Spank's LFF Diary, Friday 12/11/1999
1.15pm: A Room For Romeo Brass
It's criminal what we've done to Shane Meadows. Two years ago, after making a highly-regarded series of cheap and cheerful shorts, Meadows came to the LFF with his first feature, TwentyFour Seven. It was shown as a high profile gala in the mid-festival slot. Its star, Bob Hoskins, came on stage after the screening and claimed Meadows was one of the best directors he'd ever worked with. Bolstered by the incredibly warm reception the film got at its LFF screening, it got released to the general public a couple of months later, and died a death because... well, because people are twats, basically.
Two years on, Meadows' followup movie is being snuck into an early festival slot with hardly any fanfare. Hopefully, people aren't going to make the same mistake again, because A Room For Romeo Brass manages to build beautifully on what TwentyFour Seven promised. It tells the story of two young boys living in the Midlands. Their friendship is coming under some strain due to outside events: Gavin (Ben Marshall) is having an operation to cure a problem with his back, while Romeo (Andrew Shim) is trying to cope with the sudden return of his long-estranged father. Into their lives comes the geeky twentysomething Morell (Paddy Considine), who initially makes friends with the boys while trying to cop off with Romeo's sister. Romeo spends more time with Morell while Gavin's laid up in bed following his operation, but slowly starts to suspect there's more to Morell than meets the eye.
With Mike Leigh currently working in the realm of costume drama, it's tempting to start looking for his successor, and with this film Shane Meadows proves himself perfect for the role. Like Leigh, he's great at observing the minutiae of suburban life and getting them down on film in a form we all recognise, no matter where we come from. The script by Meadows and childhood pal Paul Fraser gets the volatile on-off nature of pre-teen friendships down cold, helped by great performances from the two leads. But the acting honours go to Paddy Consdine as Morell, a beautifully graded performance in which he starts as the apparent comic relief of the story but slowly mutates into something more sinister. Meadows handles all of this with a deft touch, aided by a wildly eclectic soundtrack featuring everyone from Christy Moore to Steps. People may have avoided TwentyFour Seven because it was black and white: well, this one's in colour, so you've got no excuses this time. See it, you twats.
3.15pm: Cradle Will Rock
And while I'm in a name-calling mood, what about those bastards at American Express? Sponsors of last night's gala screening of Cradle Will Rock, they bought up the vast majority of tickets for the screening and sold them on to their corporate clients for £50 a throw, thus denying us plebs the right to hobnob with director Tim Robbins and the like. Bearing in mind Robbins is one of the more left-wing people working in Hollywood, you do have to wonder if he's aware of what's going on in his name. Anyway, I'm sure the audience at the next day's matinee screening was much nicer. Really.
Almost a true story, Cradle Will Rock is set in the middle of the Great Depression. As the workers start to realise the power of unionisation, labour riots are sweeping the country. The ensuing panic results in a huge increase in anti-Communist activity, as public bodies all over America are scrutinised for any trace of Red subversion. This is bad news for the Federal Theater programme, a body producing cheap theatre for people who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford it. When traces of Godless Communism are found in a children's show about a band of revolting beavers, the Federal Theater's budget is cut dramatically - thus closing down their latest production, a pro-union musical by Marc Blitzstein (Hank Azaria) entitled The Cradle Will Rock. But its young director, Orson Welles (Angus MacFadyen), has other ideas...
The above synopsis can only scratch the surface of the epic spawl of this story (guess you were right, FilmFan). There are umpteen other subplots, concurrently showing how the Red scare affected thirties America. Nelson Rockefeller (John Cusack) clashes with artist Diego Riviera (Ruben Blades) over the content of a mural he's painting. William Randolph Hearst (John Carpenter) makes under-the-counter deals with the Fascists in Italy. And a hack ventriloquist (Bill Murray) tries to do his own bit to root out Communism in vaudeville, without considering the consequences.
Writer/director Tim Robbins handles all these plots magnificently, interweaving all the stories to great effect without ever confusing the main thrust of the movie. The all-star cast does him proud: it's impossible to praise everybody who deserves it, but a special mention is probably required for Emily Watson, who goes out there a stagehand and comes back a star!!! in true Broadway tradition. There's a huge amount of comedy in the movie: worryingly, one of the biggest sources of laughs is the hearing where the Federal Theater group is condemned, which is based on actual transcripts. (At one stage, England's notoriously Communist playwright Christopher Marlowe is berated for not being present.) The climactic production of The Cradle Will Rock is stunningly well staged, and intercut magnificently with the other subplots: and the final shot is terrific. A certainty for Oscar success, unless we get another Red scare in the next four months.
6.00pm: Kikujiro
Dig around this site long enough and you'll find a love letter to Takeshi Kitano somewhere, cunningly disguised as a review of Hana-Bi. I've been a huge fan of his ever since Sonatine played at the LFF earlier this decade. Since then, Takeshi has been a regular attendee of the Festival with his movies: sadly he was too busy filming to accompany Kikujiro. It's a shame, as this is an interesting progression from his earlier movies, and a post-screening Q&A could have been fascinating. Still, we've got the film, and that's the important thing.
Kikujiro tells the story of a small boy. (As did everything I saw today apart from Cradle Will Rock, for some reason.) Masao (Yusuke Sekiguchi) lives with his grandmother, but still wonders what happened to his mother, who moved away following her divorce. A chance encounter with a photo of his mum makes Masao determined to track her down. A friend of his grandma's, the gruff gangster Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano), accompanies him on his journey, and we follow their adventures during their summer together.
Pretty much everything Takeshi has ever made has been shown in the UK by now: the most delayed release was his 1991 comedy A Scene By The Sea, which took eight years to reach our screens, possibly because it eschews Takeshi's typical violent gangster action in favour of a touchingly comic love story. Kikujiro is another rare example of a Takeshi movie without a body count. It's a sweetly amusing road movie which gets its laughs from putting his well-established hair-trigger Yakuza character together with an unpredictable child and waiting for the sparks to fly. (Although Takeshi's usual sentimental edge means that we always know nothing bad will ever happen to the kid, even in the scene where he meets a child molester.)
As always, the film's jokes are shot, framed and edited to perfection: one gag involving their attempts to stop a car using some chewing gum and a nail is worth the price of admission on its own. There's a typically meandering structure to the movie: rather than skipping over the journey home after Masao reaches his destination, there's a whole third act devoted to the return leg, where Masao and Kikujiro meet again with some of the people they encountered on the way and play silly games with them. (It's as much a happy diversion for us as it is for Masao, given what precedes it.) Takeshi is his usual hilariously impassive self, but allows the occasional hint to come through as to why he's bothering with the kid in the first place. It's another gem from one of Japan's most consistently entertaining filmmakers - if you can make it to the ICA in London in December 1999, all his movies are on display in a special season, and they're well worth catching.
9.30pm: My Silly Mother
There aren't many cinemas left in central London that I haven't visited at one time or another, so it's always worth mentioning when I encounter a new one. The Lux Cinema is in North London's terrifyingly fashionable Hoxton district, home to some of our capital's posiest bars. It opened a year or two ago as a specialist arthouse, and is being used as an overflow venue for the LFF for a week. The film on display here tonight, My Silly Mother, was apparently recommended to the Festival by Santiago Segura, director of last year's Spanish hit Torrente. God knows why, though.
Martin (José Luis Lago) is a young boy with problems. He's picked on at school for repeatedly shitting himself. His mother Gema (Faustina Camacho) is the sort of cretin who'll phone people up to let them know that she's on the phone. Her father Toribio (Eduardo Antuña) crams his conversation with weak badly-translated puns at every possible opportunity. Just when Martin thought he couldn't get any more embarrassed, a new TV company comes to town. As a joke they take Gema, their cleaning woman, and make her read the local news every night. Martin's life gets worse and worse as the TV people heap ever-greater humiliation upon his family for the sake of publicity.
"Why are you here?" asked writer/director Santiago Lorenzo before the screening. Good question. Presumably the audience was attracted by the synopsis, and the implication that although Martin's family are stupid, the TV company is infinitely worse - thus leading to a scenario where after a certain amount of humiliation the family will turn the tables on their oppressors, wittingly or otherwise. We'd all pay to see that, wouldn't we? Unfortunately, the humiliation section of the film is the first 87 minutes of a 92 minute picture, and the payoff is so perfunctory as to be almost invisible. What we're left with is almost an entire film's worth of a family being painfully and crassly tortured by the media, without any sort of retribution to make it worth our while suffering along with the family.
It's all very well the programme citing Neil LaBute's misanthropy as an influence, but LaBute has two advantages. Firstly, he doesn't make the audience take sides: a film like Your Friends And Neighbors is careful to make sure we don't identify with any of his characters, by making them all bastards. And secondly, he's got a visual and verbal wit that Lorenzo, on this evidence, shows no signs of being able to achieve. Perhaps you'd better ignore what I said yesterday about Spanish comedy.
Notes From Spank's Pals
(it's their day off)
November 13th 1999
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