Tag: David Fincher

Mank

Posted on by victorfraga

This is David Fincher’s long-awaited return to “theatrical features”, after doing mainly work for Netflix television with the series House of Cards and the fantastic Mindhunter. It’s based on a screenplay written by his father, Jack Fincher, with some uncredited rewrites by Eric Roth. The story is very loosely inspired by the New Yorker article “Raising Kane” by Pauline Kael.

Initially Mank was going to be Fincher’s follow-up to The Game (1997), with Kevin Spacey as Mank and Jodie Foster in an undisclosed role, but in the end he made Fight Club (1999). The fact that it had to be shot in black and white was a problem, until he made them butt loads of cash on Netflix and their willingness to fund black-and-white films.

The film is not about the making of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) – you never see any of that, although you do see Mank receiving his Oscar for co-writing the screenplay. It’s a character study of Herman J. Mankiewicz, who is played by Gary Oldman, his life in Hollywood throughout the ’30s, and his contribution to Citizen Kane. If people are expecting to see a lot of Orson Welles in it, he is kind of a Charles Foster Kane type throughout most of it, an unapproachable person who calls in but whom you don’t get to see much until near the end. Welles is convincingly played by Tom Burke.

Mank depicts Hollywood when it was at the height of its power, both on and off the screen, and the dangers of that power. The main narrative at a certain point is the Upton Sinclair gubernatorial election in 1934 California. Sinclair, who is played very unexpectedly by Bill Nye the Science Guy, was a well-respected novelist and socialist, a early example of a “democratic socialist” in the vein of Bernie Sanders. It also covers Mank’s personal experiences with William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, of whom he had been a regular dinner guest at Hearst Castle. The power that Hearst could have over state politics is a key theme.

It’s beautifully filmed, digitally. One of the nice touches in Mank is that there are scratches, grain and “cigarette burns,” the latter making a nice link to Fight Club. While the film is the cheapest one Fincher has ever made, he captures the era well. If you look at something like Peter Bogdanovich’s Nickelodeon (1976), although it approaches the look of the ’20s, it doesn’t feel like a film made in that era, whereas Mank manages this trick.

If you see Mank theatrically, the sound is very different to what you hear when watching on Netflix. The mix has this wonderful analogue warm quality in tune with films of the ’30 and ’40s which on my Netflix viewing it lacked.

The performances are all strong, especially Gary Oldman. He brings more to the role because he has had his own problems with alcohol. The character of Mank is an alcoholic, and Oldman turns in a showy performance, as he’s been known to – but it’s not some Oscar-bait like The Darkest Hour (Joe Wright, 2018), it’s actually a good film. Amanda Seyfried is also very good as Marion Davies. She always has these large expressive eyes from a screwball comedy of the ‘30s. She has accepted her fate as Hearst’s mistress, and her career is on the way down.

Both Welles and Mankowitz regretted that everyone thought the character Susan Alexander Kane was based on Marion Davies, but it wasn’t. As Mank shows, and as Welles also said at numerous occasions, they both liked Davies and thought she was a very good actress, unlike Susan Alexander Kane. Charles Dance turns in a good performance as the latest in a long line of people to play Hearst including even Robert Mitchum in a ‘80s TV Movie. Arliss Howard, who has been a good character actor for years, is also fantastic as Louis B. Meyer. He pulls off what a scumbag Mayer was.

It’s very clearly the best film of the year and deserves a very dirty rating, and until its final moments the film is fairly respectful to Welles. It’s not the hit job some have painted it as. Welles was clearly arrogant, and there was definitely a tiff over the screenplay credit. However, while Welles got the best collaborators he could for Kane, if you watch any of his other movies, it’s clearly Welles behind it. While Charles Foster Kane is certainly modelled on Hearst and other newspaper barons of the time, much of the character is Welles himself, especially the part about Kane’s childhood.

The idea that it’s all Mank’s structure is gibberish, too. Welles had already written a play about the abolitionist John Brown that uses the same structural conceit, long before he met Mankowitz. The biggest flaw in the story is that in real life, before Mank went to the ranch to write his draft of the script, he and Welles wrote around 300 pages of notes together. Pauline Kael’s version of reality was based on talking only to people who had a grudge against Welles, and has been thoroughly discredited. But it’s still a great movie, and hopefully the Welles fanatics won’t hate it despite the inaccuracies. It’s a movie about how Hollywood manipulates facts, so keep that in mind.

Mank is on Netflix and in selected cinemas on Friday, December 4th.

Three horrific short movies

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The first short film of this horror triptych by British filmmaker Neville Pierce is the psychological terror Lock In (2016, pictured above). It boasts a clever little script concerning a gangster Jimmy (Nicholas Pinnock) visiting a pub just after closing time ostensibly to ask Richard the landlord (Tim McInnerny) for protection money. Richard, meanwhile, is soon to be a granddad: his pregnant daughter Lucy (Sing Street’s Lucy Boynton) is working behind the bar and hits Jimmy over the head with a bottle, knocking him out. Unbeknownst to Lucy, Richard and James have a history as former school teacher and difficult pupil.

Aside from some in car shots and a few exterior pub moments, the whole thing takes place inside the pub. The script packs in a lot in its 10 minutes and is a real gift for a director. Pierce responds with some fantastic casting: McInnerny, a prolific actor who deserves much wider recognition, plays a character who seems to change as revelations alter our perception of him. The catalytic Pinnock lends the whole thing an edge while Boynton is terrific as the daughter confronted with unpleasant home truths (or are they lies?) about her father. Pierce also has a striking feel for pace: the whole thing never lets up and moves along very nicely.

The second short Bricks (2015) adapts Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Cask Of Amontillado in which one nobleman lures another to his wine cellar to exact a cruel revenge. The Russell/Pierce adaptation shifts the tale to the present day and the two characters to stockbroker William (Blake Ritson), the owner of the wine cellar, and builder Clive (Jason Flemyng), his unsuspecting victim. Which means that the script has the virtue of consisting of just two characters on one set, which makes it reasonably easy to produce as a film. But that virtue could so easily be the film’s downfall: hard to imagine anything potentially more boring than two people in a room.

Fortunately for us viewers, as the two characters from their very different worlds talk, Russell avoids that pitfall and delivers a taut sparring, a game of cat and mouse. Pierce again demonstrates astute casting skills and elicits from both actors performances among the most memorable of their considerable careers. Flemyng claims this film is one of the few times a director has actually given him direction – and you can feel it as you watch. The short has also been championed by no less a director than David Fincher (who directed Flemyng in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 2008).

For this writer, however, the best of the three films here is the black and white photographed Ghosted (2016). Again, Russell’s script posits a deceptively simple idea. A widow in search of love and romance visits a restaurant on a series of five dates (the fifth is a man who happens to be at the next table when date number four goes wrong) accompanied by the ghost of her late husband whom she alone can see. It’s an excuse to explore male foibles – narcissism, personal baggage, obsession with tech, earnest intellectualism.

The five dates are beautifully cast, among them Jason Flemyng as a man unable to forget the woman who left him, a very different but arguably equally impressive performance to the one he gave in Bricks. Christien Anholt projects just the right amount of wry observation and world weariness as the dead husband, but the actor who really brings the tale to life is leading lady and comedienne Alice Lowe (Prevenge/2016, Sightseers/2012) who is as good here as she’s ever been (which is saying something). Pierce pulls his various elements together brilliantly: comedy is a notoriously difficult genre to do well, and this one is very funny indeed.

So, an intriguing horror story adaptation, a tense gangster genre outing underpinned by relationships and an hilarious romantic comedy with supernatural overtones. Quite an impressive range of material and all three well executed which makes me, for one, want to see more by this writer-director team. I have no idea what Russell and Pierce will do next (the latter has already made another short with a different writer, unseen at the time of writing) but if they can come up between them with a feature length piece as good as these shorts, we want to see them make it. Meanwhile, the three shorts just released are something of dirty treat.

The Three Neville Pierce Shorts are available to view on Vimeo from Monday, February 5th. Find them here.

The films will also screen on YouTube channel Tall Tales, the new online home for indie films. Lock In will play on Tall Tales from February 6th, Ghosted from February 13th and Bricks later in 2018.