Treat Yourself to a Capital Extravaganza (From The Oxford Times)

Treat Yourself to a Capital Extravaganza

7:56am Thursday 15th October 2009

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Perhaps the most striking thing about the American movies showing in the Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival is how many of the big titles have been made by onetime indie mavericks who now form the bedrock of the mainstream. For instance, Joel and Ethan Coen return to the 1960s to inflict personal and professional woes on Midwest college professor Michael Stuhlbarg in the playfully melodramatic A Serious Man, while Todd Solondz returns to Happiness territory to heap crises of conscience and confidence on the friends and family of sisters Ally Sheedy, Allison Janney and Shirley Henderson in the gleefully provocative Life During Wartime.

Jim Jarmusch is also in the mood to tinker with generic convention in The Limits of Control, as ice-cool hitman Isaach De Bankolé's mission to Spain is jeopardised by an all-star cast that includes Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Gael García Bernal, John Hurt, Luis Tosar, Jean-François Stévenin, Alex Descas and Hiam Abbass. But can anything top Grant Heslov's adaptation of Jon Ronson's bestseller The Men Who Stare at Goats for stellar wattage, as George Clooney is joined in a madcap exposé of the US Army's little-known new age and paranormal squadron by Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, J.K. Simmons and Robert Patrick.

Clooney also headlines Jason Reitman's take on Walter Kim's corporate satire Up in the Air, in which he strives to save his job as a downsizing expert and press his suit with fellow frequent flyer, Vera Farmiga. And the opposite extremes of the business world feature in Steven Soderbergh's darkly comic study of blue-chip corruption, The Informant!, which stars Matt Damon as a whistleblower with a vivid imagination to match his passion for truth and justice, and Mike Judge's Extract, which sees Ben Affleck suggesting that blue-collar boss Jason Bateman opts for a pharmaceutical solution to the problems facing his marriage and the food extract company that is being circled by avaricious predators.

Judge first came to fame with the TV animations Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill and one wonders whether Pixar maestro John Lasseter will ever try his hand at live-action. He has taken a small step closer to reality by producing a 3-D version of Toy Story 2, which is bound to keep the kids as happy as David Bowers's Astro Boy, a CGI updating of the much-loved anime hero, The Mighty Atom, who first appeared on Japanese screens in 1960.

Freddie Highmore, Nicolas Cage, Samuel L. Jackson and Bill Nighy are among the vocal talents. But the contrasts couldn't be starker between the brave new world of Metro City and the post-apocalyptic America depicted in John Hillcoat's faithful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Road, in which Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee make for the coast to find signs of life and hope for a viable future. Just as encounters with Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Robert Duvall and Molly Parker shape the destiny of the unnamed father and son, so the events and engagements of a single day in Los Angeles in 1962 help fiftysomething academic Colin Firth over the death of partner Matthew Goode in designer Tom Ford's anticipatedly stylish debut take on Christopher Isherwood's novel, A Single Man.

The Sixties also provide the setting for Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock and Tom DiCillo's documentary, When You're Strange. The former stars Demetri Martin as Elliot Tiber, the interior designer who helped save the most iconic gig in rock history while renovating his parents' struggling Catskills motel, while the latter provides the first feature-length profile of The Doors. Narrated by Johnny Depp, this labour of love chronicles the fortunes of Jim Morrison, John Densmore, Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger by using footage shot between 1966-71 (much of it previously unseen material by UCLA graduate, Paul Ferrara), amongst which are clips from Morrison's supposedly lost experimental film, HWY: An American Pastoral.

Morrison was a firm believer in spiritual transmigration and he may well have been familiar with Carl Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul, which proved the inspiration for Sophie Barthes's debut feature, Cold Souls. Paul Giamatti stars as a New York actor of the same name, who is having problems getting into character for a stage production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. So, he makes an appointment with doctor David Strathairn, who has perfected a technique for removing the soul and replacing it with one more suited to the patient's temperament. Despite misgivings, Giamatti plumps for the soul of a Russian poet and is soon dazzling his director with his passionately perceptive performances in rehearsals. But his own soul is then trafficked to St Petersburg.

The process of creating a character is further dissected by Joe Swanberg in the mumblecore dramedy, Alexander the Last, as newly married actress Jess Weixler finds herself becoming increasingly attracted to Tennessean co-star Barlow Jacobs during rehearsals for an off-off-Broadway play. With musician husband Justin Rice on the road, Weixler offers Jacobs a place to stay and tries to pair him off with her needy photographer sister, Amy Seimetz. However, directors Jane Adams and Josh Hamilton keep testing Weixler's fidelity by devising ever-more sensual stage business and the temptation literally to take her work home with her grows excruciatingly stronger.

Fellow mumblecorpser Andrew Bujalski also considers the extent to which sisters help and hinder each other in Beeswax, as Maggie Hatcher proves too wrapped up in her own problems to assist older twin Tilly Hatcher in saving the vintage clothing store she runs in Austin, Texas. The shambling mumblecore style has occasionally proved irksome, but it has never set out to provoke. The same can't be said for the cinema of Harmony Korine, who is on particularly shocking form in Trash Humpers, which follows an anti-social social gang as its members drink cheap booze, dry-hump dustbins, masturbate trees and bushes, smash things up, put razor blades in apples and drag dolls around behind their bikes. They are also prone to acts of brutality and occasionally break into a song and dance number and Sean Bones finds himself lost in a milieu similarly beset by delights and dangers after his belongings are stolen on a trip of a lifetime to Jamaica in Sam Fleischner and Ben Chace's fish-out-of-water story, Wah Do Dem.

Charlyne Yi embarks on a very different kind of odyssey in Nicholas Jasenovec's Paper Heart, as she falls for actor Michael Cera while conducting an investigation into the possibility of enduring love. Expanded from a 2007 short, Suzi Yoonessi's Dear Lemon Lima, runs a similar risk of being overwhelmed by its own idiosyncrasy. But Yoonessi consistently stays the right side of twee in turning her adolescent journal into a delightful misfit comedy. Mischievously designed by Kay Lee and Rena Bussinger to temper the bunnies and lovehearts of 13 year-old Savanah Wiltfong's pastel-coloured imagination with the rougher realities of her existence outside the Alaskan town of Fairbanks, this is a celebration of both heritage and diversity, as Wiltfong and her team of outcasts triumph in the school's annual Snowstorm Survivor competition.

Another newcomer, Gabourey Sidibe, makes an equally indelible impression as an ostracised teenager in Lee Daniels's Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, as her obese, illiterate single mother is emotionally and physically abused by her mother, Mo'Nique. However, her fortunes look set to change when she is accepted into a special school. With eye-catching support from Lenny Kravitz and Mariah Carey, this disturbingly direct slice of Harlem realism is bound to be one of the festival standouts. The same can't be said, however, for Denis Villeneuve's Polytechnique, which loosely recreates 25 year-old Marc Lepine's murderous rampage at Montreal's school of engineering on 6 December 1989. Adopting a morose monochrome aesthetic and shifting focus between shooter Maxim Gaudette, would-be hero Sébastien Huberdeau and victim Karine Vanasse, this is a structurally fussy rather than diegetically valid or psychologically elucidative exercise.

Filmed in both English and French versions, Polytechnique is showing here in its Anglophone form and Canada's leading film-maker, Atom Egoyan, gives a Gallic text and Anglo twist in Chloe, which relocates Anne Fontaine's Nathalie (2003) to a wintry Toronto and casts Amanda Seyfried as the beauty hired by doctor Julianne Moore to test the fidelity of music professor husband, Liam Neeson. The feminine influence is decidedly lacking from Scott Hicks's adaptation of Simon Carr's memoir, The Boys Are Back, however, as wisecracking sportswriter Clive Owen decides the best way to deal with the loss of his second wife and the arrival of troubled teenage son George MacKay to join six year-old Nicholas McAnulty is to adopt an anything goes attitude to parenting.

The other Australian titles at LFF 2009 are much weightier affairs. In Bright Star, Jane Campion teams Ben Wishaw and Abbie Cornish to explore the passion between John Keats and Fanny Brawne that between 1819-20 inspired some of the most beautiful poetry and prose in the English language, while in Balibo, Robert Connolly draws on Jill Jolliffe's book, Cover-Up, to reveal the part played by the Indonesia government in the murder of five Australian journalists who were about to expose a plot to destabilise East Timor as a pretext for invasion in the autumn of 1975. Lastly, neophyte Warwick Thornton comes right up to date to examine the plight facing the Aborigines living on the fast-emptying Outback reserves in Samson & Delilah, which features exceptional performances by Marissa Gibson and Rowan McNamara as the teenagers succumbing to violence and addiction after being forced to run away to Alice Springs.

Two more teens find a situation spiralling out of control in Lindy Heymann's Kicks, after Liverpool fans Kerrie Hayes and Nichola Burley kidnap star player Jamie Doyle to stop him leaving for Real Madrid. Despite a disappointing denouement that allows the well-developed mood of ominous unease to drift into frankly implausible melodrama, this is a shrewd insight into adolescent obsession and celebrity aspiration, whose most arresting aspect is Spaniard Eduard Grau's high-toned depiction of such unfamiliar landmarks as Richard Wilson's revolving window artwork, `Turning the Place Over', and the Burbo Bank wind farm.

These new additions to the Liverpool skyline are shot with even greater reverence by Stuart Nicholas White in actor David Morrissey's first feature behind the camera, Don't Worry About Me, in which soft-hearted bookie's clerk Helen Elizabeth takes pity on cocky southerner James Brough after he treks north to follow-up a one-night stand and winds up being robbed while drowning his sorrows. Although based on Elizabeth and Brough's play, The Pool, this feels more European than the average British picture, despite owing much to American odd couple items like Before Sunrise (1995) and In Search of a Midnight Kiss (2007).

Morrissey also features in the third Mersey movie on show in this year's festival. Scripted by Control's Matt Greenhalgh from Imagine This, Julia Baird's memoir about her half-brother, Sam Taylor Wood's Nowhere Boy traces John Lennon's formative years in mid-1950s Liverpool. With Aaron Johnson as the 15 year-old who becomes hooked on rock`n'roll after he sees an Elvis Presley film at the local cinema, this is more about Lennon's relationships with his absentee mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) and dotingly strict Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) than his burgeoning friendship with Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster) or the formation of The Quarrymen. Photographed by Seamus McGarvey to temper nostalgia with Austerity authenticity, while also retaining the debuting director's authorial signature, this is a much-anticipated speculation on the emotional crises that gave voice to a musical genius.

The past looms large elsewhere in the British contingent, with Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising centring on a mute medieval warrior who escapes his captors with the slaves tending him, while Cracks sees Ridley Scott's debuting daughter Jordan transpose the action of Sheila Kohler's South African tale of misguided passion in an isolated girls' school to 1930s Ireland. The Second World War provides the backdrop for a couple of family secret sagas, with Maggie Smith, Dominic West and Timothy Spall headlining From Time to Time, Julian Fellowes's adaptation of Lucy M. Boston's enchanting children's novel, The Chimneys of Green Knowe, and Julie Christie and Jenny Agutter joining Romola Garai, Bill Nighy and David Tennant in Stephen Poliakoff's Glorious 39, in which an adopted daughter discovers the skeletons in the closet of an upper-class Conservative MP.

The scene shifts to the early 1960s for Lone Scherfig and Nick Hornby's interpretation of Lynn Barber's memoir, An Education, which stars Carey Mulligan as the 16 year-old who is distracted from her Oxbridge entrance exam by cultured older man Peter Sarsgaard, much to the horror of parents Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour and teachers Emma Thompson and Olivia Williams. Another dangerous liaison drives the action in Malcolm Venville's 44 Inch Chest, as Ray Winstone's pals John Hurt, Ian McShane, Tom Wilkinson and Stephen Dillane decide to seek retribution for his wife's adultery by kidnapping her young lover. And another abduction informs the debuting J. Blakeson's darkly comic and claustrophobic thriller, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, which stars Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston as the suburban desperadoes and Gemma Arterton as their student victim.

Director Paul King confines Edward Hogg and Simon Farnaby to a single room for much of Bunny and the Bull - but what do you expect from a road movie co-starring The Mighty Boosh's Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt? The best laid plans also begin to unravel in Tom Harper's The Scouting Book For Boys, as caravan park kids Thomas Turgoose and Holly Grainger conspire to run away to prevent her from being sent miles away to live with her father, and Xiaolu Guo's She, a Chinese, in which Lu Huang's hopes of starting a new life take her from a provincial backwater to a big city and thence to England, where the problems of finding a niche are further explored in Penny Woolcock's 1 Day, a grime musical set among Birmingham's Afro-Caribbean community that sees serial loser Dylan Duffus being pursued by the villain he owes money, the mothers of his children and even his irate grandmother.

The mood is much more solemn in Rachid Bouchareb's London River, in which insular Guernsey farmer Brenda Blethyn is forced to suppress her prejudices to unite with Malian migrant labourer Sotigui Kouyaté after her daughter and his son are presumed missing in the 7/7 bombings. Surprisingly saddled with simplistic stereotypes and blatant counterpoints, this well-meaning, but TV-movieish drama is so hamstrung by rigid political correctness that it ends up saying much less about racial tension in modern Britain than it clearly intends.

Moving into the documentary strand, Jez Lewis suggests in Shed Your Tears and Walk Away that life is no easier in the outwardly idyllic setting of Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. But the actuality emphasis this year falls primarily on music and celebrity, with Julien Temple assessing the achievement of 70s pub rockers Dr Feelgood in Oil City Confidential, Damani Baker and Alex Vlack celebrating the career of singer-songwriter Bill Withers in Still Bill, Peter Esmonde profiling musical enigma in Trimpin: The Sound of Invention, Ondi Timoner recalling the wild excesses of internet pioneer Josh Harris in We Live in Public, and Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas insisting in American: The Bill Hicks Story that the comic who died of cancer at the age of just 32 in 1994 was much more than a mere stand-up. He was also a libertarian, outlaw, shaman, philosopher, romantic, preacher and a fearless genius.

Finally, LFF has unearthed another treasure trove of archive goodies, with the highlights being Anthony Asquith's Underground (1928), Frank Capra's Dirigible (1931), Norman Z. McLeod's Topper (1937), Wesley Ruggles's Too Many Husbands (1940), John M. Stahl's Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and Delmer Daves's Jubal (1956).

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