Mild Concern

At first glance Beat Girl, a new film about a young pianist grieving for her dead mother, discovering a love for DJing, and falling in love, is an intriguing proposition. Running alongside the film are a novelisation, web series, and mobile game; for a low budget film they have done all they can to generate extra content and spread the word. Sadly when it comes to the film itself the same effort is completely lacking.

The film is painfully predictable, the male lead himself has described the film as “Save the Last Dance with pianos” (I can’t think of a better way to describe it), and has been made with little effort, flair, or skill. What the film wants us to see is a girl who is passionate about music, suffering from the loss of her mother, and madly in love with the man who introduces her to DJing. Louise Dylan as Heather is incredibly sweet but does not show any passion whatsoever. She doesn’t seem overly affected by the loss of her mother; being more than happy to risk missing her memorial concert in favour of performing a DJ set. The lacklustre piano playing could be put down to grief but Heather shows the same level of enthusiasm when she steps behind the DJ booth.

For a film in which music plays such a vital role the soundtrack and sound design are incredibly weak. There’s few things worse in a film than when the characters are constantly having to tell you how talented someone is because they are failing to demonstrate it themselves. Heather’s DJ skills are utterly unconvincing and likely to offend anyone who takes their own talents seriously. Clutching headphones to your ear with one hand as you half-heartedly raise the other above your hand while smiling nervously does not make you a DJ.

Throw in the bland romance with fellow DJ Toby (Craig Daniel Adams) and you are left with very little to keep you interested. Toby was played with a constant fixed grin and a strange sheen of stilted staginess that left his every action feeling acted rather than natural. Even when Toby was sipping from a glass of water it didn’t quite ring true. Beat Girl is the story of a flaky and dispassionate musician who should probably stick to playing the piano and date a man who doesn’t grin so much..

One aspect of the film that does engage is the sub-plot involving Heather’s two best friends, played by Amy Brangwyn and Jonathan Holby, who are trying to forge a career in the fashion industry. Stranded in a film filled with cardboard characters and general blandness this pair are as close as the film gets to saving itself and each earn the film its sole two stars.

Beat Girl is on limited release from today and a full list of screening venues can be found on the film’s website.

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For the past ten years film-makers that have made films about planes crashing have had to walk a fine line between respectful, yet exciting; dramatic, yet thrilling; tense, yet nostalgic etc. The latest film from Almodóvar has decided instead to make a film about a plane crash that revolves around song and dance numbers, excess drug taking, and aeronautical orgies.

The plot of the film is set almost entirely in the business class section of Peninsula flight 2549; a plane that is having to make an emergency landing due to technical difficulties. The all-male, all-gay flight attendants have drugged the female/transsexual stewardesses and all of the economy class fliers in order to keep them calm – meanwhile the business class guests consist of a Mexican businessman with a secret, a fashion designer with a secret, a virginal psychic with a secret, a pair of newlyweds with a secret, a failed actor with a secret, and a conservative banker with a secret. As these characters begin to learn the fate of the plane they all begin to form different factions and temporary relationships until the secrets all come out over a bucket of champagne, tequila and mescaline (leading to some fantastically surreal Almodóvarian naughtiness…)

It will be said by some audiences that the film has a sense of irony around its subject matter relating to current Spanish politics. A country that is in political and financial turmoil with insane youth unemployment and a dangerous swelling of neo-fascists produces a comedy film about a selection of upper-middle class elites with secrets flying aimlessly above the country in search of a place to land. This may well be the case, but the film is mostly focused on larger-than-life characters and melodrama. A more important political reading of the film could be that it is a timely accompaniment to the wave of same-sex marriage legislation being discussed across the western world. The film is unashamedly gay with not a suggestion of homophobia or embarrassment from any of the characters as they all discuss (and act upon) the finer points of a fluid sexuality. Even the plane itself becomes a character in some of the saucier scenes as the camera lingers over spinning turbines and the long erect body of the plane fills the screen after the camera pans away from an ecstatic face mid-pleasure.

The film has got to be one of the most colourful and camp films of 2013 – especially seeing as it is named after the 1982 classic song from The Pointer Sisters (which is used brilliantly) – and it should become an instant camp classic with the right crowd.

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A few weeks ago I navigated the urban maze of Soho in London to reach the Soho Screening Rooms and watch The Look of Love. The film opens on Paul Raymond (Steve Coogan) driving in a car with his granddaughter through the urban maze of Soho in London. As they drive Raymond points out the various properties he owns and explains that he bought them all for his daughter, Debbie (Imogen Poots), who has recently died from a drug overdose. Raymond then sits down to watch an old interview featuring his daughter and himself as we flashback to the start of his career…

Paul Raymond was once Britain’s richest man, his money coming from the aforementioned properties and a lucrative history in strip clubs, sex comedies, and what some would call pornographic magazines. In The Look of Love we follow Raymond’s career as he profits from displays of flesh in numerous forms, end his adulterous marriage with Jean Raymond (Anna Friel) and takes up with showgirl Amber (Tamsin Egerton) to indulge in a life of sex, drugs, and an apartment designed by Ringo Starr.

The Look of Love has been blessed with an amazing cast largely filled with comic actors in not so comic roles. Steve Coogan nearly completely banishes Alan Partridge from your mind as he is transformed into a blonde Lothario and Chris Addison’s performance as the drug happy editor Tony Power is worth the ticket price alone. Other smaller roles are filled by the likes of Miles Jupp, Sarah Solemani, David Walliams, Simon Bird, Matt Lucas, and Stephen Fry. Heck we even get the marvellous James Lance who is never in enough films. Tamsin Egerton makes the most of her first proper leading role and is more ballsy than brave as she plays the character most often seen unclothed and with the most depth.

Director Michael Winterbottom is not one to shy away from onscreen nudity and sure enough we are presented with a plethora of scantily clad young women on stage, in swimming pools, and cavorting in Raymond’s bedroom which features sun lamps and a retractable roof. The nudity is not presented in an overly exploitative manner but is simply present in as great a quantity as it was in Raymond’s real life. For a film filled with sex and nudity there isn’t too much to titillate here for better or worse. With some exceptions perhaps…

That said there isn’t a huge deal of depth to be found either. Events from Raymond’s life are paraded in front of us with unquestionably fine acting and direction but somehow the essence of the man escapes us. The film is solidly made; if you kick it, it won’t fall down, but look inside and it is mostly empty. By the end of the film I knew a lot about what Raymond had done but had no insight into why he had done it. Why did he love Amber above all the other women who passed through his bed? Why did he love his daughter so much yet dismiss his sons? Why did Jean put up with his philandering? The Look of Love is an enjoyable film and provides the winning combination of a perfect cast and all that nudity but it doesn’t uncover anything revealing about Paul Raymond as a character.

For a film about a man who pushed the boundaries in his time there are surprisingly few boundaries pushed onscreen. And this is from the director that brought graphic sex to the multiplex. There were moments where I could feel Winterbottom censoring himself as he shied away from fully exploiting the world of Paul Raymond. The last thing this film needed was tasteful nudity. While it is ostensibly a good thing to not exploit sex and nudity this is a film about “The King of Soho” at the end of the day and I only needed to walk for 2 minutes from the screening room to see the neon clad impact of his life, something the film failed to capture.

A film worth seeing but probably just the once, The Look of Love is in UK cinemas on 26th April 2013.

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Joseph Kosinski can’t catch a break. The marketing for his first film, Tron Legacy promised us insane pants-wetting levels of excitement and many were disappointed with the slow, self-indulgent film we were given (for the record I still wet my pants watching it). Now, with Oblivion there’s a bit of reversal; we’ve been given marketing that seems to offer – in Mild Concern editor Tim’s delicate words – “one of the blandest looking Sci-Fis of recent years.” The brute even finds the time to insult Morgan Freeman. Oblivion does look shit, but the film itself – 2013’s lead-in original sci-fi in a year full of the things – is one of the most un-shit things that will be released this year.

In 2017 an alien attack obliterates Earth and just about all of human civilization. Whilst the Earth’s population migrates to Saturn’s moon, Titan, a handful of two-person teams remain on Earth to maintain and protect machinery that is extracting the planet’s remaining resources to build a new world for humankind elsewhere. Team 49 consists of protocol-abiding Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) and the too-inquisitive Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) whose “effective team” status is compromised after Jack locates a crashed spaceship with a disoriented stranger inside. Proceed, mind-f***ing hijinks.

One of the recurring insults the film has been landed with is that its plot and visual style is “A bit of this meets that, meets this other thing with a touch of oh, that one as well,” which is derivative and unfair. The familiarity experienced in Oblivion is Kosinski’s conscious choice to return to science fiction cinema’s early roots, where films were packed with simple primary shapes, ambiguously unnerving commanders with thick accents, scary machines that go “pew pew” and “braawgghh”, and lots and lots of white. Oblivion is homage-laden gold but it still has its own distinct voice which, with its many original merits owns its audience entirely.

The film’s hyperventilating pace is both its strongest and weakest talent. Combining the classic slow-burning plot and character development style of old science fiction with exhilarating action that contains no holds barred obliteration on a level that I can’t recall seeing in a 12A since War of the Worlds that is expected  of today’s sci-fi Oblivion tries to have its cake and eat it too. For the most part Kosinski succeeds; the film impressively handles the slow-burn and boasts exhausting action but the transition between the two is recurrently turbulent.

Perhaps Oblivion’s best quality is its ability to keep you constantly engaged narratively. Where most Blockbusters these days battle to see who can reveal the most about their film in their trailer, Oblivion doesn’t sacrifice its narrative integrity – albeit at the risk of making itself look like one of the blandest sci-fis of recent years – so when we experience the story in full for the first time in the cinema everything about it feels more epic and earned.

Sound and visuals also play a huge part in viscerally complementing the narrative as Joseph Trapanese and M83’s score is as gorgeous as the Icelandic, Hawaiian and mid-American landscapes that keep us in awe during the film’s immersive action and drama. If you don’t buy a copy of the soundtrack and pretend you’re alone on a grassy mountain as you listen to it immediately after the film there is something severely wrong with you.

Despite some bad publicity and unfair reviews floating around, Oblivion is a crackingly nostalgic-yet-new launching pad for the rest of 2013’s upcoming original science fiction cinema. Shame Tom Cruise does minimal running, though.

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More often than not I don’t get a chance to see a film before its release. Hard to believe though it may be, not all film distributors have yet to discover the wonder that is Mild Concern. For some films we are invited to a press/radio/niche blogger screening and for a few films like A Late Quartet this screening takes place months before the theatrical release. I saw A Late Quartet back in the haze that was 13th January 2013 and as such am relying on my notes to get me through writing this review. Below, in their entirety, are the notes in question:

So much endless talking! Slightly tedious. Just how long was it!?

Thanks for your help Past-Tim. Now allow me to extrapolate…

A Late Quartet is a drama centred around a string quartet approaching the 25th anniversary of their performing as a group. One member of the group discovers he has Parkinson’s and the group begins to unravel as old rivalries and fresh lust bubbles to the surface. The quartet comprises of Catherine Keener (my favourite actor ever), Philip Seymour Hoffman (my favourite actor ever), Christopher Walken (my favourite actor ever), and Mark Ivanir (sorry, who?) so there is a fine pedigree of comedy-drama character actors on display (along with some guy called Mark). Unfortunately the film doesn’t match the quality you would expect from this cast and instead we are left with a dry predictable drama with no sense of humour.

Hoffman and Keener play a married couple with a (crucially of legal age) daughter and Hoffman is having a predictable affair with a woman who you can’t help but feel should be totally out of his league. Keener and Egg Anne Ivanir are former lovers and there is the predictable tension this brings. You’ll never guess what happens when Ivanir’s brooding bachelor is asked to give music lessons to Keener’s attractive daughter played by Imogen Poots. Sure enough, a predictable and pretty bland affair begins.

The acting, as you would expect, is top-notch but the actors have little to get their teeth into. The numerous scenes in which they play their instruments are completely convincing to a musical dunce like me but the drama surrounding it just fell flat. Past-Tim was right; it is just endless talking, and to answer his question the running time is 105 minutes but it feels infinitely longer.

Walken is the film’s saving grace as a man losing the ability to play the music he loves and watching the quartet who should carry on his legacy allow petty rivalries to tear the group apart. Walken gives a tender performance and it is his story that pulled me through to the final scene without me doing my usual trick of falling asleep.

A truly mediocre drama that offers little relief from endless bitterness and infighting A Late Quartet is in UK cinemas from 5th April 2013.

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