Film Reviews PROFILE
RJ CUTLER Born 1962, USA
Background Cutler graduated from Harvard in 1983. He has a producing credit on The War Room (1993), a landmark documentary that follows Clinton’s 1992 US presidential campaign through his notorious spin doctors James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. He also has director and producing credits on A Perfect Candidate (1996) which follows Oliver North’s unsuccessful 1994 bid for a Virginia Senate seat. Since then he has been earning his keep as executive producer on copious amounts of Hollywood reality TV shows including Great American Dog and Flip that House. What’s he up to now? After reading an article about American Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, he approached her to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Within weeks he was through to the magazine’s creative inner circle. The idea to structure the film around the making of the magazine’s September issue (the biggest ever) came from Wintour. They filmed over a nine month period. There were no ‘off-limits’ questions; Cutler requested only one interview with Wintour and the director had final cut.
On pitching to Wintour ‘I said to her I am curious about how you do what you do. I don’t have an agenda, I don’t have any preconceptions and I just want to watch. My team is very low key, we don’t use lights or cables or big equipment. Our objective is to have minimal impact on the environment we are in. If we are filming you and you want us to stop we will, if we film something that makes you uncomfortable, we won’t use it. The story belongs to you, it doesn’t belong to us, and we hope that after you get to know us you’ll be comfortable enough sharing it with us and to let us make the film.’ Interesting fact Cutler hates doing formal interviews and if he has to do it, he leaves it right until the end of the filmmaking process. (Selina Robertson) ■ The September Issue is on selected release from Fri 11 Sep. See review, page 49.
DOCUMENTARY/SPORT MORNING LIGHT (PG) 97min ●●●●●
The Morning Light is a boat owned by Roy Disney, nephew of Mouse-house king Walt, and for Mark Monroe’s feature-length documentary, 15 youngsters chosen for their sailing prowess (and good looks) duke it out to be one of the 11 who sail from LA to Hawaii in the grueling Transpac race. Taking place over ten days and
some 2000 miles of ocean, the Transpac could well be a film in itself, but Morning Light’s chosen path takes in some 40 minutes of training and motivational chat first. The result is that, despite the clear effort that’s gone into capturing the sights and sounds of the journey, Monroe’s film plays as blandly as any reality television filler, with the crew making little impression as individuals, and the race itself proving picturesque but entirely un-dramatic. Morning Light exemplifies many of
the values on which the Disney empire prides itself; there’s little doubt that the Transpac kids bonded, stretched themselves and learnt the values of hard graft. But there’s also little of the glittery entertainment value that Disney’s name stands for. By the end, audiences are likely to be as relieved as the kids that the race is finally over. (Eddie Harrison) ■ General release from Fri 11 Sep.
COMEDY/DRAMA JULIE & JULIA (12A) 123min ●●●●●
Nora Ephron’s love affair with cookery initially surfaced in Mike Nichols’ 1986 comedy Heartburn, with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson starring in Ephron’s adaptation of her recipe book of the same name. Now Ephron and Streep have returned with another foodie picture, this one featuring Streep continuing her run of larger-than-life characters, as eccentric US TV chef Julia Child.
More in the schoolmistress vein of our very own Fanny Craddock than Nigella Lawson, Julia Child’s painfully strangulated vowels and hard-to- follow recipes have made her a television and publishing phenomenon. Ephron’s film balances Child’s awkward start in the cookery business in France with a parallel, modern narrative in which Enchanted’s Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, a ditzy, self-important blogger who sets out to cook every one of the recipes set out in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. As seen in her previous directorial efforts Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve
Got Mail, Ephron is an accomplished purveyor of light-as-a-soufflé filmmaking, and, powered by Steep’s winning portrayal as the earthy but sophisticated Child, plus some agile support from Jane Lynch as Child’s sister Dorothy, Julie & Julia succeeds as a classy chick flick performed in the best possible taste. (Eddie Harrison) ■ General release from Fri 11 Sep.
DRAMA DORIAN GRAY (15) 112min ●●●●●
Oscar Wilde’s only published novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is tricky to adapt cinematically, requiring a deft balance between its sparkling wit and the Faustian darkness at its core. As the author himself wrote, ‘man sees his own sins in Dorian, what Dorian’s sins are, no one knows.’
Yet one of the main problems in this version by director Oliver Parker (St Trinian’s, The Importance of Being Earnest) and screenwriter Toby Finlay is that the protagonist’s moral transgressions are spelt out in a rather literal manner, and the trips to various opium houses, prostitutes and orgies and the seduction of a teenage virgin and her mother seem less than shocking.
In the title role, Ben Barnes is credible as the naive newcomer in London society who comes under the influence of the worldly Lord Wooton (Colin Firth) and who is so impressed by the portrait created by Basil (Ben Chaplin) that he wishes for his youth and beauty to be preserved forever. Barnes, however, is less convincing in conveying his character’s descent into murderous despair, and Rebecca Hall is underutilised as Dorian’s suffragette lover.
Parker et al effectively use symbolic objects – keys, mirrors, a cigarette case – in their efforts to deliver a Gothic thriller, but the musical score is often overblown, the cinematography more polished than genuinely atmospheric and the effects-laden climax disappoints. (Tom Dawson) ■ Out now on general release.
50 THE LIST 10–24 Sep 2009 10–24 Sep 2009 THE LIST 50