Aubrey MaloneThere are a mixed bag of releases on show at the moment, as often happens as the ‘silly season’ grinds to a halt and the autumn schedule kicks in with a vengeance.
American Ultra is one of those comedies about lazy people who don’t realise they contain superpowers within themselves. It’s only when the timid Jesse Eisenberg learns that he’s been brainwashed by the CIA, who are about to terminate him, that he springs into action and fights back. The Transporter Refuelled is another light-hearted crime film, this time about a mercenary (Ed Skrein) coaxed into a bank heist by the persuasive Loan Chabanol. Neither film will tax your brain unduly.
There isn’t much to laugh about with cancer, but director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon makes a gallant effort to do so in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, an amusing and yet moving tale of a high school boy (Thomas Mann) who befriends a girl suffering from leukemia (Olivia Cooke). If you’ve seen The Fault in Our Stars you’ll know roughly what to expect.
Family life
Ricki and the Flash, meanwhile, has Meryl Streep once again showing her versatility. She plays a woman who gave up family life to become a rock guitarist and is now on the skids. Streep, of course, is no stranger to music, having sung already in films like Postcards from the Edge, Mamma Mia and the recent Into the Woods. In Ricki she’s forced back home after her daughter attempts suicide following a relationship break-up. The daughter in question is played by her real life one, Mamie Gummer, which gives an added attraction to the proceedings. Will we see the Streep dynasty of excellence carried on to a new generation? Hopefully.
Another interesting casting choice takes place in Legend, a film about the London gangsters Reggie and Ronnie Kray, as it has Tom Hardy playing both twins. (I can’t remember this kind of thing happening since Hayley Mills performed a similar stunt in The Parent Trap.) It may be of interest to those of you who haven’t seen The Krays, the 1990 film about this notorious duo who’ve almost been accorded iconic status in crime circles.
Beautiful film
The Irish Film Institute is currently showing Pasolini, Abel Ferrara’s biopic of the Italian director Pier Paulo Pasolini. Pasolini was murdered 40 years ago on a beach in Rome, being run over by his own car after a savage beating.
I was interested in seeing this because Pasolini made one of the most beautiful films ever about Christ, the neo-realistic 1964 release, The Gospel According to St Matthew. It was a much-needed corrective to all the sackcloth-and-ashes blockbusters that were the norm before it. The Gospel According to St Matthew is being screened at the IFI on September 13 at 4pm. Don’t miss it if you’re in the vicinity of Eustace Street.
But there was another side to Pasolini. He was gay and heavily involved with gay prostitution. It’s this aspect of his final days, unfortunately, that Ferrara has chosen to highlight. The IFI doesn’t carry classification tags but if it did, Pasolini would definitely have an Under 18s one. Its scenes of sex and violence are gratuitously graphic and add little to our knowledge of (or sympathy for) Pasolini. At times the decadent images are stomach-churning.
Ferrara is a wonderful director – at times he reminds me of an American Pedro Almodovar – but here he’s given us little but a downbeat chronicle of a society in moral decay. This makes the operatic soundtrack, which seems to be trying to lift the film onto another level, faintly ridiculous. (So also is a character who repeatedly claims to have “seen the Messiah”.)
Willem Dafoe (who played Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ) disappoints as well. He speaks in an American accent which makes no sense at all.
Ferrara says he knows who killed Pasolini. (The man originally convicted of the murder retracted his confession in 2005.) If he does, he gives no clue here. The film may have its devotees among the intelligentsia, but I found it slight and flat. Would it not have been a better idea to screen Carlo Hayman-Chaffey’s 1971 documentary on Pasolini to commemorate the 40th anniversary of his death?