The smash–hit American comedy Get him to the Greek stars the British stand–up comedian Russell Brand as a once–famous rock star and alcoholic who must be escorted from London to a vital comeback concert in LA. Charged with this task is a sweet record company minion played by the terrific young American comic Jonah Hill. It appears that Brand – with previously only one major film under his belt, the Judd Apatow hit Forgetting Sarah Marshall , in which he played a similar character – has immediately ascended to the apotheosis of a star’s career: when you seem to be acting yourself, and have a complete–enough personality to carry an entire life on screen.
Brand built his career in the UK as a controversial stand–up and presenter who talked fast and creatively about his drug and sex addiction. In the film his character does this too – lounging on sofas riffing about booze and adultery, his long legs ending in the most delicate of winklepickers, his chest bursting from nipped–in shirts and a hairdo like a Musketeer, curled tenderly around a pulchritudinously astonishing face..
Which is precisely what America has done. They’ve embraced Brand there utterly and even recently gave him the Hollywood equivalent of a Pulitzer – the lead in a remake of Arthur (currently filming), to which your reviewer has a two–word response: Dudley Moore. While it’s clear Brand is intriguing and here to stay, he has little of the devastating charm and acting chops of Moore.
In fact Brand does not seem,tiffany bracelets, in this movie anyway, to be responding to the world at all. He doesn’t appear to listen or hear, and whole scenes and important emotional moments involving his character’s supposed rebirth go weirdly by while Brand’s face simply moves through several configurations of blankness. In contrast,tiffany cuff Links, the lardy Hill – a trusty in the writer/director Apatow’s stable – has a lovely way of absorbing things. In one scene he falls into a London nightclub with Brand, and slowly, incredulously, takes in the view,tiffany earrings, his shy eyes suggesting the spirit of a fanfare within him. Unlike Brand, Hill is touching and his presence has meaning.
But what does one do with Russell Brand? How does art deal with such a person? His closest living analogue is Jim Carrey – another elastically talented comic with much physical beauty, but, crucially, acting depth and a bona fide oddness that would make him ripe for a David Lynch (I’m still waiting).
Not only could you be forgiven – looking at the poster – for thinking that Woody Allen’s new film Whatever Works had absolutely nothing to do with him, it seems the film’s distributors actively want us to mistake it for the new Curb Your Enthusiasm DVD boxset, since it features its star Larry David, alone, with absolutely no hint of his character’s context.
In the film David stars as a grouchy NYC chess teacher whose life is disrupted the day he helps a pretty dumb blonde (Evan Rachel Wood) and her naive Southern family. This being an Allen film, the initially misanthropic David must end up softened as a character, and the movie is really just a progression to that sappy point – although David puts up a spirited fight, limping,tiffany rings, possessed, down the streets in his ragged trousers bitching about the Nobel prize (“It’s just politics, like any other phoney honour“) or imitating Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (“The horror!”) or listing all that life has to offer to a late–middle–aged American male, ie Omega 3 addiction, and the day they “put you in a box“. There is something a little demeaning in hearing David actually say these kinds of things. In Curb he doesn’t need to: his face alone articulates it all (and worse).
One random thought: Allen may have recently had a devastating encounter with the bedpan. The film is littered with references to pelvic sonograms, colonoscopies, (“They probe me like coal miners . . . !”) and at one point features David disappearing into the loo, the belt of his mouldy dressing gown trailing, to the strains of Beethoven’s Fifth as his young girlfriend trips out in sequins to watch a rock band called Anal Sphincter. All of which is amusing enough, and David gives it some welly, but the film’s rallying cry – that love, of any kind (whatever works for you) is the answer – feels knee–jerk. The script may have been first written in the 1970s but has all the weaknesses of the late–period Allen.
But oh the hope . The words “return to form” have been attached to Allen’s films more than to any other director’s in the history of the universe. Bearing in mind he hasn’t made a truly great film since Hannah and her Sister (1992 – that’s 20 films ago) or had a cast–iron hit since Bullets over Broadway (1994), it only goes to show the ravenousness of our hunger. Because it’s not actually Allen’s kvetching and bitching that we worship him for – it was his ability to recreate happiness in the early films, Annie Hall, and Play it Again Sam . Think of Diane Keaton with her jaunty tennis racket, or her delighted gasp when Woody gives her a plastic skunk. Allen showed us better than anyone what the good times really look like. We can’t quite give up on that. We never will.
Two minor films featuring major names – Tetro , by no less than Francis Ford Coppola, and Villa Amalia , starring the hearteningly ageless Isabelle Huppert – are released this week to tellingly little fanfare. Coppola’s – a black–and–white film – follows an American writer and one–time depressive (played by Vincent Gallo) living what looks like a rather delightful creative life in Argentina. In Villa , Huppert plays a pianist retreating from the world and settling in a remote villa on an Italian island. Both films have a rambling, marginal quality and a romantic, perhaps monomaniacal perception of Living One’s Dream. Neither is a joy to get through.
And now to the small matter of the coolest film ever made. Jewel of the French New Wave, made with spit and sawdust and not even proper audio equipment (all the sound was dubbed in later), Breathless gets a 50th anniversary re–release this week and is doing the international rounds in an exquisitely restored new print.
The confidence of the film! The way the camera wheels around its small–time hoodlum star Jean Paul Belmondo, with his sweet spivvy bracelet and ability to lie prone on a bed smoking a whole fag without removing it from his mouth once. “I’m on my way. Hey, hey, lalalalalaaalaaa!” he sings to himself and then eyeballs the camera (the shock of that at the time . . . ). In another scene he spots the hairs on the back of Jean Seberg’s neck, momentarily caught by the sun, and lowers his eyes until his own lashes catch the rays: it’s a film that fixes each action in the memory, that thinks everything is touchable.
Even though its characters let each other down, and its director Jean–Luc Godard turned out to have a sour word for everyone (Belmondo included, and he was horribly cutting about his mucker Truffaut too), the movie is so idealistic it breaks the heart. “The worst flaw is cowardice!” it screams, and goes on to demonstrate in frame after frame what it is to be young, and fierce, and convinced that a single lie will curse you forever. Nigel Andrews is away
