2.00pm: Jim Jarmusch Guardian Interview
It was kind of obvious after Saturday's screening of Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai, but this afternoon's interview confirmed it: the woman referred to by Old Lag as "our hippy correspondent" is now thoroughly smitten with Jim Jarmusch. And why not? Tall, laid-back, and impossibly hip, Jarmusch exudes such cool that he's the only person in living memory to obtain a special dispensation from the NFT management that allows him to smoke on stage. After a series of clips from assorted Jarmusch favourites (Stranger Than Paradise, Night On Earth, Dead Man and Ghost Dog) the man himself was interviewed by Geoff Andrew, NFT programmer and film critic for Time Out.
Andrew's interview was structured as a simple chronological run through Jarmusch's career. He started with a childhood love of cinema that culminated in his studying film at Columbia University, where he made Permanent Vacation as his graduation movie. (He flunked out because nobody liked the movie, but later received an honorary degree from Columbia, as compensation for their using his name in their adverts once he got famous.) From there we moved through the rest of his key films, including a long discussion on the problems he encountered on Night On Earth: written as a quick way to start work again following the collapse of another deal, only for him to realise too late what a logistical bastard actually making it would be. ("It's in four different countries! It's all shot in cars! What was I thinking?")
Jarmusch was particularly enlightening on his writing process. As is probably apparent from the movies, it's character-driven rather than plot-driven: he works on the characters for some time, then collaborates with the actors to find out what else they can bring. One of his key techniques is to work with actors on extra scenes that will never appear in the movie, which give them the opportunity to learn to react in the way that the characters would. This approach explains Forest Whitaker's appearance in the title role of Ghost Dog: the samurai-like nature of his hitman character was written to combine the soft side of his personality we're all familiar with, with the harder edge we don't know so well. Of course, your old school actors such as Robert Mitchum don't have time for this sort of crap. Jarmusch told a great story of how he tried to get Mitchum to choose a gun for his character in Dead Man. Mitchum refused for a while, insisting that was the director's job, before coming up with a brilliant compromise: "I'll be carrying this gun around for most of the movie, right? So which one's the lightest?"
Jarmusch gives good interview: I've seen brilliant filmmakers die on stage trying to talk about their work (Jane Campion most recently), but he's obviously having a good time, and gets Geoff Andrew to corpse frequently with a series of off-topic digressions. The best one has to be an unexpected homage to the Zen qualities of baseball, leading into a comparison with cricket. "I love to watch cricket, but I have no idea what it's about. The Clash tried to explain it to me once, but it didn't work. I think it's cool the way you have breaks for tea." Let's just try for a second to imagine the Clash explaining cricket to Jim Jarmusch, shall we? If you want a transcript of the full interview, plus some sound clips (hopefully they'll include the passage on the nature of religious belief with the punchline "I want fish!"), they should be available at the LFF official site shortly.
6.30pm: Criminal Lovers
Francois Ozon's darkly comic Sitcom was an unexpected pleasure at last year's LFF, so it's not surprising there was a hefty turnout for his followup. At the centre of Criminal Lovers is a teenage couple, Alice (Natacha Regnier) and Luc (Jérémie Renier). Alice has been tormented by fellow student Saïd (Salim Kechiouche), and turns to Luc for help: together they come up with a plan to murder Saïd. The job done, they run off to the woods to bury him, only for things to go horribly wrong when they're discovered and captured by woodsman Miki Manojlovic. He locks them in his cellar while he works out what to do next. Meanwhile, Luc is starting to have doubts about Alice's motivation for the killing.
It's hard to see what Ozon was trying to do here, apart from make the equivalent of Wes Craven's Hansel And Gretel. The dark transgressive wit of Sitcom is pretty much absent here, apart from making the only protagonists we can identify with a pair of murderers. It's fairly obvious from the start what a femme fatale Alice is, so when the extent of her plotting is revealed it doesn't come as much of a surprise. Technically too, it's also a bit of a mess: the music is overamplified to the point of distortion (at least, it was at this screening), and the vast majority of the film is so underlit you can't see what's going on (luckily, this doesn't apply to the two key scenes of sex and violence that top and tail the film). A bit of a disappointment all round.
9.00pm: Surprise Film: The Insider
The speculation was rife as ever, with everyone throwing in their predictions as to what this year's Surprise Film would be. It reached fever pitch on Sunday afternoon when we were warned that the film would be two and three quarter hours long, with an appearance from the director at the end. (In fact, the title was leaked in the Daily Mail at the weekend, but luckily that had no effect on the surprise as nobody believes those wankers anyway.) The length was a bit of a worry for me: these days, a running time over two and a half hours is just used to identify an Important Film Worth Of The Academy's Consideration, rather than an indication of there being sufficient content to justify it. Thankfully, Michael Mann's The Insider proved me wrong.
Based on a true story, The Insider looks at the corruption endemic within American corporate culture in general, and the tobacco and media industries in particular. Scientist Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe) has been fired from his job at one of America's leading tobacco companies, for daring to suggest that the standard industry line of there being "no evidence of nicotine addiction" is a lie. When he's approached by Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) of the 60 Minutes news show for some research assistance, Wigand offers to tell the truth on air about the circumstances of his sacking. The rest of the movie follows Bergman's struggle to get Wigand on the show, despite the best efforts of the tobacco companies and CBS's own management to gag him: as Wigand encounters restraining orders, family problems and even death threats, he starts to wonder if he should even consider doing this.
Michael Mann takes what could have been incredibly worthy and dull material - a series of hearings and corporate meetings without any real possibility for physical action - and makes a completely gripping thriller that holds you by the short and curlies for nearly three hours without ever allowing you to draw breath. Mann avoids his usual flashy visual tricks, apart from some discreet varispeed footage and a breathless camera style that rushes after the characters so quickly it sometimes has difficulty keeping in focus. The atmosphere of escalating paranoia is brilliantly controlled using the subtlest of means: a mystery golfer here, an unexplained burning car there.
After the epic sprawl of Heat, this is by comparison a surprisingly intimate story. We're tied into it by our identification with Wigand: we're put through the wringer as much as he is, thanks to another great performance by Russell Crowe. Pacino does pretty much his standard turn, but the sheer force of the narrative drive makes him less annoying than usual. There's also great support from Christopher Plummer as 60 Minutes' anchorman Mike Wallace, and a host of other familiar faces: Michael Gambon gets just one scene to personify the whole of the industry that's lined up against Wigand, and he handles it beautifully.
For once, we have an Oscar-worthy movie with a real intelligence behind it. Possibly too much intelligence? There's a brief prologue introducing Bergman and Wallace as they go to Iran to get an interview: one cretin at the Q&A afterwards said she'd assumed this meant the movie was a Middle East thriller, and didn't understand any of the American scenes that followed. Putting aside such major deficiencies in the gene pool, this is a blisteringly entertaining thriller with something to say, and any Oscars that went to it would be completely justified. Athough this may have to be reassessed after American Beauty on Thursday...
Notes From Spank's Pals
The Insider
Ken - We learned the surprise film at the London Film Festival was 2hrs 38mins long as soon as we arrived at the Odeon West End. True film buffs were immediately able to work out what the film was, but Spank let himself down very badly with a wildly inaccurate guess [Angela's Ashes - Spank] - but I'm sure he's made his excuses for that already. Adrian Wootton gave the game away to the rest of us by ignoring the chorus of people shouting The Insider as soon as he asked for guesses of what the film might be. As you'll have noticed The Insider is a very long film, and it's about a very boring subject. The film's charm is that such a long film on such a boring subject isn't a long boring film. I'm not sure how they managed that either, but the acting skills of Al Pacino have a lot to do with it. Incidentally the film starts in the middle east in scenes which are completely unrelated to the plot, but presumably allowed Al to show off his fearless tough guy image. It's actually about a legal scandal in the US tobacco industry. Quite what the fuss was about is still a puzzle to a non-smoker like me who has known for the best part of 30 years that smoking is addictive and can kill you. Apparently the US tobacco companies had never admitted that openly, but 'The Insider' had evidence that they knew what the rest of us knew. The tobacco company (Brown & Williamson, now a subsidiary of BAT) will go to any lengths to stop 'The Insider'. You may ask why they were so bothered. In the UK cigarettes and tobacco have been taxed for decades to recoup the NHS costs of treating tobacco related illnesses (admittedly the Treasury embezzles the receipts such that the NHS never sees the money, but the point is the money is collected), but in the US 'The Insider''s revelations enabled the US states to sue for what they were paying in Medicare costs. These law suits were eventually settled out of court for $246 billion. For that kind of money the question is not why did they try to silence him, but why didn't they hire a hit man to kill him. Not a film I'd recommend rushing to the cinema to see, but if you've got a lot of time to kill, why not?
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