By FilmInk Staff. Edited By Erin Free
THE AVIATOR (2004) The legendary Martin Scorsese was at the top of his game with The Aviator, his incisive 2004 biopic of aviation pioneer, ladies’ man, and Hollywood mogul Howard Hughes. “I was attracted to the story because it told me things I didn’t know about Howard Hughes,” Scorsese told FilmInk. “He pushed the standards to what we see today. He was a renegade, and an outlaw of Hollywood.” Savvily, Scorsese cuts the story off before the always eccentric Hughes finally went completely off the rails, holing himself up in Las Vegas (most of which he’d bought), and living out his life as a phobic shut-in. The Aviator is about Hughes’ early years, when the demons were there, but not screaming as loudly. In a stellar performance, Leonardo DiCaprio brilliantly captures the many faces of Hughes, from the cocky young Hollywood player who romanced Katherine Hepburn (an initially mannered but ultimately very moving Cate Blanchett, who walked away with an Oscar for her performance) to the mentally ill but still steely businessman besieged by politicians (Alan Alda is brilliantly oily as a corrupt senator) and business enemies (Alec Baldwin is quietly malevolent as Pan Am boss, Juan Trippe), and the lost boy ultimately unable to escape his fate. Despite its great length, Scorsese keeps things moving at a breakneck clip, delivering a number of stunning set pieces (Hughes’ infamous plane crash in Beverly Hills is a blood-splattered frenzy, while the mammoth Hollywood premiere of Hell’s Angels is like a jolt of true glamourous adrenaline) and inspired creative decisions that add up to an invigorating, absolutely absorbing film. Erin Free
LIFE (2015) Life takes one brief, essential moment from the all-too-short life of movie icon, James Dean, and investigates it with astute precision. The film documents the beginnings of what would become the important friendship of fifties figurehead, James Dean (hot up and comer, Dane DeHaan, makes his all-too-recognisable character a truly mercurial and utterly absorbing creation), and Dennis Stock (a fine Robert Pattinson), the young photographer from Life Magazine whose stark, beautifully composed black-and-white images of the rebellious actor are among the greatest celebrity portraiture ever committed to film. Theirs is a complicated friendship, with Dean dodging the fame that is just about to swallow him up (the film takes place just before the release of the star-making East Of Eden, with Dean still fighting to get cast in Rebel Without A Cause), while Stock pursues recognition and acclaim to the detriment of all other aspects of his life. With the flashy Hollywood details kept to a minimum (Alessandra Mastronardi charms as Dean’s Italian actress love, Pier Angeli; Ben Kingsley is brilliant as bullish studio head, Jack Warner; and the likes of Eartha Kitt, Lee Strasberg, Nicholas Ray, Natalie Wood, and Elia Kazan flit through briefly), Life is no cheap and easy expose. Sensitively scripted by Australian poet, author, and screenwriter, Luke Davies (Candy), this beautifully crafted drama richly personalises a man whose life story has so often been told in headlines and broad strokes. “The film is about a photographer shooting somebody who’s well known, and how that balance works,” director, Anton Corbijn, told FilmInk in 2015. “That person happens to be James Dean. It then becomes a film about two guys who become friends, and the kind of effect that it has on their lives.” Erin Free
MY WEEK WITH MARILYN (2011) As daunting a prospect as it is to take on the role of a screen icon like Marilyn Monroe, Michelle Williams makes it look easy in this frothy concoction of old Hollywood and young love. My Week With Marilyn is a hugely enjoyable slice of wish-fulfillment drama, reportedly based on a true story, with a tremendous central performance from Williams as the famous screen siren. Williams embodies all sides of the nebulous Marilyn Monroe, the superstar from the fifties who was plagued with personal problems. Her drug dependence and unpredictability causes chaos in the production of the peculiar 1957 drama, The Prince And The Showgirl, and frays the nerves of her director/co-star, Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh having loads of fun). Despite being married to playwright, Arthur Miller, Monroe takes a fancy to a young, impressionable assistant, Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), who looks up to her in innocent awe. Monroe seemingly had no formal capacity for acting, despite being shepherded by the oppressive Method Acting teacher, Paula Strasberg (Zoë Wanamaker), but when she was on, she was on, and Williams effortlessly replicates her mannerisms with seductive ease. She also captures some of her raw sexiness and plenty of her debilitating vulnerability. “When I started my extensive research, I realised that Marilyn was a character that she played,” Michelle Williams told FilmInk in 2011. “Those nuances, the tics, and the gestures…she developed those. Her body and image was a sort of training ground, and she rearranged herself to become Marilyn Monroe. Those were the things that I picked up on. I had to make them comfortable, and make them feel as natural as she did, and then deal with the person behind it.” Joshua Blackman
AUTO FOCUS (2002) Being a celebrity with a “shameful” vice is hardly something to hide in this day and age. Quite the contrary in fact, as many of today’s zeitgeist elite revel in their various chemical or sexual addictions. This was not always the case, however, as is bleakly shown in Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus, the true story of television star, Bob Crane, who played Hogan from the sixties sitcom, Hogan’s Heroes, and also appeared in a few minor film roles. Crane’s private life, however, was the polar opposite of the clean-cut, likeable “good guy” image that he pervaded. In fact, Bob was a sex nut, not only indulging his libidinous appetites but actually filming them using an amazing new technology called “video”! Teamed up with John Carpenter (not the Halloween director), Crane indulged his desires several hundred times over at the expense of two marriages, his career, and ultimately his life. The notoriously uncompromising Paul Schrader brings his dark vision to a topic that could be handled by few others. The acting, with Greg Kinnear as Crane and Willem Dafoe as Carpenter (“Strangely enough, I feel more uplifted by these kind of stories,” Dafoe told FilmInk in 2002, “because if they’re told sincerely and passionately, you find compassion in unexpected places. The best thing a movie can do is to make you shift the way you think about something”), is truly top notch, and the direction is as gritty as expected. “What fascinates me are people who want to be one thing but who behave in a way contradictory to that,” Paul Schrader once said. “I like the sort of characters who might say, ‘I want to be happy, but I keep doing things that make me unhappy.’” Anthony O’Connor
BADASSSSS (2003) With the vividly entertaining Badasssss, actor/director Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City, Panther) tackles a subject that cuts right to the bone: his own father. Melvin Van Peebles is one of the great unsung pioneers of the American film industry, a man so ahead of his time that he had to decamp to the more liberal France to really sow his oats as an artist and creator. His most indelible stamp on the film world is his 1971 groundbreaker, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song, a no-budget indie that launched not only the Blaxploitation craze, but also a new era in independent film. The very personal nature of the film courses through the film like familial blood. In a tough, unforgiving performance, Mario Van Peebles plays his father as a hardened obsessive and balls-to-the-wall fighter who will do anything to get his film made. The film also bristles with a hustling energy, staying tight and cohesive even as it jumps from one picaresque event to the next, with Melvin first disguising his film as a non-union porn film before hitting up his friend, Bill Cosby (T.K Carter), for a loan, and ultimately releasing the film himself to an initially disinterested public. It’s a winningly tall tale, and Van Peebles captures it beautifully. “What I liked about the story was that it was sort of a classic David versus Goliath story like Rocky was,” Mario Van Peebles told FilmInk in 2003. “And it didn’t matter that it was about black or white or green or Asian people…It was one man driven by what would seem to be an impossible dream, and willing to go up against some impossible odds. That was the fun of it.” Erin Free
WONDERLAND (2003) Wonderland is no typical from-glamour-to-hammer rise and fall story. Gritty and grim, the film is all about the fall, and not the good times that came before it. When we meet “adult film actor”, John Holmes (Val Kilmer in a bravely scummy performance), his days as the reigning king of seventies porn are long gone. His massive member still rates a mention as a party trick, but it’s no longer sitting pretty centre stage. Instead, Holmes is dating a young starlet (Kate Bosworth), doing drugs, and mixing with a bad crowd. And it’s here where he comes undone, jamming himself between a crew of wannabe gangsters (Josh Lucas, Dylan McDermott) and the real thing, in the form of drug dealer, Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian), leading to a bloodbath on Wonderland Avenue. With Wonderland, director James Cox delivers a bleak, hard-hitting film that channels the skuzzy energy of Paul Schrader and fills the screen with a succession of alarmingly seedy characters. The film’s multi-viewpoint structure only makes them seem even more deceptive and sleazy. And though the film uses John Holmes as its obvious hook, he’s only one part of the puzzle; this is a film about the drug murders on Wonderland Avenue, and Holmes was only one participant. The other players are just as richly drawn, particularly Josh Lucas’s bullying madman. Wonderland is so relentless and creative that it nearly elevates cinematic sleaze to high art. “Hollywood is wonderful, but it does eat its young,” Kilmer told The Guardian in 2004. “The community doesn’t have much respect for people growing, or changing their opinion. John Holmes was a charming, charismatic, goofy young man who moved to Los Angeles…and got involved in a quadruple murder.” Erin Free
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PETER SELLERS (2004) Mounting a biopic like The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers was brave and possibly crazy, considering not only the immense body of the eponymous screen icon’s work, but also the bizarre working of his mind. Between bouts of film success, the insecure playboy wannabe – who phoned his mother (Miriam Margolyes) daily, and consulted a psychic (Stephen Fry) for advice on which roles to accept – claimed that he had no personality until he assumed that of his next character. Geoffrey Rush plays all of the characters that Sellers used to play so successfully that he almost captures that one extra that Sellers could never quite crack: Peter Sellers himself. Sellers’ hardcore fans – even the ones annoyed by the fact-fudging cinematic shorthand – are also pleasingly catered for here. Animated opening credits tip their cap at What’s New Pussycat and the Pink Panther films, and the recreation of Goon Show recordings is spot-on. Showing much sympathy to the point of view of Pink Panther director, Blake Edwards (John Lithgow), the one flaw is the use of the self-conscious “stepping out of the film” moments that see Rush playing Sellers playing the people around him. Still, it’s easy to overlook considering the fine performances of Charlize Theron as Britt Ekland and Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubrick. “I don’t think we try to make anyone out as a good person or a bad person,” director, Stephen Hopkins, told FilmInk in 2004. “And though it’s obviously principally about Peter Sellers, it’s also about a lot of other artists in general. I try to be an artist myself, and I know that some people just can’t express themselves through their work, and that must be really difficult.” Demetrius Romeo
HITCHCOCK (2012) “The secret of Hitchcock is that it looks at the human side of him, and the family side of him, all at a critical moment in his career and life when he’s right in the middle of making Psycho,” the film’s producer, Ivan Reitman, told FilmInk in 2014. Fleshed out with intelligent wit and style, there’s a knowingness to Hitchcock of which the master director himself would have no doubt approved. Against its making-of-Psycho backdrop, Hitchcock is essentially the love story between the iconic, woman-eating director (Anthony Hopkins), and his resolute wife and business partner, Alma Reville (Helen Mirren). From under mostly successful prosthetics, Hopkins achieves the hulking presence of Hitchcock while occasionally channelling the voice of Michael Caine. It’s an interesting result, with Hitchcock remaining cool, aloof, and theatrical. “The thing is to not do an impersonation, because if it becomes pure mimicry, then something is lost, and it becomes inauthentic,” Hopkins told FilmInk in 2012. There’s little innate sense of the blonde-bashing demon that the director was known to be, nor of the nagging self-doubt at which this film only hints. Mirren, meanwhile, creates Alma as a formidable, talented and devout woman-behind-the-man presence. Hitchcock is an energetic, entertaining tale of a genius at work, and the unshakable bond that gave him the power to do his best work. “There are a lot of people around still working in Hollywood who knew Hitch,” director, Sacha Gervasi, told FilmInk. “Some of those people have said that this film finally captures the mischief, the warmth, and also the total insanity of the man that they worked with every day.” Colin Fraser
PASOLINI (2014) “Why Pasolini?” Abel Ferrara asked of FilmInk at The Cannes Film Festival in 2014. “Why not? If you’re going to do a biography, is there a better guy than him?” The Bad Lieutenant director was referring to Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian writer/director who shocked the world with his 1975 film, Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom. “He’s a filmmaker that I adore,” adds Ferrara. “Basically, I’m a Buddhist. This is a basic meditative deal: you meditate on your teacher, and you absorb your teacher.” Pasolini made a huge impact on Ferrara – not just with his films, but with his political writing, journalism, poetry, and playwriting. “It just keeps rising: my passion for him, my love for him…that’s what it is. I didn’t know the guy, so I love the work, I love the films, I love the political writing, and I love the reason that he was doing it.” With the Italian evocatively played by Willem Dafoe, Pasolini depicts the last days of the director’s life, before he was murdered on a beach outside of Rome in November 1975, crushed by the tyres of his own car. Debate still rages as to whether it was a young male prostitute that was responsible, or whether others were involved – possibly even politicians, plotting to get rid of this uncompromising gay Catholic-Marxist. Wearing dark lenses and colouring his hair, Dafoe even bears an uncanny resemblance on screen to Pasolini, who was 53 when he died. Like Ferrara, Willem Dafoe found Pasolini an engaging figure to grapple with, particularly when he began to absorb his writings. “It’s inspiring thinking,” says Dafoe. “He was really prescient. He saw where society was going. What he was talking about is still relevant today.” James Mottram
Trumbo is available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital from June 16.