Blade Trinity
When the first Blade hit our screens back in 1998, no one knew that it would mark the start of such a glut of great superhero movies as has appeared over the last few years. Blade’s effortless cinematic cool of swishing leather coats and fancy martial arts was pinched by The Matrix the following year, and kick-started Hollywood’s love affair with sci-fi superheroics which seems to continue unabated.
Coming out only a few months after Buffy the Vampire Slayer first started on TV, Blade’s central vampire-hunting premise seemed to tap nicely into the latest sci-fi fad, and the film was a huge success. Bond-style gadgets for killing the vamps, some nicely sinister sets, metaphysical undertones and Wesley Snipes’ central cool-yet-funny character, coupled with his impressive kung-fu skills, ensured that it would retain much affection from sci-fi fans. The sequel, released two years ago, took a darker, grittier turn, but maintained the franchise’s loyal fanbase while attracting some more critical respect thanks to the presence of cult Mexican director Guillermo del Toro at the helm.
In other words, this third film in the series has a lot to live up to; yet at the same time expectations are somewhat lower. Although sequels can sometimes improve on the original, by the third film in a series most franchises are starting to run out of steam. The fact that Wesley Snipes has been in no films of note since the last Blade movie, and that his career seems to have stalled over the last few years, adds to the worry. As does news that the director this time around is the relatively untested David S Goyer, a talented screenwriter who has scripted all three Blade films as well as the oft-underrated Dark City and the much-anticipated Batman Begins, but who has only directed one, distinctly average film before this.
So, has the film lived up to the previous two in the series, or has the law of diminishing returns kicked in? Well, original cast members Snipes and Kris Kristofferson keep their end of the bargain, maintaining their jokey pupil/sensei double-act with aplomb, and the plot – the vampires resurrecting the first, uber-vamp to aid their quest for world domination, while smearing Blade as a mass-murdering psychopath through the media – is a good one.
Goyer’s script is happily on a par with his previous ones in the series, offering some good touches of humour amidst well set-up action sequences. His directing style is a bit too much of the MTV jump-cuts and swirling cameras mould for some people’s tastes – reminiscent of the almost fit-inducing Daredevil, and can distract from the still-impressive fights. But as an exercise in stylistic reinvention – which is what the series has unobtrusively prided itself on – it just about works.
However, it is with the new cast members that the film really hits the mark. Indy film goddess Parker Posey, as evil chief vampire vixen Danica Talos, is a sultry and sensual foil to Snipes’ tight-lipped hero, while his new vamp-fighting buddies Jessica (The Rules of Attraction) Biel and Ryan (Van Wilder) Reynolds add a nice touch of the young, sexy and funny. It’s a winning combination.
Blade: Trinity may not be the best superhero movie ever made, but it’s nonetheless an enjoyable, occasionally exhilarating romp, and should easily satisfy fans of the previous two movies. Whether it will appeal to newcomers remains to be seen, but the plot is kept nicely accessible for anyone who missed the first two instalments. It looks like there’s afterlife in the old dog yet…
The Merchant of Venice
Shakespeare has had a relatively tough time of it at the cinema. For every sensitive and respectful adaptation of one of his plays – like Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet or Ian McKellen’s Richard III – there will be umpteen blandly unimaginative or disastrous takes on one of these classics. Then there’s the added problem that audience tastes shift over time, so what was once considered a superb adaptation – such as Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film of Richard III – seem a couple of decades later to be laughably awful.
A lot of the problem is cultural. Al “one of the greatest actors working today™” Pacino attempted to explore this in his 1996 documentary Looking for Richard. In the course of this rather tedious film, one of the conclusions that seemed to be reached was that – as a general rule – Americans are not very good at performing Shakespeare.
Unfortunately, Pacino has not learned this lesson, and here takes on one of Shakespeare’s most complex and confusing roles – that of the vicious moneylender Shylock: poster-boy for anti-Semitic hatred for several centuries; a grotesque caricature of jewishness that would have made Hitler proud. It is a role that has previously been played on screen by actors of the calibre of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, and is only topped by King Lear and Hamlet as one of the most coveted parts for thespians. Pacino does his very best to live up to the greats that have gone before, but his style of acting simply doesn’t work with this material.
This is not to say, however, that this is a bad adaptation. There is a certain amount of alteration to lessen the anti-Semitic portrayal of Shylock, and help the character be slightly more sympathetic – and so more attuned to modern tastes – by making Christian-Jewish tensions an explicit part of the story’s backdrop. But these changes are – by Hollywood standards – minor, and if anything serve to flesh out the world of sixteenth century Venice even further than do the wonderful costumes and sets.
The rest of the cast – from big names Jeremy Irons (as Antonio) and Joseph Feinnes (as Bassanio) through minor players John Sessions, Gregor Fisher and the seemingly ubiquitous Mackenzie Crook – are all pretty much note perfect. It is a particular pleasure to see Jeremy Irons putting in a good performance again after several years of obscure mediocrity. It is also a joy to see John Sessions appearing in a film alongside Al Pacino, whom he has been mercilessly spoofing for the last few years in his TV sketch show Stella Street.
Despite a few dodgy moments from Pacino, this latest version of Shakespeare’s play – which was first adapted for the screen in 1910 – manages to hold its own with the best of them. Coming from director Michael Radford, who helmed the superb John Hurt-starring film version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, this shouldn’t be much of a surprise. He has done an expert job in both adapting the play for the screen and getting the best performances he can out of his excellent cast, ensuring that not only is this well worth a look, but will probably be shown to uninterested school children for years to come in a desperate attempt to force some culture into them. They could do worse.
The Phantom of the Opera
If you don’t like Andrew Lloyd-Webber musicals – and at least as many people despise them as think they’re wonderful - don’t even think about bothering with this movie. This take is based on that light, song-strewn version of the famous story, not that of the under-read 1908 novel by Gaston Leroux from which it originated, or even the first, classic Lon Chaney-starring film version of 1925.
But is it a good screen adaptation of the highly popular stage musical, which has been running in London’s West End, and in various other productions around the world, for the last 18 years?
Well, for anyone who knows their third-rate directors, the name Joel Schumacher should ring immediate alarm bells. Schumacher has, to date, never made a genuinely good film – although to be fair he has come close a couple of times. But in the final reckoning, this is the man responsible for the reprehensible Batman & Robin, and has thus already secured a prime place in the cinematic hall of infamy.
Then there’s the worry for Lloyd-Weber fans that the part of the Phantom didn’t go to the man who made it his own through the stage play, Michael Crawford. After dalliances with Antonio Banderas in the lead, the part has gone to the relative unknown that is Gerard Butler, whose most prominent role to date is as Lara Croft’s love interest in the second Tomb Raider movie.
Not too promising so far, right? Well, surprisingly, they’ve managed to pull it off. If you like the musical, this is about as good as you could hope for, even without Crawford – who at 62 is getting a bit old for the part now anyway – in the lead. Much like Chicago did a decent (if unimaginative) job of putting a stage musical onto the screen, this version of Phantom hits pretty much all of the bases for existing fans. The songs are well performed, the atmosphere is maintained, the sets and costumes are suitably impressive and filmed to their best effect (by the cinematographer behind Gladiator) and the supporting cast – which includes Miranda Richardson, Simon Callow and Minnie Driver – does a very good job indeed.
This was never likely to be a film that could convert sceptics to the delights of the musical – Lloyd-Webber’s songs are simply too love-it-or-hate-it for that - but nonetheless tries its very best to tap in to the potential new audience tickled by the likes of the aforementioned Chicago, as well as the more accessible (for non-fans of the genre, at least) Moulin Rouge. It will doubtless remain the fans of the stage show who find the most to enjoy here, but who knows? Maybe this might inspire a few cinemagoers to venture out to theatreland, and that can hardly be a bad thing.
The Aviator
Hollywood loves making films about itself, and sometimes these films really hit the mark – the very different likes of Singin’ in the Rain, Ed Wood, The Player and Mulholland Drive all take very different aspects of LA’s film quarter and produce brilliant yet very different films from the material. The world loves a good film and, especially in this age of DVD, we have all become movie-buffs.
The Aviator has got to be the biggest, most expensive film about films ever made. Directed by everyone’s favourite former Indy filmmaker and perennial Academy Award runner-up, Martin Scorsese, it is a biopic of the near-legendary Hollywood producer Howard Hughes (played here by Leonardo DiCaprio) – a name that may still ring bells even though he died nearly thirty years ago.
Hughes was one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century. The multi-millionaire heir of a Texas entrepreneur, he came to Hollywood at the dawn of the sound era, fascinated by the movies and determined to make a name for himself as a producer. He used his wealth to fund a string of hit movies between the 1920s and 1950s, and piled the profits into a series of eclectic business ventures, a high-end lifestyle filled with dates with the stars of the screen from Katherine Hepburn (here played by Cate Blanchett) to Ava Gardener (played by Kate Beckinsale), and his other great love – aeroplanes.
The range, capacity and genius of the man were astounding. He was a record-breaking pilot; the inventor of the push-up bra, the world’s largest passenger aircraft and a deep sea rescue vessel; he bought television stations and used them as his own personal video recorders; he even bought up most of Las Vegas from the mafia, and turned it into a (fairly) respectable, yet still highly profitable operation, and was an expert consultant to the CIA for the recovery of Soviet technology during the Cold War. At the same time, he became perhaps the ultimate eccentric, gradually withdrawing from public life to spend his last two decades a complete recluse, hidden away in hotel rooms, never to be seen, and terrified of germs and – bizarrely – nail clippers, thanks to his increasing obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In short, he is a brilliant subject for a big-budget biographical treatment. His life story has everything – wealth, glamour, involvement with other big names and events of his time, and weird, almost tragic personality flaws.
Yet to cover his whole seven-decade life in a single film would be nigh-on impossible – and in any case, the final twenty-odd years would simply involve an old, scared and lonely man sitting in hotel rooms afraid of human contact. Scorsese has sensibly, if sadly, opted to focus on Hughes’ early life, before his paranoia and eccentricities truly kicked in.
Instead we get Hughes’ Hollywood and piloting years, with all the glamour of the glitzy side of the 1930s and 40s. Scorsese has made every effort to do him justice, with an epic production and supporting cast to match which ranges from Alec Baldwin and Sir Ian Holm to Willem Dafoe and the ubiquitous Jude Law (as the dashing Errol Flynn).
It is a great re-creation of the era, aided immensely by the vast cast of big-name stars and character actors, and displays Hughes’ genius to perfect effect. The man himself may well have approved, but still one can’t help feeling sorry that so much of his eventful life has had to be left out. But as Hughes was more than aware, such is the way with Hollywood.
Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events
Jim Carrey did a lot to revive interest in his output with the recent Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. There, his sensitive, slightly more grown-up than usual role allowed him to regain some of the fans he had lost through an apparent insistence on only taking parts in which his rubbery, gurning face and silly voices could be used to full effect.
At first glance, Lemony Snicket seems to be a return to unimaginative Carrey-casting. The basic summary (a Christmas movie where he plays, under fairly heavy make-up, a character with a distinct lack of Christmas spirit) seems to be a near-repeat of his turn in 2000’s The Grinch who Stole Christmas. The fact that The Grinch was based on a cult children’s book by Theodore Geisel (writing under the pseudonym Dr Seuss) and Lemony Snicket is based on a cult children’s book by Daniel Handler (under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket) simply adds to the impression that Carrey hasn’t thought too hard about this one. You could hardly be blamed for imagining this will be more of the same.
Thankfully, for those unfamiliar with the books on which the film is based, as many in the UK are, the feel is closest in tone to a good Roald Dahl adaptation. Carrey manages to remain funny at the same time as being an evil and selfish old man, exploiting his dead relatives’ orphaned children while happily spending their inheritance. He is wonderfully sinister, and just the right side of the over-the-top pantomime villain performance that his malevolent role as the sinister Count Olaf could easily have slipped into.
Add to this a supporting cast of names that would normally get top billing – from the fatherly Billy Connolly through a paranoid Meryl Streep and even Jude Law (who seems to be in everything at the moment) – and you have all the makings of a Christmas kids’ film to knock the competition for six. Thanks to a combination of expert eyes for the unusual in director Brad Siberling and the superb double-act of Production Designer Rick Heinrichs and Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki - who last worked on Tim Burton’s spookily weird Sleepy Hollow, winning Heinrichs an Oscar and Lubezki a nomination in the process - the film also looks as great as its casting.
It’s quite refreshing, after so many failed attempts to turn popular children’s’ books into big-budget screen adaptations, that for a change some effort has gone into the production, rather than relying on the name alone to bring the kiddies to the cinema. The third in the Harry Potter series showed how it can – and should – be done: imaginative, visually interesting and deeply textured films can still be made even if they are for the kids. They don’t have to be bright, colourful and jolly – they can be dark and moody, and deal with genuinely unpleasant and scary subjects, and yet the kids will still love them and find the funny bits just as gigglesome, if not more so.
Like a ghost train filled with laughing gas, Lemony Snicket looks to be the biggest children’s film of the festive season, and rightly so. It is a superb antidote to the usual jolly pap, but still highly entertaining and in places hilarious – top stuff.
Churchill: The Hollywood Years
Winston Churchill: one of the most famous names and most iconic figures of the last century, hailed as one of the greatest Britons of the last millennium and lauded to this day as one of the finest statesmen the world has ever produced.
Of course, the only trouble from a filmmaker’s perspective is that Churchill was rather old, fat, bald and ugly by the time he came to lead the country during the Second World War. Surely from a movie audience’s point of view it would be better to have a young and handsome Winston? And why make him a Brit? I mean, most film audiences are American, and none of them would understand a British accent. Best make him a yank so that they can better identify with the guy. But keep the cigars – it makes him a real man. Oh – and that Princess they’ve got over there, the one that’ll be Queen one day – what’s her name again? Elizabeth? Yeah – she can be the love interest!
It’s a good premise for a spoof on Hollywood’s constantly-bemoaned distortions of history. Co-written and directed by The Comic Strip Presents’ Peter Richardson, and with a supporting cast featuring British comedians from several generations, from Leslie Phillips to Miranda Richardson and Rik Mayall via Harry Enfield, Vic and Bob, Stella Street’s Phil Cornwell and The Office’s Mackenzie Crook, this is a thoroughly British take on a thoroughly American tendency to re-write history for the screen.
Added to all this comic promise is the knowledge that the two lead characters – Churchill and Princess Elizabeth – are being portrayed by two of Hollywood’s best, but often under-appreciated, comic actors: Christian Slater and Neve Campbell. Slater has kept a fairly low profile since his highly-publicised run-in with the law a few years back, but has recently been pushing for a return to form, with headline-grabbing turns in the Jack Nicholson role in the stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and a heavy presence on the interview circuit. Campbell is still trying to shake off her reputation as being “the girl from the Scream films”.
So, has the talent involved produced a film worthy of their collective skills and the amusing concept? Well, nearly… Depending on your point of view, this will either be a bit of a dud with a few good moments or a good but under-funded attempt at a top-notch movie.
The lack of budget is palpable at times. Especially as it is supposed to be spoofing big-budget Hollywood productions, the money should really be seen on screen, but instead seems to have been splurged on a series of cameos which all but the most devoted of British TV comedy buffs will probably miss. It is hard – very hard – to see how it could appeal to US audiences, for the humour is very, very British.
But then, we aren’t a US audience, and as such should relish the chance to see such a fine ensemble cast working so nicely together. It’s a bit like a Carry On film in this regard, only far less puerile, and with comedy straight out of the either-you-get-it-or-you-don’t school of the director’s cult TV hit Stella Street. If you liked that, you’ll most likely like this. The trouble is, very few people ever saw Stella Street and, if the studio continue faffing about with this film’s release, the same is likely to happen here. So see it while you get the chance.
House of Flying Daggers
From Zhang Yimou, the man who brought us the seductively beautiful Hero, the idiosyncratic, visually inventive and simply beautiful martial arts epic that was finally released a couple of months ago, comes his equally majestic follow-up. For anyone who liked his last effort, or the film to which it was most often compared, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, this is unlikely to disappoint.
The reason for such a rapid appearance of a follow-up to Hero is simple: the American studio which bought the rights for distribution in the West from the Chinese filmmakers has finally seen sense. It took cult director Quentin Tarantino two long years of campaigning to get the execs to realise that there could be a market for foreign language movies and finally take the plunge.
The box-office returns for Hero more than proved Tarantino’s belief that quality would bear out to be correct and, thanks to this, we have the delight of not one, but two superb epics in the space of a few short months, even though the productions of Hero and House of Flying Daggers took several years. In fact, so well did Hero do that Tarantino himself is now reportedly planning to try his own hand at producing a Mandarin language martial arts epic as his follow-up to Kill Bill!
The absolutely stunning Zhang Ziyi, whom the director, to whom she is no relation, discovered for his low-key, wonderfully mournful 1999 film The Road Home, is the most obvious link to both Hero and Crouching Tiger, as she appeared in both and is rapidly approaching well-deserved superstar status. Here she plays a mysterious dancer, suspected by agents of the Tang Dynasty – the excellent Infernal Affairs’ Andy Lau and Asian idol Takeshi Kaneshiro – of having connections to the revolutionary House of Flying Daggers. It’s not long before the action kicks off, and it is just as spectacular as anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing Hero would expect.
Much like his last movie, here director Zhang Yimou demonstrates his superb visual intuition to perfection, masterfully manipulating the film’s palette to add layer upon layer of subtle yet highly effective emotional nuance. Every frame of this movie reverberates with its director’s passionate love for film and for the genre, and the desire to produce simply the most stunning sequences he can.
The subtlety and depth of this kind of filmmaking – a relatively new development from a Chinese film industry which, until relatively recently, operated under extremely strict state censorship – has ensured once again that a martial arts flick, previously the refuge of the largely male obsessive, can appeal to a wide, cross-gender audience. The fluidity of the actors’ sometimes physics-defying stunts are perfectly complimented by both the camera and the almost surreally perfect sets and locations to create yet another feast for the eyes. The fight sequences are plentiful, and superbly choreographed, but are filmed so beautifully as to appear almost like a ballet.
The fact that Zhang Ziyi plays a dancer is wonderfully apt; this is a higher form of filmmaking – physical and emotional at the same time as looking simply fantastic. Hero was lauded by many critics as one of the most beautiful films ever made; House of Flying Daggers is more so.
Christmas With the Kranks
Tim Allen, until a few years ago best known for his lightweight TV sitcom Home Improvement, has in recent years become one of the most bankable stars of kiddie film comedies. He was the voice of galactic hero Buzz Lightyear in the smash-hit Toy Story films, and has also managed to corner the Christmas market through the two Santa Clause movies, where he plays a normal guy forced to become Father Christmas.
Here, he tried to secure the Christmas crown once again with a farcical tale of a husband and wife deciding to skip the stress of Christmas altogether while their daughter’s away. The usual “zany” antics ensue, as they always do in these kinds of films.
Tim Allen is very much an acquired taste. It is very easy to find him dull, self-satisfied and uninspired, especially in a film like this which steals liberally from pretty much every Christmas movie ever made – most notably National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. His fairly monotonous voice and uncanny ability to be exactly the same in every part he ever plays are enough in themselves for many critics to write him off as a one-trick pony. The fact that he always seems to opt for roles where he gets to play single-minded men who realise the error of their ways is just another reason to deride him as a rather boring actor who often chooses rather unoriginal films.
But then, this is not exactly meant to be the most mind-blowingly original movie. If it were attempting to win film buffs over, the money men behind the project would have avoided using a screenplay by Chris Columbus – the rather insipid director of that 1990 Christmas smash-hit Home Alone and the first two Harry Potter movies. They also would probably have chosen more exciting source material than a written-for-screen book by John Grisham, one of Hollywood’s favourite novelist hacks, and a more experienced director than Joe Roth, best known as the producer behind the Young Guns flicks.
In the face of tough competition from the likes of Jim Carrey (in Lemony Snicket), Billy Bob Thornton (in Bad Santa) and Ben Affleck (in Surviving Christmas), unfortunately for Allen it looks like this year he won’t be able to reclaim his Christmas movie crown. This film is just a bit too bog standard to gain any more than mild affection, and Allen is simply too uncharismatic – when faced with a Carrey or a Thornton – to compare favourably.
This isn’t to say that Christmas with the Kranks isn’t a decent enough family movie. For people with young children it should be great – lots of silly slapstick and infantile gags, and some great supporting performances from comic actors of the calibre of Jamie Lee Curtis and Dan Ackroyd – but it is unlikely to achieve the kind of success of Allen’s previous Christmas flicks. Still, well worth a couple of hours to keep the kiddies amused, even if it may fare better next festive season when it’s out on DVD.
