15/11/2013 The Film Review

the southern hemisphere, we will look ahead to tomorrow's action.

That is all on Sportsday at 6:30pm, but now it is time for the Film

Review. Hello and welcome to the Film Review

and BBC News. To take us through this week's cinema releases, Mark

Kermode, what have we got? A very mixed bag, The Butler, a strange

mixture of historical fact and fiction. We have Don Jon, a very

modern look at relationships between men and women. And we have The

Counsellor, Ridley Scott directs a script by Cormac McCarthy, what

could possibly go wrong?! I see, well, The Butler has an interesting

premise, hasn't it? Yes, it is inspired by a real`life story that

was recorded in the Washington post, a guy who once served 34 years in

the White House and seen extraordinary change. The rights

were bought up by a movie company, and we now have a fictionalised

version of the story which plays loose with the facts of the story.

The central character, Cecil Gaines, played by Forest Whitaker, at the

beginning we see him in terrible circumstances on a plantation, where

his father is killed. Then he ends up working at the White House, and

he served through several administrations, and as he serves,

the world around him changes, and obviously the whole thing will lead

up to Barack Obama, so it is an extraordinary period of social

history. The movie wants to play to the largest possible audience, to

play to the stalls, and it does that rather effectively. Whilst he is at

work, Cecil Gaines as a character has to be an invisible presence in

the room, he keeps being told that the Butler's art is to not be there,

but at home, with his own life, with his wife played by Oprah Winfrey,

that is where life comes into the film.

Me and your daddy saw a wonderful movie the other day. Oh, Sri Lanka?

In The Heat Of The Night. He is a white man's fantasy of what he wants

us to be. He just won the Academy Awards, he's breaking down barriers

for all of us. By acting a white boy, he is nothing but a rich uncle

Tom. You are all puffed up with your hat on your head, coming in year,

saying what ever you want. You need to go. What? Get the hell out of my

house! I cannot take this no more! I am sorry, Mr Butler, I didn't make

fun of your hero! Everything you have is because of that butler.

The interesting thing about that clip is that it sums up one of the

problems that critics have had, the question about whether the movie is

too palatable for its own good, because Lee Daniels made things like

Pressures, which was very dark, and the Paperboy, very rude and right,

and in this Casey has reined himself in. The film is very conscious of

what it is doing in terms of how they tell the story, it does not

want to offend or alienate anybody. It wants to tell this story to the

widest possible audience, and it is full of cameo roles, Jane Fonda as

Nancy Reagan... Interesting cameos! She does it very well, she dominates

the screen. John Cusack is a very nosy Richard Nixon. For me, the

strength of the film is that... It goes the root of Forrest Gump, a lot

of people were sniffy about that, but I like it, I like the

sentimentality and the schmaltz, the fact that it is a populist movie. In

this case, the strongest performances Oprah Winfrey, who is

terrific as the wife and a matriarch, a fully rounded,

3`dimensional character. She really fills the screen. In the case of

Forest Whitaker, he's doing a difficult thing, playing a

character, who was uncharacteristically explosive in

that clip, for the most part he is absenting himself, standing witness

to these historical events. It is very on the nose, it works through

every single key historical events, one of the family members is

present. It does not gesture towards things, it sticks flags in the lawn,

it is very clear, but the fact of the matter is that quite often

critics get sniffy about this stuff, not understanding that as far

as the audience is concerned, it is working for them. I was moved to

tears. I know it is sentimental and schmaltzy, it has a piano score

which tells you which criticised and which is triumphant, but for me it

worked. I liked it, I went with it. Anything that is like Forrest Gump

is good. Don Jon. This is written by, directed and starring Joseph

Gordon`Levitt, who set out to met a romcom about a man obsessed by porn

and a woman obsessed by Hollywood romances. And to examine the way in

which both of those two characters essentially objectified each other

and therefore cannot find any real human interaction. At the beginning,

it works quite well in a sort of snappy, very superficial, quite

alienating version of a man who cannot connect with the people

around him because he is so obsessed with pornographic fantasy is. And

his central role with Scarlett Johansson, they work quite well, but

they are, after a while, quite hard to take. Then along comes Julianne

Moore, the character who has lived, who has really connected with other

people, the character who has loved and lost, and suddenly the whole

movie starts to change and it becomes much more warm, more

engaging, more human, more likeable. I think it is an interesting

directorial work from Joseph Gordon`Levitt, I think it is

slightly... It suffers from slight superficiality at the beginning,

although it is meant to do, it is meant to be about breaking down

those barriers. It is quite brave, even to tackle that theme, it is not

Steve McQueen's Shame, is it? Recently we had Thanks For Sharing,

and it is not quite as daring as it seems, but it is still, in some

areas, a taboos subject. The Counsellor, Ridley Scott, Cormac

McCarthy, what could go wrong? Banality crews, Cameron Diaz...

Everything is there on the table. The story is that Michael

Fassbender's character is a guy who decides to get involved in a drug

deal. We know from the beginning that he will regret the decision.

One of the reasons is because everyone around him keeps telling

him how much he is going to regret it, here is a clip.

What did you do with the money? You can talk about it if you like. You

seem unsettled. I am all right. You do not know what to do. I cannot

advise you, counsellor. You are advertising me. I need you to be

sure that you are locked in. Because maybe I should tell you, that is my

recommendation, counsellor, don't do it. This is a serious crime. So is

this. The problem with this film is, he is

a great writer, but probably not a great screenplay writer. He spends

all this time saying things like the truth has no temperature, what is

the value of grief? What does that mean? Exactly, it is peopled by drug

dealers who do nothing but soliloquy eyes and quote classical literature.

After a while, even Quentin Tarantino would say, this is ringing

a bit untrue. You see Cameron Diaz with a cheater, and then later on

she has a long soliloquy about what it means to be a cheater. It is the

worthiest and I have to say, the most disappointingly self`indulgent

thing I have seen for a long time. There is all this talent on screen,

and there are these moments which are meant to be excessively strange

in which, for example, Cameron Diaz makes loves to a car, and it goes on

for a long time. It must have looked good on the page, but on the screen

it looks a bit embarrassing, and the thing you would never think you

would think with a Cormac McCarthy script is, I wish these people would

stop talking, just stop talking! Even Quentin Tarantino would go,

another with the talking now! Now, not so much talking in Gravity. Have

you seen it yet? I have not. I should say, a couple of my friends

say they thought it was absolutely wonderful but it was likely

disorientating. It is. Not quite motion sickness but going that way.

It is absolutely discombobulated, and I think it is that rare example

in which the 3D actually adds to the experience. You are meant to feel

what it would be like to be weightless in space, and it comes

closer to that than any movie I have seen. You are floating around with

satellite and debris and George Clooney. And definitely not a wordy

script. Your DVD is Pacific Rim, which... I like Guillermo del Toro

but I don't know, aliens and... Guillermo del Toro normally does one

for me, one for them, and the reason I have chosen this is is because of

Michael Bay, who made the Transformers movies. What this

demonstrates is if you want to make movies about robots hitting each

other, get Guillermo del Toro to do it, because you will care about what

happens to be robots. It is robots hitting each other but with a human

heart, and you like him. I do, but I'm just wondering if robots hitting

each other with a German heart, if that was part of the core Mike

McCarthy script! If only! We will leave it there. You will find more

film news and reviews online, including all the previous shows.

That is it for this week, thank you for watching and goodbye.

Hello there. It looks like a great evening for BBC Children in Need

fundraising, a lot of dry weather around. We have had some sunshine in

the south`east, and here the clear skies will allow temperatures to