Emma Thompson

While “Nanny McPhee Returns” is suitably supercalifragilistic, it’s not quite as expialidocious as the original.

This twinkly and slightly twee follow-up to 2005’s “Nanny McPhee” leans far more heavily on high-tech, CGI magic than on the old-fashioned storybook kind that made the first film such a quaint, literate charmer. Under the direction of Susanna White, a veteran British TV director making her big-screen debut, the sequel is more sweetly sentimental and cartoonishly antic than the first.

Again, the film posits itself as an antidote to the syrupy goodness of Mary Poppins. Like Miss Poppins – but with a gnarly turnip nose, a wormlike unibrow, two whiskery facial moles and a rabbity snaggle tooth – Nanny McPhee is a British governess with a touch of magic in her pragmatic child-rearing ways.

But whereas Julie Andrews’ sprightly performance as Miss Poppins was offered up with a heaping spoonful of sugar, Emma Thompson’s sly and slightly menacing portrayal of Nanny McPhee comes with a biting spoonful of bitters.
Thompson, who again penned the screenplay inspired by mystery writer Christianna Brand’s trio of “Nurse Matilda” books, is no slouch when it comes to adapting literary material for the screen. She won an Oscar for her sterling 1995 script of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.”

This time around, she moves the action to 1940s rural England, where the overwhelmed Mrs. Green (lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal with a finely honed British accent) struggles to keep the family farm afloat while her husband is away at war. Compounding her troubles are three boisterous children whose rustic country life is upended by the arrival of two snooty, spoiled city cousins evacuated from war-torn London.

Naturally, country cousins and city cousins clash amid the barnyard muck (“Greetings, oh covered-in-poo people,” sneers the Woosterish cousin Cyril upon first seeing his grimy country kin). Soon, the children are engaged in all-out war – slinging poo, soiling clothing, breaking china and generally running amuck.

Enter Nanny McPhee, unbidden and unannounced, to throw off sparks from her gnarled walking stick and impose a stern but kindly sense of order among the children.

Naturally, the youngsters resist at first, led by the big-brother earnestness of Norman (Asa Butterfield) and the snotty archness of Cyril (Eros Vlahos).

But Nanny chides them, “When you need me, but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but do not need me, then I will have to go.”

Naturally, the rude youngsters are no match for Nanny McPhee, who patiently but firmly instills in them five valuable life lessons: to stop fighting, share nicely, help each other, be brave and have faith.

The film benefits greatly from impressive cameos by stellar friends-of-Emma in Britain’s theater world: Ewan MacGregor and Ralph Fiennes as the off-at-war dads; Bill Bailey as the farmer with a high regard for the intelligence of pigs, and a dottery Maggie Smith, the game grand dame who is not above lowering herself daintily onto a cow patty.

Rhys Ifans makes a fine if nattering villain of the piece as Mrs. Green’s conniving brother-in-law intent on conning her into selling the farm to pay off his overdue gambling debt.

Through it all, Thompson presides calmly over this imaginative little children’s movie with sharp intelligence and unfussy good sense. If only “Nanny McPhee Returns” had reined in its erratic energy and gone lighter on the CGI effects it might have surpassed the odd, eccentric charms of the original.

- Dennis King

“Nanny McPhee Returns”

PG
1:40
2.5 stars
Starring: Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans, Maggie Smith
(Rude humor, some language and mild thematic elements)

Somewhere near the intersection of vandalism and pop art, and following sign posts that mark encounters with high art and hoax, graffiti and street culture, underground celebrity and sell-out commercialism, stands the mind-bending documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”

It’s a rigorously subversive bit of guerrilla filmmaking that’s utterly befitting of its subject and its de facto maker, the shadowy and elusive British street artist known as Banksy. Having gained international renown, or infamy, for showing up unannounced in exotic locales and surreptitiously creating elaborate art installations (not mere graffiti!) in public spaces, Banksy has raised the status of art made outside the confines of traditional circles to, well, a high art.

The urban legend that has grown up around Banksy has attracted many counterculture admirers, not the least fervid being Los Angeles retailer and French expat Thierry Guetta. He’s a compulsive videographer who, upon learning that his cousin was an infamous street artist known for his tiled mosaic Space Invader installations, began bird-dogging various graffiti paint slingers and videotaping their working processes.

Guetta’s fanatical chronicling over eight years leads him to seek out and film such outlaw artists as Shepard Fairey (creator of the iconic Obama poster image) and mysterious guys with names like Buff Monster and Neck Face.

After a few futile attempts to hook up with Banksy, who obsessively guards his true identity with a seasoned spy’s network of intricate dodges, Guetta’s persistence finally pays off in 2006. That’s when Banksy shows up in L.A., apparently aware of Guetta’s bank of raw video footage, and the two meet.

As Guetta leaps at the chance to assist Banksy and as Banksy urges Guetta to deliver on his long-standing oath to produce a documentary on the burgeoning underworld of serious graffiti artists, the film takes a bizarre and disorienting turn.

Guetta’s first clumsy effort to make a 90-minute documentary from his footage proves virtually unwatchable and leads Banksy to tag him as “someone with mental problems and a camera.” So, slyly, Banksy turns the tables on Guetta, taking on the role of director and setting up his talent-challenged protégé as the street artist Mr. Brainwash.

The result is patchwork that blends Guetta’s rough, unsteady footage of working artists with Banksy’s more rigorous, sophisticated viewpoint on artistic process. It’s all craftily narrated by actor Rhys Ifans (late of “Greenburg”), featuring interviews with Guetta and Banksy himself (his face scrupulously hidden under a hooded sweatshirt).

In its rambling, sleight-of-hand style and mock-serious tone, Banksy’s film brilliantly if briefly touches on issues of artistic authenticity, on what makes an artist great and not just a well-intentioned poseur, on the intricacies of creativity, on the nature of celebrity and unhealthy fanaticism and on the commercialization of art.

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” (the title is a spoof on the commodifcation of art through exhibits and sales), which some skeptics suggest is one big prank, might just be Banksy’s idea of having one over on self-serious art collectors and stuffy academics. Maybe, but if art’s intent is to provoke then Banksy certainly is a master at that. Artist, prankster or brand name? Whatever Banksy is, he’s definitely fascinating and entertaining.

- Dennis King

“Exit Through the Gift Shop”

Not rated
1:27
3.5 stars
(Ratings criteria: sensuality and violence, etc.)

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Welsh actor Rhys Ifans exuded an appealingly shaggy, Scooby Doo quality as he strolled into a room full of reporters last spring to chat about his movie, “Greenberg,” and his role as an erstwhile rock guitarist turned regular, middle-aged family guy.

With a weeks-old growth of scraggly beard and a beaten black leather jacket worthy of any rock road warrior, the lanky, long-haired actor confidently spanned the gap between his two lifelong passions – acting and rock ’n’ roll.

In “Greenberg,” Ifans (whose name, absent its tongue-tying Welsh inflections, is pronounced Reese Ee-vans) is cannily cast in the part of Ivan, a one-time guitar god who hung up his axe years ago when his temperamental pal and bandmate Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) scuttled their group’s chance at a big-time record deal.

In the film’s story, Ivan and Greenberg are reunited after years of separation and silent resentment over their glancing flirtation with fame and fortune.

“Greenberg” is due out on DVD on July 13. In addition, Ifans plays a key role as narrator in the graffiti-hipster documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” which comes to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s Noble Theater July 23-25. He’ll also appear in this summer’s “Nanny McPhee Returns” and in the hotly anticipated “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1” later this year.

Ifans, 41, who in his own younger days had a serious brush with rock fame in a Welsh band known as the Super Furry Animals, declared during press interviews hosted by Focus Features that he was uniquely suited to play Ivan.

“I’m in a band now, you know. I’ve been in and out of bands for years, so music is always around me,” he said. “There’s a special bond with that whole band thing, and also with the halcyon days of youth. Ivan and Greenberg hadn’t seen each other in 10 years. So the breakdown in their relationship happens because the language or vernacular they have is one of a student. They don’t have the grammar to talk about these big adult issues, such as divorce or not seeing your son again. They can only resort to, ‘hey, man, how you doin’.’ That’s a testament to (filmmaker) Noah Baumbach’s writing that these guys keep hitting the brick walls of communication because they might have grown up as people but the language they use hasn’t changed. And they hit that stumbling block every time.

“I think you can see them both struggling throughout the entire film trying to address the unspeakable,” he said. “That is often comedic but essentially it’s very sad. That’s the poetry I drew from this film – the pathos of the great unspoken.”

Ifans, whose breakout role came in 1999’s “Notting Hill,” in which he played Hugh Grant’s wacky, slovenly flatmate, Spike, is a classically trained theater actor who also considers himself a serious working musician. And he believes that each artistic discipline informs the other.

“You’ve gotta work on the factory floor before you sit around the big table,” he said. “I think my theater work informs my music work more than my film work, in terms of mechanics of performance. But, of course, they’re each completely different animals. I’d rather perform in a play, but I’d rather watch a film.”

But working on a Noah Baumbach film, he said, was an especially challenging experience even for a traditionally trained actor.

“It’s impossible to act in a Noah Baumbach film, you know, to ‘act,’” he said. “But no matter how improvised or free it seems, it actually isn’t. It really is a precision endeavor. It’s really finite work, which I found thrilling, because often I’m asked, ‘OK, you’re the funny guy, run with the ball, let’s improve,’ more often than not, a badly written script. ‘Let’s get Rhys to make it funnier.’ In this case that wasn’t true at all.

“That’s why it’s such a pleasure to work with such loving attention to language,” he said. “Every single utterance in this film has gravitas or weight or informs the audience further as to the emotional life of these people. There’s no waste and I just found that very, very rewarding.”

Luckily, Ifans said, he’s never been forced to choose between acting and music.

“Oddly enough, they coincide beautifully in my life,” he said. “I just make them both work. I don’t go on holiday. When I’m not acting, I do rock ‘n’ roll. Yeah, I guess with the Super Furry Animals early on there was a point where we were going to be signed by Creation Records and I had to decide, and it took me a year to – and, of course, my acting career wasn’t what it is now, so the future was an unknown entity. I made the right decision for me by not signing. But now we’ve kind of come back together with elements of the Super Furry Animals, and we’re on our second album.”

(His current band is a psychedelic group called The Peth – Welsh for “The Thing” – which is led the Super Furry Animal’s drummer Dafydd Ieuan. Its debut album, “The Golden Mile,” was released in 2008.)

James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – James Murphy knows what it’s like being a struggling musician finally breaking out of underground obscurity to find mainstream success.

Long a fixture on the downtown Manhattan music scene, Murphy and his band, LCD Soundsystem, have grown to international acclaim and Grammy recognition with such underground hits as “Losing My Edge” and “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” from their 2005 debut album.

These days, Murphy finds himself breaking into a new musical fraternity – an elite one that’s welcomed other pop music stars such as Elton John, Phil Collins, Danny Elfman, Randy Newman and Mark Knopfler. Murphy’s first foray into film scoring is now on display in “Greenberg,” a new comedy-drama from filmmaker Noah Baumbach.

Murphy, an unassuming guy with a blue-collar attitude, said during a recent round of press interviews for the film that he knew nothing about movie scoring when he and Baumbach first met.

“I had no preconceptions,” he said. “But early on Noah asked, ‘do you know anything about scoring,’ and I said, ‘no.’ And he said, ‘great.’ And as it turned out, the way we did it was the only way I think I could have done it”.

And the way they did it was decidedly unconventional.

“Noah and I talked and he said was interested in not making a score but in just having me write songs,” Murphy said. “I tend not to like scores. I do like old scores that are very specific, but usually contemporary scores drive me crazy. They tend to be like the musical equivalent of a poetry slam, just mood tones and spacey surround-sound stuff.

“So I wrote a bunch of songs that are not directly about the movie but are like songs that we would pick out of our record collections to illustrate the movie,” he said. “We would just go back and forth and I would get scenes that Noah needed cues for – these are new words I’ve learned, ‘cues’ – and what I started doing was quickly making things that felt, like, not for scenes. I would just start making stuff and bringing it over. And he was incredibly gracious and would go, ‘oh, we’ll just try that there. Oh, I like that.’ Only a few songs were written specifically for scenes. Almost everything else was made as, like, a song. Like I would write a song. I would write it very roughly and bring it over, and then those roughs became what we became attached to.

“That became a habit of working,” Murphy explained. “Like I would make a song and then we would break it into score. So, like here’s the song, I would play it on piano and sing it. Then we’d do an acoustic guitar version. Somehow it worked, and that’s the only way I think I could have done it.”

“Greenberg” features seven new James Murphy songs, with vocals – many of which range far afield from the sound familiar to fans of LCD Soundsystem. The film’s soundtrack is due for release on Tuesday.

Murphy’s unconventional approach to film scoring earned a nod of approval from one particular cast member who knows a thing or two about movies and music. Actor Rhys Ifans, who appears in the film as a former rock guitarist, is in his offscreen time a working musician, once with the Super Furry Animals and now with a Welsh band called The Peth.

“I think James’ work here is fantastic,” Ifans said. “I don’t really like soundtrack movies. It really depresses me when a film company will just hook up with a record company and say, ‘hey, what’s new. Let’s throw it in, and let’s make some money on the CD sales.’ I think (the ‘Greenberg’ score) is very sensitively done. What it does is supply a heartbeat which is at once Greenberg’s but is also Los Angeles. There’s a hum that seems to go through the film via the music that becomes mantric almost.”