| Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps unwittingly reveals why greed is good Oliver Stone's attempt to tackle financial excess falls prey to an inconvenient truthThe Great Financial Calamity has left everyone feeling cheated. Bad guys doing bad things brought disaster upon us. We rescued them from the consequences of their misdeeds only to see them return triumphantly to their wicked ways. Our leaders rebuke them feebly but insist on sustaining their mastery. We need someone to make sense of what's befallen us, to nail the guilty men and to bring us closure. But who?Oliver Stone sounds like just the chap. He knows how to mythologise epic events, and has the Oscars to prove it. He wrapped up the Vietnam tragedy and provided the big screen's best take yet on the disaster that was Bush. His suck-up to Hugo Chávez implied encouragingly lefty leanings. Above all, he gave us Wall Street, that nonpareil of movies about money. Now that we really need him, how could such a crackerjack fail us? Yet he has.Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has disappointed. Stone himself says the film is supposed to constitute "a reckoning with what happened". Nobody seems to think it does. It offers us macho grudge-matches, revenge drama and a bit of a romance too. Yet its supposed theme somehow slips through its fingers.The implosion of the financial system seemed thrilling enough at the time, but it doesn't seem thrilling enough for Stone. He feels obliged to inject extraneous excitements, and in so doing exonerates reality. The architects of our downfall were doubtless terrible villains, yet they don't seem to have been motivated by personal vendettas; nor did most of them get where they were by stealing from their daughters.Far from indicting their behaviour, this film bathes it in allure. Perhaps you think that being rich must be a bit tedious. Who'd want to waste their time at fancy charity functions? Well, if anything could persuade you of their charms, it's the gala benefit lovingly created by production designer Kristi Zea in the soaring Great Hall of Cunard's former HQ. This is the movie to persuade you that your life's pointless without a Ducati superbike or one of Bulgari's priciest baubles. The most evil of its money-men, Josh Brolin's Bretton James, radiates sex-appeal like a lighthouse.The burden of belittling all this falls on the slender shoulders of our own dear Carey Mulligan. As Gordon Gekko's put-upon daughter Winnie, she couldn't be cuter, but she's also prissy, whiny and sanctimonious. She works for some soppy right-on website and knows what really matters in life. Her task is to convince us that virtue, love and babies are better than wealth. Instead, she succeeds in putting the matter in doubt.Of course, we've been here before. Stone believed that the original Wall Street was "a morality tale". Famously, it became instead the anthem of a get-rich-quick generation. Traders adopted Gekko's braces and Brylcreem, read his favourite book, Sun Tzu's The Art of War, and watched his big-screen exploits again and again. In fact, that film may have played its part in begetting our current woes.You have to ask why both films should have proved so counter-productive. The clumsy title of the current exercise is taken from a sonorous warning delivered by Gekko to his would-be son-in-law Jake. "Money never sleeps," he says. "She's jealous, and if you don't pay her close attention, when you wake up in the morning she might be gone for ever." It doesn't ring true. It's Winnie whom Jake must struggle to satisfy, and who dumps him when he doesn't. Money reassures and waits for you while you're in jail, unlike your nearest and dearest. It sorts out life's problems, even for those like Winnie who affect to despise it.It's Gekko's original claim that "greed is good" that continues to resonate. In Wall Street he proclaimed that it's not only good, but "right". It "works"; it "clarifies". He told us: "Greed in all its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind." We know we're supposed to disagree, but do we?In the real world, as in these films, people continue to thirst for more, however loudly they claim to have kicked the habit. Perhaps that's why we're letting the bankers get back to business as usual, sensing that our own prospects of future enrichment depend inescapably on theirs. And perhaps it's why Stone's films show us the opposite of what he intends. The camera cannot lie, it seems, however hard it tries to.DramaDavid Coxguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Jesse Eisenberg: Privacy settings engaged You won't find Jesse Eisenberg, formidable as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, on Facebook. It's a different kind of attention he cravesJesse Eisenberg is eager to deflate expectations. This, he assures me, will be a mediocre interview. His answers shall be trite and generic. He doesn't have a clear thought process at this stage in the day. He'll ramble. It'd be better were I to lie on the couch and have him quiz me instead (he sees two therapists a week, so he's pretty proficient in probing). Words rattle out of him: self-deprecating scattershot from a salmon-shirted manboy.Muting the buzz is no easy task. After a decade as the go-to guy for directors in need of a sweetly inept alter ego – Roger Dodger, The Squid and the Whale, Adventureland – he's suddenly, at 27, playing a rather more formidable real-life character: Mark Zuckerberg, in David Fincher's The Social Network, a fictionalised take on Facebook's birth and subsequent internal fallout. It's topped the US box office for the past fortnight, been hailed as the film that defines the decade, and is a shoo-in for Oscar nods. His face is everywhere, in alarming closeup.So, managing expectations is tough. Plus, Eisenberg has a reputation for being as bright in the flesh as he seems on screen. Unlike, say, Michael Cera – his weedier, creepier doppelganger – he's one of those rare actors who can project real intelligence (not just fluency or intensity). Cute casting, then: few could pull off Zuckerberg without making him seem frighteningly isolated or unreachably geeky. Eisenberg makes it look a cinch.There's an emotional connection, he thinks. "Mark doesn't feel happy interacting in person," says Eisenberg, "and so he creates a comfort zone, an environment where you can have relationships which are the ideal version. At the start of the movie, he has trouble with a two-way dialogue, first when he's talking with his girlfriend [she dumps him], then when he writes his blog [he trashes her]. And then he creates Facebook."Eisenberg's equivalent was acting. He turned to plays aged nine after struggling to fit in at school, and suffering what he's described as "terrible separation anxiety" (Eisenberg's Woody Allenish neurosis is no mere patter – it is absolutely for real). "When playing a role, I would feel more comfortable, as you're given a prescribed way of behaving. So, both Facebook and theatre provide contrived settings that provide the illusion of social interaction."It's a ferociously unvain performance – feral-faced, stiff round the torso, left hand forever lodged in hoodie pocket; a movement born from his discovery that Zuckerberg is an expert fencer. His Zuckerberg is bitter, ruthless, obsessive – another of the focused sociopaths that Fincher specialises in, rather than one of the lovable stutterers from Eisenberg's CV.Eisenberg leaps to Zuckerberg's defence, nonetheless. "I really view him as an artist. And if you view it in that way, a lot of what he does is not only defensible but necessary. As an actor, if I show up late somewhere or I say something that's eccentric, it's totally acceptable – not only that, it's lauded in some perverse way. Because Mark is a businessman, we don't give him the same leeway."He sips some orange juice, bristles with the injustice. "But if you substitute Facebook for the Mona Lisa, then everything in the movie is seen in a different light. His kicking off his friend because he has to protect his painting: I think we would all understand that."Eisenberg brilliantly captures the creative fizz Zuckerberg feels while designing and coding Facemash, the Hot or Not-style site that's the precursor to Facebook; flexing his fingers, playing the keyboard like a Steinway. "It's this very exciting feeling that you've got something that's yours and is original and is some way contributing. Mark creates Facemash in a flurry of inspiration. The end result is really painful for many people, but the creation is really remarkable."Eisenberg isn't on Facebook himself – far too self-loathing, he says, plus further celebritisation of his personal life is the opposite of what he wants – but he's open-minded towards those who are, and defensive towards the charges of destroying privacy levelled against Zuckerberg."It's just a technology; it can be used either benevolently or harmfully. When cellphones came out, my girlfriend refused to get one for five years, because she thought it would turn her into somebody who couldn't connect with other people – and, of course, she got a cellphone. And I'm sure after Facebook it will be the little cameras that we have implanted into the palms of our hands and we'll be debating whether we should get them, and then we'll all get them. And then we'll have pants with holes cut out for our genitals and at first people won't want to have those pants and then of course we'll all have those pants. Society will decide after the technology is created what we will and won't accept."I already have way too much attention paid to me. I wouldn't want to be totally invisible because it would be hypocritical to say I want no attention at all. I assume that's 90% of why I act; I didn't get enough attention as a child. That's why all actors act – they want more attention." He smiles and his eyes flit nervily round the room.Eisenberg was born in New Jersey in 1983 to Barry, a sociology professor, and Amy, a professional clown. He found a happy niche at a performing arts college, where he was studying when he won the lead in Roger Dodger, in which he plays Campbell Scott's callow nephew, coached in the art of the pick-up. Then, a pause, until The Squid and the Whale, since when he's worked steadily, in between completing a degree in democracy and cultural pluralism ("It's meaningless. You have a choice of 17 degrees and then you take the same exact classes as the guy who took art history.")The common thread through most of Eisenberg's performances is that he plays a young man intellectually seduced by someone older who turns out to be less impressive than expected. In The Social Network, this psychological framework is repeated: Zuckerberg is a sucker for Sean Parker, the Napster founder played by Justin Timberlake, who eventually becomes a liability.Eisenberg nods, and enjoys the reductiveness of the reading. "Yeah, I play that revelation really well. It's like: wait a second, you're not everything you're cracked up to be? The world is not black and white? Wait a second, I think I just grew up! Let me check." He peeks beneath his shirt to check on the progress of any chest hair. "Nope, still a kid."There's something remarkably youthful about Eisenberg. He's less personally assured than he seems on screen; the opposite to what you'd expect. For the evidence suggests Eisenberg is both erudite and enterprising. At 22, he launched oneupme.com, an internet parlour game in which users must provide punchlines for a gag set-up ("She was like a Laundromat ... kept stealing my socks"). At 26, he wrote a couple of pieces for literary mag McSweeneys – a list of Marxist/socialist jokes, another of manageable tongue-twisters. He's also knocked off a novel and a musical, and has lived with his girlfriend, Anna, 33, for four years.He acknowledges the confusion. "I've never had tastes of people my own age. All of my friends when I was 15 were in their 40s. I'm not actually mature, just very self-conscious around people my own age because I feel like I'm supposed to act the same way they act and I don't know how."He stops and swallows. "Well, OK, no – the truth is I like to infantilise myself because then I don't have to be an adult. If I'm always around people who are older than me then I can act like a child, which is how I feel most comfortable because I miss my mum." I laugh – but he's not kidding. "I get really homesick. If I'm with someone my age and I act like a child it seems very strange behaviour. If I'm with someone younger, it makes me very uncomfortable. Because I have to take care of them; if there's a fire I'm supposed to save them. I want to be saved."Still, Eisenberg will, at some point, get older. Does he fear a sell-by date on his coming-of-age schtick? He looks cheery. "No. That feeling – of deification and then demystification – is timeless. The joy of acting for me is to be able to experience emotions in a safe environment. You can't scream and cry in the street because everybody will look. If you do it on a movie set, you get applauded. And that's one of the great emotions we can experience. Everyone can put somebody on a pedestal and then realise the pedestal is of your own making."He's right. A good point, by a fine actor. Curious, then – sad, even – that Eisenberg should try so hard to dislodge himself from a pedestal he belongs on.DramaDavid FincherCatherine Shoardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Paths of Glory: No 7 Stanley Kubrick, 1957This is one of the darkest anti-war films ever made, in great part because its vision – that of the young director Stanley Kubrick (he was only 29, making his third full-length picture) – is as bleak as the story. The place is the western front of the first world war, in a section manned by the French army. An attack is decreed by General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), and passed on to General Mireau (George Macready) to execute.Everyone knows the attack is doomed because infantry advancing over open ground torn apart by artillery barrages will be cut down by the machine guns in the secure German lines. But when the plan fails, Broulard determines that there must be scapegoats – alleged cowards or malingerers – who betrayed the national purpose. Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), who led the attack, is charged with picking three victims who will be subject to court martial and firing squad.The Humphrey Cobb novel on which it is based had been published in 1935. At that time, Sidney Howard made a play out of it, but the play flopped. Kubrick loved the book and he got a script out of Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson (the famous pulp novelist who wrote The Grifters and The Killer Inside Me). The project became viable when Kirk Douglas agreed to play Dax and to produce the film for his own company, Bryna Productions. The trench and attack scenes were all shot for just under $1m. The photography is in glittering black and white, but the pattern of tracking shots is Kubrick's design – and he actually shot some of the attack scene himself with a hand-held camera.For the rest, there is a stark, sardonic contrast between the splendid chateau where the officers live and the mean barracks for the enlisted men. Douglas is angry but repressed – this is one of his most controlled performances. Menjou and Macready are properly odious. The three scapegoats are Ralph Meeker, Joe Turkel and Timothy Carey, abject or defiant but not sentimentalised. If you expect any kind of mercy or relief, then you are misjudging the misanthropic tone of this movie. But the conclusion is a strange, touching gesture to hope and the future, and it involves a young German actress – Susanne Christian – who would become Kubrick's wife.Action and adventureStanley KubrickKirk DouglasDavid Thomsonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The best horror films of all time: in pictures Our choice of the 25 best horror films of all time. Just click the film title for more information guardian.co.uk |
Paranormal Activity 2 exorcises ghosts of Blair Witch on UK opening British audiences give sequel to low-budget horror hit a chance, while Despicable Me wins the family film face-offThe winnerWhen Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows came out for Halloween 2000, exactly a year after the cult horror hit that spawned it, the film opened in the UK with a disappointing £1.09m. This compared with £5.88m for the first weekend of wide play for the original The Blair Witch Project.This cautionary tale was presumably uppermost in the minds of executives at Paramount Pictures as it produced and distributed Paranormal Activity 2, the sequel to the low-budget chiller it originally acquired at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival with remake rights in mind. Encoded in the DNA of its marketing campaign was the message that Paranormal Activity 2 was no Blair Witch 2.On the evidence of PA2's opening of £3.76m, including £453,000 in previews, that message has been received by UK cinemagoers. The figure compares with the slightly lower £3.59m, including more extensive previews of £1m, for Paranormal Activity's debut last November. Comparing like for like over the Friday-to-Sunday periods, the sequel is a solid 28% up on the opening weekend of the original Paranormal Activity.The half-term battleWith a drop of just 25%, and a 10-day cumulative total of £7.58m, Despicable Me shrugged off the challenge of a quartet of new films squarely aimed at the October half-term market. Universal's 3D animation grossed £2.59m over the weekend, compared with £737,000 from its nearest challenger, the improbably named Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'hoole. Winning third place in the family film face-off is yet another animation, Alpha and Omega, which targets younger infants than Zach Snyder's surprisingly scary owl picture. Previews of £208,000 boosted Alpha and Omega's opening tally to a vaguely respectable £643,000.With those three family flicks picking up nearly £4m between them, two competitors found themselves virtually squeezed out. Africa United, which benefited from a certain amount of media goodwill, and was the Comic Relief gala at the London film festival, opened with a lacklustre £178,000 for a screen average of £783. Bravely tackling issues including child soldiers and safe sex, the Africa-set film isn't an easy sell to families with primary-school-age children, but arguably lacks the sophistication to satisfy teens and grown-ups, giving distributor Warner/Pathe a narrow target to aim at. Ramona & Beezus is much more clear in its intended audience – young girls – but so far has failed to entice them, with a dismal opening of £84,000 from 256 sites and an average of £330.As the half-term holiday progresses, it's traditional for the weaker titles to pick up, as families Hoover up their second and third choices, but it remains to be seen whether they will get round to watching this season's weaker entries.The loserWell-liked high-school flick Easy A, starring Emma Stone, belly-flopped at the box-office. The film's 15 certificate was always going to be a huge handicap for a film targeting teens, leaving backers Sony hoping that strong reviews would entice twentysomethings and older to give it a try, augmenting a target audience aged 15-19. After all, teen flicks including Clueless, Mean Girls and Juno all connected with adults. On the evidence of a £278,000 opening from 203 screens, this has not occurred with Easy A.Upscale carnageThe Social Network, predictably, posted a strong hold, with a decline of just 27%, following strong midweek results last week that saw it outgrossing box office champ Despicable Me. The popularity of the film, which is playing arthouses as well as multiplexes, created a challenging environment for a trio of well-reviewed indie flicks, which all under-performed.Innovative documentary The Arbor was a particular critical favourite, and deserved a better opening than its £17,000 from 17 screens. French-made thriller Carlos, a sprawling account of the titular Venezuelan-born terrorist, picked up less than £15,000 from 16 screens, but had the alibi that critics urged viewers to plump for the longer 324-minute version, rather than the 165-minute one, giving cinemagoers a choice between a marathon time commitment and a more manageable option that had been stigmatised as the lesser creative achievement. Clearly many film fans who would enjoy Carlos opted to see neither. Stop-frame animation Mary & Max also attracted critical praise, notably from BBC1's recently rebooted Film 2010, and achieved a slightly better average, with £12,000 from eight screens. Still, it's hard to escape the conclusion that discerning cinemagoers are feeling themselves well-served by The Social Network. In the capital, the London Film Festival provided additional competition for upscale audiences.The futureThanks to the arrival of Paranormal Activity 2 and old-timer thriller Red (solid £1.66m debut), plus strong holds for Despicable Me and The Social Network, the weekend overall was a handy 22% up on the previous frame, as well as 19% up on the equivalent period from 2009, when the top titles were Up, Saw VI and The Fantastic Mr Fox. What happens at the weekend hinges on how the new Saw film performs: Saw VI saw a big dip in the franchise's commercial fortunes, but backers Lionsgate will be hoping that audiences will return for the first Saw movie in 3D. Calling it Saw 3D, rather than Saw VII, should help convey a message of franchise reboot. Homegrown effort Burke and Hare, starring Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis, offers a distinctly less grisly alternative for Halloween, while The Kids Are All Right targets fans of sophisticated American comedy drama.Top 10 films1. Paranormal Activity 2, £3,764,722 from 389 sites (New)2. Despicable Me, £2,589,170 from 549 sites. Total: £7,585,3483. Red, £1,662,472 from 402 sites (New)4. The Social Network, £1,538,571 from 399 sites. Total: £5,359,1095. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'hoole, £737,444 from 472 sites (New)6. Alpha and Omega, £643,425 from 391 sites (New)7. Vampires Suck, £530,136 from 358 sites. Total: £2,024,8098. Easy A, £277,975 from 203 sites (New)9. Life As We Know It, £263,134 from 309 sites. Total: £2,919,24610. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, £258,968 from 225 sites. Total: £3,698,077How the other openers didAfrica United, 227 screens, £177,827Ramona & Beezus, 256 screens, £84,475Jhootha Hi Sahi, 24 screens, £32,681The Arbor, 17 screens, £16,883Carlos, 16 screens, £14,556Mary & Max, 8 screens, £12,053Hisss, 9 screens, £8,517The Stoning of Soraya M, no figures availableFilm industryCharles Gantguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |