Kelly + Victor (18)

This two star film is out on DVD and Blu-ray Monday 13th Jan.

Kelly + Victor (18) (This review on FilmJuice.com)

Kelly + Victor is the feature debut of Welsh director Kieran Evans.  On his search for a story that spoke to him he discovered the 2002 novel by Niall Griffiths, a no holds barred harrowing romance about young love gone bad.

Victor is something of a watered down hipster, and Kelly is a petite lost soul with a broken heart.  They meet on Victor’s birthday when he’s out celebrating, and lust strikes without hesitation.  After a hasty night filled with sadomasochism, neither can get the other out of their minds, much less the marks left off of their bodies.  After this fiery start they try something bordering on conventional, a date to a museum, where they ponder what love means to a Godless couple, and whether what they have can be beautiful.

In their own ways the two characters become afraid of what the other means to them, and they take a hiatus to lick their wounds, emotional and otherwise.  Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Julian Morris give admirably raw performances with only a paper thin script to draw on.  Tellingly, Evans removed a lot of the book’s rich narration from his adaptation, leaving Kelly and Victor as unfinished skeletons of characters crying out for flesh and blood.  Promising subplots go nowhere, and the director only demonstrates any inventiveness in the shooting of the sex scenes, which aren’t much more than eye candy for the marketing campaign.

Budget constraints meant a reduced crew and humble resources, and Evans and his cinematographer Piers McGrail admittedly do a splendid job of creating a haunting and unusual portrait of Liverpool, and it’s broken youth underbelly.  But some obvious visual metaphors bring down the level of sophistication, and the overall style is disappointingly derivative of many other better gritty British films.  The typically indie soundtrack plays it safe, and the incongruity of it’s cutesy feel compared to the film's darker side has been done before and much better in films like 2010’s Blue Valentine.

Whilst the photography is sharp and modern, the performances brave and immediate, Kelly + Victor commits the one true sin of filmmaking - being boring.  The story is so slight and the dangers it warns of self-evident; you’re left thinking did we really need another down-and-dirty Brit flick to state the obvious?

DVD & Blu-ray extras: Trailer, Q&A with Kieran Evans

8 1/2 (15)

Italian classic 8 1/2 is released on Blu-ray and remastered DVD today.

8 1/2 (15) (This review on FilmJuice.com)

In 2013, the question for Italian director Federico Fellini’s seminal work 8 1/2 is does it stand up to it’s reputation as an iconic masterpiece?  The answer is a hearty yes, if your cinematic vocabulary hasn’t solely been taught by hobbits and terminators.  Though coolly influential and often breathtaking, 8 1/2 belongs to a bygone era and culture of filmmaking.

The fantastical episodes that make up this celluloid tapestry follow film director Guido Anselmi, a cypher for Fellini himself, struggling to find the reason behind his next film, which is already underway.  He thought he had something important to say, but now that he’s started saying it he’s not so sure.  Harried by colourful characters including a producer who doesn’t care what decisions Guido makes as long as he makes them, a mistress plagued by sudden fevers and a wife with the questionable gift of always seeing through her husbands lies, Guido retreats ever further from reality and hides in a fantasy world made of memories and wishes.

Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido, a handsome and elusive dreamer, mysteriously quiet on the outside, a swirling pool of confused ideas inside - the personification of still waters running deep.  Anouk Aimée is disarming as Guido’s troubled wife Luisa, Sandra Milo fantastically portrays the director’s forbidden lover as a hilarious caricature of a rich married woman capitalising on her voluptuousness, and Claudia Cardinale ignites the screen as a movie star who Guido casts as his dream woman, also called Claudia.

Gianni Di Venanzo’s black and white cinematography certainly stands the test of time, dazzling with inventive and adventurous camerawork right from frame one.  Likely alienating to present day audiences however, are techniques such as the use of an old Italian tradition of dubbing all the dialogue in post production, whereby the actors are filmed mouthing nonsensical lines, leaving no hope for lip-synced dialogue!

Fellini’s use of cinematic language, grammar and technique to wrestle with his own demons, and his use of craft to rediscover his muse, are mightily personified by Guido, an artist who feels an alien in an industry populated by shallow moneymakers and divas, an industry he depends on for his art as much as he tries to escape from it.  Fellini’s brazen honesty in committing these internal and private thoughts into a very public piece of art still makes for a potent sucker punch of entertainment.

Fifty years on, much of the homage critics lay at Fellini’s feet when 8 1/2 first hit a silver screen in the glorious gloom of a Cannes cinema, is undoubtedly still deserved.  Technical mastery, daring honesty and dispassionate liberality are intrinsic to the identity of 8 1/2, one of the few films still snapping at Citizen Kane’s heels as one of the greatest works of art created by a filmmaker.

DVD & Blu-ray extras: ‘Lost Sequence - Fellini on Fellini’ 50 minute documentary, Interview with Lina Wertmuller, Tribute to Fellini, Theatrical Trailers

The Look of Love (18)

The latest collaboration of comic legend Steve Coogan and director Michael Winterbottom is out on DVD and Blu-ray this week.

The Look of Love (18) (This review on FilmJuice.com)

A personal passion project of Steve Coogan’s, The Look of Love reunites him with director Michael Winterbottom (24 Hour Party People, The Trip) to tell the tragicomic true story of Paul Raymond, the man who built a fortune on erotic theatre and clubs, owned half of Soho and became the richest man in the UK.

The character of Paul Raymond fits Coogan like a glove; he ticks all the boxes that drive him as a performer - he’s a vilified monster with a lesser known side that’s uncomfortably recognisable as universally human, and his line of business lands him in all manner of surreal and darkly humourous situations.  Winterbottom and Coogan are a dream team, and this was an obvious project for them, the director playing to the actor’s strengths in areas such as improvisation and comedy.

We are introduced to Raymond in his latter years, looking back on the wild ride of his life in the light of a family tragedy that suddenly frames things differently, and for a moment Raymond is quiet, sober and reflective.  The rest of the film is a whirlwind tour of his lavish lifestyle, dizzyingly presented through hyperkinetic editing and eye-popping colours, not to mention nudity in quantities that might have made Raymond himself blush.

Besides the classic song, the title refers to the performance of porn actresses as they’re required to appear to be enjoying what they are doing.  It’s a subtle insight into the falseness behind the marketing of human flesh, that’s still going strong today.  Raymond constantly ignores reminders of the importance of family and the damaging nature of his work, and it’s telling that in their research the filmmakers struggled to find anyone who was truly close to him.

As expected the supporting cast sometimes struggle to keep up with Coogan’s in depth and exploratory performance, particularly in the improvised scenes.  Still strong though are Tamsin Egerton as Amber, one of Raymond’s mistress/muses, and Chris Addison as photographer Tony Power.  British comics from Steven Fry to David Walliams fill out most of the other supporting parts - perhaps comedians are the only ones happy to touch this kind of hot material.

The delivery of the moral is heavy handed but true, King Midas being a parallel so obvious there’s even a scene where Raymond himself ponders it.  For a film that on one hand warns of the dangers of hedonism, it takes a surprising amount of relish providing gratuitous titillation of it’s own; an uncomfortable ambiguity that Coogan and Winterbottom are typically happy to settle for, but also one suggestive that there may yet be answers to the questions posed, even if the filmmakers stop short of discovering them.

DVD Extras: Deleted Scenes, Paul Raymond Timeline, Interviews with Cast and Crew