Why do adults believe that young people who are excellent students are smart enough to figure out everything else about life? Instead, whey don’t adults worry that eggheads have spent so much time with their noses in books that they will be like fish out of water in other situations? In Starter for 10, Brian Jackson (James McAvoy) believes that knowledge is power, gets into university, and learns that it’s not. An encyclopaedic knowledge actually seems inversely correlated with wisdom. On the romantic front, things go exactly as you’d expect: He falls for the blonde bomb shell, gets crushed, and finds love with the more homely and substantial activist girl. The originality comes when Brian gets on the Bristol University team competing in “University Challenge” (similar to “Reach for the Top”). How Brian screws up speaks volumes about his lack of wisdom—even lack of basic common sense.
It is a toss up whether you’ll find the film clichéd or winning. I found it both. It is winning largely because the acting is good. James McAvoy is continually believable as the jejune scholar. Rebecca Hall is solid as the radical student handing out leaflets. She was exceptional in The Prestige (2006) and yet got barely a mention on this side of the Atlantic, so I’m pleased to see that both the film fans (Empire Awards) and the critics (London Critics Circle) in the U. K. have nominated her for her role in The Prestige. In Starter for 10, she and McAvoy are individually good but develop no chemistry that pulls the audience in. Alice Eve is assured as the blonde bombshell, but, probably through not fault of her own, she looks too much the part. She looks like a Hollywood starlet instead of an English university student, and, sure enough, she grew up in Los Angeles as well as in England. I found the film winning largely because I identified with Brian. The film tries to draw you in and deliver an emotional punch with carefully selected music. If you are moved by the Psychedelic Furs, the Buzzcocks, The Cure, and The Smiths, you’ll love the sound track. I found it mildly annoying. I wished that the film makers had, instead, put more effort into making the story more nitty-gritty and original.
X-Men (2000) is a good movie, and I say that never having read the comic books and not particularly liking super-hero movies. X-Men tells the story of humans who have become mutants and thus have special powers. One group of mutants is not hostile toward normal people and the other group is. They fight it out, all the while being shunned by society.
The movie works mainly because of the actors. The cast has great depth; for example, Halle Berry can play a secondary role as Storm (you can guess where her special powers lie). Individuals seem particularly well cast. Hugh Jackman makes his debut as “Wolverine,” an angry mutant who can sprout high-tensile metal claws and, also, feel compassion for the lost teenager he finds. That teenager is played by Anna Paquin. Already with one Academy Award under her belt, she immediately wins you over. Although Paquin does not seem to be particularly beautiful in the many celebrity pictures snapped of her, in X-Men her deep brown eyes are innocent and full of life, her skin soft, and her lips a seductive curl. Old hands Patrick Stewart and Ian Mckellen are perfect as the heads of the good and bad mutant factions respectively. A fine example of the great casting is Framke Janssen who plays a medical doctor at the school for children with special powers. The movie could have cast any young Hollywood starlet with good looks, a soft voice, and winning ways to attract Wolverine. But Framke Janssen is a believable doctor—older (born 1965), speaks with a professional tone of voice (English is not her first language), has an intellectual air (from The Netherlands, she speaks four languages), and has a slight remoteness (maybe from her runway career). All characters are superbly costumed—the dress seems perfectly suited to the character yet does not draw attention to itself.
Director Brian Singer and the script writer do a fine job of cramming years of comic book plot into two hours. Naturally, there is a sequel, and I’d gladly see it.
Pickup on South Street (1953) is a film noir well worth seeing. When a pickpocket steals a young woman’s wallet on the New York subway, neither at first knows that he has stolen top secret microfilm on its way to the enemy Communists. Samuel Fuller, screenwriter and director, tells a complicated story with easy and clarity, maintaining tension throughout. The acting is superb. Richard Widmark is wonderfully insolent as the cocky pickpocket. Thelma Ritter is world-weary and street smart as the middle-aged informer surviving day by day (her Academy nomination was deserved). Jean Peters as Candy is not quite perfect in every scene and she has to say a couple of stereotypical lines that almost no one could breath life into, but she exudes sexuality, and that is important to her role. The supporting actors, from Richard Kiley as Joey the Communist agent on down the list, give solid, credible performances. All of this is supported by an edgy score by Leigh Harline. I particularly appreciated the inventive music after I’d just watched Key Largo with its stereotypical and overblown orchestration. All the action is captured by one of my favourite cinematographers, Joseph MacDonald, who could shoot noir as well as anyone (although the three Academy nominations later in his career had nothing to do with noir). Shot in 20 days on location, the mean streets of New York City were captured convincingly.
The film is not without its flaws, but I will discuss briefly two scenes to suggest why the flaws are easy to forgive. Toward the end of the movie, Joey the Communist agent beats Candy, his ex-girl friend, when she refuses to help him further. In 1952 the Production Code had refused to approve the script for Pickup on South Street because of excessive violence, singling out the scene of Joey beating Candy. Although the scene must have been toned down, it is still very violent. But it works because it is so well done and it fits perfectly in the dramatic texture of the film. Unlike many modern films which use dozens of edits for a fight scene and show close-ups of blood spatters and so on, Pickup uses so few edits that it seems a continuous shot in my mind, and the camera is at mid distance. While this sounds boring to the modern movie mind, it works wonderfully because we see two real people, in real time, spinning and crashing around the apartment in a stomach-knotting, realist way. It works dramatically because it manifests Joey’s mounting desperation to get the microfilm his relentless bosses want; it demonstrates Candy’s growing love for Skip, the pickpocket, in that she refuses to help locate him; and it makes forcefully clear that what started as a petty crime could become a life and death affair.
The weak point in the movie is that after Skip steals Candy’s wallet, gets her in trouble, and then treats her miserably, she falls for him. We are given superficial motivation: He is a devilishly charming guy, and she is, well, a woman of relatively easy virtue. But this is not enough to make reasonable viewers overlook an improbable occurrence in a realistic film. We tend to accept the scene because it is done so well—steamy and complex. Steamy you’ll have to see for yourself, and as you do, your mind will start questioning whether he is just trying to get some easy sex or whether he’s toying with her before he makes some demands for money. Simultaneously, you will be wondering whether she has fallen for the guy or whether she is seducing him to get the microfilm or whether both motivations are going on at the same time. A lot of strengths make it easy to overlook a few weaknesses and create a movie which is greater than the sum of its parts.