Incendies [film review]

There are two stories running through Denis Villeneuve's award-winning French-Canadian film, Incendies. But, as is pointed out in a slightly strained mathematical analogy, one plus one sometimes equals one.

Based on a earlier play, Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies takes its central characters, twins Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Mélissa Désormaeux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette), from Canada to Lebanon, following a quest set by their mother's Will in 2009. She, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal - also seen in the BBC's Occupation) has insisted her grave remains unmarked until they find the father and brother whose existence they've only just discovered.

Meanwhile – as it were – the young Nawal, in 1970s Lebanon, is living through the upheaval and religious warfare rampant in the Middle East. Her brother kills her lover, before her newborn son is taken away for adoption. Azabal gives us a spirited heroine, contrasting with the shellshocked woman we've already seen her become in contemporary Canada at the shattering moment when those two stories collide. It's a powerful and moving story of ugly actions across a divided nation. Seriously, this is a period of history well worth reading up on in light of Incendies.

The twins uncover more and more of their mother's story, and inevitably discover more about their own origins than they're comfortable with. There's a human drive for knowledge, a curiosity in the face of a conundrum which keeps pushing the twins inexorably onwards. They don't know it, but it's a quest for self-knowledge as much as it is a quest for their father and brother. The tight plotting and human thirst for knowledge in Incendies wouldn't be out of place in a Greek tragedy, and here it lends Incendies a throbbing ache in its heart; humans can be so curious they'll find things they don't want to know.

In fact, there's definitely something Oedipal about that missing brother, taken as he is just after having his ankle tattooed. The tattoo is one marker allowing us to follow his life in snapshots through the same war that his mother survives. It's a war that hardens him, and Incendies doesn't shy away from the acts of brutality committed, though always leaving just enough unseen and unsaid for the blanks to be filled in. That said, the order of events is masterfully handled in a way to make Greek tragedians spin in their graves, but to deliver a full-on shock to the modern audience.

A film that starts as powerfully as Incendies could build to something angry, something bereft of hope. The first five minutes leave the viewer fixed firmly in the gaze of a young boy (with a tattooed ankle) whose hair is being shaved by soldiers conscripting an orphanage. His eyes appeal for outside help even while defiance shines from them – how like his mother, later imprisoned and raped by the militia.


But what finally comes out of Incendies is forgiveness and the unbreakable love of family. Incendies teaches us that humanity can somehow overcome the ugliness it creates. Or at least that a family may do so.

Howl [film review]

What is great art? How are you going to define literary merit? What things do you look for to decide that a piece of art is good, great, indifferent or simply bad? You had better be ready with a least an idea of answers to those questions.

Rob Epstein’s and Jeffrey Friedman’s film Howl focuses on and takes its title from Allen Ginsberg’s four part poem, Howl, in which Ginsberg articulates his vision of the world in 1955. It’s not an especially positive vision, following the travels of Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met when both men were patients in a mental health institute. You should probably read it yourself, but in Allen Ginsberg’s nasal, drawn-out voice with its curious cadences; it sounds better that way, and Ginsberg’s poetry is very aural. A lot of poetry works best when performed rather than read silently (some might say a poem stands or falls on its performance – and maybe that’s a way of defining great art in poetry), but this is especially true of Ginsberg’s work.

Howl brought Ginsberg to public attention, and even more so when it landed the publisher in court two years later for breaching obscenity laws. It was Howl that launched Ginsberg onto his journey to becoming, as the film Howl claims, one of the most celebrated poets of the Twentieth Century.

Obscenity trials are great for getting the debating juices flowing. The arguments involved are usually much bigger than the works of art that initially sparked them off. The trial – perhaps very publicly – becomes a verbal battlefield for two sides in wars between conservative and liberal thinking, between upholding moral standards and freedom of speech, between adult seriousness and youthful artistic expression.

The film Howl documents the poem Howl’s trial on grounds of obscenity, interspersed with an interview with Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) and animated renderings of the poem itself. Jon Hamm (he of Mad Men fame) defends the literary merit of Ginsberg’s poem (as well as arguing over what constitutes literary merit) accusations that the poem is puerile and lacks the redeeming qualities found in ‘great’ art.

I put it to you that great art creates its own form and is original in that respect. It should have no precursor, no obvious inspiration that has been altered to suit the writer’s purpose (we’re talking about literature, even though we say ‘art’).

But doesn’t that view overlook the fact that great art is often great because it nods to the formal rules, then breaks or twists them, and experiments with them creatively? Isn’t it true that individual works of art are rarely entirely unique, but often borrow from others? And isn’t literary merit fairly subjective anyway? Isn’t art something that can be appreciated by one person even if not by the next? Answers on a postcard please.



Poetry – and I don’t just mean Allen Ginsberg’s poetry – is all about the words creating images for an audience (of readers or listeners). It’s painting pictures with sound , rhythm and cadence, in a way that prose can’t quite manage (as one of Howl’s advocates explains in the trial). By animating Ginsberg’s words, Howl the film seems to miss the point of poetry. Epstein and Friedman imply that Ginsberg’s words alone – ably performed by Franco – aren’t enough to conjure images of the god Moloch, or of the thousand blind windows of his eyes, or of the best minds of Ginsberg’s generation drifting through life and reeling from the effects of World War Two. It seems only animation can convey the epic scope of Ginsberg’s Howl. The sexual exploits of his friend (the cocksman, the Adonis of Denver) and the cosmic search for meaning undergone by Solomon and humanity can apparently not be appreciated in words without us having them visualised for us. Stunning as the animation is, it is reductive and undermines the power of Ginsberg’s howl.

I leave you with another question: is the literary critic a better judge of whether art is obscene, or is the average reader (whoever that is) a better judge? That’s a question thrown up late on in Howl, and not really covered.

One more: is a film a great piece of art if it raises more questions than it answers, eloquently defends free speech, probes at our definitions of what constitutes ‘merit’ and ‘great’ and also fires up the imagination through poetry and imagery? That’s Howl, helped out by Allen Ginsberg – make up your own mind (it’d be in line with Ginsberg’s approval of free thought and individual expression).

Up in the Air

Here's a film that – despite the solitary isolation of its main character – is all about human relationships and intimacy. No, really.

Even though Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) spends most of his time zipping across America in American Airlines jets, expenses paid, this is a film that finally emphasises the need for human contact. Bingham's life is obsessed with jumping queues and staying in Hilton rooms paid for by his boss (not for nothing does his love interest (Vera Farmiga's Alex) say that they are two people 'turned on by elite status'. It's a pretty soulless life, a fact almost mourned by the film's final shots – taken in flight – when the music underscoring Clooney's final monologue cuts out as he finishes. We are left with just the distant hum of the jet engines and the clouds, rolling away endlessly below. It's an empty, empty world.

Even in the opening credit sequence, Up in the Air manages to present America as an ugly, soulless place – using snapshot after snapshot of uniform, bland cities and open, uninteresting fields to show Clooney's vast national travelling. He's a man working his way up to the landmark ten million air miles, so naturally there's a lot of flying involved.

His job? He fires people for a living, working in one of the few industries whose workers clap their hands with glee at the first sign of a financial crisis. The global recession is their payday. Company directors that have been forced to downsize hire men like Clooney's Bingham to lay off the workforce they themselves daren't face. Again and again, as he fires another hapless worker, Bingham is asked how he can sleep at night, what should the newly-unemployed tell the people at home that rely on their pay cheque? Bingham is a smooth operator, well-rehearsed in dodging such questions and avoiding all forms of human connection with these people. Instead, he hands them a load of paperwork to help them fulfil their dreams and live up to their true potential, a way of looking at their redundancy as a positive, life-enhancing experience.

But for all Bingham's 'philosophy' of cutting lose from interpersonal connections and being a lone individual, life just keeps forcing relationships onto him. From his sister's upcoming wedding to the rookie (Natalie – Anna Kendrick) assigned to shadow him at work (in planes and offices around America) and learn the ropes, through to the woman he hooks up with when their flying schedules allow, Bingham just can't get away from human relationships. It's perhaps ironic that his dream – that air miles milestone – involves as a prize a meeting and conversation with the human face of American Airlines, chief pilot Maynard Finch (Sam Elliott). But where it really hits him hard is when he's the one asked to talk to his sister's intended (Danny McBride), who gets cold feet on the day of the wedding. Suddenly, he has to argue in favour of relationships and family and children – all of which he argues against in his motivational speeches for the touring speakers' circuit.

Crucially, the comedy lies in the personal touches. Natalie's scene or so of personal revelation after being dumped by text, for example – ironic, as she's the one keen to introduce to Bingham's company firing by videophone, thus removing what he values as a personal touch (again, a life with little interpersonal interaction) – or the easy, early flirting between Bingham and Alex.

But what Clooney's boyishly charming Bingham finally realises – and should have known all along – is that he actually quite wants to settle and that maybe, for some people at least, companionship is no bad thing. Therein lies the heart of the matter.

2012

In some ways, it'd be a blessing if the world did end in 2012. For one, we wouldn't have to sit through the shame of Britain's Olympics going really badly (over-budget, late, silly-looking designs even when complete, that kind of thing, never mind the actual performance of British athletes). We could probably also avoid getting hyped-up about a possible second Obama term, as well, with all the incumbent rhetoric of hope that may or may not ever get fulfilled.

Those aren't things that are important to the latest end-of-the-world film, 2012, which seems to try to take a more realistic view of the whole affair. Hey, they've even got scientists predicting stuff...and getting the schedule wrong! A writer whose book about the end of the world, in which people acted selflessly, is criticised for being naïve. So, the makers of 2012 probably don't want us to think that they're pulling any punches.

But...are they pulling any punches? There might be a bit too much sentimental 'we all need to pull together in the cause of common humanity' stuff (rhetoric of hope?) to avoid such an accusation, but it's still quite touching. Yes, maybe the closing scene is a bit optimistic, but only because of the things it misses out. In fact, there's a lot missing here that would make it much bleaker a film.

Now, let's be honest. The way the trailer plugs this is very much about the effects. The film's main draw is the utter (and I mean utter) destruction of the world. It seems to be the first of two (probably more) films this year to involve 'the end of the world as you know it' (the other, curiously, is Sherlock Holmes, not a subject known for its apocalyptic overtones). There may be a modicum of science thrown in – something about solar flares and neutrinos – but it's basically about watching the planet ripping itself to bits while people scramble to get out of the way. Various governments have been tipped off by science, and so have started building ships, or arks as they're known (watch out for the kid called Noah...see what they did there?).

That 2012 comes from the same director (Roland Emmerich) as he who did Stargate and Independence Day should come as no surprise. Similar sort of people – with immediate access to the US President – bustling through corridors of power, slightly incomprehensible scientific tecnhobabble...oh, and devastation on a planetary scale.

And what devastation! The rumbling, rising of Yellowstone is especially fun, and fictitious plane flights have probably never been so harrowing. There's some slightly improbable dashing away from oncoming danger – lucky then, that John Cusak's character is professional driver, able to race away from what seems like a huge, angry mole in hot (underground) pursuit.

Moments like Woody Harrelson's harmless (and spot-on) conspiracy nutter getting blasted into smithereens are rewarding, as is the one when the President's daughter gets dewy-eyed as the attractive, principled scientist makes a moral case for the sake of humanity, very much in her father's style (the way that ends up is all a bit predictable). Less rewarding are moments like the wanton destruction of a load of flashy sports cars – beautiful things, absolutely no need to trash them. Sometimes, it feels like destruction for the sake of it.

Mind, that's what the trailer advertises, so it shouldn't be a surprise. Plot: hammy. Ending: dodgy. Sense of governments dealing with difficult situations: hope-inspiring. General note of apocalypse: amazing.

The Soloist

Man is a social creature. No matter what the company he keeps, he invariably wants to exist in company.

He – or she, for that matter – also tends to think of himself before others, which is called greed and has led over the centuries to massive differences between the most impoverished and the most wealthy of humanity. There's a line in ITV's recent Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff says he made his fortune by taking advantage of other men's weaknesses – and it's a sentiment that rings very true for all fortunes made on the back of some exploited person.

Exploitation is a big theme hanging over true-story The Soloist. It's the latest film about a gifted person in poverty (and with mental health issues on this occasion), who meets someone that sees his talent and wants to help him. That would be sweet, if it weren't for the fact that the person helping him is reporter for the LA Times – Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) – who features this homeless, schizophrenic prodigy of a musician in his newspaper column and picks up a journalism award for it. As he picks up his award, his ex-wife jokes that he's exploiting this man – Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) – and tells him he should write a book as well as the column. She neglects to mention the film that would be adapted from that book.

Meanwhile, Ayers is slumming it with the 90,000 homeless people of Los Angeles. He's been homeless since running away from the college course that allowed him to play cello in an orchestra, which went downhill once he started hearing voices. Now he's down-sized and plays his two-stringed violin in the streets. He's the soloist of the title, but this story belongs to Lopez. He's the reporter that starts off telling his readers about Ayers, but then gets more involved until he's writing about the ways that he's changing Ayers' life – whether Ayers likes it or not.

While such philanthropy is admirable, it seems misplaced, or perhaps misjudged. Lopez directs his efforts at one man, who only appreciates it some of the time. He's a man uncomfortable indoors, a man who is happiest listening to the sounds of Beethoven's string compositions swelling through the city air and mingling with the sounds of the freeway traffic and building work. Lopez's intrusive 'help' sees him moved to an apartment, and away from the sounds of people that had surrounded him. While it seems an improvement on the crowded slum (crowded mostly with black and mentally handicapped people, the oft-ignored side of America), Ayers has chosen that slum over the apartment he used to have.

It seems the American Dream in which everyone is free to do as s/he pleases has gone sour, as Lopez imposes his help on Ayers while using his story to win awards (and presumably Brownie points at the local philanthropists' club), and a cello teacher tries to convert the prodigy to God.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

If you know what the Transformers are, you know pretty much what to expect from this sequel to 2007's film, Transformers, also based around the wars of the Hasbro action figures. If you know the difference between Autobots and Decepticons, you already know what to expect. If you've seen that 2007 film, you probably have a good idea of what to expect. You'll probably not be surprised by whatever happens in the third Transformers film that this one sets up as a possible sequel.

In fact, if you've ever seen the last ten minutes of an episode of Power Rangers, you've got the basic idea of the Transformers films: big robots knock seven bells out of each other, ideally in the middle of a bustling metropolis. Add in a bit of King Kong or Cloverfield and you've got the American military trying to take down the bad guys.

Like the Power Rangers, Transformers also have a raft of merchandise. Unlike the Power Rangers, the Transformer toy came first, before the films or TV shows. Another difference is the sheer scale of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It is huge. Massive battle scenes play out across deserts, all over cities and through the skies. They even go under water (no rusting!) and into space. There is a plot loosely tacked onto all this, but it's basically a series of opportunities for big robots to smash each other up. If anyone's interested, evil Decepticon leader (with a name like that, you'd know not to trust them, eh?) the Fallen (voiced by Tony Todd) is keen to get hold of the Matrix of Leadership in order to activate his monumentally huge gun that will harvest Earth's sun. He releases stalwart villain Megatron (Hugo Weaving's voice) from the ocean, so Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) – with human Sam (Shia LeBeouf) – must once again save the world. All fairly standard rescue-the-mystical-key-with-a-silly-name-from-an-ancient-tomb-and-stop-the-baddies'-superweapon. It's all a bit Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull meets The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor – with big robots.

But the plot isn't really important; you're watching a Transformers film for the thrill of cars or plans or trucks turning into ten-tonne robots and slapping each other about. You're watching to see which humongous weapon the American military will wheel out next. You're watching for the explosive set-pieces and battle-sequences that hit you time and again. That's what Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen does, and does very well. Don't watch for the plot; it's not the point and you'll only be disappointed (or start asking questions about whether an American military incursion in Jordan to fight the easily-identified Decepticons is easier/better than an incursion into Afghanistan to fight the trickily-identified Taliban, or why the f*ck-off rail gun is only used on Rampage but not on the Fallen or Megatron).

Also, Mark Ryan's decidedly northern – and brilliantly cynical – cranky Jetfire is well worth watching for, along with twins Wheelie and Skids (both Tom Kenny's voice) and their deliciously creepy ice cream van. Shame they get 'upgraded' so early on.

A Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

One of the main reasons the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart in 1918 was that is was made up of several very different groups of people who just didn't get on. But, before 1914, the Empire had been considered useful as a means of balancing power in Europe between more powerful nations.

If you think that's an incredibly simplified, even reductive, view of history, then you understand what A Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian feels like. It throws in one or two fairly well-known facts about historical figures and events, and paints its characters with broad brushstrokes to avoid getting bogged down in any complicated meaning. But, in its defence, it pleases its target audience with delightfully bad baddies and gloriously good goodies.

Just look at those baddies...a megalomaniac Egyptian Pharaoh (always good for the old 'resurrect a dead army and take over the world' idea – sound familiar?), Ivan the Terrible (who is here far too much of a pushover – literally), Napoleon Bonaparte (played with some French stereotyping in mind – he's also too tall, surely?) and Al Capone (who amusingly appears in monochrome, even in the real world). What a line-up of evil.

Against them is Amelia Earheart (sounding like a good twenties British gel but played by an American – how odd), General Custer (a dubious choice of military leader at the best of times), Octavius Caesar (Augustus, to later historians, and here easily confused with foster-father Julius), the Lincoln Memorial given life (don't get me started on the whole 'giant statue of Lincoln stomping about saving the day and uttering quasi-philosophical statements in a meaningful, deep voice) and Ben Stiller's Night Guard from the previous film in which museum exhibits come to life. Oh, and Owen Wilson's odd little cowboy, who mercifully spends most of the film trapped inside an hourglass. There's even a potential sweet romantic ending, when Stiller meets a real woman who just happens to be the spitting image of Earheart...seriously?

What appeals about this film is the idea of people from different periods of history fighting it out, with various bits of modern technology, or just things they shouldn't really be able to get hold of. Ancient Egyptian troops with tommy guns, say. But it never really works. As an idea, it's been done before – at least once – an episode of Star Trek being the occasion that springs to mind, and it didn't work terribly well in the sixties either (they also brought back Abe Lincoln, and a later episode of Star Trek: Voyager even brought back Amelia Earheart). The biggest problem is the idea that a man like Napoleon or Ivan the Terrible would go along with a long-dead Pharoah's plans for world-domination, and not set up some plan of their own.

Then there's the issue of historical reportage. I think I can just about cope with Lincoln miraculously saving the day...even though his main reason seems to be that he's a whopping huge chunk of marble, and who's going to argue with that? I can also cope with the presentation of Custer as a 'do first, think later' coward of a General with an inflated sense of his own importance. What I'm not so sure about is that Lincoln here seems to be the best possible thing for America, and the best America has ever had, while Custer is persuaded that the Battle of Little Bighorn (his famous Last Stand that cost 208 American lives (including his own) for the sake of Custer's vanity and pride) is all in the past, and that actually, he's a good man to have in a fight. I'd worry about his military shrewdness, and am definitely unsure about Lincoln's negative traits being glossed over.

Though the colour and cheap jokes seem to satisfy the younger target audience, you've got to wonder what A Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is teaching them.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - yes, my first published film review

So, what happens when you get two – probably indestructible – men to fight each other? Does either of them win? Can either of them win?

That's the problem Danny Huston's Colonel Stryker finds himself presented with in the latest instalment of the X-Men franchise, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a prequel which fills in what Hugh Jackman's Wolverine had forgotten at the start of the first X-Men film. Stryker wants to use his super-dooper new toy – Weapon XI (Scott Adkins) – to attack and kill Weapon X – Wolverine. It shouldn't be too much of a problem, because, you see, Stryker has been using Wolverine's big brother Sabertooth (Liev Schreiber) to round up fellow mutants, then has sinister scientist-types steal their super powers and create one super mutant with them. So, the rather unimaginatively named Weapon XI can pull most of the tricks we've already seen X-Men pulling off: claws in his hands; samurai skills; stupidly rapid movement; climbing really big things really fast; blasting searing energy out of his eyes; being pretty much indestructible...that sort of thing. The perfect weapon with which to kill Wolverine, who's decided not to go along with Stryker's plans in the war (basically Stryker vs. the mutants) on mutants.

Except that Stryker has only gone and made Wolverine indestructible too! In fact, that's where Weapon XI gets his indestructibility from – though you have to be pretty sharp (or imaginative about adding in your own scenes to films) to spot the moment at which Wolverine's DNA is actually taken for this purpose. But it must happen, because Weapon XI also does the whole 'sliding-blades-out-from-his-knuckles' thing, because he's as cool as Wolverine.

It's actually a classic moment of one-upmanship, that. Wolverine has just slid his metal bones out, so Weapon XI (really needs a better name) slides out his much, much longer samurai swords from his knuckles. If he could speak you just know he'd say, “You call those blades? These are blades!” before proceeding to engage in that age-old male-bonding technique, also known as battering seven bells out of each other. Which is all they can really do, because both are indestructible.

But don't overlook the male bonding and machismo of this film. You could almost think it's a film that serves as a withering critique and satire on the culture of masculine beauty that dictates a need for hairy, muscle-bound men, who are sensitive enough to have their hearts broken (because of weedy men too cowardly to fight for themselves – I'm looking at you, Stryker) but can also beat each other to a pulp. Or maybe I'm being too generous, and it could just be that this is a film that wraps itself up in too much fighting/explosions/competition/freaky mutant stuff, at the expense of a working plot. For a start, why is it that the one thing deemed capable of killing – the indestructible – Wolverine is a bullet made of the same metal that his skeleton is reinforced with? Then, if you have that weapon, Stryker, why send Agent Zero – a thankless role for Daniel Henney – and Weapon XI out to kill him...without it? Of course they won't make it back!

If you can keep up with the dodgy plotting – jumping over the holes as you go – and like your heroes muscled and feral, X-Men Origins: Wolverine might do for you. But don't expect brilliance.

Captain Scarlet is still my favourite indestructible hero.