The Screengrab : mike leigh

Tim Roth's Good Old Days

Phil Nugent — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

"I can't believe I even did shit like this back then." That's Tim Roth, talking to John Patterson of The Guardian about how he got his breaktrhough role as Trevor the skinhead in Alan Clarke's Made in Britain. "For the final audition - which I think was in front of the producer, the writer David Leland, and Alan - I turned up early on purpose. I came in and I told 'em, 'When you need me I'll be in the park across the way,' knowing full well they'd be watching me through the window. And I did some, you know, character work in the park. And luckily a friend of mine turned up who was in a band called King Kurt. And he has this fucking huge mohawk and I'm bald and we started mock-fighting and he's making a peacock noise - and then the police turned up and got involved - and Alan and his lot are all watching me out the window. And then I went in and did a reading; but by then it was more of a formality than anything else."

Having made his bones with Clarke, and gone on to do memorable work with such directors as Mike Leigh (Meantime), Stephen Frears (The Hit), Chris Menges (A World Apart), Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover), Robert Altman (Vincent & Theo, where his performance as Van Gogh inspired Pauline Kael to describe his acting, admiringly, as "a form of kinetic discharge"), Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction), James Gray (Little Odessa), and Woody Allen (Everyone Says I Love You), Roth is currently starring in the Fox TV series Lie to Me, a transparent attempt by the network to find another overqualified, sardonic Brit to build a hit around before Hugh Laurie plows his motorcycle under a truck. Under these circumstances, it may be no surprise that Roth seems to have latched onto this interview as an excuse to tell all his best stories to someone who might have trouble comprehending his accent. Roth has actually done a lot of work in American movies: "Gary Oldman came to the States to do State Of Grace and he built the bridge for a lot of us who came after. Then I came out and I thought at the time it would be better to keep playing Americans because the casting directors mostly didn't know who the fuck I was; they thought I was American!"

However, his image here is that of indie guy, thanks to his having done so much of his best work in films like Tarantino's or the sadly neglected black comedy Gridlock'd, which may perhaps have suffered from audience's reluctance to laugh at a film about a couple of junkies when one of them was played by Tupac Shakur, who did not survive to see the premiere. On Reservoir Dogs, Roth recalls, ""My agent had me look at Mr Blonde or Mr Pink. I said, 'No, I like Orange.' Because I liked the idea of an Englishman playing an American, playing a cop, pretending to be a bad guy. Complete deception through and through! And I remember walking back to the trailer with Harvey Keitel one day, us both covered in blood, and saying, 'I think this might be pretty good.'" As for Tupac, "He was a natural. A really good actor. I didn't even know who he was then, which is fucking typical of me, but I didn't. [He was] charismatic, funny, and incredibly articulate. We became very good mates. In fact, somewhere in the vaults of Death Row Records, there's a tape of me and Tupac rapping, which is hilarious." We'll see how funny he thinks it is when someone does the right thing and puts them on eBay.

Roth himself made an impressive directing debut ten years ago with the harrowing family drama The War Zone. He still hasn't had the chance to follow it up, but if Lie to Me hangs around for awhile, the chance to store up his TV money might make for a way back to that. "I learned most about directing from the bad directors I've worked with," he says, "because you're better off knowing what not to do"

DVD Digest for March 10, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a handful of the most acclaimed films of 2008, and an animated classic gets released from the Disney vaults again.

This week’s selection of recent releases coming to DVD includes some of 2008’s best-reviewed films, including Sean Penn giving an Oscar-winning performance in Gus Van Sant’s Milk (Universal, also Blu-Ray), Anne Hathaway in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (Sony, also Blu-Ray) [the best film of the year, says I], Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky (Disney), and the Swedish vampire chiller Let the Right One In (Magnolia). Also this week, Jason Statham in Transporter 3 (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the real-life blues story Cadillac Records (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott in Role Models (Universal, also Blu-Ray), Charlize Theron in the WTO-centric ensemble piece Battle in Seattle (Universal, also Blu-Ray), and finally, one of the worst-received films of 2008, Mark Herman’s Holocaust-themed family movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (Disney).

The big news in classic releases this week is the 70th Anniversary “Platinum Edition” of one of Disney’s greatest animated classics, Pinocchio. Also coming to Blu-Ray, the new DVD includes new commentary from Leonard Maltin and others, some newly-unearthed deleted scenes and storyboards, and a bunch of new features for kids and animation buffs alike. Also this week: Richard Gere and Edward Norton in Primal Fear Special Edition (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), and perhaps the least likely “classic” I’ve spotlighted to date, Howard the Duck Special Edition (Universal).

In TV on DVD news, this week brings South Park Season 12 (Paramount, also Blu-Ray) and The Starter Wife Season 1 (Universal).

Finally, the biggest Blu-Ray only release this week is Batman: The Motion Picture Anthology 1989-1997 (Warner), which is great news if you don’t mind paying for two DVDs you’ll probably never watch just so you get DVDs of the Burton Batman movies. Also, where’s Mask of the Phantasm?

Oscar Fallout: MIke Leigh's Diary, Danny Boyle's Home Base

Phil Nugent — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

The last scattered bits of 2009 Oscar news are petering out over the Atlantic. The Guardian has Mike Leigh's Oscar week diary: Leigh, whose Happy-Go-Lucky star, Sally Hawkins, was robbed of the Best Actress nomination she was widely assumed to have coming her way, but Leigh himself somehow managed to nab a nomination for Best Original Screenplay. (This is typical of the Academy's sense of humor, since Leigh is known to develop his movies out of improvisational sessions with his cast and used to take a pass on giving himself official writing credits until he moved from television to theatrical-release films and the unions got involved.) Leigh reports that his Los Angeles cab driver "thinks that we're kidding when we say it's got only one nomination", but not because he thought that the movie deserved better: Travis Bickle had "never heard of Happy-Go-Lucky." A recurrent theme quickly develops. Told that Happy-Go-Lucky is "creeping up in the blogs and polls" and that "yesterday, the bookies' odds in London were 39-1", but Leigh can only shrug and confess that he's "convinced that Dustin Lance Black will win for Milk." His next day in town, he enjoys "breakfast in the patio cafe" with his sons, after which "we potter round Hollywood Boulevard with its stars on the sidewalk and its tacky gift shops - it feels familiar to my film-maker son Leo, who's just been shooting in Blackpool. The boys snap me with a plastic Oscar in a shop. We all agree that's the nearest I'll get to one." The day of the awards, his dates for breakfast are David Hare and the screenwriter Danny Strong, who "insist that my category is wide open, and I stand a good chance. Still unconvinced." Finally, Leigh, who has been nominated twice for director and a total of four times for original screenplay, insists that "At one, weird moment, some strange force suddenly convinces you that you're about to win, while you affect to look benign and generous for the camera that's suddenly in your face; then you don't win, and you spend the rest of the night trying to be grown-up and sporting. You even try to enjoy yourself." He's got the part about covering up his expectation that he might win down to a science. In the end, he claims to be happy to lose to such a deserving crowd (though he thinks Sally Hawkins got shafted) and salutes Danny Boyle as a deserving winner. Give the man credit for being a gentleman.

Boyle himself has been taking his prize on a victory lap, stopping off at "St Mary's Social Club in Radcliffe, Bury, where his family and supporters watched the ceremony", and which Boyle was good enough to give a shout-out to in his Oscar speech. Boyle has already been around to the establish, which his father used to run--"He used to get up and sing, 'Oh Danny Boyle', which was pretty embarrassing when you're 11 years old."--to show off his Golden Globe and his Bafta, and by now you'd think that the locals might be getting a little tired of the sight of him bursting in yelling, "Hey! Look what I got!" But apparently Radcliffe is a tolerant place, and everyone seemed tickled that he'd pulled off a trifecta. Now the local council is considering him for "the honour of Freeman of the Borough of Bury," which comes with fries.

Thursday Poll for January 29, 2009

Paul Clark — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

With Oscar nominations, there of course comes the second-guessing. While many of our favorites made the cut this year, it seems like just as many got the shaft. But which was most egregiously snubbed? In a shocking turn of events, the Best Picture omission of fanboy favorite The Dark Knight was narrowly edged out by Academy voters’ lack of love for Happy-Go-Lucky’s persistently positive Poppy, Sally Hawkins. Hawkins’ non-nomination brought in 37% of the vote (compared to Dark Knight’s 32%), and prompted Steve C. to ask how the Academy could honor the screenplay for Mike Leigh’s film but not Hawkins herself. Astute question, Steve, and I’d add that it’s doubly odd considering that, this being a Mike Leigh film, Hawkins would no doubt have had a good amount of input on the screenplay, given his methods. Coming in third and fourth place, respectively, were Clint Eastwood’s growly star turn in Gran Torino and The Boss' title track from The Wrestler. Finally, only 5% of the voters found Woody Allen’s inability to procure a fifteenth Best Original Screenplay nomination for Vicky Cristina Barcelona to be the Academy’s biggest oversight this year. I guess that makes sense, since after all, it’s not like he’ll show up for the ceremony anyway…

Moving on to the movies that were nominated, I find myself surprisingly unmoved by this year’s crop of Best Picture nominees. Maybe it’s just that we’re coming off a year in which not only did I actually like all five nominated movies, but I thought that two of them- including the eventual winner- were out-and-out masterpieces. This year, on the other hand… yeesh. Of the five nominees, I can only claim to have liked two of them, and I wasn’t even all that keen on those. How about you? How many of this year’s Best Picture nominees did you like?

(In case you’ve forgotten, and I wouldn’t blame you if you have, the Best Picture nominees are: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, and Slumdog Millionaire)

How many of this year's Best Picture nominations did you LIKE? | BuzzDash polls

Bonus poll: much has been made of how this year’s Best Picture nominees are the least box-office-friendly in years, with only one having played in more than 1,000 prior to nomination day. So, just for curiosity’s sake, how many of this year’s Best Picture nominees have you seen?

How many of this year's Best Picture nominations have you SEEN? | BuzzDash polls

As always, the comments section is open. Please keep death threats addressed to non-Dark Knight nominating Academy members to a minimum. See you next week!

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Movies of 2008 (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 21:47:00 GMT

So, by the end of first quarter 2008, I’d seen exactly one memorably list-worthy movie (see #7) and figured it was just gonna be one of those low tide kinda years after a pretty strong 2007 (Knocked Up, Juno, The King of Kong, Gone Baby Gone, Hell On Wheels, Zodiac, 2 Days In Paris, etcetera). And yet, looking back over the past twelve months, I have to admit, to paraphrase Charlie Brown, it wasn’t such a bad little tree, with a lot of perfectly enjoyable (if not terribly memorable) films, as well as a number of...

WILDCARDS: (potentially list-worthy movies unseen by moi in 2008): Man On Wire, Encounters at the End of the World, Waltz with Bashir, Trouble the Water, Let the Right One In, Revolutionary Road, Gran Torino

And now, the Top 10 I did see...

1. YOUNG@HEART

Usually, the top of my Top Ten list is something I’d be happy to watch again at the drop of a hat, but I suspect I’ll never, ever sit through Young@Heart again: the first time was wrenching (and memorable) enough. My wife and I saw the film at the Harvard Square Loews with my Dad, who’s been in AARP territory for quite a while now, and a theater half full of strangers. For the first thirty minutes or so, Stephen Walker’s documentary about feisty senior citizens singing ironic hipster doofus perennials like “I Wanna Be Sedated” and “Staying Alive” was a hoot...and then the first lovable oldster died. And then another, and another, like some horror movie of age we’re all trapped in, and suddenly every single person in the theater was getting smacked right in the kisser with the harsh realities of mortality, and nearly all of us were openly sobbing. Yet for all that, the film is never mawkish: the chorus members are presented as a platoon of happy warriors, singing at the top of their lungs as they march into the shadow of the valley of death, fighting tooth and nail for every last drop of joy they can squeeze out of life, even as their comrades fall around them. As I said before in my 2008 half-time wrap-up, I try not to judge people based on their personal tastes when it comes to movies, but if you can sit through the Young@Heartster’s performance of Coldplay’s “Fix You” (punctuated by the rasp and click of the soloist’s respirator) without a lump in your throat, you may need to check your own pulse.

2. HAPPY-GO-LUCKY

While not as powerful or memorable as Young@Heart, Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky was an equally heartfelt (and far less harrowing) film-going experience, with a similar theme (not to mention a timely one, given the world’s collective George W. Bush hangover): get busy living or get busy dying. Yes, life can be tough and full of injustice and, yes, it’s easy to be aloof and snarky and negative about it, but whether or not that makes anything better (for yourself or anyone else) is the question Leigh tackles here. Underpaid elementary school teacher Poppy (the infectiously great Sally Hawkins) is a relentlessly cheery optimist, the sort of person easily dismissed as a shallow, annoying bubblehead...in fact, one guy I know found the character so irritating he ditched the film after fifteen minutes. But then Poppy encounters her polar opposite, a seething mass of bitterness (embodied in a visceral performance by Eddie Marsan) whose dismal, head-full-of-spiders malevolence provides the necessary contrast to show the true strength and value of Hawkins’ irrepressible sunbeam, raising questions (and suspense) about which of the two worldviews will ultimately triumph.

3. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

Like my fellow Screengrabber Scott Von Doviak, I didn’t expect this Jonathan Demme curiosity to wind up on my Best of 2008 list. Watching it the first time, it seemed unfocused and self-indulgent with its meandering Altman-wannabe pace, its self-consciously eccentric diversity and its melodramatic Lifetime-esque family drama. Yet because of its unusual construction, Rachel Getting Married feels now like a memory of an actual wedding I attended rather than just a movie I watched, adding extra punch to my recollections of the infrequent but correspondingly vivid moments of drama like the blistering showdown between Anne Hathaway’s loose cannon recovering addict Kym (a.k.a. Shiva the Destroyer) and her mother (Debra Winger...damn!) –- though even if Demme hadn’t gotten all artsy with the structure, Hathaway’s mesmerizing performance alone would have been worth the price of admission.

4. FROST/NIXON

Ron Howard’s cinematic adaptation of the acclaimed Peter Morgan play is what I call a “guys-in-suits” movie (one of my favorite genres) where formidable, top-level professionals like Howard, Morgan, Frank Langella (recreating his Tony-winning stage performance as Nixon) and the reliably great Michael Sheen (as Frost) focus their collective talents on a film about formidable, top-level professionals (like the real Frost and Nixon), sparring and strategizing and walking quickly down hallways and corridors rattling off witty bon mots and dense bits of jargon in the midst of high-stakes negotiations and race-against-time showdowns. Some critics have noted the actual historic impact of the Frost/Nixon interviews wasn’t really all that monumental, but the film charts high on my list as an entertaining poker tournament between two fascinating characters (with extra points for Toby Jones’ hilarious cameo as super-agent Swifty Lazar).

5. MILK

Sometimes timing is everything. In twenty years, critics will still be praising Sean Penn’s amazing transformation from scowling, self-important killjoy movie star into sweet, gawky force-of-nature gay activist Harvey Milk, but hopefully by 2028 this film will seem like just another well-made but otherwise run-of-the-mill “issue” film about an issue that’s no longer really an issue. But here in 2008, in the wake of the Proposition 8 disgrace, Milk is still, sadly, very much of the moment, and even for some progressives, the casual man-on-man kissing and romance between Penn’s character and his lovers (James Franco and Diego Luna) is a rare enough sight to give pause. From a historical standpoint, I was horrified to learn that Dan White (well captured by Josh Brolin in a chilling “mundanity of evil” performance) could murder Harvey Milk and the freakin’ mayor of a major American city in cold blood and get just seven years in prison on a manslaughter rap...that fact, combined with the anti-gay slanders of the McCain/Palin campaign (and, really, every Republican campaign in recent memory), the controversy over Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural and the sense of communion at the packed house screenings of Milk during its opening weekend are just some of the reasons Gus Van Sant’s good movie feels like such a great and important one now.

Click Here For Part Two

Morning Deal Report: Golden Globe Nominees Announced, NY Critics Sound Off

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button lead the way with five nominations each, as the Golden Globe nominees were announced this morning. Both were nominated for Best Drama, along with The Reader, Revolutionary Road and Slumdog Millionaire. Meryl Streep is nominated for both Doubt and Mamma Mia, matched by Kate Winslet for The Reader and Revolutionary Road. Other acting nominees include Sean Penn for Milk, Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler and Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight – the sole Bat-nomination. Check out the full roster here.

The New York Film Critics Circle drank up Milk, naming it the best movie of the year and honoring Penn and Josh Brolin for their performances. Happy-Go-Lucky earned kudos for director Mike Leigh and star Sally Hawkins. Penelope Cruz took Supporting Actress honors for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Here's the full list.

“Ben Stiller is set to replace Mark Ruffalo in Greenburg, a comedy-drama Noah Baumbach is writing and directing,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Ruffalo dropped out after the shooting death of his brother last week. Greenburg “is expected to center on the intimacies of relationships in the manner of Baumbach's other films,” if that helps.

Related:
Globes Without Glitter
Auto-Baumbach-graphies

Screengrab Preview: Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

As of this posting, I haven’t yet had a chance to see Happy-Go-Lucky, the latest release by director Mike Leigh...but even so, just based on pedigree alone, the film is already a strong contender for my Best of 2008 list.

Leigh, an admirably egalitarian humanist and keenly observant class warrior from way back, won an Oscar nomination for the abortion bummer, Vera Drake, yet despite his reputation as a director of grim downers, even his bleakest films are less depressing than most standard “feel-good” Hollywood drek thanks to his stubborn, old-school devotion to art over commerce and relatable reality versus artificial sweetener.

His latest, currently winning rapturous reviews (and a 95% favorable tomato-meter critical response at RottenTomatoes.com) features Sally Hawkins in what sounds like a breakthrough performance as Poppy, a cockeyed optimist whose determined cheeriness would be downright unbearable if not for the hardscrabble verisimilitude of Leigh’s cinematic landscapes. Like the mother in Life Is Sweet, Poppy is no bubblehead, but rather a tenacious survivor determined to wring every drop of joy from an often joyless world rather than succumbing to easy cynicism and despair.

Click here for an exclusive Screengrab preview of the film, and keep your chin up, mate!

Related Stories:
Trailer Review: Happy-Go-Lucky
Location, Location, Location: Mike Leigh’s London

Trailer Review: Happy-Go-Lucky

Paul Clark — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Has Mike Leigh gone and made an honest-to-goodness crowd-pleaser? I’m skeptical. Yet that seems to be what Miramax wants us to think, judging by its marketing campaign. So Miramax takes the latest film from Leigh- director of the less-than-cheerful Naked, Life Is Sweet, and Vera Drake- and sells it as a feel-good charmer in the vein of previous Miramax hits like Amelie. Now, I’m sure Happy-Go-Lucky is probably lighter in tone that those aforementioned Leigh films- probably closer in tone to, say, Topsy-Turvy- but I highly doubt it’s the movie the trailer is making it out to be. But then, the Mike Leigh name, Oscar nominations or no, doesn’t carry much box office cachet, and spunky sells better than bleak, so there you go. I’ve still got faith in Leigh, and Berlin reviews were positive, but if I didn’t know the film’s pedigree, this trailer would probably convince me to give the film a pass. As it stands, I’m hoping it’s just a studio hatchet job.

Tribeca film Festival Review: "Bitter & Twisted"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The Australian film Bitter & Twisted, a first film by the writer-director Christopher Weekes, is about a family that hasn't yet recovered from the suicide, three years ago, of the oldest son, Liam. Jordan (Steve Rodgers), a gentle, morbidly obese salesman as "Carn's Car Yard", spends part of each day eating lunch while visiting Liam's grave. Jordan has shut down sexually, and his wife, Penny (Noni Hazlehurst), is in desperate need of being made to feel that she's still desirable. When her period is late, Penny is flustered at the thought of becoming pregnant at 53, then horrified to learn that she isn't pregnant, she's menopausal. She takes her unhappiness out on her teenage daughter, discovered a childish, scribbled love note in the girl's pocket and barging into her room to ask, "Are you having sex!?" Weekes himself plays the younger son, Ben, who keeps showing up at the doorstep of his dead brother's girlfriend Indigo (Leeanna Walsman) and asking her if she'd like to go for a walk. (The sexually ambiguous Ben is being courted by a male friend who keeps a dead pet in the freezer in a plastic bag and recalls that he froze the animal "at the moment he was dying, just as he was reaching up for the light.") Indigo herself, when not humoring Ben with their walks, has taken refuge in an affair with an older, married man (Gary Sweet) and has just learned that she's pregnant. When she confronts her lover and her tells her how "complicated" things are, she replies, "This is something people say when they want to fuck you over and forgive themselves for it."

Bitter & Twisted feels underdeveloped in places, but it's also elliptical in the right ways: whatever reasons Liam had for his suicide are never made clear, and they don't really matter. The movie is about the people left behind, and about the different degrees to which each of them has chosen to remain paralyzed by grief, nursing it and refusing to move on. Jordan has reached the point where his body seems to be trying to either kill him or shock him back to life, and Penny has just started looking into the mirror and reeling from the discovery that time itself didn't freeze that day three years ago: the world has kept barreling ahead without them. Bitter & Twisted isn't quite a comedy, but despite its subject matter and the throbbing ache at its center, it's never merely a downer, either. The performances are superb, and the movie has a fresh, distinctive way of looking at its characters even when the story ends seem frayed. Weekes, who as an actor has some of the anguished angularity of the young Kyle MacLachlan, could turn out to be something special; his best work here already suggests an Australian Mike Leigh, without a political ax to grind.

Famous Last Words, Round 1 Winners! (Finally)

Paul Clark — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Well, it's about stinkin' time. After 12 weeks of regular competition and three tiebreakers- encompassing a total of 21 quotations- we finally have a group of winners for this first round of Screengrab's Famous Last Words game. Even with all of the extra weeks of play, I was unable to whittle down the winners to the pre-determined three, so I decided to award prizes to the five top finishers. The worthy winners are: Ben Herrera, Brian Kennedy, Victor Morton, Marshall Savitt, and Cameron Worden. Each will receive a $25 gift certificate from The Criterion Store.

A prize which, I might add, could potentially be used to help pay for two of the three films represented by last week's quotes. Here are the films in question, for those of you playing at home:

1. "It's the tin lids... when- how- will the world ever..."
"End?"
"Yes." ~ this exchange marks the final dialogue we hear in Mike Leigh's masterpiece Naked, taking place before one of the greatest parting shots in movie history.

2. "Jones is my name. I'm in insurance." ~ this was the gimme of the bunch, coming at the tail end of Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys.

3. "Will there be a last letter?" ~ And this comes from Chris Marker's towering 1982 essay film Sans Soleil. Oddly enough, the film shares a Criterion DVD with Marker's classic La Jetee, which was the inspiration for Twelve Monkeys. I assure you I didn't do that on purpose.

Congratulations to all of the winners, and thanks to everyone who participated. The game will be taking a break for the next few months, but I'm planning to start it up again this summer with a whole new batch of quotes. Until then, remember:

"The end is important in all things."

Location, Location, Location: Mike Leigh’s London

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Mike Leigh has been making films in London since the early 1970s, so it figures he’s a guy who knows his way around town. In anticipation of the April 18th release of his latest, Happy-Go-Lucky, Time Out London asked the man himself for a guided tour of locations from his 18 feature films. They only wanted a few hours, but Leigh was so into the idea, it stretched into two days. The director “barely ever shoots in a studio and the usual drill is that he, his cast and crew will take over a location and inhabit it fully, whether it’s a gothic-looking corner house in Dalston for Naked in 1993 or a derelict council estate in Greenwich for All or Nothing in 2002. It became obvious, too, as Leigh leapt in and out of the car, squeezed through canalside railings in Haggerston, or gamely stood beside the traffic at the entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel, that he lives and breathes this city. There’s no need to ask him where he gets his inspiration from: you’ve only got to watch him in action to see that real people and places mean everything to him.”

Of course, the downside of shooting on location is that real life tends to intrude on your attempts at make-believe. “For Topsy-Turvy we wanted to use a Victorian oyster bar near the Monument,” says Leigh. “But the owner was a very old lady who had once been to a party where someone had said: ‘Never let a film unit in your house.’ Nothing would shift this woman! Not even talk of a putative Royal Command performance. No gold in sums untold would persuade the old girl, so we shot in the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall instead.”

Others are more welcoming, as Time Out learned upon visiting a 19th century block of flats called Stepney Green, which Leigh used as a period location in Vera Drake. “We bump into a woman, one of the residents. ‘Hello, Mr Leigh, are you coming back to shoot here?’ Leigh: ‘It was fun, but I don’t think we’re going to make the sequel, not least because I think we know what happens to Vera: she stops doing what she does.’ The woman: ‘Yes, I liked Vera Drake, but not as much as Topsy-Turvy. Leigh: ‘Yes, there were more songs in Topsy-Turvy.’ ”

You can view the whole tour as a slideshow starting here.

Trailer Review: Made of Honor

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

By now, I know better than to expect realism from most Hollywood movies, especially in the romantic comedy genre, which has always been about vicarious fantasy fulfillment. Still, this trailer begs the question: who ARE these people? Made of Honor seems to take place in an unbearably glossy parallel-dimension version of New York City where everyone is super-successful and sexy, excepting of course the obligatory comic relief nerd. If that's not bad enough, there's Patrick Dempsey, riding out his Grey's Anatomy success as an impossibly smooth (yet sensitive!) ladies' man who has the bad habit of knocking people over when he gets flustered. Cute! I'm not saying that every love story needs to look like a Mike Leigh movie, but the more trailers I see for romantic comedies, the more I'm convinced that the studios are trying to one-up each other for the title of most lavish and opulent onscreen romance, which of course doesn't do wonders for non-Patrick Dempsey-looking guys like me who are still trying to hack their way through the dating scene. Also, after Kiss Kiss Bang Bang a few years back I had high hopes for Michelle Monaghan's career, but it's looking more and more like Hollywood has no idea what to do with her. It's a shame- a talented, appealing actress with a real flair for comedy, she deserves much MUCH better than tripe like Made of Honor.

Screengrab Q&A: Eran Kolirin, Director of The Band's Visit

Peter Smith — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Eran Kolirin's first feature, The Band's Visit, opened in New York and Los Angeles last Friday. A poignant story of an Egyptian police band lost in Israel, the film has won a host of awards worldwide. That the film has done well internationally is fitting, since for all its apparent evocation of local politics, its themes are existential — can we connect with other people, or even with our own pasts? The Band's Visit makes the political personal, capturing perfectly the homesickness that can strike even when you're still at home. And if I'm making it sound grim, it's also got some great jokes. When I reached Kolirin on the phone last week, he sounded weary and lonely, stranded in the middle of a two-week press tour — probably the perfect position from which to promote this wry, bittersweet film.

What was your initial inspiration for this film?
It began with an image of the main character, of Tewfiq, a man in uniform who sings an Arabic song. [Then] part of what you do is to research within yourself why this story interests you. It has my own private nostalgia for Egyptian cinema — part of my lost youth or childhood. I share this incomplete feeling that all of the characters share, a feeling of living beside life and not really touching. A movie is a kind of mirror of your own self.

The central relationship between Tewfiq, the reserved bandleader, and Dina, the woman who takes him in, feels very real. How did you develop it?
No big secret to this. Some of it was developed while working with the actors. Sometimes in a good cast you get this kind of magic, and at least as far as I'm concerned, between Sasson Gabai and Ronit Elkabetz, this is what happened. During the rehearsals we rewrote the scenes. For example, the whole scene of them on the park bench was written through rehearsal.

That relationship encapsulates the whole subtext of the film—the question of whether it's possible to connect with another person. Even though it's about people from different cultures and different languages, there's a universal quality to that struggle.
I never thought I had these characters who are very different and this movie kind of brings them together — not at all, not for a second. It's the very starting point, I never doubted it: they're all the same. And this is why sometimes when people describe the movie as different cultures coming together. . . I never thought about it this way.

As you show in some of the family scenes, it's perfectly possible to feel lonely and isolated even within your own family — never mind different cultures.
Yeah. I kind of have this thing with loneliness. [laughs]

What are some of your favorite films?
Mike Leigh's High Hopes. Down by Law by Jarmusch. I like very much Jean-Claude Brisseau, Sound and Fury. With this movie, I was thinking also of Jacques Tati and Aki Kaurismaki, and I guess there are a lot of others — I like Wenders a lot, I like Bresson and I like Ozu.

There's a very sharp sense of place in this movie. This outpost town, Bet Hatikva, feels very real. I have very strong childhood memories from those places. Since I have asthma, they sometimes would take me to small towns — not where we shot, but towns not far away from there — what they would call in Israel development towns. And I have memories of these concrete buildings — this kind of monumental communist architecture in the desert, and this feeling of distance and emptiness.

I tried to shoot it more like I remembered it than the way it is. It took me a lot of time to understand how to get this feeling. I realized that what makes a difference is the sound of those places. Sometimes in the desert the wind blows in your ears and you go deaf for a second. We tried to somehow capture this feeling in the whole sound of the movie.

If you just told somebody you were making a film about Arabs lost in Israel, they might expect an obvious political statement, which this film isn't.
I know those expectations. In some ways it's kind of a colonialist approach. You're expected to be in this theater play they wrote. And you know, I live in the Middle East, and I'm aware of the politics. This is a political movie as far as I'm concerned. There are questions of culture, there are questions of the connection of Israel to the region, and how it's lost its connection through the process of capitalization and modernization. There's a very specific connection between the Israeli side and the Egyptian side in the movie. They share this same feeling of loss, nostalgia. If you listen close enough and you're acquainted with the cultural conflicts of the region, you would see the movie raises a lot of political questions. Not just the obvious ones about the conflict — I'm not saying those questions are not important, but it doesn't have the character saying, you know, "My brother was killed in the war," and then everyone can sleep comfortably in their beds having been reassured about what it was all about.

How has the film been received in Israel and Egypt?
Unfortunately, it cannot be shown in Egypt, formally anyway, but I've been reading quite a lot of articles from the Arab world about the movie, and I've gotten some good reactions. It's been reviewed quite well in Israel, and again, the nuances, they differ from place to place, but at the end of the day, the proportion of people loving it and not loving it is about the same all over.

Israel couldn't submit this film for an Oscar, because over half of it is in English. Were you disappointed?
I would like to say thank God, because without the Academy Award I've been flying all over the States for two weeks now and I miss home. If I had been a nominee, they would take me here for two months. I would kill myself.