Reviews and SPOILERS

http://deliriousview.blogspot.com/2009/10/swimming-in-flood.html

Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Swimming In The Flood

The movie is Fish Tank and I highly recomend this to fans of british cinema or anyone who likes dark dramas that cause both reflection and realism in the viewers. The movie is about a 15 year old girl named Mia, her mom's a young self-obsessed lush more concerned with parties and men than her kids. Mia is bitchy, angry and feels alone, she drinks and dances her pain away in an abandoned flat as her only way of escaping her reality. You start off loathing the two female leads but when Mia comes across an old horse that's sickly and chained near a trailer she softens the tiniest bit and tries to break the chains to set it free. (This is the whole point of the movie in that Mia herself feels like a tortured and chained horse bitter and stuck in a bad situation that just want to be free or like a fish trapt in a fish tank staring out a world she can't touch.)

As the movie progresses Mia's mom brings home a new boyfriend and there is instant sexual tension between the two. Her moms new boyfriend serves as a positive influence of sorts at first, encouraging Mia to believe in herself and to pursue her dancing. But when their relationship crosses the line which was inevitable it changes everything and sets Mia off towards a serious emotion breakdown that takes her down an even darker path than what she started out on, but she isn't the monster or bitch that you think.
You start to slowly unwind the characters cores and you see Mia as more than just a pissed off teenager. She's not nearly as tuff on the inside as she is on the outside and she's not a bitch she's just a product of her enviorment. Even the mother you feel for in the end, she's not a good mother by any means but you see her cracking as well and you see a girl, not a mother just a tuff little girl chocking and drowning in her on own reality.

The boyfriend Conner played by Michael Fassbender didn't come off as a predator or a creep more like a boy who can't help himself even though he tries that avoids responsibility and runs from his problems to avoid the consequences. In fact all the grown ups in this movie come off more as lost little kids, while the actual lost kids in the movies are forced to take on grown up roles. I could go on and on about how amazing this movie is. It's beautifully filmed and the acting is nothing like acting it's all incredibly real feeling. The bright shining star of the movie is Katie Jarvis who plays Mia. In her first shot at acting she comes off as an old pro and I hope she has a long acting career ahead of her because I'll never forget her performance in this movie!
Posted by Made In The J.L.A. at 12:00 AM

http://filmforager.blogspot.com/2010/01/fish-tank-2009.html

Sunday, January 31, 2010
Fish Tank (2009)
Alright, Somerville Theatre, thanks for the free screening of Fish Tank! Written and directed by Andrea Arnold, the film chronicles the coming-of-age experiences of the strong-willed, foul-mouthed, 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis), who lives in a run-down apartment with her withholding mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths). Mia doesn't really have any friends and spends most of her time yelling at people around her or practicing her dancing so her dream of being in a hip hop music video can be realized. Her mother is desperately clinging to her youth and ignores her children so she can have wild parties and hook up with hot dudes, while her sister just hangs around being a kid and swearing at unexpected moments.

Joanne's most recent boyfriend, Connor (Michael Fassbender), is a charming security guard who's slightly too friendly to Mia, but seems well-intentioned. His presence encourages Mia to open up a little and spend more time with her family, and she soon develops a crush on him. He encourages her to try out for a club hiring dancers, and she works privately on her audition tape with little idea of what is actually expected of her. After trying to free his chained horse, she also begins spending time with Billy (Harry Treadaway, whom I totally didn't recognize from City of Ember), a friendly teenager who lives in a trailer with his asshole brother. These and other various day-to-day events culminate into a transformative summer for Mia, who begins to take control of her life in ways she never thought to before.

Fish Tank tells a story we've all seen in some format or another, sporting a range of elements from other recent "girl coming of age" movies like Precious and An Education. What makes it stand apart is the wonderful way in which the story is told, as well as the spectacular performance from newcomer Katie Jarvis. Almost every shot is either of Mia, or shown from her perspective, giving viewers a focused point of view and visual insight into her character; this movie shows, it doesn't really tell, and that gives credit to the intelligence of its audience. The story is completely about her but also comes from her, and Jarvis' performance is simultaneously nuanced and bold, making all this attention wholly worthwhile. Mia isn't an especially likable character for a lot of the film, but she is certainly an interesting one, and Jarvis makes her sympathetic but never a victim. This lady's got moxie, let me tell ya, even if she's not the best dancer.

The film is not without its faults: the running time is definitely too long, as the story drags at certain parts and there are a few throwaway scenes. Sometimes the narrative structure is a bit jagged and ambiguous, causing a bit of initial confusion about certain plot points. It becomes more cohesive towards the end, when the action shifts to a more tense and suspenseful mode. Fish Tank features a well-told, if familiar, story with a remarkably strong and independent young woman at the forefront. It's very thoughtfully-directed and interesting to watch, and I appreciate the level of respect Arnold shows her audience. Also there's a lot of cussing. A lot.

4/5

http://willlink.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/fish-tank-a-brief-review/


What a Crappy Time To Be Alive!
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Fish Tank: A Brief Review

I have already seen a film that is sure to be on my top 10 of 2010 – Fish Tank. I urge everyone to go see it. If it’s not playing near you, which unfortunately might be the case, I believe you can purchase it on IFC on demand.

After reading a few reviews and then seeing the trailer I knew I had to check this out. The film is about a young girl named Mia played by Katie Jarvis in a stunning debut. Mia (15) lives in London housing projects, has a terrible relationship with her party girl mother and is outwardly hostile to everyone she meets. She starts to let that shield of hostility down when her mom starts dating Connor (Michael Fassbender) a man who Mia beings a complicated relationship with.

This film takes many turns in all the characters relationships but even the ones that you see coming never play out the way you expect them. Michael Fassbender, who was brilliant in Inglorious Basterds, has a very complex role to play here. He successfully walks the line between charmer and creep – neither of which can fully define him. The film plays out like a much darker version of An Education but a lighter version of Precious. I think it’s better than either and I think Jarvis gives as powerful a performance as Sidibe or Mulligan did in those fine films. There is a scene between Fassbender and Jarvis, in which the tension between them finally boils over, that is one of the most real and beautifully shots sequences in my recent memory.

I will say no more other than to again urge you to seek out Fish Tank. If you do, I would love to hear your thoughts.

http://www.filmradar.com/reviews/item/fish_tank/#When:03:21:46Z

FISH TANK

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British director Andrea Arnold is on a serious roll. Her short film, “Wasp” won the Oscar for best live action short in 2005, and her debut feature, 2006’s “Red Road,” won the Jury Prize at Cannes plus numerous other awards in the UK. In fact, when you include “Fish Tank,” her stunning new feature, her films have won more than 40 awards around the world, and “Fish Tank” has yet to officially open in L.A. Using bleak British landscapes as a backdrop for complex characters, Arnold has quickly proven herself a force to be reckoned with.


“Fish Tank” grabs us from the very first shot and drags us straight into the chaotic world of Mia, a fifteen-year-old girl trying to make her way through the grim world of apartment life in Essex, England. She’s got attitude to burn, thanks to her heavy drinking promiscuous Mum and bratty younger sister. As the movie opens, we discover that the one bright spot in Mia’s life is her strong passion and surprising talent for hip hop dancing. Even this one escape turns ugly fast. When she spots some of the other girls dancing on the blacktop after school, she lets them know what she thinks of their moves by offering the ringleader a head butt to the face. Mia’s so desperate to escape her surroundings, she attempts to hammer free a horse she finds chained in a neighborhood lot. All she gets for her trouble is harassment from a couple of the local toughs.


Unlikely encouragement soon arrives in the form of Connor- the latest in a long line of local men her mom has brought home from the pubs. While most are gone by the next day, Connor sticks around for a while, taking the girls on outdoor excursions, and more important, taking what seems to be a sincere interest in helping Mia foster her talent as a dancer. He even lets her borrow his video camera so she can record an audition for a local club. When she shows him the routine that she’s been working on one drunken night, their relationship takes an unexpected turn and Mia realizes that he’s not exactly the father figure she’s been seeking.


Although the two films are very different, “Fish Tank” at times feels like a grittier version of Lone Scherfig’s “An Education.” Both are compelling coming of age stories where an impressionable girl is swayed by a dubious older man. But while “An Education” is bittersweet, we’re led to believe that everything will work out for its heroine in the end. The end result of “Fish Tank” is much less certain, but Mia’s fierce tenacity makes us pity anyone who would try to stand in her way.


Arnold’s real success here is in her casting of 17 year old newcomer Katie Jarvis as Mia. Pulled out of an argument with her boyfriend from a train platform, according to the press notes, Jarvis had never acted before and brings a very raw quality to the role. She’s center stage for the majority of this movie, and she’s responsible for nearly all the movies’ emotional heavy lifting. Arnold shrewdly casts the charismatic Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) as Connor, and his more polished style of acting is a perfect fit for the character and a great counterpoint to the edginess that Jarvis brings. Fassbender walks a fine line here; he’s convincingly scary at times, but he also has a number of moments with Mia that are filled with real tenderness. A lesser actor would have played Connor as a monster, but Fassbender gives him depth.


“Fish Tank” is not an easy film to take, but that’s also what makes it so effective. It’s hard to imagine a Hollywood film taking the kind of risks that Arnold takes with the story, especially in the film’s third act. These characters are far from perfect; often they’re not even likable, but the cast all do amazing work, and the end result is that we’re able to see flawed human beings struggling to make the best of flawed circumstances. Arnold works differently than a lot of directors in that she doesn’t give her actors access to the script until filming begins. By letting her actors discover the story as they go along, Arnold’s careful camera captures the hard ring of truth.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/01/fish-tank/

Review: Fish Tank
by Veronika Ferdman on January 30th, 2010 at 4:00 pm in Film

Fish Tank

Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold’s second feature, is the heir to a long-standing British tradition of Kitchen Sink Realism, in which the pains and reality of Britain’s lower class denizens are captured in what is often a pared down realist aesthetic. Mia (Katie Jarvis) lives with her mother (Kierston Wareing) and hilariously potty-mouthed sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) in a low-rent tenement. She’s been expelled from school, is prone to outbursts of violence, has no friends and a lush of a mother who treats Mia’s existence as the weight of the cross. The film pivots on the relationship Mia establishes with Connor (Michael Fassbender), her mother’s new boyfriend, who seems to take an interest in Mia, slowly chipping away at her centurion guard and encouraging her to pursue hip-hop dancing (Mia’s one pleasure and mode of escape).

Basically, the film suffers from the same problem as its central character: heart’s in the right place, but its excesses are sometimes a bit too much. Arnold has good visual sensibility, yet she loves to send up red flags of “pay attention, this is important!” which actually ends up taking away from the moment by pulling you out of it. Case in point: While on an excursion, Mia accidentally cuts her foot. Her mother and Tyler cringe at the blood and scurry away to the car, while Connor attends to the wound and offers a piggy back ride. Once Mia jumps on Connor’s back the shot becomes slow-motion, so you can hear every breath of air Mia takes and really internalize the moment; finally someone is showing Mia some attention, some kindness, and clearly there’s a burgeoning attraction between Mia and Connor, so it’s all very momentous. Here’s the thing: We can appreciate the beauty of one human being doing a small act of kindness for another, and understand how profound of a moment this probably is in Mia’s life, without time having to slow down. The organic occurrence of the event loses some of its vitality, its, dare I say, realism, when so forcibly drawn attention to via the imposed poeticism of time being drawn out. Arnold employs slow-motion numerous times and this is, admittedly, a small thing to quibble over. But honestly, the film is good, and could have been great, with the reduction of such flourishes.

Arnold does know how to let a moment be beautiful and poignant without forcibly making us take notice. In a scene which the entire film builds up to, Mia shows Connor the dance routine she’s worked out for her audition. The sexual tension between them is nearly bursting off the screen. They’re in the living room and she’s standing against the backdrop of palm trees and beach surf wallpaper that grace the back wall. It’s night out and a street lamp casts a soft golden light into the room, illuminating and almost animating the beach backdrop as Mia dances in front. The shot is quietly stunning. A moment of beauty created out of what was banal seconds before, without any visual cues as to its perceived importance.

Aside from the formal qualities, the other problem is that even though this is supposed to be a real hard-nosed look at the life of one struggling teen, the hard-knocks are piled on a bit thick. I understand that life can be very difficult and that some people really do have it very rough, but does Mia have to have a terrible mother and no friends? Is it really necessary for everything to be so dreadful? Or, even if the mother really is terrible, can’t there be at least a few moments in which she’s at least briefly redeemed in relation to her daughter (and no, that scene at the end doesn’t count); no one and nothing is ever just black and white.

However, it is because of Mia’s near total dead-end existence that Connor’s such a beacon of hope. Irish-raised Michael Fassbender turns in another incredible performance (right on the heels of Hunger and Inglourious Basterds), once again proving that he’s the master of accents. He fills Connor with the right amount of charm, slyness and just a hint of nearly intangible off-ness. Katie Jarvis is equal measures caustic power and vulnerability, turning Mia into a volatile girl who can’t see past the ramifications of her immediate actions, yet who yearns for some sort of warmth. Fish Tank is often excessive, but on the strength of a fine cast and Arnold’s ability to understand the psyche of a young girl, it achieves measures of true insight and poignancy.

Veronika Ferdman is a student at USC, earning BA’s in Philosophy and Critical Studies-Film.

http://extremefuns.com/2010/01/18/fish-tank-review/

Fish Tank – Review
Calendar January 18, 2010 | Posted by irfan

Length: 122 min
Rated: R
Distributor: IFC Films
Release Date: 2010-01-15
Starring: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing
Directed by Andrea Arnold
Produced by Kees Kasander
Written by Andrea Arnold

In an industry and an art form where the majority of directors are male and most stories are about their needs and dreams, it’s almost frightening to come across a character like Fish Tank’s Mia. Played by nonprofessional Katie Jarvis, Mia is a bundle of contradictions, full of rage at her former friends but blind tenderness for an abused horse, constantly short-tempered with her younger sister but clearly envious of the girl’s simpler view of the world. The narrative of Fish Tank is fairly basic and familiar, but thanks to Jarvis’s unflinching rawness and director Andrea Arnold’s instinctive handling of Mia’s volatile personality, the movie feels almost miraculously fresh despite it.

Living in squalid housing projects in middle-of-nowhere Britain, Mia is spending her summer picking fights with girls who used to be her friends (she tosses in a nasty headbutt), squabbling with her sister (Charlotte Collins) who watches exclusively junk TV, and, when she’s sure no one is looking, breaking into an empty apartment to practice her hip-hop dance moves. Mia isn’t the most skilled dancer, but it’s clear in these moments that it’s the only thing for which she feels any passion; the girl unafraid to pick a violent fight suddenly too shy to breakdance in front of anyone.

Two things come to enter Mia’s life that have the potential to change it. First she begins a stealth campaign to free a horse chained up in an empty lot, and after the three boys living there nearly rape her when they catch her, she strikes up something of a paradoxical friendship with one of them. He’s a roughneck car repairman with not a heart of gold, exactly, but feelings other than malice, which is more than Mia can say for most of the people in her life. Second, and much more importantly to Mia, her mother (Kierston Wareing) brings home a new boyfriend, a gentle and funny Irishman named Connor (Michael Fassbender).

Mia is instantly smitten, though she has no way to show it, while Connor shows her the kind of attention that she’s sorely lacked– encouraging her dancing, laughing at her jokes, even taking her entire family out for a fishing trip. The filmmaking mimics Mia’s own sexual attraction to Connor, the camera ogling him and the soundtrack reduced to the sound of his breathing, but his motivations are much fuzzier. Fassbender plays the character’s every ambiguous note perfectly, and Arnold shapes the film so strongly around Mia’s attraction to him that we catch ourselves from time to time rooting for a hookup that we intellectually know will be disastrous.

A third-act plot twist and a series of terrible decisions on Mia’s part take Fish Tank away from the slow-burn character building, but by then we’re so invested in Mia and her journey that a slight misstep like that is barely a distraction. What the third act makes irreducibly clear, though, is that Mia is essentially a child– a child with sexual agency and a yearning to live on her own, but a 15-year-old without the ability to see beyond her own limited, angry world. Mia is a frustrating heroine and often impossible to read, but she’s instinctively relatable, in a way few filmmakers would dare to tackle, and even fewer could conquer. Fish Tank isn’t a perfect film, but the creation of Mia alone is its own kind of masterpiece.

http://www.newmovieslist.com/201001/andrea-arnolds-fish-tank-movie-review/

Andrea Arnolds Fish Tank Movie Review
Posted on Jan. 14th, 2010 by Joseph

fishtank_quad-2Movie: Fish Tank
Starring: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender, Kierston Wareing, Harry Treadaway
Release Date: January 15, 2010 (limited)
Studio: IFC Films
Director: Andrea Arnold
Screenwriter: Andrea Arnold
Movie Story: The story focuses around Mia, a young girl whose life changes after her mother brings home a new boyfriend. It’s a completely heart-wrenching story, and the acting is amazing. The character of the mother might be the worst person I have ever witnessed on screen, while Mia is one of the most interesting, well-developed and heartbreaking.

What’s even more amazing is that the actress who plays Mia, Katie Jarvis, was discovered by the director at a train station in Britain while having a screaming match with her boyfriend. If you see the film, you will know why this is perfect. She has never acted before, and seemingly plays herself as a loud mouthed, but strong teenager. Films with stories like this could often be seen as gimmicky, but I feel in this case it makes it more authentic.

Fish Tank one of those films where you think you know where it’s headed, and you either don’t want to it to head that way, are happy that it does, or completely surprised by whatever happens next. It isn’t a huge or intricate plot, but there are many twists and turns that leave the viewer breathless, and it all comes together at the end. It’s definitely one of the best coming of ages films I have seen.

I’m glad to report that a woman directed this film, and I would be lucky to have the chance to work on a piece like this during my career in film. Not only is the story great, but it is shot beautifully, and the tone couldn’t be more perfect. I hate for this post to be just me heaping praise on this film, but I felt I should since it’s a small film, and the more people who get the chance to see it, and enjoy it, the better.

http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/reviews/specialty-releases/e3i3602f61793f3cd8826ced07884f2baed

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Film Review: Fish Tank
Penetrating portrait of a complicated teenager in a sour world, with a standout performance by newcomer Katie Jarvis.

Jan 12, 2010

-By Ray Bennett

filmjournal/photos/stylus/120948-Fish_Tank_Md.jpg

For movie details, please click here.
Following her Festival de Cannes Jury Prize-winning debut feature Red Road in 2006, British director Andrea Arnold creates another vivid portrait of a woman in the Cannes 2009 entry Fish Tank, in which newcomer Katie Jarvis gives a star-making performance as a disaffected teenager. Co-starring Michael Fassbender ( Hunger) and Kierston Wareing (It's a Free World), it's a vivid depiction of a single mom (Wareing) and her two daughters living in a grim council flat on a decaying housing estate on the outskirts of London.

The film will attract audiences drawn by Arnold's gift for unblinking observation and some wonderfully naturalistic acting, particularly by Jarvis, who is onscreen throughout. She plays Mia, a foul-mouthed, aggressively violent and desperately yearning 15-year-old with a slovenly mother, a noisy kid sister (Rebecca Griffiths) and dreams of becoming a dancer.

Arnold presents the claustrophobic urban wasteland where they live as a breeding ground for anger and despair. The arrival of mother's new boyfriend, Connor (Fassbender), brings some hope due to his charming confidence and caring manner.

Mother cleans up the house and Connor takes the kids on outings and encourages Mia in her dancing. The director subtly foreshadows the events that follow and while they come as little surprise, they play out in credible fashion.

Only one episode of revenge late in the second half stretches plausibility, but it does not detract from the film's impressive power. With her Red Road crew of cinematographer Robbie Ryan, making skillful use of handheld cameras, production designer Helen Scott and editor Nicolas Chaudeurge all contributing sterling work, Arnold creates searing scenes that stick in the mind.

Besides the dancing element, she weaves in a thread involving Mia's compassion for an aging horse and captures the tiny moments of affection that provide the glue that just about keeps deprived families sane.

Fassbender and Wareing give honest and open performances as the conflicted adults and young Griffiths, another first-timer, is memorably sharp as the kid sister. The film belongs to Jarvis, however, and she makes the most of it with expressive features that convey Mia's mixed-up emotions from raging temper to sweet vulnerability. She will go far.

http://trustmovies.blogspot.com/2010/01/andrea-arnolds-fish-tank-british.html

Monday, January 11, 2010
Andrea Arnold's FISH TANK: British kitchen-sink realism for the new century

If the 2006 film Red Road pretty much put Andrea Arnold (shown below) on the movie-maker map, her new film FISH TANK should keep her there. Relying less on plot, surprise and coincidence than did her earlier endeavor, this one rests mainly on character -- and the very fine new actress, Katie Jarvis (on the poster above and in the second and fourth shots below) who brings it to life.

With this, her first film, Ms Jarvis appears to have a similar ability, as does Samantha Morton, to rivet the viewer and never let go. (She even bears some resemblance to Ms Morton.) On-screen for almost the entire film, Jarvis grows more interesting as the movie progresses, handling like a pro even the one major disbelief-suspension scene that the filmmaker throws at us toward the finale.

It has been over half a century since the the British gifted the world with their kitchen sink drama, often featuring an angry young man at the center. Times change (the sinks are more modern), and now the anger is coming off a very young woman (she's but 15), who's got a lot to be mad about: her distant, slatternly mom and bratty little sister, for starters. Into an already fractured household, mom introduces her latest boyfriend, played by the immensely appealing, versatile and highly sexual actor Michael Fassbender (shown below, from Ozon's Angel and from Eden Lake and the recent Hunger). The fire starts slowly but sparks do fly.

Arnold is a realist filmmaker: Her ambient sound is filled with distant cursing -- the locations are the projects -- and her visuals are fairly bursting with working-class/on-the-dole life. (You'll think of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, among others.) Dance figures into the scenario, as well, and Arnold makes excellent use of it -- from her observations of a schoolgirl group to how dance draws Jarvis & Fassbender together, from the highly sexual-ized "audition" process to a final dance that becomes both telling and moving via its low-key circumstance and the director's smart refusal to push any emotional buttons.

Were Fish Tank not so full of life and spunk, as is its heroine, you might be tempted to call it a character study. You’d be right in that, too. And it’s a very, very good one. The year is young, but I'll be surprised if this film does not end up on numerous "best lists." The movie, from IFC Films, opens Friday, January 15, at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and the IFC Center.

http://filmsmell.com/?p=323

Fish Tank (80/100)

2010_fish_tank_004Fish Tank is a movie I’ve been really wanting to see. It has done really well in film festivals all over the world and will be available here in the US in about two weeks. I thought all the build-up might be hype, but it was indeed quite a good little film.

Mia, our main character, is a poor girl living in a trashy part of Essex. She dreams of being a dancer even though her mom is a slutty drunk and there seems to be no way out of her situation. (Also, she’s kind of a bad dancer. Don’t tell her I said that, but I totally did not feel served.)

There have been a lot of socially-introspective coming-of-age stories like this lately, so what makes this one better than most? For me, it was all in the directing here, done by Andrea Arnold. She filmed these scenes in a way where in most of them you THINK you know what is going to happen, or what is coming down the pipe, and it’s not what necessarily happens. It’s also free from weird twists as well. It’s just an interesting story to watch, full of very decent characterizations. Great acting from Michael Fassbender and the rest of the cast, and believe me he owed us one after EDEN LAKE (see below).

This movie is not going to knock your socks off, and it’s not as good as Precious, but it’s worth watching. (80/100)

http://www.hypertoast.net/trailer-for-fish-tank/129#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed

07 Jan Trailer for Fish Tank
by: snazzlexberries to: Movie Previews

Directed by Andrea Arnold, a British Academy Award-winning filmmaker, Fish Tank is a coming-of-age story of a young girl named Mia (Katie Jarvis). Everything changes for Mia when her “mum” brings home her new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender). Released in September 2009 in the UK, this film is to be released in the US on January 13.

For Katie Jarvis, this is her first debut as an actress. Although she was nominated for Best Actress in the British Independent Film Awards, we’ll see how well she plays her role in this film as a young actress. While there are other few “fresh” casts in this film, Michael Fassbender is no stranger. He is recently known for his role in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds as Lt. Archie Hicox as well as 300, Eden Lake, and one of my favorites, Hunger. Hunger is based on true events of the 1981 hunger strike led by Bobby Sands, a member of the IRA. The cinematography and immense care for detail cannot be missed throughout the film. I recommend any fan of Michael Fassbender or others who love to watch historical-based films to check this one out.

Based on the trailer, Fish Tank looks intimate and moving. Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out to be dull as some coming-of-age films…*ahem* Blue Crush, Love and Basketball, etc. *ahem*

http://www.mrmovietimes.com/movie-news/fish-tank/

Fish Tank

By Richard von Busack

While Fish Tank is a film about the kind of people who name their dog after a brand of lager, there isn’t an ounce of patronization in it. Director Andrea Arnold’s film is the furthest thing from a slumming expedition, although the material is lurid: the illegal romance between an adult and a 15-year-old girl named Mia (Katie Jarvis) living in a housing estate on the east coast of England.
Essex is a place that Londoners make jokes about—or celebrate in slangy form, as in Ian Dury’s song “Billericay Dickie.”

According to the BBC, the Mardyke Estate—a set of concrete towers surrounded by postindustrial wasteland—is the most notorious housing development in a 43-square-mile area. Arnold (Red Road) and her photographer, Robbie Ryan, are strangely captivated by the place. The landscapes are bathed in Flemish sea light; titanic rain clouds march overhead. In repeated spins, Bobby Womack’s version of “California Dreamin’” arrives in the same way the original version of the song did in Chungking Express: it adds forlorn romance and lyricism to the views.

Mia is a small, thin, feral girl at odds with everyone. She’s a dropout and a delinquent, and the special-ed school gates are gaping wide for her. At home, her lounging mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), barely tolerates her; Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), her little sister, isn’t a fan either. Mia is always ready to have it out with the pack of teenage girls who roam the housing project’s corridor. Mia’s therapy for the stress is dancing: practicing until she’s breathless in her hideout, the living room of an abandoned flat in this concrete tower.

Her mother has just made a real find: Connor (Michael Fassbender), a man with a job. We know this because Mia discovers a pay stub when she helps herself to a fiver out of his wallet. He can do things; he knows how to snatch fish out of a pond with his bare hands. And the bedroom action between Joanne and him is good—we can hear that through the thin walls and see it at the orgiastic party Joanne hosts. Fassbender, of Inglourious Basterds and Hunger, is making fast progress to A-list leading-man status.
Fassbender is extremely good-looking with his shirt off, and he has a soft accent that almost sounds like a New Yorker’s (I doubt if he’ll need any vocal coaching to do American films). All this is gossip compared to what he really has: a serious actor’s humor and humanity. He’s taking a risk, too, playing a character many would be ready to condemn as a molester.

But bravery is what marks Arnold, too. Only a female director would know how to chart the mixed emotions behind such a flirtation, or know how to make the sexual tension erotic instead of creepy, or to be able to make it clear what a young girl like Mia might think she wanted, while really not knowing what she might get. Weirdly, because of the film’s finale, critics have been likening it to An Education—a much more distanced and refined piece of work. To use a metaphor from Fish Tank, the difference between these two movies is like the difference between a live gasping fish and a box of Mrs. Paul’s.

The Lolita-like shot of Connor tending Mia’s wounded, unwashed foot reminds us what made that novel work as a story of power gone haywire, out of the usual channel between father-figure and daughter. The lack of preaching in Fish Tank really makes it noteworthy. When Mia takes her revenge, she becomes a brutal child acting out, but the justice of what she’s doing is apparent.
Arnold is a fiendishly persuasive director, and she ensures that you see things from Mia’s view. In the last third, when Mia starts to make a run for it, we can see past Essex’s junkyards and tired-looking houses into something wild. This is especially true at the climax at the Thames estuary, where the land ends as abruptly as if it had been chewed away by a steam shovel. This is where a little film gets big: the scene is like the end of a Romantic novel when the elements are brought in to witness the emotional states of the characters on a windy fen or by churning waters.

Katie Jarvis was a nonprofessional picked off a railway platform by Arnold, and she is chillingly good. It also helps that Jarvis isn’t a trained dancer. Although the arts can be a pathway out of the slums for kids, films rarely deal with those who have artsy dreams and loads of energy but only a bit of talent. It comforts the mass audience to believe that sheet talent will always have its way. We can see the girls of Mardyke busting their moves; some of them are even better at it than Mia. One girl practices that walking-up-the-wall move that Donald O’Connor did in Singin’ in the Rain. Arnold stops to watch some teens in a hallway doing their music-video dances: harem girls in search of a pasha, one with a navel jewel lolling out of her plump belly like a tongue.

There’s nothing delicate in this world: the concrete, the highways encircling the project, the TV spilling nonstop bilge. Mia’s mother is as negligent as an animal, and yet she’s a real presence, too: she’s true to her own nature. What amazes me most about Fish Tank, finally, is its raw hedonism. It’s rare that a director who has such a sure eye and ear and such sensitivity can understand the bliss of a hard party.

http://www.fairfieldweekly.com/article.cfm?aid=16535

Don't Sweat the Technique
To be young, not particularly gifted and white
Thursday, February 04, 2010
By Ann Lewinson

***1/2 – Fish Tank
Written and directed by Andrea Arnold. With Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender and Kierston Wareing. (NR)

Precious meets An Education in Fish Tank, the British filmmaker Andrea Arnold's follow-up to her acclaimed Red Road, in which a 15-year-old loner (Katie Jarvis), stranded in a dismal Essex housing project that might as well be a fish tank, negotiates a nebulous relationship with her mother's new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender) while dreaming of a career as a hip-hop dancer. "You dance like a black," he says admiringly but, squirming in the audience, we know the awful truth. Mia dances with the halting self-consciousness of child alone in her bedroom, and she will never, ever be in a Jay-Z video.

That Arnold's white, working-class Brits have no culture of their own, aside from massive alcohol consumption, is one of the depressing observations in a film that offers little girls drinking beer and smoking cigarettes (one in a tiara, no less), a mother and daughter who curse at each other like they're in a Scorsese movie, and a barren industrial landscape, although no one seems to work except Connor — at, perhaps symbolically, a home-improvement superstore. Indisputably symbolic is a white horse, chained in a trailer park, which Mia attempts to free. But while Arnold's kitchen-sink depravity may be over-the-top and her symbolism obvious, her screenplay goes in unpredictable directions, propelled by a welcome moral grayness that lets the audience make up its own mind.

Jarvis, who was discovered arguing with her boyfriend on a train platform, holds her own against Fassbender, a rising star last seen as the British film critic in Inglourious Basterds. Under her tough exterior is a touching naiveté that almost convinces you that a teenager accustomed to strangers having sex in her kitchen wouldn't know what an advertisement for "Female Dancers" means. And throughout this captivating film, Arnold displays an uncommon sensitivity to young women growing up in a highly sexualized culture that seems to offer no alternatives. "Life's a bitch and then you die," chants AZ, but perhaps Mia has other ideas, leaving her copy of Illmatic for mom.

http://www.xreticentreviews.com/2010/02/review-fish-tank.html

Tuesday, February 2, 2010
REVIEW: FISH TANK

Grand Readership,

I must admit I was quite excited to see FISH TANK... it had been some time since I’d given patronage to the IFC theater (despite my accolades for it in my NYC VENUE review (here) I don’t get there nearly as often as I’d like) and it’d also been some time since I reviewed a picture outside the Hollywood studio system. FISH TANK (by director ANDREA ARNOLD - who's first picture, RED ROAD, I'm told is outstanding) not only does not disappoint, but is surprising and delightful: a skillfully told story, a true drama and an even (at times) disturbing portraiture of a girl coming into her own.

MIA is 15. She lives with her mom (who, if she has a job – we’re not told about it) and younger sister, TYLER. There’s no father… there’s no money – in fact there’s little of anything but spite. It’s a decidedly poor neighborhood, Mia lives in a tenement building – her mother, when she isn’t drunk, is at best verbally abusive and at worst irresponsibly neglectful. The conditions of Mia’s life are both shocking and upsetting, but they never overwhelm her, nor seem to overtly inform her behavior. Instead, Mia simply wants grow up and like any teenage girl who feels stuck... she feels the world is against her in this. It’s summer time and her days are filled with practicing dance, roaming around, fighting with peers and getting into mischief with boys... and while on the surface this may appear carefree - we quickly learn it's anything but.

There’s a refreshing simplicity about the story Arnold tells coupled with a frankness... Mia's life isn't pretty and Arnold isn't shy about sharing this. First and foremost, however, FISH TANK Mia’s story – and it is never anyone else’s. When Mia is introduced to her mother’s latest boyfriend, CONNOR, (played exceptionally by MICHAEL FASSBENDER - who some may recognize from his also exceptional appearance in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS) there’s an obvious tension between the two. And while the relationship grows in tension and immediacy throughout the film the camera never lingers on the boyfriend. We’re never bothered with his emotional state beyond the interactions he has with Mia. In fact, we are always with Mia – when we see her little sister smoke cigarettes and drink beers with a friend, it’s because Mia is there to show us. What little we learn of Mia’s mother’s friends, we learn as Mia spies on them. The arguments Mia has with her friends remain unexplained and why shouldn’t they? What do 15 year-old girls really argue about anyway?

FISH TANK succeeds as much for what is in the picture as what is left out of it. We don’t need to know why Mia bickers with her peers to understand to her angst. We don’t need to know what her mom does all day to understand the type of role model she is for her girls. Essentially – we don’t need to know anything about anyone, except for Mia. I cannot stress enough how nice it is not to be hammered with storylines. Instead of being dealt several poorly handled storylines (as it seems is the ever-increasing norm in today’s pictures) FISH TANK actually delivers on a single one. Considering how singular our focus is on MIA - its almost startling how much we learn and feel about the supporting players - which we must immediately attribute to Arnold's sophisticated choice in dialogue and scene.

Speaking of sophistication, the film itself is stunning to look at. I saw a 35mm print and noticed immediately that it was a 1.33:1 frame – quite unusual in a day in age where 16:9 is standard even for television and 2:35:1 is the now-traditional cinema aspect. The cinematographer, Robbie Ryan, has delivered each shot as if it were plucked from a tree of brilliant Polaroids. We’re treated to flares of morning sun, the contrast of high noon summers, the magic of glowing, late-summer evenings and that warm summer night we all can’t describe but know when we see it. The smaller, square frame always keeps us proximate to Mia while the film grain and dirt specs (evident throughout the picture) recollect the imperfections of life.

I suppose that’s the best way to sum up FISH TANK – its near masterpiece as a picture is in how perfectly it brings the imperfect to life. There’s nothing unnatural about Mia’s curiosity and sexual turmoil – but that it’s happening in concert with Connor giving her attention is unsettling. There’s an inevitable sadness about Mia’s lot in life, but there’s also a beauty in how she moves throughout it. Amplified in parts by the photography, in parts by the performances but always by its direction – FISH TANK is bubbling with tears and laughter and… well, life. Make a point to see in theaters if you can – otherwise, be sure to check on home-release.

Posted by x reticent at 9:59 PM
Labels: REVIEWS

http://filmblog.michaeldoud.com/2010/01/31/fish-tank.aspx?ref=rss

Fish Tank

First Hit: This film was disturbingly good.

Katie Jarvis plays Mia a 15 year old girl who has an easily accessible temper. Just about anything sets her off and she doesn’t back down from anything. This is set up well at the beginning of the film when a girl asks her why Mia is watching her and her friends dance, Mia walks up and head butts her. She and her younger sister are being brought up by a single mother who would rather drink, party and sleep with men than be a parent. What is being modeled to these two kids has nothing to do with being responsible or following any rules. The Essex housing complex they live in, is home to the lower working class and families living on the dole. This is a tough neighborhood and Mia is alone and a loner. Besides her quick temper, Mia shows a level of compassion which is displayed towards an old horse which is chained up to a cement block. She attempts to free the horse but gets caught buy some young men who physically push her around and threaten her. Her mother Joanne (played by Kierston Wareing) brings home a new boyfriend named Connor (played by Michael Fassbender) who honestly likes the girls and tries to make good in his relationships with each of them. Mia’s escape from her life is dancing. She hip-hop dances in an abandoned room to mostly rap songs. Her dancing is the only thing that she finds any peace and solace. By reading an paper advertisement, she decides to become a professional dancer by entering a video for an audition. Meanwhile, Connor moves in and life is a better for both the girls for a while, but as time goes on, complications arise. Mia’s angst towards Connor drives her to make some poor decisions which lead to her deciding to start a new life with a boy she hardly knows.

Jarvis is effective and believable as Mia. Although her decisions were very questionable, I thought she made the character and decisions very believable. Fassbender was also very good and brought a level of compassion and inappropriate behavior to his character. Wareing was also good as a mother who is extremely selfish and only cared about herself and not her children.

Overall: This is a strong film although the subject matter isn’t necessarily pleasant to watch.

Posted by Michael at 1/31/2010 1:40 PM

http://themoviejerk.blogspot.com/2010/02/fish-tank-2009-dir-andrea-arnold-uk.html

Feb 2, 2010
FISH TANK [2009] - Dir Andrea Arnold, UK

Cast: Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender

Director: Andrea Arnold

Screenplay: Andrea Arnold

Running time: 2 hrs 03 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Andrea Arnold’s sophomore feature Fish Tank is both gruelling and astonishing to watch. It is largely a film about the bleak and the banal, a 15-year old potty-mouthed teenager living in an equally expletive-ridden, booze-fuelled sinkhole Essex estate, and whilst it’s certainly not the first time we’re lobbed at with a British kitchen-sink drama (try browsing through Ken Loach or Mike Leigh) but Arnold’s voice and vision are thoroughly compelling that it’s hard to imagine this without winning 2009’s Grand Prix in Cannes.

In Fish Tank, there are neither angel fishes nor gold-hearted Nemos but only sharks that prey on each other, especially with the weaker ones. So its heroine is compelled to turn into a villain to defend herself from the vicious mauling around her. Dancer-wannabe Mia is entrapped in this gloomy council estate with an ex-prostitute for Mum and a little scumbag as a younger sister. This is a place where heads aren’t used to think but to verbally assault or headbutt somebody else vile. Friendships are betrayed, an alliance always shift, and even Mum, when not guzzling gin and sucking up cigars, brings a new boyfriend home – there’s nobody to depend on so Mia is better off wandering alone. But all is not entirely washed with grimness. Mia (newcomer Katie Jarvis in a fiery, powerful, intense central performance), despite of her aggressive nature is such a well-drawn character that can render one brimming with empathy.

Teetering between adolescence and womanhood, she’s in a state of inner turmoil that tries to grasp the significance of her existence and her sexuality. Her dancing practices in small, cramped room overlooking the sprawl of Essex is a touching idiom of how smothered and claustrophobic her life is despite of the vast openness. This search of one’s self comes to full tilt when he meets her mother’s new boyfriend, a simmering, charismatic yet dangerous Wickes-worker Connor (a magnetic turn by Michael Fassbender), whose scenes with any trace of bare skin is sensually captured by Arnold’s camerawork from the perspective of Mia. In fact, the film is emotionally alive between Mia and Connor’s interplay, making the scenes electric with tension. His tenderness, which veers from paternalistic to sometimes harbouring menace, baffles Mia as she finds herself gently yielding to his charms. She becomes wordless and gentle, perfectly articulated by Arnold’s camera giving the film a sense of poetic realism.

VERDICT:

If Fish Tank doesn’t break your heart, then you probably have no heart at all. This is compelling, intense, authentic, compassionate and poignant British realism at its supreme height. Arnold directs with grit, grace and poetic justice, supplemented with Jarvis’ ferocious yet achingly human central performance and Fassbender’s mesmeric turn. Rank this one along with the celluloid of Loach and Leigh for vivid social studies.

RATING: A-

http://www.vanvoice.com/article/20627-real+realism

Real realism
Film | Wed, 02/03/2010 - 2:14 pm

By DK Holm

When the 33rd edition of the Portland International Film Festival commences on Feb. 11, it will do so with its usual thing — collect numerous movies from many countries (36 to be exact) and encourage the usual cheers and jeers. A jeer is that there are too many movies; how many of the offerings are worth seeing? And of course the Festival has a vested interest in making each film sound like the greatest thing since the invention of the graphic user interface. A cheer is that in its indiscriminate scooping up of international product from the last year or two, there are usually some real discoveries: Hong Kong actions films and Romanian Renaissance are part of the repertoire.

Among the many movies on offer this year is Fish Tank, a British film by Andrea Arnold, whose previous film, Red Road, was a critical hit. Fish Tank, which is Ms. Arnold’s second feature, won the Jury Prize at the last Cannes Film Festival, and the lead actress, Katie Jarvis, has received ecstatic praise from critics for her debut performance.

Fish Tank is a modern example of what was once called a “kitchen sink” film. The phrases comes not from the idea that the filmmakers have thrown in everything but; rather, it alludes to a grimy realism, meaning that visible were the dirty kitchen sinks normally hidden from the viewer.

It’s interesting that British cinema is associated with kitchen sink realism, as if it were a new thing in the 1950s. British cinema from its beginnings alternated between light comedies and grim tales of real people. Alfred Hitchcock’s first official feature film, The Pleasure Garden, though based on a melodramatic novel, shows components of lower class life and manners with great familiarity, as well as conflicts between different social strata. But it was only with the film It Always Rains on Sunday in 1947 (which recently played at the Film Center as part of a British Noir series) that creative attention seemed to coalesce around ordinary people. Meanwhile, over at Ealing studio, top comic writers and performers were exploring “little England,” ordinary people in fantastical or amusing situations. It Always Rains on Sunday is categorized now as a noir, but at the time it was probably viewed as a crime story in the Graham Greene mode, focusing on tawdry lower-level criminals. Greene’s worldview was influential on both English novels and cinema, and it’s probably one of the biggest but under-heralded influences on noir in both Britain and Hollywood.

Kitchen sink realism was a cross cultural phenomenon, also inhabiting painting (which is where the term came from) and especially theater, where the run of “angry young man” plays beginning with Look Back in Anger, created a virtually interchangeable phrase to describe a particular mood within postwar society. Soon topics like corporate advancement, abortion, and restless youth became common currency within British art cinema.

The main aesthetic impulse of the kitchen sink approach is one of close observation of reality (though reality in movies is always “reality”). This is what Fish Tank sets out to do. It is a character study of Mia, a 15-year-old girl who lives in an Essex housing project. Mia is an angry young woman who lives with her mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), and her equally foul mouthed little sister. Mia has a promising friendship with Liam (Jason Maza), a traveler sort who keeps a horse in an abandoned trailer park near the project, and also one with Connor (Michael Fassbender, of Inglourious Basterds), her mom’s new boyfriend, whom she first likes as a mentor or father figure until things turn strange.

Anyone who has seen a film by the Belgian brothers the Dardennes will recognize the surface affect of Fish Tank. The roving camera following a young person briskly navigating the streets of a depressed urban landscape; this landscape itself is blasted and dirty, untended and littered, strewn with garbage and graffiti. Through this world charges Mia, whose anger is both typical of the barbed and defensive teenage girl, but also individual to her as a coping mechanism in dire circumstances, mostly a household of continual hostility. The camera stays close to Mia as she charges determinedly through the streets, figuring out how to survive. When she is alone, she is still moving. Mia occasionally breaks into an abandoned apartment in the building where she practices dancing alone.

Fish Tank is the kind of movie where no one scene makes full sense until after you’ve seen all the others. For example, in an early scene, Mia clashes with a group of girls rehearsing a dance on a tarmac, and she ends up head-butting one of them. Only later do we learn the reason for her ire. Mia feels competitive because she is an aspiring but bashful or unconfident dancer herself. Fish Tank is also somewhat different from the other melancholy modern kitchen sink movies: Its narrative is cohesive; the tone is consistent (other kitchen sinkers sometimes include distracting crude humor). And there is a visual flair to the film that raises it above the typical griminess of most of its kind. And it has the rare virtue, especially in contrast to these days when Hollywood tent pole movies are more predictable than ever, that you never quite know what is going to happen next. Fish Tank is a penetrating Petri dish of ordinary life made explicable and poignant.

D.K. Holm is The Voice’s cinema critic and author of several recent and forthcoming books, including Film Soleil.
updated 1 hour 52 min ago

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/02/film/female-trouble

Female Trouble
by Tessa DeCarlo

Fish Tank, dir. Andrea Arnold, now playing
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, dir. Lee Daniels, now playing

Anxieties about “poverty porn,” about the exploitation of the vulnerable for the entertainment of the rest of us, arise only when we’re watching something that makes us feel guilty. The spectacle of Slumdog Millionaire’s Mumbai urchins evoked real discomfort because the extremity of suffering it depicted implicated anyone who benefits from Third World poverty, which is to say, all of us. At the same time, the movie’s unabashed artifice—not only its wacky Bollywood ending, but its cleverness and big-budget glossiness throughout—highlighted the painful disparity between the characters’ all-too-true-to-life misery and the audience’s pleasure in watching them.

Let’s turn now to two newer movies about impoverished children. Both center on youngsters of the underclass who are abused by their mothers, preyed on by other adults, and treated as expendable by the agencies designed to protect them. It’s a story that’s older than Oliver Twist and it depends on details of character and setting to make it fresh—a challenge both these films rise to, each in its own way.

One, Precious, tells the story of an obese African-American teen; the other, Fish Tank, of a skinny white British girl. And though Fish Tank takes a harder line on its main character and is far more sexually explicit, I’m pretty certain it will not face anywhere near the volume of criticism about exploitation and voyeurism that has greeted Precious.
A new kind of star: Gabourey Sidibe in Precious. Photo credit: Anne Marie Fox. Lions Gate Entertainment.

One reason is that as a society we feel a lot more guilt (and its corollary, fear) toward poor African-Americans than we do toward impoverished Anglos, and we’re more alarmed by fatness than entrenched poverty. Another is that where Precious uses shiny production values and over-the-top theatrics, Fish Tank adheres to the cinematic convention of showing poor people in documentary-realist style. The film’s grittiness reassures us that it’s taking its subjects seriously, that no one’s having too good a time—the visual equivalent of the solemnity a newscaster switches on when she turns from the sports scores to a report on a multiple-fatality car wreck. All this makes Fish Tank less vulnerable to reproach than Precious, but not nearly as much fun.

Written and directed by Andrea Arnold, Fish Tank tells the story of 15-year-old Mia, who lives in a slummy glass-fronted housing project—the fish tank of the title—in a blighted suburb east of London. She’s played by Katie Jarvis, a local girl with no previous acting experience who beautifully conveys Mia’s fury, vulnerability, and desperation.

Mia’s father is long gone and her mother (played by Kierston Wareing) is a hard-drinking party girl to whom Mia is mostly a drag, an impediment to having whatever good times life still offers. And Mia isn’t easy to love. Her neediness and anger have made her a bit of a sociopath, someone who criticizes another girl’s dance moves by head-butting her and breaking her nose. But that’s because dancing is important: Mia skips school to sneak into an empty apartment and spend hours practicing hip-hop moves, dreaming that this will somehow vault her into a different life, one with at least the tiniest chance of escape.

Her mother’s new boyfriend, Connor, gives Mia something else to dream about. As played by Michael Fassbender, he’s a hottie—the movie’s first glimpse of him, shirtless in low-slung jeans, provides a sizzling demonstration of the female gaze—but he’s also sweetly paternal toward Mia and her little sister, a fatherless adolescent’s oedipal wet dream. When Mia shows him an ad seeking dancers, he encourages her to try out. “You dance like a black,” he tells her, then adds, “That’s a compliment.” No wonder the girl is smitten.

Mia indulges in a lot of risk-taking, and that includes deliberately fanning the sexual sparks that flicker between her and Connor. We spend much of the movie dreading what the characters are going to do next, and to Fish Tank’s credit we’re often surprised both by their bad choices and their good ones, even though their actions and the consequences remain entirely credible and in character. When Mia finally gets to her dance audition, we witness the opposite of a Fame-style triumph; it’s the moment when she realizes how thoroughly she’s been betrayed.

In the end, the movie acknowledges Mia’s life force but holds out only a tiny scrap of hope for her. She may find her way, but a future of alcoholism and petty crime seems more likely. The movie’s final image distills that ambiguity: a heart-shaped foil balloon drifts above Mia’s neighborhood, but will it fly away or fall to earth as just another piece of trash?

In her 2007 feature debut, Red Road, writer-director Arnold showed she could pull terrific performances out of her actors and discover an abundance of visual poetry in the urban wasteland. Those same talents are on full display in Fish Tank, which has many high-art moments as beautiful as its characters’ circumstances are ugly. But the movie’s insistent humility, its sociological seriousness, and self-conscious miserabilism, render the story-telling a bit prim.

http://newcityfilm.com/2010/02/03/lifes-an-itch-andrea-arnolds-rude-road-in-fish-tank-review/

Reviews, profiles and news about movies in Chicago
Feb 03
Life’s An Itch: Andrea Arnold’s rude road in “Fish Tank” (Review)

By Ray Pride

Where’s the novelty in Andrea Arnold’s storytelling?

It’s everywhere, is where it is. The odd critiques of “Red Road” and “Fish Tank” that have asserted Arnold tells familiar stories with familiar characters are off the mark. The live-through-this intensity of her storytelling is charged and fresh. The English director started her career relatively late, but her first two short films, “Dog” and “Milk” were screened at Cannes in 1998, and her third, the twenty-six minute “Wasp,” won the Oscar in 2005. Her 2006 feature debut, “Red Road,” shot on digital video, exploited a fresh, bold palette in the story of a policewoman whose job is to watch Glasgow’s banks of surveillance monitors. The modern paranoia and contemporary sexual violence that grows from Arnold’s unflinching film (and Kate Dickie’s intent, sere performance as the troubled, vengeful woman) are nightmarish yet haunting. The film began as a challenge by Lars von Trier’s company, that three directors with the same outline would go out and make a film with the same characters and actors, but in Arnold’s capable hands, it was so much more than a stunt. At the time of its Sundance debut, I asked Arnold how much two versions of the same script would be in the hands of any two difference directors. “I’ve always thought that; if you gave a director the same script, you’d get a completely different film,” she said, then laughed. “Okay, maybe the same story, but a completely different film.”

From its opening minutes of anger expressed by its teen protagonist with profane, “unladylike” suddenness and directness, director Andrea Arnold’s second feature, “Fish Tank,” is an electric slice of elevated everyday life. To our good fortune, Arnold amasses her own idiosyncratic observations, different sensations from other English filmmakers who trouble to traffic with class, more tender than Loach and Leigh, and also with a more kaleidoscopic eye than the Belgian brothers Dardenne. She manages to mingle the funny, the sorrowful, the sad, the melancholy and the intimate without a solitary note of false uplift. She’s a poet, really.

The intent simmer of her cop-turned-sexual stalker of the dark, winding back streets of Barmulloch, Glasgow, in “Red Road” is displaced by a 15-year-old’s negotiation of council flats in Essex, near Tilbury, and encroaching womanhood. As Mia, newcomer Katie Jarvis, first glimpsed by the film’s casting director on a train platform in Tilbury Town Station arguing with her boyfriend, is a find: an uncultivated natural playing a council-estate teenager attracted to the handsome new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) of her single mom (Kierston Wareing). (Consider Fassbender, emaciate in “Hunger,” witty in “Inglourious Basterds” and sexually succulent here, and you arrive at one conclusion: a huge, huge star in just a minute or two from now.) Mia finds escape in emphatically visceral dancing to hip-hop on a boombox in the blasted space of a disused apartment. It’s enacting-out. Arnold, who ended “Red Road” with a piano ballad cover of “Love With Tear Us Apart,” knows when to savor a song, saving her best cue for a wordless scene between mother and daughter to Nas’ “Life’s A Bitch.” Strangely enough, the scene is lighter than air, ready to float away, even as Nas’ lyrics cut to bone: “‘Visualising the realism of life and actuality, f&#!, who’s the baddest? A person’s status depends on salary.”

Life’s an itch, too. You’d want to get away from these places. You’d have to get away from these places. The land around is scrubs and bare patches. Life’s tough. In the telling, many gray areas will be colored in. Danger’s everywhere, especially when eyes meet. An especially pungent take on the story’s dances of desire comes in Kim Morgan’s “It’s Hard Out There For A Nymph,” in which she observes, “She has little power in the world save for her youth and vigor and spunk and, as is often the case with teenage girls, her blossoming sexuality—a beautiful thing and yet, a thing that will cause confusion and pain… She’s still a kid. And again, it’s damn hard for a teenage girl.” This is the rare thing that’s captured by Arnold. “Rhythm and framing are so subjective,” Arnold observed to me in 2007, but so is the choice of what to look toward, what not to shrink from.

The language is often scouringly profane and the suburban landscape is the scorched earth of J. G. Ballard-land. The clouds overhead are mere tatters. Yet Arnold’s characters are living in the moment, close to the ground, breathing each second. Notably, Arnold didn’t show the script to her actors, even professionals like Fassbender, sharing the pages only a few days before. What are you going to do next? As a character? As a person? Bring some moods, we’ll play. We’ll play for keeps.

As a visual artist, Arnold makes many quiet creative choices that enrich her loving, lovely tapestry, but her preference for shooting in the almost square, old-fashioned 1.33 ratio and the snapshot esthetic of some of her lighting suggests memories reconstructed from a shoebox of poignant Polaroids. Still, the world is not bleak: there is dance and there are dreams and even in the most dangerous moments, Arnold implies Mia will survive; thrive. Arnold does extraordinary work with actors but she creates a lived-in, to-be-lived-through world for their characters to battle against. In the end, “Fish Tank” is kilometers away from social realism: it’s a blooming nightmare that life’s experience one day will shake this obstinate, gifted director’s characters away from.

“Fish Tank” opens Friday at the Music Box.

http://lamelbox.blogspot.com/2010/02/fish-tank.html

Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Fish Tank
A fifteen year old girl living in a run down British housing project is so angry about her life that she has alienated everyone in it. To ease away her mounting frustrations, she steals into an abandoned apartment building and pours all her anger into dance, mimicking hip-hop moves that she has seen on television and in videos. Watching Katie Jarvis as Mia dance is such a strange and provocative phenomenon. Technically she is doing all the correct steps, but there is a stiffness about it, an emotional disconnect. Like if she really lets her emotions go, she would lose all control. This is a girl, closed off and cynical. She is angry with the entire world and no one is going to touch her.

When Mia’s mother (Charlotte Collins) takes in a new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) he shows Mia a kindness and sympathy that she has long forgotten. When he compliments her on her dancing, the one thing in her life she feels good about, her steely demeanor starts to soften. She begins to hope, show interest and care. But when the harsh realities of life come rushing back in, any romantic notions or teenage pipe dreams are quickly swept away. Mia must now cope with the truth.

This unsentimental film will sadden you but at the same time show you the resilience of the human spirit. Fish Tank could take place anywhere in the world. When children grow up with little parental care in a social system that can barely keep track of them, they must grow up fast and learn to take fend for themselves. This is Mia’s story, but there are many girls just like her. There is a root and reason for all that anger.

Rating: First Run The truth behind the anger
Posted by Melanie Wilson at Wednesday, February 03, 2010

http://trendaway.com/2010/02/04/fish-tank-2009-tiff09/

Fish Tank (2009) (TIFF09)
February 04th, 2010

Fish Tank (2009, written and directed by Andrea Arnold) is Arnold’s second feature film (her first being Red Road, which I saw at TIFF07 and absolutely loved). This is an exceptional film. It takes place in ghetto UK (not sure where but it reminded me of some of Little Britain’s skits) and concerns a teenaged girl named Mia (who is amazingly played by newcomer Katie Jarvis).

Mia is introduced to us brilliantly and you know right away not to mess with her – she’ll beat the crap out of you – but we’re also quickly exposed to her softer, vulnerable side: This is the side that loves to hip-hop dance, a major cultural phenomenon that proves to be not only a creative outlet but a powerful element necessary to communicate with in her family setting.

The plot is set up quite well and even though it contains some generic elements, it still kept me feeling like I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Arnold definitely learned the language of her subjects and both recognizes and acknowledges their cultural symbols, which include shouting profanities and dancing to hip-hop. Although it’s easy to feel that these elements are a bit weird, they are handled so straight-faced that you soon realize that what you’re watching is very real, and is probably as strange to us as our way more conventional and “nice” way of life is to them. These people pull no punches – they call it as it is; they’ll punch you in the gut and then let you know why – or not.

Michael Fassbender is brilliant as usual and it was great to see him deliver another fine performance, sandwiched between his grueling portrayal of Bobby Sands and his equally intense LT. Archie Hicox.

Andrea Arnold is 2 for 2 now and I can’t wait to see what’s next from her!

http://www.nj.com/newsflash/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-15/126531016593470.xml&storylist=entertainment

A Difficult Age in a Hard Place
2/4/2010, 12:52 p.m. EST
by Ann Hornaday
The Associated Press

(AP) — c ()-2010, The Washington Post

At first the title of "Fish Tank" is obscure, relating as it does to a 15 year old's coming of age in England rather than a literal aquarium.

But as this tough, mesmerizing film takes hold, the metaphor makes itself clear, from director Andrea Arnold's boxlike framing to the impassive but compassionate way she watches her characters swim in their own murky psychological waters.

Teen-age Mia (Katie Jarvis) lives with her little sister and her single mother, Joanne (Kierston Wareing), in a drab housing project in Essex; as "Fish Tank" opens, Mia is in the midst of an argument with her best friend, fighting with her mom and getting away from her troubles by dancing alone in an abandoned flat. Taking a British realist cue from Ken Loach (Wareing coincidentally made her astonishing debut in Loach's "It's a Free World" ), Arnold films the lives of her subjects with fierce, up-close urgency. But Arnold injects her own lyrical touches in "Fish Tank" that make it more poetic than most films of the miserabilist school: amid a gray postindustrial wasteland Mia may come upon a lone horse, for example, or take a wild digression into a lowland worthy of Thomas Hardy.

The plot of "Fish Tank" takes off when Mia's mum brings home an attractive lover named Connor, played by Michael Fassbender with quiet, seductive guilelessness. (Most recently seen in "Inglourious Basterds," Fassbender delivered his own breathtaking breakout performance as Bobby Sands in "Hunger.") Connor, it seems, might finally give Mia the protection and support she has clearly been missing most of her life.

In many ways "Fish Tank" joins "An Education" and "Precious" as an acute, empathic portrait of a girl growing up, but more than those films Arnold leaves viewers with a feeling of unsettled ambiguity.

Jarvis, whom the director reportedly discovered at an Essex train station, is nothing less than a revelation in a performance that is tender, spiky and utterly fearless in its physical and emotional range.

Not rated. Contains profanity, smoking, teen drinking and some sexuality. 122 minutes.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=38436

Throng and Dance: The Last Station and Fish Tank Tolstoy founds a cult; a misfit teaches herself hip-hop moves.

By Tricia Olszewski
Posted: February 3, 2010
Sexual Pension: In their dotage, Plummer and Mirren enjoy a limited sex life.

Move Precious to a British ghetto and downsize incest into statutory rape and you get Fish Tank, writer-director Andrea Arnold’s follow-up to her quietly excellent 2007 debut, Red Road. Fish Tank is all about Mia (Katie Jarvis), a 15-year-old who spends her days walking her bleak town in a sweat suit, practicing her hip-hop moves, and fighting with nearly everyone who crosses her path. She hopes that dedicating herself to her chosen art will be a ticket to a better life, one in which she doesn’t have to deal with her waste-case young mother (Kierston Wareing) and a home in which there’s always more booze than food.

So, yeah, the film shares more than a superficial similarity to Step Up, Save the Last Dance, and pretty much every other dance movie released in the last decade. But Fish Tank not only grabs you from the very start—you haven’t heard this many “cunt”s and “fuck”s since Glengarry Glen Ross—it also takes some surprising and bravely subversive turns. Mum’s latest boyfriend, Connor (Hunger’s Michael Fassbender), immediately notices the lovely Mia, and though his attention is always a little skeevy, it initially seems chaste and even good for her. With no friends and a mother who couldn’t care less about her daughter’s life, she finds Connor a relief: He talks to her like an actual person and encourages her dancing.

http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/film/82529/fish-tank-film-review

Film review
Fish Tank
By Hank Sartin

Dir. Andrea Arnold. 2009. N/R. 123mins. Katie Jarvis, Kierston Wareing, Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Griffiths, Harry Treadaway.

Those familiar with Arnold’s suspenseful Red Road may be surprised to find that Fish Tank seems more like the work of the long-absent Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar) than it does like Arnold’s previous film. With a too-close-for-comfort focus so intense it almost hurts, Arnold introduces us to the truly awful life of 15-year-old Mia (Jarvis), who is navigating the dangerous transition from childhood to adulthood.

Mia leads a lonely life, killing time in an empty flat in the housing project where she lives, practicing dance moves lifted from hip-hop videos. Her mother, Joanne, (Wareing) seems far too young to have a teenage daughter and still parties as if she’s in her twenties. Into this fairly squalid environment comes Joanne’s new boyfriend Connor (Fassbender), whom we first meet as he encounters Mia for the first time in her kitchen. He’s shirtless and scruffy and practically oozes sexual energy. He’s alternately friendly and mocking with Mia in a way she finds exciting. She can’t quite decide whether to treat him like a father figure or flirt with him. So she does both.

Arnold lets us see the trouble ahead long before Mia does, but that’s fine; this film isn’t about suspense. It’s a careful character study that demands that we pay attention to a girl just learning the possibilities and limitations in her life. There are a few missteps, like the overly obvious use of a chained-up horse as a symbol, but that’s outweighed by the raw honesty of Jarvis’s performance.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100203/REVIEWS/100209991

Fish Tank (No MPAA rating)

Fish Tank

BY ROGER EBERT / February 3, 2010

Cast & Credits
Mia Katie Jarvis
Connor Michael Fassbender
Joanne Kierston Wareing
Tyler Rebecca Griffiths
Billy Harry Treadaway

IFC Films presents a film written and directed by Andrea Arnold. Running time: 123 minutes. No MPAA rating (recommended for adults, because of sexuality, frank language and children in peril).

Andrea Arnold's piercing "Fish Tank" is the portrait of an angry, isolated 15-year-old girl who is hurtling toward a lifetime of misery. She is so hurt and lonely, we pity her. Her mother barely even sees her. The film takes place in a bleak British public housing estate, and in the streets and fields around it. There is no suggestion of a place this girl can go to find help, care or encouragement.

The girl is Mia, played by Katie Jarvis in a harrowing display of hostility. She's been thrown out of school, is taunted as a weirdo by boys her age, has no friends, converses with her mother and sister in screams and retreats to an empty room to play her music and dance alone. She drinks what little booze she can get her hands on.

And where is her mother? Right there at home, all the time. Joanne (Kierston Wareing) looks so young, she might have had Mia at Mia's age. Joanne is shorter, busty, dyed blond, a chain-smoker, a party girl. The party is usually in her living room. One day, she brings home Connor (Michael Fassbender), a good-looking guy who seems nice enough. Mia screams at him, too, but it's a way of getting attention.

Joanne seems happiest when Mia isn't at home. The girl wanders the streets and gets in a fight when she tries to free a horse chained in a barren lot near some shabby mobile homes. She surfs in an Internet cafe, goes to an audition for sexy dancers and breaks into a house at random.

One day differs from the routine. Connor takes Mia, her mom and her little sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) on a drive to the country. This isn't an idyllic picnic; they simply park in a field and hike to a river, Joanne staying with the car. Connor takes Mia wading ("I can't swim") in the river. Walking barefoot, she gets a ride on his back and rests her chin on his shoulder, and what was in the air from the first is now manifest.

Some reviews call Connor a pedophile. I think he's more of an immoral opportunist. "Fish Tank," in any event, isn't so much about sex as about the helpless spiral Mia is going through. The film has two fraught but ambiguous scenes -- one when she goes to Connor's home, another involving a young girl -- that we can make fairly obvious assumptions about. But the movie doesn't spell them out; Arnold sees everything through Mia's eyes and never steps outside to explain things from any other point of view. She knows who the young girl is, and we are left to assume. Whatever she thinks after the visit to Connor's house, we are not specifically told. The film so firmly identifies with Mia that there might even be a possibility Joanne is better than the slutty monster we see. A slim possibility, to be sure.

In a film so tightly focused, all depends on Katie Jarvis' performance. There is truth in it. She lives on an Essex housing estate like the one in the movie, and she was discovered by Arnold while in a shouting match with her boyfriend at the Tilbury train station, which is seen in the movie. Now 18, she gave birth to a daughter conceived when she was 16.

We can fear, but we can't say, that she was heading for a life similar to the one Mia seems doomed to experience. Her casting in this film, however, led to Cannes, the Jury Prize, and contracts with British and American agents. She is a powerful acting presence, flawlessly convincing here. And Arnold, who won an Oscar for her shattering short film "Wasp" (2003), also about a neglectful alcoholic mother, deserves comparison with a British master director like Ken Loach.