The cover story of this month’s Vanity Fair paints a disturbing picture of a major Hollywood movie going off the rails. Over-budget and with its release date delayed, the film is further troubled by a lack of creative vision and no clear sense of how to deliver a concluding third act. These are production problems that you might assume would beset a mainstream blockbuster – the film in the Vanity Fair story is Brad Pitt’s zombie epic World War Z, by the way.
A collaboration between filmmaker Michael Winterbottom and star Steve Coogan, where a lad from the north west of England makes good in unconventional circumstances, accompanied by a bunch of like-minded, but broadly eccentric characters. This is the story of Soho porn entrepreneur Paul Raymond, but it could just as easily describe the trajectory of Tony Wilson, the subject of Winterbottom and Coogan’s first collaboration, 24 Hour Party People – or even Coogan’s own back story, which stretches back to his working class origins in Liverpool.
There already exists a hefty body of work documenting the adventures of record label bosses from the punk era and beyond – but the accomplishments of Terri Hooley have so far been largely unrecorded.
Hollywood has never quite known what to do with Park Chan-wook. On the face of it, a director of extremely violent genre films like Sympathy For Mr Vengeance and Oldboy, dig a little deeper however and Park’s output isn’t that easy to qualify. His films are violent, yes, and often in the most grisly sense possible, but they are also astonishing to watch – beautifully styled and composed – and undercut with a rich sense of the absurd.
Hitchcock arrives, rather inconveniently, two months after the superior BBC/HBO co-production The Girl, which cast Toby Jones as a deadpan, ruthless Hitch and Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedron, the blonde star of The Birds and Marnie who endured his abuse.
With Flight, director Robert Zemeckis has made a solid, unshowy character drama, the kind of film cinemagoers of a certain age will tell you the studios don't really make any more. It reminds me a little of an Eastwood movie - specifically, with Eastwood in his capacity as a film director, that is.
Lincoln begins with the Battle of Jenkin’s Ferry in Arkansas in April, 1864, at the height of the American Civil War. It is a messy, close-quarter scrap in the mud between black and Confederate soldiers, with men shooting, stabbing, punching, flailing and gouging at each other. The rest of Spielberg’s film is about conflict, too, but of a less visceral kind: the constitutional battles Lincoln faces on screen, and the tussle off-camera between Spielberg’s ropey tendencies to mythologise and Tony Kushner’s scrupulous screenplay that strives for fact and precision.
