The Libertine
Johnny Depp seems to go through spurts of rampant popularity. After bursting onto the scene in the early 1990s following his remarkable performance in Tim Burton’s glorious fairy tale Edward Scissorhands he was lauded as the next big thing, but then embarked on a rather eclectic series of film choices. Never opting for the obvious big budget, typically Hollywood roles, as he more than had the looks – and offers – to do, Depp has maintained his desire for the quirky, the small-scale and the unusual throughout his career.
Since his turn as the Rolling Stone pirate Captain Jack Sparrow in the hugely popular (and great) Pirates of the Carribean a couple of years back, and as Peter Pan scribe JM Barrie in last year’s Finding Neverland, however, he has found himself once again with a public – and critics – clamouring for more – and even a couple of Oscar nominations under his belt.
Yet still he refuses to choose roles that guarantee success, only those that interest him. And so we find him, under another flowing wig and with a hideous prosthetic nose that renders him nearly as unrecognisable as he was playing Edward Scissorhands, as the 17th century poet and utter cad the Earl of Rochester in a rollicking period piece packed with debauchery, lechery, drunkenness, wit and disease that attracted controversy even while it was filming thanks to rumours of wild scenes of orgies and nudity. It sounds like it must have been immense fun to film – and as Depp seems to pick his roles for either fun or challenge, you can see the appeal straight away.
Yet this is not a mere bit of fun for a successful star who has enough money to do what he wants. Based on the play of the same name by award-winning British playwright Stephen Jeffreys, this is a far more complex beast than the early reports would have one believe. Depp’s Rochester is a complex antihero, a classic study of self-destruction, and a part that would challenge any actor to pull off. Depp is more than up to the task, having dabbled with self-destruction himself many times in the past, as his frequent tabloid appearances throughout the 1990s are a testimony to.
The prototype rock star-like behaviour of Rochester was a scandal at the time, and still has the power to shock even now, yet his tale is a tragic one, reminiscent of any number of lost geniuses whose talent was only appreciated after their deaths, a combination, if you will, of Vincent Van Gough and Kurt Cobain.
Aided by a strong and eclectic supporting cast ranging from John Malkovich, on top form as King Charles II, to Brits Samantha Morton and, bizarrely, comedian Johnny Vegas in a vast ginger wig, were it not for Depp’s assured central performance this film could have easily ended in failure. As it is, this is yet another piece of evidence to add to the file suggesting that not only is Depp one of the most interesting and surprising actors working today, he is also one of the most enjoyable to watch.
The Brothers Grimm
Former Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam’s first film in seven years couldn’t help but be much anticipated. Especially since the well-documented failure of his Don Quixote project, so painfully revealed in the superb documentary Lost in La Mancha, which brought back industry memories of his big-budget, underrated flop The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the idea that Gilliam could ever get a project funded – let alone finished – ever again was but a vague hope for his many fans.
The idea of a fantasy biopic of German fairytale maestros the Brothers Grimm, played in deliciously over-the-top style by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, where their stories are based on a reality which they reluctantly have to confront, sounds like perfect Gilliam material from the get-go. His ongoing obsession with the blurring of fantasy and reality is one that has cropped up throughout his feature film making career, from Time Bandits through the truly outstanding masterpiece that is Brazil, the sprawling visual feast of Munchausen and the more character-focussed The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys. The only idea that could have been any more perfect for Gilliam is an adaptation of the original tale of confused reality, Don Quixote itself. But that was not to be…
In the States, the film was greeted with a bizarrely mixed reaction. Some loved it, some found it very disappointing, others didn’t seem to understand it at all. All these responses are fair. It’s an utterly confusing film – especially considering how long it’s been since Gilliam’s last outing, it’s easy to forget just how damn odd, and how improvised in feel his stuff can be.
This is utterly unlike the work of pretty much any Hollywood director. The closest to his style is probably Tim Burton – but Burton has always had a far glossier feel than the often rough and ready approach of a Gilliam movie. The fact that it has been such a long time since his last outing as a director makes it even worse, as many have forgotten just what his movies used to be like – and many teenagers, who used to be among his core audience, are now too young to have even heard of him.
To compound the problem, this is old-style Gilliam – the Gilliam of twisted live-action cartoons like Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits, not the more grown-up Gilliam of The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
It has been seventeen years since he last completed a movie of this type, and in the meantime he has been consistently lauded by critics as some kind of genius. Which he is, but not in the way many imagine. His genius was always in the concepts – not necessarily in their execution.
Gilliam’s early work was always great fun, but generally had some parts that didn’t quite manage to work – yet they were always still well worth watching, and had a tendency to grow with each subsequent viewing as more and more subtle ideas that he’d worked into the background came to the fore. The same is true here. It may not immediately leap out as a classic, it may not leave you thinking it was great after one viewing, but the experience – as with any Gilliam film – is more than worth it, and you might just find that it starts to grow on you.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Val Kilmer’s name on a film poster is, these days, enough to drive anyone away. He’s been associated with more high-profile duds than pretty much any actor currently working, be it the awful The Saint to the sprawling Alexander, has built up a reputation for being an arrogant and unpleasant person to work with, and by most accounts he hasn’t managed to put in a genuinely good performance since 1993’s Tombstone, where he was truly superb as the slowly dying gunslinger Doc Holliday.
Robert Downey Jr has likewise not had much luck in recent years. Though he won wild praise for his turn in the title role of Richard Attenborough’s ambitious biopic Chaplin back in 1992, for the last decade or so he’s been more prominent in the tabloids for drug offences and imprisonment than for anything he’s managed to achieve in front of the camera, and is probably best known these days for being in an Elton John video and playing yet another in a long string of Ally McBeal’s boyfriends.
Putting these two together as the headline leads in a movie is, therefore, either utterly insane or a very bold move, depending on how much faith you have in their abilities to shake off their respective reputations and actually start to bother acting again.
Written and directed by the screenwriter behing the insanely successful and continually endearing Lethal Weapon series, the news that this is another take on the “mismatched men have to overcome their differences to solve a crime” idea that lies at the heart of that franchise might also suggest a certain lack of originality. The fear might be that this is merely a rejected script for Lethal Weapon 5 that Mel Gibson didn’t want anything to do with now that he’s not only richer than God but in the big man’s good books for The Passion of the Christ to boot.
Somehow, though, this combination of talent with chequered pasts has merged to bring out the best in all concerned. Though there may be little logic to the plot, centred around Downey Jr’s petty thief trying to make it as an actor in Hollywood under gay detective Kilmer’s tutelage amidst an LA underworld that becomes increasingly strewn with bodies, the two leads are both back at the top of their game.
This kind of movie, undoubtedly a buddy cop film in the fine 1980s tradition of Lethal Weapon, 48 Hours and Beverley Hills Cop but with a noughties twist, succeeds purely on the charisma and on-screen relationship of the lead actors. With Downey Jr and Kilmer on top of their game, as they are here after a long famine of good roles, even with the most ridiculous premise the movie would work. They both, when on form, can exude such an easy presence and charm that either alone could buoy up an otherwise poor movie. Neither have done so for such a long time, the sight of both working expertly together is a real joy.
This is by no means an excellent movie – it’s a bit too silly to become that. It is, however, great fun, solidly entertaining, and a long-overdue return to form for two of Hollywood’s finest bad boy actors. More than worth the price of admission.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
If the title doesn’t ring any bells, if you don’t know which number in the series this is, there’s little hope that this film will hold any interest – although if you’ve managed to avoid the Harry Potter phenomenon this long, either you have no interest in anything that’s going on around you, or you’ve been locked up in some far off distant land for the last few years.
Yes, it’s that time of year again, so the latest film version of JK Rowling’s still insanely popular children’s novels about the young wizard at boarding school is ready for release. With the once young and innocent cast looking ever more grown-up, the Hollywood types behind this celluloid version of the franchise must be getting worried.
This is, after all, only the fourth in the series, and though there are a couple more books – and so a couple more films – left so far, Rowling seems to have slowed down the speed of her writing now that she is officially richer than the Queen, and pretty soon the films will have caught up. Not only that, but pretty soon leads Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint will be far, far too old to continue playing schoolchildren.
This particular tale is set in Harry’s fourth year at Hogwart’s wizard school – he should technically be fourteen. Not only is actor Daniel Radcliffe already sixteen, but he looks rather older. Does this matter? Well, it means that the films are becoming ever more unlike the books. The tall, muscular Radcliffe is hardly much like the rather small and weedy Harry that Rowling seems to envisage any more. And if Rowling has yet to change the way she writes the character, those hoards of children and adults who have already read all the novels are increasingly going to come to see the screen Harry as little like the one from the page.
Yet though they may be diverging from the books, the film version of Harry Potter is at the same time going from strength to strength. Much as the first two books in the series weren’t really that great – at least in comparison to the more assured sequels, the first two films were, if we’re honest, really rather shoddy. They showed very little imagination, the special effects were dire, the child actors weren’t up to much, and the only thing that they really had going for them was being excessively faithful to the originals.
With last year’s outing, and change of director from hack Christopher Columbus to proper, talented director Alfonso Cuarón, the film franchise shifted into something more grown up, just as did its (formerly) child leads. This time the director has shifted again, but they have once again opted for a proper, experienced man behind the camera rather than a talentless figurehead – and considering this is effectively an ensemble cast picture with a bunch of very well known British actors, they have opted for one of the best possible choices – Mike Newell, probably best known for Four Weddings and a Funeral.
As such, with Newell at the helm, although this may not be as visually assured and interesting as last year’s outing, the confidence of the director in handling his vast cast, featuring as it does some of the biggest names in British screen acting, ensures that this is a worthy addition to the franchise. Even if Harry really is looking a tad big these days, he has yet to grow out of the public’s love.
The Proposition
It’s not often that you get a western these days. It’s even less often that you get a Australian western. Rarer still is the attraction of an Australian western written by cult Aussie singer Nick Cave, erstwhile lead crooner in The Birthday Party and now best known as the deep-voiced head of slightly weird music troupe The Bad Seeds.
Set as it is in 1880s Australia, as that vast island was just beginning to grow some kind of civilisation out of its penal colony status, this is a perfect yet original setting for an old-school western, the lawlessness of the Outback an ideal substitute for the Wild West of so many countless predecessors.
Chuck into the mix a cast featuring Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson and John Hurt, at the very least you’re going to end up with an interesting curiosity that would be well worth a look for novelty value alone. As it is, the final result is a very welcome surprise indeed.
Ignoring the foul-mouthed TV antics of Deadwood, yet to make it onto terrestrial in the UK, the western has been much maligned over the last couple of decades. With the advent of Star Wars and special effects, old-style gunslingers out on the open plain seem to have lost their appeal, even as many of the themes spiralled out into the expanses of the universe. The recent Joss Weedon flick Serendipity was, after all, a western in everything but setting – and even in setting in a few scenes, as the rag-tag crew got into scrapes on a desert world. But in terms of proper westerns, with the rare exception of the likes of Clint Eastwood’s superb Unforgiven, released thirteen years ago now, there have been but few since the heyday of the likes of John Ford and Sergio Leone.
This is very much a western of the Leone school – bleak, philosophical, and beautifully shot. Much as with Leone’s best work, the central theme is of one man and his conscience, as captured gunslinger Guy Pearce is forced to decide which of his fellow outlaw brothers he should betray in the wake of a brutal killing and his subsequent capture by Winstone’s gruff yet sensitive Sheriff figure, Captain Stanley.
The stark, twisted harshness of the Austalian bush is a superb setting for such a tale, recalling at once both the sandy wastes of Leone’s spaghetti westerns and the surging majesty of Ford’s favourite locations around the iconic Monument Valley. The landscape here is as much of a character as any of the actors, and it does its job superbly.
The end result is every bit as surprising and satisfying as A Fistful of Dollars must have been when it first shook the western genre to its very roots and made a superstar of Clint Eastwood. Guy Pearce returns to his top form of La Confidential and Memento, while Ray Winstone puts in one of the best performances of his career around Cave’s surprising and deep script. Chuck in close yet epic feel of a Once Upon a Time in the West, and this makes a very good proposition indeed. A welcome return of a favourite genre, pulled off with aplomb.
The Constant Gardener
Following the near Oscar success of last year’s Hotel Rwanda, Hollywood returns again to the plight of modern Africa – this time Kenya, where British diplomat Ralph Fiennes finds his outspoken, politically-active wife, played by Rachel Weisz, murdered while travelling through the lawless outer reaches of the country. Based as it is on a novel by thriller novelist legend John Le Carré, a conspiracy lurks beneath the killing, made to look like the work of bandits.
And so lie the premise behind what appears to be one of those films that seems designed to win wild praise and multiple awards. An epic mystery centred around a strong central performance from an actor lauded by all and sundry as one of the finest working today. A tragic, complex, old-fashioned tale of love and grief spanning several continents with sweeping vistas and stunning cinematography, luscious music, and with a backdrop of timely topicality. The sort of film, we are constantly told, they simply don’t make any more.
Added to the strong base that is two fine leads, top-notch source material and a broad yet compelling backdrop of highly topical political intrigue lies a well-paced yet sensitive script from Jeffrey Caine, the man behind Peirce Brosnan’s fine first Bond outing Goldeneye. But a story so sprawling could have been lost in the hands of a less capable director. Thankfully, therefore, the man behind the camera is Fernando Meirelles, Oscar-nominated Brazilian director of the superb City of God, amply aided by the lush visuals flair of his cinematographer from that movie, César Charlone. As with that earlier movie, Meirelles and Charlone have managed to produce something that always looks harshly beautiful, no matter how grotty or run down – or even how naturally wonderful – the subject at which they point their camera.
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From the wilds of Africa, Feinnes’ mild-mannered, gardening-obsessed diplomat finds himself trekking across three continents in search of the truth behind his wife’s death, providing all kinds of excuses for yet more wonderful camerawork and ever more layers of intrigue, as he exploits his diplomatic status to unearth a conspiracy – as the genre would dictate – far wider than a mere covered-up murder.
But adhering to genre does not have to detract from a movie – The Godfather, after all, pays minute attention to the rules of the gangster genre of which it is the masterpiece, just as The Maltese Falcon adheres to the peculiarities of detective movies without ever suffering. With another performance from Feinnes so natural it almost seems like he’s not acting, a deeply involving story, well-paced script, expert direction and wonderful cinematography, The Constant Gardener will certainly vie for a position near the top of any chart of the best conspiracy thrillers of recent years. If you like spy movies, murder mysteries, or even just involving, intelligent filmmaking of any genre, this is one not to be missed. Come March, the Academy will be calling.
In Her Shoes
The “chick flick” is much derided as one of the most formulaic and unoriginal of genres. Effectively a derivation of the male version, the “buddy cop” movie (which, like the Lethal Weapon series, normally have at least some cross-gender appeal), often spliced with that other much-hated genre the romantic comedy. Chick flicks always tend to revolve around two or more women who shouldn’t really be friends, who have some kind of – usually relatively minor – obstacle to overcome, and who eventually end up bonding over one or more men, be it through love or hatred. Even on the rare occasions that a chick flick gets wider critical praise, as with Ridley Scott’s 1980s classic Thelma and Louise, it is rare that anyone male can bring themselves to see what all the fuss is about.
This could be the exception that proves the rule. Directed as it is by Curtis Hanson, the man responsible for one of the best films of the last decade, La Confidential, you’d expect something fairly special. His last two movies, 8 Mile and Wonderboys were both surprising and original in their own way just as LA Confidential was, and once again he has managed to do something different with a subject matter that could, in lesser hands, come off as little more than jaded and derivative.
Centered around two excellent performances by the often underrated Cameron Diaz and the often forgotten Toni Collette, best known for Muriel’s Wedding but one of the best young female character actors in the business, while following the chick flick formula much as LA Confidential followed the Film Noir manner, Hanson and his leads have managed to transcend the restrictions of the genre to produce a chick flick that, amazingly, will also manage to appeal to the boyfriends who will inevitably get dragged reluctantly along.
Diaz is the glamorous sister, Collette the plain one – putting on a lot of weight again for the part as she did for Muriel’s Wedding, and then losing it during the shoot to reflect her character’s evolution. After a breach of sisterly trust, Diaz finds it expedient to get away from it all, tracking down a long-lost grandmother played, in a now rare screen outing by the near-legendary Shirley MacLaine, on form again after her disappointing outing in the recent Bewitched movie. As the sisters embark on their separate lives, this could so very easily have turned into a bog-standard film about family responsibility and the nature of friendship.
Somehow, however, almost all of these kinds of genre pitfalls have been skilfully avoided – something that the trailer has little chance of convincing anyone of, coming across as it does as merely the usual opposites clashing nonsense that we’ve all seen countless times before. Thanks to some skilful direction by Hanson, some perfectly on-the-ball acting by Diaz and Collette, an attentive supporting cast and a great script by the woman behind Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich based on the novel by the woman behind the story of that other great almost chick-flick, this is much more than any trailer could lead you to believe. An engaging, entertaining and intelligent movie about life and love that will leave you more than satisfied.
Everything is Illuminated
Adapted from the critically-acclaimed faux-autobiographical novel of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer, this could well be the film that allows Elijah Wood to shake off the Frodo associations which, following the insane success of The Lord of the Rings movies, threatened to haunt him for the rest of his career. Following outings in both Sin City and Green Street in which he was evidently determined to play against type, Wood here shows that he can indeed do more than merely gaze in wide-eyed terror at computer-generated beasties with a performance that is at once sensitive and quirky.
The novel on which the film is based is so sprawlingly complex that almost everyone who has read it will tell you that it is utterly unfilmable. Then again, fans of The Lord of the Rings and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas said much the same, yet Peter Jackson and Terry Gilliam respectively managed to come out with superb, if not entirely faithful, adaptations which mostly satisfied existing as well as won over countless new fans to those cult books. Liev Schreiber, best known as a solid character actor whose face you would recognise but never be able to put a face to, in his directorial debut and working from his own screenplay, has done a masterly job of translating the intricacies of the eclectic prose of the novel into a truly unusual cinematic experience.
Where the novel was a bizarre mix of folk tales, bizarre English and absurdity, Schreiber has managed to whittle away the utterly unfilmable and end up with the odd road movie that lay at the core, as Wood’s almost obsessive-compulsive Froer sets out on a journey to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, deep in the heart of Slavic eastern Europe. It is a part of the world rarely ventured into by Hollywood except as the venue for dodgy deals between Cold War spies. But here Schreiber exposes the heart, the cultural richness and the humour of the place, thanks largely to the filter that is Elijah Wood’s really very odd, yet pretty much perfect central performance, and aided by a range of excellent supporting actors, most notably the relative newcomer Eugene Hutz as the slacker travelling companion.
This should really be no surprise – for Schreiber, like Foer, is a descendant of Ukranian immigrants and first met the author before the novel had even been finished. The agreement for Schriber to turn what was then just a short story into a film has, therefore, had just as long a genesis, and is perhaps just as valid a take on the story, as Foer’s own novel. And it was largely on the initial short story which formed the core of the book that Schreiber based the movie.
Though the company is truly weird, and the journey aiming to go deep into the murkiest, most unpleasant depths of Europe’s past, thanks to some expert and sensate adaptation and some truly memorable performances, this is a journey you will not regret taking.
Wallace & Gromit - The Curse Of The Wererabbit
It’s hard to think of anyone who doesn’t like Wallace and Gromit – or even how anyone could fail to like them. There’s something about this bumblingly eccentric inventor’s bizarrely mundane adventures with his infinitely more intelligent, exasperated yet ever loyal dog which seems especially English. The ever-creative humour and pitch-perfect timing of this animated duo’s escapades, as meticulously crafted by creator Nick Park and his team, simply brings the concept to perfection.
Although they first appeared in 1989’s BAFTA-winning and Oscar-nominated short A Grand Day Out, nipping off to the moon to stock up on cheese, since the wonderfully whimsical The Wrong Trousers back in 1993, with its mechanical legwear and evil penguin, they have effectively become a national institution. In the run-up to 1995’s broadcast of A Close Shave the BBC even made the pair the centrepiece of their Christmas TV schedules, the two of them popping up in between programmes to much delight, further heightening the expectation.
And so now, ten years after their last proper outing, Wallace and Gromit return in their longest adventure yet – longer, in fact, than all their previous films put together.
There’s normally some worry when an idea which started as a series of short films not topping half an hour is expanded to feature-length. Concepts which can be sustained for thirty minutes can often seem stretched when taken to ninety, especially when they are such simple ones as a crackpot inventor whose machines have a tendency to go haywire and who has a predilection for cheese unknowingly being saved from disaster by a mute mutt. Innumerable films taken from cartoons or TV series have struggled to shake off their origins in the shorter, episodic format of the small screen. Yet when it comes to Wallace and Gromit, somehow – perhaps thanks to the success of Park’s Chicken Run film from five years ago – you know that on this occasion they’re going to pull it off.
And pull it off they have. The remarkable Peter Sallis – now in his eighties and one of the few remaining stars of long-running sitcom Last of the Summer Wine, for which he is still best known as the nervous sidekick Cleggy – returns as the beautifully distinctive, slightly whining voice of Wallace, without which it’s hard to see how the series could carry on. After being the sole voice on the duo’s first outing, this time he’s backed up by those quintessentially upper-class English stars Ralph Feinnes and Helena Bonham Carter, as well as British comedy favourites Peter Kay of Phoenix Nights, John Thompson of The Fast Show, Liz Smith of The Royle Family and Nicholas Smith of Are You Being Served? It’s a veritable wealth of distinctive voices to add extra eccentric colour to the bizarre goings on as Wallace and Gromit have to use all their nous to defeat the terrifying apparition that is the wererabbit of the title – a hulking behemoth of a bunny causing chaos in the cabbage patches.
The Legend of Zorro
It has been seven years since The Mask of Zorro catapulted its stars, Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, from moderate fame to stardom. Seven years is normally a very long time to wait for a sequel – there are few exceptions to the rule that more than three years equals disappointing box office and normally equally disappointing films.
This swashbuckling Spanish-American Robin Hood, however, is one of those enduring icons of the screen. He’d survived decades without a proper film to his name until the 1998 revival yet managed to pull it off and, much as with the likes of King Arthur and Sherlock Holmes, there’s rarely any reason to believe that we’ve seen the last of him – he’s simply too good a character, too fun an idea. After all, what could be more typically classic Hollywood than a cross between a Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler and a John Wayne cowboy? And that, at its heart, is what Zorro is all about. Oh, and fighting for truth, justice and all that, obviously…
While The Mask of Zorro was by no means a classic of filmmaking genius it was, nonetheless, a great night out. After nearly a decade of “modern” and “gritty” blockbusters, it was a return to the old-school Hollywood – the glamour, the silliness, the fun. There hadn’t been a new Indiana Jones film in nine years, and the public were screaming out for a true, uncomplicated hero, preferably with a whip, to leap about the shop like a deranged baboon once again.
No one really knew it at the time, but this was the sort of thing we all secretly wanted from our movies – stereotypical heroism, a glamorous girl, horses galloping and swordfights. Zorro was the perfect combination of the two genres that made Hollywood, and here it was on our screens once more. We could forgive the fact that the film was fairly unoriginal, because the joy of sparkling sabres clinking against each other in a rapid dance was simply too fundamentally cinematic for us to care if the plot was up to much.
So now, with Zeta-Jones now Oscar-nominated and Banderas with a great line in self-parody via the Spy Kids franchise and Shrek 2, they team up once more to bring us more of the same. Is it a top-notch film? No – but neither was the original. Is it great fun? Certainly. It has all the elements anyone could want from either a Western or a swashbuckler, with chases, fights and stunts galore plus, in a fine tradition of sequels trying to bring in the kiddie market, an adorable child sidekick – this time the son of Zorro and his dear wife, caught up in intrigue seemingly designed solely to provide excuses for old-fashioned excitement.
In short, it’s pure Hollywood: glitz galore, utterly shallow, nearly completely mindless, and hugely enjoyable – as long as you don’t go in expecting a masterpiece, you’ll have a whale of a time. Just don’t analyse it too much, or you’ll realise that when they used to refer to the movies as shadows on the wall it was largely because they were all just as insubstantial.
Sky High
Hey – superhero flicks have been popular the last few years, right? And kids love superheroes, right? And kids’ films can make bucketloads of money, can’t they? Hey – why don’t we do a superhero flick about kids with superpowers? At a school for superheroes and stuff! It’d be great!
What? What do you mean X-Men revolves around a school for superheroes? What do you mean the Harry Potter films are basically about a school for kids with incredible powers? What do you mean there was a film released only a couple of months ago, The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, which was all about superhero kids? What do you mean The Incredibles had superhero kids? Are you saying this idea’s not original enough?
But who cares? If we do it well enough, the idea’s obviously got legs, hasn’t it? It must be a good one if there have been a load of films based around it already, and if they’ve all done relatively well, right? Well, except for that Shark Boy one, but that was just because it was a badly thought-out rehash of Spy Kids by the guy who came up with that franchise and had run out of ideas.
What? No, of course this hasn’t got any similarity to Spy Kids! Just because it’s about a boy whose parents are the best at their crime-fighting game and has to end up rescuing them from one of their enemies, like Spy Kids. And The Invisibles, for that matter… But shhh! You’re such a downer, man…
And anyway, a large chunk of this film is about this kid who’s just normal and stuff, right, but then he finds out he’s got these special abilities and has to come to terms with them, right? What? No, of course it’s not just like the first Spider-man film. Or just like that Smallville TV series about the young Superman. Or just like Batman Begins. It’s totally different! Sort of…
Anyway, we can get in some actors to appeal to kids’ parents – some hero figures from cult movies, like Bruce Campbell from the Evil Dead series! What? He’s already had cameos in both Spider-man films? So what? We’ll make him a teacher at this school for superheroes and he can use his trademark charm and comic timing to full effect. And we can get in Kurt Russell from The Thing, Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China! Those are all-time eighties classics, and it’s people who were growing up in the eighties who have got kids now – they’ll love it!
In other words, as if you hadn’t realised by now, this is hardly the most original idea to have come out of Hollywood in the last few years, and seems based largely on a careful analysis of market trends and previous successes. That doesn’t, however, make this a bad film. It doesn’t make it a great film either, but then it is largely designed for the kids, and as such it’s actually really rather fun. It’s got all the ingredients you’d expect from something that’s been scrupulously market researched – and so is good for a very entertaining night out, kids or no kids. Well worth a look.
Serenity
Having turned a failed movie into a hit TV series, can Joss Whedon now turn a failed TV series into a hit movie? After the relative failure of his 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, Whedon five years later somehow managed to gain funding for a TV series based on the same concept, and turned it first into a cult hit and then a multi-million dollar smash.
This time he’s hoping that his Buffy follow-up, the sci-fi Western series Firefly that was cancelled after less than one series in 2002 despite having gained a respectable cult following, can provide him with a much-needed career boost after three years of doing very little. Even before its release Serenity, a feature-length version of Firefly with much the same cast as the TV series, seems to have – for Whedon at least – done the trick: he’s already landed the job of directing the big budget film version of hot comic book property Wonder Woman, largely on the pre-release buzz for this sci-fi actioner.
The obvious question that follows is whether or not Whedon’s apparent return to Hollywood’s favour is down to the quality of his new product or merely the fanaticism of his fans.
Well, all the usual Whedon ingredients are here – humour, stylish action and fairly decent plotting. But as he’s more used to working within the less restrictive confines of television, where he’d normally have twenty hours rather than two to play out his story, the subtleties and character development are naturally not quite as satisfyingly complex as his fans may be used to. For those who have seen the TV series from which this film has arisen this won’t be a problem, hence the good buzz from the fans – but what of everyone else?
Well, it’s sci-fi for starters, which may put some off straight away - and in any case we’ve been inundated with such movies over the last few years. Especially after the last Star Wars prequel, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could top George Lucas in terms of massive space battles and incomprehensible action. It’s also sci-fi based around a small group of comrades in arms, stuck in a tiny vessel in the far reaches of space, battling – as the rules of the genre dictate – against a far superior, malevolent force, epitomised by a sole baddie. On the surface it could seem like a typically derivative rip-off of everything that’s gone before, and to an extent it is.
What lifts this at least some way above the usual paint-by-numbers fantasy flick is Whedon’s knack for amusing, snappy dialogue and character interaction. The cast, honed as they have been by months spent filming the failed TV series stuck in each others’ company day in day out, work superbly together, even if they may not exactly be of Academy Award standard. There’s something about it which seems almost home-made in its easy charm, despite the fancy special effects. While certainly not worthy of any major accolades, if you like the genre or have enjoyed Whedon’s work in the past, you could do far, far worse than this.
Oliver Twist
There have been well over twenty different film versions of this, one of Charles Dickens’ most famous tales. Even in the last few years there have been high-profile television versions produced on both sides of the Atlantic, the British with Robert Lindsay as the perennial favourite Fagin, the American with Richard Dreyfuss – and a then unknown Elijah (Frodo) Wood as the youthful master thief the Artful Dodger.
Yet despite all these many different takes on what is, at its heart, a fairly simple story of the desire to be loved and human nature, the best remain David Lean’s 1948 take, with Alec Guinness as a deliciously over the top Fagin, and Carol Reed’s much-loved 1968 musical version.
But the very simplicity of the tale of the little orphan boy’s attempts to make it in the world has been hugely overplayed in the innumerable adaptations of the last few decades. Dickens may have dreamed up larger than life, almost stereotypical characters on occasion, but he remains one of the masters of the storytelling craft, and his true genius lies as much in his beneath-the-surface complexity and, in particular, his social awareness as his ability to spin a yarn.
Much the same could be said of director Roman Polanski – it’s often easy to forget that this is the man responsible for the groundbreakingly complex and in many ways Dickensian Chinatown, so often is he remembered for the much-parodied horror classic Rosemary’s Baby, the equally gruesome murder of his wife by the Manson Family and the conviction for statutory rape that has forced him to flee America for the rest of his life.
In 2002, after two decades of comparative filmmaking mediocrity, Polanski proved he still had it in him with the multiple Oscar-winning The Pianist. While his take on Oliver Twist may be neither as deep nor as original as that intimate portrayal of the Holocaust, nor as likely to win awards, it nonetheless shows that Polanski’s long-overdue return to form was not a mere one-off.
There still remains the question of precisely what the point is of doing a more serious version of this incredibly well-known classic when David Lean’s 1948 film is so perfectly realised. Is Sir Ben Kingsley up to bettering Sir Alec Guinness as Fagin? Well, he’s certainly up to equalling him. Are child actors Barney Clark (as Oliver) and Harry Eden (The Artful Dodger) able to avoid the usual cringe-making awfulness of kiddies on screen? Pretty much.
There of course is no point in yet another remake of such a famous and loved story other than that it is famous and well-loved. And this is a wonderfully skilled new version of it to appeal to a whole new generation – after all, musicals aren’t for everyone, and Lean’s version is in black and white, which many still seem to find off-putting. Polanski has provided over a new, charming, faithful and beautifully-shot Oliver Twist which should keep us all entertained for years to come.
Doom
Films based on computer games really haven’t got a very good pedigree. After the first attempt, the truly abysmal Super Mario Brothers back in 1993 – where both Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper put in turn which are well up there among their worst – many thought that they may have learned their lessons. After all, most games, at least back in the early 1990s, had little in the way of plot or characterisation, and how could you possibly make a film without those?
But as computer game technology advanced and games became more involved and complex, Hollywood kept track of the success of this new rival to its crown as head of all entertainment. By the late 1990s, top computer games began to make nearly as much money as many movies (and now they often surpass them), and so the studio executives began to hunt around. Tomb Raider seemed a perfect choice – a sexy, posh Englishwoman with guns battling against strange beasts in a modern Indiana Jones style. But it was awful. Resident Evil seemed another sure-fire hit – another sexy female lead, but this time with all the benefit of decades-worth of zombie film lore to fall back on. Again, failure. Let’s not even go down the path of the shockingly awful Mortal Kombat or Streetfighter: The Movie, both of which were based on games with precisely no plot whatsoever – all they involved was beating people up.
Yet despite the failure of just about every film based on a computer game so far, they’re still determined to push ahead with the idea. On the basis of games from recent years, you could see how they could think it might work – as technology has improved the likes of the Grand Theft Auto series and others do have definite plots, and borrow liberally from Hollywood, so why shouldn’t Hollywood do the same? There have even recently been computer game versions of some Hollywood classics, notably Star Wars and even The Godfather and Scarface, and almost every blockbuster is now transferred to consoles, sometimes even before it has hit the cinemas.
Yet still they don’t appear to have learned their lesson in Hollywood. Rather than take a complex, narrative and character-driven game like the ongoing favourite The Legend of Zelda and turn that into a movie, they’ve once again decided to pick one of the least cinematic titles possible – the once groundbreaking Doom. This was a game with no plot, no real characters, just first-person blowing the living hell out of everything that moves with a variety of increasingly ridiculous weapons.
The trouble is, Doom itself was largely based on a film – the 1986 action-fest Aliens. The basic idea was exactly the same – kill as many nasty beasties as you can and get out alive. Aliens, of course, had rather more to it than that, and was a moderately successful satire on not only Vietnam war films, but also 1980s capitalism – even if many of its fans couldn’t have cared less about the political commentary. The Aliens formula was taken even further in 1997’s Starship Troopers – a satire so perfect that the majority of people who saw it didn’t even realise that it was satirical. So, once you’ve had films that good revolving around mindless killing of as many nasty beasties as possible, why bother with another?
Well, in short, because it’s fun. No one expected anything brilliant from this film – not least because it stars ex-wrestler The Rock – and if anyone did then they’re a fool. It was always going to be mindless nonsense. But mindless nonsense can be great fun. Is this? Well, to be honest it depends how drunk you are. A Saturday nighter, most likely.
Domino
If you had your pick of people to play a ruthless, heroin-addicted bounty hunter, it’d normally be a fairly safe bet that Keira Knightley would come somewhere near the very bottom of your list. All she ever seems to do in all the various films in which she’s appeared since shooting to fame in Bend it Like Beckham is play exactly the kind of posh-sounding public schoolgirl that she appears to be in real life.
In this particular glossy bounty hunter action flick, however, she is perfectly cast, as the real story on which it is based is just as unbelievable as the idea that Knightley could convincingly wield heavy machine guns and take on America’s most wanted.
Domino Harvey was the illegitimate professional model daughter of Oscar-nominated actor Laurence Harvey – famed for his turns in the likes of Room at the Top and the original version of The Manchurian Candidate – and step-daughter of the owner of the Hard Rock Café chain. She was a typically plumy, good-looking middle class girl to boot, exactly the type of girl you can find strutting around Chelsea any day of the week blathering about the latest fashions and saying “yah, daaarling” a lot. Yet she ended up in some of the most grimy and horrible places in the US, mixing with – and fighting with – the kind of people you’d normally not only cross the street to avoid, but probably hail a taxi to speed away from as fast as humanly possible. She died earlier this year, aged thirty-five, apparently unimpressed with what she had seen of this Hollywoodisation of her life.
From that little overview, it should be fairly obvious that this is perfect, near ideal Hollywood material from the get-go. Domino Harvey was the sort of person who, if she didn’t exist some movie executive would have had to have invented her. In fact, arguably they already did – although it was a computer games geek rather than a film man – with Lara Croft and Tomb Raider.
Nonetheless, even though this is the real thing, the real-life Harvey’s slow descent into drug-based self-destruction is hardly as much fun as the idea of a glamorous, gorgeous, incredibly posh English model charging around with big guns shooting people. So they’ve got in the man behind possibly the cheesiest Hollywood action film of all time, Tony “Top Gun” Scott (also known to pretty much everyone as “not as good as his big brother Ridley”), and he’s applied his trademark over-the-top glossy romanticism in thick, gloopy coatings.
As such, the big budget and big-name cast (running from Christopher Walken and Lucy Liu to Mickey Rourke and Mena Suvari, not to mention the incredibly well-preserved Jaqueline Bisset) couple with Scott Jr’s rather crude taste for flashy camera effects and try-hard editing to make this, really, little more than the kind of film you’d expect had Hollywood actually invented Harvey. Little here rings of truth, and her story has been tarted up for mass appeal. But it is, nonetheless, rather fun, and probably Knightley’s best role to date – after all, at least in this outing she does something other than simply sound posh and look concerned all the time.
Broken Flowers
Of late Bill Murray seems to be making a bit of a thing out of playing middle-aged men desperately searching for some kind of meaning in their lives. There was, of course, the almost depressingly bleak and lonely Lost in Translation, then the quirky The Life Aquatic and now this which, as in that last film, revolves around the discovery of a son he never knew existed and the resultant confusion about the state of his life.
If it weren’t for the fact that Murray is one of the most instantly lovable of all Hollywood stars – from his outings among the original line-up of Saturday Night Live and stoner turn in the classic Caddyshack through Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day right up to his resurgence of the last couple of years – it would be tempting to suggest he’s getting typecast. Yet, with the sole exception of last year’s disappointing Garfield movie (for which he was, in any case, perfectly cast), his choice of roles in at least his last ten movies have been impeccable – interesting, deep beneath a placid surface and wonderfully quirky to the last. When you’re doing something so well, why stop?
So here, after receiving an anonymous letter telling him an ex-girlfriend (of which there are many) had a son by him years ago, Murray sets out to track down his old flames and discover which of them is the mother of the child he never knew existed. His by now familiar hang-dog expression, the world-weary gaze and easy, droll humour are given at least as full a work-out as they were in Lost in Translation, yet despite being in places equally philosophical, this comes closer to the comedy for which Murray became famous than Sofia Coppola’s understated take on middle age. Which considering the director is odd indy hero Jim Jarmusch is rather weird, as he’s not a man generally known for too much humour.
Jarmusch is often at his best when dealing with lone men trying to work out a problem, such as with the superb Ghost Dog and Dead Man, and here the existential ponderings of his often emotionless lead again prove a fruitful cinematic vein for him to mine. In Ghost Dog it was Forest Whittaker, in Dead Man Johnny Depp – and now, having cropped up in Jarmusch’s last film Coffee and Cigarettes, Murray gets to try and act without really doing much as well. That American critics have already been suggesting Oscar nods should tell you all you need to know.
Jarmusch is usually not for everyone – even when making a film about a hit man his pacing was relatively slow and the action intermittent at best – and is often considered pretentiously arty by his critics, yet here he has finally managed, thanks to Murray’s superb central performance and his top-notch supporting cast, to create something almost mainstream. Yet mainstream with an edge unlike that which you’ll find in your standard Hollywood fare – a different, more wistful approach to filmmaking which could well prove to be a welcome break from the usual explosions, guns and action. Certainly well worth checking out.
Cinderella Man
There seems to be something about boxing that makes for adventurous, experimental, often award-winning films. Although Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky got increasingly jingoistic and silly in the sequels, the first movie won both Best Film and Best Director at the 1977 Oscars, with Stallone getting nominations not just for his acting, but also his screenplay. Likewise, Scorsese’s elegantly brutal Raging Bull pulled a Best Actor Oscar for Robert De Niro plus a slew of nominations at the 1981 awards, while only last year Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby picked up four Oscars out of seven nominations, including Best Director, Best Film, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor.
Starring Oscar-winners Russell Crowe and Renee Zellwegger, directed by Oscar-winner Ron Howard, and set in the dark years of the American Century during the Great Depression of the 1930s in which so many great movies have done so well, if ever a boxing film looked a dead cert for Academy Award success, this was it.
Based on the true story of boxing folk hero James “Cinderella Man” Braddock, much like Scorsese’s earlier pugilistic classic it is the despair and depression of the sport star’s declining years and desperate attempts to get one last shot at proving his worth in the ring that provide the compelling focus. As America found itself struggling through economic hardship, the washed-up former prize fighter ends up the personification of the common man’s refusal to give in to overwhelming odds, clawing his way back to take on the Heavyweight Champion of the World.
This is an incredibly emotionally manipulative movie – but then it is coming from the director of Apollo 13 and Coccoon, so that should really only be expected. Somehow, however, Howard manages to avoid the kind of toying with his audience’s emotions that leaves you filling irritated and violated. In part thanks to another truly impressive turn by Crowe, amply aided by Zellwegger and the superb Paul Giamatti, this remains engaging throughout in spite of the heart strings being viciously tugged at all the while.
While Crowe – and Zellwegger for that matter – may be at best irritating, at worst punchable in the real world, when they’re on the silver screen something special seems to kick in. Real-life brawler Crowe, normally a bit of a porker, lost 50lbs for the role while training hard with professional boxers, suffering broken ribs, cracked teeth and a dislocated shoulder which set filming back by two months, making this one of the most realistic-looking boxing movies going – largely because many of the hits Crowe takes on screen are full impact punches. The thuggish Australian always seems to excel in physical roles, and once again his softer side here comes to the fore to create yet another memorable turn, certainly worthy of a few award nominations.
In lesser hands, this could be tedious, predictable, emotions-by-numbers TV movie material – but these are by no means lesser hands. Howard’s innate eye for detail, intuitive ability to get the best out of his actors, great ear for emotional pitch and eye for a good shot, not to mention a spot-on supporting cast, means this more than looks like it should easily live up to its Oscar-winning potential.
The Longest Yard
At first glance it’s rather hard to see the point. A relatively faithful remake of the 1974 film of the same name, widely regarded as one of The Dirty Dozen director Robert Aldrich’s finest, even thirty years ago this was by no means an original concept. The idea of prisoners taking on guards in sporting competitions had already been fully explored in innumerable war movies, with Aldrich simply transposing the action to a US jail and making the sport in question the already fairly violent American Football. The finished product, with Burt Reynolds on top charismatic form in the lead, was an entertaining romp with some impressively painful-looking sequences on the pitch.
So why remake it? Well, the presence of two of Hollywood’s most bankable comedians, Adam Sandler and Chris Rock, may well answer that one. After the successes of other male comedian team-ups from the so-called “Frat Pack” of Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn, it seems like a logical step for studios to try out more pairings in an attempted revival of the double act successes of the likes of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby or Lewis and Martin.
Sandler’s laid-back style paired with Rock’s trademark quick-fire banter should be a mismatch made in comedy heaven. Add to that the two actors’ large fanbases – Stiller’s alone being worth several tens of guaranteed millions at the boxoffice – and you can easily see where the studio bigwigs were coming from with this one. But sadly, guaranteed bankability doesn’t equal guaranteed quality.
As so often, the remake fails either to live up to the original or sufficiently to alter it for modern tastes. While there may be the rare Thomas Crown Affair where the remake actually manages to compete well with what has gone before, more often we end up with an Italian Job, where any happy memories of the first version are sullied, demeaned and destroyed by the ineptness of what comes after. While this is certainly not as dire as the Italian Job remake, it’s hardly a worthwhile repeat either. About the only thing it manages to improve on over the 1974 film is to tone down the racism a bit.
Stiller’s washed-up American football star, lumped in jail after getting drunk and smashing up his girlfriend’s car, fails to be either as charismatic as Reynolds’ original or – amazingly, considering in the original film the character was also a violent wife-beater – as likable. In fact, he’s a bit of a wimp. Which is hardly what you’d expect of a supposedly tough sports star trying to play of a bunch of convicts against a load of vicious prison guards. Rock, meanwhile, is the same as he ever is – wise-cracking, fast-talking, and increasingly high-pitched and irritating as the film wears on. Although his stand-up routines often work well, on film his persona is frequently too over the top to be bearable.
Despite a good supporting cast, including the always good James Cromwell and generally reliable William Fichtner, as well as – in a nice nod to the original – Reynolds himself, the whole fails quite to gel. The jokes are basic and unoriginal, while the sports scenes fail to be as brutally grunt-inducing as they really should be. If anything, it’s rather like a watered-down Dodgeball. While there are admittedly a few good laughs, this can honestly only really be recommended to the loyal fans of the two stars. Not a disaster, but hardly a worthwhile exercise either. If you want a prisoners versus guards sports flick, stick to Escape to Victory.
On A Clear Day
Once you hear the basic plot, it’s hard not to notice similarities with some of the British successes of recent years, from Billy Elliot and The Full Monty to Little Voice and Brassed Off. It’s also hard not to think that the audience for this particular kind of sweet and uplifting British comedy must surely soon have had enough. Not just yet, though.
Nominated for the Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, although this is yet another light-hearted movie about bizarre ways to avoid depression in the industrial north it’s done with an easy charm which swiftly dispels any real fears that this might be little more than another attempt to cash in on past Britflick successes.
So, forget the fact that the unemployed fifty-something Glaswegian shipbuilder who decides to swim the English Channel of this movie could easily be the unemployed thirty-something Sheffield steelworker who decides to start a strip troupe in The Full Monty and settle back for the kind of harmless, comforting, fairly predictable yet fun films we as a nation still manage to do so well.
As ever, this kind of movie revolves around the likeability of the characters and their various eccentricities. With Ken Loach favourite Peter Mullan in the lead, ably supported by perennial Britflicker Brenda Blethyn as his long-suffering, ever-loving wife, we’re already off to a good start. Chuck in Billy Boyd (the likeable Scottish hobbit from Lord of the Rings in one of his first performances since that ultra-successful series), and a range of quality character actors you are sure to recognise from various TV shows and movies over the years – playing a typically bizarre bunch of friends – and you’ve got the makings of a deliberately endearing film.
Working from a script by a first-timer and directed by a relative newcomer, despite this lack of behind the camera experience it’s a more than competent job that manages to avoid the ever-present danger with British movies of seeming like a TV special that’s somehow managed to wrangle a cinematic release. There have been altogether too many of those kinds of films in recent years, churned out to an underwhelming response seemingly just to meet government targets, and they’ve been successfully destroying the British movie industry by siphoning off money better spent on, well, better films. Let’s face it, it’s far preferable to have one Trainspotting or Four Weddings and a Funeral every two or three years than a Sex Lives of the Potato Men every six months. Luckily this is far closer in quality to the former two movies.
Still, despite the good supporting cast and sometimes surprisingly inventive direction, this is undeniably Mullan’s movie. It’s a truly engaging turn as the emotionally scarred Frank, feeling redundant in every possible way, embarks on his quest to find a purpose and sense of pride. What could have been a run of the mill, paint by numbers affair is raised up to something genuinely emotional and worthy of attention thanks to this wonderfully sweet central character, perfectly propping up the absurdity of his caricature mates and turning this into a welcome addition to this very British genre.
Howl's Moving Castle
After a few years on a steady diet of computer animated movies, as amusing as the likes of Shrek and Toy Story may have been, when Hayao Miyazaki’s whimsical, dream-like Spirited Away finally made it to the UK it seemed to prompt a mini revolution. For the first time since the dystopian sci-fi world of Akira hit our screens in the late 1980s, everyone seemed to be into Japanese animation.
As technologically inventive as a lot of the American computer animated films may have been, and as amusing as the scripts and characters, they lacked that real escapism of genuinely original imagination. Miyazaki’s hand-drawn Anime style, packed with weird and wonderful creatures and places, seemed a genuinely fresh revelation.
Of course, what many failed to realise was that Miyazaki had been making such films for decades, lauded by those in the know as the Walt Disney of Japan for his part in helping vastly to expand the reach of Japanese animation since the 1970s. And Howl’s Moving Castle is but his latest addition to an illustrious line of movies which really are best described as magical.
Yet at the same time, this is quite evidently an attempt to follow on from the international success of Spirited Away – not to mention the new-found access to English language voice talent through Miyazaki’s partnership with the Disney Corporation. So whereas the dubbed versions of his earlier films had typically awful, utterly inappropriate voices added unconvincingly to the characters, now the big-name likes of Christian Bale, Billy Crystal and Lauren Bacall have joined the English-language cast to make this the most convincingly dubbed Miyazaki film to date. (You should really still see it with the original Japanese soundtrack first, though…)
This tale of a young girl magically transformed into an old woman and her quest to regain her youth from within the vast, mechanical chicken-legged castle of the benevolent sorcerer Howl will be an ideal thematic sequel for fans of Spirited Away still unfamiliar with much of Miyazaki’s other work. It’s more of the same sort of idea, kept up to the usual exacting standards of Miyazaki’s work with superb animation as love blossoms amidst magic and a clash of good and evil.
For long-term fans of Miyazaki’s work, however, while undeniably beautiful to watch and with an engaging storyline (taken from the children’s novel by British author Diana Wynne Jones), the similarities to Spirited Away will be complemented by strong reminiscences of earlier works Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke. This may be good or bad, depending on whether you are a fan of Miyazaki for his recurring themes and style or for his rampant originality – if the latter, you are likely to be slightly disappointed.
For everyone else, however, this remains a charming and delightful movie, just as was its immediate predecessor. If you enjoyed Spirited Away you should certainly check this out, and if you’ve never seen a Miyazaki film before, this is a near-perfect introduction, splicing as it does elements from so many of his previous movies into one absorbing, visually luscious whole. Without a doubt one of the best animated films of the year.
Corpse Bride
This is looking like a superb year for Tim Burton. After his long-overdue return to form with his new take on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, released last month to rave reviews, we are now in for a real treat – a project he has been rumoured to have been working on for more than a decade, ever since the rampant success of his last animated outing, 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
When Burton’s eccentric visual style is allowed to run fully wild, as here, it can really be a joy to behold. His strangely elongated take on human beings, making them almost skeletal, adds an ethereal feel which is wonderfully complemented by the crooked twirls of the background sets. It’s a delightfully unique style in movie making, and ideally suited to the material.
Based on an old Jewish folk story, Johnny Depp voices Vincent – a homage to Burton’s hero Vincent Price as well as to the director’s very first professional film short of the same name – a young man with pre-wedding nerves. Trying to make light of his upcoming vows, he places his wedding ring on what he thinks is a stick poking up from the ground, only to discover to his horror that it is in fact the bony finger of a woman killed on her wedding day, who promptly rises from her shallow grave to claim her new husband.
Approaching the film in the same way as he did Nightmare – Burton providing concepts, sketches and a guiding hand while getting in a dedicated animator to handle the hugely time-consuming process of day-to-day direction – this is not the only similarity to that perennial Christmas/Halloween favourite. Not only is this also animated in stop-motion, a painstakingly manual task in this age of computer graphic short-cuts, Burton has also brought back Nightmare’s writer, Caroline Thompson, and his constant composing companion Danny Elfman again provides the delightfully atmospheric music.
In fact, this is very nearly a who’s who of Burton collaborators. We’ve already mentioned Johnny Depp, star of such Burton movies as Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Alongside him is Burton’s fiancée, the mother of his child and star of Planet of the Apes, Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Helena Bonham Carter. Then there are other Burton regulars like Albert Finney from Big Fish, cult hero Christopher Lee from Sleepy Hollow and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Deep Roy from Planet of the Apes, Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and even the veteran eighty-seven year old Michael Gough, best remembered for his turn as Butler Alfred in Burton’s two Batman films, who – as he did for Sleepy Hollow – has come out of retirement to lend his experience and talent to the production as a personal favour to Burton.
With a typically morbid yet strangely sweet central story, Burton has managed to create a superb follow-up to his 1993 animated classic. But rather than being a mere derivation of The Nightmare Before Christmas, as many feared, this manages to forge a style and atmosphere all its own. It’s a rare thing to see a film essentially about zombie necrophilia that’s aimed at the kids, but Burton has pulled it off with aplomb.
Pride and Prejudice
After Bridget Jones’ obsession for Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy, as he appeared in the 1995 BBC TV version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it is perhaps only fitting – and predictable – that the company that brought Bridget to the big screen have now turned their attention to the inspiration. Yep, this is Working Title’s take on Austen – the people who brought us Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love, Actually.
But the widely praised BBC TV version was only a decade ago and still readily available, so you have to wonder – why? You’re surely unlikely to get a more appropriate Mr Darcy than Firth, and Jennifer Ehle’s Elizabeth Bennett was pretty much spot on. Surely no one’s going to be able to compete with the performances of those two actors as the story’s central characters?
Well, no. As pretty as Keira Knightley may well be, she’s rather too skinny for Elizabeth. Had anyone been that poker thin during the period the story is set they’d have been assumed to have been consumptive and locked up in an infirmary, not be allowed to gallivant around the grounds of sumptuous stately homes (here played by Chatsworth, the luscious estate of the Dukes of Devonshire). She also – still – hasn’t quite got the hang of this acting lark. Although at least, in her defence, her plumy public school accent is vaguely appropriate for the character for a change.
For the rugged Mr Darcy – one of the all-time romantic heroes, and the prime reason most of the largely female audience would probably want to attend – they’ve landed themselves Matthew MacFadyen, a man of whom hardly anyone will ever have heard. He may have turned in a decent, if fairly wooden turn in the lead of the BBC TV spy drama Spooks for a couple of series, but he’s hardly a big name. Then again, neither – really – was Colin Firth until his spin in the wet shirt and slightly grumpy manner, and he’s dined well off it since. Can MacFadyen pull it off? Well, he’s likeable. But is he sexy enough?
The rest of the cast, however, are certainly top notch, ranging from the always superb Dame Judi Dench to the likes of Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn. And while a two hour movie is naturally not able to offer as much in the way of storyline or character development as a six hour TV series, this is probably as good a costume drama take on the classic novel as we’re likely to see for some time, following the Bollywood-style version Bride and Prejudice from last year and the modern day American take, which sank without trace, from 2003.
There’s still, however, the vague feeling that it’s all somewhat unnecessary. The lush costumes and scenery are all very pleasant to look at, but why bother when there’s already the BBC TV version or even the excellent 1940 film take with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier to fall back on? Why do another take on this already well-known early 19th century novel when there are so many more out there yet to see a screen adaptation? Still, it must be said that in yet another summer packed with superheroes and sci fi, this is a welcome, tranquil break from the usual Hollywood fare. If you like your costume dramas, it’s well worth a look.
Land of the Dead
If you don’t like horror films, don’t bother. If you don’t like zombies, don’t bother. If you don’t like films with lots of violence, don’t bother. For those who like all of the above, it’s time to put your happy faces on – the master has returned.
Yes, twenty years after the last film in the classic series, and nearly forty years since the first, cult hero George A Romero has returned to the zombie genre which he did so much to popularise with the low-budget 1968 megahit Night of the Living Dead, which by now surely ranks as one of the most influential horror films of all time, we’re getting a new Romero zombie movie. After the recent rather disappointing remake of that black and white classic in 1990 and the more recent remake of the 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead, now we finally get to see how it’s really done.
So, after Night of the Living Dead introduced the idea of the dead rising to hunt down and eat the juicy innards of the living, Dawn of the Dead’s superb zombie siege in a shopping mall, and Day of the Dead’s vision of the desperate underground resistance of the last remaining humans in an America entirely overrun, now we see humanity trying to recover from the refuge of a chaotic walled city fortress.
It may all sound like it’s getting more sci-fi than straight horror, but never fear – this is still pure violent, gore-filled zombie joy, complete with Romero’s trademark twisted humour. Hell, there’s even a (very brief) cameo from Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, the writer/star and writer/director of Shaun of the Dead, last year’s Brit hit spoof of Romero’s movie trilogy.
Romero is obviously fully aware that his films can be as funny as they can be scary with their often incredibly slow, mindless, lumbering zombie stars. He’s also fully aware how much his films have been loving joked about in innumerable movies over the years. He evidently realised that, as beloved as the undead beasties he created may be amongst his fans, cinematic times have moved on and zombies have been parodied so much that an injection of something new is needed to keep up the scare factor.
So this time, the zombies seem to be evolving. Rather than a mere mindless mass, in some ways a metaphor for the mob mentality which had seemed endemic in parts of America in the decade in which the first film appeared, now the creatures are beginning to work more as a team. This new strain of the rotting hive shows signs of intelligence, just as the last remaining outpost of humanity is beginning to lose its cohesion.
Doubtless more metaphors and satires could be read into this latest addition to the series – the tendency of recent years for people who should be working together in the face of a common enemy to descend into bickering and infighting over the best ways to respond - and there is certainly more to this film than mere violence. But, at its heart, it remains grimy gorefest entertainment, pitched into the top league by Romero’s uncanny knack for a shock. This is horror as horror should be – gruesome, explicit and unrelenting. A top night out for fans of the genre, and guaranteed to be a welcome addition to the beer and curry-fuelled night in for years to come.
Four Brothers
It really is about time director John Singleton got back on form. Since his debut with the superb, genre-defining 1991 gangsta flick Boyz n the Hood, he’s been involved with very little decent, first selling out to do Michael Jackson videos, more recently helming the pointless remake of blaxploitation classic Shaft and the even more pointless 2 Fast 2 Furious.
Sadly, however, this bears all the signs of being another dud. For starters, of the four leads, three are pop stars, the other a male model – and two of the pop stars are models on the side. To be fair, one of the leads is former New Kid on the Block Mark Wahlberg, who has turned in decent performances in the likes of Boogie Nights and Three Kings in the past – but he has failed to impress on screen for nigh on six years now. The others are Outkast’s André 3000, who has shown some promise but has yet to prove himself as an actor, R&B star Tyrese, and Garrett Hedlund, whose first acting gig was in the disappointing Troy as Patroclus – Achilles’ gay lover in the original classic story, but a relative nonentity in the film version thanks to American squeamishness over homosexuality.
These four – two black, two white – play deliberately unlikely brothers from a rough part of town, reunited after the unsolved murder of their adoptive mother in a bid to track down her killer. Naturally enough jocular racial tension – with a few undertones of real problems – and outsiders’ confusion ensue as they re-acquaint themselves with the grimy neighbourhood their mother called home. And then it all goes a bit silly.
This whole mixed race brothers thing could have had some interesting potential in more capable hands – and certainly with a more interesting script. Four guys coming to terms with their differences and similarities, a bonding between the races – a perfect example of the tension the US has been wrestling with since before the Civil War, what the likes of Martin Luther King preached about, which remains a major issue in certain parts of America to this day.
But no, a social character drama wouldn’t have had as much box office potential as a silly conspiracy thriller with lots of guns and fights, and so the central conceit of these guys being brothers, rather than merely a mismatched group of friends, is soon effectively dropped. The kinds of sibling rivalries that pop up are not only tedious, but would logically have been dealt with years ago if these people had actually been brought up together.
But shhh! What’s important here is not characterisation, it’s shouty Marky Mark and his non-actor friends charging around trying to look hard. The trouble is, although they all try their best, they simply aren’t remotely believable as tough guys – especially Wahlberg. Despite his famously toned torso from those Calvin Klein underwear ads, he’s only really any good at playing people who are a bit wimpy. The rugged, punch-happy version simply doesn’t work. And as he’s the only one of the leads with any real claim to being more than just a pop star or a model, if he’s not up to scratch, the entire movie’s going to fall down. Which it promptly does.
Unleashed
There has been a real glut of good martial arts films getting releases in the west over the last few years. After the appearance of Jackie Chan in Hollywood, with his own brand of slapstick violent comedy, we’ve had the grandiose beauty of the likes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers, and the likes of Steven “Kung Fu Hustle” Chow have also begun to make their mark. But another kung fu superstar who has been knocking around in the background for a while now is Jet Li, a lithe, fast and brutally graceful master of the flying kick and karate chop.
Working in films for a quarter of a century now, Li has been a megastar in his native China for well over a decade, second only to Jackie Chan in terms of box office success thanks to a series of fast-paced actioners from the late 1980s and his still youthful good looks. Making his first Hollywood appearance in the passable fourth film in the Lethal Weapon series, his other English language outings haven’t fared too well, even when as well-produced as 2001’s fun sci-fi thriller The One. Instead, for most western audiences it was his central starring role in Hero which attracted notice – a much richer and more symbolic outing than his standard spectacular fare.
With Unleashed Li is back to his roots of gritty close combat and near-unbelievable physicality, but with a very much western attitude. Written by Luc Besson, the basic storyline has a fair few similarities to some of that director’s earlier works, notably La Femme Nikita and Leon, both of which saw highly trained assassins trying to learn to cope in a life without killing.
This time Li is a dehumanised killing machine, brainwashed by Bob Hoskins’ brutal gangster to kill on command, caged like a dog the rest of the time. When a deal goes awry, the wounded Li escapes to be nursed back to health by Morgan Freeman’s kindly blind piano player, the only thing stopping the former assassin from going on a murderous rampage being the collar whose removal triggers his programming. When Hoskins re-emerges, unsurprisingly Li’s none too keen to go back to his former life.
It’s a good set up with a good cast, Bob Hoskins in particular being on top form as a larger-than-life version of his vicious gangster character from the classic British flick The Long Good Friday, while the action sequences, largely choreographed by Li himself, are as grittily beautiful and painful-looking as anyone might wish. Directed by Louis Leterrier, to date known only for his entertaining but mediocre actioner The Transporter, all the parts come together for a very satisfying whole.
Assuming, of course, that you like this sort of thing. This is very much of the old school of martial arts movie – the 1970s/80s style basic set-up leading to as much violence as possible, with a little bit of characterisation chucked in. If you’re expecting another Hero you are likely to be sorely disappointed. If, however, you fancy the kind of film Bruce Lee would probably be making if he were around today (well, and still agile enough, obviously), look no further.
The Dukes of Hazzard
Based on the cult action TV series that ran from 1979-1895, the same period and same genre as the cheesy likes of The A-Team, Airwolf, CHIPS and Streethawk, it seems rather odd that this is the first of that glut of near-classics to make it to the big screen. Smart money would always have been on The A-Team, but the movie version of that old favourite has been stuck in development hell for years – one is still pegged for release next year, but as of yet no cast or director has been finalised, which is hardly very promising.
It seems doubly odd when you consider that the whole concept revolves around two buddies driving around very fast in a retro orange car, fighting crime and corruption while cracking jokes and having fun. Sounds awfully similar to last year’s big screen version of Starsky and Hutch, doesn’t it? The fact that they’ve got in low rent versions of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, in the shape of Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott, only further underscores the point.
The added problem with the Duke brothers, not just as played by Knoxville and Scott but also in their original television incarnations, is their redneck, deep south nature – a drawling good ol’ boy Americana today epitomised by George W Bush, but made slightly uncomfortable by the Confederate flag prominently emblazoned on the roof of their car. Thanks to the vaguaries of history, this is a symbol – albeit somewhat unfairly – associated with America’s dark days of slavery and racial repression. It becomes slightly uncomfortable to cheer for people who sport such a symbol and name their car after a Confederate general in much the same way it would be to cheer for a couple of guys with swastikas on their T-shirts who call their car Goebbels.
Yet the Duke brothers were always wonderfully likeable and entertaining, aided by the buxom charms of their hotpant-wearing cousin Daisy, played here by pop princess Jessica Simpson, and the devious corruption of local bigwig Boss Hogg, here portrayed with a piece of genius casting by that other early 80s TV hero Burt Reynolds. The southern drawl and apparent stupidity was all part of their charm, along with the insane stunts and massive explosions.
As such, it should be perfect blockbuster material – blending the inanity of the likes of Dude, Where’s My Car? with high-speed thrills. The only problem is that neither Knoxville nor Scott have, to date, demonstrated that they’ve really got the ability to carry a film. Both are fairly likeable and relatively amusing, but it seems painfully apparent that the producers really wanted the Stiller/Wilson team, yet lost them to Starsky and Hutch. The lack of an experienced director only adds to the worries that this isn’t quite the glossy blockbuster that it perhaps should have been.
Nonetheless, it remains relatively solid, mindless entertainment. Not up there with the best of the summer’s releases, but worth a look at least – if only to lend support to the concept of reviving of other cult shows from the period, which may finally see us get that long-awaited A-Team flick.
Primer
This ultra-low-budget indy flick, made for just $7,000, is one of those rare breakthrough movies from a first-time writer/director/actor which genuinely deserves the rave reviews and lavish praise. Like Darren Aronofski’s Pi or Christopher Nolan’s Memento, this is a wonderfully complex and intelligent film with a fascinating and – all too rare these days – original premise. It came out of nowhere last year to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, yet thanks to its indy roots has taken a while to get distribution on this side of the pond. It’s well worth trying to catch.
Yet the praise has not been unanimous. Some critics have pointed to the lack of acting ability of the film’s mastermind, Shane Carruth, while others have attacked its sheer complexity. This is a little unfair, considering not only the glossy job he has managed to pull off with so few resources but also the fact that these same critics so often complain about the lack of intellectual stimulation in modern movies. This has intellect in spades.
The central premise – two friends accidentally invent a time machine and start working out ways to put it to their advantage – doesn’t sound anything special. There have been countless time travel movies, some more successful than others. The subject is an endlessly intriguing one, with so many potential paradoxes and pitfalls that rare is the movie that takes it on without a few trips along the way. Back to the Future may be great fun, and its sequels truly cunning in their interconnected backtracking, but in places the logic still fell down. Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys admirably managed to keep tabs on all the problems, but his Time Bandits – deliberately – was rather more nonsensical.
Does the interweaving plot here make sense? Do all the strands add up? It’s fairly tricky to tell after just one viewing, but Carruth has repeatedly insisted that, if you pay close enough attention, it does.
This is the major concern for some critics – Carruth has done such a good job of providing an intelligent, understated exploration of the ever-increasing pitfalls of time travel that it’s well-nigh impossible to keep tabs on all the various plot strands. With his background in mathematics and engineering it is entirely possible that Carruth has got all this worked out somewhere in a vast spider chart as the friendships splinter, the ability to travel back in time is misused, and the dangers of bumping into alternate versions of oneself become clear.
For an audience viewing for the first time, however, much of what is going on is – deliberately – baffling. You will need to see this film at least twice to work out what’s going on, and probably more if you really want to unravel the details and work out whether it genuinely makes sense. But despite the criticisms, despite the occasionally amateurish acting, the likelihood is you’ll want to.
Crash
Not a re-release of the controversial 1996 David Cronenberg movie about people turned on by car crashes, although a car crash does play a central part in this collection of inter-connected stories.
Written and directed by Paul Haggis, best known for his superb mid-1990s Canadian Mountie drama/comedy Due South but also Oscar-nominated for his script for Clint Eastwood’s gritty boxing drama Million Dollar Baby earlier this year, this is another of those ambitious multiple character, multiple storyline dramas in the mould of the master, Robert Altman. Setting it in LA also adds to the inevitable comparisons to one of the most recent of this type of film, Paul Thomas Anderson’s emotionally complex blend, Magnolia. Thankfully, Crash acquits itself admirably in such exalted company – not least because, unlike Magnolia, it manages to avoid being tediously self-righteous and overly long.
This is a wonderfully realised look at race relations in a city always bubbling with tension – black versus white versus Hispanic versus middle eastern, all deeply mistrustful of each other, all filled with unthinking hatred. There’s the black cop (Don Cheadle) and his Hispanic girlfriend (Jennifer Esposito), the white district attorney (Brendan Fraser) and his snobby wife (Sandra Bullock), the two black thugs who mug them (Ludacris and Laurence Tate), the rich black film director (Terrence Howard ) and his trophy wife (Thandie Newton) and the racist white cop who abuses his position (Matt Dillon). All are, in their own way, scared and unpleasant. All find their very separate worlds overlapping and colliding.
The whole thing could end up sounding excessively pretentious, but this danger is something of which Haggis seems fully aware. Unlike Anderson’s Magnolia, which was so obviously trying to be a truly great film that when it ended up being rather sub-par it was all the more galling, Crash never tries to do more than provide detailed character studies, sparkling dialogue and a blend of interconnected storylines with a simple message. In this it succeeds more than admirably, and more Oscar nominations must surely come Haggis’ way.
The actors, too, are all on top form, with Cheadle and Bullock especially notable, playing so heavily against type as they are. Cheadle, fresh from his raised profile thanks to the Oscar-nominations for Hotel Rwanda, was apparently the driving force behind this film, and his determination to make it work has shined through to be adopted by the rest of the cast with gusto.
Smooth, sleek and – despite the contrived story-telling technique – always utterly real, this is a disturbing yet near-masterly movie which shows that Hollywood can still, when it wants, provide ensemble pieces of intelligence and style. Come the Oscars, keep an eye out for this one.
The Island
Directed by the man responsible for Armageddon, Bad Boys, and Pearl Harbor, with Michael Bay in charge you know that you can expect a big, dumb, cheesy action movie with an overdose of popcorn-friendly stupidity and very little in the way of brains. Bay has, for many film buffs, become the embodiment of all that is bad in Hollywood filmmaking – glossy, superficial, entertainment by numbers. He is almost the anti-Speilberg, resolutely un-intellectual and constantly appealing to the lowest common denominator in his mass audiences. He has also, perhaps for these very reasons, been massively successful.
To Bay’s credit, his films are rarely truly terrible, with even Pearl Harbor having its redeeming features in spectacular action sequences and breathtaking special effects, but with perhaps the sole exception of The Rock, they have rarely been especially great either. They do, however, almost always achieve precisely what they set out to do – provide a couple of hours of mindless fun and action with a liberal dose of explosions, normally revolving around a fairly straightforward plot where some friends take on a powerful enemy with a bit of romantic interest chucked in for good measure.
This is, unsurprisingly, more of the same. Returning to the sci-fi genre in which he had so much success with Armageddon, Bay has turned his attention to the confusing morals of human cloning. It’s a subject which has been covered by the movies many times by the likes of the thoughtfully understated Gattica and even that classic look at identity crisis that is Blade Runner. But this time Bay’s taken it up a notch with the addition of rocket-powered motorbikes, massive explosions and breakneak chases.
Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johannson live in a futuristic utopian world, a closed community of tracksuit-wearing beautiful young things most immediately reminiscent of the 1970s sci-fi classic Logan’s Run, but glossily Americanised almost beyond belief. As ever, all is not quite as perfect and wonderful as it appears, and as McGregor’s character begins to delve into the background of their little community – and of the near mythical island to which winners of the “lottery” are sent their true position becomes clear – and escape becomes the only option. In fact, it’s rather surprising they didn’t just call this Logan’s Run and get it over and done with, as the basic plot is almost identical.
Thankfully, however, with the escape the film soon shifts both gear and direction, with Bay regular Steve Buscemi adding some much-needed quirkiness and humour – amidst an impressive cast that also features Sean Bean, Djimon Hounsou and Michael Clarke Duncan – as the action and effects kick into overdrive. If there’s one thing Bay does well, it’s spectacle. Remember the rocket-powered motorbikes? Yep – that’ll do it. Utterly stupid, yet superb popcorn entertainment.
The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl
Yet another outing from the workaholic Robert Rodriguez, just a few months after his sprawlingly intriguing overdose of stylised violence that was Sin City, this sees the maverick auteur return to the world of kids’ films in which he had so much success with his Spy Kids franchise.
Taking the same basic premise as his other childrens’ action movies, the concept for this outing seems both obvious and logical. Where Spy Kids saw the childhood fantasy of kids being mini James Bonds, this latest outing gives them pint-sized superheroes following almost exactly the same format. It’s an almost insanely simple and obvious step – so perhaps it should come as no surprise that the original idea came from Rodriguez’s young son, who gains a “Story by” credit for his pains.
Just to add to the childhood wish-fulfilment premise, here the plot hinges on a boy, Max (Cayden Boyd), with a wild imagination, ridiculed for his insistence that his kid superhero friends, the eponymous Shark Boy and Lava Girl, are real. It’s a bit of a re-tread of the ground covered by the 1980s franchise The Neverending Story, only with better special effects and no giant flying snake/dog hybrids. Once again the ordinary kid has to help the extraordinary by going off to a weird world and battling the forces of evil.
In other words, it’s all fairly standard stuff, with the promise of good special effects, the lure of the “from the director of Spy Kids” strapline, and the gimmick, used by Rodriguez for the third film of that earlier franchise, of 3-D. But although a lot of kids’ films are, by the very nature of their target audience, rather unchallenging and lacking in originality – the same plots can be rotated every ten years or so thanks to the rapid turnaround of the potential customers – it’s rare for them to be quite this uninspired.
It’s a good, simple premise, but somehow manages to fail dismally. Whether this is thanks to the reliance on the child actor leads, none of whom are up to the job, or the almost painful garishness of the rather unimaginative special effects it is hard to say. But it is, shall we say, little surprise that this movie was dreamed up by someone yet to hit double figures.
Considering the whole point of the film is the power of the imagination, as Max has to use his daydreaming skills to help his superhero buddies battle an array of stock CGI villains, the lack of imagination on display is even more galling. In a standard children’s film such blandness would be expected and forgivable, but not when the whole point is to be inspirational and mindblowing.
When Rodriguez last turned out two films in one year, with Spy Kids 3-D and Once Upon a Time in Mexico back in 2003, both obviously suffered as a result of the pressures he had put himself under. This time he seems to have put all his effort into making Sin City something genuinely special and left nothing in reserve for this outing. It may be time for Mr Rodriguez to take stock, and realise that there’s a reason why people no longer make films as if on a factory production line. Here, the vision which served him so well in Sin City is utterly lacking.
Herbie
There have been four Herbie movies to date – if you include the 1997 TV movie remake – and a TV series, all derived from the 1968 Disney classic The Love Bug, in which a San Francisco racer car driver teamed up with an intelligent Volkswagen Beetle for a series of high-speed capers. For what is basically just a car, and a car designed in Nazi Germany no less, Herbie proved surprisingly lovable, and has become a children’s comedy classic.
This new outing thankfully, after the disappointing 1997 version, doesn’t try to remake the original. It is instead fairly firmly a sequel. Herbie has been sitting in a scrapyard for the last couple of decades, his powers untapped and unknown. Given to a teenage girl (Lindsay Lohan) as a college graduation present, the dormant love bug’s powers are soon awakened – with perhaps a few too many special effects for the tastes of fans of the original – before finding a rival in Matt Dillon’s evil champion racer.
In other words, bar the initial set-up where Herbie is re-activated and a few special effects, it’s taking the original formula and rolling with it. The only major difference – beyond having a young girl in the driving seat – is that rather than rally racing, this time it’s NASCAR. And a forty year old Beetle in that sort of race is even less believable than a car with a mind of its own – especially in this age of satellite-guided navigation systems and “intelligent” breaking.
But it’s not the originality that matters in this kind of film, but the stunts, the jokes and, considering the presence of Lindsay Lohan in the lead, the sweetness and tentative romance. On these fronts, it’s certainly a passable kids’ comedy – but of the old school, with few concessions to the poor adults dragged along. Parents will instead have to content themselves with wondering whatever happened to the once promising careers of Michael Keaton and Matt Dillon that they have to stoop to this kind of movie.
With a fairly bland script it’s nothing special, but hits all the marks competently enough for its purposes. A handy diversion for the kids, who should be more than happy to be introduced to the little car which has brought so much joy to so many. Not only that, but then you’ll have a good excuse to go out and buy the originals, watch them all again, and show the kids how this sort of movie was so much better in the good old days. At which point they’ll probably turn round and remind you of precisely how old you are. Which is never much fun.
Bewitched
The 1960s saw two sitcoms revolving around suburban couples where the wife had magical powers, the genie-based I Dream of Jeannie and witch-based Bewitched. Both had their moments, the former largely thanks to the presence of Larry “JR” Hagman as the long-suffering husband, the latter thanks to the wiggly-nosed charms of Elizabeth Montgomery.
Between them these two shows built up nearly 300 episodes – each and every one concerned with the need to prevent friends and relations of the central couple from finding out about the wife’s powers. That’s around 9,000 hours of comedy all hinging on one basic premise – is there anything left for a feature-length movie? Well, considering next year promises an I Dream of Jeannie flick as well, someone in Hollywood seems to think so.
Still, a straight update of the original sitcom premise seems to have been decided not to be quite interesting enough. Instead we get a slightly postmodern take on the thing – this is a film about updating the sitcom, with Will Ferrell as the star set to play the beleaguered husband and Nicole Kidman as the unknown cast to play his witchy wife. With this premise, the twist is predictable – Kidman’s character is a genuine witch. A witch pretending to be a regular human playing a witch pretending to be a regular human. It’s as much a magical version of the Julie Andrews classic Victor/Victoria, where the dancing Dame played a woman pretending to be a female impersonator, as it is a straight update of the sitcom from which the film takes its name.
It’s a moderately promising premise, if a tad odd to waste the rights to a remake on something that isn’t quite a remake, with a quality cast that includes Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine, teaming up again as they did in 1966’s sub-par caper movie Gambit, as Kidman’s supernaturally-powered parents.
Sadly, however, neither the plot nor the characters really seem to sparkle. Co-written and directed by Norah Ephron, the woman responsible for, among others, classic romantic comedies Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, the emphasis on the frankly implausible blossoming relationship between the egotistical Ferrell and sweetly innocent Kidman never quite manages to engage, while the comedy set-ups are all fairly predictable and repetitive.
The cast try their best with the lacklustre material, but they really haven’t got much to work with, and Ephron’s unimaginative, visually uninteresting direction really doesn’t offer any help. It’s perhaps ironic that, in a movie revolving around witchcraft and the kindling of love, there is absolutely none of that Hollywood magic which lifts mediocre films to the level of something special. Considering it took them thirty years to get this sitcom onto the big screen, you think they would have tried a little harder to create something worthy of the name.
War of the Worlds
It’s hard not to wonder what the point is. Even if Orson Welles’ version of H.G. Wells’ classic tale of Martian invasion hadn’t broken the mould for radio drama by causing panic across America there would be the 1953 film adaptation, still good after all these years. Then there are all the many TV versions and, of course, two utterly different yet equally great (in their way) modern movie updates in the huge blockbuster Independence Day and the cult comedy Mars Attacks! Yet this year there are no less than three different film takes on The War of the Worlds – even if this team up of megadirector Steven Spielberg and megastar Tom Cruise is the only one likely to see a release on this side of the pond.
Much like Independence Day, the special effects are massive, the dread of the approaching space ships is palpable, and the storyline is only tangentially related to H.G. Wells’ original novel. As with most previous adaptations, the action is also relocated to America – which makes sense in plot as well as commercial terms, as watching huge North American cities get disintegrated is always going to be more impressive than the destruction of balmy English villages.
However, this is where Spielberg’s take and that of the producers of Independence Day actually begins to diverge. Sensibly realising that spectacle is becoming a tad passé with the massive influx of sci-fi movies the last few years have brought, Hollywood’s favourite director has, much like with his Close Encounters of the Third Kind, opted for a more intimate approach to alien invasion. He focuses on a small group of ordinary people simply trying to survive, rather than the more standard blockbuster fare of larger than life heroes taking the battle to the aliens. Whereas Independence Day brought us the President of the United States battling flying saucers in an F-15 fighter jet, here the entire film is told from the perspective of one small family, with Cruise at its head, scrabbling through the chaos.
In this respect it is, despite the many changes from the original book, rather more faithful to Wells’ vision. Whereas most big sci-fi epics are rather impersonal with their constant quest for “the wow-factor”, here the audience can really begin to associate and identify with the plight of the movie’s heroes, simply because they are (bar Cruise’s pretty-boy features) so normal. Rather than an action movie, as the trailer may have made it appear, this is far more psychological – and as such, both more interesting and more terrifying.
Add to this mix a lush score from film soundtrack legend John Williams, the man responsible for the music of, amongst countless others, Star Wars, E.T. and Jaws, and wonderfully atmospheric cinematography from long-time Spielberg collaborator Janusz Kaminski – who did such wonders with Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List, and this makes for yet another roaring hit for the man who is already the most successful director in film history.
Sky Blue
Korean cinema is undergoing a major renaissance at the moment, with a series of minor hits and numerous relatively small-budget, critically acclaimed movies hitting film festivals worldwide. The majority have been heavily influenced by recent Japanese cinema – notably the likes of “Beat” Takeshi Kitano’s gangster flicks and the horror movies of Hideo Nakata and Takashi Miike. Now it seems they’re branching out into Japanese-style animation to boot.
Since the success of Hayao Miyazaki’s enchanting Spirited Away, western interest in Asian animated films seems to be on the rise. Perhaps with the spread of American feature-length cartoons away from merely Disney fairy tales with the likes of Toy Story and Shrek there is also a growing appreciation that cartoons are not merely for kids.
Until recently, if you wanted cartoons aimed at adults you’d go to Miyazaki’s homeland of Japan. There has been some interest in Japanese Anime ever since Akira burst onto our screens back in the late 1980s, and this latest animated sci-fi epic is very much in that mould – not least thanks to the designs of the futuristic motorbikes. But as it’s Korean, it looks like Japan may finally have a rival in the animation for grown-ups market.
Seven years in the making and with a price tag of $10 million – a lot for a Korean movie – Sky Blue was originally released as Wonderful Days back in 2003, but has only just made it to this part of the world. Set in a now fairly familiar post-apocalyptic future, the year is 2142, and the city of ECOBAN is running out of fuel, its scientist founders resorting to using human beings as furnace fodder to keep their dream alive. As is so often the case with this kind of science fiction set-up, a group of freedom fighters are determined to destroy the city and save the oppressed masses. It’s The Matrix without the alternate reality and robots, basically.
An innovative blend of traditional hand-drawn and computer animation, this is the kind of visual feast which the big screen was made for. In fact, it would be perfect for an IMAX screen, as the level of background detail is such that bigger is most certainly better. The fact that the plot is hardly original and the script nothing overly special is entirely incidental. The entire film is an sumptuous orgy of special effects and surrealist images of a dystopian future vaguely reminiscent of a combination of Akira and Blade Runner. Which, let’s face it, can’t be bad.
Although sometimes the blend of traditional and computer animation jars a tad, it is nonetheless the kind of eye-candy which all too rarely gets an outing on UK cinema screens, and as such should be taken full advantage of. Even with its flaws, this is one of those movies that really demonstrates the exhilarating power of the movies.
Madagascar
It’s always tempting, when visiting a zoo, to feel sorry for all the animals locked up in their cages. They should surely be out in the wild – roaming the vast African plains, wandering through lush jungles, or diving into crystal-clear waters in search of fresh fish – not cooped up in tiny enclosures being fed meat they haven’t hunted themselves or chewing on dried hay rather than sweet green grass. That film about the theme park killer whale, Free Willy, only emphasised this tendency, as the mighty beast befriended a small boy before that ridiculously cheesy yet strangely satisfying moment where he leapt the enclosure wall to freedom.
Of course, what that movie didn’t show was what happened to the real whale when it was released into the wild. After a few weeks of acclimatisation, the effectively tame orca wandered off for a few days to try to catch some fish on its own. She failed dismally, and soon came skulking back to her erstwhile captors in search of a spot of lunch. In fact, she never managed to hack it in the real world. For most zoo animals the same would be true – captivity has bred complacency, and they can never survive on their own.
Here, a bunch of cocky zoo creatures – principally Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Melman the Giraffe and Gloria the Hippo, voiced by Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, David Schwimmer and Jada Pinkett Smith respectively – decide they fancy seeing life beyond their cages. Charging through the city in which their zoo is based they have a stupendous time. But it’s not so much fun when they find themselves deported, shipwrecked and washed up on the shores of Africa – well, Madagascar to be precise, hence the title – and have to try and get by not only in the world in which they were meant to live but also with its inhabitants.
This latest computer-animated kids’ flick from Dreamworks has some good concepts and a decent cast. But coming as it does hot on the heels of their rather disappointing Shark Tale, which also had a good concept but benefited from a truly great cast, many may be a bit wary. There are surely only so many wacky talking animals flicks these people can get away with, and if they couldn’t get an underwater gangster movie with Will Smith, Angelina Jolie, Jack Black and Robert De Niro to work, how can they fare better with a cast that includes the guy responsible for Ali-G?
Well, here’s how – penguins. Penguins are brilliantly silly creatures anyway, but turn them into devious masterminds who work like a S.W.A.T. team to organise a series of escapes from captivity and you’re on to a real winner. If your kids don’t love the penguins get them to a doctor post haste – there’s something wrong with them.
These silly creatures don’t quite manage to lift the film to the level of the likes of a Shrek or a Toy Story, but the penguins alone will at least ensure that your time at the cinema isn’t a total waste. Not a great movie, but not a bad one either. But then, it is for kids.
Dark Water
In 2002, cult Japanese horror director Hideo Nakata released an understated yet highly effective psychological horror flick, which focussed on a recently-divorced woman fearing she’s going mad in a strange and foreboding apartment block where objects seem to move of their own accord and, from somewhere up above, water is constantly seeping. After the runaway success of Nakata’s cursed video-based Ringu a few years earlier, such a retrained take on sinister seemed to have less immediate appeal to audiences, even though it was adapted from a novel by the same author and many critics raved.
This is the American remake, a phrase which often horrifies fans of Asian horror movies far more than the contents of the films they love so much. Never mind haunted videos and ghostly, murderous beings crawling out of television sets, with remakes there is always the danger of the dreaded curse of Hollywoodisation. American studios seem to have a tendency towards simplifying and dumbing down the often very finely nuanced atmospheres of the originals in a desperate attempt to appeal to western audiences more used to the blood and guts horror of the likes of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
No such danger here. Although Nakata himself is not directing, as he did with the disappointing US remake of his own sequel to Ringu, Brazilian director Walter Salles has captured the spirit of the original perfectly, and if anything used the pressures of Hollywood to his own advantage with a cast packed with people whose very presence adds to expectations of the unexpected.
If the likes of Brits Tim Roth and Pete Postelthwaite turn up in an American movie, they are usually playing someone a tad dodgy. Likewise put generally affable character actor John C Reilly in a sinister setting, his most recognisable screen persona of the put-upon everyman becomes slightly distorted, and his past roles as various good natured chaps lend the film an added air of uncertainty – he may, after all, be playing against type. Chuck in Shelley Duvall, still best known for Stanley Kubrick’s masterful horror of suspense The Shining, and Dougray Scott, who has played a fair few baddies in his time, and you’ve got the makings of a very promising film.
But his is merely the supporting cast. The film actually revolves almost entirely around the always superb Jennifer Connelly and her gradually growing unease and ever-approaching psychosis as she tries to create something approaching a regular family life amidst the darkly threatening corridors of the hulking apartment building.
But even with such a fine cast, atmosphere is everything. Thankfully Salles has enlisted the aid of some masters of the art, with cinematographer Alfonso Beato making the very best of Térèse DePrez’s grimy sets and David Lynch’s favourite composer Angelo Badalamente complementing the whole with a trademark darkness of a score. For once the Hollywoodisation has not been a bastardisation. In fact, it could even top the original. Just don’t go and see it on your own…
Wedding Crashers
A buddy movie cum romantic comedy starring Vince (Swingers) Vaughn and Owen (Starsky and Hutch) Wilson. It’s got to be good, right?
Vaughn and Wilson are best mates whose principle pastime seems to involve the seduction of as many women as possible. Being cunning, amoral types they’re only after one night stands and couldn’t care less about anything other than getting their wicked way. Being typical lazy men, anything which involves too much effort simply isn’t worth it – even women. So they opt to hang out at the one place where it’s guaranteed that single women are going to be emotional and off their guard – weddings.
Director David Dobkin, best known for the Owen Wilson / Jackie Chan action comedy sequel Shanghai Knights, manages to bring out the best of the material and cast – including a number of supporting players who may seem somewhat familiar, from Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken to Isla Fisher from Aussie soap Home and Away.
Even so, with leads less charming and amusing than Wilson and Vaughn, this set-up could have crashed and burned from the get-go simply for its unapologetically devious and misogynistic premise.
Both are, however, thankfully on absolutely top form, and make the very most of a script which could, in less capable hands, have otherwise fallen a bit flat. As Wilson accidentally meets the woman of his dreams, Vaughn gets mistaken by one hapless girl as the man of her dreams and the two buddies’ friendship starts to go awry, they are each able to hold attention and interest individually as well as part of a duo.
Vaughn, as the – shall we say – less sensitive of the two, not to mention the mastermind of the wedding crashing plan, naturally gets most of the best lines, with Wilson picking up the more standard romantic lead role alongside his love interest Rachel “Mean Girls” McAdams. But Wilson has such a uniquely laid-back style, a bit like a hunky, blond Jimmy Stewart, he more than holds his own even with the less interesting part.
It’s a fun film with a fun premise which, while featuring a whole array of what are little more than sexist stereotypes and set-ups, still manages to remain endearing and sweet at its core. In lesser hands than those of Wilson and Vaughn, who make a great double act which will doubtless be revived in future ventures as Wilson’s team-ups with Jackie Chan and Ben Stiller have already, it could have been uncomfortably chauvinistic. Thankfully they pull it off with aplomb.
The Fantastic Four
Yep, it’s the summer, so it’s yet another movie based on a comic book. We’ve already had Batman Begins, Sin City and Constantine this year, and we’ve still got V for Vendetta and more sequels to X-Men and Spider-man plus a revival of the Superman franchise to look forward to over the coming months, not to mention countless other comic book projects which are currently chugging their way through the Hollywood pipeline to cash in on the superhero genre’s successes of recent years.
For those unfamiliar with this particular superhero team, the Fantastic Four bear little resemblance to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five or Secret Seven beyond their hobby of occasionally trying to thwart crimes. There are few lashings of ginger beer, more lashings of over-the-top action and special effects.
The Four are boyfriend and girlfriend astronauts-cum-scientists Reed Richards and Susan Storm, plus Susan’s brother Johnny and their fellow astronaut Ben Grimm. On a jaunt into space they run into the usual comic book disaster which leaves them all with superpowers – Reed able to stretch his body, Susan to become invisible and create force fields, Johnny to fly and turn into a human fireball, with Ben getting the raw deal of turning into a hulking, super-strong lump of orange rock.
With the exception of “Human Torch” Johnny, you might think that these powers are lacking somewhat. You’d be right. The Fantastic Four have always been a little bit stupid – no cool adamantium claws like Wolverine, no webslinging like Spider-man, no laser eyes like Superman, and no dark psychological problems like Batman. Ben Grimm’s transformation into “The Thing” makes him little more than a slightly more articulate orange version of The Incredible Hulk, while Reed’s stretching ability is simply silly and Susan’s invisibility-cum-mild telepathy is hardly either that useful or impressive.
And then we’ve got the Four’s arch-enemy, the rather dumb sounding Victor Von Doom who, unsurprisingly with a name like that, is a metal-clad supervillain with the rather unimaginative moniker of “Doctor Doom”. The usual battles and fights and the like ensue. To add insult to silly premise injury, they’ve even messed around with the characters a bit, ensuring the fans of the comics are up in arms.
To be fair director Tim Story, the man behind comedy hit Barbershop, makes the best of a bad premise, but with such incredibly uninspiring characters to work with their cast – of whom Ioan Gruffudd and Jessica Alba as Reed and Susan are probably the best known – does little but struggle. The special effects are, as with most films these days, pretty good, but somewhat let down by the decision for “The Thing” to be portrayed via a man in a prosthetic bodysuit rather than CGI, making him rather less impressive-looking than could have been managed had they made him a tad bigger and more agile.
In short, certainly not the best comic book adaptation to date. But it’s still by no means terrible. If you fancy a silly slice of sci-fi, this will while away a couple of hours fairly happily.
Silver City
A clumsy, inarticulate and apparently rather stupid guy running for high political office after a lifetime messing about, largely because his father’s already a successful politician with good connections? Sound a tad like a certain George W. Bush, perchance? This political satire from cult indy director John “Sunshine State” Sayles is, however, thankfully more than merely another jab at the current U.S. President – although there are jabs aplenty.
The always superbly subtle Chris Cooper is Dicky Pilager, son of veteran Colorado senator Jud Pilager, and is following his father into the family business by running for governor. His mastermind campaign strategist Karl Rove – sorry, Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss) – is evidently the brains of the operation and, when the hapless candidate drags a corpse out of a lake while fishing for a campaign ad, takes charge of the situation, calling in a former hot-shot journalist to investigate any links between the stiff and the Pilager dynasty’s enemies that might be exploited for the campaign.
Cooper’s performance as Bush – sorry, Pilager – is absolutely spot-on, a near-perfect pastiche of the current president’s various idiosyncrasies, but still different enough to be more than just impersonation and allow room for deeper characterisation than merely aping a prominent real-life figure would allow. Chuck in a great turn from Dreyfuss and a supporting cast that includes the likes of Tim Roth, Billy Zane, Kris Kristofferson, Daryl Hannah and Thora Birch and you’ve got the makings of a good little film.
While the British general election earlier this year passed by with little scandal or incident, the prevalence of money in almost all American political races ensures that at all levels there is scope for surprises and corruption. While most American political movies focus on Washington and the White House, having a glimpse at the state level, even such an irreverent look as this, can help build a better understanding at just how different U.S. politics is from our own.
Of course the main concern with any political movie, satire or not, and especially one revolving around the uncovering of a devious conspiracy, is whether the basic premise is plausible. Could the complex web of interconnections between the Pilagers and their rivals, the lies, the dodgy deals all be kept secret for so long? Well, let’s face it, if it took thirty years for Deep Throat’s true identity to be uncovered, and he was the most mysterious figure at the heart of the biggest political scandal in American history, then yes – it is entirely plausible. That doesn’t stop it from being silly, but then this is at least in part a satire, so a bit of silliness is probably allowed.
Though by no means one of those must-see political movies like Nixon or All the President’s Men, Silver City still has much to recommend it to anyone even slightly interested in American politics – and in this day and age who can afford not to be?
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Tim Burton’s take on Roald Dahl’s classic children’s tale of a young boy who wins a tour of the mysterious Willy Wonka’s fantastic sweet factory has been awaited with a mixture of expectation and dread.
The Gene Wilder-starring 1971 film version of the story, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is for many an all-time favourite thanks to its combination of a superb central performance, the weirdness of the Oompa-Loompas and a number of catchy songs, and its fans have been fearing a desecration of their fond memories. Equally, Tim Burton has not been on best form over the last few years, with Big Fish not being up to the standard of his earlier masterpieces like Edward Scissorhands and his “re-imagining” of Planet of the Apes being, even to his most ardent fans, a load of old rubbish.
The fact that this is another Burton “re-imagining” of a favourite cult classic has led many to fear the worst, but at the same time it is a return to the kind of territory in which he has so often excelled – an eccentric loner in a weird world which allows plenty of scope for Burton’s trademark visual inventiveness. And then there’s the fact that the always excellent Johnny Depp has taken the Wonka role and really made it his own, basing it on a combination of weirdo popstar Michael Jackson and shock-rocker Marilyn Manson just as he based Pirates of the Carribean’s Jack Sparrow on Rolling Stone Keith Richards, adding promise of something truly special.
Oddly, considering this version has the boy Charlie in the title and the 1971 version opted to push Willy Wonka, whereas the child was the main focus of the earlier film, here Depp’s Wonka not only steals the show but is the main focus of the movie. Let’s face it, a reclusive and eccentric sweet manufacturer is always going to be more fun and interesting to watch than a sweet and innocent, poverty-stricken boy. So whereas Wilder’s Wonka was odd without explanation, here we are treated to flashbacks revealing the genesis of this utterly weird entrepreneur, and how he came to be living in his bizarre factory with only the dwarf-like Oompa-Loompas (complete with their song and dance numbers) for company.
This extra characterisation, missing from both book and earlier film, adds much, works superbly, and ensures that few fans of the 1971 version will resent this new take on Dahl’s tale. It also means that, in the wake of Michael Jackson’s acquittal, it will be hard not to see parallels with the erstwhile King of Pop, as Wonka is, beyond being merely just another eccentric innocent in a long line of Burton odd-ball heroes, quite uncannily like that plastic-faced megastar.
It is about time that Burton had a real return to form, and this is it – plus we’ve still got the Depp-starring, Burton-directed Corpse Bride to look forward to later in the year.
We Don't Live Here Anymore
Whereas the other film focussing on the troubles of married life released this month, Mr And Mrs Smith, sees the spouses start resolving their difference with over-the-top guns, explosions and stunts, this look at the simultaneous breakdown of two couples is a rather more sombre and serious affair.
The Lindens (Mark Ruffalo and Laura Dern) and the Evanses (Peter Krause and Naomi Watts) are close friends, all frustrated with both their personal and professional lives in their small New England town. And so begins a wonderfully realised exploration of the tensions and difficulties of any close mixed-sex friendship, as feelings of companionship and matey closeness become confused and confusing. The basic premise may initially sound uninteresting, but with a cast like that you know this is likely to be something special.
Director John Curran manages to bring out the very best in his excellent cast, drawing out the humanity and compassion behind a tale of marital strife which could, with less subtle talents behind it, easily seem cold and alienating. The sheer likeability of all involved quickly draws the audience in, as small town life is perfectly created – along with all the little secrets behind closed doors.
The two couples, both sets of husband and wife still deeply in love despite their frustrated ambitions, become blurred. Their friendships lead to heart to hearts which lead, as these things are sometimes wont to do, to infidelity – but an infidelity where neither party really wants to leave or hurt their long-term partner while still not being able to stop.
It seems odd that a film revolving around such a disheartening subject as extra-marital affairs and romantic anguish can remain so sweet and engaging. This is in large part why it works so very well. Unlike in most other cinematic portrayals of relationship breakdowns there is no one to hate, no one to blame. As in life the motivations of all parties are clearly understandable and fully sympathetic.
As such, it must rank as one of the most interesting and best explorations of love American cinema has yet produced. Already dubbed “the best American movie so far this year” by The New Yorker on its US release last August, many critics were rightly surprised that it was overlooked by the Oscars. The fact that it didn’t receive any nominations is a genuine injustice – this is a beautiful, intelligent and deeply engaging film based around a quartet of masterly character studies from its stars, and a worthy escape from the blockbusters that are currently dominating the multiplexes.
Sin City
Whether over-the-top violence is your cup of tea may well affect your approach to this movie, but the thing which will remain most striking is the highly unusual look. This is almost entirely unlike anything you will have seen onscreen before.
In terms of structure, Pulp Fiction will probably be the comparison most often bandied about – and not merely because Quentin Tarantino directed one of the scenes and Bruce Willis co-stars. Following three loosely-connected storylines, the emphasis is on brutal violence and confusion amongst corrupt and criminal lowlife, centred around a tough streetfighter, an accidental murderer and a wrongly imprisoned cop, it is not the storylines which will first strike anyone.
Co-directed by Robert Rodriguez of Once Upon a Time in Mexico fame, a close friend and follower of Trantino’s, you may think you’d know what to expect. But the real impetus for the directorial style comes not from him, but from first-timer Frank Miller – the veteran cult writer/artist of innumerable comics and graphic novels, and the creator of the original comic book series of which this film is an adaptation. Miller’s harsh, idiosyncratic drawing style has here been recreated just about as faithfully as it possibly can be for the big screen without being an animated movie.
The harsh blacks and whites, brief flashes of primary colour, and all-pervading sense of shadow and decay help make this one of the most beautifully horrid films noir in years. This is the Gotham City of Tim Burton’s Batman movies blended with the gloomy metropolis of Blade Runner and the grimy late 1940s urban landscapes among which Philip Marlow might hunt for clues, heightened and made yet more surreal by crisp monochromes which indicate a visual inventiveness never before hinted at in Rodriguez’s prior work. It all comes straight from the original comics – shots set up as similarly to the original drawings as is physically possible while working in three dimensions rather than two.
So, it should keep the fans happy, at any rate – but what is there for the non-geeks? Well, there are the wonderfully perverse performances from the incredibly talented ensemble cast for one. Alongside Willis are Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Rutger Hauer, Jessica Alba, Mickey Rourke Brittany Murphy, Michael Clarke Duncan, Michael Madsen and even Frodo himself, Elijah Wood, turning in one of the most sinister performances of the year – so unsettling as to be almost certain of shaking off his wimpy image of The Lord of the Rings.
Then there’s the violence – almost insane levels of frequently highly unpleasant violence. Enough almost to make Tarantino’s flicks look like family movies, and stylised to an extent that even the most gruesome become artistic vignettes in their own right. It is, simply, stunningly beautiful – while being simultaneously revolting.
While certainly not being one to take your grandmother to, if you have ever enjoyed an old Humphrey Bogart movie or revelled in the ultraviolence of a Kill Bill, this has to be one not to miss.
Mr And Mrs Smith
After his recreation of the spy genre with 2002’s gritty amnesia flick The Bourne Supremacy, this initially seems like a rather odd choice for former indy wunderkind Doug Liman, who first came to the world’s attention with the casually witty 1996 buddy comedy Swingers. After all, it’s a remake – and not of the rather weak 1941 Alfred Hitchcock comedy of the same name, but of an even weaker, quickly cancelled television series from the mid-1990s starring Quantum Leap and Star Trek: Enterprise’s Scott Bakula. On the surface, it’s not a very auspicious start.
But no one really cares about the director here – it’s Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie everyone will be going to see. The rumours of a blossoming on-set romance between the two stars, each entirely rightly counted as among the most gorgeous people in the world, will be more than enough to pique the interests of the gossip column-reading crowds. It’s like Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, Cruise and Cruz in Vanilla Sky or Hepburn and Tracy in Woman of the Year all over again. The fact that both actors are – at least, when they try – masters of their craft is simply an added bonus.
So – talented director, two insanely good-looking leads that rumour has it are an item in the real world. The plot seems pretty much irrelevant by this stage – which is probably just as well, because it’s insanely silly.
Pitt and Jolie are an increasingly bored married couple – disillusioned with their humdrum life together and heading towards a breakup. But – wait for it – they are both highly-trained assassins, working for competing organisations under secret identities so closely-guarded that even husband and wife don’t know about each other’s alternate lives. Sure enough, they are hired to kill each other – still unaware how very well they know their targets.
Cue the firing of ridiculously improbable weaponry and resultant huge explosions, viciously-choreographed hand-to-hand combat, spectacular stunts (and, for Jolie, costumes which will turn the men in the audience into gibbering wrecks) and – naturally – the slow rekindling of the Smiths’ initial romance long after they thought it was as dead as their masters want them to be.
Naturally enough with such a concept, this could have simply been a nonsense blockbuster. The basic idea behind it is, after all, somewhat reminiscent of the dumb but fun 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle True Lies, where the Governator’s James Bondish secret agent ended up going up against a group of international bad guys while trying to keep his wife in the dark.
Thankfully, however, the sheer talent involved both in front of and behind the cameras here ensure that this is a cut above the usual summer fair. It’s still basically a big dumb blockbuster, but with a panache and self-awareness that will ensure it’s practically impossible not to love it.
League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse
When BBC2 first introduced viewers to the world of The League of Gentlemen and their creation of Royston Vasey back in 1999, after several years of its founders trawling the comedy and radio circuits, it was difficult to know quite what to make of it. It was bloody funny, certainly – but was it a sketch show or a sitcom? Was there an ongoing plot, or just a collection of oddities and vignettes?
As the series progressed – there have been 18 episodes to date plus an hour-long Christmas special – the intricacies of the intertwined plotlines began to get ever more convoluted, sinister and bizarre even as the denizens of the odd little northern town in which the show is set became more grotesque. Meanwhile, Little Britain has cropped up to adopt much of the more absurdist character comedy even as the League themselves have pursued darker paths. Always an unsettling style of humour, the lesser incidence of catchphrases and greater emphasis on disturbing plotlines in their more recent outings seems to have lost them a number of the early fans.
In all, this not only seems a rather odd choice for a feature film adaptation, but also an odd time to do it – at least in terms of popular appeal. But in terms of the League’s ability to create involvingly ingenious storylines and highly unpleasant yet engaging characters, they remain at their peak.
Here a number of the familiar denizens of Royston Vasey – braindead Mickey, psychotic Pauline, Edward and Tubbs from the Local Shop and the terrifyingly unsettling Papa Lazarou – are faced with the destruction of their home of choice. Soon three of Royston Vasey’s residents, butcher Hilary Briss, German tour guide Herr Lipp and loser Geoff, venture beyond the borders of their little town and into the real world to track down those responsible for its imminent destruction.
As should be expected by now from the talents of writer/stars Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, the unexpected should always be expected. Here, the “real world” is just that, and the writer/actors also appear as themselves, creating what media studies courses would probably term a post-modern metatextual paradox – especially when the film is consciously morphed into another altogether halfway through.
What this actually amounts to, however, is a far more interesting and successful approach to translating a British comedy series to the big screen than pretty much anything since the Monty Python movies. Whether people unfamiliar with the League’s idiosyncratic comedy and characters will be able to acclimatise themselves quickly enough to the humour and horror is another matter, but for anyone who has ever been entertained by any of the previous escapades of these highly inventive comic creations, this film will satisfy and surprise in equal measure.
Kung Fu Hustle
It’s the 1940s, some gangsters are fighting a turf war and a (relatively) innocent petty thief who wants to hit the big time gets caught up in the middle. So far, so like countless movies, from Scarface to Once Upon A Time In America. But this is no ordinary gangster movie. First of all, it’s set in China. Second, the gangsters use martial arts rather than guns (the name’s a bit of a giveaway there). Third, the gangsters are introduced with a lavish, Broadway-style musical number.
This is not your average gangster movie, nor is it your standard martial arts flick. Stephen Chow, the man who brought us the superb Shaolin Soccer, is back with his follow-up just months after his much-delayed masterpiece finally made it to western cinemas, and once again he doesn’t disappoint. If he carries on like this he’s easily going to claim Jackie Chan’s crown as the heir not only of kung fu master Bruce Lee but also that of slapstick king Buster Keaton.
This has got to rank as one of the best comedies so far this year, and is thankfully getting a much wider release than its massively mistreated predecessor, which was held back for two years and then mutilated by the American studio which bought up the rights. This time the studio has changed and Chow’s genius can be witnessed by western audiences without the indignity of cuts or mindless dubbing
It’s a film so jam-packed with inventiveness it’s almost impossible to know what to single out for particular praise. There’s the movie references – from West Side Story and The Untouchables to The Matrix and Batman to innumerable Hong Kong action flicks. There’s the unbelievably complex and frequently beautiful fight choreography. There’s the rip-roaring humour and silly sound effects. But above all else is the seemingly effortless ability to splice all the various parts into one immensely entertaining whole.
For a cinema-going public now more used to the world of flying kicks and karate chops after the likes of Hero and Kill Bill, this could open up a whole new world of oriental cinema, one which has been unjustly ignored for decades by most western audiences. Many younger movie-goers missed Bruce Lee first time around, and Jackie Chan is now past his prime. Stephen Chow is right at his peak and, what’s more, has a back catalogue of fifteen years’ worth of starring roles – over thirty films in all – which, now that he has found an understanding western distributor, will surely soon be more readily available to his growing army of fans.
This is parody of the highest order, a brilliantly witty mocking of the source yet done so well as to equal the movies it has been inspired by – and in places even surpass them. The plot, as with so many spoof films, is almost entirely incidental, merely providing a framework for a series of comic sketches and breathtaking stunt work. This is Airplane! with fighting, Naked Gun with Bruce Lee in the lead, one of those films which will keep you laughing until your throat’s sore right up to the closing credits, and then have you coming back for more.
Baadasssss!
Films about films have a long and often noble tradition in Hollywood, from Charlie Chaplin’s 1916 short Behind the Screen via Sunset Boulevard, The Player and even last year’s The Aviator. The old adage for aspiring novelists to “write about what you know” can apply just as well to filmmakers. They know Hollywood and the movie business inside out, and in this particular genre there have been far more hits than misses. Strike this one up as another definite hit – in terms of style, humour, interest and entertainment, if not, thanks to its relatively limited release, box-office takings.
As the flower power of the 1960s raged, the black writer/director Melvin Van Peebles had a dream – a film with an all-black cast, dealing with all-black subjects. But, less than a decade after the Civil Rights movement had finally secured true emancipation for the African American population, racism and snobbery in America was still such that such a film was considered not only likely to be a commercial failure, but potentially dangerous for any mainstream studio to be finance.
On point of principle as much as through conviction that his screenplay would be a success, Van Peebles decided to self-finance, scraping together – with the aid of a $50,000 loan from rising black TV star Bill Cosby – just enough money to bring his dream to life. Taking on directorial duties as well as the lead role, Van Peebles created the first true Blaxploitation movie, one of the defining films of the 70s that would be described in certain quarters as “the black Citizen Kane”. It grossed over $10 million, and spawned countless imitators – including the likes of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown.
But Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’s importance was not just for its story – black/white racial tension and police brutality amongst the counterculture’s rejects, with a liberal dosing of sex and swearing – but for the way in which it was made. In the first place it was practically unheard of to self-finance a movie, but it was certainly unheard of to make a movie in this way – with an almost entirely amateur cast and crew scrimping, scrounging and stealing anything it took to get the thing made. It is a genuinely fascinating story of perseverance, immorality and inspiration, and has already been the subject of a bestselling making of book – also written by Van Peebles.
Now, over three decades after Sweetback hit theatres in 1971, Van Peebles’ son Mario – the director of another defining black film, the “gangsta” classic New Jack City – has managed to bring the story of his father’s struggle to make his masterpiece to the screen. Just like Dad, he writes, directs and stars – as his father. What he has also managed to do is make a truly superb docudrama-cum-biopic which actually manages to be even better than the film it is about.
For anyone interested in the inventiveness of the counterculture rebels on the fringe of the 1970s, the history of Hollywood or the Civil Rights movement, this is a must-see. For the rest, it’s a funny, fascinating and sympathetic movie which somehow, despite son playing father, manages to avoid pulling any punches about some of the more sordid details.
Batman Begins
Forget Star Wars – this is the real geek film of the summer. It has been eight years since the last Batman film ended up so utterly without merit that the franchise fizzled to a halt, and thirteen years since the last time the Dark Knight was really done justice on screen in Tim Burton’s superb sequel to the Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson-starring 1989 blockbuster. In the intervening years, superhero movies have become bigger than ever – yet it has taken until now for the two franchises that really kicked the genre off, Superman and Batman, to get their act back together.
The horrible memories of George Clooney trying his best in skintight black rubber in the insanely camp and completely awful Batman and Robin will be wiped clear with this reincarnation of what remains one of the coolest comic book heroes of all time. Now it is the turn of Christian Bale to don the cowl and cape, the story focussing on how the orphaned millionaire Bruce Wayne made his first forays into the world of vigilante crimefighting.
Loosely based on the groundbreaking comic series Batman: Year One by cult writer/artist Frank Miller (whose Sin City also makes it to the big screen this month) and adapted by Blade scribe David S Goyer and Memento writer/director Christopher Nolan (who also directs here), the announcement of this project got the world of comic fandom so excited some kind of frenzied geek explosion seemed likely.
But for the casual fan too, it only gets better. The cast is rounded out with some of the best actors around – Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Katie Holmes, Rutger Hauer, Cilliam Murphy, Tom Wilkinson and Ken Watanabe among them. And, if you thought that was good, the part of Alfred, Batman/Bruce Wayne’s faithful butler, is filled out by none other than the near-legendary Michael Caine. It is a dream cast, with every actor being perfect for their roles – almost all of which have long been known to Batman’s followers over the more than six decades during which he has been thrilling his fans.
After so many aborted efforts over the years, Nolan has managed to rival Tim Burton’s two Batman films for his audacious realisation of the grittily unpleasant underworld of Gotham City in which Batman stalks his prey. Like Burton’s darkly psychological outings, there isn’t a trace of the camp tomfoolery of the much-loved Adam West-starring 1960s TV series in sight – this is an altogether more sinister take, and as such entirely in keeping with the character as he has developed over the last few decades.
After all, Batman’s ultimate motivation, brought perfectly to life here, was the senseless murder of both his parents in front of his very eyes. Dark and disturbing is what Batman should be, so the casting of the star of American Psycho should really come as no surprise – and this film has the decency to be absolutely top-notch, exhilarating and absorbing to boot. One you will definitely regret missing, and quite possibly the film of the year.
A Lot Like Love
People who like lighthearted romantic comedies are, generally speaking, an undemanding lot. When they pay their hard-earned cash for one of these films, they don’t expect a life-altering experience. They aren’t after any massive revelations about relationships and love. All they want is a pretty boy, a pretty girl, a bit of a misunderstanding, some implausible set-ups and a happy resolution, all interspersed with some moderately amusing jokes. People who don’t like romantic comedies usually, and often wrongly, write the whole lot off as mindless pap. On this occasion, the latter group is entirely correct.
Starring the badboy toyboy of Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, who hit the big time with his wonderful stoner turn in the hilariously braindead Dude, Where’s My Car? and perennial also-ran starlet Amanda Peet, best known for Bruce Willis flick The Whole Nine Yards, this ranks as a perfect example of cynical Hollywood exploitation of a target audience’s expectations with almost no actual delivery on the promise.
Perhaps most insulting to the intelligence of lovers of romantic comedies is the fact that this is a not so subtle rip-off of one of the finest examples of the genre, the classic that is When Harry Met Sally: boy and girl meet, hate each other, go their separate ways, meet again, fall in love. The plot, however, is where all similarities to that infinitely superior film end.
The really shocking thing is that this is directed by Nigel Cole, the man responsible for the satisfactorily whimsical British menopausal comedy Calendar Girls. He really should have known better than to follow up with such unmitigated, derivative rubbish. But to be fair on the guy, from his half-hearted efforts it seems he may well have been aware of how useless this movie was going to be from the start.
It really is a great shame that two such likable actors as Kutcher and Peet have to resort to this kind of nonsense to attempt to revive their sagging profiles. Neither are really star material, but both have the kind of easy likeability and charm which should have made them a shoe-in for an on-screen romantic pairing. But there’s no chemistry, no comedy, no character to their performances, just an all-pervading sense of “been there, done that” and ever-rising boredom.
One to avoid – even on DVD. Let’s just walk away and pretend it never existed. It’s films like this that give romantic comedies a bad name.
The Jacket
Time travel can often make for great, fun movies – the Back to the Future trilogy and Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits being prime examples. They can also make for disturbing, psychologically and philosophically confusing films examining the paradoxical possibilities of being able to alter history, like Gilliam’s superb Twelve Monkeys. This film is so consciously modelled on the latter that at first glance it could almost look like a rip off.
In fact, although stylistically there are resemblances to Gilliam’s 1998 Monkeys movie, this is an adaptation of the 1914 Jack London book The Star Rover. Best known for his canine epic White Fang, London was one of the most prolific and successful American authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and dabbled in early science fiction around the time that the genre was being invented by the likes of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
The Star Rover was effectively an early call for an end to inhumane treatment in prisons – a fairly topical subject considering the recent uproar over the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay – as a prisoner locked in an asylum undergoing experimental treatment experiences a kind of astral-projection time travel to various eras.
Here, Oscar-winner Adrien Brody plays the internee, locked up for criminal insanity following a roadside shooting which amnesia prevents him from fully recalling. Strapped into a straightjacket and locked in the dark, his growing hallucinations gradually become lucid as he ends up in the distant future, finding out about his own death just days away in the real world. Much as Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys had but days to prove his sanity and save the world, here Brody has but days to prove his sanity and save his life. But, as with Terry Gilliam’s other masterpiece Brazil, are these trips to the future real, or is he actually insane?
Brody does his usual excellent job – just the right level of utter confusion in the eyes to lend credence to his apparent time-shifts, as well as to emphasise just how terrifying the claustrophobic “treatment” he is being put through must be. Director John Maybury, whose last outing was at the helm of the 1998 Francis Bacon biopic Love is the Devil, makes a competent shot at imitating Gilliam’s grittier, more disturbing techniques, amply aided by Mullholland Drive and Evil Dead II cinematographer Peter Deming.
Add to that a supporting cast including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kris Kristofferson and Keira Knightley, a soundtrack by disconcerting electronica genius Brian Eno, and the knowledge that this comes from the production company set up by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, who act as producers, and you’ve got the makings of an very interesting film. Confusing, thought-provoking and enthralling, it may fall down a bit towards the final reel, but is nonetheless a worthwhile addition to the time travel genre that will most likely keep you guessing until the very end.
Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith
What is there to say? We’ve all been disappointed by the last two and yet we’re still all going to go and see this one anyway.
This marks final closure after more than twenty-five years of Star Wars being the single most successful set of films of all time. At least, until George Lucas changes his mind again and goes off to make another trilogy.
Yep, with this movie we finally find out the official version of how Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader. It involves an intergalactic war, lightsabre battles, a volcano and a bunch of incredibly detailed special effects, that much is guaranteed. But is it actually any good?
What is most interesting about these Star Wars prequels is not so much the reactions of the 25-40 year-olds who are old enough to have been the target audience of the original films at the cinema, but the response from the kids who are the target audience today. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, Star Wars was everything. We lived and dreamed Star Wars, and our parents loved it too. These new films simply don’t seem to have captured children’s imaginations in the same way.
To be fair, it’s a fairly tall order to compete with the rampant success of the original trilogy. They did something no other films had previously managed, with groundbreaking special effects and a depth of imagination rarely before seen on screen. So it’s not really fair to complain that the new films aren’t as innovative. It’s also not fair to complain that they aren’t as liked – moaning fans of the originals have ensured that most people will slag them off, given half the chance.
The only fair thing is to wait for a quarter of a century and see how they all look then. Of course, the trouble with that is that the original trilogy as most people remember it no longer exists. George Lucas likes tampering with his creation so much that the DVDs are based on the 1997 “Special Editions”, with further new special effects and footage. Even the new series has been altered between cinema and its DVD releases – The Phantom Menace in particular receiving a number of effects tweaks to ensure the computer graphics were as up to date as possible for home viewing.
In the meantime, this latest – and final – instalment brings twenty-eight years’ worth of storytelling to an end. Star Wars has had such an impact on not only Hollywood, but also people’s lives in that period that it would be a shame not to mark its passing. But – as with the last two bitter disappointments – don’t get your hopes up for genius.
Millions
Coming as it does from director Danny Boyle, this film is a significant surprise. This is, after all, the man who brought us the hugely unpleasant Trainspotting and Shallow Grave, as well as the zombie horror 28 Days Later. He’s hardly a prime candidate to produce something as sweetly engaging as this. In fact, in places it’s almost so sweet as to be vomit-inducing.
But it’s important to take films on their own merit, and in the context of what they are trying to achieve. This sets out to be a family film, and it has more than enough to appeal to all ages. The only requirement is to leave your cynicism at the door, or else the sentimentality – not to mention the religious aspects – could get overwhelmingly unbearable.
Yep, the guy who brought us Heroin, squalor and ultraviolence in Trainspotting is now bringing us the spiritual benefits of charity and an overtly Christian worldview. In fact, this could almost seem cynical after all, but in an entirely different way – a cynical attempt to tap into the American market. After all, it’s a British-set film with a British cast, the biggest name of which is the unknown outside the British Isles James Nesbitt, it has a fairly big name British director, yet is being released in the US first and has religious themes that are far more likely to appeal to Yanks than Limeys. It’s also set in a depressed part of the North, just like past British cross-Atlantic hits Billy Elliot, Calendar Girls and The Full Monty and, again like Billy Elliot, revolves around a boy who’s considered odd for his unusual interests. It seems to be trying to tick all the boxes at once.
Luckily for Boyle, if this was his aim he seems to have succeeded amply. The American critics almost unanimously adored this film, with praises heaped upon praises. It’s already a financial and critical success on one side of the Atlantic; the only question is whether it can translate – religious manifestations and all – back to the British market.
Ignoring the religious aspects – largely in the form of benevolent apparitions by various Christian saints – this is basically another retread of Brewster’s Millions, about a sudden influx of cash that has to be spent within a very short period of time. The story has been remade countless times before since its first appearance as a film in 1914, and this time is given an added contemporary spin – the reason the money has to be spent is that the cash is in pounds, and Britain is here just about to join the euro, making the currency itself worthless. Found by a small boy with an active imagination – a bit like Tim Burton’s schmaltzy Big Fish – there is now an added appeal to the youth market. What would a bunch of schoolchildren do if they had millions of pounds?
It is, however, more than just a fantasy-made-reality light comedy, with various messages about responsibility towards one’s fellow man and the rest of society. For some it may be far too preachy for its social as well as religious messages. It is, however, a finely-crafted movie nonetheless, and yet another indication that Danny Boyle remains an interesting, intelligent, highly talented and entirely unpredictable filmmaker.
Kingdom of Heaven
In the current political climate, producing a film about a bunch of Christians charging off to the Middle East to slaughter as many Muslims as they can instantly sets all alarm bells ringing. What’s the message? Is this pro-war or anti-war? How is Islam portrayed? What’s the agenda?
Yep, this is a big-budget Hollywood epic about the Crusades. It’s a fascinating part of history which to date hasn’t really been done much justice by the movies. There was 1935’s Cecil B De Mille epic The Crusades, which made a decent stab of things considering the constraints of the technology of the time, and then 1954’s King Richard and the Crusaders, which bizarrely starred Rex “Doctor Dolittle” Harrison as Muslim leader Saladin, and that, bar the odd brief mention in various Robin Hood movies, is about it.
It makes very little sense that there haven’t been more movies based on the various Crusading campaigns of the late 11th through to early 14th centuries. They have pretty much everything you could ask for in a spectacular piece of cinema – huge armies, powerful characters, confusion, tragedy, mistakes, victories and losses. Then there’s the noble enemy in the Third Crusade’s Saladin, portrayed as worthy of the utmost respect by, among others, Dante in The Divine Comedy and Sir Walter Scott in The Talisman. There’s also the various tales of devious and unscrupulous deeds from campaigners on the supposedly Christian side, adding a sense of ambiguity to the whole thing. It is grand, epic subject-matter, and needs grand, epic films.
So, whereas the Golden Age epic master De Mille was the ideal choice for a Crusades movie in the 1930s, today there is again one obvious candidate for director – Ridley “Gladiator” Scott.
As this film is effectively being sold as “the third Lord of the Rings movie, only without all that fantasy nonsense” – massive battles, sieges, a band of warriors trying to do what’s right, a massively evocative musical score and a bit of cross-cultural romance to boot – I suppose getting Orlando Bloom in as the main lead seemed a great idea. He’s used to this sort of thing after playing Legolas, after all – and he’s done the slightly more historical stuff in Troy to boot. The fact that he can’t act for toffee doesn’t matter – he looks pretty.
Yep, Orlando Bloom is not a good choice, although to be fair he does put in a good effort. Thankfully, he’s backed up by a superb supporting cast, from the well-known and respected Jeremy Irons, Edward Norton and Liam Neeson to the little-known but superb David Thewlis and Brendan Gleeson.
Over all of this, however, lies Ridley Scott’s superb eye for a spectacular shot. It is just as visually impressive as you’d expect, as vast armies clash in the deserts round Jerusalem, siege engines advance, and swords and armour glint in the setting sun.
The political agenda? It has none. The purpose is simply to make truck-loads of cash, while sticking relatively close to historical record. Sure, there’s a bit of sixth form philosophy in here, the nature of good and evil, that sort of guff. But the primary reason to see this film is epic battles filmed by a master director. In that it does not disappoint. The only remaining question – in the events the film is based around, the Muslims won – can Hollywood bring itself to have the “good guys” lose?
It's All Gone Pete Tong
The phrase from which this film derives its title was a popular bit of rhyming slang for a while in the early to mid 1990s – “Pete Tong, wrong” – a tribute to the habit of one of the earliest superstar DJs to make mistakes during his sets. As you might expect with a title like that, it revolves around the club DJ scene. Which seems a tad passé these days, but still.
Thankfully, however, this is not merely a mindless trip through clubland like the inexplicably popular Human Traffic from a few years back. Nor is it a documentary about the now pretty much past it world of insanely loud music, overly-energetic dancing and mind-altering drugs. At least, not really.
Seemingly loosely based on Citizen Kane, the movie is a partially documentary-style attempt to explore the life of fictional superstar DJ Frankie Wilde, partially a regular movie following his various difficulties. With contributions from the likes of Carl Cox and the man himself, Pete Tong – both playing themselves – as well as a thumping soundtrack, it’s a convincing look at the club world of the 90s built around a great central performance from the often criminally underrated Paul “Dennis Pennis” Kaye as Wilde.
The major conceit, as with Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” investigation, is that the filmmakers are trying to uncover what happened to the once legendary DJ, who vanished without trace a few years ago. The basic answer is uncovered pretty early on – he went deaf and had a breakdown. After all, how can you mix music if you can’t hear the beat? After setting up the character, his attempts to cope with his sudden change in circumstances and plans for the future – if he has one – form the bulk of the movie, and it’s all good stuff.
Although a DJ with a coke habit going deaf could easily end up an excuse to preach about the damage clubbers are doing to themselves, that would – let’s face it – hardly pull in the punters. Instead, the story of Frankie Wilde’s tragic fall is layered with dose after does of richly black comedy.
There are also some nice surreal touches chucked in for good measure to emphasis Wilde’s other major problem – a hefty cocaine addiction personified by a six foot tall badger in a fairy costume being a particular highlight. That in itself should be enough to demonstrate that, despite the talking heads from real life DJs, this is anything but a serious film.
With a less talented lead, this could all have come crashing down, much like Wilde’s career. But Paul Kaye is more than up to the task, turning in a superb performance that’s at once obnoxious, funny and endearing, and well worth the price of admission on its own. It’s about time he got a decent break onto the big screen, and this could well be it - he’ll be cropping up in a big budget blockbuster before you know it.
House of Wax
This film has two things that should instantly set off warning bells to stay well away. First, it’s yet another remake of a horror classic, following pointless recent retreadings of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror and The Ring. Second – and most important – it stars Paris Hilton. Actually, “star” is probably too strong a word. She certainly doesn’t feature as prominently as she did in the film for which she is best known, but she is nonetheless relatively high up the billing and is the only member of the cast, bar the chick who played Keifer Sutherland’s daughter in 24, who has any kind of name recognition value.
A spoiled rich-kid accidental porn star and someone off the telly are hardly adequate substitutes for the original 1954 classic’s line-up of Vincent Price and a then unknown Charles Bronson. Although music video director Jaume Serra makes a fair stab at his feature debut, he is also no match for the original movie’s visionary cult director André de Toth. It is also, it must be said, pretty much a travesty to take that classic film’s name and put it to this utterly bog-standard slasher movie.
Quite how anyone thought, after the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scream and Scary Movie ripped this kind of formulaic trash to shreds, that a straight take on the old “pretty young people get hunted down like animals by a crazed killer” genre could be taken seriously, it is impossible to tell. They’ve even roped in Jon Abrahams, one of the stars of Scary Movie, as if to underline the point. As such, there is the constant expectation that the whole thing is meant to be a joke, making it impossible to get into the right mindset and impossible to get scared.
It also really doesn’t help that Paris Hilton is nowhere near as pleasant to look at as she and certain sections of the lad mag press seem to think. She is, after all, only here as eye-candy. In fact, the entire cast is only there as eye-candy, so in many ways it’s entirely appropriate that the psycho killer they run across in a deserted town wants to turn them all into waxwork figures once they’ve been despatched. They’re all a bunch of plastic nonentities, so that’s probably the best thing for them.
In short this is both a pointless remake and a pointless revival of a thoroughly ridiculed and outdated subgenre, directed by a first timer and starring a bunch of relative unknowns. It is by no means an interesting addition to the world of the movies.
Having said that, it does what it sets out to do perfectly well. With no apparent pretensions to be more than simply a slasher flick, it’s probably rather mean spirited to be overly critical. But at the same time, if you go expecting a decent horror film, you’ll come away feeling like you’ve wasted both time and money. Stick with the original, and if you want a slasher flick, go for one of the classics like Halloween or Friday the 13th. Don’t bother wasting your money on this kind of nonsense.
Friday Night Lights
For most people outside of the United States, the idea that watching a bunch of schoolchildren play sport could actually be worth getting worked up about is almost incomprehensible. If you watch a football match, you want it to be decent, surely? You’d much rather see David Beckham kick a ball around than auntie Flo’s next door neighbour’s boy, Archie – wouldn’t you?
However, as with so many sporting movies, the sport itself is largely incidental here, with the off-pitch tensions being the prime focus. So it is to this film’s major credit that the central role of the coach has gone to an always excellent actor in Billy Bob Thornton. Unfortunately, however, the basic plot is almost identical to that of another recent US sport-based import, the Samuel L Jackson-starring basketball flick Coach Carter, released a couple of months ago.
Both Coach Carter and Friday Night Lights revolve around teams of academically underachieving dropouts from underachieving neighbourhoods whose only hope of any success in life comes from their success at their chosen sport. Both Coach Carter and Friday Night Lights revolve around superb and inspiring central performances from the actors playing the coach/mentor. Both films also received rave reviews in the US.
Even though the sport may be somewhat alien – with the perennial difficulty of trying to work out why these people need body armour to play rugby – the basic themes and message are entirely familiar. It’s in many ways a standard retread of a typical genre film, looking at coming of age rituals, the need to apply oneself to gain any kind of success in life, and the hopes that older generations always pin on the young.
While it may say little that’s new, this is nonetheless and accomplished and moving film which, focussed as it is around yet another great performance from Thornton and good supporting turns from the likes of the (now all grown up) Lucas Black of American Gothic fame as the youthful team members. It’s a travesty that Thornton hasn’t yet won an acting Oscar – although he did pick up a statuette in 1996 for Best Adapted Screenplay for Sling Blade. This is both the kind of film and kind of performance that might make the Academy sit up and take notice again, even though he should really have won for The Man Who Wasn’t There – and for that he didn’t even get a nomination.
Americans love their sport movies; us Brits seem to prefer the real thing. But if you’re tempted to see what the yanks get so worked up about with these things, this could be an ideal introduction to the genre.
A Good Woman
Oscar Wilde is always a good option for anyone planning a film. His convoluted yet accessible stories and wit-laden dialogue simply refuse to grow old or tired. In the last few years we’ve seen excellent versions of The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, both starring Rupert Everett, and now it is the turn of Lady Windermere’s Fan to get the big-screen treatment – albeit under a different name and without Everett among the cast.
It must be said, at first glance it looks like they’ve missed a trick. Why the name change? Lady Windermere’s Fan must still have some recognition value, surely? And even if he is the wrong age for them all, couldn’t they have roped Everett in for one of the male parts?
Even with the alterations – the story has also been shifted from Victorian England to the Italian Riviera of the 1930s – this is everything you would expect from a film based on a Wilde play: sumptuous sets, sparkling dialogue, glittering costumes, and a superb ensemble cast that includes starlet of the moment Scarlett Johansen, Oscar-winner Helen Hunt, Oscar nominee Tom Wilkinson and a host of lesser names putting in decent turns. Add to that Wilde’s trademark ability to uncover timeless truths about relationships and human nature, and it is easy to see not only why this story still holds appeal more than a century after it was written, but also why the number of screen adaptations of it already runs into double figures.
Johansen is Lady Windermere, one half of the most popular young couple in the ex-pat Riviera society, yet pursued by another man; Hunt is gracefully aging seductress Mrs. Erlynne, out in Italy to attempt to wrangle her way into the high life. Deviousness abounds, with twists and surprises aplenty – assuming you are unfamiliar with the original play, that is.
The only slight trouble is that Wilde’s dialogue tends to work best at pace – rapid-fire quips and pithy observations rattled off almost as if the characters haven’t really got time to think. Although the performances here are all decent – with Tom Wilkinson in particular standing out as Lord “Tuppy” Augustus – both Hunt and Johansen seem to specialise in speaking their lines in a slow drawl, as if almost bored. While this may add a certain realism in places, this is a Wilde play – reality here is meant to be heightened, exaggerated, almost a parody. There’s something not quite right with this version of the tale.
Even so, the typical Merchant Ivory-style costume drama feel that anyone going to a film like this would hope for permeates every frame, taken a notch above by Wilde’s dialogue – even when this has been toned down by the screenplay or the actors’ delivery. It may not be the best Wilde adaptation of recent years, and Rupert Everett may be missed, but it still makes for an entertaining couple of hours, and for fans of this type of movie it’s certainly worth a look.
