The second world war supreme allied commander was a fascinating character. This 1977 biopic signally fails to live up to his reputation

Director: Joseph Sargent
Entertainment grade: D+
History grade: C+

American five-star general Douglas MacArthur served in the Pacific during the second world war and went on to command US forces in Korea. He was wildly popular with the public.

In military and political circles, though, he was criticised for his self-promotion, arrogance and alleged recklessness.

War

The film’s first action scenes are set in Corregidor in the Philippines, scene of a rout at the hands of the Japanese. Ordered to leave for Australia by President Roosevelt, MacArthur (played anaemically by Gregory Peck) bids an emotional farewell to his adoring men. They’re a little too adoring. In reality, many of MacArthur’s officers were fed up with him by the time he left the Philippines. Of 142 communiques he issued during his first period of war service there, 109 failed to mention the bravery of any soldiers apart from himself. There was also a fuss over $500,000 he accepted as a personal reward from the Philippine president, which, while technically legal, was ethically dubious. To be fair on the film-makers, that story was not made public until 1979 – but MacArthur’s patchy reputation was no secret.

Geography

In Australia, MacArthur plans to return to the Philippines and force the Japanese out. Gesturing at a gigantic wall map, he proposes the attack: “Land at Leyte beach on Luzon, and then carry the fight to Manila.” Fine, except he is pointing – in extreme closeup – at Lingayen Gulf, over 400 miles from Leyte. Also, Leyte is not a beach on Luzon: it’s another island, and the two are separated by a substantial archipelago. MacArthur may be accused of many things, but an ignorance of Philippine geography is not one of them. In real life, he fought to retake the Philippines on both Leyte and Luzon; but not at the same time, because that would have been physically impossible unless he was 500 miles wide and could float.

Politics

After the war, MacArthur oversees the democratisation of Japan. He seems to have some rad ideas. “I want these privileged landowners stripped of their holdings!” he barks. “And the rightwing industrialists … I want them expunged! The workers must have a strong voice in the means of production.” “General,” stutters an aide, “this reminds me somewhat of … well, it’s like …” Marxism, thinks the viewer. “… the New Deal.” Oh, OK. Clearly this film is aimed exclusively at an American audience. Pointing out that General MacArthur was not a Marxist is not unlike pointing out the Pope’s religion or the lavatorial habits of bears. Still, since the question has come up: no, he was not. It’s also a myth that MacArthur personally directed Japanese development. Multiple documents prove that Washington set the goals and policy of occupation.

Dialogue

In the final scenes, set during the Korean war, the film’s MacArthur regains his political footing. “It’s my destiny to defeat communism, and only God or those Washington politicians will keep me from doing it,” he growls. That is almost a direct quote from the man himself. It’s a pity it wasn’t left in its original, more lyrical form (“Only God or the government of the United States can keep me from the fulfilment of my mission”). This is one of several occasions on which the writer has presumed to tweak MacArthur’s words (or, as he called words, “those immortal heralds of thought which at the touch of genius become radiant”), to make him sound more down-to-earth and folksy, and less like the ostentatious intellectual he really was. The real MacArthur once barged in on a subordinate, catching him in a clinch with a lady. The general’s immortal heralds of thought: “Eject that strumpet forthwith.” Folksy he was not.

Verdict

Controversy aside, the real MacArthur was a coruscating personality. Had he written and directed this film himself, it might have been even less accurate, but a lot more entertaining.

The actor has been dispatched to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro

Age: 49.

Appearance: Unholy progeny of Robert de Niro and Sylvester Stallone.

Profession: Actor/director/journalist.

Journalist? Penn has written for Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation and the Huffington Post, among others.

Any big assignments lately? Vanity Fair has sent him to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro

What are Penn’s journalistic credentials, if any? “I have been in the public eye to varying degrees,” he wrote last year, “for most of my 48 years, and had many occasions to sit in the front row of popular and political culture.”

Is that it? “I can speak in first-hand, to bearing witness to an often untruthful, reckless and demonising media. Yes, in many cases, the smoke would prove an accurate expectation of fire.”

Say what? George Orwell he ain’t, I’m afraid.

So why have Vanity Fair sent him, then? Because a year ago he managed to meet both Fidel’s brother Raul and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

And how did that go? His interview with Raul Castro lasted seven hours.

Yikes. Imagine having to boil that down to 2,000 well-chosen words. Penn’s subsequent piece for the Huffington Post was 18,000 words long.

Give us a reflective moment from near the end. “In this early-hour darkness, our tires streaming the wet pavement, isolated in a quiet Havana morning, it strikes me that even the most basic belief in sovereignty offers substantial insight into the complexities of US antagonism toward Cuba and Venezuela, as well as the controversiality of those countries’ internal policies.”

Is there any sort of curious precedent for celebrities who can’t write being sent to interview Latin American leaders? Well, GQ did dispatch Naomi Campbell to interview Chavez in 2007. She asked him if he knew the Spice Girls.

Do say: “File when you can, Sean. We’re holding the front page and several dozen inside pages.”

Don’t say: “Fine Sean, but can you do him as a Pass notes?”

Creating a new film festival poses no problems for Abu Dhabi, one of the richest places in the world. But using it as a base for nurturing the emirate’s non-existent film-making culture is a far more tricky proposition

The emirate of Abu Dhabi has proven itself expert in building something out of nothing. What was a largely unpopulated island less than half a century ago is now a thriving metropolis. Where once there was sand, there are now lawns. And in a state built on and fuelled by oil, the foundations are being laid for the world’s first carbon-neutral city. So turning this cultural desert into a cinematic hub should be a doddle.

Abu Dhabi hosted the third Middle East International film festival (Meiff) earlier this month. Staged over 10 days, it was greeted with a burst of local publicity, international stars including Hilary Swank, Freida Pinto and Orlando Bloom, but also questions as to its purpose. Was there a need for such an event? There will be several other festivals in the region this year – other host cities being Cairo, Beirut and local rivals Dubai. Meanwhile, of all the films screened in Abu Dhabi, only one full-length feature originated in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It was even unclear as to where the audience for a festival was supposed to be found; the head of the Meiff jury, Peter Scarlett, claiming that in Abu Dhabi “to the best of my knowledge, there’s no education in cinema [or] media literacy of any kind”.

So why does Abu Dhabi bother with a festival at all? One obvious reason is that they can. As any Manchester City fan knows, there is a lot of money in Abu Dhabi. It has one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world, standing at $63,000 (£38,000) in 2006, and a sovereign wealth fund estimated at $627bn. This money is regularly spent on large investment projects, everything from bringing a branch of the Louvre to the region to the imminent arrival of Formula One racing. Any money spent on a film festival is piffling in comparison.

Yet to walk around the city, at least when the sun has dipped a bit, is not to feel like you’re in a spendthrift’s paradise. The Grand Prix and Meiff are more than just vanity projects for Abu Dhabi’s rulers; they serve a political purpose too.”The easiest way to understand a different nationality is through their cinema,” says Eissa al-Mazrouei, director of special projects for Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage. Educated in north America and in charge of the film festival, he says that an exposure to western cinema expanded his horizons. “Watch only your own films and you never escape your own box.”

Al-Mazrouei seems to believe that a greater exposure to cinema can help his country become more outward-looking. It is also true though that cinema is something common to all the many different nationalities within Abu Dhabi (there is striking ethnic diversity in the emirate, and more than 180 nationalities reside in the UAE as a whole). The largest community in the emirate is of south-east Asian origin, and they provide a regular audience for a steady diet of Bollywood imports.

This audience was out in force at the Meiff premiere of Bombay Summer, an Indian indie that follows a love triangle across Mumbai’s class divide, precisely the type of engagement Al-Mazrouei says he wants the festival to foster. He also claims to have plans, further down the line, to stage screenings in more remote areas of Abu Dhabi, in the desert communities outside of the city. “Eventually we want to extend the festival throughout the year,” he says. “We want to take it to the western region, where it’s 200km to the nearest city and set up open-air theatres to screen movies there.”

Part of Al-Mazrouei’s five-year plan for the festival (here, every scheme comes with a strategy) is to grow the small pool of Emirati filmmakers. He claims the absence of local product from the festival schedule is positive because that means “the bar has been raised”. Most entries in the festival’s Emirati Film competition were shorts, part-funded by government money, the aim to give experience to more film-makers, to get more cameras in hands.

“I got a grant for equipment and others have got finance for projects. I was also fortunate in that my actors didn’t always want paying,” says Yaser al- Neyadi, whose short Temporary Drought screened at Meiff. He bemoans the absence of expertise in the region, of teachers and schools that would provide his generation with the skills they need. But his earnest determination to succeed was apparent, too. “This is part of a learning process for us, we are studying movies as we would art or science, but it is giving me a chance to find the character of our local cinema, to speak truth about the qualities of people.”

This plan for a community of cine-literate citizens consuming a diet of intelligent, locally made cinema could strike you as something of a fanciful pipe dream. But you don’t have to look far to see a pragmatic logic, too. A cinematic culture is a prize in itself, but it will also help to sell Abu Dhabi to the film world. The launch and growth of the festival is matched by that in production facilities, with financial incentives for filmmakers not too far down the road. On top of it all and perhaps most important of all, Abu Dhabi is announcing itself as a funder of motion pictures. The latest Robert Rodriguez kids’ movie, Shorts, received its Middle Eastern premiere at Meiff – the first example of a movie partly funded by Hollywood, partly by Abu Dhabi’s state-funded company Imagenation. Upcoming on their roster is the Sean Penn political thriller Fair Game. That, and a family-friendly comedy from Brendan Fraser. They may not be a powerhouse in cinema just yet, but to misquote Colin Welland, the Emiratis are coming.

For actors, there’s always a role for conscience, says Samantha Morton

Last week Nicole Kidman told the US Congress that Hollywood contributed to violence against women by portraying them as sex objects, and Matt Damon revealed that he turned down scripts if they featured gratuitous violence. How hard is it for actors to make decisions of conscience?

I have a huge issue with Hollywood actors who don’t use their power in a way that’s really constructive. For example, if they do a big blockbuster action film and they’re playing someone violent, yet they don’t have a say over the movie’s poster and whether they appear naked in it, or with weapons. What does that say to the children who are in the backs of cars being driven around cities?

I do have a say in those things and if people don’t want to work with me, then they don’t. You want to be proud of all the choices you make and your reasons for making them.

When I receive a script the first thing I ask my agent is: what’s it about, who is making it and who is producing it? These considerations are not always straightforward. When, for instance, I was sent the script for Longford (2006), in which I played the part of Myra Hindley, my initial instinct was: no. “It’s a very good script,” my agent said. “I don’t care,” I replied.

But I trust my agent, and when I read the script, I felt educated by it. So although that role attracted public dismay as well as critical acclaim, I felt my performance was part of a bigger message.

But not everyone gets it. After I played Iris in Under the Skin (1997), a woman who was harming herself through sex and being very promiscuous as part of a medical condition, I got sent every script going for women who would open their legs at anything. I was reading them thinking: “There’s no reason whatsoever for making this film.”

Actors can be manipulated. You can think you are involved in something with a message, and it can turn into something else altogether. You are at the mercy of the director, the director is at the mercy of the producer, and the producer is at the mercy of the financier. People can change the script while you’re working and they have the right to do so. And you have to cooperate, otherwise you are deemed unsupportive.

A scene can be directed in a way that you had no concept of. A film I made recently, which I thought was about one thing, somehow turned into a different kind of film altogether. I had no idea that was going to happen. I felt abused by it.

I admire Nicole Kidman for speaking out. It was a brave thing to do. For her, the difficulties multiply – it’s a different world. You have obligations, you have to respect the studios that keep employing you. You probably have houses all over the world you would like to keep . . . It must be hard at times to keep making conscientious choices – and not everyone does. Some people think they just want to act, and don’t care about the broader message.

(1988, 15, Nouveaux Pictures)

Brunel University has joined the Nouveaux art-house label to launch Cine-Excess, a welcome new series devoted to “Taking Trash Seriously” featuring low-budget exploitation classics from around the world. It’s off to an excellent start with this stylishly atmospheric Dutch thriller written and directed by Dick Maas, a fast, gory, immensely entertaining horror flick that cleverly crosses Dirty Harry with Jaws and throws in a dash of Don’t Look Now. A mad serial killer in a diver’s wetsuit emerges from the murky water of Amsterdam’s canals to murder people in nasty ways: the Mayor is furious and a maverick cop (Huub Stapel) is assigned to track him down before travel agencies boycott the city. There are ingeniously staged killings, terrific chases, a visit to the Rijksmuseum where the heroine works, and a sharp green socio-political message given a new topicality by the current Trafigura affair. The film can be viewed either with subtitles or dubbed into English and is accompanied by a fascinating “making of” documentary.

His uncompromising films deal in sadistic violence, sexual mutilation and the dark menace lurking within normal life. Michael Haneke, Austrian director of the acclaimed Hidden and winner of this year’s Palme D’or for his latest movie, The White Ribbon, talks to Elizabeth Day about Nazi Germany, fanaticism, fatherhood – and his own happy childhood

When people first meet the film director Michael Haneke, they generally expect him to be dark, edgy and more than a little bit weird. Perhaps they are mindful of the scene in Haneke’s 1992 film Benny’s Video, in which the blank-eyed teenage protagonist shoots dead a schoolgirl with a stun gun. Perhaps they are thinking of Funny Games (1997), in which two young men beat to death a dog with a golf club before subjecting a bourgeois Austrian family to an orgy of sadistic violence. Or perhaps they remember the French actress Isabelle Huppert mutilating her own genitalia with a razor blade in The Piano Teacher.

Whatever the reason, it seems natural enough that most people imagine Haneke will be a scowling mass of repressed emotion and psycho-sexual oddness. Which is why it comes as something of a surprise to walk into the Munich hotel room where our interview is scheduled to find him giggling. And it is definitely a giggle rather than a laugh: warm, burbling and inescapably girlish.

Haneke stands up to greet me mid-smile, unfolding himself from his chair to the full extent of his lean 6ft4in frame, his limbs jutting outwards like pipe cleaners. Although he is dressed entirely in black, the Gothic effect is somewhat undermined by his candyfloss white beard and hair. Physically, he resembles a cross between a slimmed-down Father Christmas and Getafix, the cartoon druid in the Asterix books.

We sit down on either side of a highly-polished table and I confess that, having seen most of his films, I had imagined someone a touch more forbidding. He nods his head affably. There is a small dish in front of him containing several carefully sliced chunks of fresh pineapple. He spears one with a cocktail stick and pops it in his mouth. “Of course,” Haneke says, eyes twinkling as he chews. “I’m a very bad person.”

Over the past two decades, since the release of his first feature film, The Seventh Continent, in 1989, the 67-year-old Haneke has built up a reputation as one of the most uncompromisingly bleak film-makers of modern times. His work deals repeatedly with themes of social alienation and the deadening effect of mass media on human empathy and impulse. He attacks the comfort we take in bourgeois certitudes by forcing his characters to make extreme, discomfiting choices.

When Huppert self-mutilates in The Piano Teacher (2001) it is because conventional society has no place for her uninhibited sexuality. When the television-obsessed teenage protagonist kills his classmate in Benny’s Video, he has been so desensitised by the constant stream of on-screen violence that he feels nothing. Benny’s parents fare little better: they are so determined to preserve the outward appearance of their respectability that they callously dispose of the body. “There is just as much evil in all of us as there is good,” says Haneke. “We’re all continuously guilty, even if we’re not doing it intentionally to be evil. Here we are sitting in luxury hotels, living it up on the the backs of others in the third world. We all have a guilty conscience, but we do very little about it.”

These are not the sort of subjects that traditionally have audiences stampeding to the box office, but Haneke makes no effort to disguise his contempt for the mainstream and its sanitised, neatly-packaged depictions of glossed-up sex and violence. “I can give you an example,” he says, flexing a long bony index finger. “I returned to Austria recently after a trip abroad and I saw the news and the headlines were all horrible things about earthquakes and explosions but the whole thing was set to a nice, upbeat musical accompaniment. It was dumbed down; it had become part of the entertainment. That’s the danger: that I don’t notice it anymore.” For Haneke, violence must always be shown as it is, in all its vicious detail. “The truth is obscene,” he says with the shrug-shouldered nonchalance of a man ordering a cappuccino.

Born in Munich, Haneke has lived in Austria all his life and has a distinctly European artistic sensibility. American cinema is dismissed with a wave of the hand as “cultural imperialism”. How so? “I hate films that try to make me more stupid than I am, and there are a lot. But I must admit I don’t go that often to the cinema. In the 60s and 70s, I went almost every day, but not anymore.”

So it is perhaps ironic that in recent years Haneke has experienced considerable success in the mainstream he so dislikes. In 2005, he had a worldwide hit with Hidden, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil as Parisian intellectuals terrorised by a series of unexplained videotapes left for them by an anonymous stalker. Hidden won a clutch of awards, including best director at Cannes, and grossed more than £1m in the UK – a feat practically unheard of for an art-house film.

But Haneke’s most recent work looks set to become his most acclaimed yet. The White Ribbon won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year and tells the story of a German village on the eve of the first world war beset by sporadic outbreaks of unexplained violence. Shot in black and white, with no musical soundtrack and no easy resolution, it is in many ways classic Haneke in its refusal to make concessions to the viewer. Again, his focus seems to be the dangerous nature of conventional social structures: much of the action centres on children who have antagonistic relationships with authority figures, whether it be the priest who rules over the church, the baron who rules over the village or the parents who rule over their families. Critics have theorised that Haneke is attempting to explain the genesis of Nazi Germany – the children who carry out acts of random cruelty will grow up to be the generation that spawned the barbarism of the Holocaust.

“It’s not a coincidence that I chose this period of time in which to present the story,” Haneke says. “This is the Nazi generation, but I didn’t want the film to be reduced to this example, to this specific model. I could do a film about modern-day Iran and ask the same question: how does fanaticism start?

“That’s the core of the film. In places where people are suffering, they become very receptive to ideology because they’re looking for something to clutch hold of, a straw that will take them out of that misery.” Does ideological belief remove the need to ask questions? “Of course. The less intelligent I am, the more easily I follow someone who is going to give me the answers.”

It is partly for this reason, one assumes, that Haneke’s work never offers one simple answer where several complicated enigmas will do. As a director, he believes firmly that a film should pose more problems than it solves; his ideal viewer is “one who leaves with questions”. Does he find it irritating when people who have seen his films ask him what happened next? “It’s not at all irritating because it’s a normal question. I say: take a look at the film, let it go through your head, consider what you want to think about it. People always want answers, but only liars have the answers. Politicians have answers.” Later, he confesses that the only thing he watches on television is the weather forecast, because “that’s the only thing that is not a lie”.

In the past, Haneke’s absolute belief in authenticity – in showing life as it really is, with all its messy contradictions and brutal awfulness – has led to criticism that his work glamorises violence as a necessary rebellion against stifling social convention. Does he worry about the impact this might have on an impressionable audience? He rolls his eyes, picking at his teeth with the cocktail stick. “You’ll see more violence in any television crime series than you will in my films… Art is there to have a stimulating effect, if it earns its name. You have to be honest, that’s the only thing.”

Doesn’t he also have a responsibility to entertain? “Yes, of course. But what do you understand by ‘entertainment’? St Matthew’s Passion – that’s also entertainment. The problem is when you can only be entertained by distraction or by stupidities.”

In spite of the fact that most of the children in Haneke films have fairly monstrous home lives, he insists he had a happy childhood. “You won’t believe it,” he says with another disarming giggle, “but I was actually a very spoilt child. I was an only child and my more mean-spirited friends say that it shows.” His parents, Beatrix von Degenschild and Fritz Haneke, were actors who met while entertaining the troops during the second world war: Haneke was born in 1942 while they were on tour near Munich. His father walked out before Haneke was three, settling in Germany, while his son was raised in Austria. It was only as adults that they got to know each other, but Haneke remains remarkably sanguine about being abandoned: “My father and I had a good relationship, it was very relaxed. He had a lot of humour. He looked a little bit like me, although he had no beard. He had the appearance of a very elegant British-looking man.”

Beatrix married again, to an Austrian Jew who had been forced to emigrate to England during the war. As a child, was Haneke aware of what had happened in Nazi Germany? “Very, very little. We never spoke about the war.” Was there a sense of collective guilt? “For my father, I don’t know. My mother as a young girl went out with a young SS officer and she didn’t really know what was going on – she just liked the uniform. When he told her about the things that he did, she was disgusted and broke up with him.”

At first, Haneke had an ambition to become a piano player or a preacher – when I ask if he still believes in God, he insists, “I don’t answer such questions in the same way as I wouldn’t answer a question about my sexual practices: it’s too intimate” – but he recalls being fascinated by cinema as a child. His earliest memory of film is being taken by his grandmother to see Laurence Olivier in Hamlet at the age of four. “She said afterwards that I had to leave after three minutes because I was terribly afraid of the music.”

A year later, he was sent by his mother and stepfather to Denmark on a post-war exchange programme for young children. Haneke was away for three months and was miserable – “It was the only hard experience of my childhood and when I came back, I didn’t speak to my parents for two weeks” – but the highlight was a trip to a Copenhagen cinema. “We saw something set in Africa with camels and palm trees and I was so enthralled by this film that when it was over, when the lights went up and the doors opened and we went outside into the cold, rainy snow of a Copenhagen evening, I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand how we could get that quickly back from Africa to Copenhagen.”

He ended up studying philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna and then joined a German television station where he spent the next 18 years directing programmes before making his first feature film, The Seventh Continent, at the age of 47. Much of Haneke’s film work seems to have been conceived as an antidote to what he believes is the debilitating immediacy of television. “We’re used, from TV, to scenes giving immediate information, so that the viewer thinks ‘I’ve seen it. I understand it. Next,’ and you never really get to the point of having a particular sensitivity to the situation.”

Haneke, by contrast, is unafraid of the lingering shot; of the camera that stays steadily focused on a door that has just closed or a building that has just been entered. “If you want to move someone, then you have to play with their visual habits, with what they’re used to seeing.”

His parents died before The Seventh Continent was released, but he has four children – one from his first marriage and three stepchildren from his second wife, Susi – ranging in age from 32 to 44. What do they think of his work? “They are happy when I have success but whether they really like the films, I have no idea. I don’t like to speak a lot about my work in my private life but when I am writing, the first reader is always my wife. She always tells me the truth, ‘Here is boring; this I cannot understand’ – anyone else has too much respect. She reacts very spontaneously.”

Is he a good father? “Certainly not. I am always working. To be a good father you have to have a lot of time, a lot of space for children.” So is he difficult to live with? “You’ll have to ask my wife,” he says, before breaking into a grin. “I’m very stubborn. Otherwise I would not be able to make films.”

He looks down and notices that he has eaten all the pineapple chunks. Our time, it seems, is over. Haneke gets up from his chair with a Tiggerish bounce and shakes my hand. “Thank you, that was fun,” he says, walking across the room and disappearing rapidly behind a mirrored door like a black-suited magician. For a few seconds after the door swings shut, all that is left of him is the sound of his footsteps receding down the corridor and the faintest vapour trail of an unsuppressed giggle.

In harm’s way… Haneke’s hits

Funny Games (1997, 2008)

In what he described as his only piece of agit-prop film making, Haneke confronts audience voyeurism with a brutally violent film about a family held hostage in their own home. To win a bet with their sadist captors and the cinema audience for their survival the family engage in horrifically violent games. Originally made in German, Haneke remade the film shot for shot in English with Tim Roth and Naomi Watts in 2008.

The Piano Teacher (2001)

In a further exploration of themes of alienation and voyeurism, Haneke portrays the sadomasochistic sexual relationship between repressed piano teacher Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) and her pupil Walter (Benoit Magimel). Both actors won awards at Cannes and the film won the prestigious Grand Prix.

Code Unknown (2001)

Using long, unbroken shots and an episodic narrative, Haneke explores themes of nationality, politics, culpability and family through the lives of five apparently disparate Parisians. Initiated by an approach from Juliette Binoche, this was Haneke’s first French-language film.

Hidden (2005)

A characteristically tense thriller in which the lives of successful literary couple Georges and Anne Laurent are destroyed by guilt, doubt and mistrust when a mysterious surveillance tape is delivered to their front door. Juliette Binoche and co-star Daniel Auteuil both won best performance awards at Cannes where Haneke also won best director.

The problem with prequels is that they usually add up to little more than a bunch of boring backstory and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009, Fox, 12) is no exception. Despite being directed by Gavin Hood, who cut his teeth on edgy fare like Tsotsi and Rendition, this is plodding comic-book stodge all the way, with surprisingly little sense of character development or narrative invention. While Bryan Singer’s original X-Men flicks traded on their political nous, this is all empty, eye-popping punch-ups and unremarkable CGI – a real sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Much more fun (although still far from exceptional) is Monsters Vs Aliens (2009, Paramount, PG) which mashes up die-hard riffs from Attack of the 50 ft Woman, Dr Strangelove, Invaders From Mars and more and reconfigures them as a sparkly, child-friendly digimation. As always, the 3D gimmick is just that, but snappy voiceover work from Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen and Hugh Laurie keeps things upbeat and the visual design is likably retro.

In Fired Up! (2009, Sony, 12), a pair of thumpable high-school jocks enlist at cheerleader camp to score chicks with headache-inducingly dull results. Imagine Porky’s with all the X-rated rudeness removed, leaving only a crust of bland crassness and you’re in the right ballpark. Stalwart funny man John Michael Higgins does his best to alleviate the boredom but it’s a losing battle. Fired Up? More like Pissed Off.

Thank heaven, then, for Claire Denis whose 35 Shots of Rum (2008, New Wave, 12A) is that increasingly rare thing – a “proper film” with believable situations and finely drawn characters. Tracking the complex relationship between a father and daughter against the backdrop of the Parisian rail network, this warm but melancholic work owes an obvious debt to Ozu, locating its participants in a landscape that is social, emotional and geographical.

Alex Descas and Mati Diop are excellent in the central roles, but this is very much an ensemble piece which benefits from unintrusively intimate support.

A few hundred miles from Pakistan’s Badlands, Islamabad is the setting for Hammad Khan’s new low-budget indie flick. So why does it feel like smalltown America?

Visitors to Islamabad, the small but perfectly formed capital of Pakistan, could be forgiven for thinking that the only things to rock the place were terrorist attacks. But they would be wrong. The city, population approximately 600,000, forms the backdrop for the country’s first slacker movie. Titled Slackistan, the low-budget independent film from first-time British director Hammad Khan features the Pakistani young and privileged as they drift around in a rarefied world of cars, dating, drinking and parties. Worrying only about what to wear and where to go, this group of fashionably-dressed kids could be in Orange County or New York’s Upper East Side.

Khan, who co–wrote the no–budget, independent film with his wife Shandana Ayub, says he could have picked an easier target for his debut but wanted to capture an undiscovered world.

“It’s a countercultural film, one that rejects the stereotypical western view of Pakistan, as well as one that rejects the prevailing establishment of older cultures and traditions.”

The turbulence in Pakistan hasn’t dampened spirits among the young creative community

As the first film of its kind, Khan is confident it won’t be the last. “The people who worked on the film are writers, actors, photographers, musicians, artists and film-makers. Slackistan should be a wake-up call to the wider youth base, both in and outside Pakistan, to redirect the future of the country. I made the film without any backing and I hope it can influence others to tell their stories. Pakistan has had a zombie movie in the last couple of years, now my slacker movie. Who knows what’s next to counter the same old superficial song’n'dance ‘masala’ movie?”

The turbulence in Pakistan – played out on rolling news channels – has not dampened spirits among the country’s young creative community. Pakistan’s second largest city, Lahore, has a thriving underground rock scene (and has recently seen the launch of its first guitar school) while Islamabad is about to gain a new outdoor auditorium and recording studio, the Rock Musicarium. Its founder Zeejah Fazli says there’s a real thirst for entertainment and estimates that there are at least 20 rock bands in the city.

Khan, meanwhile, likens Islamabad to Canberra or Brasilia – seats of power that are very organised but entirely uneventful – and affectionately calls it the city that always sleeps.

“Islamabad is quite dead but it has a lot of young people. It feels like smalltown America. The kids are living in a bubble. It’s chaotic outside but the two worlds don’t meet.

“The only pictures of Islamabad you see are western journalists reporting on the Taliban.”

The Slackistan story – if it can be called that considering the absence of a hard and fast plot – is about the lives of young people in Islamabad. Khan cast locals – Islooites – with no acting experience, who were essentially playing themselves on screen.

“Every Islooite is talking or listening to stories of other people. It is a small town and the mentality is that of characters from Gossip Girl. Who was seen with whom, what car they were in and what happened at the last party are typical concerns for the Islooite. This town isn’t big enough to get away with much.”

If you were in Islamabad and in your twenties, he explains, you’d probably be seen at places like The Hot Spot, an ice–cream parlour and B–movie shrine housed in a disused train, or Rendezvous, somewhere that offers outdoor sheesha and indoor dating.

Ice-cream parlours and Gossip Girl? This hardly sounds like a cinematic feast. So why should anyone care about another bunch of bored and privileged kids?

“They are the kids of businessmen, politicians or professionals,” explains Khan. “They are the future of Pakistan. They will inherit Islamabad and it is more interesting to look at what they might do with it, rather than look at the poor or the radicalised who have very little real power. The film is about growing up, too. It asks, can we really do this for the rest of our lives?”

It’s not just the cast and story that lend Slackistan its realism. The soundtrack features underground hip–hop and rock artists such as Zerobridge, the Fatsumas and Adil Omar.

‘People ask me if I live in a hut! Those who don’t know Islamabad will learn something’

Indeed, the strapline for the film is: “Think you know Pakistan. Think again.” While it sounds like it ought to be part of a tourist campaign, it points to a country that is rarely explored in modern cinema, TV or literature. “It’s a weird conflation of Pakistani and western cultures and privilege,” observes Khan.

His friend and mentor Asif Kapadia, who won a Bafta for his film The Warrior, says the trailer surprised him. “I have my ideas of what I think Pakistan is like, so I can only imagine how much of a shock it will be for western audiences. It will really affect their preconceptions. It’s exciting.”

For Slackistan’s two leads, Shahbaz Shigri and Aisha Akhtar, the film is quite simply a reflection of their day-to-day realities. “It’s about being a big fish in a little pond,” says 20-year-old Aisha, when we meet in a bar at London’s Cumberland Hotel.

“You live in your comfort zone but you get stuck in a rut there.”

Shahbaz, 21, who plays the film’s protagonist Hasan, an aspiring film-maker, says there’s a real lack of ambition.

“Most jobs that kids get are through contacts. Ninety percent of Pakistani boys say they want to take over their dad’s business. The slacker thing was always there, I was just never aware of it.”

Aisha agrees that their Islamabad life is like “Gossip Girl without the glamour. It’s fun. It’s awesome.”

“No matter how bored or unproductive it gets, it’s nice,” adds Shahbaz.

Having lived in the US and the UK Aisha says she has a more “rounded vision” than people who never leave Isloo. Both say it is “completely normal” for 20-somethings to hang out with and date 30-somethings in Islamabad, whereas it would be socially unacceptable elsewhere in the country.

“You’re friends with whoever is left in town,” says Aisha.

Shahbaz feels the audience for Slackistan is a limited one. “All the films that come out of Pakistan are either religious or political. I’m looking forward to see how it does abroad. It’s made in a way that an indie would be made.”

That would be, according to Khan, with a one–man crew, no script, no budget, no permission and, at one point, when the Taliban were just 60 miles away from Islamabad.

Shahbaz used his own car in the film, Aisha used her own room and they borrowed houses from friends to keep costs down.

“We enjoyed making it and when it was over we were so bored, we were just being pathetic,” says Aisha.

“People who don’t know Islamabad will learn something,” says Shahbaz. “People who don’t know it have asked me if I live in a hut!”

“This is the anti–Slumdog,” proclaims Aisha. “That was a good film but highly overrated. It wasn’t anything new. It didn’t show people a side they didn’t already know. This will be a film people talk about.”

www.slackistanthemovie.com

A few hundred miles from Pakistan’s Badlands, Islamabad is the setting for Hammad Khan’s new low-budget indie flick. So why does it feel like smalltown America?

Visitors to Islamabad, the small but perfectly formed capital of Pakistan, could be forgiven for thinking that the only things to rock the place were terrorist attacks. But they would be wrong. The city, population approximately 600,000, forms the backdrop for the country’s first slacker movie. Titled Slackistan, the low-budget independent film from first-time British director Hammad Khan features the Pakistani young and privileged as they drift around in a rarefied world of cars, dating, drinking and parties. Worrying only about what to wear and where to go, this group of fashionably-dressed kids could be in Orange County or New York’s Upper East Side.

Khan, who co–wrote the no–budget, independent film with his wife Shandana Ayub, says he could have picked an easier target for his debut but wanted to capture an undiscovered world.

“It’s a countercultural film, one that rejects the stereotypical western view of Pakistan, as well as one that rejects the prevailing establishment of older cultures and traditions.”

The turbulence in Pakistan hasn’t dampened spirits among the young creative community

As the first film of its kind, Khan is confident it won’t be the last. “The people who worked on the film are writers, actors, photographers, musicians, artists and film-makers. Slackistan should be a wake-up call to the wider youth base, both in and outside Pakistan, to redirect the future of the country. I made the film without any backing and I hope it can influence others to tell their stories. Pakistan has had a zombie movie in the last couple of years, now my slacker movie. Who knows what’s next to counter the same old superficial song’n'dance ‘masala’ movie?”

The turbulence in Pakistan – played out on rolling news channels – has not dampened spirits among the country’s young creative community. Pakistan’s second largest city, Lahore, has a thriving underground rock scene (and has recently seen the launch of its first guitar school) while Islamabad is about to gain a new outdoor auditorium and recording studio, the Rock Musicarium. Its founder Zeejah Fazli says there’s a real thirst for entertainment and estimates that there are at least 20 rock bands in the city.

Khan, meanwhile, likens Islamabad to Canberra or Brasilia – seats of power that are very organised but entirely uneventful – and affectionately calls it the city that always sleeps.

“Islamabad is quite dead but it has a lot of young people. It feels like smalltown America. The kids are living in a bubble. It’s chaotic outside but the two worlds don’t meet.

“The only pictures of Islamabad you see are western journalists reporting on the Taliban.”

The Slackistan story – if it can be called that considering the absence of a hard and fast plot – is about the lives of young people in Islamabad. Khan cast locals – Islooites – with no acting experience, who were essentially playing themselves on screen.

“Every Islooite is talking or listening to stories of other people. It is a small town and the mentality is that of characters from Gossip Girl. Who was seen with whom, what car they were in and what happened at the last party are typical concerns for the Islooite. This town isn’t big enough to get away with much.”

If you were in Islamabad and in your twenties, he explains, you’d probably be seen at places like The Hot Spot, an ice–cream parlour and B–movie shrine housed in a disused train, or Rendezvous, somewhere that offers outdoor sheesha and indoor dating.

Ice-cream parlours and Gossip Girl? This hardly sounds like a cinematic feast. So why should anyone care about another bunch of bored and privileged kids?

“They are the kids of businessmen, politicians or professionals,” explains Khan. “They are the future of Pakistan. They will inherit Islamabad and it is more interesting to look at what they might do with it, rather than look at the poor or the radicalised who have very little real power. The film is about growing up, too. It asks, can we really do this for the rest of our lives?”

It’s not just the cast and story that lend Slackistan its realism. The soundtrack features underground hip–hop and rock artists such as Zerobridge, the Fatsumas and Adil Omar.

‘People ask me if I live in a hut! Those who don’t know Islamabad will learn something’

Indeed, the strapline for the film is: “Think you know Pakistan. Think again.” While it sounds like it ought to be part of a tourist campaign, it points to a country that is rarely explored in modern cinema, TV or literature. “It’s a weird conflation of Pakistani and western cultures and privilege,” observes Khan.

His friend and mentor Asif Kapadia, who won a Bafta for his film The Warrior, says the trailer surprised him. “I have my ideas of what I think Pakistan is like, so I can only imagine how much of a shock it will be for western audiences. It will really affect their preconceptions. It’s exciting.”

For Slackistan’s two leads, Shahbaz Shigri and Aisha Akhtar, the film is quite simply a reflection of their day-to-day realities. “It’s about being a big fish in a little pond,” says 20-year-old Aisha, when we meet in a bar at London’s Cumberland Hotel.

“You live in your comfort zone but you get stuck in a rut there.”

Shahbaz, 21, who plays the film’s protagonist Hasan, an aspiring film-maker, says there’s a real lack of ambition.

“Most jobs that kids get are through contacts. Ninety percent of Pakistani boys say they want to take over their dad’s business. The slacker thing was always there, I was just never aware of it.”

Aisha agrees that their Islamabad life is like “Gossip Girl without the glamour. It’s fun. It’s awesome.”

“No matter how bored or unproductive it gets, it’s nice,” adds Shahbaz.

Having lived in the US and the UK Aisha says she has a more “rounded vision” than people who never leave Isloo. Both say it is “completely normal” for 20-somethings to hang out with and date 30-somethings in Islamabad, whereas it would be socially unacceptable elsewhere in the country.

“You’re friends with whoever is left in town,” says Aisha.

Shahbaz feels the audience for Slackistan is a limited one. “All the films that come out of Pakistan are either religious or political. I’m looking forward to see how it does abroad. It’s made in a way that an indie would be made.”

That would be, according to Khan, with a one–man crew, no script, no budget, no permission and, at one point, when the Taliban were just 60 miles away from Islamabad.

Shahbaz used his own car in the film, Aisha used her own room and they borrowed houses from friends to keep costs down.

“We enjoyed making it and when it was over we were so bored, we were just being pathetic,” says Aisha.

“People who don’t know Islamabad will learn something,” says Shahbaz. “People who don’t know it have asked me if I live in a hut!”

“This is the anti–Slumdog,” proclaims Aisha. “That was a good film but highly overrated. It wasn’t anything new. It didn’t show people a side they didn’t already know. This will be a film people talk about.”

www.slackistanthemovie.com

The Royal Tenenbaums director’s Roald Dahl adaptation – starring George Clooney and Meryl Streep – is full of his trademark wry dialogue, whimsical characters and quirky visual cues.

The last time I saw Wes Anderson, seven years ago, he was wearing a tight, beige corduroy suit. He’s still wearing it today. On the previous occasion, though – a Q&A for his film The Royal Tenenbaums – it was accessorised with plastic-framed glasses and a preppy scarf. Now the glasses have gone, there’s a stripey tie, and the hair is longer and more luxuriant. He looks less geeky, as if he’s been spending more time outdoors. Does he go hiking in his corduroy suit, perhaps? “I rely on corduroy,” Anderson admits. “I’ve been here in London a week – this is all I’ve got.” It’s not the same suit, though, he stresses. “They last a couple of years. I have a guy who makes them specially for me. They’re very inexpensive and I can just call him up and say, ‘Can I have another one please?’”

Every director needs a trademark. Anderson is a giant compendium of trademarks. His movies have varied in scope and setting, but they’re all of a type. Whether it’s a broken family of overachievers (The Royal Tenenbaums), a morose ocean explorer (The Life Aquatic) or an Indian train odyssey (The Darjeeling Limited), you’ll find the same blend of urbane comedy, regular players (Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston, Jason Schwartzman), and obsessive attention to design details such as lettering (Futura, always), decor (that painstakingly hand-painted train in The Darjeeling Limited, for example), soundtrack (retro but not too obscure), or costume (vintage Adidas, Lacoste, and, of course, corduroy).

His latest, Fantastic Mr Fox, features most of the above, and it should come as no surprise to see that its hero sports a natty double-breasted version of Anderson’s beloved suit, tastefully accessorised with a few ears of wheat in the breast pocket. More surprising is the fact that Anderson has made a children’s movie. It’s based on Roald Dahl’s novel, of course – the simple tale of a cocky fox pursued by three determined farmers.

People watch Wes Anderson’s movies precisely because they’re not about the real world

Anderson himself seems pretty surprised he’s made the film. He’s wanted to do it for a good 10 years, he says, since it was the first book he remembers ever owning. “I grew up loving it and somewhere along the way I thought this one should be mine.” But he imagined it as a side project he could oversee while making another movie. “I thought I’d do the script and record the actors and design it, then other people would just … animate it. And they’d send it to me and I’d say ‘good’ and maybe tinker with it a bit. But that’s not the way it ended up happening at all. “

Henry Selick, who animated the imaginary sea creatures in The Life Aquatic (and had previously adapted Dahl’s James And The Giant Peach), was lined up to do Fantastic Mr Fox, but then he went off to make Coraline instead. “And I got more interested in the details of it,” Anderson continues. “So in fact, for the last two years, my whole life has been Fantastic Mr Fox every day. But I’m happy about that because this is the only way I could feel like this is really one of my movies.”

There’s no mistaking Anderson’s touch. With the help of that compendium of trademarks (including new additions George Clooney and Meryl Streep as Mr and Mrs Fox), and some gloriously old-school stop-motion animation, Anderson fleshes out Dahl’s basic story into something more like The Royal Tenenbaums mixed with Ocean’s 11 and Bagpuss.

For a detail addict like Anderson, animation must be the movie equivalent of crack cocaine. Here’s a world where everything needs designing from scratch, and every frame is a carefully composed still photograph – 61,920 of them in the whole movie. It was all made in Britain, and many of the film’s details – the furniture, the interiors, the buildings – came from Gipsy House, Dahl’s Buckinghamshire home. Anderson had been in touch with Dahl’s estate since 2000, when he first thought about making the movie, and Dahl’s widow, Felicity, let Anderson and his co-writer Noah Baumbach stay at Gipsy House to write the movie. They basically photographed everything in it while they were there and had it all copied in miniature for the movie sets. So there’s a distinctly British feel to it, despite the fact the animals all have American accents and the dastardly humans are English – a move that’s sure to set whiskers twitching in the home counties. Is there a buried political subtext to the movie? Not really. As Anderson points out, real animals in England don’t have British accents either since they can’t actually speak.

Anderson doesn’t really do politics. He doesn’t really do “real”, his critics say. His previous movie, The Darjeeling Limited, at least made an attempt to engage with the outside world. Granted, its trio of materialistic Americans rarely left their luxurious train, but when they did, they were confronted with a harder reality that threatened to shatter the film’s precious little world, such as when a child tragically drowns. It was pleasing to see the film-maker stretching himself, even if it laid him open to accusations of cultural imperialism. As the reviewer in Slate.com put it, “Beware of any film in which an entire race and culture is turned into therapeutic scenery.”

“More was written about the fact that these guys were walking around India with Vuitton bags than practically anything else in the whole film,” Anderson complains. “I don’t think I’ve made a film where I’ve had a political agenda that I was trying to get across or anything like that. I want to create a certain sort of world that doesn’t quite exist, to imagine something new. With Darjeeling, our goal was to make as personal a story as we could, and it’s filled with things that are connected with our lives and experiences and people close to us.”

Anderson’s stories are full of adults who act like children and children who act like adults – at the moment he’s somewhere between the two

People watch Anderson’s movies precisely because they’re not about the real, grown-up world. That heightened, self-referential, beautifully-designed reality that’s so alluring in his films is only really possible in hermetic environments: schools, homes, ships, trains, underground. “I guess that’s what happens if you’re going to try to invent something with the way the movie is designed and where it’s set. Often it means you can’t stray too far off the set because it’s not like that any more over there,” he laughs, pointing across the room.

That’s almost an admission that style triumphs over substance, but then Anderson’s style has shaped American indie cinema for much of the past decade. His trademarks have been ripped off to the point of becoming cliches. A few years ago, The Onion even ran a piece entitled “10 Movies That Couldn’t Have Happened Without Wes Anderson”, detecting his influence in indie hits like Napoleon Dynamite, Juno and Little Miss Sunshine – most of which were bigger draws than Anderson’s own films.

He’s awkward about acknowledging his influence. “I’ve never had … I don’t think that … um,” he stammers, trying to work out a way of not sounding too big-headed. “It’s certainly a nice idea to think that … one could have …” He goes on to list innumerable film-makers he has been influenced by himself, from Bergman to Soderbergh to Almodóvar to Spike Lee. “Stanley Kubrick is the one I think about now,” he says. Kubrick’s favourite font was also Futura.

Anderson’s stories are full of adults who act like children and children who act like adults, and at the moment he seems to be somewhere between the two. He’s no longer the hipster prodigy he was in the days of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. He’s shed the geek chic and is 40 years old now. It would be interesting to see him take on heavier, more “mature”, Kubrick-like themes, but instead he seems to have come running back to the security of the playpen with Fantastic Mr Fox.

Perhaps that is a form of growing up. Having led the hipster generation into reluctant adulthood, he’s now making movies they can take their children to. Despite his insistence that Mr Fox is based on Dahl himself, it’s tempting to also read him as the director’s corduroy-veiled alter ego. Mr Fox is a flamboyant charmer, an impulsive dreamer who doesn’t accept his position in life, a risk-taker who’s got some growing up to do. Like Anderson he’s also approaching middle age, thinking about moving up the real estate ladder and settling down. Anderson has spent the past few years flitting between Paris and New York, but has recently bought a house in Kent, he says. He intends to live part of the year there with his British-raised girlfriend. So is that why he’s making a children’s movie? To show to his own kids one day? “It’d be nice to have a six-year-old and say, ‘I have this film I made, you might quite like it’. Yeah, definitely that’s on my mind.” You can just picture him writing in his wood-panelled study like Mr Fox, looking out at the children playing in his English country garden, in identical little corduroy suits

Fantastic Mr Fox is out now