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.
