Is Christopher Nolan overrated? ***SPOILERS***

I have just read an article on Ain't It Cool News about Christopher Nolan's 2006 film, The Prestige. While the article itself is the usual fluff piece to introduce a behind-the-scenes photograph, it offers the readership a chance to start waxing about their love for this film and Nolan.

This annoyed me, because it seems to me that the online fan community are oblivious to Nolan's principal failing. Every film Nolan has made since Insomnia (which, crucially, was not his script) has hinged on some Unique Selling Point (USP). This USP exists at the expense of some fundamental imperative of storytelling meaning that for me, Nolan's films fall frustratingly short of their promise.

To wit, The Prestige is 95% of a brilliant film, but the final 5% completely undermines all the good work up to that point. The Nolans (being Christopher and his brother Jonathan) wrote a carefully structured and delicate script, setting up a very clear USP, which was exploited to the fullest in the marketing campaign for the film. The film sets itself up as a magic trick (The Pledge, if you will), and leads the audience to expect the rug to be pulled from under them with some fantastic sleight-of-hand in the third act.

However, the film also goes to great pains to illustrate that the very best magic tricks require a level of commitment to deceit which would overwhelm ordinary people. Perhaps unfortunately, I have worked with Christian Bale and recognised him under the top hat and false beard within the first half hour of the film, so The Turn was rather ruined for me.

So I thought the real Turn, the moment that made me scratch my head, was Jackman apparently coming back from the dead. I was expecting the silk handkerchief to be pulled off the deceit and something devastatingly simple, but perfectly formed to explain what we as audience members had not spotted, something which, on second viewing, we could spot each hint of in the first two acts.

However, that is not what we were given. As my wonderful scientist girlfriend pointed out, the reason why she hated Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, but loved John Carter, is that while ROTPOTA sets itself up in the real world, and then mucks about with science and how scientific research is conducted, John Carter sets out an entirely fabricated story universe, but gives it concrete boundaries, and always works within these.

In the case of The Prestige, the rug of realism, of deceit by commitment and hard work was pulled from underneath us, when Nolan introduced fantasy into what he had set up as real world in the final act. Like some of the feedback posters on the Ain't It Cool News article, I had assumed that the "top hats in the forest" scene would prove to be a red herring smelly enough to throw us off the real scent. But no, as it turned out, that was the real scent, and it was fishy indeed.

So, example one is Nolan shooting himself in the storytelling foot by allowing the hook ("It's a clever illusion!") to be more important than the prime storytelling directive (set up a defined environment and work within it).

Example two would be the Batman films. I group these together because I think they both suffer from the same problem, and although it is a different problem to The Prestige's, it again arises from Nolan's commitment to the real world.

I find the dialogue in the Batman films to be unutterably bad. The climax of the film, the moment at which  Batman ideologically defeats the Joker, is when the occupants of the two ferries opt not to destroy each other. And what is the first thing Batman says after this crucial moment?

"What were you trying to prove? That deep down, everyone's as ugly as you?"

Jesus wept. It reads like a line from a bad high school movie. It is certainly not what I would expect to hear from a darkly camouflaged, masked anti-hero who relies as much on his intelligence as his brawn and gadgets. In fact, it's hard to find a key scene in Batman Begins or The Dark Knight which doesn't suffer from horrible dialogue.

Take, for example, the coda to The Dark Knight, in which Harvey "Two Face" Dent means to wreak revenge on Commissioner Gordon by killing one of his family in front of him:

Gordon: "I was trying to fight the mob!"

Dent: "You wouldn't dare try to justify yourself if you knew what I'd lost!"

I cringe, I really do.

Consider also the climactic scene of Batman Begins, aboard the monorail, when Ra's al Ghul taunts Batman as they fight:

Ra's al Ghul: "Familiar, don't you have anything new?"

Batman: "How about this?" (snaps Ra's al Ghul's sword at the hilt)

Ra's al Ghul overpowers Batman and pins him to the floor.

Ra's al Ghul: "Don't be afraid, Bruce. You are just an ordinary man in a cape.
That's why you couldn't fight injustice and that's why you can't stop this train."

Believe it or not, this sounds even worse when coming from the mouth of a strokey-moustached bad guy sporting a suit and a samurai sword.

However, these are just illustrations of a broader issue I have with Nolan's Batman films. He is so committed to the "real-world" set-up of Gotham City and her inhabitants, that he feels the need to justify every beat of the extraordinary characters with some pitiful verbalisation of their motivation or thought processes. He couldn't leave their behaviour well alone, and ultimately gives the impression that he doesn't believe in his characters enough to let their actions do the talking.

So, Nolan's second unforgivable miscalculation is unnecessarily setting his USP ("Real world superheroes and supervillains!") in conflict with his characterisation.

And then there is Inception.

Ah, Inception. The film that everyone's favourite ranty Trotskyite, Mark Kermode, holds up as a beacon for intelligent blockbusters. Except, it's not.

For one, the complex plot isn't that complex. The fact that Nolan had to draw a diagram to explain it to thickos doesn't alter the fact that basically we are witnessing dreams within dreams, which is not that innovative. John Landis brilliantly employed a dream within a dream thirty years previously in An American Werewolf In London, and that was just for a scare and a throwaway joke. Individually, each of these dreams are pretty simple:

• In the real world, there's a bit of preamble with a few training dreams (introducing the audience as much as Ellen Page to the rules of this world, some backstory and a couple of subplots), in preparation for a plane trip on which DiCaprio drugs Cillian Murphy's character, and they have the duration of the flight to perform the titular inception and implant the seed of an idea in his head.
• There is a dream in which our protagonists kidnap Murphy and escape through a city in a white van, during which they jack in again, into:
• A hotel, where they convince Murphy that his father's right hand man is plotting against him. From here they jack into:
• A snowscape fortress, representing Murphy's own mind, in which they hope to force Murphy to encounter and accept a father's love and dying wish for his son. A dying wish which they have made up for Ken Watanabe's gain. They then are forced to go into:
• A crumbling cityscape in which DiCaprio finally addresses the dead wife subplot and recovers Watanabe from apparently fatal wounds.

Despite the pseudo-metaplot aspirations of Nolan's script, everything moves forward in parallel, linear fashion as the diagram describes. Essentially, Nolan is using layers of dreams to the same effect as other sprawling action films might use different locations, with different battles happening simultaneously at the climax (see Return of the Jedi, for example).

So, the unique selling point, that the film is really brainy, just isn't so. Feel free to debate the final shot all you like, but ultimately it doesn't matter - have you been able to follow the principal dramatic conflicts? Yes. Have these conflicts reached a satisfactory resolution? Yes. Is this clever? No. Whether Leonardo is back in the real world or not is a disposable coda, redundant against whether or not he cares. It's pretty clear he decides not to care, so why should we?

If Inception's plotting isn't that intelligent, then I should consider the themes, which are where I believe an action film really shows its mental muscle. The nature of dreams and reality? Well, okay, but not a particularly insightful or clear exploration, if you ask me. If anyone can tell me what Inception is trying to say beyond "dreams can be better than reality, but they're not real", then drop me a postcard, as I would love to know.

Inception is a great action film, no doubt, and perhaps a notch or two more intelligent than most contemporary actioners. But it is nowhere near the heights of Collateral, or The Matrix, or District 9, or The Bourne Identity, or Heat... the list goes on. These films make us ask questions about ourselves, about what it means to be human, the limits of morality, how we form identities, what it means to commit to an idea or a person, etc. Inception asks none of these things.

It does have an immense score though. So thanks for that, I suppose.

Accountants in film

Thanks, Hollwood. Thanks a bunch.

I spent the better part of a decade on the front lines of film as an assistant director/producer, loving the work and collecting anecdotes of remarkable places, people and experiences. I considered myself fortunate to have one of the most interesting jobs going.

And then, for fairly standard reasons, I decided I needed to get out. Uninteresting twists of fate meant that I soon began training as an accountant. A few years on, here I find myself still.

There is a marked difference between the responses you get from telling someone you're a filmmaker, and telling them you are an accountant. At parties, where there used to be expectation, now there is pity. Because of Tinseltown, we accountants are variously perceived as pedantic, idealistic, immoral or (worst of all) boring. Maybe Hollywood just doesn't like accountants. Given that Hollywood has produced some of the most dubious figures this side of the Sarbanes-Oxley act, I'm not surprised.

Did you know, for example, that according to Paramount Pictures, Forrest Gump, the most successful film of 1994, with a box office of $677m worldwide, did not make a single penny of return for its investors? Or that My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which took almost 50 times its production budget of $5m in the United States alone, somehow made a net loss of $20m? The one which  really blows my mind is that The Lord of the Rings, the most financially successful film trilogy of all time at $2.9 billion worldwide,  made "horrendous losses" according to production company New Line. The mind truly boggles. So does the taxman.

Thus Hollywood is more creative with numbers than scripts - all but one of the top ten films of 2012 and 2011 were sequels, remakes, or direct adaptations, and the last was The Smurfs - so it is understandable that accountants are sometimes painted as the bad guys. It is therefore worth pointing out the few films in which accountants are a bit more colourful (beware of spoilers):

The Untouchables

Al Capone gets put away for tax evasion by bean-counter Oscar Wallace, aided ably by Kevin Costner and the inscrutable Sir Sean Connery. The Mounties may not approve of the Untouchables methods, but the audit approach managed to get done what the Bureau could not. True story, too.

Midnight Run

So, the funny one in this film is the bookkeeper. Charles Grodin is as acerbic and withering as they come, playing a mob number-cruncher who has jumped bail, being brought in by bondsman Robert De Niro. Upstaging De Niro takes some doing, and it is a rare treat to see Grodin carving acid lumps out of the erstwhile Don Corleone as they trek across the country in trains, planes and automobiles.

Stranger Than Fiction

Will Ferrell is a metronomic IRS investigator, who refuses a gift of cookies from baker Maggie Gyllenhaal, whom he fancies but is obliged to audit, lest it be misconstrued as a bribe. He does, however, start a relationship with her, so perhaps his ethics are not so exemplary. Also, he may in fact be mad.

Lethal Weapon 2

Joe Pesci is Leo Getz, possibly the most annoying character in movie history. Nevertheless, he observes some of his obligations as an accountant, having blown the whistle on his former employers, some moustache-twirling South African types claiming "diplomatic immunity" as if it were "bagsy" rules on the playground. Getz also pops up in Lethal Weapons 3 and 4, although mercifully he gets shot in one, and has an uncomfortable trip to the dentist in the other.

The Shawshank Redemption

The crowning glory for accountants in film. Long ranked as the greatest film ever made on the  IMDb, our hero is Andy Dufresne, a bank clerk unjustly condemned to life in prison for the death of his wife. Andy's first big moment comes when he cuts his fellow prisoners a big break, and a few bottles of ice cold beer, by giving the guard some sound tax advice while teetering on the edge of a very high roof. He finally gains his freedom and gives the tyrannical warden his comeuppance, by exposing the prison's systematic corruption and embezzlement, while making off with most of the proceeds. Personally, I choose to overlook this final little peccadillo; Andy has suffered a lifetime of unwarranted hardship, so I'm cheering as much as the next man by the time he sees Red on the beach in Zihuatanejo.

However, almost all of the above films are works of fiction. The truth, when spectacular, is often much more sinister. For a look into the heart of darkness, see Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the story of  one of the most cataclysmic Chapter 11 bankruptcies in history, and how "The Big 5" became "The Big 4". Or check out Margin Call, Arbitrage, Rogue Trader. While these are certainly investment-driven stories, it was the accounting that nurtured the beast...

Seriously. Accounting: not that boring!

Review: Leon (aka The Professional) ***Spoilers***

La Femme Nikita, the film which introduced us to Jean Reno as 'The Cleaner', is a very different beast to Leon / The Professional. Although they share a character and a few bits of backstory, they don't share anything else. Not even the language. So I shall disregard Nikita entirely to avoid muddying the waters of this review.

If you can get your hands on it, the extended cut of Leon elaborates on the intended driving theme of the film, a burgeoning romance between a ruined, 13 year old orphan and an exploited 40-ish hitman. The excised scenes demonstrate that romance to be merely a dramatic crush from Matilda, sternly rebutted by Leon. However, a few beats here and there, such as Matilda's frank proposition that Leon take her virginity, make for uncomfortable viewing, and the film is better off without them.

Unfortunately, in cutting most of these scenes the baby has rather gone out with the bathwater, as most of Reno's nuance, and the core of the characters' arcs,  were here. What we are left with is a succession of comic scenes between the protagonists which, although well performed, paint Leon as a plant-loving innocent with lethal skills.
A simpleton Bourne, if you will.

So thank the heavens for Gary Oldman.

Three years after Leon, Gary Oldman would walk away with The Fifth Element as Jean-Baptiste Zurg. Besson gave Oldman that opportunity after his turn here as Stansfield. Oldman's performance is driving and unpredictable, a man poking at the bleeding edge of sanity, fuelled by drugs and protected by office. Besson puts obstructions in Stansfield's path, both physical and logistical, to frustrate his deluded machinations, so Oldman's parting, storming and swatting become a handy signpost of the villain's disregard for those around him, as well as giving rise to a few brief moments of dark humour.

The henchmen who surround Oldman are, in retrospect, redolent of the stock baddies Besson would carve out for the many B-actioners he would produce in later years. In this film, however, they are given enough to do to keep them distinct and interesting, if occasionally a little clownish.

The decidedly French, subversive vein of comedy running through Leon suggests Besson had total confidence in his ability to weave self-defeating humour into the film without undermining tension. Either that or he was oblivious to the possibility of jarring incongruence. The former seems more likely though, given his more overt, but less successful tonal play in his next film, The Fifth Element.

It is not unreasonable for him to have such boldness, however, as the action sequences in this film are some of the very best committed to film in the 1990's. The opening attack on Fatman's penthouse (yes, that is the character's name) introduces Leon brilliantly as an unseen, unstoppable angel of death. The attack on Matilda's family is pure carnage: disorienting, messy and brutal. The protracted final assault is a masterclass in geographical action direction, showing us a string of firefights and flights through an entire apartment block and the streets outside, without ever confusing our sense of orientation.

That is not all to commend the action. Note that at Fatman's, Leon wants to be efficient, unseen. At Matilda's, Oldman just wants to murder everyone and tear the place apart. In the final assault, Leon employs his superior knowledge of the environment to take the fight to his enemy. So Besson managed to marry the style of each action setpiece exactly to the mindset of the active parties, which is no mean feat.

Eric Serra's standard "string and ring" score sounds fairly indistinguishable from his Goldeneye score, and does little to enhance any sense of tension or heighten any emotion. Besson's fleeting views of the jagged but familiar Manhattan skyline were vaunted at the time of the film's release for evoking a jungle. However, contemporary overexposure to New York in action films, especially those of a superhero bent, has worn this originality thin. Coupled with the nondescript soundtrack, Leon is left without a distinctive stylistic identity. Besson would emphatically address this problem on The Fifth Element.

What the viewer takes away from Leon, therefore, is based entirely on the characters and motion of the movie. The action alone would be enough to make this film memorable, but Reno and Oldman, committed as they are to the extremes of their roles, elevate the film something almost mythological.

Review: Splice (SPOILERS)

Rather like the two scientists played by Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, Splice is not as clever as it thinks it is.

There is some interesting creature design, if not entirely plausible. This is where Guillermo del Toro's hand is most apparent. Unsurprisingly given his pedigree, this element works very well, but it highlights how short of the mark the rest of the film falls.

The film is particularly gunshipped by a script which confuses a plethora of themes. Even the one-sheet poster (see right) falls prey to this, combining the familial warm fuzzies of Cocoon or Ghost with the pointy-tailed threat of Alien, and the scuzzy, aggro font of a million and one spatter horrors. The visuals are better, under the capable eye of Tetsuo Nagata, although far from the heights of his work on Ma Vie En Rose and Micmacs.

All too often Splice tries to plug thematic leaks by asking the actors to ram a square peg into a round hole; Sarah  Polley suffers bipolar swings between maternal angst and emotionless laboratory genius, which highlights the writers' fumbled attempts to draw out the moral conflicts between science and parenting. If The Godfather had to spell out that "it's not personal, Sonny, it's strictly business" to show just how much of a lie Michael Corleone was selling, then it is remarkably brave of Natali to rely on performances alone to render abrupt character shifts. Even Adrien Brody, doing his utmost to keep the film plausible, cannot pull off a moment that sees him spontaneously decide to have sex with Dren.

"I won an Oscar, what the hell am I doing here?"

Speaking of whom, Delphine Chaneac's performance as the adult Dren brings absolutely nothing beyond stage directions such as "Dren looks hurt", "Dren giggles like a schoolgirl", or "Dren snarls". The whole farrago leaves me wondering if the director actually offered his cast any notes at all.

Finally, this film relies on characters explicitly choosing to pursue or ignore scientific method, as one of the main motivators. Now, I'm no scientist, but from the very first scene it is clear that is underpinning is laughably weak.

I struggled for a while afterwards to understand what the film set itself out to be in terms of genre and aims. I suppose that the only genre which might get away with showing this much contempt for its protagonists is contemporary horror, but even by these meagre standards Splice fails, as it tries to introduce "issues" to build tension, but then handles them incompetently. The result is boredom and so the scares, when they come, are anaemic.

So we have characters who struggle to achieve two dimensions, a shoehorned script and ineffective performances from the two female leads. There are many more flaws besides, but for me, these were the most significant. While I didn't hate the film, it felt like a woefully missed opportunity.

The only people I can see enjoying this film might be genre addicts, whom the visceral creature/horror elements may be enough to satisfy. It is certainly the only aspect of the film which I will remember beyond today.

Weak, weak, weak.

Review: Searching for Sugarman (Semi-spoilers)

A documentary charting the attempts of a few South Africans to shed some light on the death (and life) of American musician Sixto "Jesus" Rodriguez, arguably one of the world's greatest singer-songwriters, but completely unknown outside South Africa.

Perhaps a spoiler warning on a documentary seems odd. However, the documentary itself plays on myth and mystery, relying on the audience to be as clueless on Rodriguez walking into the cinema as the majority of the world, or even bearing the preconceptions which our narrators do at the start of the film.

My strongest advice, therefore, would be to shy away from any reviews, and especially from any Wikipedia articles or other googling about Rodriguez. What you should take away from this review ends with this paragraph: This is a film about wonderment, which touches on the very best in humans and the human experience, of self-fulfilment, of homecoming, and above all, of truly magnificent music. Seek it out and soak it in.

Warning done, I shall now delve a little deeper, while trying to stay as spoiler-free as possible.

There are several overarching constraints on this documentary, which have an inevitable impact on the finished product. Chief among these is that the documentary was made more than a dozen years after the culmination of the events it describes, and 40 years after the beginning of the story. As a result, there is very little contemporaneous footage in the film, which is mostly made up of talking heads and scenic shots.

Every subject interviewed is hugely passionate about Rodriguez. Such fervour is infectious, and I found myself shortly looking beyond the limitations of the presentation and becoming immersed in the tale itself.

It is by no means visually poor, though; the film is beautifully shot. The visuals do occasionally go overboard and draw attention to themselves: there are misguided animation sequences, overstylised title cards, and a couple of obviously staged treks through snowy landscapes. A couple of interviews are against backdrops so striking as to almost be distracting. Brief, furtive attempts to associate Rodriguez' lyrics to imagery of the slums of Detroit fall flat. But these are quibbles.

For those who know Rodriguez' music already, the heavy rotation of the title track, "Sugarman", may become a little tiring by the third time the opening lines are played. Nonetheless, there is broad enough coverage of his repertoire that even if you'd never heard of him before, by the credit roll you will have a good sense of his music.

The real strength of this film, however, is its narrative. To the few naysayers who complain that the film is economic with the facts, I respond that this has been true of every great character documentary from When We Were Kings to Senna. It is the simple necessity of telling a story about a real person in 2 hours - real life is too complex, hypocritical, convoluted and muddy to generate good cinema. To make an effective, engrossing story, documentary makers must pull on some threads and brush away others.

Searching for Sugarman is the majestic story of a man whose destiny finally catches up with him. For reasons unclear, Rodriguez never found the success he was due in his time. A whisper of him travelled to a faraway land, where his music took root and grew, unbeknownst to him. Meanwhile, those who revered him as an icon were oblivious to his plight, and so the aura of mystery around the man fed on itself and the man's musical legacy until Rodriguez became, to paraphrase some of the key players, bigger than the Rollling Stones, better than Dylan, on a par with The Beatles and Elvis.

So how is it that no-one knew anything about him beyond the picture on the album cover, of a Mexican looking hippy in shades and a big hat?

Extraordinary though it may seem that a man of such iconic status should in the modern era be so undocumented, I can vouch first-hand for the total lack of any information on Rodriguez at the height of the period described in this film. I first heard him as a teenager in about 1995, a full three years before the climax of the story the documentary describes. In the same manner as those who speak on camera first heard him: on a third-generation bootleg casette, which even through the lo-fi grindings of the magnetic strip blew me away.

There was only rumour - the friend who'd brought back the bootleg and stories from the southern hemisphere told us that Rodriguez had blown his brains out onstage before we were born, in front of a crowd of hundreds. There was little internet at the time, so no way to verify or disprove this tale. It took me years to find a copy of the album on CD, and another friend took a further 12 years to get me a copy of his second album.

Rodriguez didn't exist. We'd imagined him.

The music was a gift left behind by someone who had simply vanished from the face of the earth.

That was the underlying feeling of all Rodriguez fans. Even of the 3 daughters who knew nothing of their father's legacy before this film.

This film taps directly into that sentiment from the opening couple of interviews, and then takes you on the rollercoaster which saw a music journalist and a die-hard fan come together and undertake a detective's journey from Cape Town to Detroit, and back again. By the end of the journey everyone's life has changed beyond recognition, but the soul of Rodriguez remains immutable, and somehow still shrouded in mystery.

But the biggest shot of all, the one which turns the whole film on its head, is perhaps the simplest: A window in a dilapidated house being opened. In one shot, the film discovers new lungs, and builds to some of the most glorious, uplifting moments of self-realisation ever committed to camera.

Find it, watch it, buy the album.

Review: An American Werewolf In London (SPOILERS)

I must admit that I am prone to superlatives when it comes to early John Landis films. So take the following with a liberal pinch of salt.


Although it might not appear as such in retrospect, John Landis, Universal and Polygram took a terrific gamble with An American Werewolf In London. The film subverted genre conventions and defied audience expectations, and could well have missed its target audience altogether, if such an audience even existed in in 1981. The result was a seminal piece, accessible but with myriad layers of depth, which has informed and inspired countless horror comedy films since, and still gets the synapses firing a generation later.

AAWIL was the first successful melding of horror and comedy in mainstream American cinema (of which I am aware), and it remains the benchmark against which subsequent horror comedies are measured. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have even gone so far as to say that they modelled Shaun of the Dead, arguably the most successful and well-loved horror comedy of recent years, on AAWIL.

Landis' knockabout script bounces two milk-and-cookies American youths and several dour British supporting players between London and the Yorkshire Moors. This dislocation, which plays such a key part in the comedy and the drama, is perfectly complemented by the offbeat banter of the central characters. The naturalistic tone that the American protagonists maintain throughout most of the movie has not dated but, if anything, become more enjoyable over the years; filmgoers today are much more attuned to fast and loose dialogue, and a tongue-in-cheek tone than they were thirty years ago.

The criticism I have most heard of this film (and one which, on first viewing, I also had) is that the ending is too abrupt, downbeat, and seemingly out of keeping with the rest of the film. However, building through the the film is a dark undercurrent of inevitability, and the finale is the logical resolution of this.


The high-water mark of this malaise takes place in a phone booth in Piccadilly Circus, the very heart of London: David, our lead, is in one of the busiest places in the world, surrounded by people, and yet he is completely alone. After he tries to contact his parents for the last time, only for his pre-teen sibling to pick up, alone in the house, we are left with the distinct impression that the parents will never in fact receive the message of love which David was trying to pass on. He pulls out a Swiss Army knife - a symbol of resourcefulness and the endurance of the human spirit - and prepares to cut his own wrists... Landis understands that it is not in Nazi warthogs and dreams of carnivorous lunar activities that true horror lies, but in lost hope and the absence of human connection.

If the film had been edited around Jenny Agutter's Alex, we would have a great modern tragedy. Watching it through her eyes is heartbreaking, as her dawning comprehension of David's condition, and of her own growing Florence Nightingale crush is always chasing actuality, finally a mere half-step behind where it might have needed to be for David to be saved.


I still remember the first time I watched this; it scared the pants off me. The second time I laughed my arse off. Every screening since then has left me with something different and new. This is a film that has already proven it can stand the test of time, and it only gets better with repeated viewings.


Did I mention the special effects...?