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Post by Admin Wed Jan 13, 2010 2:27 am

http://www.observer.com/2010/culture/tank-girl

Tank Girl
y Rex Reed
January 12, 2010 | 7:19 p.m

Fish Tank
Running time 123 minutes
Written and directed by Andrea Arnold
Starring Kate Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing

Michael Fassbender, the versatile, highly acclaimed, Irish-raised hunk who nearly starved himself to death as IRA hero Bobby Sands in the harrowing Hunger before winning more applause in the colorful role of a brutal Nazi hunter in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, is in top form in Fish Tank. But the real star is Katie Jarvis, a newcomer with no previous experience who plays a teenage social misfit in a bleak housing project looking for love in all the wrong places. It’s a debut both raw and astonishing.

The second film written and directed by Andrea Arnold (Red Road), an exponent of the Ken Loach film school of naturalistic dialogue and kitchen-sink naturalism, Fish Tank is a heartbreaking coming-of-age story about 15-year-old Mia (Jarvis), a tortured, combustible girl who lives in an ugly subsidized housing estate with her combative younger sister and foulmouthed, slatternly mother, venting her pent-up rage on her family, classmates and neighbors. Except for getting into trouble and harboring a passion for hip-hop dancing, Mia has no outlet for her wasted energy. Until, that is, the arrival of her mother’s sexy new boyfriend, Connor (Fassbender), a security guard who takes the time to bandage the wound when she cuts her foot, slips her an occasional slug of vodka and extends the kindness and friendship she has been missing in a father of her own. Behind her mother’s back, he even encourages her to audition for a dance contest, selecting a more sophisticated song to emphasize the body movements of a mature woman. The sexual attraction is immediate, followed by inevitable jealousy and resentment when Mia secretly watches he and her mother making love through a crack in the bedroom door. It’s only a matter of time before the man and the girl turn flirtation to lust. For a fleeting moment, Mia experiences purpose, and something new in her mind called peace. It’s a pipe dream. At war with the world already, Mia has her attraction to the older man turn ferocious when she discovers he is not only emotionally unavailable but hiding a secret that courts disaster. These are not easily likable people, but Ms. Arnold’s chief talent is the way she makes us understand and even sympathize with both their flaws and attributes. The people in Fish Tank are neither good nor bad, but merely human, with elements of both.

Though plagued by accents that are not always to understand, Fish Tank excels on more than one level—as both a girl’s fairy tale fantasy of romance among the vacant lots and factory whistles, and as a sharp-focused vision of working-class squalor and despair in the U.K. today. As Mia feels trapped in her caged life, it is no mystery why she reacts so violently to a chained horse in a nearby lot, or why she tries to free a fish caught on a hook, or why she sees in Connor her first ticket out of the fish tank that is her life. Miraculously, the harsh environment is laced with lyricism and a generosity of feeling.

First-rate acting is required to bring this kind of dichotomy to life, and Ms. Arnold is an ace when it comes to drawing real emotional truths from her actors. Since Connor is softhearted and seductive, it is essential that the actor playing him is appealing enough to make him plausible even when his dark side surfaces. Mr. Fassbender is irresistible. His charisma is undeniable. And he is matched by Ms. Jarvis, whose verbal explosions and painful expressions never surrender to sentimentality or lost-child clichés. The ending is not depressing. Out of the chaos of Fish Tank, there is hope.

rreed@observer.com
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Post by Admin Wed Jan 13, 2010 2:33 am

http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2010/01/12/check-out-fish-tank-the-last-station-and-44-inch-chest-in-this-weeks-unlimited/

"Fish Tank"

What it is: The second feature from Oscar-winning director Andrea Arnold, "Fish Tank" is a British drama about an outcast 15-year-old girl (newcomer Katie Jarvis) with dreams of being a dancer, who develops a crush on her mother's new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender of "Inglourious Basterds"). For American audiences it may be slightly reminiscent of "Thirteen" (Jarvis even resembles Evan Rachel Wood), though it fits mostly with the social realist, "kitchen sink" tradition of British filmmakers Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Shane Meadows.

Why you should be interested: Andrea Arnold won her second straight Jury Prize at Cannes with "Fish Tank," and the film picked up multiple other prestigious honors at film fests in Edinburgh, Chicago, Norway and Croatia. Arnold and Jarvis were also recently named Best Director and Most Promising Newcomer, respectively, at the British Independent Film Awards. Never mind the awards and critical acclaim though; take my word that this is the best-looking and best acted of these neo-kitchen-sink, council estate-set British films in years.

How you can see it: IFC Films opens "Fish Tank" in NYC this Friday and in other U.S. cities over the next two months (see the scheduled bookings here). You will also have the option of watching the film on IFC On Demand beginning January 27.
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Post by Admin Wed Jan 13, 2010 2:36 am

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/weekendwarriornews.php?id=62206

THE CHOSEN ONE:

Fish Tank (IFC Films)
Starring Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing, Harry Treadaway
Written and directed by Andrea Arnold (Red Road)
Genre: Drama
Unrated
Plot Summary: 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) has already had a lot of problems at home with her dysfunctional mother (Kierston Wareing) before she brings home her new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender), a charming man who Mia starts bonding with, but immediately creates new problems for the girl.

Interview with Michael Fassbender

Back in September, one of the last movies I caught at the Toronto Film Festival was this low-budget character drama from Andrea Arnold that effectively introduces the world to Katie Jarvis, another amazing British newcomer on par with Carey Mulligan, only with far less previous acting experience. Very few people who've seen this movie have not been impressed with her portrayal of Mia, a troubled teen girl whose love for hip hop dancing helps her escape from her dysfunctional household in a council estate in Northern England. Things look to be getting even worse when her mother's gregarious boyfriend Connor, played by Michael Fassbender, moves in with the family, but he proves to be a positive influence for the girls, as he does his best to try and bond with Mia.

Using a similar storytelling approach as Red Road, we meet Mia through her normal everyday life. She's essentially a loner, not getting along with the other girls her age, and doing whatever she wants, which involves skipping school and finding ways to stay out of her house. Her mother, played by Kierston Wareing, is one of those women in their late 30s who still acts like they're teenagers, a woman still on the prowl for men and in denial of her responsibility as a mother, another thing the film has in common with Precious.

Like so many slice-of-life films, it takes the simplest approach to establishing and developing the characters by allowing us to be a fly on the wall watching their lives unfold. In that sense, Arnold has an impressive way of capturing the character's most intimate moments in a way that makes you feel as if you're there in the room with them, which is quite a talent. While it may not immediately seem like every scene is about moving the plot forward, all of it is important to Mia's story even a subplot of Mia finding an aging white horse in a scrapyard, at first feeling like the most esoteric aspect of the movie. The hyper-realism Arnold creates with her cast keeps you riveted to the screen to see what might happen next, and watching the movie a second time recently allowed more of the film's minutiae to reveal themselves in the subtlety of all the performances.

Like with Red Road, it's hard to believe such a simple story can have such an effect on you but that's partially what made Arnold's previous film so memorable, and Fish Tank confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt that Andrea Arnold's previous film Red Road was no fluke. Along with Shane Meadows and Ken Loach, she's become one of the best filmmakers at representing the British working class and life in council flats, also doing a fine job showing how pop culture and the media are so influential on the poorer communities in suburban areas.

The last act is fairly intense as Mia goes to confront Connor about him leaving, and the story goes in directions no one could possibly see coming, and it will leave you shocked by how that translates using this naturalistic approach. True, some aspects of the plot can be easily sussed out, but it's the way that Arnold chooses to reveal these sharp curves in the road that makes the overall experience hard to easily dismiss.

Not that the film is all dark and serious, because like with Precious, there are moments of joy found in the situational humor, not only from the film's more pleasant moments like when Connor takes them on a family outing, but even watching the three women squabble is quite entertaining, mainly due to Mia's younger sister Tyler, played by Rebecca Griffiths, who gets a lot of laughs with her sassy behavior.

It's great to see a simple but well-crafted film like this appearing so early in the year offering an alternative to some of the studio fare and reminding us that there are young women like Mia who are going through life-changing experiences like this one everywhere, and Andrea Arnold has a way of leaving things open-ended yet hopeful.

Fish Tank opens in New York at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and then in L.A., Boston and San Francisco on Friday, January 29.
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Post by Admin Wed Jan 13, 2010 3:45 am

http://www.indiewire.com/article/review_the_girl_cant_help_it_andrea_arnolds_fish_tank/

REVIEW | The Girl Can’t Help It: Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank”
by Eric Hynes (Updated 15 hours, 18 minutes ago)
A scene from Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank." Image courtesy of IFC Films.

Even after the advent of psychology, feminism, and the sexual revolution, female desire remains culturally discomfiting, a topic to be avoided or willfully mystified. Outside of hyper-hormonal slapstick, adolescent desire is just as taboo. Furthermore, female adolescent desire is so socially unsavory that even the dubiously chaste “Twilight” counts as a welcome corrective. Enter Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank,” a film so fearless, honest, and wise about emergent female sexuality that no grading curve is necessary. She approaches sex not as an aspect of politics but of experience, continuous with life’s other impulses, bafflements, dangers, and joys.

Arnold’s combustible first feature, “Red Road,” wedded British kitchen sink realism with moody expressionism, a marriage she revisits and intensifies with “Fish Tank.” Her two films are as unsentimental as they are sensitive, and so attuned to the messy modalities of behavior that even tallies of fear and heartbreak accumulate with dignity. Urban living’s concrete drabness is both bemoaned and limned with color and grace, the smallest and most desolate corner yet capable of offering escape and earthbound pleasure. Her characters may not transcend their place in the world, but at least they’re allowed to fully inhabit it.

In “Fish Tank,” a fifteen-year-old named Mia (Katie Jarvis, a complete and mesmerizing presence) careens around an English apartment complex motored by frustration and rage. During an Odyssean opening sequence she dances alone, barks into a cell phone, throws rocks at a window, head-butts a girl, and trades f-bombs and door slams with her mother and younger sister. The sequence seems a touch too efficient, but does effectively collar the viewer into Mia’s world—and most crucially, into her point of view. Henceforth the camera doesn’t just follow Mia around, it attends, encircles and becomes her. It both registers and expresses her fluctuating moods. Whether she’s rehearsing dance moves, peering through chain link, or slumping in the backseat of a car, the camera matches her sightlines to actively, subjectively look. When her dishy, boozy single mother’s latest conquest appears in her kitchen one morning, the camera ogles him with furtive, shameless glances. Connor (Michael Fassbender, sex on a stick here) notices her too, and helps charge the air with vague entendres, but the camera fixes not on her state of relative undress (t-shirt and panties) but on his long, muscular torso and ass arching out of low-slung jeans. It’s Mia’s eureka moment of exploding desire, as spectacular and troubling as anyone could hope for. She tells him to f&#! off, which of course means she’s hooked.

Yet it would be unfair to color Mia and Connor’s rapport as only sexual, for it also has platonic and familial tints. As far as we can tell, Connor is the first person who talks to Mia as if she were an adult. Connor honors her with civil conversation, genuine interest, and frank compliments. She comes to see herself the way he sees her: as a woman. Exiled upstairs while mom (Kierston Wareing, resplendently braless but constrained by a one-note character) hosts a bump-and-grind house party, Mia falls asleep in her mom’s room but awakens when Connor carries her off to bed. Pretending to slumber, she peers down to watch him remove her shoes and pants, discovering her own body as he does the same. With desire comes power, of course, and it’s something this previously invisible, embattled truant thrills to possess. His power is just as great (and legally speaking, much greater), but Arnold stays close to Mia, attending her choices and honoring the erotics of her self-possession. To the aching strains of Bobby Womack she dances into the unknown, eager for the possibilities but ignorant of the consequences.

Several notes in the film’s final act seem a bit off—such as an extended turn into thriller territory, a tardy and literally choreographed bid for familial depth, and an impersonally elegiac finale—but only because Arnold so succeeds at establishing and convincing of Mia’s perspective that any kind of distance from it feels like a betrayal. What in any other movie could be a highlight—a kidnapping tangent provides several minutes of breathless tension—pales in comparison to the rest of the film’s casually profound intimacy. But even these missteps follow a certain logic, for as Mia pushes too far so does Arnold’s filmmaking, purposefully making Mia alien to us just as she becomes alien to herself. She wasn’t ready for the costs of being a woman—for the heartbreak, the resentments, the cowardice of men. But suddenly there’s a tomorrow, a life beyond the council flat and even beyond Connor. And tomorrow she’ll be ready.

[Eric Hynes is a Reverse Shot staff writer and host of the Reverse Shot Talkies video series. He has also written for Slate and Stop Smiling, among other publications.]
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Post by Admin Wed Jan 13, 2010 3:56 am

http://elitestv.com/pub/2010/01/fish-tank-2009

Fish Tank (2009)
By MovieFilmReview • on January 12, 2010

Fish Tank
By Max Evans
Director Andrea Arnold

The wreckage of “broken Britain” can be seen in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, which featured in last weekend’s line up at the Cornwall Film Festival.

Following up the director’s debut feature Red Road, the film has received all sorts of accolades including winning a coveted Jury Prize at the Cannes Film festival. It’s easy to see why.

The plot centres around Mia, a unremittingly boisterous but brittle teenager growing up on an sink estate in Essex, who insulates herself in the hopes of one day becoming a hip-hop dancer.

This is no gentle portrait. Nor is it simple: Mia is no Vicky Pollard, no caricature. In the opening sequence we see her headbutt a rival girl as the ugly, doused landscape gapes between the tower blocks, but quickly we are drawn into the slip-stream of this young woman as she ghosts the vacant council flats with her self-choreographed, cider fuelled routines, and her plots to free a withered horse from a gypsy encampment.

Mia, played to a perfect pitch by debutant Katie Jarvis, is at the margins of her own household where the stink of spilt booze emanates from every room. When her disinterested mother comes home with a handsome stranger called Connor (Michael Fassbender) Mia becomes stifled between her urges toward him as a father figure and the nascent nascent sexual desire he inspires in her.
In this sense Fish Tank takes on the classic structure of a rights-of-passage story but the motif of growing-up reaches beyond the central character, colouring a world that has failed to deliver on its parental responsibilities for every one. In Arnold’s film adults play at being children, as much as children play at being adults.

Mia’s younger sister smokes, drinks and spits worn expletives as though she were already weary of this world at the age of ten, whilst her mother strops around the flat, ordering the daughters out so that she can play in the living room with her friends.

Connor, who is played delicately by the fast growing phenomenon that is Michael Fassbender, confirms this idea more than any other character. He is charming and he engages with Mia with a breathy humility that she has never experienced in a man, and yet his immaturity won’t allow him to realise his desired identity as the adult in their relationship – the father.

As Mia and Connor inevitably give way in a strikingly presented sexual encounter we are left wondering who is to blame for this mess? The scenes between the two characters up to this point have been so sensual that we, as viewers, can hardly resist the attraction more than they can.

When later on in the film it becomes clear Connor has been concealing a double life, a life decidedly more middle class than Mia’s, we are left wondering if he is the villain of the piece. Yet the direction and the acting simply won’t allow for such easy distinctions.

The narrative rattles on into an uneasy pace as events seem to spin out of control. Mia behaviour takes her into dangerous territory. Frightening consequences loom. One character warns her, as if she were voicing the thoughts of the audience, “You’re starting to scare me know. ”

The visuals are stippled and scarred by clever cinematography, although it must be admitted that the film’s symbolism (including a balloon amidst the tenements) becomes a little tired in places. The plot too is a little slow in unfurling its quite foreseeable arc and yet there is a pleasure in having the physical tension eked out.

The people in Andrea Arnold’s locale – a wasteland of empty concrete underpasses and dual carriage ways – have been left to dissipate in tower blocks like decaying teeth, and yet they are people. They are redeemed by hope, however bootless it may appear.

It is obvious to draw parallels with the work of Ken Loach, or to a lesser extent Mike Leigh. The film is couched in the syntax of its forbears, but it is the dismal and puny hope that gives Fish Tank its own tragic identity.

There are no easy answers; no easy outcomes, but there is possibility. It is what allows Andrea Arnold’s characters to beam their humanity across all that beaten space, over those fences and motorway partitions that have kept them disconnected.

Andrea Arnold, originally a native of Dartford, was a guest of the Conrwall Film festival several years ago. Before the screening Lucy Freers, member of the festival steering group, paid tribute to this “inspiring young woman” and said that she had it on good authority that some of Fish Tank was based on the director’s personal experiences.

Britain was once the undisputed champion of social realist cinema and its lovely to see such an accomplished film showcasing the talent still to be found in this country. The Cornwall Film Festival has been passionate about promoting British Film makers and the organisers should be congratulated for bringing such a well realised English picture to an audience that would not otherwise get to see it on the big screen.

Written by Max Evans
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Post by Admin Wed Jan 13, 2010 4:42 am

http://livingincinema.com/2010/01/13/review-fish-tank-2010-12/

Review: Fish Tank (2010) **** 1/2
By Craig Kennedy - January 13th, 2010; 12:01 am

Katie Jarvis in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank

Two English coming-of-age dramas about young girls at a crossroads whose fates are impacted by older men emerged from the festival circuit as critical darlings in 2009. Lone Sherfig’s An Education was a Sundance hit that has already landed in theaters while Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank made waves at Cannes and arrives in the US this week. Though they share some commonalities, ultimately the two films couldn’t be more different.

With its easy-to-swallow gloss and neatly resolved uplift, An Education is jaunty, eager to please and solicitous of a mainstream audience. Fish Tank on the other hand is harder-edged, grimmer and more uncompromising. While it might not draw as big of an audience as Sherfig’s entertaining film, it offers a more challenging character study and a slice of working class English life that feels wholly real. Of the two, it’s also a more powerful, moving and better film.

Newcomer Katie Jarvis makes a strong impression as Mia, a sullen 15-year-old trapped in a bleak, Essex apartment block with her little sister and dud of a mother. Dissatisfied but armed with only the vaguest notion of how to escape her lot in life, Mia charges through the film chin first with a barely contained anger-fueled intensity – a balled fist of a girl ready to lash out at anyone who crosses her with bad intentions or good.

Unlike An Education’s pretty Carey Mulligan who had the deck stacked in her favor as Jenny, a smart and likable character surrounded by morons, Jarvis’ Mia is admittedly difficult to warm up to. And yet, Mia feels real. Her ill-focused rage is a hallmark of a certain adolescent age, but it’s not all that defines her. In occasional unguarded moments, Mia’s capacity and yearning for genuine love emerges from behind her curtain of discontent and she’s revealed to be a feeling, caring, sympathetic human being. By comparison, the heroine of An Education finally seems like a privileged, selfish complainer.

The biggest name in the film as far as US audiences are concerned is Michael Fassbender who you’ll remember from his intense performance in Hunger and more widely as British agent Lt. Archie Hicox in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. He’s great here as the charming and handsome new boyfriend of Mia’s mother. You fear from the start by the way he interacts with Mia that there is the potential for an inappropriate physical relationship between the two, but Fassbender doesn’t play him as a predator. He has a genuine concern for Mia and he seems to be the only adult in the film who understands where she’s coming from. Of course, his role as a kind of father figure makes the looming threat he represents that much more disconcerting. It’s a difficult line to tread, but Fassbender pulls it off with great sensitivity and Fish Tank pays off all the more for it.

Though it sounds grueling, Fish Tank is more than just a despairing slog through the working class trenches. Vague and unarticulated as they may be, Mia has hopes of her own and the spare realism of her story is punctuated by surprising moments of dreamy beauty. She’s relatable once you get under her skin and though her story ends on an unresolved note, you know enough about her to believe she just might make something of herself. More importantly, she’s made you care enough so that you hope that she does.

Fish Tank. UK 2009 (US release 2010). Written and directed byAndrea Arnold. Cinematography by Robbie Ryan. Edited by Nicolas Chaudeurge. Starring Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing, Rebecca Griffiths, Sydney Mary Nash and Harry Treadaway. 2 hours 4 minutes. Not rated by the MPAA. 4.5 stars (out of 5)
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 12:39 am

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20336517,00.html

Fish Tank (2010)
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum | Jan 13, 2010

Details Limited Release: Jan 15, 2010; Rated: Unrated; Length: 124 Minutes; Genre: Drama; With: Michael Fassbender and Katie Jarvis
GIRL IN THE HOODIE Katie Jarvis busts some moves in Fish Tank | Fish Tank

Mia (Katie Jarvis) is a cauldron of teen-girl sullenness and yearning in the vivid British drama Fish Tank — we can't take our eyes off her, even if her anger is familiar to audiences of the subgenre of cinematic realism classified as British miserablism. A 15-year-old loner who doesn't play well with others, Mia lives in a crappy U.K. housing project with her aggressive kid sister (Rebecca Griffiths) and her boozy, slutty mother (Kierston Wareing), and secretly breaks into an abandoned apartment to practice hip-hop dance moves; she's a poster girl for the depression of underbelly England. So the sudden appearance of a sexy man in her mother's life is as unnerving as it is exciting. Connor (Inglourious Basterds' seductive Michael Fassbender, first admired in glorious shirtlessness) turns on a dangerously live switch in a girl who doesn't yet understand her own wiring.

Such a premise — and such a tight, hand-held, close-up study of an inarticulate young woman trapped by the luck of life's bad draw — might skitter toward have-not cliché. But writer-director Andrea Arnold (Red Road), an astute chronicler of lower-class turf, mostly steers clear of the expected, especially with the remarkable Jarvis in the lead, a non-pro who was 17 when the movie was shot. A local girl from the same blighted Essex neighborhood where the film is set (as is the excellent Wareing, who also starred in leading miserablist Ken Loach's It's a Free World), the amazingly natural first-timer was discovered, in a gift of publicity-ready truth, while having an argument with her boyfriend at a train station. Word is, she didn't even dance, and was shy to do so on camera. In freeing her young star's physicality in Fish Tank, Arnold also demonstrates one way a girl might learn to swim up and out. (Available on cable via on demand starting Jan. 27) A-
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 12:41 am

http://www.nypress.com/article-20799-automatic-pity-for-the-people.html

Wednesday, January 13,2010
Automatic Pity for the People
Fish Tank reduces Britain’s great realist filmmakers to a morose message
By Armond White
. . . . . . .

Fish Tank
Directed by Andrea Arnold
Runtime: 123 min.
The 1994 Nas song “Life’s a Bitch”— one of the most cynical, yet most admired rap singles ever made—has finally found its film equivalent.The song appears on the soundtrack of the new British movie Fish Tank as to authenticate its grim story of a teenage white girl’s alienation. But the pathetic, council-flat life of runty 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) doesn’t take place in Nas’ 1990s. Despite the film’s pretenses of social realism, its contemporary-set story merely borrows those once-fashionable postures of working-class alienation. It’s the same sullen despondency that makes “Life’s a Bitch” so irredeemably phony. Both song and film pander to underprivileged self-pity.

This knee-jerk pathos is a reflex from both America’s Reagan-era hip-hop and England’s Thatcher-era miserabilist pop. Call it Automatic Pity.That’s the true meaning of Illmatic, Nas’ famous debut album title that contains the song. Nas imitated the anger of more inspired and sincere hip-hop artists. His baby-brother impudence bit-off the wisdom and skepticism of Public Enemy and Geto Boys, then regurgitated it (all the while avoiding L.L. Cool J’s joie de vivre). This resembles Fish Tank’s glum reduction of Britain’s great realist filmmakers Ken Loach, Alan Clarke and Mike Leigh.

Making her second feature film, director Andrea Arnold follows the Loach-Clarke- Leigh template but with none of the insight. Arnold has baby-sister impudence. Mia’s misery is routine, just as the circumstances of her dislocation (her still-immature, romantically active single mother who keeps a slatternly home; her lack of educational interest; her submersion in overly sexualized teen pop) establishes a cliché portrait of social ills.This al most anorexically thin white girl who likes to break-dance fits clinical stereotypes no differently than the obese black girl of Precious.

It’s a true pop culture irony—and calamity—that Arnold introduces Mia loping through the streets of her housing projects as the camera tracks her in a single shot that instantly recalls Alan Clarke’s truth-hunting technique in the 1989 film Elephant (about a sullen, overweight black girl misunderstood by family and social workers). Clarke filmed like a political and emotional detective (his insight clearly influenced Shane Meadows’ superb films on contemporary British class problems). Clarke’s best movie Rita, Sue and Bob Too! featured a remarkable moment when working-class British girls imitated Bananarama music videos.That scene defined the pop alienation that Hollywood filmmakers— bound up in the capitalist process of indoctrination and materialist-lust— never question.

But Arnold doesn’t critique the situation either. Like Nas, Arnold broods over Mia’s condition and fakes empathy with the girl’s selfishness—the same solipsistic immaturity that separates Nas’ hip-hop from Motown and blues truths. Arnold seems confused by the way pop music expresses working-class experience. Mia discovers Bobby Womack’s version of “California Dreaming” through Connor (Michael Fassbender), her mother’s lover who first flirts with Mia by telling her, “You dance like a black. It’s a compliment.” Arnold merely drops this pop reference, never creating its cultural context as Shane Meadows did with the diverse, sometimes contradictory, punk, reggae and soul music influences in This Is England.

In Fish Tank, Arnold displays a patronizing social view like Allison Anders’ film on Chicano girl gangs, Mi Vida Loca. Arnold’s Automatic Pity also shifts from cultural critique to a puberty alarum. No quicker than it takes Nas to mangle a soul music truism, Fish Tank counts down to Mia’s seduction by Connor.That age-old jailbait subplot (made almost credible by Fassbender’s horny confusion and instantaneous regret) is an obvious plot cliché without the freshness of the 1988 Brit-girl drama Wish You Were Here, where Emily Lloyd played a classic female example of unruly English youth. By reducing Connor’s complexity, then ignoring the more interesting character of Mia’s mother Joanne (the strikingly nubile—and better dancer—Kierston Wareing), Arnold proves she hasn’t really pinpointed her subject. Her opportunistic narrative never consistently follows Mia’s development; she absurdly goes from horse-loving adolescent to an Amy Fisher-like vandal and kidnapper.

The final scene where Mia and Joanne line-dance together but refuse to embrace is the fakest scene of mother-daughter tension since Precious. Arnold makes an equally obnoxious implication that both generations of women have been bamboozled by pop culture. She suggests that pop teaches young women about sex without teaching them about love. It’s just another guilty-liberal myth and the music of Dusty Springfield, Joan Armatrading,The Au Pairs and Echobelly’s Sonya Madan exist to refute that fallacy.
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 12:47 am

http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/an-education-for-a-chav-precious/Content?oid=1501065

An Education for a Chav Precious
by Mark Asch

Fish Tank
Directed by Andrea Arnold

Like a chav Precious, 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) dreams of a better life as a rap video dancer, when not swapping cusses with her single mother in their ill-maintained public housing. But writer-director Andrea Arnold at least underpins her frequent brand-X symbolism—Mia will also caress a chained animal, in slo-mo—with a handcrafted feel for environment. Not especially for the Essex milieu, despite Fish Tank’s handheld camera and scattered empties (British “kitchen-sink” realism has, like Carveresque Kmart realism, become an influential aesthetic partly because it’s so easily mimicked), but certainly for the way her characters’ psychology and behavior is shaped by their frame of reference.

Like An Education, Fish Tank is interested in how a girl’s hunger for experience can be the source of her vulnerability, here explored through a more drawn-out, stuttering two-way seduction, but with a similar dependency on revelations that are, by the nature of the story, only revelatory to the brazenly naïve. Mia’s precocious mistake is her mom’s too-good-to-be-true new beau, Conor (Michael Fassbender), who drives the whole indoorsy family out to the country, and plays them music from outside their microcosm. The increasingly tense moments between the two are based in mother-daughter competitiveness and the calloused but unworldly Mia’s media-mishmash of fairytale and sexual fantasies; while local girl Jarvis’s sharp performance has a whiff of the directed to it, Fassbender alternates with with beautiful uncertainty between paternal and flirtatious, and between a responsibly “roguish” front and a f&#!-up’s dropped-everything self-loathing. It’s enough to make one wish that the screws this story turns weren’t already stripped from overuse.

Opens January 15
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 1:01 am

http://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/81380707.html

"Fish Tank" — Writer-director Andrea Arnold has created something so real and raw with this British teen drama, you may come away with a twinge of guilty voyeurism, a sense of peering too closely and impolitely into other people's lives. Arnold made a remarkable find with her teen lead, Katie Jarvis, who had not acted before but proves a natural, at least for the sort of honest intensity needed to anchor the story. Jarvis plays Mia, a 15-year-old alienated from friends, her mom (Kierston Wareing) and everything else around her bleak home in a crumbling industrial town east of London. Her mother's new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) becomes both someone new to confront and an intriguing mix of father figure and dream suitor to Mia. Extreme things happen, yet it all feels genuine, even inevitable, thanks to the devoted, fearless cast and Arnold's attention to detail, which helps the film unfold like actual lives playing out on screen. Unrated, but contains scenes of sexuality, sex involving a minor and teen drinking and smoking. 122 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

_ David Germain, AP Movie Writer
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 1:58 am

http://ourtownny.com/?p=5114

Automatic Pity for the People
Fish Tank reduces Britain’s great realist filmmakers to a morose messag
By Armond White

January 13, 2010

The 1994 Nas song “Life’s a Bitch”—one of the most cynical, yet most admired rap singles ever made—has finally found its film equivalent. The song appears on the soundtrack of the new British movie Fish Tank as to authenticate its grim story of a teenage white girl’s alienation. But the pathetic, council-flat life of runty 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) doesn’t take place in Nas’ 1990s. Despite the film’s pretenses of social realism, its contemporary-set story merely borrows those once-fashionable postures of working-class alienation. It’s the same sullen despondency that makes “Life’s a Bitch” so irredeemably phony. Both song and film pander to underprivileged self-pity.

This knee-jerk pathos is a reflex from both America’s Reagan-era hip-hop and England’s Thatcher-era miserabilist pop. Call it Automatic Pity.

It’s rough out there.

Making her second feature film, director Andrea Arnold follows the Loach-Clarke-Leigh template but with none of the insight. Arnold has baby-sister impudence. Mia’s misery is routine, just as the circumstances of her dislocation (her still-immature, romantically active single mother who keeps a slatternly home; her lack of educational interest; her submersion in overly sexualized teen pop) establishes a cliché portrait of social ills. This almost anorexically thin white girl who likes to break-dance fits clinical stereotypes no differently than the obese black girl of Precious.

It’s a true pop culture irony—and calamity—that Arnold introduces Mia loping through the streets of her housing projects as the camera tracks her in a single shot that instantly recalls Alan Clarke’s truth-hunting technique in the 1989 film Elephant (about a sullen, overweight black girl misunderstood by family and social workers). Clarke filmed like a political and emotional detective (his insight clearly influenced Shane Meadows’ superb films on contemporary British class problems).

Like Nas, Arnold broods over Mia’s condition and fakes empathy with the girl’s selfishness—the same solipsistic immaturity that separates Nas’ hip-hop from Motown and blues truths. Arnold seems confused by the way pop music expresses working-class experience. Mia discovers Bobby Womack’s version of “California Dreaming” through Connor (Michael Fassbender), her mother’s lover who first flirts with Mia by telling her, “You dance like a black. It’s a compliment.” Arnold merely drops this pop reference, never creating its cultural context as Shane Meadows did with the diverse, sometimes contradictory, punk, reggae and soul music influences in This Is England.

In Fish Tank, Arnold displays a patronizing social view like Allison Anders’ film on Chicano girl gangs, Mi Vida Loca. Arnold’s Automatic Pity also shifts from cultural critique to a puberty alarum. No quicker than it takes Nas to mangle a soul music truism, Fish Tank counts down to Mia’s seduction by Connor. That age-old jailbait subplot (made almost credible by Fassbender’s horny confusion and instantaneous regret) is an obvious plot cliché without the freshness of the 1988 Brit-girl drama Wish You Were Here, where Emily Lloyd played a classic female example of unruly English youth. By reducing Connor’s complexity, then ignoring the more interesting character of Mia’s mother Joanne (the strikingly nubile—and better dancer—Kierston Wareing), Arnold proves she hasn’t really pinpointed her subject. Her opportunistic narrative never consistently follows Mia’s development; she absurdly goes from horse-loving adolescent to an Amy Fisher-like vandal and kidnapper.

The final scene where Mia and Joanne line-dance together but refuse to embrace is the fakest scene of mother-daughter tension since Precious. Arnold makes an equally obnoxious implication that both generations of women have been bamboozled by pop culture. She suggests that pop teaches young women about sex without teaching them about love. It’s just another guilty-liberal myth and the music of Dusty Springfield, Joan Armatrading, The Au Pairs and Echobelly’s Sonya Madan exist to refute that fallacy.


Fish Tank
Directed by Andrea Arnold
Runtime: 123 min.
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 5:59 pm

http://www.indiewire.com/article/cinemadaily_fish_tank_swims_into_us_theaters/

cinemadaily | “Fish Tank” Swims into US Theaters
by Bryce Renninger (Updated 5 hours, 27 minutes ago)
A scene from Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank." Image courtesy of IFC Films.

British indie “Fish Tank,” directed by Andrea Arnold, hits US theaters this weekend. Last month, the film received two British Indie Awards for Best Director and Most Promising Newcomer (Katie Jarvis); the film also won AFI’s top prize and our weekly criticWIRE poll. In the film, Kate Jarvis plays a volatile fifteen-year old whose coming-of-age is disrupted when her mother (Kierston Waring) brings home a mysterious man (Michael Fassbender). Click here for an exclusive interview with Arnold on indieWIRE.

indieWIRE‘s Eric Hynes calls “Fish Tank” “a film so fearless, honest, and wise about emergent female sexuality that no grading curve is necessary. She approaches sex not as an aspect of politics but of experience, continuous with life’s other impulses, bafflements, dangers, and joys.” In a A- review for Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum notes, “Andrea Arnold (‘Red Road’), an astute chronicler of lower-class turf, mostly steers clear of the expected, especially with the remarkable Jarvis in the lead, a non-pro who was 17 when the movie was shot. A local girl from the same blighted Essex neighborhood where the film is set (as is the excellent Wareing, who also starred in leading miserablist Ken Loach’s ‘It’s a Free World’), the amazingly natural first-timer was discovered, in a gift of publicity-ready truth, while having an argument with her boyfriend at a train station. Word is, she didn’t even dance, and was shy to do so on camera. In freeing her young star’s physicality in Fish Tank, Arnold also demonstrates one way a girl might learn to swim up and out.”

Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir absolutely glows about the film, “I’m telling you here and now to seek out ‘Fish Tank,’ either at a big-city theater or via VOD, because it’s absolute dynamite. As cheesy as this is, you could say it combines the best elements of ‘Precious’ and ‘An Education,’ and not be cheating. It’s an explosive female coming-of-age story set against a dreary backdrop of poverty, abuse and neglect—in this case the grim suburban housing developments on the working-class outer fringes of London (the title refers to a certain blocky style of glass-fronted apartment)—with an astonishing breakout lead performance from Katie Jarvis, its teenage star.” Lauren Wissot, in Slant Magazine, joins the chorus of supporters, “The British director’s filmmaking style is precise and concise, as tight and lean as her teenage heroine. Because this coming-of-age tale contains not one extraneous word or image, its strong visceral atmosphere is allowed to organically emerge.”

In the New York Press, Armond White disagrees, “Making her second feature film, director Andrea Arnold follows the Loach-Clarke- Leigh template but with none of the insight. Arnold has baby-sister impudence. Mia’s misery is routine, just as the circumstances of her dislocation (her still-immature, romantically active single mother who keeps a slatternly home; her lack of educational interest; her submersion in overly sexualized teen pop) establishes a cliché portrait of social ills.This al most anorexically thin white girl who likes to break-dance fits clinical stereotypes no differently than the obese black girl of Precious.” The Village Voice‘s Ella Taylor is similarly disappointed, “What’s best about ‘Fish Tank’—Arnold’s gift for atmospherically evoking what it feels like to inhabit an unsteady, frequently hostile, and arbitrary world, and to respond in kind—ends up fatally undermined by a denouement so hammy, it invokes a giggle rather than a tear.”
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 6:17 pm

http://jbspins.blogspot.com/2010/01/another-british-education-fish-tank.html


Thursday, January 14, 2010
Another British Education: Fish Tank

Growing up is not easy in the working class section of England’s Essex County, and Mia certainly is not making it any easier. You could call her a hard kid to love, but few have ever bothered trying, except maybe her younger sister. At least she finds some satisfaction through her dancing in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (trailer here), a Ken Loach-style film for the hip hop set opening tomorrow in New York.

Mia’s self-absorbed mother is an aging party girl. Her biological father is out of picture. Without any real authority figures, Mia runs wild through the neighborhood. She only finds temporary escape in the hip hop steps she practices in a vacant apartment. Then one morning a strange man appears in her apartment. He turns out to be Mom’s special friend Connor, who will be staying with them for a while. At least Connor tries to make an effort to be cool, talking music with Mia and giving her beer money. In fact, Mia starts to like him quite a bit.

In many ways, Tank is an unsentimental corrective to Lone Scherig’s An Education, paralleling that far breezier coming-of-age film in many respects. Yet, when events head in the direction you might expect, it is not an empowering life lesson Mia learns. Instead, things get decidedly messy. Mia gets a heck of a lesson in life though.

Few films have a stronger sense of place than Tank, but it is hardly likely to please the Essex tourism bureau. Mia’s world of crummy housing projects and highway intersections looks as if it could only produce alienation and longing. It is an atmosphere that fosters violence, both in very real physical threats and through slow burning resentments. Yet while Tank might present a largely amoral environment, it is not an immoral film. Actions very definitely have emotional consequences here.

Carey Mulligan might be generating Oscar buzz for Education, but Katie Jarvis blows her out of the water with her remarkable debut performance as Mia. Discovered in a train station, the first-time actor Jarvis nails it in every scene, projecting toughness and vulnerability in her completely natural, unaffected breakthrough star turn. As Connor, the outwardly charming ladies man, Michael Fassbender wisely tacks a more understated course rather than going for an over-the-top smarminess, making Mia’s attraction only too credible.

With its unforgettable not-as-tough-she-thinks protagonist, the gritty Tank has a visceral immediacy that is hard to shake off. Relentlessly naturalistic and often profane, it is not exactly feel-good cinema, but it is powerful stuff. It opens tomorrow (1/15) in New York at the IFC Center and the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 6:20 pm

http://alinaderzad.blogspot.com/2010/01/brit-helmer-andrea-arnolds-star-shines.html

BRIT HELMER ANDREA ARNOLD'S STAR SHINES BRIGHTLY WITH 'FISH TANK'

BY CRAIG YOUNKIN - January 14, 2010

Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” was a big hit in Britain and at Cannes and now tries its hand at America, who will probably nickname it “White Precious.” Anchored by a star-making performance from Kate Jarvis, Arnold’s film is more grit and zero melodrama, a step-up from the weepy style of “Precious.” Jarvis plays Mia, a teenager living in the ghetto where kids expect to follow in the option-less footsteps of their parents. Her little sister (Rebecca Griffiths) is already smoking and emulating skanks on MTV and mom (Kierston Wareing) is a drunk throwing parties with very sketchy friends. Mia has a dream of becoming a dancer and she finds encouragement from mom’s new boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender), a hunky security guard who seems like a nice guy but is, at times, “too friendly.” It’s familiar other-side-of-the tracks territory but it doesn’t spend time wallowing in misfortune. Arnold’s film is harsh, and with its use of language (the C and F words are used a lot), dead-end scenery, breathless sexual and violent encounters, and Jarvis’ award-worthy portrayal, it’s nothing short of compelling. It’s a brave performance, a rough-fighter exterior masking youthful vulnerabilities. Fassbender also impresses as a charming/shady character that you’re never quite sure has a sexual or fatherly preference toward Mia. It all comes down to a predictable yet scary ending where neglect turns dangerous.
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 7:33 pm

http://moviesaremyreligion.blogspot.com/2010/01/katie-jarvis-for-best-actress-at-next.html?zx=33d8893a73d2a66c

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Katie Jarvis for best actress... next year.

As we prepare for the 2009 nominees to be announced, here you have, two weeks into the new year, the first *2010* best actress nominee: Katie Jarvis.

Michael Fassbender (Inglorious Basterds) meanwhile... keep an eye on this guy in 2010. I have a suspicion he'll establish himself as one of the most multifaceted character actors currently working.

The most acclaimed British film of 2009, gets its theater release (limited) January 15th, 2010.
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 7:34 pm

http://livingincinema.com/2010/01/14/weekend-forecast-3/

Weekend Forecast
By Craig Kennedy - January 14th, 2010; 12:01 am

Katie Jarvis and Michael Fassbender in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank

The new wide releases continue the January pattern of sucking foul air, but there are still some glimmers of life in limited release department. Andrea Arnold’s terrific Fish Tank opens in New York while The Last Station featuring a great performance from Helen Mirren returns to NY and LA. Meanwhile, Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones finally goes wide this weekend.

Opening in limited release:

* Fish Tank (**** 1/2). A gritty slice of social realism in the tradition of Ken Loach and Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold’s coming of age tale features a powerful lead performance from newcomer Katie Jarvis as Mia, a young working class girl at a crossroads. Filled with anger, she’s a hard character to warm up to, but she eventually wins over your sympathies. Up and coming Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, Hunger) provides solid support as the new boyfriend of Mia’s mother. He’s a kind of father figure and the only adult that seems to understand where Mia is coming from. The 2009 festival circuit spawned several movies about teen girls trying to make their way into adulthood against varying odds, but Fish Tank is the best of the bunch. Trailer / Review
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 7:45 pm

http://www.cinenema.com/news/capsule-reviews-book-of-eli-and-others

Fish Tank" — Writer-director Andrea Arnold has created article so absolute and raw with this British boyhood drama, you may appear abroad with a ache of accusable voyeurism, a faculty of analytical too carefully and impolitely into added people's lives. Arnold fabricated a arresting acquisition with her boyhood lead, Katie Jarvis, who had not acted afore but proves a natural, at atomic for the array of honest acuteness bare to ballast the story. Jarvis plays Mia, a 15-year-old alienated from friends, her mom (Kierston Wareing) and aggregate abroad about her austere home in a crumbling automated boondocks east of London. Her mother's new admirer (Michael Fassbender) becomes both addition new to accost and an arresting mix of ancestor amount and dream suitor to Mia. Acute things happen, yet it all feels genuine, alike inevitable, acknowledgment to the devoted, assured casting and Arnold's absorption to detail, which helps the blur disentangle like absolute lives arena out on screen. Unrated, but contains scenes of sexuality, sex involving a accessory and boyhood bubbler and smoking. 122 minutes. Three and a bisected stars out of four.

• David Germain, AP Cine Writer
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 7:54 pm

http://www.stargab.com/check-out-fish-tank-the-last-station-and-44-inch-chest-in-this-weeks-unlimited/

“Fish Tank”

What it is: The second feature from Oscar-winning director Andrea Arnold, “Fish Tank” is a British drama about an outcast 15-year-old girl (newcomer Katie Jarvis) with dreams of being a dancer, who develops a crush on her mother’s new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender of “Inglourious Basterds”). For American audiences it may be slightly reminiscent of “Thirteen” (Jarvis even resembles Evan Rachel Wood), though it fits mostly with the social realist, “kitchen sink” tradition of British filmmakers Mike Leigh, Ken Loach and Shane Meadows.

Why you should be interested: Andrea Arnold won her second straight Jury Prize at Cannes with “Fish Tank,” and the film picked up multiple other prestigious honors at film fests in Edinburgh, Chicago, Norway and Croatia. Arnold and Jarvis were also recently named Best Director and Most Promising Newcomer, respectively, at the British Independent Film Awards. Never mind the awards and critical acclaim though; take my word that this is the best-looking and best acted of these neo-kitchen-sink, council estate-set British films in years.

How you can see it: IFC Films opens “Fish Tank” in NYC this Friday and in other U.S. cities over the next two months (see the scheduled bookings here). You will also have the option of watching the film on IFC On Demand beginning January 27.
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 7:59 pm

http://fromthefrontrow.blogspot.com/2010/01/review-fish-tank.html

Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Review: "Fish Tank"

Lone Scherfig's An Education, a coming of age drama about a sheltered 16 year old girl's tempestuous affair with a wealthy, worldly older man, has gotten quite a bit of critical acclaim and awards buzz in the past few months. Yet despite all the effusive praise, I found it too buttoned down, too calculated, too safe. It is a well crafted film, but I never felt it really took the chances it needed to transcend its immaculately produced period trappings.

Enter Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, a gritty, hard hitting British drama that is everything An Education isn't. Its themes are similar; a 15 year old girl's life is suddenly turned upside down by the arrival of her mother's charismatic new boyfriend. But unlike An Education, Fish Tank takes chances. Its protagonist, Mia (Katie Jarvis, in a revelatory performance), leads a hard scrabble existence far from the charmed life of An Education's upper middle class suburbs. Her mother is a drunken floozy, her little sister a foul mouthed brat, and her dirty little apartment is sandwiched into a sardine-like high rise complex on the rough side of town. Mia spends her days roaming the street looking for trouble, whether its breaking some mouthy girl's nose, or trying to set loose a chained horse she begins to feel a kinship with, Mia is loud, confrontational, and downright rude.

Katie Jarvis in FISH TANK directed by Andrea Arnold. Photo credit: Holly Horner. An IFC Films release.

But the rough, street-wise veneer hides a desire for something more, a longing to break out and become a dancer. Cliche? Perhaps. Arnold ultimately has more on her mind than a rags to riches, girl from the ghetto makes good story of cheap inspiration. Fish Tank is a character-driven film, and Mia's dream to become a dancer is not the thread that holds it together. It is the journey of a lost and confused teenager, still trying to discover who she is while navigating the tricky waters of life in an unforgiving world.

Then something begins to change in Mia when her mother brings home a new boyfriend named Connor (Michael Fassbender, quickly becoming one of my favorite actors to watch). Connor is easy going, likable, something very foreign in Mia's run down world. And while she at first greets him with trepidation and disdain, his encouragement of her dance dream weakens her defenses. He provides her with music, and a camera to tape an audition piece. Slowly but surely, Mia lets down her guard to let the mysterious stranger in.

Katie Jarvis as Mia and Michael Fassbender as Connor in FISH TANK directed by Andrea Arnold. Photo credit: Holly Horner. An IFC Films release.

Where this is all going isn't particularly hard to guess, but Arnold consistently surprises and shocks, even while traversing thematically familiar territory. The first third of the film is an exercise in pure ugliness, a portrait of Mia's world that is both engrossing and repulsive. But Arnold draws us in, investing the audience in Mia's plight. 17 year old Jarvis, who did not have any acting experience before being cast in the film, gives a remarkably layered performance, showing us the vulnerable little girl beneath the hardened, street-smart exterior. She is the heart and soul of Fish Tank, a girl trapped in a glass bubble unable to escape. But when an escape route finally presents itself (beautifully symbolized in the film's quietly powerful final shot), it doesn't come in the form that she, or the audience, suspects.

Under Arnold's assured direction, Fish Tank comes to life with a thrilling verve. It's always vibrantly alive, teeming with energy and a raw, compelling power. She pulls no punches, taking consistently bold chances and daring choices that ultimately pay off. This is a rare coming of age drama with the courage avoid the genre's typically maudlin pratfalls, and emerges as an electrifying and triumphant piece of cinema.

GRADE - ★★★ (out of four)

FISH TANK; Directed by Andrea Arnold; Stars Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing, Rebecca Griffiths, Harry Treadaway; Not Rated; Opens Friday, 1/15, at the IFC Center in New York
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 8:06 pm

http://jestherent.blogspot.com/2010/01/film-review-fish-tank.html

Thursday, January 14, 2010
FILM REVIEW: FISH TANK

Mia (Katie Jarvis) dancing in her Fish Tank.

Pent up Essex

By Don Simpson

As an heir apparent to the British social realist tradition of Ken Loach’s working-class dramas, director Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank is a painfully bleak portrait of modern life on an Essex estate (which, for us Yanks, is a half-step up from the ghetto) –- a steely urban wasteland located somewhere near Tilbury.

We never witness the protagonist, an aggressive and jaded 15-year-old named Mia (Katie Jarvis), attend school (apparently she has been expelled and may be going to boarding school next) and she is rarely out of her life’s uniform of choice: hoodie and sweat pants. Mia resides in a dreary non-descript council flat with her mother –- more like a slutty, foul-mouthed and foul-tempered older sister –- Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and a potty-mouthed, beer drinking and cigarette smoking prepubescent younger sister, Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths). Together (with no father in sight) they are indeed the poster family for "broken Britain" –- the hopelessly marginalized class of high-rise, low-income Britain. The most unpleasantly sour, piss-off existence if ever there was one. Together they personify the mantra of the prominently-featured Nas track: “life's a bitch and then you die.”

Apparently the only form of communication for Mia’s family is yelling at outlandishly loud decibels (Arnold’s casting agent discovered Jarvis in the midst of an argument with her boyfriend at Tilbury station in Essex) and their language is riddled by profanity and hatred. When a working man –- an Irishman named Connor (Michael Fassbender) –- enters their lives as Joanne's new boyfriend, the three intense females begin to mellow out thanks to the lulling nature of his attentive charm and apparent kindness. In fact, Connor seems to be the only factor that can keep the three females in the same room without an incredibly violent combustion.

Connor even goes as far as ushering them to the country, thus forcing them to peacefully coexist for an extended period of time while in the restricted confines of a car. During this excursion, Connor introduces them to his favorite music. It is "weird shit" (as Joanne calls it), like Bobby Womack’s "California Dreamin'" and “Get Up Offa That Thing” by James Brown, but they adapt to it quickly. It is not long before Womack’s "California Dreamin'" is Mia’s favorite song and it becomes the soundtrack to her fantasy of escaping the concrete jungle of Essex.

Connor’s cooling affect seems to be strongest with Mia. When she is around Connor her personality is toned-down to somewhere around content bordering on pleasant. Yet, we are not fooled by this: from Connor’s initial ogling of Mia as she sensually dances in the kitchen (“like a black” – which, according to Connor, is a compliment) to Mia’s wanting stare of Connor’s bare-chested body, it is easy to predict down which path this story will eventually travel. Their relationship becomes disturbingly more heated as they endlessly alternate between being the victim and the perpetrator in the pedophilic scenario. Mia just wants someone to love her (she certainly does not receive any positive affirmations from her mother or sister) while Connor is just hoping to get those damn sweat pants off of Mia.

Trapped on the wrong side of the unforgiving glass walls of lower-class Britain (most likely the fish tank to which the film’s title refers), Mia’s pent-up anger and frustration is busting at the seams. The question is whether or not Mia will ever be strong enough to shatter the glass in order to break free of the inherent restraints of her family’s class. Cramped in a claustrophobic 4x3 ratio, director of photography Robbie Ryan purposefully and effectively encages (and enrages) Mia’s energies as she quite literally pounds against the outer frames of the screen while she dances.

This is definitely not a healthy environment for a 15-year-old (and especially her younger sister) to be raised –- no hope, no future and no love. It is overtly apparent that Joanne only cares about getting drunk and getting laid; her children are pesky annoyances that continually get in the way of her fun. Joanne’s feeble efforts to keep Mia away from the bumping and grinding parties going on in their living room at night is most likely due to sexual competition, not good parenting (it is obvious that Joanne does not care about keeping Mia and Tyler away from alcohol).

Such a grim picture, but we do glimpse some goodness and naivety within Mia. For one, she is fascinated by, and repeatedly attempts to free, a dying old horse helplessly chained in a parking lot alongside a highway. But, Mia has her excessively evil moments as well, such as the harrowing sequence on the Essex marshes with Connor’s young daughter Keira (Sydney Mary Nash).

Fish Tank’s bravado is a hard kick in the balls for all of the sexist and demeaning jokes that have been made about Essex women over the years. Despite Mia’s penchant for liters of booze and profane tirades, she exudes a relentless and spirited will to do better for herself. Mia is motivated not by role models or the support of friends and family, but solely by the hope that there is something better out there than what she currently has.

First-timer Jarvis gives a bitterly honest lead performance, one that is a schizophrenic (or, at least, hormonal instability) mix of tenacity, meanness and fragility. The character of Mia exudes so many emotions in so little time yet Jarvis ties them all together so authentically and effortlessly. The greatest compliment to an actor is to say that they did not appear to be acting and Jarvis is not portraying Mia, she is Mia.

Admittedly, I did not enjoy much of the music per se but the soundtrack of Fish Tank is flawless nonetheless. Not only do the songs fit the characters and mood of the film like a glove, but the lyrics of the songs provide greater meaning and depth to the onscreen events. In some instances, the song lyrics literally become part of the dialogue as if the singer was an omnipotent narrator. Fish Tank is proof of one of the great potentials of soundtracks –- the use of lyrical songs to work with and advance the narrative of the film.

Fish Tank scored the Prix du Jury at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Andrea Arnold won Best Director and Katie Jarvis won Most Promising Newcomer at the 2009 British Independent Film Awards.
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 8:10 pm

http://pacificfilmacademy.blogspot.com/2010/01/fish-tank.html

Thursday, January 14, 2010
Fish Tank
Drew's Thoughts:
Fish Tank, Oscar-winning writer/director Andrea Arnold's coming of age story, is sort of an amalgam of Precious, An Education and Save the Last Dance; fortunately, it's better than all of those.

After a shaky start, the film finds its legs and ends up being pretty good. The film follows 15 year old Mia (played by Katie Jarvis) who lives with her mum and younger sister in low-income housing in London suburb, Essex. Her days consist of wandering around, watching MTV, and drinking two liter bottles of generic brand cider and practicing her dance moves in a vacant apartment.

Things change when her mum gets a new boyfriend Connor (Hunger's Michael Fassbender) and this is when the movie starts taking shape. Jarvis and Fassbender's scenes together are the heart of the film really and the exploration of their relationship is the most interesting aspect of the film.

The charismatic Connor is a lot nicer to Mia and her mum and sister than they are to each other and they are all rather smitten with him. He also encourages and aids Mia's interest in dancing, making Connor a quasi-father/older brother figure as well as an object of desire.

The film seems like it should have been slimmed down by at least 20 minutes; various symbolic bits and subplots, such as a white horse chained up in empty lot that Mia repeatedly tries to free, aren't really necessary or that effective. However, the bulk of the movie is good and suprisingly engaging. Fassbender is good as well and I think Katie Jarvis should definitely be added to the list of Best Actress contenders at the Dolphins this year.
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 8:20 pm

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122460481

In A Bleak London Life, A Few Flashes Of Color

by Ian Buckwalter
Katie Jarvis
Holly Horner/IFC

In Fish Tank, 18-year-old Katie Jarvis makes her acting debut as Mia, who responds to the roughness and randomness of her neighborhood by making as much trouble as she encounters.

Fish Tank

* Director: Andrea Arnold
* Genre: Drama
* Running Time: 123 minutes

With: Katie Jarvis, Rebecca Griffiths, Carrie-Ann Savill, Toyin Ogidi, Grant Wild

January 14, 2010

One summer morning, 15-year-old Mia Williams trudges downstairs, suffering from a massive hangover. Before facing the wrath of her casually abusive mother, she stops to take a long drink straight from the kitchen tap. That writer-director Andrea Arnold has crafted a scene that approaches a literal embodiment of the term "kitchen-sink drama" here is most likely coincidence; nevertheless, her film is a bold new entry in that long-standing British tradition of disquieting social realism.

Like the directors who have defined the genre, Arnold is unflinching in her examination of the British underclass. Yet despite all the despair on display, the director manages to find glimpses of beauty amid the blight in Essex, a London-adjacent landscape dominated by scrubby vacant lots, broken chain-link fences and depressing public housing.

Mia (Katie Jarvis) seems fairly typical of the wayward kids growing up in this harsh environment — which is to say she already has a burgeoning drinking problem, a tendency toward impulsive violence and a good chance of reform school in her future. Her 12-year-old sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) isn't far behind, smoking and cursing like some Cockney stevedore.

Arnold envisions Mia as a vulnerable soul, barely protected by her glowering tough-girl facade; she's taken enough abuse that her heart goes soft whenever she sees an innocent mistreated. Spotting an emaciated horse chained up in a makeshift trailer park, she immediately attempts to free it. It's an action motivated by kindness, but easily mistaken for juvenile delinquency. Her reward is violent retribution.

Jarvis, a first-time actor discovered by Arnold on a train platform, gives a startlingly direct performance. She's on screen in nearly every frame, and beautifully navigates the lightning-fast emotional changes behind Mia's fragile and shifting fronts. These shifts are only magnified by the appearance of Connor, her mother's new boyfriend; he's bright and charismatic, and has a calming effect on the tempestuous Williams women. In him, there is the potential for a caring father figure, a potential that is complicated by an uneasy sexual tension between him and Mia. It's an uncomfortable dynamic that Arnold tackles with remarkable candor.

As Connor, Michael Fassbender continues a magnificent run of performances. In three roles over the past year — from his harrowing turn as Bobby Sands in Hunger to the suave film critic-cum-military spy he played in Inglourious Basterds — he's displayed more range than many actors manage in a career. Here, Arnold requires the actor to find a precise balancing point between fatherly tenderness and predatory sexual menace, never giving away which is motivating him. His great success lies in his ability to convey both in a single action or expression; the measured ambiguity he delivers results in a combination of surprise and inevitability when Connor finally comes into clear focus.

What glimmers of hope the film may offer are severely undercut by the knowledge that reprieves for young women such as Mia has are generally short-lived. Escape routes are never as easy to travel as they appear from a distance, a point the film makes with cruel efficiency when Mia tries to make good on her dream of becoming a dancer. Her story is simply another sad revolution in an ongoing cycle, captured bravely here by Arnold.
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 8:23 pm

http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/movies/15fish.html

Movie Review
Fish Tank (2009)
IFC Films

Katie Jarvis in “Fish Tank.”
January 15, 2010
A Reckless Teenager, Seeking Solitude Yet Craving Connection

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: January 15, 2010

Mia, the 15-year-old protagonist of “Fish Tank,” Andrea Arnold’s tough and brilliant second feature, moves with such speed and fury that she seems to be trying to flee not only from her bleak surroundings but also from the movie itself. The narrow, nearly square frame boxes Mia in, and Ms. Arnold’s on-the-run hand-held tracking shots increase the sense of panicky claustrophobia. Living in a cramped apartment in a British housing project that stands like a cluster of megaliths in the middle of nowhere, Mia is at once trapped and adrift, unable to contain or to express the feelings seething beneath the blank, sullen mien she usually presents to the world.

In the first scenes she comes across a group of girls practicing hip-hop dance moves on a patch of asphalt. She taunts and provokes these apparent rivals, pushing the confrontation toward violence and delivering a nose-breaking head butt to one of them. A few minutes later Mia is in a fenced-in vacant lot trying to free a horse tethered to a concrete block. She swerves from rage to tenderness, and may not even know which is which.

What does Mia want? To be free, to be safe, to be left alone, to be loved. The contradictions of adolescence have rarely been conveyed with such authenticity and force. Though Mia is poor, unruly and obviously, in social-work parlance, “at risk”— her mother (Kierston Wareing) and younger sister, with whom she lives, are equally volatile, or even more so — “Fish Tank” is not drawn from the case files, and does not solicit pity. Rather, thanks to Ms. Arnold’s fine-grained realism and the astonishing performance of Katie Jarvis, the nonprofessional actress who plays Mia, it is a diamond-hard reflection on the peril and progress of a fragile soul in a bad situation.

A trained actor might have taken care to sort out and communicate Mia’s emotions, giving the audience a clear perspective on the girl’s inner life. Instead, Ms. Jarvis’s tentative, sometimes opaque self-presentation registers the crucial fact about Mia, which is her confusion. She is a puzzle to herself, unable to understand, much less control, her fury, her desire or her fear. When she dances alone in an empty apartment, she is not exactly at peace, but at least in a state of cease-fire in her ongoing war with herself and everything else.

Although she prefers to be alone, Mia craves connection. She develops a tentative friendship with one of the young men who keep that poor half-metaphorical horse, and a far more complicated relationship with Connor (Michael Fassbender), her mother’s new boyfriend. Mom, slightly less miserable and abusive when drunk — and therefore, perhaps luckily for Mia, rarely sober — has brought home a bit of decency as well as fun. Or so it appears. Connor is friendly, generous and easy in the company of Mia and Sophie, her prickly, foulmouthed little sister.

He takes the family fishing — his car is among his many attractive assets — and lends Mia his video camera so she can record a dance routine for an audition. More unsettling implications gather slowly, and arise partly out of the welter of Mia’s feelings about Connor. She sees him as a big brother, a father figure and an easy-going pal, but she also has a crush on him. As it intensifies, so does our unease about Connor’s response. Like Mia, the audience trusts him at first because we have no other choice, but we come to suspect a predatory, deceiving side to his character long before she does. How could she? She’s 15.

“Fish Tank,” insofar as it concerns the relationship between a restless teenage girl and an unreliable older man, bears some resemblance to “An Education,” Lone Scherfig’s much-praised recent movie. That film wraps its sexual queasiness in period glamour, fetishizing early-’60s clothes, cigarettes and cultural references as ardently as its young heroine. Ms. Arnold is no less absorbed in the details of her film’s setting — the graffiti in the corridors, the litter on the sidewalks, the trash on television — and her harsh brand of realism is no less a style than Ms. Scherfig’s wry worldliness. We find ourselves, in “Fish Tank,” in a world made familiar by the films of Ken Loach, Mike Leigh and other socially conscious anatomists of British misery.

It’s a place I’m usually (perhaps perversely) happy to visit, and to locate Ms. Arnold’s work in a recognizable tradition is not to slight her particular and considerable strengths as a filmmaker. Her first feature, “Red Road,” was a tour de force of psychological insight slightly undermined by a script that relied a bit too much on late reversals and surprises. “Fish Tank” goes a little astray toward the end, in a scene of breathless pursuit across a marshy seaside wasteland. (To say more would give too much away.) The sequence is powerful and skillfully filmed, but the dread and horror it injects into the story seem superfluously melodramatic.

Otherwise, “Fish Tank” is nearly flawless. Mr. Fassbender, who was the Irish militant Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen’s “Hunger” and the suave British film critic in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” is quickly establishing himself as an actor of impressive range and skill. The slightest imprecision in his portrayal of Connor — too much overt menace, or too little — would have thrown the film off balance. (It may have helped that Ms. Arnold gave the script to her cast one scene at a time, so that they did not know what was coming next.) And Ms. Wareing, who appeared in Mr. Loach’s “It’s a Free World,” keeps her woebegone character just this side of caricature.

But the movie is Mia’s, whose life is too much for her to handle but who must learn to manage it anyway. Whether she will succeed is a big question, of course, but Ms. Jarvis’s triumph, and Ms. Arnold’s, are hardly in doubt.

FISH TANK

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Andrea Arnold; director of photography, Robbie Ryan; edited by Nicolas Chaudeurge; production designer, Helen Scott; produced by Kees Kasander and Nick Laws; released by IFC Films. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Katie Jarvis (Mia), Michael Fassbender (Connor), Kierston Wareing (Joanne), Rebecca Griffiths (Tyler) and Harry Treadaway (Billy).
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 8:26 pm

http://www.backstage.com/bso/reviews-movie-tv-reviews/fish-tank-1004059355.story


Fish Tank
Reviewed by Pete Hammond

January 14, 2010

Seventeen-year-old Katie Jarvis was involved in an argument with her boyfriend on an Essex train station platform when casting agents for "Fish Tank" approached her and asked if she would be interested in auditioning for the leading role in Oscar winner (for live-action short "WASP") Andrea Arnold's new film. For any actor who has spent years hitting the bricks looking for that kind of break, it's quite incredible to see that not only did she get to audition; she got the role in a movie that played in competition at Cannes, winning the Jury Prize, and earned its leading lady raves from the international press. With the film finally opening in the U.S., it's nice to report that the praise is warranted.

As a restless teenage misfit in a dreary housing project who enters into an illicit relationship with her slutty mother's boyfriend, Jarvis is a complete natural. There isn't a false note in her performance, which feels almost like a documentary in its effortless portrayal of teen angst and confusion in a dead-end life. That's probably what Arnold was trying to achieve in casting a nonprofessional who had never acted a day in her life. Jarvis plays 15-year-old Mia, a social outcast with a singular passion for dancing—and Jarvis particularly nails those scenes. Although the relationship with Connor (Michael Fassbender), her mom's boyfriend, could be creepy, Jarvis makes it more of an awakening and understandable act for this girl who is trying to escape the "fish tank" existence she is stuck with. Even when it goes south on Mia with surprising revelations, Jarvis never loses the heartbreaking rhythms of this character who is looking for a way out into a more optimistic life.

Arnold is a terrific director of actors; the bulk of the film's dialogue seems improvised and raw. The audience can almost smell the dank and bland housing project this "family" lives in; every detail is there, though it seems deceptively simplistic on the surface. This is a true character study in the best sense of the word, and Jarvis isn't the only one who shines. Fassbender, whose star has been rising with "Inglourious Basterds" and the harrowing "Hunger," is equally at home as the cagey Connor. But he never makes the guy less than human, even as we discover he is infinitely capable of unsavory actions. Kierston Wareing is fine, if less dimensional, as the loser mum, but she acquits herself nicely despite the limitations of the part. Harry Treadaway and Rebecca Griffiths round out the cast.

Arnold is clearly staking a claim as director of the moment for the new wave of English kitchen-sink slice-of-life dramas, the kind the Brits so excelled at in the late '50s and early '60s. Although the territory is bleak, there is a heart beating at its center that makes this fine drama must-see viewing. Its name is Katie Jarvis, and you will be hearing a lot from her.


Genre: Drama
Written and directed by: Andrea Arnold
Starring: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing, Harry Treadaway, Rebecca Griffiths
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Post by Admin Thu Jan 14, 2010 8:29 pm

http://blackstarnews.com/news/132/ARTICLE/6209/2010-01-14.html

Review: Fish Tank

By Kam Williams

January 14th, 2010


This searing, coming-of-age saga, written and directed by Brit Andrea Arnold (Red Road), gets my vote as the best cinematic release of the first two weeks of 2010, if that means much. Last year, the movie made a big splash on the other side of the pond where it reeled in awards at film festivals in Cannes, England, Norway, Scotland and Croatia.

Despite the film’s title (and my employing every aquatic allusion I could think of in the previous sentence), the movie doesn’t revolve around a fish tank. Still, that might be the best way to describe the modest which serves as the setting for the picture’s lead characters sharing the cramped confines of an increasingly-claustrophobic, pressure cooker.

Joanne Williams (Kierston Wareing) doesn’t look old enough to have a 15 year-old daughter, and the immature single-mom certainly doesn’t behave in a responsible enough fashion to be raising Mia (Katie Jarvis) and her kid sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths). First of all, she’s an irascible, foul-mouthed lush, traits she’s already passed on to her troubled teenager.

Consequently, Mia has ended up an angry, friendless alcoholic who’s always at odds with the world. This is not a healthy frame of mind when you’re stuck in the forbidding environs of the Essex projects, a maze of cold, towering edifices, each overlooking the vast, soulless wasteland of a totally-defoliated concrete jungle.

At the point of departure, it is established that Mia is a wanksta ---White gangsta-- who loves to dress, walk and talk hip hop-style, plus she’s doing her best to teach herself to breakdance in order to enter a competition. But she also like boys, and lands in hot water after head-butting a classmate whom she considers competition. Between that infraction and the booze, it isn’t long before Mia isn’t going to school anymore, but instead hanging out at home and contemplating working as a stripper.

A little hope comes into the rudderless juvenile’s life the morning Connor --Michael Fassbender-- staggers out of her mother’s bedroom after a one-night stand. He compliments gyrating Mia by telling her that, “You dance like a Black,” and it isn’t long before he further ingratiates himself with the needy girls as her new father figure.

Too bad sexually-impulsive Joanne hadn’t bothered to determine whether the guy was married, had any kids or was a pervert before introducing him to her daughters. For, there is only danger in store as she endeavors to cobble a relationship with a pedophile who’s just waiting for the right moment to pounce on emotionally-vulnerable Mia.

Trouble in Cockneyland.

Excellent (4 stars). Unrated. Running time: 122 Minutes
Distributor: IFC Films
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