Chris Sullivan

Cinephile: Martin Freeman stars as Rembrandt in Nightwatching

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:14:17 +0000

“It really is very conventional and straightforward film for Peter Greenaway,” explains Martin Freeman who plays Rembrandt in the famed British director’s latest outing. Nightwatching. “But I was very flattered when I was offered the part. There aren’t many Greenaway’ s in this world making films for the reasons that he makes films.”

Indeed, this rather delicious film tells the story behind one of the painter’s most famous masterpieces that although not one of his finest, daringly presents a group of soldiers not in traditional static pose but as a cacophony of action and innuendo. Of course the painting begs many a question and as such the director, who formerly helmed The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Thief, The Cook, His Wife and Her Lover, rolls up his sleeves and, like a doc performing a Caesarean, pulls out his child a kicking and a screaming.

At the start, successful artist Rembrandt is married to Saskia (Eva Birthistle) and as she is pregnant, accepts a commission to paint the Amsterdam Civil Guard, led by Capt. Frans Banning Cocq (Adrian Lukis). Subsequently after one of their number, Piers Hasselburg (Andrzej Seweryn), is accidentally killed; Rembrandt discovers more and more about the dissolute band he’s painting and suspects foul play. Further enquiry uncovers that Banning Cocq is “hopelessly in love” with co-conspirator Willem van Ruytenburgh (Adam Kotz) and that the orphanage under the Guard’s protection has been turned into a child brothel. Consequently, Rembrandt uses his painting as a cipher that offers such covert censure of his patrons, that on it’s unveiling, they throw a complete and utter wobbler. Of course this would explain, one of the great riddles in the history of painting i.e. just how Rembrandt went from being an extremely successful painter to penury almost over night. And as s is his wont, Greenaway dives into the intrigue lock, stock and barrel but in effect said conspiracy plays second fiddle to the director’s depiction of artist himself who beautifully realised by Freeman is a bawdy, lusty outspoken triumph of a man who at one point says, “What if the Virgin Mary wasn’t a virgin at all an error and that the mistake was down to an error in that translation from Hebrew to Latin?”

“ The good thing about playing Rembrandt is that no one knew what he was like,” chuckles Freeman. “It was an open brief. Okay we know what he looks like as he did so many self portraits and that was my main research but no one really knows what he was like which gives you the opportunity to make shit up. Peter’s view of Rembrandt was of a businessman keeping a household together while I portrayed him as a bit of a chap.”

“But, working with Peter is like working with a professor of painting,” adds Freeman. “He knows everything about Rembrandt. But he is also not only concerned with what he can make up and what is visually interesting. I asked him how much of this intrigue is true and he said, ‘No of course not I just made it all up!’ But most interestingly, he likened Rembrandt to the first ever lighting cameraman as it was during Rembrandt’s lifetime that domestic candle became affordable for the so, for the first time you could have artificial light, and that was what Rembrandt was all about – shadows and light- which is what film per se is also all about. I liked that.”

Nightwatching is released from Friday 26th March at the ICA and key cities.

Cinephile: Letter from an Unknown Woman and The Firm

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:50:36 +0000

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), an adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella of 1922, is widely considered to be German born director Max Ophüls’s over-riding masterpiece. Now released for the first time in thirty years on the big screen it stars Joan Fontaine as a woman infatuated by the rakish former concert pianist Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) who send him a letter that starts with the immortal line, ‘By the time you read this letter, I may be dead … The film then tells her heartbreaking tale, in flashback of unrequited love, of her affair with him and their child together that he is completely unaware of while Stefan simply wracks his brain to discover just which of his many hundreds of lovers she might have been..

On a completely different note, I was rather curious as to why director Nick ‘football factory’ Love would remake director/writer Alan Clarke’s seminal footie hoolie masterpiece, The Firm (1988). In the original Gary Oldman excels as he’s never done before or since, as Bexy, a successful thirty something professional who has grown fat on Thatcher’s boom, bought a flash motor, a detached houses and has a wife and a kid. Also the leader of the ICC- West Ham’s footie hoolie firm Bexy plans his violent ‘awaydays’ with military precision and dreams of taking on Europe. But of course, as in real life, the football is just an excuse for a good ruck or as Billy (Steve McFadden of East Enders’) says at the end: ‘if they ban them from football they’ll just switch to cricket, darts, anything that gives them the same excuse.’ The Firm much like Clarke’s other work, Scum and Made in Britain, caused middle England to call for it to be banned as it was the first movie ever made about football hooliganism and, had a massive impact on all young tearaways, some of whom like, Nick Love (who has Millwall tattooed on his lip) went onto make their won hoolie films and create a genre. At first I thought Love might have remade the film as a homage to Clarke updating and fine tuning but what he has done is take the premise of the psychopathic pack leader as a well to do businessman with a family and thus a double life and stick another story on it . In Love’s The Firm (2009) the psychotic Bex, brilliantly rendered with excruciating menace by relative new comer Paul Anderson, simply takes a young ‘un , Dom (Callum McNab) under his wing and shows him the ropes (albeit in a nasty, bullying, psychopathic way) gets him into the ‘firm’ and takes him out to fight. Of course, Dom soon sees that what he once thought as glamorous is anything but and that said football violence is propagated by nasty, horrible lowlifes who you wouldn’t want to sit next to on the bus, and in reality, said aggression can end in death and disfigurement. Pretty much a coming of age story, I applaud Love for making a film that, both hilarious and exciting, features some of the most realistic footie fight scenes I have seen on screen and simply delivers a most worthwhile lesson. It should be on the school curriculum.

Letter from an Unknown Woman opens in the BFI Southbank and all good art house cinemas on Friday www.bfi.org.uk/releases <http://www.bfi.org.uk/releases>
The Firm (2009) is available to rent or but RRP £15.99
The Firm (1988) special edition DVD is available to rent or but RRP £15.99

Cinephile: Invictus, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and Fishtank

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:34:38 +0000

I truly appreciate the work of Clint Eastwood. Always have. Indeed as far as I’m concerned he has created some of my favourite and most watched movies, but sadly, his latest offering, Invictus, falls way short of his usual mark. Basically, it tells of how in 1995 Nelson Mandela’s in his first term of office joined forces with the Captain of the countries rugby squad in order to win the cup and thus unite the countries troubled peoples. Of course, the whole thing is seen through rose tinted glasses the size of Africa itself, totally relies on the final of the cup to give itself any dramatic worth and leaves one wondering why on earth did Eastwood bother. In one scene we actually see a black African street kid sidle up to an Afrikaans’s cop car to listen to the final on the car radio with them. At first the officers are not at all keen but, by the end, they are almost hugging their new friend - SURE THING CLINT – hundreds of years of racial enmity and hatred forgotten because a bloke kicks a ball over a goal post. I wish it were that simple. Would have been better if had they given some of the vast amounts of cash it cost to field the cup to the starving and impoverished indigenous South Africans?

Indeed, it reminds me of our situation now. The government are spending billions of OUR cash on the Olympics when the country is virtually bankrupt, when social services are at an all time low when we are all on our uppers. I don’t know about you but I make sure my family is fed first before I go out and party!!! To add, they are ruining the city of London, making our lives hell by sprucing up the tubes system (£4 for a one way ticket – what a liberty) smashing down clubs (such as The Astoria and 2,Metro, Ghetto etc) to make way for the cross rail and demolishing many beautiful old buildings (such as the Café Royal) just to build hotels – and all for the bleeding Olympics aka - two weeks of people running around for no particular reason. Harrumph!!!.

As for DVD this week the quite cracking, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs is the latest in a long line of animated features that are almost as much fun for adults as they are for kids, This one has my particular vote because it questions the very nature of over consumption, corporate and commercial prosperity at the loss of individual well being and greed whilst examining father and son relationships. Another film that looks at the machinations of the family unit, this time a Thames estuary unmarried mum, her older chav daughter and her younger sibling is Fishtank. Directed by Andrea Arnold it stars the quite excellent Kate Jarvis as Mia the older daughter and Michael Fassbender as Connor her ma’s boyfriend who seduces her – genius.

Where The Wild Things Are - a Christmas cracker…

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:22:57 +0000

With the Yuletide season bearing down on us cinemas the world over have turned their attention to the family movie –which on the face of it is not such a bad thing. That said, the highlight of this years seasonal offerings has to be, Where The Wild Things Are. Based on Maurice Sendak’s landmark book of the same name, this cracking turn is directed by Spike Jonze, stars Max Records as Max and is he first film that I’ve seen that actually respects how children are, takes the concept of childhood seriously and is grubby, messy, chaotic and just a little bit sad. Nevertheless, as a whole the picture makes one yearn to be a child again. Of course the Jewish slacker humour (almost de rigueur for all kids flicks now) is intact but unlike some other films it is not patronizing and not peppered with in jokes. And after just ten minutes the Wild Things (oversized furry beasts) cease to be in any way scary and, magnificently rendered by James Gandolfini, Chris Cooper and Forrest Whitaker (who plays a Ira the el typico intellectual Jewish Wild thing) are entirely endearing. A quite beautiful film in every way, with a fine soundtrack by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s (“I was inspired by Cat Stevens soundtrack for Harold and Maude.” she told me) I cannot recommend it enough.

And while I enjoyed the above, another Christmas perennial, the latest in the Potts franchise, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince left me as cold as a pint of last years piccalilli. But then again it doesn’t seem to matter how uncommonly hopeless any of the Harry Potter’s are, most kids (and some VERY odd grown ups) seem to flock to them whatever. But for the record this is one shite-overblown waste of money.

An ever kicking cool shaking uber motivating no nonsense cracker for the big boys in the house, Quentin Tarantino’s, Inglourious Basterds, is the dogs. His biggest hit since, Pulp Fiction, it has grossed some £300 million worldwide and is now set to double that with the DVD release. Starring Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine a blood thirsty good ol’ boy with a ‘little [American] Indian’ in him who is sent, almost Dirty Dozen style, with his gang of Jewish American psychopathic avengers to go forth and hunt down and torture and scalp and murder as many of the Nazi scum as he can find, it is a blast. “The German will be sickened by us and the German will talk about us and the German will fear us,” he says. A marvelously enjoyable film with no real cohesive centre, it is basically QT riffing, referencing classic movies, tipping his hat here, with a wink there, throwing in a bit of spaghetti western inflection and rejoicing in his glorious dialogue. A rollicking yarn full of bad intention, I liked this film a lot.

Where The Wild Things Are is on general release form 11th December.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and Inglourious Basterds are available to rent or but on DVD now.

Oh la la - ‘tres amusant’ indeed

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:24:54 +0000

I’ve always been utterly disdainful of slapstick, pratfalls and silent movie comedies but, will admit, that the Gallic director/star Jacques Tati (France’s main purveyor of such) had me chuckling like good ‘un with, Mon Oncle (1958). As his alter ego, the well meaning, but enormously accident prone, M. Hulot, Tati visits his relatives the Arpels and their incredibly chic friends. Ensconced in Paris, the rather bourgeois family are everything that Hulot is not. He is a kindly postman who lives in a run down, almost bucolic, part of the city while they live in a fantastically swanky suburban Modernist house (that to this day is one of the finest interiors I have ever seen). Naturally Hulot enters this immaculate world, sticks his spanner in, creates chaos and notices nout .

Of course, the film that put Tati on the map was Les Vacances de M. Hulot, (1953) which shot on location in the small Breton seaside town of Saint-Marc-sur-mer serves almost as much as an intact historical document as it does a comedy. Tati, true to his music hall beginnings as a mime artist, utters just one phrase throughout the whole picture ‘Monsieur Hulot,’ while the scant plot is but a vehicle for a series of softly sardonic studies of human absurdity.

Another DVD release this week looks at another French icon. Coco Avant Chanel reminds me of a guard dog without teeth. The opportunity was there to tell the untold true story of a household name that, riddled with controversy, would have made waves. Instead the film’s director has taken the vacuous Mills and Boon route and told the incredibly boring tale of the designer’s beginnings. “I thought I wanted to make a film that told of how Chanel became Coco Chanel instead of one about what she became,” explained the director Anne Fontaine sitting in Hotel Bacon in Paris. “I thought this was a more interesting story.” How she worked that one out still confuses me. Surely, more beguiling is the story of this woman who, unable to live in anything but unrestrained luxury, throughout WW2 accepted the protection of her lover the German officer and Nazi spy, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, who allowed her to live in the Ritz - a hotel that the Germans were using as their head quarters. Even more intriguing is the fact that after the war it was proven that she did indeed work as a Nazi spy was arrested for war crimes and was acquitted, before trial, via the intervention of the British Royal Family. Indeed, when the Americans liberated Paris, so petrified was Chanel of the fate that met all collaborators that she hid in the Ritz Hotel and subsequently ran off to Switzerland pronto where she stayed in exile until 1953. Chanel’s subsequent renaissance, success and iconic status ensured that all of the above was swept nicely under the carpet but there’s no getting away from it: Coco Chanel was a collaborator who, for an easy life, slept with the Nazi’s.

The Jacques Tati collection featuring: Jour de Fete, Les Vacances de M. Hulot, Mon Oncle, Playtime and Paradise is available now RRP 339.99

Coco Avant Chanel is available to rent or buy

Christmas is coming, and Disney’s getting fat

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:18:43 +0000

Christmas is a bit like the flu. You are forced to lie around all day, watch crap TV, consume lots of food you wouldn’t normally eat, and each year both seem to arrive earlier and than the last. This year I had flu fashionably early,setting the trend in July while London’s utterly loathsome and incompetent major, Boris Johnson has been bribed by Disney to switch on the Oxford Street Christmas lights purely to coincide with the release of, A Christmas Carol, this week. They even allowed the films star Jim Carrey to switch the buggers on!!!!!

Yet, directed by Robert (Forest Gump , Back to the Future) Zemeckis this 3D animated adaptation of the Dickens tale is not aimed at kids of all ages. I’d say, due to it’s thoroughly creepy protagonists, nightmarish scenes of ghouls taking their jaws off and spectres chasing ol’ Scrooge through dark alleys, it is definitely 10 year old and upwards. Put it this way I wouldn’t advise going to see it zonked out on Acid.

Another seasonal chestnut, It’s A Wonderful Life, directed Frank Capra in 1946 releases this week for the first time in both black and white and colour on DVD. The film stars James Stewart as, George Bailey, the proprietor of a small local savings and loans (building society) who sees wrack and ruin approaching. Consequently he attempts suicide only to be saved by his guardian angel, Clarence (Henry Travers) who then shows him how the world would have been without him. A sobering film for many in these troubled financial times; it is as relevant today as it ever was.

And then there’s, Bruno, that, directed by the great Larry ‘Seinfeld’ Charles and written by, and starring, Sasha Baron Cohen as the gayest man in the world and Austrian fashionista, might be the most outrageous, uncompromising mockumentary ever to hit the DVD shelves. Having lost his cred in Austria our eponymous hero travels to the US where he attempts to become a celebrity: “I am going to be the biggest Austrian celebrity since Hitler,” he says. What follows are perhaps the most excruciatingly hilarious series of set-ups with unsuspecting public, celebrities and politicians that I have ever witnessed. On his quest for fame at any cost we find the man arbitrating between Palestinian’s and Israeli’s s confusing humus with Hamas and doing a US Jerry Springer style talk show with the black baby he has swapped for an IPod in Africa in front of an outraged Afro American audience. When all fails he decides to go hetero.” Suddenly it hit me,” he says. “All the most famous stars in the world Tom Cruise John Travolta, and Kevin Spacey have one thing in common- they are all straight. I’ll have to give up guys and find a cockaholics anonymous!”

Subsequently, he goes to a real life God bod ‘gay convertor’ Pastor Jody Trautwein and tells him he’s got blowjob lips , goes shooting game with some proper grade ‘A’ in-bred crackers and tries to enter their ‘tent’ naked, joins a swinger’s party with a gaggle of trailer trash and compeers a caged fighting comp in front of a crowd of Arkansas oiks. Now all that is funny enough but when one considers that, apart from Cohen, all are members of the unsuspecting thicko American public, it is downright hilarious. All I can say is that Cohen and Charles have got some humongous cojones.

A Christmas Carol is in cinemas now
It’s A Wonderful Life is available to rent or to buy RRP £17.99
Bruno is available to rent or to buy RRP £19.99