Berlinale 2010 - Pronósticos de premios y comentarios de A Family, The Killer Inside Me y Mammuth (Clarín)

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Sundance/Berlín: "The Killer Inside Me", de Michael Winterbottom (Screendaily review)

Dir. Michael Winterbottom, USA, 2009, 110 min.

Michael Winterbottom’s staggeringly violent adaptation of Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me reaches a new extreme in the cinematic depiction of a psychopathic murderer. It is hard to watch – and for some will be impossible - regardless of any psychological logic behind its many killings.

Distributors everywhere will be shy of this film, despite Winterbottom’s established reputation. Anyone releasing it will be dogged by its violence, especially towards women. Theatrical response should be similar to Antichrist, another film whose violence is at the extreme of what is watchable.

The killer is (and is in) Sheriff’s Deputy Lou Ford (Casey Affleck), the son of respectable parents in Central City, Texas. Ford is imperturbable, except for when provoked, as we see in an encounter with a local prostitute, Joyce (Jessica Alba), who gets a beating after she strikes him, and then becomes Ford’s lover. He eventually kills her and the local mayor’s spoiled son, which he blames on Joyce.

Affleck plays Lou Ford as a boy scout who graduated to the police force with an eerily high voice and a rigidity that seems inscrutable. His motivation in killing seeps through over the course of the film, but far more time is devoted to the murders of two women than there is to why Ford kills them.

More violent than Chigurh, the killer in No Country for Old Men, Ford is also far more cerebral than American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. In his ability to talk about almost anything, he is reminiscent of real killers like the well-groomed Ted Bundy.

Thompson’s novel is mostly dialogue and interior monologue, so an adaptation has flexibility in its depiction of Ford’s town. Production design by Rob Simons and Mark Tildesley recreates a sedate western city meticulously, down the details of Ford’s clothing, about which the killer is fastidious. Cinematography by Marcel Zyskind takes us back to the 1950’s with the precision that Ford applies to his own life.

Ford’s exterior, as played with serene control by Affleck, is a defence and an offence. It hides the horrific drives inside him, which the film never probes satisfactorily, and it challenges anyone to penetrate through the mask of decorum. Winterbottom seems to be assuming that, as a work of fiction, The Killer Inside Me plays by its own rules, and that a character’s actions are better witnessed than explained.

Just as troubling are Joyce and Ford’s girlfriend, Amy (Kate Hudson), who remain drawn to him despite beatings and signs of depravity. Ford’s acceptance by these women could be why audiences will attack the film on grounds of misogyny. Winterbottom seems to suggest that their willingness to endure violence, like Ford’s aggression, are things that can happen to people.

The Killer Inside Me is well within American film noir territory, in that it identifies the criminal without understanding the crime.

Secondary roles are solid, with Ned Beatty as the town’s corrupt mayor whom Ford blackmails, and Bill Pullman as the wildly inane lawyer who escorts Ford out of an insane asylum, enabling him to kill one last time. Simon Baker plays the district attorney who sees through Ford’s defenses and hates what he sees.

Audiences up to their ears in cinematic serial killers may enter this film, thinking blithely that they already know them all. Like it or not, Winterbottom will prove them wrong.

Production companies

Stone Canyon

Muse

Revolution

Wild Bunch

Curiously Bright Entertainment

Indion Entertainment Group

International Sales

Wild Bunch

+ 33 6 20 36 77 72

Producers

Chris Hanley

Bradford L. Schlei

Andrew Eaton

Screenplay

John Curran, based on the novel by Jim Thompson

Cinematography

Marcel Zyskind

Editor

Mags Arnold

Production design

Rob Simons

Mark Tildesley

Main Cast

Casey Affleck

Jessica Alba

Kate Hudson

Ned Beatty

Elias Koteas

Tom Bower

Simon Baker

Bill Pullman

Brent Briscoe

Matthew Maher

Film: The British are coming! (The Independent)

With new films from old masters Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, fresh comedy talents behind the camera and two Roman epics in the pipeline, these are exciting times for homegrown movies. Geoffrey Macnab looks ahead

This year looks as if it will be a vintage year for British filmmakers... but a very difficult one for the British film industry as a whole. We will be seeing work by established auteurs like Stephen Frears, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Meanwhile, there are signs of a new wave in British big-screen comedy led by movies like the 1970s-set Cemetery Junction directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, satirist Chris Morris's directorial debut, Four Lions, and Nigel Cole's We Want Sex, about the 1968 Ford Dagenham strike by 187 sewing machinists. Expectations are high, too, for films from British directors working in North America: Edgar Wright's comic-book adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and Michael Winterbottom's foray into film noir, The Killer Inside Me.

Back in Britain, Rowan Joffe's new version of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock (updated to the 1960s) marks the first major foray into production of ambitious UK distributor Optimum Releasing. And it will be intriguing to discover whether actor turned director Nick Moran can follow up on the promise of Telstar with his new film The Kid, about an abused child from a grim background building a better life for himself.

Two competing projects about Romans in barbaric Britain, Neil Marshall's Centurion and Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle of the Ninth, means that 2010 is also shaping up as the year of the toga in British cinema.

The downside is that in spite of the promise of all these films, independent British producers are finding it ever harder to finance their new movies. Cuts are looming at the UK Film Council, the public body that has been one of the major investors in UK production over the last decade. With lottery money being diverted to the Olympics, less money will be available for British film-makers and the commercial sector is becoming more and more "risk averse". It's yet to be seen what implications the planned merger between the UK Film Council and the British Film Institute will have on British production. There is uncertainty, too, about what a change in Government might mean for public film policy.

Another worry is that the Harry Potter bubble will soon burst. For the last decade, the British film industry has derived huge economic benefit from the series shooting in the UK. When it ends next year with the second part of the ominously titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it is bound to create a funereal chill in the industry.

Whatever kind of films the Brits make, they remain heavily reliant on backing from the UK Film Council or broadcasters like the BBC and Channel 4 and there just doesn't seem to be enough money to go around. In the short-term, though, there seem to be plenty of decent British-made and British-directed films in the pipeline. Enjoy them while you can.

ONES TO WATCH: BRIT FILMS IN 2010

Route Irish
Ken Loach's new film takes its title from the often lethal road that links Baghdad airport with the city's Green Zone. The focus is less on the Iraq War itself than on its effect on a former soldier whose best friend died on "Route Irish". Scripted by Paul Laverty, Route Irish sees the director reunited with the cinematographer Chris Menges, who first worked with Loach more than 40 years ago. He was a camera operator on Loach's Poor Cow in 1967 and was cinematographer on Loach's early masterpiece, Kes (1969).

Cemetery Junction
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant make their big- screen directorial debut with a nostalgic comedy set in 1970s England. The heroes are twentysomething clerks, working for a life assurance company and whiling away their days boozing and chasing women. Cemetery Junction is billed as "the funny, touching and universal story of being trapped in a small town and dreaming of escape". The conventional wisdom used to be that British TV comedians struggled to make the transition to the big screen. However, Gervais and Merchant are promising that their evocation of early 70s Reading will be "glossy and glorious, full of humour, romance and drama." (9 April)

Untitled (Mike Leigh)
"An intimate portrait of people's lives" is how Leigh's latest is described. It is doubtful that even the financiers know exactly what the film is about. As Leigh once remarked of his insistence on complete creative freedom, "there is none of that hideous, long-winded process of shunting a film backward and forward... having every cigar-chomping producer putting in his ill-conceived two-pence worth." What we do know is that the new film sees Leigh surrounded by familiar faces. The cast is led by Jim Broadbent and Lesley Manville.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
After Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright goes it alone - he has made his new film, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, without his usual accomplices, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Wright is collaborating with a cast of young Hollywood actors led by Michael Cera, who played the gawky charmer Paulie Bleeker in Jason Reitman's Juno. Based on Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novel, the film tells the story of the young slacker Scott who can only win the girl of his dreams by vanquishing her seven dastardly ex-boyfriends. (6 August)

Four Lions
Chris Morris's satire about a bunch of British jihadis who push their abstract dreams of glory to breaking point premieres at the Sundance Festival later this month. Given the furore about alleged Christmas Day bomb plot on a Detroit-bound plane, Four Lions could hardly be more topical. Some are bound to be offended by Morris's hijacking of terror for the purposes of big-screen farce. The film starts from the premise that terrorist cells are "driven by the same group dynamics as football teams and stag parties."

Tamara Drewe
Stephen Frears follows up on The Queen with an adaptation of Posy Simmonds' graphic novel. Offering a modern reworking of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, the new film stars Gemma Arterton as a big city femme fatale returning to her rural roots. Once a shy and awkward teenager, she is now the focus of envy, lust and gossip wherever she goes.

Never Let Me Go
This adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel stars two of Britain's biggest young stars: the long established Keira Knightley and the fast-rising Carey Mulligan. It is produced by DNA, the UK production company behind 28 Days Later and Sunshine. US director Mark Romanek was behind the very creepy Robin Williams drama One Hour Photo. Never Let Me Go promises to be equally unsettling. It is about a very sinister boarding school where human beings are cloned to provide organs for donor transplants. (November)

Brighton Rock
Rowan Joffe's new screen version of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock is likely to be very different to the Boulting brothers' 1947 version. For a start, the new film is set in the 1960s - the era of mods, rockers and Quadrophenia. Sam Riley plays the razor-wielding Pinkie (the role made famous by a young Richard Attenborough.). "We're making Brighton Rock as contemporary as we possibly can because the story feels "modern". It's too alive, too vibrant and too relevant to be contained in the late 30s," Joffe has said of his adaptation.

The Killer Inside Me
Pulp writer Jim Thompson is the patron saint of film noir. The Grifters, The Getaway, The Kill-Off and After Dark, My Sweet were all adapted from his work and he helped script Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. Now, prolific British director Michael Winterbottom has made a film version of his 1952 novel. The film stars Casey Affleck as the small-town deputy sheriff who is also a sadist, a psychopath and a killer.

Mr Nice
Oxbridge educated drugs smuggler and libertarian Howard Marks is played by Rhys Ifans in Bernard Rose's biopic. Expect an epic - Rose has already characterised the film as "the Lawrence of Arabia of stoner movies." (8 October)

Centurion
The Wire's Dominic West exchanges the mean streets of Baltimore for the muddy bogs of Pictish Britain in horror meister Neil Marshall's foray into sword- and-sandal territory. (23 April)

The Eagle of the Ninth
Tourism in the remoter reaches of Wester Ross is likely to be boosted by Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle of the Ninth which was partially shot last October at Achiltibuie on the Coigach Peninsula. This rugged part of Scotland should make a suitably austere backdrop for a film set in 2nd-century Britain and exploring the circumstances behind the disappearance of the Ninth Legion somewhere in the Highlands. Channing Tatum, Donald Sutherland and Jamie Bell head the cast.

Berlinale: "The Shock Doctrine", de Michael Winterbottom y Mat Whitecross (Variety)

The Shock Doctrine

(Docu -- U.K.) A Channel 4, More4 presentation of a Revolution Films, Renegade Pictures production. (International sales: E1 Films Int.l, Toronto.) Produced by Andrew Eaton, Alex Cooke, Avi Lewis. Executive producers, Alan Hayling, Hamish Mykura. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, Mat Whitecross. Screenplay, Naomi Klein, Winterbottom, based on a book by Klein

With: Naomi Klein, Kieran O’Brien (voice).

By LESLIE FELPERIN

A handy cinematic summary of radical-left pundit Naomi Klein’s bestseller of the same name, polemical docu “The Shock Doctrine” attempts to connect the dots between shock therapy and torture, Milton Friedman’s economic theories, and catastrophic recent events. Judged against the many other docus around now that also critique the machinations of modern capitalism, Michael Winterbottom’s and Mat Whitecross’ “Doctrine” looks eminently sober, polished and persuasive. Stauncher critics, however, on both the left and right will have the same beefs with the film as they did with the book. Limited release and airings on upscale TV are sure to follow.

Something of a poster-girl for the anti-globalization movement, Canuck journalist Naomi Klein has built a formidable following for her lively, accessible, detail-rich books, particularly the anti-brand tome “No Logo” (2000) and her latest, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” on which this film is closely based. Klein herself appears on camera here (although not as much as some might expect), mostly giving lectures to packed halls of worshipful students, one group of which rise to give her a standing ovation at pic’s end.

To summarize brutally, both book and film postulate a connection between psychological techniques such as shock therapy developed in the 1950s to “brainwash” subjects, more extreme forms of torture (used now by the U.S. military), Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics free-market-boosting economic philosophy, and the way in which repressive regimes since the 1970s have sought to “shock” and coerce whole countries into perpetuating pro-privatization, anti-communitarian social orders with the backing of the CIA, the U.S. military, and multinational corporations. This, in essence, is the Shock Doctrine.

Using a mix of well-researched archive footage and animation, co-helmers Winterbottom and Whitecross (who co-directed Berlinale Silver Bear winner “The Road to Guantanamo” together) work through case studies of how this doctrine was put into practice over the last 40 years, starting with Pinochet’s Chile. Pic traces explicit lines between Friedman’s neoliberal disciples in that country, the denationalization of its industries, the Nixon administration’s support of Pinochet, and the murder of thousands of Chilean citizens. Parallels are drawn with Iraq and Afghanistan today, as well as what happened in Blighty after the Falklands War and in Russia under Yeltsin.

Niftily integrated blend of voiceover narration (spoken by Brit thesp Kieran O’Brien) and visuals is fluent and mesmerizing enough to sound persuasive, as well as offering a freshman-level refresher course on recent history, albeit with an unabashedly left-wing slant.

However, there’s a certain wooliness about Klein and Co.’s argument here, which rests more than it ought on a rhetorical sleight of hand. Listen really closely and the link between the shock tactics (let alone “shock and awe” tactics) exercised by governments and armies on whole societies and actual shock therapy, as practiced on victims like Janine Huard (interviewed here by Klein) by psychological experimenter Ewan Cameron in the 1950s, seems based on nothing much more than metaphor. Similarly, pic and book’s use of Friedman as the whipping boy for so many of the world’s ills necessitates a vast oversimplification of what happened in, for instance, Russia in 1996. Still, compared to the usual comic-book level of discourse in so many anti-globalization docus, “The Shock Doctrine” looks as rigorous as John Kenneth Galbraith’s prose.

For the record, pic was presented in Berlin as a work in progress, and version shown lacked any end credits. All info in the credit blocks here was drawn from the Berlinale’s official catalog and press notes supplied by the film.

Camera (color, B&W, HD, digital projection), Ronald Plante, Rich Ball; editors, Winterbottom, Whitecross; sound designer, Joakim Sundstrom. Reviewed at Berlin Film Festival (Panorama Documentary), Feb. 9, 2009. Running time: 85 MINS.

"The Shock Doctrine", también en la Berlinale

Winterbottom y Whitecross en la Berlinale, cuando ganaron con "Camino a Guantánamo"

Varios supimos el año pasado de la presencia en el país de Michael Winterbottom y Mat Whitecross (cuyos padres fueron detenidos durante la dictadura militar argentina) para filmar un documental que resultó ser una "adaptación al cine" del libro de Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine". El filme estará en la sección Panorama de la Berlinale y en la página de la autora de "No Logo" se puede saber un poco más del tema. No es un filme sobre la Argentina, pero las experiencias políticas y económicas del país forman parte de su narrativa.

Aquí, unos comentarios (en inglés) de Naomi Klein, que ya dirigió una película ("La toma"/"The Take") aquí en la Argentina.

"I am beginning work on a documentary of my book The Shock Doctrine, directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, the team that made The Road to Guantánamo. We are picking up that road a few decades earlier this time, in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s. The most notorious of the period's torture centres was ESMA, a Navy school converted into a clandestine prison. According to human rights groups, roughly 5,000 desaparecidos, or disappeared people, were tortured here, the vast majority of them murdered."

Michael Winterbottom y la dictadura argentina

La información, en inglés, está aquí abajo y, resumiéndola, dice que Michael Winterbottom y su colaborador en "Road To Guantanamo", Mat Whitecross, harán un documental adaptando al cine el libro de Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine", centrándose específicamente en las dictaduras de Argentina y Chile de los años 70.

La información, publicada en "Screen Daily", me hizo recordar un extraño llamado telefónico que recibí meses atrás. Un asesor de un importante político argentino que ya no ocupa cargos importantes (pero que los ha ocupado) me llama a "Clarín". Se presenta y me dice si conozco a un tal Michael Winterbottom que quiere entrevistar a su "representado". Le digo que sí, que lo conozco, que más allá de opiniones me parece un cineasta serio y le recomiendo --con cierta picardía, debo admitir-- que acepte la entrevista, aún imaginando que, siendo el político que es, no creo que quede muy bien parado en el documental del director de "Guantánamo".

Ahora que sé en que se basa el documental, estoy seguro de ello. Lo que no estoy seguro es que el filme se centre sólo en la década del 70, porque la persona de la que hablo afectó --y vaya si afectó-- nuestra situación de los 80 en adelante. Tampoco sé, de hecho, si más allá de mi recomendación, al asesor le pareció buena idea que su jefe sea entrevistado por Winterbottom. O bien por Mat Whitecross, cuyos padres -- esto ya se ha dicho antes-- estuvieron detenidos en la Argentina durante la dictadura militar.

Lo que sigue es la información, en inglés, de "ScreenDaily".

"Michael Winterbottom and Road To Guantanamo collaborator Mat Whitecross are working on documentary The Shock Doctrine.

The film is based on a book by Naomi Klein which aims to expose what she calls "disaster capitalism". The theory is that neo-liberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war and terror to establish its dominance.

Klein herself will narrate the film, as she did a short film of the same name last year, directed by Alfonso and Jonas Cuaron.

Winterbottom´s film will again explore major events in history where the shock doctrine seems to apply, focusing particularly on the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile in the 1970s.

"I have started shooting segments of the film already with Naomi Klein narrating (reprising her role from the short film)," Winterbottom told ScreenDaily.

Winterbottom is at the San Sebastian film festival to promote his latest film Genova, starring Colin Firth, which screened this morning in official selection."