community know what they love and they really, really love it”, says Frost. “We went to the comic conventions for Shaun and for Hot Fuzz and say what you want about them, but they’re a great audience”.

Typical of the two actor’s shared, unashamed geekiness, they are fond of putting things in their correct classifications and giving their pop-culture findings catchy names. For the film’s half-way change of tone they invoked what they refer to as Bruckheimer’s Law, after Jerry, the arch-duke of high-concept pyrotechnics. “Well I say law, but it’s really more a set of rules derived from the application of Popcorn Logic”, continues Pegg as I nod, understandingly. “As you might discern, we spend a lot of time sitting around watching films. For the purposes of Hot Fuzz, we’re trying to get the right ear for the language of them, to look at the alphabet of the genre – what are the clichés and which of them we want to include. Then, we write it out and hopefully, make it funny, but the point is that logic goes out the window in an action movie like this. So, when the time came to explain something away on set, that was the term we used, Bruckheimer’s Law. Things like not having to observe the elementary laws of physics or human physiology. Or never having to reload your gun”. Wright explains how this model of filmmaking fits, saying Hot Fuzz is “about wanting to make a film that was resolutely parochial English but inexorably became something unmistakably Hollywood. And as it does so, it starts to take on all the attributes of both types of films. We start tight and repressed and finish loose and mad as hell. Our film mutates from this pastoral comedy into this loud, chaotic beast of a stand-off; a mini-Armageddon.”

All three of them are obvious fans of the genres they adapt into their own comic universe, zombie horrors for SotD and action blockbusters for the follow-up. “Hot Fuzz is definitely a tribute to those kinds of movies”, explains Pegg “but we’re referencing the whole genre, I suppose, rather than specific films. Except for The Wicker Man and Bad Boys II and Point Break”. “And Supercop and Rambo and Lethal Weapon and every one of John Woo’s films“, says Frost. “Yes, um, but I’m talking about stuff like how the bad guy will always get up again after you think he’s dead, and when someone speaks into a microphone in a public place, you’ll always get feedback. It’s the familiar shorthand for action movies and we had to learn that; know how to place those elements in the movie”. “Like a mathematical formula, or a magic spell”, says Frost, wriggling his fingers.

“But going back to all those references that I made a point of saying we didn’t want to make a big deal out of”, Pegg continues, “The Wickerman was a real starting point for us. We watched a lot of movies about small communities and we thought that this uptight cop coming in from outside was a great place to start for comedy. The idea of casting Edward Woodward came later, when we thought it’d be great to offer him a part. When we were writing, I always pictured Skinner as looking like Timothy Dalton with a moustache until the thought occurred, why not ask Timothy Dalton and, if we’re lucky enough to get him, ask him to grow a moustache?”

Later, director Wright gets very excited when talking about his cast, describing it as a dream ensemble and listing them one by one with a superlative in the middle of their names. He also gets very animated when mention is made of the top-secret cameos in the film, inserted “for our own entertainment, really, not credited”. The first one arrives in the opening reel and features an Oscar-winning actress. I had an idea who it might be but Wright, who congratulated me for getting it, but asked me not to reveal it, maintained there’s another “very high-profile” actor in Hot Fuzz. “He makes a fleeting appearance much later, and he is just as well known. I think of the cameos as little rewards for sharp-eyed viewers.”

Wright might love his in-jokes, but he respects his genres. “There’s a big difference between celebrating something and taking the mickey out of it. Tarantino truly loves his inspirations and it shows but somebody like the makers of Scary Movie or whatever, don’t. And it shows too. We want to exalt! Enthuse!” Pegg puts it another way, saying that any interest in the types of movies they’re paying homage to will add to the whole experience. “We always throw stuff out there that deliberately plays to that side of the audience. I think it’s important to have that level of interaction in a film that’s made, really, for the audience. It changes it from being just something to watch into something that allows the spectator to make connections. It’s more enjoyable, like that, joining the dots”.

I tell them that having watched the movie, all the scenes of sitting around, eating cake have a real-life feel to them. “Well, yes”, admits Pegg, “pastries and ribald talk are essential to the process, but the whole thing about the cake in the movie, as with a lot of the language and the more absurd events, are that they’re based on our research. We spent a lot of time with real cops. The escaped swan is, word-for-word, a real story. Having to buy cake for everybody when they mess up, that happens all the time”. “Not only that, there are different grades of cake for different indiscretions,” says Frost. “A misfiled arrest report might mean a tray of éclairs. Wrongful arrest, a couple of Black Forest Gateaux”. If Hot Fuzz has a message at all, according to Frost, “it’s something like what Danny says to Nick during the couch scene, ‘sometimes you’ve got to just switch off’.”

Snooze of the World

Returning to Paris from Mexico after his father’s death from cancer, Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) pitches up in his childhood home, sleeping in his old bed. His French mother (Miou-Miou) has found a job for the young creative, but it’s an unbearably unfulfilling task, setting preprinted type on cheesy calendars in an office run by fools. Chief among the idiots is the obnoxious one Guy (Alain Chabat), a loudmouthed bully, who quickly forms a bond with the quiet, dreaming Stephane. Romance of a kind arrives in the shape of new neighbour Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her cute friend Zoe (Emma de Caunes). Although seemingly unable to tell the truth, shy Stephane tries to impress his thoughtful, interesting neighbour with his home-made inventions and stories of his dreams. Stephanie seems to like him, but is unnerved by his childlike intensity and constant games. Meanwhile, at work, Stephane is struggling to get his boss to look at his own work, including a calendar of hand-drawn images of recent catastrophes called ‘Disasterology’, featuring tidal waves, plane crashes and earthquakes. As Stephane immerses himself again in his childhood, his already odd behaviour continues to disintegrate, and he becomes unsure of his sense of who he is. "Since he was 6, he's inverted dreams and reality," Stephane’s mother reveals to Stephanie, a charming portal into the mind of the character, and the director.

Michel Gondry’s genius for imaging is The Science of Sleep's most immediate advantage, from his constantly mobile, intimate camera to his handmade, cardboard sets, perfectly executed in-camera tricks and simple animations. The film doesn’t have a single digitally processed shot, barring an ancient chromakey used, in context, as part of Stephane’s inner television station. Throughout the film, the director communicates Stephane’s inner turmoil with a series of drip-painting animations after Jackson Pollock, joyful and confusing in equal measure. There are also constant references to his own body of work, from the underappreciated Human Nature to Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and his vast panorama of classic music videos, all of which get specific nods in what amounts to the artist reclassifying his own repertoire. With Science of Sleep, Gondry is confessing to the difficulties he has experienced in becoming a filmmaker, the unbridled enthusiasm for creativity tempered by frustrations, the frequent crises of confidence in his own abilities and the strain of constant originality. That the main location used is a house that Gondry lived in for a long time further illustrates that Science is highly personal cinema, made from the most part out of scraps of the director’s memories, recreated dream diaries and romantic fantasies.

Without the structure, however playful and intentionally complex, of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, Gondry’s scattershot approach idles lazily across his themes, defining his characters in a blur of thoughts and dreams. Some of his dialogue is less than sparkling, but there is no shortage of heart, something the cyclical, cynical Kaufman struggles at times to find. Following their extraordinary collaboration on Eternal Sunshine, Gondry has difficulties in communicating Stephane’s confused state of mind with dramatic, rather than visual, power. However, when the imagery is as strong and undiscovered as in Science of Sleep, poking holes in the drama is unnecessary quibbling. The story mostly plays out as a collection of intimate stream-of-consciousness explosions, primed by snatches of dialogue, music or disarmingly exuberant bursts of energy from the cast. There are hints at a dangerous darkness in Stephane, whose disturbed sleep in his childhood bed remove him, somehow from the real, adult world. He is living in his childhood mind, the root of his creativity, but his grown-up aggressions surface in his struggle to express love: an extended chase dream is played like a hardboiled cop movie and there are glimpses of his jarringly violent drawings.

Although Bernal and Gainsbourg are both terrific to watch and completely inhabit their characters, the film doesn’t, in the end, find anywhere for them to go to and ends on a downer, without conviction. Never mind, what had gone before was some of the most arresting and sincere filmmaking I have seen, or felt, in a cinema.

Irish Blog Awards, 2007

The nominations are in for the Irish Blog Awards 2007, and (thanks to an assidious campaign of hitting up my friends for votes) Confessions of a Film Critic has secured a nod in the Best Arts & Culture category, alongside more than a few very worthy contenders. Chuffed, naturally.

If you have a few minutes, go to the awards website before the closing date of Feb 15th and give us the auld number one. It's under Maguire's Movies. There are also details on the site for the awards show itself on March 3rd in Dublin.

Dublin International Film Festival 2007

Between the 16th and the 25th of February, the D.I.F.F. will show well over 100 movies to packed houses (really packed, book now), a snapshot of the best in features and documentaries from around the world.

A complete schedule and booking information is available at the festival website.

This will be the last programme compiled by Michael Dwyer from the Irish Times, who has shown tremendous dedication to the festival and masterful discernment in his presentation over the years.

For the first time, this year the D.I.F.F will present awards - The Voltas, to celebrate outstanding contribution to the art of cinema. There is also a special award to the favourite film from the festival, as voted by the audience. Rather than shill supporters a premium text number, the ballot will be in pen and paper and available outside every screening.

The D.I.F.F. is a not-for-profit event and is only made possible because of the support of sponsors and the dedication of their team of volunteers.

These are a few of my highlights:

Once
John Carney's Sundance-winning musical (he describes it as a video album) stars Glenn Hansard and Markéta Irglová and tells the simple story of a Dublin busker and a Czech immigrant who fall in love as they write and play music together. It is not the low-budget Music & Lyrics, but is the hot tip for the Best Film award I mentioned.

Tony Takitani
Taken from a story about a introverted illustrator from the extraordinary Haruki Murakami (who wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), Japanese director Jun Ichikawa’s film looks terrific – astonishing compositions, simple yet complex plotting, little dialogue but an almost constant spoken narration.

Small Engine Repair
Niall Heery's comedy drama has Iain Glenn playing a recently single smalltown mechanic having one last go at making it as a Country & Western singer. Best First Feature winner at the Galway Film Festival last summer.

This Is England
Shane Meadows’ portrait of Thatcherite Britain, based on his own experiences, tells the story of a young teenager getting involved with a gang of skinheads.

Neil Jordan, Portrait
A documentary about the director from French filmmaker Philippe Pilard.

Mutual Appreciation
Another movie about a girl and a guitarist, Andrew Bujalski makes the Slacker for our age. Linklater's 47 now, you know.

Sunshine
Danny Boyle’s sci-fi about a group of scientists sent to re-ignite the dying Sun. Cillian Murphy continues his collaboration with the director. The trailer is online, and looks good.

Curse of the Golden Flower
Zhang Yimou's intricate, beautiful wushu epic with Chow Yun Fat and Gong Li is a must for fans of Asian cinema.

Dear Diary

Opening on a scene of absolute isolation as Judi Dench’s Barbara Covett sits on her favourite park bench, London below her swathed in thick fog, Richard Eyre’s thrilling adaptation of Zoe Heller’s novel Notes on a Scandal slowly brings us inside the broken mind of a monster. A lonely, repressed history teacher, Barbara’s only confidante is her diary, extracts of which provide a startling narration throughout the story, artfully composed words of pure venom.

When Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) joins her school as an art teacher, Barbara insinuates herself into her company, and the two become fast friends, the older woman helping the younger to discipline the unruly children, a matter of “crowd control”. Soon, Barbara is invited to Sunday lunch, where she meets Sheba’s older husband Richard (a typically unrestrained Bill Nighy), tormented teenage daughter Polly (Juno Temple) and Down Syndrome son Ben (Max Lewis). On the surface, their life appears to be the ideal of middle-class comfort and security, but Barbara finds the chink in Sheba’s armour when she spies the teacher in a compromising position with Steven, a fifteen year old student (finely played by Donegal actor Andrew Simpson). Upon confronting her with the knowledge, Sheba confesses and promises to end the affair. Barbara agrees to keep the secret, although we, privy to her thoughts, know the titillating affair will become ammunition, fuel for her secret passion.

Blanchett’s beautiful, naïve art teacher, all scarves and tweeds and twitchy energy, is like a woman wading down a dangerous riverbed, unaware of the sinkholes being dug in her path. She is terrific, but the film belongs to Dench, whose Barbara is a unique creation, a sociopathic monster with the cunning of a chess master and the mouth of a fishwife. An emotional vampire, preying on those around her, she is a horribly likeable villain with a devastatingly cynical view of the world, a place that has always disappointed her.

The film is beautifully posited by director Eyre, from a script by Patrick Marber (Closer). The only flaw is a moment of narrative inconsistency in the final reel that lessens the impact of the resolution but doesn’t deflate it entirely. His economically composed, fatally attractive visuals are matched by a stirring score from Phillip Glass, looping crescendos of strings delicately balanced against the emotional peaks of the riveting story. Boasting two of the finest performances of the actress’s careers, this is supremely judged cinema, utterly nasty without being vulgar and creepily intimate without a shred of self-consciousness.