FULL FRONTAL
111mins

THE FOUR FEATHERS
125mins

TRIBUTE
66mins

IF THE Regus London Film Festival has a point to prove it’s that the film business is infinitely stranger than fiction. And few stories are stranger than the life of Robert Evans, the legendary head of Paramount (1967-73), and the playboy producer of hits such as The Godfather, Chinatown, and Marathon Man. In a brilliant documentary compiled by Brett Morgan, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Evans mulls over a career plagued by drugs, scandal, women, bankruptcy, extortion and murder. His rise and fall (and rehabilitation) is not just a biblical yarn; it’s a piece of art: a relentless montage of paparazzi shots, film clips and lurid headlines.

Evans didn’t just dream the dream. He lived it with an arrogance that made his critics steam with envy. He met Norma Shearer by a Beverly Hills swimming pool, so impressing her that she got him a part in Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). By his own admission, Evans was a pretty useless actor, but a very pretty man. When Darryl Zanuck cast him as the matador in The Sun Also Rises he told the infuriated cast (Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner and Mel Ferrer): “The kid stays in the picture. Anybody who doesn’t like that can leave.” No one left. Evans had an inkling then of what he wanted to do: call the shots.

He was hired to run Paramount by a tycoon called Charles Bluhdorn. The rest is history if you believe Evans’s creamy voice-over; or a convincing pack of lies.

Industry sharks wrote his obituary every week. Yet Evans survived for seven roller-coaster years, living like Gatsby. He married Ali MacGraw, only to lose her to Steve McQueen. Four more wives followed, and Evans hardly breaks stride in this celebrity-packed narrative.

Just how good a producer Evans was is almost impossible to gauge from this compelling soap opera. Of only one thing can we be sure. Evans rose like a phoenix and crashed like a lead balloon. A drugs bust involving fabulous amounts of cocaine, followed by a link to a high-profile murder investigation more or less finished him. The candour with which Evans recounts his tale is astonishing. The undiluted pleasure he takes in it would embarrass Faust.

Steven Soderbergh’s nude satire on the film industry also hinges on a Hollywood mogul, the mysterious Gus. Full Frontal is a movie within a movie within a movie, and it looks as if it was assembled by a crackpot professor in a matter of minutes. Fake credits, and actors who play themselves playing other people, create deliberate confusion. Julia Roberts plays a flaky actress who doubles up as a magazine reporter interviewing a black actor on his first big movie break with Brad Pitt. It sounds vaguely clever, but the reality is a baffling mess.

The “action”, shot on digital cameras over one day, involves Hollywood stars mucking up their personal lives. Catherine Keener, taking her neurotic self to uncharted extremes, prevaricates over dumping her depressing husband. David Duchovny likes to asphyxiate himself while having sex. And Mary McCormack can’t hold down a man once he’s pulled up his trousers. This is one jigsaw puzzle you feel no desire to complete.

Terence Stamp wafts through a hotel foyer. Cult director David Fincher (Fight Club) helms one of the movies within the movie. Brad Pitt chats to the crew. If this is the nouvelle LA vague, then the vague is in serious trouble. Ultimately Full Frontal exposes far more of Soderbergh’s ego than is entirely decent.

Shekhar Kapur’s remake of The Four Feathers shamelessly lionises a group of Victorian upper-class twits weaned on rugger and balls (the waltzing variety). It’s an old-fashioned stiff-upper-lipper, completely untouched by originality, logic or humour. Kapur ladles Merchant Ivory gloss all over his lush sets and soldiers. The Royal Cumbrians are dispatched to Sudan to bash the hell out of the local savages, but on the eve of departure, Lieutenant Harry Faversham (Heath Ledger) gets cold feet. His army friends — Michael Sheen, Wes Bentley and Rupert Penry-Jones — react as if he had goosed the Queen.

Three white feathers (badges of cowardice) duly arrive in the post. A fourth is supplied by his lofty fiancée (Kate Hudson). To massage his guilt, Ledger plods off to Africa, disguised as an Arab, where he plunges into a series of pointless suicidal scrapes. Kapur thoughtfully provides him with a 6ft 4in, 300lb, English-speaking native (Djimon Hounsou) to iron out most of the opposition. Those of a romantic disposition may swoon at Ledger’s smouldering eyes and al-Qaeda beard.

Finally a plug for real life as experienced by young British directors in the excellent Birmingham Film and Television Festival line-up (Nov 14-23). Debbie Isitt’s West Midlands documentary, Tribute, is a terrific zero-budget version of Spinal Tap, which charts the dismal fortunes of Britain’s only Nina and Frederik tribute act. Our deluded heroes play wobbly covers of the Danish duo’s drippy 1960s songs. Their Quixotic lust for fame takes 45-year-old Nina and 34-year-old Fred (complete with fake ginger beard) from pensioner tea parties to the pier end. Tragically, they are completely baffled by their lack of success. “We are unique,” says Nina, tearfully. “We know that, but nobody else does,” rants Fred, seething with fury that the Tweenies have poached his Little Donkey number. It’s delirious in every sense.

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