Four from the Fest

We've now seen four more of our London Film Festival selections, leaving the remaining three to be viewed over the coming weekend. I must confess that I am a little disappointed so far, so let's have a look at this week's festival movies.

First up last Saturday morning at 10.30 am was the Venice Film Festival hit "La La Land", a modern musical from director Damien Chazelle -- a long-cherished project made possible by the success of his first feature "Whiplash" (2014). It just happened to be my birthday as well and I thought, 'Great! The perfect start to the day'. The film has been hyped to the skies and was even introduced by the Festival director as 'the best 10.30 am of your lives', or words to that effect, so I was expecting something truly remarkable.

Well the rest of the audience seemed very happy with the movie and it is receiving rave reviews on IMDb; I found it jolly enough viewing but not a great film. It struck me as being very derivative in part from so many other musicals and the original score from Justin Hurwitz is by definition an unknown quantity and not terribly catchy. In a way Chazelle might have done better with more familiar classic tunes a la Woody Allen. The personable leads, Emma Stone as a wannabe actress and Ryan Gosling as a wannabe jazz pianist are pleasant enough and have reasonable chemistry, but neither are strong singers nor graceful hoofers. They do try hard and the end result is not without some charm, but it hardly leaves one 'breathless' as promised.

The story starts as the usual boy hates girl, boy comes to love girl, boy loses girl, but not the expected happy-ever-after of boy gets girl. Towards the end we are presented with a scenario of what might have been, but this is not how the movie actually finishes. Realism is fine, but fantasy happy endings are what we've come to expect from most musicals, unless you're looking at Shakespearian tragedies morphed into the musical genre like "West Side Story". This is not the feel-good movie that one might have wished or as it is being promoted.

Well, I have spent far too long on the above film, so I will rush through the remaining three. Christopher Guest can always be relied upon to provide amusing tongue-in-cheek mockumentaries and his latest "Mascots" is no exception, even if it is not quite in the same league as his very best. Here he looks at those costumed animals and whatevers who prance about during major (and minor) sports fixtures. We're privy to a competition where the best of them are vying for the bronze, silver, and gold Fluffy. Most of Guest's regular stock company are present and correct, although I do miss Catherine O'Hara, but few of them are given much to do apart from the ever-fragrant Parker Posey. He fills in the movie with a number of new faces from American and British TV, most of whom I don't know, but they all manage amusing turns with the possible exception of Chris O'Dowd. Still it's always lovely to see Jane Lynch, Jennifer Coolidge, Ed Begley Jr, Bob Balaban, and the rest of Guest's crazy gang. However this movie is unlikely to reach your local multiplex as it has been made for Netflix and has now debuted on their service. How the world changes!

The remaining two movies will get even shorter reviews. "Interchange" hails from Malaysia and is an exotic tale of how an ancient curse from Borneo 100-odd years ago came to create a series of vampirish killings today. Very stylishly photographed with a foreboding atmosphere and great special effects of a man morphing into a bird, it probably would help if one was more familiar with the anthropological background to the story, but the intriguing film does not outstay its welcome. The same can't be said for the Korean film "The Wailing" which starts off as a straightforward policier but rapidly becomes a supernatural horror with the cop's daughter's possession by an evil spirit, an orgiastic shaman, a strange Jap who may be the devil, and a lurking woman in white. However at 156 minutes the movie manages to lose its way and become a muddled mess of occult mysticism. I'm none the wiser.