'We Need To Talk About Kevin' directed by Lynne Ramsay.

Produced by: Jennifer Fox, Luc Roeg, and Bob Salerno.

Written by: Lynne Ramsay and Rory Stewart Kinnear. (Based on a novel by Lionel Shriver).

Starring: Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, and Ezra Miller.

Year of release: 2011.

Country: United Kingdom and United States.

Budget: $7 Million.

Box Office: $4, 339, 547.

This was a difficult one to watch. It’s billed as a psychological thriller, but you should read that as ‘arty-movie-that-doesn’t-quite-fit-into-a-genre-so-we’ll-just-tack-on-Psychological-Thriller’. Won’t go into too much detail about the plot, you can find that on the Wikipedia entry here. To summarise it in a sentence? How about: Mother deals with life after her sociopathic son performs a massacre via bow-and-arrow at his high-school. There is another movie coming out featuring Maria Bello and Martin Sheen that deals with the same theme, but judging by that film’s trailer, it couldn’t be more different from this.

Though it’s not particularly violent (at least not until then end), it’s still a film that is unbearable to watch. This is perhaps reinforced by the recurring and uncomfortable motif of thick red liquid plaguing Tilda Swinton’s Eva Katchadourian in virtually every scene that she is in. From the beginning, Eva is covered in it in the form of crushed tomatoes when she takes place in La Tomatina, the famous festival that occurs in Spain. This first scene is a flashback that establishes Eva as a travel-hungry, adventurous, and childless woman in absolute bliss. The film quickly jumps to Eva as she is several months after the massacre that her teenage son committed. She wakes up on her couch in a faded Led Zeppellin t-shirt and hurries to go to work only to notice that her house has been vandalised by red paint, most likely by a parent of a student that Eva’s son killed. Whoever the vandals are, they manage to tag a good portion of the front of her house and the windshield of her car. Eva then has to use newspaper to remove the thick red paint from her windshield so that she can drive to work. The sight of Tilda Swinton removing viscous red substance from her property and herself is something that you’ll soon get used to. Whilst some might say that it is an obvious symbol, it’s effective nonetheless. Her constant cleaning gives us the sense that she’ll never be able mop up all the blood that her son has spilled, on a social and emotional level.

It must be said that Tilda Swinton is marvellous in this film. I’d heard a lot of buzz about her performance before I managed to see it, and it’s justified. Though a lot of this works purely because of the structure of her face. Swinton is really quite strange looking-- I mean this as the utmost compliment. I think if they were to cast someone with a more conventional appearance that the film might suffer as a result. Kevin is such an odd and hostile child, and for someone as conventionally beautiful as say...Rachel Weisz to give birth to such a sociopath would cheapen the whole event. It sounds like I’m saying that the film works because only ugly people give birth to sociopaths, but that’s not what I mean at all. Swinton is really quite striking; just in a way that is not in line with traditional Hollywood beauty. I simply think that by putting an unconventionally looking actress in the lead, Ramsay manages to highlight that each individual is utterly genetically unique, and that this could be why some babies are born sociopathic. Swinton is also a brilliant actress who takes us through such a strange range of emotions. She’ll get an Oscar nom for this, though I don’t know whether the Academy will give her another statue. Needless to say Swinton is a fucking powerhouse.

As for the central theme of the film; well it’s a complicated one that comments on the age old psychological conundrum of Nature vs. Nurture. The film presents us with the question: ‘Why is Kevin the way that he is?’ and the two answers that it seemingly hints at is that he was either born that way, or that he was made that way due to Eva’s own lack of empathy. This is one of those films that is left intentionally ambiguous. There is evidence to suggest both possibilities. When Kevin constantly mucks up as a toddler, a fed-up Eva tells him: “Mommy was happy until Kevin came along, now she wakes up every day and wishes she was in France.” Even though Kevin is only very young when she says it, it’s sort of implied that he could certainly pick up on her tone.

This film is one that will certainly inspire a lot of heated debate amongst film-goers, and I might even be tempted to write a more detailed argument about what I think the film says about the ‘Nature vs. Nurture’ issue. However, this review is already spiralling well past the five-hundred word limit. It is enough to say that it is a really riveting, though gut-wrenching film. It’s the kind that I probably won’t watch again, at least not for a while.

Four stars:

'Tree of Life' directed by Terrence Malick.

Produced by: Dede Gardner, Sarah Green, Grant Hill, Brad Pitt, and Bill Pohlad.

Written by: Terrence Malick.

Starring: Brad Pitt, Sean Penn, and Jessica Chastain.

Year of release: 2011.

Run Time: 139 minutes.

Budget: $32 Million.

Gross Revenue: $54, 246, 069. 

“The nuns taught us that there are two ways through life- the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow. Grace doesn’t try to please itself, accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked, accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world shines around it, and love is smiling through all things.” Jessica Chastain’s Mrs. O’Brien informs us in voice over at the beginning of Tree of Life, and we the audience know that it is in for something special.

This movie was my second experience of Terrence Malick’s exceptional writing/direction, the first being The Thin Red Line, which is often unfairly compared unfavourably with Saving Private Ryan due to the proximity of its release to Spielberg’s war epic. I’m happy to report that Tree of Life is a stunning film—one of those classic films that inspired me to start writing a blog about film in the first place. Not only is it visually intriguing, and riveting dramatically, it also connects two ideas that have too long stood unrelated in the general zeitgeist: the relationship between the evolution of species and human behaviour.

If I were to recommend a companion book for this movie, it would certainly be Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. This book is a consciousness shifter, the kind that changes your entire view on life after you read it. If you have ever found yourself pondering why humans behave the way they do, then let me assure you that The Selfish Gene provies an answer, and indeed the answer to that timeless question of the meaning of life. And if The Selfish Gene provides the answer, then Malick’s Tree of Life certainly extends the reach of the book well into human psychology, attempting to explain human nature through a scientific lens. Is it successful? Probably not as much as it could have been if the run-time was extended by another two hours, but Tree of Life still stands as one of the most thought provoking films of 2011 (it is perhaps bested by Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, which I shall endeavour to review at some point).

When I say that Malick attempts to explain human psychology via a scientific lens, I suppose you’d be forgiven for thinking that the film is a cold consideration of humanity, much like Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion. It is a sad fact that most people quickly associate the word ‘scientific’ with words like ‘cold’, ‘sterile’, and ‘non-living’. When the grandiose and beautiful reality of biology on Earth is considered, science is quickly transformed into something that is warm and wonderful (though sometimes cruel indeed). Tree of Life is filled with such warmth, and such insight into what it is like to be a human, that you'd be a pretty hard individual to not be at least a little moved by it. It successfully manages to marry the depth of human emotion with the scientific crane of evolution by natural selection in a way that would make Richard Dawkins proud.

By now, you’re probably aware that the film doesn’t follow a linear narrative path, but rather presents fragments of narrative through stunning images. This is certainly true in the first half of the film, which leads up to the much lauded montage of the big bang, right on past the evolution of simple life forms, to the extinction of the dinosaurs. After this however, Malick explores the life of the O’Brien family much more comprehensively, though altogether natural and realistic. You get the sense that you are actually witnessing real lives, as opposed to characters, and scenes where the boys of the film put themselves in danger cause a primitive emotional response; you wish you could reach into the film and tell them to stop doing what they are doing.

The film is marred a little in the last twenty-minutes, where it kind of meanders off and doesn’t really make much sense (at least not to me), but ultimately Malick achieves something that no other film-maker has; a vision that is beautiful and utterly unique. Is this not more than we can ask for as an audience of cinema? Though Tree of Life might not change your outlook on life completely, its ideas will stay with you pleasantly for weeks. It's also one of those movies (much like 2001: A Space Odyssey) that's going to be interpreted and reinterpreted for years. I thoroughly recommend this one.


                                               Four-and-a-half stars:

'The Ledge' directed by Mathew Chapman.

‘The Ledge’ directed by Mathew Chapman.

Produced by: Michael Mailer, Mark Damon and Mathew Chapman.

Written by: Mathew Chapman.

Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Terrence Howard, Liv Tyler and Patrick Wilson.

Release date: January 21^st, 2011 (Sundance)

Budget: $10 Million.

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I thought that it could be interesting. It’s essentially a thriller based around the conflict between religion and atheism, a debate which has grown in popularity since Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion and subsequently released a bee in the bonnet of pretty much anyone that takes the concept of faith seriously. I think there are a lot of people out there tapping away on keyboards that are all too ready to proudly take a position on the issue. All you need to do is sign up to an internet message board and hang around for a while before an atheism/religion argument pops up. I’m not saying that it’s not an important debate (it’s probably the most important), I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are too many people out there in cyberspace that are arguing the issue just for the sake of arguing (this is true of both sides). For the record I’m an atheist, and for one more record, I’m not a physicist or a biologist that has dedicated my life to the pursuit of answering the big questions. So for the remainder of this review, I’m gonna do what it is people who aren’t physicists or biologists should do when it comes to questions about reality: Shut the fuck up.

As an atheist, however, I was interested to see how the The Ledge would unfold. I went in expecting heated drama motivated by two opposing views of life. What I got was an unconvincing mess of a film that was, at the best, clichéd to the point that it was laughable, and at the worst, more pretentious than your average Mac owner.  It appears that Chapman (writer/director) has written the script with a copy of The God Delusion at his side, and simply shoe-horned each argument into his plot. Whilst this is not necessarily enough to make the film shit, Chapman solved that problem by injecting his movie full of the over-dramatic cheese that only Americans seem to be capable of.

An example of this? Well, The Ledge has its damsel-in-distress in the form of Liv Tyler’s character Shana, a devoutly religious woman who is married to the worst kind of alpha-male—the one that has received a higher calling from Yaweh himself. Why is Shana religious? Because she used to be a prostitute and one of her johns had a church fetish: he liked to have sex prostitutes inside churches and then beat them up. This is no joke folks, Liv Tyler tells us so in the second act. When she says it, the first thing I wondered was how the hell you have sex inside a church without anyone noticing. The second thing I wondered was just how obvious the whole backstory was. This is the kind of writing you’d expect from a tenth grade emo kid’s creative writing assessment. The kind the teacher probably laughed at, but ultimately gave an A+ because all the other kids wrote about what they did in the summer break.

Another problem I had was that none of the characters were likeable. Indeed if film is a dessert that we enjoy after the main course that is our daily life, then The Ledge is arse-hole pie. The atheist protagonist makes it his mission to seduce Shana just because he feels like he needs to liberate her from the puritanical leash of her husband, not because he likes her or anything, just to make a patronising point. Indeed women should be mad at Shana’s characterisation here. She’s basically a fuck-puppet that gets passed from one douche-bag to another douche-bag without so much as complaining about her role in the warped power play. Of course, it’s okay to have unlikeable characters in film. There Will Be Blood had a bastard of a protag, and it’s one of the greatest films ever made. The characters that inhabit The Ledge just aren’t developed well enough. A few of them achieve character arcs, but they are uninteresting and utterly contrived. I think it took two scenes of Terrence Howard’s whole rocky family situation before I just didn’t give a shit anymore.

And the ending sucked. I won’t give it away and spoil it for those out there that want to see it, but suffice to say Terrence Howard has what is quite possibly the most retarded Eureka! moment ever recorded on film.

One star:

'Gnomeo and Juliet' directed by Kelly Asbury.

Produced by: Baker Bloodworth, David Furnish, Steve Hamilton Shaw and Elton John.

Written by: John R. Smith, Rob Sprackling, Kelly Asbury, Mark Burton, Andy Riley, Kevin Cecil, Emily Cook, Kathy Greenberg, Steve Hamilton Shaw.

Starring: James McAvoy, Emily Blunt, Michael Kane, Jason Stratham, Maggie Smith, Patrick Stewart and a bunch of other Brits.

Music by: Elton John, Chris P. Bacon and James Newton Howard.

Year of release: 2011.

Budget: $36 Million.

Gross Revenue: $189, 712, 432.

My girlfriend chose this movie when we were in the video-store looking for something to watch. I have a sneaking suspicion that she chose it because she’s halfway through the fifth season of Six Feet Under and just needs a break from all the fucking sadness that seems to permeate every second of that show. Regardless, I didn’t complain too much because the idea of Romeo and Juliet as a computer animated kid’s film intrigued me. I wondered whether or not the titular gnomes would meet the fateful end that garnered the original play its tragedy tagline (the gnomes don’t kill themselves by the way, something which annoyed me a little bit before I realised that suicide is probably a little bit too hectic for kids aged 4-10 to have to confront.)

The music of Elton John worked pretty well for the most part, however I did think that they could have used more of his songs here. I think you get three or four of them, and it’s nice to see how the film-makers fit them into the story, but I was hanging out for Goodbye Yellow Brick Road or Love Lies Bleeding, and instead got the typically clichéd Your Song. Also, Elton John doesn’t actually sing many of the songs; they are covers by artists who by definition (i.e.- not being Elton John) are inferior.

Apart from that, the story is pretty good and the movie actually works as a kind of introduction to the themes of Romeo and Juliet for kids. The best part about the movie however is definitely the gnomes. They are all very cute and they get up to all kinds of gnome mischief, which is what you want to see in a movie like this. Particular favourites include the red gnomes which all run around and say funny things. Also the flamingo was pretty cool.

The movie isn’t all skittles and sunshine though, and if I had of been at the premiere sitting in close proximity to the film’s director, during the credits I would have huffed “Well it was no fucking Pixar Film, that’s for sure!” before I tossed the remainder of my popcorn to the floor and spat on the seat. No, come on, I wouldn’t do that. If I was actually invited to the premiere of a movie, I’d be well chuffed to meet everyone and generally just pleased to get out of the house.

The Good: The constant references to different Shakespeare plays in the same way that various elements of pop. culture are referenced in the Shrek movies. Sure, some of the Shakespeare references are a bit cheap (in the Gnomeo and Juliet universe there is a removalist company called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Removals), but at least it’s sort of trying. Also Ashley Jenson’s turn as Nanette the frog is really refreshing because she actually tries to be something other than the character she was famous for in Extras. Something which can’t be said for Stephen Merchant, who plays the same character in every fucking thing he’s in.

The Bad: At the beginning of the movie, a gnome comes out and says something along the lines of: “Before we begin the movie, I must read out a long and boring prologue to establish the scene...” He then sets about reading the opening lines from Romeo and Juliet before being booed off stage. It sort of screamed ignorance to me and reminded me of one of those douche bags that everyone knows that says something like: “Shakespeare was ruined for me in school...” whenever the topic turns to Shakespeare, as if anyone gives a shit what you think, you narcissistic cunt.

The Ugly: The gnomes all breathe as though they are just regular humans. There are several scenes where some of them exert themselves and then have to catch their breath, and everything seems to work as though they have organic lungs. Yet whenever they eat, the food clunks as it goes down as if it were rubbing against porcelain. That shit sent a shiver down my spine.

Three stars:

'The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [Extended Edition]' directed by Peter Jackson.

Produced by: Peter Jackson, Barrie M. Osborne, Tim Sanders and Fran Walsh.

Written by: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson. (Based on the book by J.R.R Tolkien.)

Starring: Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Liv Tyler, John Rhys-Davies, Orlando Bloom, Sean Bean, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving and Ian Holm.

Music by: Howard Shore.

Distributed by: New Line Cinema.

Year of release: 2001.

Run time: 228 Minutes.

Budget: $93 Million.

Gross Revenue: $870, 761, 744.

So the blu-ray extended editions of The Lord of the Rings have been released and I managed to watch the first instalment with friends just the other day. I realise that everyone has seen these movies already, but I thought I would write about them because... Fuck you, that’s why.

The Lord of the Rings has always been dear to me. At high-school when the inevitable Lord of the Rings vs. Harry Potter debate came up it was always no contest. Harry Potter had a bunch of kids stumbling awkwardly through their adolescence and Lord of the Rings had fucking Aragon handing a delicious pot of smack down to a bunch of cloak wearing mother-fuckers, culminating with him throwing a burning torch at one and setting him on fire. You won’t find that at Hogwarts, I always used to say. Also the lines are just more memorable in LOTR. Anytime I walk through the automated sliding doors at shopping centres, I’m sure to whisper ‘Mellon’ so that no one around me will hear it. Don’t get me wrong, Harry Potter had its charms too, but I didn’t hear anyone cheering in the cinema during Goblet of Fire. In the cinema where I first viewed Fellowship however, the crowd erupted in spontaneous applause when Aragorn beheaded that huge orc that killed the troubled, yet ultimately good, Boromir.

Fellowship is defintiely my favourite of the trilogy, and I’m sure it has nothing to do with the quality of the other films. I suppose it’s because I saw Fellowship with both my parents when they were still together. It was during the following year that they separated and ultimately divorced. So I went into Fellowship still firmly in the familial nest, at the tender age of fifteen when the ideas of magic and wonder were still very accessible to me. The next year, after the nest was ripped apart, I viewed The Two Towers through a much more cynical lens. I still enjoyed it, but only amidst a cloud of anxiety and general stress. When I watched Fellowship  again, I was able to remember the good times that I had with my family, because seeing it at the cinema was one of the good times we had. I’m not sure whether that’s sad or not, but I think it speaks to the way in which pop. culture is so deeply enmeshed with our own emotional development. At least if you were one of the awkward kids at high-school.

The Good: The atmosphere of mystery and awe that is generated so well in this first chapter. A lot of the scenes are ‘talking’ scenes, and we definitely get the sense that some bad shit is gonna go down before it’s all over. The intensity is brought across in the dialogue which is laced with a subtext of apocalyptic anxiety. Even Elrond walks around like he is in need of a cigarette, and he’s the king of the most peaceful race in Middle-Earth! Also, the killer musical score that reaches an explosive climax during the mines of Moria—specifically the part where Aragorn and Frodo successfully jump from the massive broken piece of stair-case and the fellowship triumphantly run off as an alternate chorus of Howard Shore’s score blares.

The Bad: I’m also a big fan of the books, and I’m a bit pissed that I can’t read them now without imagining Elijah Wood as Frodo. I used to have this clear image of what I thought Frodo—and hobbits in general—looked liked, but that’s all shot to shit thanks to these movies which I’m sure executed the imaginations of thousands of Tolkien fans.

The Ugly: The king and queen Elves in Lothlorien talk too slowly. I remember being mesmerised by how cool they were when I first saw the movie. Now they just sound like they have a slight mental retardation.

I was tempted to give this a four star rating just because I didn’t want to look like too much of a geek, but 

fuck that shit right? It’s Lord of the Rings man.

Five Stars:

'Paul' directed by Greg Mottola.

Produced by: Nira Park, Tim Bevan, and Eric Fellner.

Written by: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jason Bateman, Blythe Danner, Sigourney Weaver,
John Carroll Lynch,  and Bill Hader.

Distributed by: Universal Pictures.

Year of Release: 2011.

Run time: 104 Minutes.

Budget: $40 Million.

Gross Revenue: $92, 163, 299.

I missed Paul when it was playing at cinemas, which is a shame because I really wanted to see it when I first saw the trailer. I’m a big fan of Simon Pegg’s Blood and Ice-Cream Trilogy, which so far consists Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. According to the imdb, Paul is not part of the trilogy because Edgar Wright—who directed the first two instalments of the trilogy—was not involved in its production.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that it was part of the trilogy though, because Paul follows the same formula as those films mentioned. Whereas Shaun of the Dead playfully pastiched the zombie movie sub-genre, and Hot Fuzz the action genre, this instalment is a loving tribute to sci-fi, but I’m sure you’re already aware of that if you’re a long time Simon Pegg fan. This movie is loaded with references to science-fiction films and television shows, particularly the movies directed by Steven Spielberg in the 80s. Unlike the recently release Super 8 though, Pegg and Frost know that it’s all about having fun.

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play Graeme and Clive, two British geeks that have made a trip to the United States in order to go on a road-trip to visit all the significant UFO hotspots in America. It is on this road trip that they encounter Paul, an alien that has escaped from Area 51 because the U.S. government are planning to cut out his brain. Paul is computer generated and voiced by Seth Rogan, who uses the opportunity to play the alien the same way he has played all the other characters in his movie. The trio are chased by a sinister man in black (played by Jason Bateman), who reports to the mysterious Big Guy, who is played by Sigourney Weaver in a nod to her standing as the Queen of Sci-Fi. Along the way, the trio meet a fundamentalist born-again Christian, a woman that Paul first met as a young girl when he crash-landed on Earth (played by Bythe Danner), and a variety of other characters. They also get up to some crazy shenanigans.  

Make no mistake, Paul is a geek’s movie through and through, and you really have to be a sci-fi geek to get all of the jokes. You’ll probably still have a good time if you aren’t a geek though, because many of the jokes draw from the golden treasure chest of comedy—the dick and fart joke—but if you are a sci-fi geek, you’ll probably have a lot more fun than someone unintroduced to sci-fi (you know, a moron who doesn’t know what they’re missing).

So how is it? Yeah it’s pretty funny for the most part. Seth Rogan really suits the role of the alien, so much so that you wonder whether they had him in mind when they were writing it. I know there are a lot of people out there that don’t like Seth Rogan, but I think he has great comic timing, and he seems like the kind of guy you would want to get high with. In one scene, Paul the alien warns his friends not to try the pot he’s smoking because it’s really strong: “...[It’s] the stuff that killed Dylan”, he says. “Bob Dylan isn’t dead.” Graeme says. Paul smiles and replies: “Isn’t he?” with typical Seth Rogan cheekiness. It’s all very fun stuff.

It’s also not the type of movie that achieves any over-arching message. There is the typical theme of friendship, which pervades almost all of Pegg’s work. This time it’s made especially touching by Pegg’s performance, particularly in one of the final scenes—which I won’t spoil. The interactions between Graeme and Clive seem authentic and it is apparent that they love each other in a purely heterosexual way. However you definitely get the sense that the theme is just a vehicle for the film-makers to deliver references to various sci-fi media.

Notable examples? Well the best is probably the line delivered by Blythe Danner to Siguorney Weaver near the end of the film. Weaver’s Big Guy is about to kill Graeme’s love interest when Danner yells: “Get away from her you bitch!” before punching her, mimicking Weaver’s immortal words from the end of the iconic Aliens. It’s a nice moment, made especially exceptional because Weaver actually has a somewhat meaty role in Paul. There are numerous other references to sci-fi television shows and movies. As a long-term X-Phile, I was happy when Paul admitted that he was the one that came up with the idea for Agent Mulder.

In spite of all this cool novelty, I did feel that there was something missing from Paul. Maybe it was just because I had hyped the movie up a lot in my head; believing it was going to be the ultimate pastiche of science fiction. In the words of George Bush Snr as depicted in the famous Simpsons episode, it was: “Good...not great...” Shaun of the Dead was the ultimate pastiche, perhaps because it was so unexpected. There was also something about Shaun of the Dead that was quite touching. The friendship between the two characters was better established in Shaun than it is in Paul. There are certainly some touching moments to be had in this film, but I’m afraid Paul just doesn’t reach the same level. Don’t listen to me though, I’m being too nit-picky. You’ll have a good time here, so go rent it.

Four stars:

      

'Somewhere' directed by Sofia Copolla.

Produced by: Fred Roos, Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Coppola, Paul Rassam and G. Mac Brown.

Written by: Sofia Coppola.

Starring: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Michelle Monaghan, Chris Pontius and Simona Ventura.

Music by: Phoenix

Studio: American Zoetrope.

Year of release: 2010.

Run time: 98 Minutes.

Budget: $7 Million.

Gross revenue: $13, 936, 909.

I really loved Lost in Translation and accordingly, I thought I really loved Sofia Copolla as a director. I think it was the overall ambient realism of the film; it was so close to real life yet without being completely mundane. You know, you’ve got Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray making this really intimate personal connection that they probably would never have made if it weren’t for the setting of the film, and yet you totally believe that the story could happen. It’s because the characters were so realistically portrayed that you became so attached to them. By the end of the film, it was almost as if they were real people. I daresay that if Bill Murray had of died in the end, it would have been the saddest film ever created. With the given ending, it must be content to rest as one of the saddest films ever created.

Somewhere is in a very similar style to Lost in Translation. I’ve yet to see Marie Antoinette, and I saw The Virgin Suicides so long ago I can’t even remember what it was about, so I’m not sure if this style of realism pervades Sofia Coppola’s entire oeuvre. However, if we were to go by Lost in Translation and Somewhere on their own, we can kind of uncover what Copolla is all about.

Existential angst is the big issue here, with a heaped teaspoon of ‘celebrity’ just to get the broth simmering well. In Somewhere, Stephen Dorff plays Johnny Marco, a tabloid celebrity who lives the high-life of a famous millionaire, which is actually made pretty mundane through Copolla’s lens. This is nowhere more apparent than in the scene where two blonde identical twin strippers perform a synchronised pole dance for our protagonist. Though popular culture has ingrained into the collective consciousness this idea of the super-sexy woman using her super-sexy pole to be super-sexy, Copolla forces us to watch the entirety of the dance sequence and it’s actually quite clumsy and awkward looking. Apparently, Johnny agrees with us, because he passes out in the middle of it. Scenes like this deconstruct all the media out there that depicts the celebrity life as fabulous and awe-inspiring. It reminds the viewer that real life can never be like life as depicted in movies, and even (perhaps especially) in reality television.

Dancing serves as a recurring visual motif in Somewhere, with the above mentioned pole-dancing twins routine juxtaposed with the much sweeter figure skating of Marco’s estranged daughter, played brilliantly by Elle Fanning. I struggled to come up with what such a motif could mean and settled on the idea that Marco is so saturated by women who want to perform for him that he can’t even tell which performances are meaningful; whilst he can be forgiven for falling asleep during the pole-dancing, he is judged a little more harshly for sending text messages during his daughter’s figure skating routine.  

It’s all very bleak stuff, however the question I think every film-maker must ask before they commence a project is whether or not it’s engaging enough to hold the attention of the audience. This is where Somewhere falls down a bit. I don’t think it’s a complete train wreck by any means, but there was just something so sweet about the intimacy between Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray in Lost in Translation that was missing in this film. You do get a little bit of tenderness between Marco and his daughter, but it’s just not as good. I’m not saying that Copolla should be restricted to composing endless variations on a similar riff, but I just don’t think that Somewhere reaches the same level as Lost in Translation, which was quite simply a classic film in the true sense of the word. 

A few critics condemned Somewhere as the whining of a privileged brat, and I think such allegations are unfair, because Copolla’s celebrity background provides insight into what is really a unique situation: A  man who is allowed to remain a child by virtue of an over-paid and perhaps under-demanding career. If he were a working class man, he would be forced to grow up in order to pay the bills. French magazine Le Monde expressed it far more eloquently when they said that Somewhere details “...the delicate irony of the delinquency of a universe of the happy few.” 

Three and a half stars: