Armie Hammer is one of the most sought-after young actors in Hollywood. Not yet twenty-eight, the six-foot-five leading man has already taken direction from David Fincher, Clint Eastwood and Guy Ritchie in addition to starring alongside the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp and Julia Roberts.

He recently wrapped principal photography on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and is in the midst of producing something of a passion project—a documentary about his transcontinental Vespa expedition with a cast of his closest friends. He tells me that he and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their first child, and the actor fails miserably to conceal the obvious pride in his eyes as he reaches for his beer.

“We had been married for four years. We had travelled to about six continents, worked everywhere we could imagine; we’d taken amazing vacations and really enjoyed marriage, just the two of us, almost as much as you possibly could. So we were like, let’s introduce that next thing. We tried for about six or seven months. It’s a lot harder to get pregnant than it seems in high school.” We tacitly agree he should revise this position before any future graduation ceremonies, and he recalls fondly his own, “extremely peripatetic” childhood.

Riding a seller’s market, the Hammers moved yearly before settling down for a considerable portion of Armie and brother Viktor’s childhood in the Cayman Islands. Armie, great-grandson of famed businessman Armand Hammer, of Occidental Petroleum, considers his time in the Caymans as developmentally transformative. “It changed the way I dealt with people. It changed the way I dealt with stress. It changed the way I dealt with life. [Moving] was difficult. And moving back to Los Angeles was amazing at first, but then I hated it because I didn’t have the social tools to live in Los Angeles. I had grown up on an island. You’re nice to everybody. You’re going to see them again so you’re never a jerk. Whereas, you come to L.A.,”—he reads my mind about Hollywood’s reputation for the highest standards of propriety—“there’s this incredibly mean sort of social thing going on that I just didn’t have the tools for.”

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Unbeknownst to him at the time, it was Armie’s itinerant lifestyle that ultimately prepared him for a career in acting.  “The more actors I speak to I realise that there is a kindred past. Most actors that I can think of moved quite a bit, and I think it builds this survival mechanism where you develop the ability to adjust. You have to meet new people. To read people. You can be with different groups of people, and you’re not being dishonest about who you are, but you’re also allowing a different part of you to interact with these people. It encourages characters.”

It was here in the Caymans where Armie first realized that he wanted to become an actor. His parents thought him crazy; perhaps he needed something their island medicine cabinet lacked due to geographical constraints. Yet the precocious Armie was able to see the distinction early on between film’s specificity for projecting fantasy and the reality that he might one day play a contributing role in the experience.

“It started for me when I saw Home Alone living in the Caymans.I had a dream that I was Macaulay Culkin in the movie. It didn’t translate, oh, what a fun dream. It translated to, that’s acting. There’s something about it that feels like a bigger message that I’m getting.” He reclines in his chair, throwing his arms to the heavens in self-deprecation. “I’m supposed to be an actor! I knew that I wanted to participate in the fantasy. I knew that making movies was magical. Watching them even more so.”

Returning to Los Angeles aged thirteen, he began going for auditions, and although “each one of them was a lot like being in a car wreck,” he confesses that part of him revelled in the experience. Yet after only a scant few of these episodes his parents had had enough of chauffeuring him around in traffic and subjecting him to the lifestyle of a child actor. Speaking now on others with less fortunate direction, his countenance, falling serious for the first time, reflects the immediacy of a soon-to-be father who’s seen it first-hand. “It fucks these kids up. Sometime beyond repair.”

After finding acting again in his late teens, a mature Armie received an invaluable crash course in moviemaking politics while portraying evangelist Billy Graham in his first leading role.  

“The movie [Billy: The Early Years] turned out to be a holy war. Robbie [Benson], the director, isn’t religious at all; he’s a humanist. He loves all people—especially underdogs. Certain people were convinced he was the devil. They had priests show up to exorcise demons from the set. I got together and told these guys they were barred from set while we try to make this movie.” Invariably, “there’s more shit than there is actual movie making process,” and I wonder whether certain studios in the Valley might not benefit from the tempered hand of a board-certified exorcist.

Familiar as he now was with the tumultuous nature of his profession, were his antennae able to pick up on clues as to the eventual success of David Fincher’s The Social Network? Not necessarily, he tells me. “The thing that made me not think of all that was just how nervous I was. I felt like I was in over my head. I was pulling double duty, playing two characters, with Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue being directed by David Fincher. It scared the piss out of me.”

Instead of focusing on his self-proclaimed deficiency in experience, Armie channelled his energies into avoiding becoming the “weakest link” at all costs. Work came first. David Fincher saw to that.

“[Fincher] is the smartest person that I’ve ever been in a room with—hands down. And he wields it like a club. His direction was really specific because of the way his brain works, just the broadband of shit he’s able to focus on at once. He’s looking at your body position; he’s looking at where you are in the frame; he’s looking at the branches of every tree. We stopped takes during Social Network and he would say, ‘Someone get up in that tree and tie that branch down.’ Guys on the crew would laugh saying, ‘OK, yeah sure’. He’d say, ‘I’m not fucking kidding, now you’re wasting my time. Someone get up in that tree and tie that branch down.’ Every now and then he’ll ask, ‘Why aren’t we shooting?’ Quietly. But you hear it through the whole set.”

Fincher also has a notorious propensity for shooting upwards of fifty takes for one scene, and while many actors have difficulty with such repetitive volume, Armie appreciated the stylistic technique.

“The way I like to think about acting is everybody has the same set, essentially, of emotions. If you were going to really simplify it, it would be like sitting in front of a mixing board—with all the different levels—and everybody has one switch that is their anger, and their happiness, and their this and that. Every character that you make is built out of those same switches on the same switchboard, but it’s about how much you turn up this, versus how much you turn down this. It’s just about those little tiny tweaks you make in between every single take. You go, on the next one I’ll try a little bit of this. I don’t know why somebody wouldn’t appreciate it. It feels like safety. Like you’re taken care of, in a way. It was like going to film school, working with David Fincher.”

Compared to Clint Eastwood, the American frontier personified, the difference in directorial style is best illustrated by take count. “Dude, it’s like comparing ice cubes to lava. [Clint] has boiled down filmmaking to its most essential elements. He’ll walk off set and go the gym; that guy’s got veins bulging in his biceps. You’ll do a scene and he’ll go, ‘Great. Alright. Onto the next thing.’ And you’ll be like, wait, Boss—everybody calls him Boss—Boss, can we get one more? And he’ll go, ‘No, I really think that was it.’ There wasn’t a day when we didn’t lunch-wrap.”

For J. Edgar Armie accepted the challenge of playing Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s alleged lover. In preparing for the role he had to delve into the psychology of a repressed homosexual while maintaining the authenticity of portraying an elderly stroke victim, playing the character from his early twenties through his late seventies—no small task. “That role was the scariest. I turned down the audition twice because I was like, I don’t get it. It’s too scary. I wasn’t playing college kids anymore.”

Though J. Edgar opened to an uninspiring critical reaction it pales in comparison to the universally-regarded blemish of Disney’s The Lone Ranger. I ask him flatly if that movie’s vitriolic critical reception is the reason for the ensuing poor box office attendance, as Johnny Depp has controversially claimed. 

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“For sure. But it depends on how much credit you really want to give critics. I would also place a lot of credit in the hands of the audience. People knew what Disney was doing: very obviously trying to set up their next big franchise. They wanted their next Pirates of the Caribbean, with the same guys [producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Gore Verbinski]. If you were making movies in a vacuum, it would have been perfect. But the audience knew they weren’t being sold the first Lone Ranger movie. They knew that they were being sold what we were meeting with [Disney] about which was how they were going to turn part of Disneyland into the Wild West.”

More commerce than art?

“Totally. It was about setting up a franchise. 100% what it was about.”

Surely, not Disney?

“I think the audience said, ‘We’re not ready for that.’ Pirates of the Caribbean was spontaneous. It was lightning in a bottle… The movie itself I was fine with. The finished product? Tonally, there were definitely issues. It wasn’t a perfect movie, but at the same time I don’t know that it deserves the backlash it got.”

We progress into the present in silent acknowledgement of the setting California sun, pushing onwards in the face of overwhelming tragedy; the beer has been depleted. I ask about Tom Cruise, originally tapped to co-star alongside Armie in the Cold War adventure film, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

“I met Tom on the set of J. Edgar when we were doing late night shoots with his son, Connor. He shows up with his son and just walks on set. Just wants to see Clint. I think he was in a Veyron at the time. Who knows what he was doing? It’s a weird thing—I’m over it now because we’ve spent so much time together, but when Tom Cruise walks into a room, people get funny. People who you’re like, oh they’ve got it under control, they’ll act weird. He’s Tom Cruise. Literally the movie star. The most famous movie star. He is the guy. When he walks into a room people drop shit. And like, yelp. Cry. Weird, weird stuff.

“So he shows up, meets everybody. I think he knows Leo. Then he comes up to me and he’s like, ‘Hi. Tom. So nice to meet you.’ Later we end up doing the full screen test before I get a call saying Tom’s out. Sure. Whatever. Tom Cruise has like eight movies that he’s working on at all times. I just know we had a blast working together while we did.”

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Hammer and Henry Cavill on the set of U.N.C.L.E.

U.N.C.L.E. marked another learning experience. Having wrapped principal photography, Armie found himself frustrated with a different aspect of the Hollywood process. “I loved every second of it and I’ve learned so much—but at the same time, for the first month of shooting, I didn’t say anything. It was artistically frustrating. I didn’t get into this to do action movies. I didn’t get into this to drive the car, or shoot the gun, or jump out of planes.” He cites this as his impetus for branching into co-producing his first theatrical feature, Mine, along with his Vespa documentary. “Mine was one of the best scripts I’d read in a long time and it seemed like such an amazing opportunity. It was just like let’s go. Let’s do it.”

Since his pregnant wife is waiting for him at home, I release his shackles and tell Armie he’s free to go after one last question. How might his own fame affect raising his child? He smiles.

“Ah man. It’s so funny. I just don’t consider myself famous. I don’t really consider the problems of raising my child while—I don’t even like saying famous—I don’t know. I would like to do everything I can to raise them so they don’t even realize it. This one will probably spend more time on road trips than anything else. Seeing stuff and having fun. Guy [Ritchie] gave me a lot of advice. He was like ‘There’s nothing about it that’s difficult. There’s nothing about it you need to fear. Just go for it. Quit fucking around.’ But you know we just travel so much—‘You crazy? Who cares? Take them with you.’ He made it so much about like dude, you’re making up problems.”

I anticipate a bright future. For his little one-to-be, and for the nomadic young actor who still, to this day, remains on the move.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E is scheduled for January 2015 release.

Three Stars
★★★☆☆

Amidst the giant robots and the superheroes who make up the majority of Hollywood’s population these days is a running tradition of films based on Ancient Greece. Producers seem to see the land of Plato and Homer as ideal source material for sword and sorcery epics, as well as gratuitous nudity and gore.

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Films such as the 300 franchise and Brad Pitt’s Troy have popularized the trope of blurring the line between history and myth, and it is the latter film which the new production of Hercules, starring Dwayne Johnson, emulates the most. Just as Achilles’ famed immortality is referenced in Troy, but basically denied, along with the existence of the gods, Hercules is here transformed into a mercenary-for-hire whose heroic myth is merely a fabrication by his spin-doctor nephew intended to frighten his enemies.

To the Ancient Greeks, Hercules, or Heracles, as he was known in their language, was an extremely prominent mythical figure. Not only were the stories about the life of the son of Zeus known to all, there were even a number of temples devoted to his worship, and an annual festival, the Heracleia, commemorating his death.

With all of this rich, cultural history surrounding the man, one might fear that his complete persona could not be summed up through the acting abilities of The Rock. However, Heracles as a figure is most commonly seen in art, depicted on pots, murals and the like. As a result, his image in antiquity essentially boils down to a strong man with a club, and it is difficult to think of any actor who could embody this better than Johnson in a loin cloth.

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See what I mean?

The Rock’s physicality is a key part of this film’s success, and care is taken to show off his muscles as often as possible. Meanwhile, the rest of the film excels visually, with attentive costume design and magnificent locations, both real and computer-generated. The CGI monsters present in Hercules’ labours are also impressive, though in a slightly bizarre, Scooby-Dooesque twist, they all turn out to be fake – the Hydra, hilariously, turns out to be nine dudes in masks.

As one might expect from a film so keen to marginalize mythology, the story is grounded in an historical context at all times. Set in Thrace in 358 BC, it tells the real-life tale of Cotys I, king of Thrace, played, somewhat surprisingly, by the always brilliant John Hurt. In Cotys’ struggles with warlords in ancient Thrace, he was famously aided by the mercenary Charidemus.

Hercules replaces Charidemus, and his mythical master Eurystheus replaces King Philip I of Macedon, making it clear that someone with some knowledge of ancient history had a lot of fun working on this script. Furthermore, placing the emphasis on a local power struggle rather than some kind of battle to save the world makes the story more relatable than other epics like the recent Clash of the Titans or The Immortals.

The films strengths are its stunning visuals, Dwayne Johnson’s genial and believable portrayal of the son of Zeus, and some genuinely hilarious scenes such as Hercules’ nephew explaining to some soldiers how Hercules removed the indestructible hide of the Erymanthian Boar (he used an indestructible blade, obviously).

Its weaknesses include an irritating tendency to spell out its moral messages until they’re engraved into your eardrums, an astonishingly predictable storyline (will the relentlessly mercenary Rufus Sewell turn up again in the nick of time? Yeah, probably) and a severely juvenile sense of humour. However, these are the stuff that 12As are made of, and by Zeus is it a lot of fun.

★★★★★
Five Stars

People often talk about the emotions a film made them feel, and where they felt them. A film can tug at your heart strings, tie your stomach in knots, make your brain hurt or sit in your gut. Hide Your Smiling Faces, which is beginning its limited release in London this week before expanding to other major cities, settles atop your rib cage, weighing down onto your lungs. It feels mostly like regret, but a little like resignation. And it’s magnificent.

The film is an unconventional coming of age tale that concerns itself with two brothers who live with their parents in a small provincial community that is spread throughout a seemingly endless forest. One of the boys is about to enter adolescence, the other about to leave it. The oldest is disaffected and frustrated, unarticulated rage and resentment lying constantly beneath the surface. The youngest is slowly beginning to lose his wide-eyed naïveté, emulating the eldest without understanding him.

The film feels like the kind that belongs in galleries, told as it is in disconnected vignettes. Its technique is subtle, its director’s hand hidden, so that we feel we are observing a story, rather than being told one.

Another boy from the neighbourhood falls from a viaduct to his death. An argument with a neighbour about the family dog escalates. One of the boys learns to swim. These types of loose narrative threads unfold slowly and insignificantly, adding to the characters’ lack of purpose and invoking the audience’s memories of the claustrophobia and heat of the long summers of childhood. The slow pace both numbs you and makes you restless, and so we come to understand the boys.

The film’s primary theme is the boys’ existential awakening. They are fascinated with the borders of their existence, though the youngest is just beginning to grasp where these lie, whilst the oldest is already tired of them. They observe bugs and lizards crawling across their skin. They wrestle with other neighbourhood boys in secluded fields, they inflict emotional wounds on authority figures to see how far the repercussions extend.

We feel the eldest’s weariness with the borders of his experience in the never ending forest, in the ceaseless evening light, in the constant drone of the ambient score that eventually quietens down to reveal, even worse, monotonous silence.

Some scenes play out in a single take, whilst others cut between intimate closeups and distant long shots. In this way we are invited to observe the same surfaces of places and people that the boys experience, but like them we are also kept at a distance. Our understanding of scenes is only what we bring to them, what memories and feelings we project onto these surfaces. We have to make sense of the film’s environment as much as the boys do.

Part of this discovery of their own existence is the discovery of death, the spectre of which hangs over the whole film. Again, the youngest is just becoming aware of his own mortality whilst the oldest is already well aware of his, perhaps even glad of it. Adults try to deal with the death of the boy who fell, animal carcases litter the woods, their friend tells them he wants to die.

That these ideas simmer quietly without further examination for much of the film reminds us of the boys’ innocence, of their inarticulacy and of their tenuous grasp on the border between life and death. They continue to play on the viaduct, to fight each other, to toy with stolen weapons. They know that actions have consequences, but they think that like the ripples on the surface of their lake, that they only spread outwards from the source. The film shows how much more complicated it can be than that.

A haunting and poetic work with inspired minimalist direction and some of the most naturalist children’s performances ever captured on screen, Hide Your Smiling Faces is a must see film for fans of personal film-making. It is nostalgic not for the transience of childhood, but for the seeming endlessness in which it is experienced. A sensory experience as much as an intellectual one, the film is hypnotic, thematically potent, and my favourite film of the year so far. Seek it out.

Four Stars
★★★★☆

The self-titled album from Wisconsin sextet Phox is a genre-busting magical mystery tour. Blending rock, psychedelia and soul with Caribbean rhythms and banjo riffs, the result is a summery ferment that makes perfect holiday listening.

Due to be released on September 1st, the album follows the success of the band’s recent single ‘Slow Motion’. Describing themselves as “endowed mutants” who “make music that straddles Feist and Monty Python”, their eclectic tastes are immediately apparent.

The key to the album’s success lies with the lead singer, Monica Martin. Her voice, powerful but with a husky undertone, is redolent of Lana Del Rey: the listener is immediately drawn in to the subtle rise and fall of the melody.

The second track on the album, the amicable, ska-influenced ‘Leisure’, does what it says on the tin. The perfectly crafted melodies are at once captivating and soporific, and the inclusion of string and clarinet solos keep up the interest.

Adventurous harmonies and hazy nostalgia define ‘Slow Motion’. The hammond organ, banjos, and whistling seem opposed to the Caribbean rhythms, yet it somehow works: the song is one of the album’s catchiest.

‘Laura’, placed towards the middle of the album, is a slow, thoughtful lament lasting over six minutes. Lulling the listener into a trance, Martin’s silky voice floats, disembodied, above guitar, synth and string textures. However, the track feels too long: the interest is lost after four or five minutes.

The weakest track on the album is ‘Kingfisher’, which features endless guitar riffs and a whimsical flute solo. Attempting to straddle the line between the light-hearted and the glib, it comes down decidedly on the side of the latter.

‘In Due Time’ is a welcome acoustic addition, providing respite from the eclectic instrument combinations and allowing Martin to really show off her voice. The Caribbean vibe returns for the closer, ‘Evil’, which, despite the name, is one of the happiest, most up-beat tracks on the album.

Phox’s adventurous combinations of unusual instruments, distinctive harmonies and subtle melodies pay off. An outstanding debut, this group seem destined for great things. 

What is the strange musical organism that flourishes in the canals of Manchester? From Ian Curtis to the Gallaghers, the virus of musical talent seems to have been drunk from its waters by every generation. Thirty years after its first release, self-titled album The Smiths (1984) continues to infect listeners and musicians alike.

However, fans and critics have suggested that the album is far from the band’s best work. True, the raw beauty of Morrissey’s voice and Marr’s trademark ‘jangle’ are unjustifiably restrained. But if the listener is anywhere near being a ‘charming man’, they will have the nous to disregard these technical flaws and marvel in awe at the forms beneath.

From the simpering beauty of the album’s Delaney-inspired opener ‘Reel Around the Fountain’, to Morrissey’s mournful closing elegy to the victims of the Moors Murders ‘Suffer Little Children’, the album has few weaknesses.

I have spent hundreds of hours listening to Morrissey’s drawling warble as I writhe on the floor in a spasm of teenage angst. Thus, I can vouch for the power of the album and can stamp it with the teenage-gloomy-listener seal of approval. 

You need not believe my own reactions in order to understand the album’s magnetic effect on listeners: it has provided consistent inspiration for The Smiths’ successors. Locally, it enthralled the Gallagher brothers, prompting them to produce their own brand of lyrical whining with Morrissey’s lyrics in mind. Bridging both time and distance, Arcade Fire’s admiration is flaunted in their cover of Smiths crowd-pleaser ‘Still Ill’.

The produce of a couple of local lads creating a racket in their bedrooms continues to charm. But why is this so? Morrissey and Marr’s style is the perfect mixture of creation and reinvention, poetically engraving the kitchen-sink drama of working class life onto the grooves of vinyl. T.S. Eliot (that well-known listener of The Smiths) remarked that a good poet makes the mundane “into something better”. What Morrissey and Marr achieved was to encapsulate familiar, normative life and transform it into something more appealing.

‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ is not entirely a realist self-indulgent mope – it is laced with a carry-on sense of humour. Arguably, it is the diversity of emotions that the album inspires that allows continued pleasure and interest.

Whatever the reason for the continued success of The Smiths, it carries an admirable legacy for an album whose final cut Morrissey said “wasn’t good enough”. Morrissey and Marr’s love-child may have aged thirty years, but its sound continues to inspire as it did upon its first release.

Click here for a review of Morrissey’s latest album.

Four Stars
★★★★☆

After a relatively silent five years for one of music’s most outspoken divas, Morrissey has once again graced the musical world with his warbling tones.

For fans of Morrissey, the scene of his new album is one of familiarity. The immensely successful You Are The Quarry (2004) required a gestation period of ten years. The question is, has Moz’s break provided him with suitable breathing space? Or are the new songs of World Peace Is None Of Your Business merely the burnt remnants of the ageing ex-frontman?

It’s certain that “the passing of time”, to quote his earlier work in The Smiths, has not altered Morrissey’s topics of choice. Topical politics, dead icons, vegetarianism and mild racism are all fused together in just over 54 minutes. The album’s title track makes clear Morrissey’s sarcastic attack on government has not been cooled. Rather, it has been heated further. 

For me, the title track is somewhat cringe-worthy. Morrissey regurgitates the same-old ‘edgy’ critique on democracy, complete with a repeated cliché – “Each time you vote you support the process.”

Yet the next track, ‘Neal Cassidy Drops Dead’, is the perfect mix of humour and sorrow. The song narrates the reaction of Allen Ginsberg to the death of the beat-poet Neal Cassidy, whose “tears shampoo his beard”. At first listen, I couldn’t help chuckle at the comical rendering of the poet as a growling hairdresser. Yet, the image of tears as a beauty product is a thought-provoking image.

The album as a whole is a mixed bag. ‘Kiss Me A Lot’ isn’t awful, but neither is it particularly memorable. And album-closer ‘Oboe Concerto’ is so annoyingly self-indulgent you just want to skip the track entirely.

However, ‘Staircase At The University’ is a song with which all students can sympathise. A light-hearted tune, it humorously details the trials and the tribulations of a student struggling “to get three A’s”. Here, the Morrissey of old returns triumphal in the same strain of lyrics that ensured his Smiths-era fame, complete with joyous sing-along clapping.

And as for the penultimate track ‘Mountjoy’, the combination of lyrics about 19^th century squalor laid over acoustic guitar is surprisingly relaxing. Here, the dulcet tones of Morrissey’s voice are allowed to really shine.

In short, Morrissey’s lyrics and his band’s music continue to be successful, despite the long  absence. Listen to it a few times and I’m sure you’ll all be humming and clapping along to such cheering lines as, “If it breaks your legs then don’t come running to me.” I know I am.