Despite being advertised as a good old knees-up, full of ‘cheeky frolics’, the Oxford Revue’s latest offering got off to a slow start, with early sketches falling a bit flat. However, towards the end things improved; the material was a lot funnier and the audience had had time to warm up. I was disappointed that the show ended just as the Revue seemed to have  got the right atmosphere going; it was this shaky beginning that prevented the show from being an overall success.

The performers themselves were excellent and made the best of the material they had. The company as a whole were full of energy and threw themselves wholeheartedly into each situation and set of characters they portrayed. Sophie Klimt’s performance was a great comic turn throughout and her musical number was a particular highlight. Ollie Mann played a succession of camp characters amusingly and with great relish.

The sketches themselves were, with some exceptions, a let down. The comedy was fairly predictable and I felt that some more surprises could have given the humour a much needed kick-start. There were some witty lines but these were too thin on the ground and unoriginal. The caricatures were too familiar and the juxtaposition between carry-on style innuendo and more ‘gritty’ sexual jokes wasn’t always a success. The funnier moments came from the unexpected, and there just wasn’t enough of this. The continuous stream of jokes about ‘broken-Britain’ and the ‘nanny-state’ were funny in their mockery of Daily Mail readers, but were repetitive and not laugh-out-loud.

I also felt that the potential of the Brighton theme was not fully exploited. Looking at the promotional material I was expecting a bawdy old fashioned music-hall approach, but many of the sketches were only loosely related to this. A few more songs might have helped mix things up and remind the audience how the show fitted together as a whole.

Despite these problems the show was still enjoyable, fun and frothy. While some gags were weak, the Revue never lost the energy of the performance. Things jogged along smoothly and there was never a point where the audience seemed bored. It was an entertaining and enthusiastic performance but it certainly didn’t send me laughing my way home.

two stars

The Oxford Revue continue their run at the BT studio, 24-27 February, 9.30 pm

Student filmmaking, it’s fair to say, has its share of stigmas. Some of them have probably been earned, but the modest (at best) production values of amateur movie-making needn’t preclude invention, ingenuity and commitment. As long as these three factors are in ample supply there is no reason why student films can’t conceivably shame their professional counterparts.

Nor is such an achievement unprecedented. It might be hard to believe this if you’ve ever witnessed firsthand the joyful chaos that tends to descend on budding amateur film-sets, but some of the most widely-acclaimed pictures of the last thirty years had their origins on humble campuses. Eraserhead, a deeply haunting and technically accomplished cult favourite, was made intermittently by David Lynch and a group of like-minded individuals from 1971 to 1976 while the future auteur was enrolled on a Masters course in Fine Arts. Shot on sets assembled cheaply from plywood and with a cast of family, friends, and (legend has it) one unborn calf foetus, the enduring respect that it commands from film buffs and serious critics alike is testament to what the enthusiasm of student filmmakers can achieve.  

  Less fêted, perhaps, but no less impressive in terms of ambition, was the first feature-length production of the Oxford University Film Foundation, Privileged, in the early eighties. Following the sexual escapades and drunken misadventures of a group of student partygoers, it not only proved that determined students could make a little go a long way, but launched the careers of some of modern cinema’s biggest names after it was bought for theatrical release. Director, then-student Michael Hoffman went on to lead major studio pictures, including this month’s The Last Station, (reviewed in Film) while it was the world’s first exposure to Hugh Grant who has since become a household name for being impossibly British in numerous wildly profitable romantic comedies.

  Given the kudos that Privileged brought to student filmmaking, it is perhaps surprising that although our university has produced myriad stars of stage and screen, novelists, playwrights and politicians, the percentage of alumni that successfully forge a career behind the camera is small. There are impressive exceptions of course: Ken Loach, an undergraduate in Law, went on to make his name synonymous with social realist cinema in such bleak yet compassionate masterpieces as Kes, regularly cited by critics as one of the greatest British films ever made. Former English undergraduate Michael Winterbottom, meanwhile, is known as one of modern cinema’s most versatile and innovative directors, having brought unsimulated sex to mainstream films in 9 Songs and experimenting with form in A Cock and Bull Story, a meta-comedy about the making of an adaptation of The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy. Even Michael Winner, now better known in pop culture for his long-running appearances in excruciating advertisements, was once the director behind exploitation movies like the Death Wish series. But for the most part Oxford has appeared short on filmmaking talent.

  This is quite possibly a result of the relative lack of any available communities of filmmakers in the university, in comparison to the wealth of dramatic and musical productions frequently put into motion. If filmmaking received the representation that its fellow art-forms enjoy in Oxford life, it is more than likely that a greater number of students would direct their creative energies into distinguishing themselves via moving pictures.     

  This is certainly the belief of Misha Kaletsky, current president of the Oxford University Film Foundation, and his fellow committee members. After a brief period of inactivity, the foundation was revived in Michaelmas of 2009 by Kaletsky, who is keen to see the foundation’s presence grow within the university.

He wants it to not only provide resources and networking opportunities for budding filmmakers in Oxford, but also lectures by heavyweight figures who can share their years of experience in an often impenetrable industry with those who are still wet behind the ears.  

  The centrepiece of the foundation’s calendar in Hilary term, however, is the first annual Oxford University Film Festival. The main event is film cuppers, when shorts by Oxford students will be judged by a panel of industry professionals, and the top eight will receive a special screening at the Phoenix Picturehouse, before an overall winner is announced at an awards ceremony. However, the festival also promises to offer something for those who want to take a less hands-on approach to film, including talks by illustrious names like actress Natasha McElhone of The Truman Show, and Margy Kinmonth, whose series Naked Hollywood won the BAFTA for Best Documentary.

  But aside from this imminent celebration of student movie-making, the OUFF also have plans to emulate its founders and produce another large-scale film. ‘We will be starting next term on a project of our own, based on the winner of our screenwriting competition, which closes at the end of term’, Kaletsky has said. ‘This should be finished before the end of the year, when we’ll once again focus on making the film festival even bigger and better.’ As far as we know, Hugh Grant has no plans to reprise his role as supporting actor.

  With interest and activity in student movies once more on the rise, then, it may not be long before Oxford has a filmmaking community to rival its theatrical counterpart. And if some of the most ambitious and brilliant minds in the country decide to realise their artistic visions through a camera lens, it’s always possible that more talents to equal such luminaries as Michael Winterbottom and Ken Loach might emerge from amongst them.

One of the most reliable rules of film-viewing has always been to avoid directors with only one name, from McG to Pitof. However, The Fall may be the exception that proves the rule. It is the definition of a vanity project, and, as Roger Ebert points out, ‘you can only admire the man vain enough to make it’. That man is Tarsem, an Indian-born director who has written, directed and financed an unfairly ignored gem.

It begins in an early 20th century Los Angeles hospital, where a paralysed stuntman, Roy (Lee Pace) weaves a surreal fantasy tale for a fellow patient, six year old Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), in a plot reminiscent of The Princess Bride. However, this is not such a light-hearted film, and the motive behind Roy’s skilful storytelling is soon revealed to be far darker.

Of the little coverage the film received, critics largely concentrated on its breath-taking visuals, yet failed to note that, amazingly, the film contains absolutely no CGI, instead employing locations in twenty-four different countries and a gruelling four-year shoot. Yet while its beauty is extraordinary – Tarsem happily calls it ‘a visual wank’ – The Fall contains so much more. It is unashamedly sentimental about story telling and a celebration of the transformative power of art.

Vital to the film’s success is the performance of Catinca Untaru, a young Romanian girl with no previous acting experience. Indeed, the film would not have been made had the right actress not been found, and production was fast-tracked as soon as Untaru was discovered. Her naturalism and innocence is extraordinary, both of which stem from a semi-improvised script and an unsteady grasp of the English language.

The Fall is one of a handful of films that can truly be referred to as ‘visual poetry’, though such a hackneyed term hardly does it justice, and fails to take note of its emotional power. It is a film at once joyous and sinister, a fantastical and truly original celebration of the powers of story telling and cinema. Close in tone and quality to the better-known Pan’s Labyrinth, the film should be regarded as a worthy companion to Del Toro’s masterpiece. Tarsem has single-handedly produced a film of staggering beauty and wild ambition, and his plaudits are long overdue.

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. As this famous Tolstoy quotation faded out of the opening scene of The Last Station, I got the feeling my hopes were raised too high. The premise of the film, you see, is very good; it charts the last year of the life of Leo Tolstoy (Plummer), who, having embraced a spiritual and ascetic way of life, is regarded by many Russians as virtually a saint. In his private life, however, he is very old, very ill and constantly fighting with his wife and muse of forty-eight years, the Countess Sofya (Mirren), over the rights to his life’s work. We see the shakiness of these last days of their marriage through the eyes of Tolstoy’s fresh-faced and admiring new secretary, Valentin Bulgakov (McAvoy), who learns a lot about life, and of course love, from the great man.

Although Plummer and Mirren are both nominated for Oscars for their performances, I felt that director Michael Hoffman did not make full use of either actor, or indeed of Tolstoy’s story, owing at least in part to the fact that the script is certainly not a work of literary genius. You can tell that McAvoy was struggling a little with what he had been given; on Valentin’s first meeting with Tolstoy, he supposedly becomes overwhelmed with emotion, although it took me a while to work this out, as he looks more like a hayfever sufferer who’s been hit in the face with a six-kilo daffodil. This is a fairly accurate simile, in fact, as Valentin sneezes whenever he is nervous, an emotion-conveying shortcut that I found intensely annoying.

The sneezey, over-earnest Valentin improves slightly as he becomes more worldly, and gives up his excruciatingly well-guarded virginity to his new girlfriend Masha (Condon). This is supposed to be the blossoming-young-love story that offsets the souring love between Tolstoy and the Countess, but it is very poorly executed; Masha swings between keen and reticent for no apparent reason, and when she finally packs up and goes to Moscow, Valentin doesn’t seem too bothered about it.

Mirren, however, is wonderful, as she works her way around the house destroying every breakable object. Perhaps another criticism of the script is that Sofya is painted as extremely childish and spoilt for a woman who, in actual fact, gave birth to thirteen children and wrote out War and Peace six times for her husband. I’m not sure which of the two sounds more painful.
The attention to detail isn’t great; some scenes were cut off too early, and accents slipped in places. Also, look out for one of Tolstoy’s apparently more smug sons, who appears in one scene and one scene only. Of Leo and Sofya’s thirteen children, it is only he and the painfully dull Sasha (Duff) whom we get to see.

Aside from the constant fighting, the film has a rather cosy feel, afforded by the fact that it looks as if it is set in a National Trust-owned manor house. The only real nod to Russian culture is the obsessive tea drinking.

It is about love, and adequate enough, so I think that The Last Station will become a prime fodder for the BBC’s daytime schedules on Easter Mondays for many years to come, but I probably won’t watch it when it does.

2 stars

Extraordinary Measures is a sensitively made film about a heartbreaking subject. Starring Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford, it is based on the true story of businessman John Crowley (Fraser) and his wife Aileen (Keri Russell), who undertake a seemingly impossible task in the hope of saving the lives of their two youngest children, Megan and Patrick. The children were born with a rare and incurable genetic condition known as Pompe’s disease, which is threatening to end their lives within the year. Their only hope is the research of biochemist Dr. Robert Stonehill (Ford), who is on the verge of a breakthrough discovery in the treatment of Pompe’s. John and Aileen begin the arduous task of securing funding for Stonehill’s research, eventually setting up a bio-tech company, all the while struggling to deal with the deteriorating health of their children.

Although the synopsis makes this film sound desperately depressing, we are immediately assured that this will not be the case. The film begins with the vibrant, fun-filled celebrations of Megan’s 8th birthday, and her illness takes a backseat while we are introduced to her. The Crowley family are instantaneously charismatic, and you get the impression that their weariness and strength has been translated well onto the screen.

One successful aspect of the film is that the personalities of the children do not get lost in the story. They are outgoing and very optimistic, despite how staggeringly close they are to their life-expectancy of nine years. Six-year-old Patrick in particular, who has very few lines, commands great empathy. It does not take a lot of effort to emotionally engage with the family; this is a real achievement on the part of director Tom Vaughan, who infuses the film with the same gentle sensitivity that he harnessed in Starter for Ten.

One criticism of the film is that it is not hugely exciting. There is really very little that happens outside of a science lab, a business meeting or the Crowley family home. The science is never too intense, nor the business-speak too overwhelming, but the film is simply not action-packed or varied in its locations or themes. This is down to the nature of the story, which is essentially two men setting up a company. Dr. Stonehill (Ford) is the only main character who is not based on a real person (he is an amalgam of the many scientists and businessmen who assisted the Crowleys), and this perhaps explains why he is not quite as complete a character as the others. He is a wonderfully grumpy loner who has rather good taste in old rock music and no interests outside of biochemistry and fishing, yet of his background and psychology we know virtually nothing.

Though a little bland, if you can overcome the lack of fast-paced action and immerse yourself in a shamelessly emotional story, you will find much to enjoy. It is certainly good to see Harrison Ford and Brendan Fraser on screen together, despite the distinct lack of swashbuckling archaeological adventures. There are countless glimmers of wit, and, having spent the film’s duration wondering whether you will ultimately be uplifted, the wait turns out to be worthwhile; perhaps the cherry on the cake is spotting the cameo at the end: ‘Businessman 3 – John Crowley’.

3 Stars

It’s fitting that the director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie), has the French word for ‘youth’ embedded in his surname: Micmacs’s dialogue is saturated with puns, jokes and untranslatable Gallic idioms, with its plot often little more than a string of knockabout set-pieces. It may be cast with adults, but their roles and relationships are unmistakably childlike, and even the more ostensibly grown-up aspects of the story often serve as little more than fodder for yet more slapstick escapades.

Ironically, it’s these darker elements that give the film its premise. As a child, Bazil (Dany Boon) lost his father to a land-mine; years later a stray bullet lodges in his brain. Jobless and homeless before long, he falls in with a motley ‘family’ of misfits living in a junk-yard grotto, and sets out to avenge himself on the two arms-manufacturers responsible for his twin misfortunes. Marshalling the various talents of his new-found accomplices, Bazil then proceeds to play the company directors (André Dussollier and Nicholas Marié) off against each other, resulting in a series of increasingly elaborate acts of sabotage.

The results of all this are certainly enjoyable, with the cast (including several Jeunet regulars) obviously relishing the madcap fun. The film’s attempts at satire, however, prove noticeably more hit-and-miss overall. The villains – like the heroes – are largely cartoonish, which makes for an uneasy tone whenever the story is forced to rely on the real-life destructiveness of their profession in forcing the audience to emotionally invest. The eventual humiliating come-uppance is noticeably awkward, with Dusollier and Marié’s petulant defiance to the last ringing much truer in a comedic setting than an apparent bawling apology to their victims. Meanwhile, the episode’s dissemination via youtube, rather than anything more constructive, feels particularly misguided as a forced feel-good payoff.

Jeunet has described Micmacs as a mix of all his previous films, and many of his trademark features are present: oddballs with bathetic back-stories, childlike yet determined protagonists, animated interpolations, not to mention – as Jeunet himself has admitted – a long-held obsession with ‘orphans fighting monsters’. The visual palate is once again warm and rich, with Jeunet’s favoured greens, yellows, and browns popping off the screen, and Jeunet’s love of endearingly literalist flights-of-fancy is further developed.

The effect of all this is reassuringly familiar, but luckily Micmacs has just enough to differentiate itself from its predecessors. The Parisian setting – though still noticeably cleaned-up in post-production – is less idealized and more obviously contemporary than before, and it’s notable that the backgrounds of tower-blocks and suburban canals don’t end up undermining Jeunet’s fantastical cinematic glow. Micmacs’s indebtedness to the silent cinema of Keaton and Chapin is in good hands given Jeunet’s love of the mischievous and irreverent, and this also serves to give the film a noticeable freshness which balances out some of the more clichéd elements – the obligatory tomboy rival/love interest in the form of Julie Ferrier’s Elastic Girl being a case in point. Further filmic allusions help maintain a lightness of touch, with the prologue’s build-up to satisfyingly old-Hollywood opening credits being particularly slick; meanwhile, using excerpts from several classic Max Steiner soundtracks proves an imaginative touch, with the quality of the original music alone seeming to ensure their effectiveness.

Occasionally, however, the references seem superficial and underdeveloped – a subtle penchant for Sergio Leone-like framings is dropped early on, denying the film a potentially interesting addition to an already fertile mix. To some extent the film as a whole suffers from a similar problem: the early sections seem to be striving for something beguiling and elusive, beautiful even when in ostensibly shabby environments and with the childlike elements emanating from Bazil himself, rather than seeming imposed upon the situation. As soon as Bazil enters the grotto, however, this intriguing atmosphere is replaced with an altogether more safe mix of slapstick and whimsy. The results are certainly enjoyable, satisfying and developed with undeniable flair, but the incongruity of the early scenes – as well as the time it takes for the plot to establish itself – leaves a lingering impression of uncertainty – it may not undermine the later fun, but it does leave one wondering just what might have been.