The Unseen Movie Review

The Libertine

2005-11-01T04:55:00.001-08:00

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

2005-11-01T04:55:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-01T04:54:00.001-08:00

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

2005-11-01T04:54:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-01T04:53:00.001-08:00

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

2005-11-01T04:53:00.000-08:00

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

2005-11-01T04:52:00.001-08:00

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

2005-11-01T04:52:00.000-08:00

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

2005-10-01T04:41:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-01T04:40:00.001-07:00

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

2005-10-01T04:40:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-01T04:38:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-01T04:37:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-01T04:33:00.000-07:00

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

2005-10-01T04:32:00.001-07:00

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

2005-10-01T04:32:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-01T04:40:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-01T04:25:00.001-07:00

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

2005-09-01T04:25:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-01T04:24:00.001-07:00

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

2005-09-01T04:24:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-01T04:23:00.001-07:00

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

2005-09-01T04:23:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-01T04:22:00.000-07:00

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

2005-08-01T04:16:00.001-07:00

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

2005-08-01T04:16:00.000-07:00

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

2005-08-01T04:15:00.001-07:00

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

2005-08-01T04:15:00.000-07:00

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

2005-08-01T04:14:00.001-07:00

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

2005-08-01T04:14:00.000-07:00

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

2005-08-01T04:13:00.000-07:00

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

2005-08-01T04:12:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-01T04:07:00.001-07:00

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

2005-07-01T04:07:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-01T04:06:00.001-07:00

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

2005-07-01T04:06:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-01T04:05:00.001-07:00

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

2005-07-01T04:05:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-01T04:04:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-01T04:03:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-01T00:00:00.007-07:00

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

2005-06-01T00:00:00.006-07:00

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

2005-06-01T00:00:00.005-07:00

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

2005-06-01T00:00:00.004-07:00

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

2005-06-01T00:00:00.003-07:00

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!

2005-06-01T00:00:00.002-07:00

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

2005-06-01T00:00:00.001-07:00

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

2005-06-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-01T00:00:00.007-07:00

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

2005-05-01T00:00:00.006-07:00

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

2005-05-01T00:00:00.005-07:00

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

2005-05-01T00:00:00.004-07:00

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

2005-05-01T00:00:00.003-07:00

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

2005-05-01T00:00:00.002-07:00

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

2005-05-01T00:00:00.001-07:00

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

2005-05-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

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.

XXX2: State of the Union

2005-04-01T00:00:00.007-08:00

In 2002, and after already generating interest through some smaller roles, Vin Diesel seemed to all and sundry to be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone as he finally took on the lead in an all-action macho spectacular. The only trouble was that the film in question, xXx (complete with the bizarre capitalisation), wasn’t really that good. Yes, it was fun. Yes, it had some good action sequences. But it simply wasn’t possible to like, identify with or aspire to be like Diesel’s gruff, self-satisfied secret agent. Without a likeable lead, action films are doomed to failure.

So when Diesel allowed his new-found fame to go to his head and decided to turn down the sequel (which for some reason has also lost the odd capitalisation of the first movie), he actually did the filmmakers a favour. They, of course, were not able to see this at the time, but thanks to the lack of Diesel they have been able to find a lead actor who is far, far more appealing – even if he is simultaneously a highly unlikely action star.

Yep, this time the XXX (or xXx) moniker has been given to rap legend Ice Cube, once part of the groundbreaking group N.W.A. alongside Eminem favourite Dr. Dre. Ice Cube has been knocking around in films since his debut in “gangsta” classic Boyz n the Hood, and generally made a good show of it. In recent years, especially since his turn in 1995’s superb Friday but also in the recent Barbershop films, he has shown a definite talent for comedy. So although he had a rock-hard image back in his 1980s rapping heyday, now Ice Cube is generally regarded as a cuddly and fun kind of guy - an odd choice for a tough ex-con special agent.

Diesel wasn’t the only one to quit the franchise – when he walked, so too went the first film’s director, Rob Cohen, a flashy try-hard responsible for the earlier Diesel vehicle The Fast and the Furious. For the sequel, they’ve been able to get in someone with a bit of talent, New Zealander Lee Tamahori. With experience both of traditional action (the Bond film Die Another Day) and combining close characterisation with realistic violence (the brutal, low-budget Once Were Warriors), Tamahori certainly has the CV to pull this sort of thing off.

So, can the Ice Cube/Tamahori combination do something more interesting with the idea of a special agency which recruits talented criminals to protect the United States than the Diesel/Cohen partnership managed? Well, yes and no. The single best thing in the first film was Samuel L. Jackson as XXX’s stone-faced boss, and he returns again in a greatly expanded role. All well and good. The only trouble is, the plot’s hardly an original or especially interesting one, centring around an attempted coup by a maniacal general turned US Defence Secretary, played by a typically over-the-top Willem Dafoe.

In other words, it’s Ice Cube versus Donald Rumsfeld. If you think of it like that, and mentally replace Dafoe with Rumsfeld whenever he appears onscreen, this film becomes almost a work of genius.

Ice Cube is a far better lead than Diesel ever was, and Tamahori a far more coherent director than Cohen, but there is otherwise little new here – and certainly nothing in the way of intelligence. But then, if you’re tempted by this, mental stimulation is hardly what you’re after – just explosions, stunts, and the occasional one-liner. Here, XXX2 delivers amply. No classic, but braindead fun nonetheless.

The Interpreter

2005-04-01T00:00:00.006-08:00

After the immense drubbing the United Nations has got from many pro-war commentators in the United States over the last year or two, it is entirely possible that this film is part of an attempt by the UN to win back some American support. Despite having been featured in innumerable films over the years – perhaps most famously Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest – this movie marks the first time any Hollywood filmmaker has been allowed to shoot inside the UN’s New York headquarters.

Ignoring the limited interest of seeing inside the UN HQ (one big skyscraper is, after all, much like any other), the idea of using it as a setting for a thriller is actually very clever. Despite being on US soil, and in the heart of one of America’s greatest cities, the United Nations building is officially not US territory. Much as foreign embassies in London are technically the sovereign territory of the country which they represent, the UN’s headquarters is not bound by US law or jurisdiction. In fact, thanks to the UN being an international organisation, it is not bound by the laws of any country. So, if a crime is committed or plotted within the UN compound, does it actually count as a crime? And if so, who is responsible for investigating it?

So, when UN interpreter Nicole Kidman, working late, overhears a plot to assassinate the leader of an African nation on a forthcoming visit to the UN, who is responsible for checking to see if the threat is real? A US federal investigator, Sean Penn, is assigned to look into the conspiracy and, as is the way of things in political thrillers, aside from the jurisdictional difficulties all may not be as it seems. As Kidman’s interpreter begins to fear that she too may be a target, Penn’s agent gradually begins to uncover a complex international conspiracy closely tied in with the domestic political problems of a small African nation about which he knows nothing.

This film hits all the hot political topics right on the head – the role of the UN, African instability, terrorism, assassination, and the urge to do the right thing even when what that may be remains unclear.

In the hands of veteran director/producer/actor Sydney Pollack, perhaps best known for the 1993 thriller The Firm (starring Kidman’s ex-husband, Tom Cruise), this potentially impenetrably convoluted material has been finely crafted into a stylish, absorbing movie. In this he has been greatly aided by crisp cinematography by the guy who shot modern classic Se7en and the recent Panic Room, as well as the same editor who helped The Firm maintain its tension, and the composer whose scores have added so much extra suspense to all of M. Night Shyamalan’s popular twist-filled flicks, from The Sixth Sense to The Village.

With such an accomplished creative team behind the scenes and two Oscar-winning actors in the leads, it should be no wonder that The Interpreter hits all the right notes. Together, they have produced one of those films ideal for an entertaining, shock-filled night out.

The Assassination Of Richard Nixon

2005-04-01T00:00:00.005-08:00

It is a little-known fact that September 11th 2001 was not the first time someone decided to try and fly a jumbo jet into the White House. On February 22nd 1974, failed car tyre salesman Samuel Byck attempted to commandeer a Boeing 747 to assassinate President Richard Nixon. His failure ensured that today he is little-known, remembered as little more than a footnote amongst the chaos of the Watergate scandal which ended Nixon’s presidency six months later.

Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival last year, this film received little attention among the more instantly commercially viable entries of the likes of Shrek 2 and Kill Bill. It is, nonetheless, an interesting – if flawed – take on the all but forgotten events which led to Byck’s failed bid to enter the history books.

Considering the anger that has been caused by the actions of the current US president, it is easy to see why the story of an American apparently driven to extremes by his exasperation with his head of state might appeal. The fact that Byck was also somewhat psychologically deranged – even dressing up as Father Christmas to protest outside the White House in the run-up to his plot – simply makes the character more interesting.

This film is in a way an attempt to put Byck up there with other infamous American crazies of the likes of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, Hollywood murderer Charles Manson or the Waco Massacre’s cult leader David Koresh. It is, however, a level of infamy he almost certainly doesn’t deserve – hence a hefty addition of fictional material, and the alteration of his name to “Bicke”.

Centred around a brilliant central performance by Sean Penn – one of his best to date – the most obvious parallel here is with Martin Scorsese’s classic tale of deranged attempted assassination that is Taxi Driver. Much like Robert De Niro’s similarly-named Travis Bickle in that earlier film, Penn’s Bicke is a socially-withdrawn loner, with little in the way of an appealing personality and a tiny circle of acquaintances. He is a pathetic figure, desperately hoping for a loan to help rebuild his life and restore his relationship with his waitress wife, played by increasingly popular Naomi Watts.

It seems as though first-time director and co-writer Niels Mueller saw Byck/Bicke as one of those classic characters, which scatter American literature and the movies, who has been utterly let down and overlooked by the American Dream. Nixon’s rise from poverty to the highest office in the land, in contrast, was in many ways the epitome of that ongoing myth. Was Byck/Bicke simply envious, or was he actively deranged?

It is a question the film never quite manages to answer, being instead a complete antithesis to the usual Hollywood feel-good fare, and a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion. What the film does provide, however, is a truly masterly display of virtuoso acting and characterisation by Penn. Although he won his Oscar for 2003’s Mystic River after three prior nominations, this display of sheer talent could well help him secure his place as one of Hollywood’s all-time greats. Film acting doesn’t get much better than this.

Sahara

2005-04-01T00:00:00.004-08:00

“In the Civil War, a battleship carrying a secret shipment of gold vanished without a trace.” And with that premise is launched yet another attempt to repeat the success of the Indiana Jones movies. Yep, this is a treasure-hunting adventure yarn set in inhospitable and uncivilised lands, where a ruggedly masculine yet likeable hero performs various feats of derring-do straight out of those “Boy’s Own” annuals of the 1950s, while making wisecracks and chatting up any attractive females he happens across. Classic action movie material, in other words.

Based on a novel by pulp action writer Clive Cussler – effectively a low-rent Tom Clancy – Sahara has all the hallmarks of being just the first film in a potentially very successful new action franchise. Considering that Cussler’s Dirk Pitt novels – of which there are around a dozen to date – have sold over 100 million copies worldwide, there’s certainly a market for it. Add to that the fact that – since the failure of the Mummy franchise, the ongoing failure to revive Indiana Jones, the decline of Bruce Willis’ Die Hard series, and the end of Piers Brosnan’s run as James Bond – Hollywood has been looking for a new old-fashioned action hero, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

Much as with earlier films of this type, the hero must have sidekicks. Here, the beautiful love interest – a part taken by Rachel Weisz in The Mummy as well as innumerable Bond girls – is amply filled by the somewhat easy on the eye Penelope Cruz. The zany male sidekick – played jointly by Denholm Elliott and Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and a combination of John Hannah and Kevin J. O’Connor in The Mummy – is taken up by Indy film favourite Steve Zahn, probably best known to date for his turn as the hapless stoner ex-con Glenn in Steven Soderberg’s Out of Sight.

However, this kind of film always hinges on the lead. Harrison Ford was perfect and set the mould as Indiana Jones. Brendan Fraser did a good job of replicating Ford’s success in The Mummy – though botched it in the sequel. More recently, Angelina Jolie looked good but utterly lacked the required charisma as Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider flicks.

Here, they’ve opted for Matthew McConnaughey – easy on the eye, certainly, but with little in his back catalogue to suggest he’s action movie lead material beyond his turn in the low budget and underrated man versus dragon sci-fi flick, Reign of Fire. He’s one of those actors who have been around for ages, yet who don’t seem ever to have done anything memorable. Given the fact that Cussler’s first choice for the role was apparently X-Men’s Hugh Jackman, his casting could seem worrying.

Can McConnaughey pull it off? Well… Yes, actually. With the help of Zahn’s comedy antics and Cruz’s smouldering sexiness, plus the utterly ridiculous yet very enjoyable mystic conspiracy plot, in adventurer Dirk Pitt McConnaughey could finally have found himself a role that will earn him wider recognition than just occupying poster space on teenage girls’ bedroom walls. For the rest of us, it’s just possible we may have found a suitable heir to Indiana Jones’ undisputed title of the king of the action heroes.

The Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2005-04-01T00:00:00.003-08:00

This film has been longed for now for nearly a quarter of a century. First optioned as far back as 1982, with Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd mentioned as possible stars, it has only finally made it to the screen four years after the premature death of Douglas Adams, the man whose hilarious brainchild it was.

First a hit radio series, then a record album, a bestselling novel, a cult television series, a classic text-based computer game, a stage show and a comic book, every version to date has seen both subtle and major alterations to the overall storyline of a reserved Englishman who finds himself the last survivor of the planet Earth, following its destruction to make room for an intergalactic bypass. This movie is no exception, with several major additions to the storyline, not least John Malkovich’s religious leader Humma Kavula, all of which were added by Adams before his death.

Here, the reserved Englishman in question, a part which has been linked to everyone from Hugh Laurie to Jack Davenport over the years, has gone to Martin Freeman, best known as the hapless, unlucky-in-love Tim from the insanely popular Ricky Gervais sitcom The Office. As Ford Prefect, Arthur’s best friend who just happens to be an alien (hence his being mistaken for an American), they’ve got in hip hop hero Mos Def. An odd choice at first, especially for those used to the television version, but one which works surprisingly well.

Freeman and Mos Def in turn are backed up by a superb cast which ranges from Bill Nighy and Alan Rickman to the absolutely perfect Stephen Fry as the voice of the Guide itself. To direct, after flirtations with the likes of Spike Jonze, pop promo helmer Garth Jennings, best known for Blur’s brilliant milk carton-based video for hit Coffee and TV, has been brought in for his first major project.

The trouble with any new version of something as loved as Hitchhikers is that it won’t live up to the expectations of long-term fans. But, unlike most movie adaptations, this is not one where fans of the original have any grounds for complaints that their cherished plot has been tampered with. In fact, it’s a fairly safe bet that people who consider themselves fans of the original won’t even be able to agree on what the “original” actually means, so many different versions have there been since the story’s first appearance on BBC radio way back in 1978.

In other words, this film should be judged entirely on its own merits – and its merits are manifold. For newcomers to the world of the Guide, a whole wealth of additional material and different versions are awaiting you. For those of us who have listened to, read about and watched the adventures of Arthur Dent and his companions many times over the years, we still have our favourite old versions. We now also have a big budget and accomplished new take on Douglas Adams’ vision, and one of which he would fully have approved. Don’t Panic. They haven’t ruined it. Sit back and enjoy.

Cursed

2005-04-01T00:00:00.002-08:00

Director Wes Craven is one of the kings of American horror. Not content with having helped shape the nature of the genre during the 1980s with his Nightmare on Elm Street films, he was also the man responsible for reinventing it as self-parody with the in-joke-laden Scream series. During his career, Craven has had ghosts, vampires, psychics and teenagers as his slashing, mass-murdering protagonists. With Cursed he turns his attention to yet another classic nasty – the werewolf.

Werewolves have had a fairly tough time of it in Hollywood recently. While vampires have been perennially popular, The Mummy made a comeback and Frankenstein’s monster keeps being reinvented anew, since the dire Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle Wolf back in 1994 the only werewolf film to do much business was surprise French success Brotherhood of the Wolf four years ago. The last really good, big budget werewolf film was all the way back in 1981, with the modern classic An American Werewolf in London.

The trouble is, werewolves simply just aren’t that scary a prospect. Let’s face it, all they really are is big doggies and, for anyone who grew up in the 80s, one of the first thoughts that will spring to mind when someone mentions werewolves is Michael J. Fox covered in hair and playing basketball in 1985’s Teen Wolf. There the transformation into a hairy beast was – fairly disingenuously – used as a metaphor for puberty, in much the same way as it would later be with the character of Oz in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

So Craven’s set himself quite a task in taking on werewolves, and one only made more difficult by his own contributions to the horror genre, which have ensured that straight gore and shocks without a bit of humour these days hold little interest. Thanks to his own deconstruction of the genre in the Scream films – which were, incidentally, written by the same screenwriter as is responsible for this outing – Craven these days is expected to finely balance scares and laughs.

Unfortunately, Craven seems to have lost his touch. He took four years off after Scream 3, and in that time appears to have forgotten everything he once knew about making intelligent, funny yet scary movies. He tries to get the same combination of humour and horror that he has achieved in recent outings, but somehow his aim has ended up slightly off with both. A few good scares and a few good jokes do not a good movie make.

This is not as bad as most of the straight to video horror trash which still gets churned out by low-budget studios to this day, but it is also nowhere near as good as you would expect from a master of the genre armed with a good screenwriter and a halfway decent cast. Perhaps one to rent in a few months time, but not one to venture out for.

Beauty Shop

2005-04-01T00:00:00.001-08:00

You don’t go to see this sort of film if you’re after sophisticated Wildean wit, you go for broad, obvious silliness.

A spin-off from the Ice Cube-starring Barbershop films – themselves based on some amusing sketches in the late-80s Eddie Murphy vehicle Coming to America – Beauty Shop takes a tried and tested formula and changes little but the sex of the main characters. Where the two Barbershop films focussed around a series of black male stereotypes moaning and joking with each other to pass the time of day, this sees a bunch of black female stereotypes doing precisely the same thing.

Here, the Ice Cube role is adopted by the surprisingly popular Queen Latifah, who currently seems to be trying to corner the Hollywood market for vivacious, slightly overweight Africa-American women who seem to do little more than waggle their heads from side to side while saying “girlfriend”. Absolutely fine, if you like that sort of thing.

The plots of the two Barbershop films, such as they were, were all about struggling to maintain an idealised, old-fashioned approach to business in the face of bigger, bolder competition. No changes here. Latifah’s Gina, who cropped up in a relatively small role in Barbershop 2 last year, has moved from Chicago to Atlanta to give her daughter a chance to make something of herself. After a brief stint at the upmarket salon of the insanely over-the-top Jorge Christophe (Kevin Bacon, having fun with the limited material and a ridiculous wig), she ends up opening her own rival business, populating it with the full range of entirely predictable caricatures.

But predictable caricatures and old set-ups can be funny. That is, after all, the entire premise of every sitcom ever made – a bunch of exaggerated people knocking around a limited environment, doing similar things all the time. It’s Friends, it’s Cheers, it’s Only Fools and Horses. If it works for television, why shouldn’t it work for film?

Well, whatever the reason, it doesn’t. When you go to the cinema, unless you’re going to a classic movie on re-release, you generally expect to see something entertaining and original for your money. This is, to all intents and purposes, neither.

That’s not to say that this isn’t a funny film. There are a number of good jokes, amusing characters and moments. Mena Suvari and Andie MacDowell as a couple of stuck-up posh customers are both fun, if seemingly not trying too hard. Kevin Bacon, a much underrated actor, certainly has his moments. The woefully underutilised Djimon Hounsou, who amply proved his acting mettle in Amistad and Gladiator, may only be the love-interest, but he too is likable when onscreen. The only completely bum note is Alicia Silverstone’s obnoxious wannabe-black stylist – but then Silverstone hasn’t been good since Clueless, and that was ten years ago.

It’s always a shame when a generally good cast is left with duff and unoriginal material. All involved should have known better than to take part in this desperate attempt to wring more money out of the failing Barbershop franchise. Don’t expect a sequel to this one, but if you fancy an unchallenging couple of hours with a few giggles, it might be worth it. Assuming you can get a discount on the ticket price and so can avoid feeling ripped off, that is… Don’t say you weren’t warned, girlfriend.

Be Cool

2005-04-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Get Shorty saw John Travolta on a post-Pulp Fiction high, enjoying popularity the likes of which he hadn’t known since Saturday Night Fever and Grease. As mobster turned film producer Chili Palmer he seemed to prove that his run of bad films throughout the 1980s was more to do with studio politics than any lack of talent. His apparently easy charm combined perfectly with an amusing plot and some fun supporting performances from various big names to make an enjoyable film which seemed easily to secure his rediscovered star status.

Today, Travolta’s star has once again plummeted – thanks to a succession of dire turns in the likes of Swordfish, Ladder 49 and the near-official worst film of all time, Battlefield Earth – and he is in dire need of a fresh hit. Add to that the fact that since he has put on a lot of weight – and especially with the slicked-back hairdo he sports here – he has begun to bear a striking resemblance to laughing stock action “star” Steven Segal, he must be aware that, without a new big success, being forced into another Look Who’s Talking film is only a matter of time.

So, in the absence of any more parts in Tarantino flicks, ten years after Get Shorty showed that Pulp Fiction wasn’t a fluke we finally get the sequel which was rumoured even as the first film was still in cinemas. The fact that the tagline to this movie is “Everybody is looking for the next big hit”, and that Travolta has somehow managed to rope in his old Pulp Fiction co-star Uma Thurman to do a repeat performance of their dancing scene from that movie, simply makes the desperation even more obvious. The only confusing thing remains the awful title – why not simply call it Get Shorty 2?

If you want to revive your career in a slick Hollywood-set comedy, getting in a load of your big-name buddies is a superb idea. So we get James Woods, Danny DeVito, Harvey Keitel, Vince Vaughn, wrestler The Rock, comedian Cedric the Entertainer and even Aerosmith all strutting their stuff alongside Travolta and Thurman, and all seem to be having a stupidly fun time. Vaughn and The Rock in particular are evidently having the time of their lives with their overly silly characters.

Just because the actors are enjoying themselves does not, however, necessarily guarantee that the audience are going to enjoy watching it. Being an actor, Travolta seems to have concentrated too much on the cast, not enough on the plot, dialogue or – especially – direction. Not up to the task himself, he got in the cheapest hack director he could find – the man responsible for the simply appalling Italian Job remake. Where the first film was expertly adapted from a good Elmore Leonard novel, this has been written from scratch by the man responsible for tedious “comedy” sequel Analyze That.

Without enough plot, they’ve opted for as many musical interludes as possible to pad out the runtime, many of which are only moderately excusable thanks to the central conceit that Travolta’s ex-gangster is branching out into the music biz with promising starlet Linda Moon (played by promising starlet Christina Milian). Sadly the music is not up to scratch either.

This may be being harsh. There is some enjoyment to be had here. But considering the acting talent involved it is far, far less than it might – and indeed should – have been. To win back his fans Travolta must do much, much more than this.

Robots

2005-03-01T00:00:00.007-08:00

Cute character design? Check. Male and female leads for a bit of love interest? Check. Occasional movie references? Check. Yet another computer-animated movie with a big-name cast which is trying to appeal to adults as well as their kids? Surely not!

The big-name stars here are Ewan McGregor and Halle Berry, with the help of the likes of Robin Williams, Greg Kinnear, Mel Brooks, Jim Broadbent and Drew Carey. But oddly, despite McGregor being in the lead and the story being set in a bizarre world populated entirely by robots, his voice is practically unrecognisable due to a combination of one of his Big Fish-style American accents and an apparent attempt to imitate Tobey Maguire’s creaky, geeky tones from the Spider-Man movies. Why get in a big name if no one will realise it’s him? Still, this is a kids’ film, after all – the voices are meant to be slightly silly.

This is a fairly typical tale of an innocent country boy going to the big city, meeting some dodgy types and the girl of his dreams, making it big, and showing the dodgy city types the error of their ways. Albeit with an odd-looking mechanical country boy and a city populated with cybernetic swindlers. It’s all nicely-done stuff, with a decent amount of visual invention chucked in to the fairly standard storyline. The cross-city transport system which seems based on some kind of elaborate executive stress toy is a particularly nice touch, and the various cyborg characters are all lovingly detailed in their design.

But the danger with a film like this which is so reliant on technological expertise, and especially with one in which all the characters are machines, is that the scientific wizardry will get in the way of the storyline. What is always needed is a firm guiding hand in the shape of a director who knows precisely what they are trying to achieve. With the directorial team of Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldhana, of Ice Age fame, such a guiding vision is only to be expected. If they can make fluffy creatures wandering around an icy wasteland trying to avoid extinction appealing, surely they can manage it with robots?

Sure enough, while this is certainly no Incredibles, Wedge and Saldhana –aided and abetted by their starry cast – have managed to produce another very likeable children’s film. But that, sadly, is pretty much all it is. There is very little here to appeal to the adults, the humour being largely infantile and slapstick and, despite the big names and a few vague stabs as some in-jokes, there is none of the knowing humour of the likes of Antonio Banderas’ self-mocking turn in Shrek 2. Which is a bit of a shame, but still. What we’ve ended up with instead is a perfectly good way to amuse the kids for a couple of hours, and that’s always got to be worth something.

Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous

2005-03-01T00:00:00.006-08:00

Sandra Bullock’s exploits as a geeky FBI agent turned beauty queen in 2000’s Miss Congeniality were an entertaining slice of lightweight farcical fun. Nothing too challenging, just a silly premise nicely supported by a likeable central performance, and greatly aided by Michael Caine in a superb supporting role as the gay beauty pageant coach and Star Trek’s William Shatner in a delightfully self-mocking turn as the show’s host.

Here, Bullock is back for pretty much more of the same inconsequential and inoffensive amusement. Kicking off shortly after her success at the first film’s pageant, Bullock’s Agent Hart has become something of a celebrity, adored by the media and with a book to promote. Keen for the positive publicity, the FBI are allowing her a lot of leeway to show the agency in a good light, and her crime-fighting skills seem to be slipping, when the news comes that some of her old pageant friends have been kidnapped. She naturally wants to get in on the case, but her bosses not only doubt her skills but also don’t want to risk losing their prime PR asset. To compromise she is given a bodyguard to help out, and it turns into a fairly typical female buddy cop movie.

Bullock is her typical ditzy on-screen presence, reviving the character from the original film with so little effort you could almost imagine that it’s because it is exactly the same character as she’s played in pretty much every film she’s ever made. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing – she has ably turned the Sandra Bullock persona into a likable and marketable commodity and achieved the near-impossible of maintaining her position as a sexy Hollywood star despite having hit her forties. For women in the cutthroat world of showbiz, that’s no mean feat. Of course, the fact that physically she’s hardly changed since her big break in 1993’s Demolition Man has probably helped a fair bit too.

Sadly, Caine has not returned for the sequel, but we do still at least get Shatner as one of the unfortunate abductees, allowing him plenty of space for yet more of his trademark overacting. When Shatner is on top self-aware form, he can be a true delight to watch, gamely lampooning his public persona to the max and happily weighing in with that wonderfully bizarre delivery which these days freely acknowledges that he will never be considered a great actor. He is – as long as he’s kept in relatively small doses, as here – some kind of comic genius.

Much as with the first film, there is little of any originality here. This is no great cinematic masterpiece. It is not reinventing any genres, experimenting with any new techniques, and is not going to win anyone involved any prizes. It is, however, a fun and silly slice of throwaway nonsense – and as such an ideal antidote to a hard week at the office.

Melinda and Melinda

2005-03-01T00:00:00.005-08:00

There was once a time when a new Woody Allen film was a cause for celebration – especially if it were a new relationship comedy, as this film is. But his last really decent outing was back in 1999 with Sweet and Lowdown, since when he’s directed six movies, all of which were more or less massive flops – both critically and commercially. For those who have never seen Allen’s many masterpieces of the 70s and 80s, judging by his recent output it must be very hard to see what all the fuss is about. Even for his fans, a new Woody Allen film has, over the last few years, become not a cause for celebration but dismay. His former talent seemed utterly to have deserted him.

This, however, is finally that longed-for return to form. It’s no Allen classic, certainly, and will never earn a place up there with the likes of Sleeper, Annie Hall and Manhattan in the hall of fame, but nonetheless it is both far better than any of his last few films and genuinely funny and intriguing in its own right.

The Melindas of the title are actually just one person, played by Finding Neverland’s Radha Mitchell, and she’s entirely fictional – dreamed up thanks to a discussion of the relative merits of comedy and tragedy. As such this film is made up of two alternative storylines weaving in and out of each other, one comedic, one fairly straight tragic drama, with only their starting point, a New York dinner party, and Melinda herself in common. If it sounds similar to 1998’s Gwynneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors, that’s because it is – Allen even uses the same device of using different hairstyles on the central actress to distinguish between the two plotlines.

But despite appearances, and despite the fact that Allen’s recent films largely seem to have been exercises in self-plagiarism, this is not a movie of mere derivativeness, but is actually an interesting and often amusing exploration of the age-old concerns at the heart of theatre.

Some of the problems of Allen’s recent outings remain, however. Now that he is getting on a bit (he will hit seventy this year), Allen tends to remain behind the camera, whereas he always used to take prominent lead roles – all of which were somehow pretty much the same character. Here some of the impressive ensemble cast, which includes Will Ferrell, Chlöe Sevigny and Johnny Lee Miller, make the mistake of previous recent Allen stars, notably Kenneth Branagh in 1998’s Celebrity, and seem to start trying to imitate both Allen’s delivery and mannerisms. This, sadly, often gets in the way of the twin plots, as it’s nearly impossible not to start comparing the imitations with the real thing.

Nonetheless, both storylines are sufficiently well-realised and convoluted to draw the audience in to their worlds of fiction-within-fiction, and Allen’s trademarks of sharp wit and uncanny insight into human nature are present in their droves. Sevigny and Mitchell are both on superb form, and the increasingly popular Ferrell – despite the occasional uncomfortable feelings that his character should be a foot shorter, much thinner, more Jewish and wearing glasses – continues to prove that his comic timing and slapstick skills could help him go far. As already mentioned, it’s not a Woody Allen classic; it is, however, exactly the kind of intelligent and funny film we always used to expect from the master of neurosis, and well worth a look.

Maria Full of Grace

2005-03-01T00:00:00.004-08:00

Five years ago Steven Soderbergh brought the complexities of the international drug trade vividly to life in his astoundingly complex, documentary-style, Oscar-winning film Traffic. Whereas that movie featured multiple viewpoints, characters and storylines, Maria Full of Grace, despite dealing with the same central issues, features just one – that of an impoverished Columbian girl forced to become a drugs “mule”, trafficking heroin concealed in her stomach into the United States. What is lost of Soderbergh’s complexity is more than made up for by the sheer emotional connection this focus on one desperate and exploited individual helps bring about.

The lead actress, beautiful newcomer Catalina Sandino Moreno, has rightly received both an Oscar nomination and several awards for her incredibly moving portrayal of the put-upon young mule Maria Alavrez. The combination of her delicate and utterly sympathetic portrayal and writer/director Joshua Marston’s sensitive filmmaking must rank as one of the most powerful cinematic offerings of recent years. The plight of those forced into the drug trade through lack of economic clout, education or opportunities for escape from poverty through other means has rarely been so perfectly displayed.

This is, unsurprisingly, a very serious film with a very serious message. Whereas Soderbergh’s Traffic expertly demonstrated how illegal drugs affect the lives of their users, the users’ families, and those officials charged with combating the trade, this film manages to humanise those who bear the brunt of the danger of actually trafficking the drugs themselves. Whereas certain sections of the popular press would label women such as Maria as being as guilty as the bosses of the cartels they work for in the spreading of the pernicious influence of hard drugs on western society, this film amply shows that when it comes to drugs, everyone is a victim bar those at the very top of the chain.

This is a film which hard drug users should be forced to watch for its ability to bring harshly to life the sheer horror of the process by which they get their hits. It should be watched by everyone else to give a sense of the human cost in those impoverished lands from which most of the world’s illegal drugs originate. It deserves a wide an audience as possible.

Yes, it is hard to watch at times. Yes, it is a “difficult” subject. No, it is not the sort of film many would go to see out of choice thanks to a combination of its lack of explosions or special effects and the fear that, due to having a message, it may be a bit preachy. It is indeed preachy, but the sermon it delivers is neither tedious nor untimely, and the film is simply so well made, and the performances so perfect, that even without its central point it is an incredible piece of cinema. This sort of film is very rare indeed, and as such cannot be recommended highly enough.

Kinsey

2005-03-01T00:00:00.003-08:00

In the mid 20th century an unknown zoology professor single-handedly altered the course of western civilisation. Alfred C. Kinsey’s name remains little known to the general public, but his research into sex and sexuality in the 1940s and 1950s for the first time shattered taboos about sexual behaviour which had more or less dominated society since the middle ages. His research was the first step on the road to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, and broke the barriers which had continued to stand in the way of equal for women and homosexuals.

This classic nerd - complete with trademark bow tie and a love of classical music and gardening - the son of a Methodist lay preacher, was the most unlikely hero of the wars of the sexes. Brought to life by the always superbly understated Liam Neeson more than sixty years after his research interests shifted from wasps to humans, this film could do much to reclaim his rightful place as the unwitting father of the modern permissive society.

The sheer impact of Kinsey’s work on the world in which we live is brought to life most clearly in scenes from a “hygiene” class at Indiana University, where Kinsey taught. The prudish professor in charge of the course, played by an almost gleefully over the top Tim Curry, spreads in all seriousness misinformation about sex which would, if taught today, probably be cause for a lawsuit. It is almost unbelievable that such untruths could have been treated as fact such a short time ago – especially by a supposedly civilised society.

While Kinsey’s sexual/scientific research lies right at the heart of the film, the presence of Liam Neeson in the lead alone should be enough to demonstrate that this is not mere titillation or scandal-mongering. Aside from his turn as a Jedi master in the abysmal Star Wars: Episode I, Neeson is hardly known for taking on mindless roles. Here, the exploration of the effects of Kinsey’s academic specialty on his marital life - and on those of his researchers – is just as much a focus as his findings. Plus, as should be expected, Neeson’s performance is practically flawless.

Considering the recent resurgence of the self-professed “moral majority” in the United States, this film’s subject matter is highly risky – a supreme irony, considering it was so many decades ago that Kinsey’s well-meaning research first caused such a stir. Despite the adoption of so many of his ideas, they are still – for some – both perverse and challenging.

So it is a blessed relief that the film, artfully and sensitively written and directed by the man behind the superb 1998 biopic of homosexual 1930s film director James Whale Gods and Monsters, manages to avoid kowtowing to American pressure groups who would far rather sex had remained the taboo it was before Kinsey arrived on the scene. Kinsey’s occasionally obsessive devotion to research which many would still call immoral is neither condemned nor lauded. Most today would say that the ends – the liberation of women and the decline in persecution of practices once deemed beyond the pale – were almost entirely good. The film does not judge, and whether or not Kinsey’s means justified these ends is left entirely up to the audience to decide. It’s an odd subject for a biopic but, despite initially seeming like it will have little to say in our post-Kinsey age, still has the ability to provoke much thought.

Hitch

2005-03-01T00:00:00.002-08:00

Nope, not a biopic of uber-director Alfred Hitchcock, but the latest vehicle for Will Smith – returning to his familiar Fresh Prince of Bel Air style comedy after a series of sub-par turns in the likes of Men in Black II, Bad Boys II, I Robot and Shark Tale. This is the Will Smith we all know and love – charming, witty, and showing impeccable comic timing. Thankfully he’s also refrained from singing the theme song this time…

Smith plays Alex Hitchens, appropriately nicknamed “Hitch” as his vocation is to help hapless blokes, as he himself used to be, to get hitched to the women of their dreams. As he puts it, he’s a “date doctor”. It has been dubbed, in some quarters, as “Black Eye for the White Guy” after the recent popularity of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy TV series – and that is pretty much spot on.

Although Hitch could seem like a busybody – poking his nose into other people’s relationships and offering initially unasked-for advice, his easy likeability and unforced charisma somehow makes the fact that no one ever seems to punch him for getting involved entirely believable. The fact that, even after he’s hired by these unlucky love-hunters, money is never seen to change hands only adds to the sense that he is practically impossible to dislike.

Of course, Smith simply helping out others, as amusing as some of the set-ups – especially those involving Kevin James of the US TV sitcom The King of Queens – may be is hardly in itself enough for a movie, even for the notoriously slight plots of the romantic comedy genre. So, naturally enough, he falls for someone himself and – surprise, surprise – the power of true love seems instantly to rob him of all his smooth sophistication as he regresses to the kind of klutzy incompetence which it is his job to rid others of.

Cue an array of slapstick antics and cringe-making embarrassments as Smith desperately tries to woo the woman of his dreams – played by the equally entirely likeable and utterly gorgeous up-and-coming Latino actress Eva Mendes, who seems rapidly to be surpassing J-Lo in the Hollywood Hispanic hottie stakes.

The whole film is utterly predictable and entirely devoid of originality, naturally, but – like Hitch himself – it is both funny and practically impossible to dislike. They really should have released it a month ago to catch the Valentine’s Day crowd as it is, unsurprisingly considering it’s a romantic comedy with a male lead whom both sexes can like and a female lead that men will lust after, an ideal date movie. Unchallenging, but amusing and fun.

Constantine

2005-03-01T00:00:00.001-08:00

This is certainly not a regular comic book superhero movie. How often have you seen Superman lurk around in the shadows, battling demons and angels and trying to con the devil himself? How often have you seen such a movie in which the superhero in question not only refrains from wearing a garish costume, but is also dying of lung cancer brought about from his addiction to cigarettes?

John Constantine is a kind of self-centred freelance occult investigator, following his instincts and putting his magical powers to good use while battling some fairly impressive special effects (provided courtesy of the guy behind the effects on the X-Men movies). Teaming up with Rachel Weisz’s police detective, investigating the apparent suicide of her sister, he uncovers something somewhat more sinister beneath the surface. Cue appearances from voodoo DJs, transgender angels and even Satan himself in a beautifully-shot and skilfully-directed piece of darkly noirish sci-fi.

For those who have read any of the superb comic book series, Hellblazer, on which this film is based, the casting of Keanu Reeves as Constantine initially seems a travesty. Constantine is a sorcerer versed in the dark arts, a devious and practically amoral character who antagonises the forces of good as much as those of evil in the twisted underbelly of society which he inhabits. All this more or less remains in the film adaptation. But – shock horror – in the comic, Constantine was blond and Liverpudlian, but in the film he’s got dark hair and is American! Oh no!

The comic’s fans do, however, have a point – albeit one which misses the fundamental difference between comics and film. Constantine’s adventures on the page were far more philosophically complex and psychologically dark than those on display here, certainly. And in the comics Constantine’s companion, Chas, is a middle aged cockney taxi driver, not a young black street kid.

But what this neglects to acknowledge is that the comic book character has been around for over twenty years, allowing for a huge amount of character development and a vast array of plots - whereas this film lasts but two hours. It would be impossible to distil twenty years worth of anything into just two hours without losing something, but in the filmmakers’ defence they have chosen to adapt some of the very best storylines of that twenty year run.

For those fans who can get over the idea that their hero is no longer blond or British, the essence of the comic remains. Keanu is, amazingly, a good Constantine. He maintains precisely the right level of dark, tortured brooding, contempt for the world that has given him such a raw deal, and yet simultaneously the sense of underlying decency which always appealed the most to fans of the comics. He is an ideal film antihero – one part Humphrey Bogart, one part Clint Eastwood – and although the film may not quite be enough to blow you away, the concepts are intriguing and it looks fantastic. And in any case, once you’ve seen it you can pop to your local bookstore and catch up on twenty years’ worth of Constantine’s more complex adventures.

9 Songs

2005-03-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

All you need to know is that this is the film which caused a major ruckus last year when it emerged that its respected British director, Michael Winterbottom (of Welcome to Sarajevo, Wonderland and 24 Hour Party People fame), had got his lead actors, the experienced Kieran O’Brien and newcomer Margot Stilley, to have real, explicit, penetrative sex on camera. Absolutely nothing left to the imagination. Absolutely nothing faked.

Yes, this is basically porn – but porn presented in a manner which allows various pseudo-intellectuals the room to blather unconvincingly about how it’s not porn, it’s art. Because – hey – it’s all a flashback as the guy reminisces about his relationship, yeah? And all he seems to be able to remember is, like, the music gigs he went to and the sex, yeah? Because, like, that’s like where his head was at the time, yeah? It’s, like, confronting us with harsh truths about the superficiality and egocentricity of the inner workings of the male psyche, yeah?

Abject nonsense – it’s porn, plain and simple. And it doesn’t even have the benefit of being good porn. If you’re watching it in the hope of titillation, unless you’re fourteen you’ll be sorely disappointed. And if you’re fourteen, you shouldn’t be watching it anyway – it’s got a well-deserved 18 certificate.

The only argument going for the “it’s art” brigade is that it is almost entirely unerotic and devoid of and genuine sense of sensuality. But much good art is incredibly sensual and erotic – without the need to pay a woman to take her clothes off and perform various rather tedious-seeming sexual acts. Quite what Winterbottom was trying to achieve – beyond getting to see an attractive young woman naked and demeaned and earning himself a reputation for being a dirty old man – is impossible to work out.

It is also entirely without any kind of plot. The film is basically just sex scene, music, sex scene, music throughout its entire length. No character progression, no revelations, no surprises, no interest.

The only redeeming feature, beyond the fact that at 69 minutes it is mercifully shot, is the music - intercut with the sex as excerpts from the gigs the couple apparently went to at London’s Brixton Academy. The hip and trendy likes of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Von Bondies, Super Fury Animals, Dandy Warhols, Franz Ferdinand and Primal Scream fill out the few parts of the film that don’t involve banal intercourse and brief snippets of entirely unenlightening and uninspired dialogue.

In other words, the soundtrack could be worth picking up, but that’s about the only thing going for this turgid mess of a cheap and unimaginative skin flick. In fact, it may almost be worth showing to fourteen year olds, if only to show them that sex isn’t necessarily all its cracked up to be and can be just as tediously boring as any maths lesson.

The Spongebob Squarepants Movie

2005-02-01T00:00:00.007-08:00

Spongebob Squarepants is a phenomenon, a hero (of sorts) for many children, a cult figure for many adults, and the most popular children’s TV show in the United States. Apparently. When asked for an explanation, this was the response from one fan: “its great and they go jellyfishing and blow bubbles underwater and they have a friend called Sandy and she's a squirrel who lives in a bubble and like a spacesuit and its all good and YAY!” Make of that what you will…

By all accounts, this is about as exciting for modern children, and a fair few adults, as Transformers: The Movie was to those of twenty years ago, or the first Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night, was twenty years before that. But for those that remember them, the 1980s antics of man-child comedian Pee-wee Herman, especially in the film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, are probably the closest direct ancestor of both the main character and this movie.

Spongebob is, well… a sponge. And he wears trousers (“pants” to our American cousins) which are, it must be admitted, somewhat square – well, rectangular really, but who’s going to quibble? He lives in a pineapple house with his best friend, Patrick the starfish, and his pet snail, Gary, in the underwater town of Bikini Bottom, where he works as a chef at a fast food joint. An incurable optimist, his prime aim in the television series seems to be to make friends with his grumpy, clarinet-playing next door neighbour, Squidward the squid, while thwarting the plans of the evil (but tiny) Plankton, the owner of a rival restaurant.

Why is it so popular? Well, as those descriptions probably make clear, it’s pretty damn silly. Silliness and a childish delight in stupidity are at the very heart of the show. Spongebog is like a squidgy yellow cross between Mr Bean and Shaggy from Scooby Doo, with the added bonus of occasional sparks of humour of the likes of that other cult cartoon Ren and Stimpy. Chuck in some silly voices and a range of utterly bizarre characters, and you have one of those very weird things which people are either going to love or hate. It seems that a sizable number of people – of all ages – love it.

Thankfully for his fans, Spongebob’s first big-screen outing deviates little from the TV version. Unlike so many cinematic versions of cartoons, there has been no attempt to “improve” the animation through computer graphics or the introduction of live-action (well, there is some live-action, notably featuring a cameo from Baywatch living joke David Hasselhoff, playing himself, but it’s so insanely self-mocking that it works perfectly). This is effectively just a much longer regular episode of the show.

As such the kids will love it, though it may stretch the patience of some of the stupid sponge’s adult admirers. An idea which works well in short doses can swiftly lose its appeal when it drags on too long, and there is always that danger here. To the film’s credit, it just about keeps at a bearable length, and the gags are fast and mad enough to keep everyone largely amused.

Though probably not one for first timers to the weird and wacky world under the sea, this movie does at least demonstrate that there is still a market for films with a less technologically advanced look, as long as they are entertaining enough. The art of hand-drawn animation is not yet dead.

The Magic Roundabout

2005-02-01T00:00:00.006-08:00

Yep – THAT Magic Roundabout. That self-same confusion piece of surreal children’s puppet animation which used to go out before the news, which gained a huge cult following during the 1960s and 1970s, and which still gets repeated on and off to this day.

Only it’s not quite as you may remember it. Dougal is there, as are Florence, Dylan, Ermintrude, Brian and Zebedee. But none of them seem to look quite the same, or sound quite the same. The old man who ran the roundabout, Mr McHenry, seems to have vanished, but he never really did much anyway.

In fact it’s other missing elements, all easy to miss at first, which explain the real difference between this film and the cult series we all know and love. Unfortunately all are missing because they are no longer with us. The first is Serge Danot, the series’ original French creator, who died in 1990. Also gone, last October, is Ivor Wood, the British animator who brought the characters so wonderfully to life. Danot’s original character designs and Wood’s instantly-recognisable, slightly jerky style of animation (he was also the man behind The Herbs, The Wombles and Paddington) have gone with them, updated to a computerised, slightly less amateurish look.

But for British viewers it is the loss of writer/narrator Eric Thompson, who died in 1982, which will be most regretted – as it was during the series’ brief revival in the early 1990s. Thompson’s surreal stories, based simply on Danot and Wood’s visuals and no idea of what the original French scripts were blathering on about, read with a laid back drawl, were to a large extent what made the series such a success during both its original broadcasts and the rather odd and largely forgotten 1972 film spin off, Dougal and the Blue Cat.

Instead of Thompson’s laconic tones voicing all the characters, the makers of this new version have brought in a broad array of British talent. Bill Nighy returns to the stoner rock star persona he adopted for Love, Actually as spaced-out Dylan the rabbit, Jim Broadbent does another of his bumblingly good natured turns as slow-witted snail Brian, Joanna Lumley plays to type as the posh cow Ermintrude, and Ian McKellen takes on another Gandalf-style role as the wise, all-knowing Zebedee. Backing them up are the likes of Lee Evans, RayWinstone, Tom Baker (as the evil bouncing nemesis ZeBadDee) and, in a move which has worried many fans, pop stars Robbie Williams and Kylie Minogue as the two central characters of the original series, Dougal the dog and the little girl Florence.

Bizarrely, both Williams and Minogue are really rather good, showing talents for voices which even their most ardent fans may not have suspected them of possessing. But then, old Robbie was actually rather good in 1999’s animated Christmas TV special Robbie the Reindeer, and Kylie did start out as an actress of sorts. Perhaps we should have guessed they could pull it off.

Unsurprisingly, considering the fact that this film is feature-length, rather than five minutes like the episodes of the original, and that none of the original creative team are involved, it’s not quite what we all may remember. There is also excitement and adventures aplenty, which were rare things in the non-plots we all used to love, but it still somehow manages to remain true to its inspiration. There is enough of what we loved to still appeal to old fans, and plenty to convert a new generation to the antics of Dougal and pals – don’t be put off by the changes.

The Door in the Floor

2005-02-01T00:00:00.005-08:00

Author John Irving, on whose novel A Widow for One Year this film is based, has seen several of his books turned into films over the years, the best known of which are probably the Robin Williams vehicle The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules, for which Michael Caine won an Oscar a few years ago. He’s not as well known in this country as his native America, yet has a strong pedigree for turning out unusual yet engaging tales combining high drama, deep emotion and often broad comedy.

The main problem with Irving’s novels, for those who don’t quite get them, is their often cloying sentimentality. Thankfully here director Tod Williams, a relative newcomer aided by his own well-adapted screenplay, manages to avoid the worst of Irving’s excesses while remaining true to the source material. This has been hailed in some quarters as by far the best adaptation of an Irving novel to date – which, considering the fact that most of his books’ previous screen outings have garnered multiple Oscar nominations, is no mean feat.

Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger, both in roles which could revitalise their somewhat flagging careers, play husband and wife Ted and Marion Cole, still trying to come to terms with the car crash which killed their teenage sons some years earlier. Despite the presence of a new daughter, the couple decide to separate just as a young student comes to spend the summer as writer/artist Ted’s assistant. At first worshipping Ted, the young man soon sees him for the vain semi alcoholic he is, and begins to get somewhat closer to his boss’ equally traumatised wife.

This could very easily have turned into a rather unimaginative take on the central ideas of the classic The Graduate, with Kim Basinger in the Mrs Robinson role. Thanks in part to director Williams’ ability to leap nimbly and almost imperceptibly between melodrama, comedy and farce, some great cinematography and – perhaps most importantly – a powerhouse central performance from Jeff Bridges, the numerous pitfalls of both the original material and the danger of simply repeating earlier films is entirely avoided.

No less an authority than the New York Times has described this performance by Bridges, whose last good outing was in 1998’s The Big Lebowski, as “perhaps the wittiest and richest piece of screen acting by an American man so far this year”. Not for the first time with an Irving adaptation, there are rumours of potential Oscar nods. Thanks in part to Bridges, the rest of the cast - and the film as a whole - are lifted above the overly emotional guff which, in less capable hands, this material could so easily have become.

It is a rare gift to be able to combine sentimentality and humour while dealing with such serious themes as bereavement and the breakdown of a marriage. The fact that, to boot, Jeff Bridges has helped create one of the most complex, sympathetic yet monstrous characters to have graced cinema screens in many a year boosts this from a good film to a great one.

Spanglish

2005-02-01T00:00:00.004-08:00

Although this is an Adam Sandler vehicle, it is not simply one of those “zany” slapstick comedies at which he has been so successful. But if you are a fan of The Simpsons, the news that this movie has been written and directed by that show’s producer, James L Brooks, will no doubt raise a lot of promise.

However, rather than being Simpsons-style in humour or a typical Sandler film, it more closely resembles Brooks’ last outing as film director, the Oscar-winning 1997 Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt vehicle As Good As It Gets, in which an array of very different characters gradually came to realise how much they have in common in an unlikely yet endearingly sentimental gush-fest.

Here, Sandler plays a celebrity chef who, with his bitchy wife (Tia Leone), hires a new Mexican housemaid who doesn’t speak much English (played by Spanish actress Paz Vega in her first English language film). This being an American movie, the fact that she is Mexican doesn’t simply mean her English isn’t very good, but is an instant shorthand for “working class”.

Yep, it’s a class comedy. Only the comedy isn’t the major thrust of the film, an odd thing for Sandler judging by his past outings, largely thanks to the sheer unpleasantness of Leone’s utter cow of a stuck-up, selfish and apparently racist wife, who makes a lot of the supposed humour end up rather sour. Thanks in part to his dawning realisation of just how horrible his wife is, Sandler’s hapless chef is gradually drawn closer to their put-upon maid, especially when the couple ends up having to bring their servant’s daughter in to the household alongside their own children.

It is instead another of those “message” movies – here about how everyone, despite their class or nationality, has things in common if only they can find them. It’s all wonderfully twee as the servant teaches the masters, everyone realises the error of their ways and, much as with As Good As It Gets, happiness and delight for all seems just around the corner if only they can all learn to be a bit less selfish.

At the heart of the film’s concerns, rather than the adults who dominate the screentime, are their families – Sandler and Leone’s two children and Vega’s daughter, who acts as translator until her mother picks up enough English to get by. Sandler’s successful career and Leone’s failed one both threaten their relationships with their children, and Leone’s fraught experiences with her own ex-alcoholic mother amply demonstrate what can happen to people who don’t get enough parental love. It is the pretty Mexican maid who, in her simple way, eventually teaches them all the true meaning of family and love.

How sweet…

Sandler fans may be disappointed at the lack of oddball antics, but this will – albeit briefly – make you a little more optimistic about the human condition. It’s patronising, its saccharine, it’s comedy in only the loosest sense, it’s sentimentalist tosh, but it is undeniably heart-warming. It’ll bring a few tears to the eyes and you’ll leave the cinema feeling all warm inside in spite of yourself. That doesn’t, of course, actually mean it’s any good.

Son of the Mask

2005-02-01T00:00:00.003-08:00

Generally speaking, sequels to successful films come within a couple of years of the original. There have been a few notable exceptions – fans had to wait sixteen years for both The Godfather Part III and Star Wars Episode I to arrive after the previous instalments in those two franchises – but the general rule for Hollywood is that if something is a success, it’s best to churn out another as soon as possible.

So why have they waited eleven years to do a sequel to The Mask?

In that movie, Jim Carrey played a rather shy average Joe who discovers an ancient mask which, when worn, led him to be possessed by the ancient Norse god of mischief, Loki. Turning into a charismatic cross between a superhero and madman, it hinged around a great central performance, some (for the time) good special effects and the first on-screen appearance of the stunning Cameron Diaz as the woman of Carrey’s dreams.

The eleven year wait for a sequel has created a fair few problems for the studios. Beside the fact that The Mask was essentially a decent kids’ film with adult appeal, and the kids who liked it have now grown up, neither of the original film’s two stars have been lured back for the reprise. Yep. That’s right. Not a Carrey or a Diaz in sight.

Instead, the star of the show is Jamie Kennedy. The name might ring a bell thanks to his candid camera TV show or his turns in the Scream movies, but nonetheless he’s hardly as big a star as Jim Carrey – or even as Jim Carrey was when the original film first came out.

But then, although most sequels simply try to repeat the same formula, there is also always the need to do something slightly different. Getting a comedian to gurn with silly expressions while wearing green face paint again would hardly show too much originality – especially when you no longer have the rubbery features of Jim Carrey to act as your centrepiece.

Instead of taking over an introverted loser and turning him into a charismatic whirlwind of cartoon nonsense this time, perhaps inspired by the dog of the first film, the mask – or rather Loki – gains control of a complete innocent – hapless Kennedy’s infant son. The baby then goes on a “comedic” rampage.

Yep, this is a film based around the concept of the dancing baby from Ally McBeal crossed with the dire Look Who’s Talking series of films which nearly ended John Travolta’s career for good back in the 1980s. I mean – wow! It’s, like, a baby! Doing stuff that babies shouldn’t do! That’s, like, amazing!

Considering the first film was built around Jim Carrey and special effects, you’d have thought they’d try somewhat harder to find an adequate Carrey substitute and to make the effects top-notch. Sadly, they’ve managed to do neither. Instead, they’ve produced a substandard sequel based on unoriginal ideas, and brought it out a decade too late. Quite why they thought it was a good idea is anyone’s guess.

Shall we Dance

2005-02-01T00:00:00.002-08:00

This is a remake of a 1996 Japanese film which hardly anyone will have seen, but which was rather good as romantic comedies go, focusing on the need of straightjacketed businessmen to rebel against the regimentation of Japanese daily life, albeit only through dancing. For the Americanised version, a middle aged suburban lawyer (Richard Gere) is having a bit of a mid-life crisis - not quite as insightful or broad in scope as the Japanese take, it must be said. Despite being nicely content in his marriage (the wife played by the still gorgeous Susan Sarandon), something seems to be missing, and only ballroom dancing lessons can satisfy him. Oh, the fact that his teacher looks like Jennifer Lopez probably helps a bit too.

Boosting the relatively basic storyline with big names is probably giving the fairly unimaginative plot and unsubtle script more than it deserves, but then with this kind of largely heartwarming tale, complexity and delicacy of touch are rarely warranted. The point here is for Gere to look manly, Lopez to look sexy, and both of them to dance well. To be fair, they manage this pretty effectively. It does exactly what is says on the tin.

Whether, since his turn in Chicago, this will prove to be Richard Gere’s new career path remains to be seen, but this is the first film he’s done since that popular musical, and once again he’s showing off his fancy footwork while trying to flirt with (though not necessarily actually seduce) women somewhat younger than himself. In Chicago it was Catherine Zeta Jones and Renée Zellweger, this time it’s J-Lo.

All that really matters, however, is whether they can both dance – and that they certainly can, even if Gere is looking a tad podgy these days – and whether it’s a nice, fluffy tale of human nature and decency winning out over adversity of some kind. Not that the adversity here is that great – the guy is basically just a bit bored – but still.

Sadly Susan Sarandon is utterly wasted in this film as the doting but worried wife who suspects an affair. Presumably they just offered her such a vast amount of money that she couldn’t turn it down. Her basic role is to look a tad upset most of the time while Gere’s off prancing about the place with Lopez and the other denizens of her dance studio.

Naturally enough, as one of those soppy, supposedly life-affirming pieces of dross Hollywood often churns out, everything works out fine in the end – that much is obvious from the trailer, let alone the film itself. And this is precisely the sort of film which is only likely to be watched by people who already know how it ends.

Bland romantic comedies like this remain perennially popular, and it is nearly impossible for those who don’t like them to work out why. It’s not that they, or indeed this film, is necessarily “bad”. It’s just got so few surprises in that it seems to resemble Gere’s mind-numbing life at the start of the movie. Perhaps you’d be better off taking a leaf out of his book and going to a dance class instead.

Ocean's Twelve

2005-02-01T00:00:00.001-08:00

This is Steven Soderbergh’s first time directing a sequel. He made his name through independent inventiveness and even since emerging into the mainstream has doggedly stuck to his indy roots, and refused to play by the standard Hollywood rules. He seems to hate repeating himself, so a sequel seems at first to be an odd choice.

Considering he’s the man behind both the effortlessly cool Out of Sight and the complexly intelligent Traffic, it’s a fairly safe bet that if Soderbergh had wanted to turn his 2001 remake of the third-rate 1960s Rat Pack classic Ocean’s Eleven into a more “grown-up” movie than it was, he easily could have done. Instead, he opted for an affably silly heist romp which, though being rather more stylish than the usual Hollywood fare, was essentially little more than a basic blockbuster done very well with a huge all-star ensemble cast. Just as with the original film, a lot of the charm came from the sense that all involved in its making were having a damn good time.

For the sequel, there is more of the same – sort of. Again, there’s a roll call of big name stars most directors would kill for: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Elliott Gould and all the rest from the first film, plus some additions including Brits Catherine Zeta-Jones, Robbie Coltrane and Eddie Izzard. Again there are touches of Soderbergh’s trademark visual flair, humour, and ear for snappy dialogue. Again there is an all-pervasive, laid-back feel, despite this paradoxically still both looking and feeling like the big-budget Hollywood number that it is.

Rather than being another straight heist flick, kicking off where the first movie left off with Clooney and Roberts heading off into the sunset pursued by the recently-swindled Garcia’s hired goons, the director has ensured that the material remains fresh, interesting and fun, perhaps in part due to its European setting. Yet the events of the first movie are vital – Garcia’s enraged casino boss has tracked Clooney and co down, and they must pull off yet another daring heist – or rather, heists – to pay him back the money they stole.

In places, Soderbergh’s love of the bizarre leads the narrative to become almost entirely secondary to the characters’ relationships – their conversations and friendly playfulness almost descending to the level of the kind of impenetrable, in-joke strewn, dialogue-heavy territory of the Kevin Smiths of this world.

While not as accomplished as the first movie, which in any case many at the time found a fairly sleight affair by Soderbergh’s usual standards, Ocean’s Twelve still manages to be a far superior film to much that comes out of Hollywood these days. With the sheer amount of talent involved, this should be no surprise, but at the same time it remains an impressive achievement to keep all those superstar egos under some semblance of control. Don’t expect an Ocean’s Thirteen, but this will certainly give fans of the original what they want – more of the same, only different.

Coach Carter

2005-02-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

The world of college basketball is a mysterious one for anyone who isn’t American. Why would such a large chunk of the US population get so excited about what is effectively the American equivalent of school football matches? After all, professional basketball is weird enough - where are the goalposts? What’s with all that running backwards and forwards?

This is based on the true story of a High School basketball coach (played here by Samuel L Jackson) who, in 1999, refused to let his ream of typically tough-minded yet athletically talented brats compete unless they did well academically. Now, bearing in mind that the US is a country where even the best universities – let alone schools – frequently offer full scholarships to incredibly dense people purely to ensure that their sports teams do well, you can start to see how that might be a problem. Which is more important, academic work or athletic pursuits, long-term or temporary success?

The message is simple, yet worth repeating: reminded by the principle that "You and I both know that this basketball season will be the highlight of their lives," Jackson’s coach pointedly replies, "I think that's the problem, don't you?" It’s a sentimental call to aspire to bigger and better things, to try your hardest even at the things you aren’t any good at in the hopes of bettering yourself and the lives of those around you.

This is basically one of those films about that inspirational brand of teacher, of which Mr Chips is probably the prime example, in which sceptical students and parents take a while to work out that this person is actually genuinely trying to do the best for their young charges. Thanks in part to the “urban” MTV feel, it is very reminiscent of the 1995 Michelle Pfeiffer flick Dangerous Minds, or even of the previous Samuel L Jackson as teacher movie, 1997’s One Eight Seven.

Coming as it does from MTV Films, you’d probably expect some kind of fast-edited, achingly contemporary affair. It doesn’t disappoint, with a multiracial team of youngsters fully geed up with hip hop speak, a side role for R’n’B star Ashanti, and one of those soundtracks which seems to be trying just a tad too hard to be cool.

But despite all the hip hop speak, “street” macho nonsense and the MTV tag, this is a deeply old fashioned film. Rather than simply being based on a true story, it almost plays like a modernised remake of the 1938 classic Boys Town, in which Spencer Tracey’s Catholic priest shows young tearaway Mickey Rooney the error of his ways.

Add to that some cliché-ridden sport scenes, complete with final-second winning shots and the like, it would be easy to get the impression that, despite the “true story” angle, this is a rather unoriginal attempt at a plot that has been covered many times before. But, thanks almost entirely to the ever-watchable Jackson, this is an effective stab at the genre, and makes for an entertaining – if largely predictable – couple of hours.

Vanity Fair

2005-01-01T00:00:00.007-08:00

Long before “Vanity Fair” was the name for the world’s glossiest celebrity magazine it was one of the most bitingly satirical novels ever written – a brilliant demolition of early nineteenth century society. If the magazine of the same name was anywhere near as critical of the people who feature within its covers as William Makepeace Thackeray was of his characters it would have been bankrupted through lawsuits decades ago.

The last major big-screen outing for a Thackeray novel was Stanley Kubrick’s often under-appreciated 1975 adaptation, Barry Lyndon, in which the master director decided to abandon much of the novel’s plot and characterisation in favour of a lush visual experiment. It’s an incredible film, but hardly very faithful to the book.

Vanity Fair is an immensely broad, lengthy, amusing, insightful and complex novel with a strong central narrative based around the formidable social climber that is Becky Sharp - one of the most interesting and complicated heroines in literature. It should be ideal movie material – assuming the normal pitfalls of literary adaptation are avoided and a skilled screenwriter and director are put in charge, and assuming that they, unlike Kubrick, stick to the material.

The director assigned the task of bringing this classic to the cinema is the supremely talented Indian all-rounder Mira Nair, responsible for 2001’s surprise hit Monsoon Wedding – an examination of prejudice with much in common with Thackeray’s tale from a century and a half earlier. The original screenplay, by a couple of relative unknowns, has been given a hefty polish by Julian Fellowes, the Oscar-winning scribe behind the wonderful examination of class relations that was Gosford Park. If anyone could condense the novel for the screen, you’d imagine this pair would have a good chance.

When the casting was announced there was initially also much to raise hopes. The original novel is inundated with great characters, and the casting department for the movie seemed to have scoured high and low for some of the best character actors in the business – Bob Hoskins, Rhys Ifans and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers among them.

But the key to this quintessentially British tale was always going to be the shrewdly manipulative Becky Sharpe. So why did they pick American Reese Witherspoon, best known for her ditzy blondes in the likes of Cruel Intentions and Legally Blonde? Despite her best efforts to cope with a UK accent in one of her most challenging roles to date, she just can’t quite bring the character believably to life.

This isn’t the only problem. Director Nair, for some reason not content with the ability to exploit Thackeray’s immense imagination, bizarrely opts to include a couple of almost Bollywood-style production numbers, and reduces a number of key characters to minor roles, despite them being played by some of the best talent in the film.

Yet despite the diminishment of the central character and the director’s tendency to go off on tangents, this is nonetheless a far more appealing film than might be feared. Just enough of Thackeray remains to give a hint at the complexity of the world he created. It certainly would have been nicer if more of the original could have been retained – and if the film could have been made to look rather more like Thackeray’s own illustrations – but for those who have never read it this will still act as an ideal introduction to one of the greatest English novels ever written.

Team America: World Police

2005-01-01T00:00:00.006-08:00

One short explanation will tell you all you need to know about this film: it’s from the people who brought us South Park. If you liked that, you’ll probably like this – if not, stay well away.

Yep, this is Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s take on George W Bush’s foreign policy. Told through Thunderbirds-style puppets.

But as with most things this pair of occasionally masterful satirists set out to do, simply offending fans of Bush isn’t enough – they want, as usual, to offend everybody. Namby-pamby peacenik liberals, redneck warmongers, the vacuous celebrity-centred culture we live in, terrorism, Hollywood clichés and vomiting are all equally at risk of having jokes made at their expense.

The thing many people will find themselves asking is “what’s the message?” In the US, both left and right claimed this movie to be upholding their own views – albeit in highly exaggerated forms. Is the film’s critique of Michael Moore genuine, or is its portrayal of the tubby film maker itself a satire on how he has been portrayed by his detractors?

Is there in fact a message at all? It’s left so very nicely ambiguous that it is entirely up to each individual audience member to decide. It is mostly played so very straight that it could almost be a genuine attempt at a Jerry Bruckheimer action flick along the lines of Pearl Harbour – all gung-ho patriotism, wooden acting (both literally and metaphorically) and stupidly simplistic plot.

So the other obvious question is, “is it actually any fun to watch?” For some people, even fans of South Park, the answer will be a resounding “no”. The obvious jokes are so obvious as to lose any novelty value after five minutes. From then on, the deliberately awful dialogue and rather basic action sequences (this is based on Thunderbirds, after all) could put some people off the task the film makers leave entirely up to their audience, namely thinking about what it could all mean.

At the same time as being prime satire – after all, the best satire is always so well-crafted that it can be nearly impossible to tell whether it is actually poking fun or not – this is an intensely silly movie. These are, after all, the same people who brought us the fat sociopath Cartman and the perennially dying Kenny, the people who brought us songs about bombing Canada, and a giant mechanical Barbra Streisand.

Is the state of the world post-September 11th 2001 a fit subject for taking the micky in such an unrelenting and heartless manner? Are terrorist atrocities and self-righteous western reactions to them, along with all the resulting loss of life, fair game for such puerile humour?

It all comes down to your attitude. If you like the wilfully offensive style of humour of the likes of South Park and Britain’s own spoof news show Brass Eye, don’t mind graphic sex scenes (yes, really – despite the puppets) and extremely strong language, and can get over the style of presentation here, then the unrelenting courage to take on all comers that is on display here should be right up your alley. If, however, you don’t find the idea of swearing marionettes, flatulence and mass killings to be a suitable source of humour, avoid this like the plague.

One thing is for certain – as with South Park, despite how it may appear at first glance, this is definitely not one for the kids.

Ray

2005-01-01T00:00:00.005-08:00

The legendary blind soul singer Ray Charles died last June at the age of 74, having done as much to shape the music of the late twentieth century as pretty much anyone, as well as act as an inspiration to countless thousands for his perseverance in overcoming his disability. His success despite his twin disadvantages of growing up both handicapped and black at a time when America was tolerant of neither of these things would have been enough of itself to warrant a biopic, but add in his dabblings with hard drugs, involvement with the civil rights movement, two marriages and twelve children, there’s room for something genuinely interesting.

During his career, Charles shifted from crooning ballads to gospel, blues to Rock’n’Roll, Soul to Country, blending them all and distilling them into a uniquely original take on the soundtrack of the American century. The filmmakers have made the sensible choice of focussing on the brilliance of the music as much as on the overcoming of adversity which plays such a prominent part in pretty much every biopic ever made.

What most people going to see a film about an artist are most interested in is, after all, the art. While revelations about their personal life may be interesting, and these are also included here, what is truly fascinating here is the creativity which allowed a blind orphan to rise from his deprived and tragic roots to the very pinnacle of his profession.

Of course, the fact that this film is coming out just five months after its subject died will lead to all sorts of fears that it is little more than a rushed hack job, and won’t do justice to a man who, despite his flaws, was a true great. Thankfully these fears are utterly unfounded – not only was the film in production well before Charles’ demise, but it is a remarkable piece of work, and not just for featuring so many of the near-legend’s near-legendary tunes.

Any biopic relies almost entirely on the performance of its lead – no amount of fancy filmmaking techniques and quality supporting cast can possibly cover for an unbelievable central actor, especially when playing such a well-known and well-loved figure as Ray Charles. So when rumours of impending Oscar nominations begin to circulate about the lead in a movie of this type, you know something special is on the cards.

Comedian Jamie Foxx – last seen as the taxi driver in the Tom Cruise hitman flick Collateral – looks to have secured himself a position among the very top Hollywood talent with this amazingly assured and versatile showing. Whether he will be named Best Actor in March – which would make him only the third African American actor to achieve the accolade in the Oscars’ history – remains to be seen, but he most certainly deserves to be nominated.

This is one of those rare performances which promises to mark the emergence of a major new talent. Foxx has been knocking around on the sidelines for years, never managing to break permanently out of his television work, but with Ray he shows an uncanny ability to both imitate and innovate at the same time – much like the man he is playing. For both the music and for Jamie Foxx, as much as for the memory of its subject, Ray is certainly worth checking out.

Meet the Fockers

2005-01-01T00:00:00.004-08:00

Ben Stiller really made his mark with 2000’s comedy about the nightmare of in-laws that was Meet the Parents. His double-act with Robert De Niro, on rare comic form as the sadistic father-in-law, demonstrated amply that he could hack it with the best of them after a series of promising turns in the likes of There’s Something About Mary and Mystery Men. Overseen by the director behind all three Austin Powers flicks, it was a top-notch comedy from a very simple key premise – like a 90 minute sitcom with an A-list cast.

This sequel sees all the key cast – including Stiller’s now equally big-name best buddy Owen Wilson – return for Stiller’s put-upon son-in-law to repay the favour by introducing his new in-laws to his own somewhat eccentric parents. Much as with the original, the basic premise could sound rather uninspired; much as with the original, it is thanks to the tight script and superb cast that this turns into something special.

The double-act cast as Stiller’s somewhat odd Jewish parents is perfect. One half you’d expect this of – Dustin Hoffman is, after all, one of the finest actors of the last four decades, and among his many talents is gifted with superb comic timing. The surprise – for many – will be with the mother.

Barbra Streisand is, these days, often thought of as a bit of a nutter with a big nose who used to sing ballad-style songs, but whose career has now mercifully ended. Her last film role was back in 1996, and that came five years after her previous one, so many have forgotten what a talented actress she can be. She did, after all, deservedly win an Oscar for her debut role as comedienne Fanny Brice in 1968’s Funny Girl.

With two such talented new cast members to add to the mix, both of whom are on absolutely top form, it is unsurprising that they, rather than Stiller and De Niro, become the focus of the sequel. Stiller maintains his put-upon embarrassment of the first movie, and De Niro is relegated to the part of the cynical straight man to the zany antics of Hoffman and Streisand. Which, considering De Niro’s rather lacklustre performances of late, is something of a relief.

On the whole, if you liked the original you will likely like this – and, unlike with some sequels, to really appreciate it you will probably need to have seen the first movie. But even for those who have missed the first film’s character-building there will be a fair few belly-laugh moments. The petty rivalries between De Niro and Hoffman in particular are perfect, and a great reminder of the superb team they made in the sorely underappreciated (and still very relevant) 1997 political satire Wag the Dog.

It still may be a trifle too long and a little slow in a few places, where the humour temporarily seems to dry up or turn somewhat derivative, but there is more than enough here to bring chuckles even to those who hate Barbra Streisand with a passion. And for a comedy to overcome that kind of aversion is an impressive feat indeed.

Ladder 49

2005-01-01T00:00:00.003-08:00

It has always been difficult to portray firefighters as anything other than heroic because, let’s face it, they are. But since those events in New York of September three years ago, they have become, in America at least, even more of a sacred cow than they ever were.

To Ladder 49’s credit, September 11th is never directly mentioned. The film is even set in Baltimore to try and distance it from that tragic event. Yet those unforgettable images of the ash, blood and dust covered men of the New York Fire Department staggering out of the rubble of the World Trade Centre have informed every frame of this movie.

The most successful film about firefighters to date, 1991’s Backdraft, allowed an exploration of internal rivalries between the movie’s smoke-choked heroes; in today’s climate it seems that even this could be seen as a criticism. There is almost no human conflict on display here – just irreproachable decency, honour and respect both for the profession and for each individual fireman who has made the noble sacrifice of constantly putting their lives on the line to save others.

There are no real character flaws among these men, as they can be seen to be nothing other than perfect heroes. But without flaws, they seem less human. As such, it is hard to truly connect or identify with them. That in turn doesn’t make for an especially strong or interesting film.

All this is despite being focussed around good performances from the two leads – the rookie Joaquin Phoenix and veteran chief John Travolta. They both turn in decent enough showings to make the most of the material, which comes slightly more to life when Phoenix is trapped in a blazing building, with Travolta frantically coordinating rescue efforts on the ground.

But then the rookie fireman starts having a series of flashbacks to his nascent career, family life and the benevolence of his older mentor, and the Hollywood schmaltz goes into overdrive. Although Travolta’s presence can be explained through his recent poor performances, it is a wonder that Phoenix, whose choices of role are normally superb, would associate himself with such platitudinous pap.

The true aim of this film rapidly becomes clear – it is thinly-disguised propaganda and little more. After a couple of years of ever-growing criticisms of the men who were labelled heroes in America after September 11th – the likes of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal shattering the myth of US moral superiority along with the idea of those who serve the flag being irreproachable – this seems little more than an attempt to revive the unanimity of respect and patriotic pride of the immediate post-9/11 period.

This may work for some American audiences, but box office returns were not overly impressive across the Atlantic despite this being released on the anniversary of 9/11, and UK cinemagoers are traditionally a rather more cynical bunch anyway.

It is difficult to see what the attraction could be here – underneath the propaganda this is little more than an overly sentimental exercise in emotions-by-numbers male bonding. Whether it helps revive American national pride is debatable; one thing that is for certain is that it will do little to help the careers of any involved.

Closer

2005-01-01T00:00:00.002-08:00

Throughout his career, director Mike Nichols has excelled at creating superbly realised character studies, from his 1960s classics Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate through to his last feature film to receive widespread acclaim, 1998’s Bill Clinton-inspired Primary Colours. Closer is more in the same vein, following hot on the heels of his all-star, award-winning TV mini-series, Angels in America, which took a surreal, existentialist look at the AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

Although Angels in America was, both in terms of subject matter and style, somewhat unappealing for many, Closer returns to the more accessible, yet still somehow unpleasant, approach of Nichols’ earlier films. Much as both the lead characters in The Graduate were rather dislikeable at the same time as remaining largely sympathetic, here all four principles – played by a remarkable key cast made up of some of the biggest names working today – are deeply flawed people with which, nonetheless, audiences can easily identify.

Dan (Jude Law) is a writer who ends up living with and writing about dancer Alice (Natalie Portman) after she is hit by a London taxi. In the kind of typically complicated series of events which seem to happen in these kinds of relationship dramas, Dan cheats on Alice with photographer Anna (Julia Roberts), with whom he then becomes obsessed even after she starts going out with dermatologist Larry (Clive Owen) – largely as a result of his own actions. After this initial set up, the film follows the quintet over the next four years, as their already complex inter-relationships develop.

In the hands of a less talented director, even the imaginative script by British screenwriter Patrick Marber (a long-time collaborator with comic Steve Coogan) could have descended into fairly bland, unoriginal fare. But with Nichols’ expertise this easily rises to a par with some of the best cinematic explorations of sex and love yet committed to screen. He even manages to coax top-end performances out of Law and Roberts – two actors who seem content to rely more on their looks than their actual talent more often than not.

But what this film will probably be most remembered for is as the movie that marked Natalie Portman’s coming of age. After more than a decade as one of the big names in Hollywood, the 23 year old here puts in her first truly grown-up performance – and this is even after her nude scenes have been edited out. The lack of nudity is in fact entirely appropriate as, despite dealing intimately with the steamier side of romance, it is the emotions behind these relationships which are the real focus. Portman’s mastery of her character – especially in her scenes with the superb Clive Owen – should ensure that her utterly wooden turns in the Star Wars prequels will be forgiven as an aberration.

This is not a date movie – not unless you want to convince your other half that your relationship is doomed to pain and betrayal, at any rate. But it is an expertly accomplished exploration of the nature of love and lust, and a far more intelligent film than anyone would normally expect Hollywood to be able to produce.

Alexander

2005-01-01T00:00:00.001-08:00

The master of controversial political movies shifts back a few thousand years for his latest – his biggest, most expensive film to date. So, will Oliver Stone’s take on Alexander the Great be JFK-style conspiracies, Nixon-style high politics, or Platoon-style gritty battle sequences?

For a director lumbered with a reputation for controversy, a historically factual tale of a supposedly bisexual political and military behemoth who came to power thanks to political assassination and died in mysterious circumstances at the height of his career is perfect material. Alexander had the personal flaws of a Nixon, his life the political intrigue of a JFK, and he took part in umpteen battles which, although on a grander scale than the jungle conflicts of Vietnam, nonetheless provide ample opportunities for a master of war film direction to go overboard.

And going overboard is precisely the accusation which has been levelled at Stone for this film. With an all-star cast, headed by Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins, a budget of more than $150 million, literally thousands of extras, and filming taking place on three continents, it is Stone’s most ambitious project by a long way. Some have felt that he wasn’t quite able to cope with the pressure, and that the film has suffered as a result.

Coming, as Alexander does, on the back of swords and sandals epics Gladiator and Troy, the novelty of these ancient worlds may now have worn off. The spectacle of vast armies clashing in desert sands, of majestic, near-legendary cities, and well-toned, sun-tanned warriors pirouetting in the glaring sun may not hold as much appeal as it would have done a few years back. The fact that the real, historical battles recreated here are on a smaller, more realistic scale than those of The Lord of the Rings adds to the worry that this may not have anything much new to offer.

The critics have, for the most part, not been kind. Although based on the best-selling biography by Robin Lane Fox, the plot has been lambasted for its confusing complexity, and the script derided nearly as much as the unusual choice of accents on show from the cast – Farrell even keeps his native Irish brogue in his portrayal of the Macedonian king.

In short, this is a disappointing show from Stone – especially as his first feature film in five years. While he was able to cope with a vast cast on Nixon, yet still coax superb performances from all involved, here he seems to have concentrated on the epic scope of the confusing narrative rather than individual performances. While the film seems like it should be focussed more on personal relationships than big battles, it seems that Stone was keener to get his war elephants and long lines of infantry looking good than on ensuring that the heart of his film rings true.

There was supposed to be another film about Alexander the Great coming out this year, directed by Moulin Rouge’s Baz Luhrman and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. When Stone’s take got the go-ahead first, the studio put it on hold. After Stone’s inability to pull it off, will they give it another go, and try and produce the film Alexander immense achievements deserve? Or is this massively complex and fascinating figure simply too big for the screen?

2046

2005-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Chinese cinema has gained serious mainstream interest over the last few years. Thanks to a combination of the appearance in Hollywood of the likes of John Woo, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, as well as films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, cinemagoers who would previously never have imagined going to see such films are flocking in their droves for the new releases.

What all three of those films had in common was the actress Zhang Ziyi. She seems to have secured herself a place as the single most popular Chinese actress working today. Here she is reunited with Maggie Cheung from Hero to team up with one of the most revered of all Chinese directors, the cult master that is Wong Kar Wai, for a very different film to the epic martial arts flicks in which audiences are most used to seeing her.

Wong Kar Wai has built a reputation for directing truly beautiful films. But unlike the almost overwhelming, broad beauty of the sweeping landscapes of Hero and Crouching Tiger, his films are usually visually stunning in a deeply intimate manner. His last, In the Mood for Love, which also starred Maggie Cheung, was a close, personal look at love and extra-marital affairs. His most famous, Chunking Express, focussed on twin tales of lost love and its ensuing despair. Both received attention as much for the richly inventive visuals of joint cinematographers Wai Keung Lau (who has since made his own name as a director with the superb Infernal Affairs series, whose Tony Leung also stars here) and Christopher Doyle as for their director’s uncanny knack for portraying melancholy emotion in a truly engaging and sensitive manner.

Here, Christopher Doyle again returns, and his eye for colour and knack for framing shots to heighten the on-screen action is again one of the primary reasons for seeing the film. Between them, director and cinematographer have created another film that is almost a work of high art as much as a piece of restrained entertainment. Like In the Mood for Love and the director’s 1997 film Happy Together before it, 2046 was nominated for the Palm D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and very nearly won – pipped to the post by the jury’s decision to court controversy by rewarding the political polemic that was Fahrenheit9/11.

Perhaps because of all this talent and expectation, 2046 may well disappoint some viewers. It covers many of Wong Kar Wai’s usual themes – love lost and found amidst a hunt for privacy in a decidedly non-private environment – and at its heart lies an attempt to unravel the nature of memory.

Yep, this is an art-house flick through and through, it just happens to have got a wider release. Told from the perspective of a writer reminiscing from the year 2046, the plot – such as there is one – is highly confusing, as various women and relationships come and go in a small hotel.

But the plot isn’t the point – this is an exercise in atmosphere, and in this it succeeds perfectly. Rarely will you find a more entrancingly wistful portrayal of nostalgic longing on screen. It’s certainly not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those who approach it in the right frame of mind, 2046 could well end up holding a special place in your hearts.

Blade Trinity

2004-12-01T00:00:00.007-08:00

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

2004-12-01T00:00:00.006-08:00

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

2004-12-01T00:00:00.005-08:00

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

2004-12-01T00:00:00.004-08:00

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

2004-12-01T00:00:00.003-08:00

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

2004-12-01T00:00:00.002-08:00

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

2004-12-01T00:00:00.001-08:00

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

2004-12-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

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.

The Manchurian Candidate

2004-11-01T00:00:00.006-08:00

Yet another remake of a 1960s classic, hot on the heels of Alfie, and following in the tradition of Ocean’s Eleven and The Thomas Crown Affair. The original Manchurian Candidate is an all-time classic of the political thriller genre. Although a flop at the time of its release in 1962, these days it is almost impossible to find a film critic worth their salt who wouldn’t rank it as an incredible movie-making achievement and place John Frankenheimer on the list of all-time great directors because of it. It has also earned a place in the history books – its star, Frank Sinatra (on incredible form) became so convinced that it had inspired the assassination of President Kennedy the year after its release that he was later to buy up the rights to prevent it from being shown lest it inspire more such acts of direct political action.

However, it was very much a film of its time, perfectly locked into the Cold War paranoia of the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis and a world where the nukes could have started flying at the drop of a hat. How is it possible that such a film could be remade now, in the post Cold War world?

Well, as with the real world, now that the Communist threat has been removed from the equation, a new enemy had to be found, and that enemy is Arabic. But it isn’t so much the external enemy which is the focus here, but – in a classic Cold War motif – the enemy within.

As with the original, the genius behind this film comes from the confusion of the central character – originally Sinatra’s Bennett Marco, now Denzel Washington’s Ben Marco – as he desperately tries to find out whether his memories of the war are real. Marco’s suspicions about the record of his one-time subordinate – played by Lawrence Harvey in the original, now by Liev Schreiber – make for an unusual plot progression which, for people who haven’t seen the original, will probably be most reminiscent of that other great film about missing memories, Memento.

Naturally, following another war in Iraq and with a Presidential election taking place in the same month as the film’s release, this film is highly topical. The fact it also revolves in part around whether a candidate for the Oval Office (albeit a Vice Presidential rather than Presidential one) truly earned his war-hero status further underscores the point.

Thankfully, however, this is no mere cash-in on the current fascination with the US political scene, and any parallels to recent political slurs are entirely coincidental. Director Jonathan Demme, who is probably best known for The Silence of the Lambs, has managed to get another great performance out of Washington, following their previous collaboration on Philadelphia, and along with his screenwriters has created a fresh, contemporary take on a great film. It’s not quite as good as the original, but it is a lot more relevant to today’s political concerns, and manages to be both engrossing and thought-provoking in equal measure. In short, it’s one of those rare intelligent yet fun Hollywood movies which crops up from time to time, and should be cherished. Go see.

The Grudge

2004-11-01T00:00:00.005-08:00

Japanese horror movies are all the rage at the moment. Here Japanese writer/director Takashi Shimizu cashes in on the recent success of the Americanised remake of his fellow countryman Hideo Nakata’s cult smash-hit Ringu (or Ring) by Americanising and remaking one of his own films. The fact that Shimizu’s film was itself a fairly blatant (if effective) rip-off of Nakata’s better-known horror flick simply underlines the point.

In Ringu the central conceit was that by watching a cursed video, you would be doomed to die within a week unless you passed the curse on by getting someone else to watch it. Here, the curse is there, but it doesn’t come from a video, and although it can be passed on to others, it can’t be got rid of. Once you’re cursed, that’s it – you are doomed to be consumed by an all-powerful rage which will eventually kill you and anyone unfortunate enough to cross your path. Bit of a downer, really, but makes a nice change from the typical horror fare where you know that the hero will almost always manage to find an escape route.

To be fair, this isn’t so much a remake or rip-off of just one movie, but rather takes aspects of Shimizu’s entire four-film Ju-On series alongside ideas from Nakata’s Ringu and its sequels – it even shares the same producer, Takashige Ichise, as the original Ringu. For the switch to the US a more recognisable name is needed, however, and is amply provided in the form of Executive Producer Sam Raimi – a cult horror hero thanks to his brilliant Evil Dead series, and now a mainstream super-director thanks to the success of the Spiderman franchise.

Going along with the whole English language theme, the casting of a nubile American in the lead was a given, and the choice of actress is superb – Sarah Michelle Gellar, aka Buffy the Vampire Slayer herself.

With Gellar in the lead, audience expectations are instantly thrown into turmoil. Will she be the kick-ass kung-fu superheroine of Buffy or the screaming parody of horror movie starlets of Scream 2? One thing that is guaranteed is that Gellar almost always puts in a good performance, so even though this may be a remake of a bunch of sequel rip-offs, most people going to see this will probably hope that perhaps it might not be that bad.

The trouble with this sort of remake is that the original is not only still very recent (the last Ju-On movie only came out last year), but that since the advent of DVD any horror fan can easily get hold of it. The original Japanese Ringu was far superior to the Americanised remake, despite the latter still being halfway decent, but the core audience had already seen the Japanese version, so what was the point in making another version so soon? As happened with Gus Van Sant’s remake of Hitchcock’s all-time horror classic, Psycho, hardly anyone could see the point, and those who cared about the original thought it sacrilege.

For the non-Japanese horror fan, the added sense of unease created by the unfamiliar culture and language of the original are utterly lost here. With that goes a lot of the attraction of the original film. Although it may well still be scary, and although it’s not a terrible job, why bother paying to see this at the cinema when you can buy the superior originals on DVD and watch them as often as you like? Horror films are always scarier watched at home, and this one’s missed Halloween by a week anyway.

Shaolin Soccer

2004-11-01T00:00:00.004-08:00

Sometimes good films die a death through no fault of their own. Two of the British film industry’s biggest hits of recent years, Sexy Beast and Croupier, vanished without trace on their first release thanks to a combination of poor marketing and insufficient money for distribution. It was only after word of mouth and a decent critical response in the US that they suddenly became massive hits, and got the recognition they deserved over here.

Shaolin Soccer has been even more unlucky. On its first release in Hong Kong, its distributor neglected to take it to the Chinese censorship board; in retaliation it was banned from mainland China – one of the largest markets in the world. Despite this, it was noticed by the US, and Disney’s grown-up wing Miramax picked up distribution rights. But then they sat on it for two years without giving it a release. In the UK, it was initially meant to come out to coincide with the 2002 Football World Cup; then it was pushed back for Euro 2004. Now, having been pushed back yet again, it is at long last about to hit our cinema screens.

During the wait, pirated DVDs and internet downloads of the movie have spread through the film-buff community, buoyed by an enthusiastic online rumour mill which declared it to be one of the funniest and most original concepts to have come out of Hong Kong since Jackie Chan first started strutting his stuff. A cult film legend was born, but – as is the way of things - the filmmakers themselves have hardly seen any money from it. It has to rank as one of the most utterly unfair stories of the film world – low-budget movie becomes massive hit, but its makers are left wallowing in obscurity thanks to the ineptitude of the money men.

The fact that even in America, a country whose own concept of football involves body armour and hardly using the feet, this film received rave reviews should demonstrate amply that it is not your average soccer movie along the lines of the bland When Saturday Comes, the silly The Great Escape or the dire Mean Machine. Nor is it a typical martial arts movie, despite containing some fantastic action choreography.

What Shaolin Soccer is is an hilariously original, almost note-perfect comedy, packed with silliness, Bruce Lee homages, and the kind of football that would make even spectators at the Rangers/Celtic derby flinch. That should probably be obvious from the fact it revolves around a group of football-loving Shaolin Monks who decide to use their kung fu skills in a soccer tournament. And it’s all the brainchild of its star, Stephen Chow, who also wrote and directed. Go and see it not just for the sheer entertainment value, but also to get this poor chap the recognition (and money) he surely deserves for this superb little film.

Of course, there is almost always a downside. In this case it is, once again, the fault of the studio. For reasons best known to themselves, Miramax decided to “re-master” Shaolin Soccer before its release, and add on an English language soundtrack. As a general rule, dubbed films are never quite as good as the original versions, even if the lack of subtitles does mean you can concentrate on the action. Nonetheless, it is still well worth a look and – who knows – maybe if enough people go see it the studio will finally get its act in gear enough to do a decent DVD release with the superior original version on it.

Ladies in Lavender

2004-11-01T00:00:00.003-08:00

It’s not often that an actor makes the switch to writer/director without making an idiot of themselves, but somehow Charles Dance has managed it. This is a masterly directorial debut from the 58-year-old star of stage and screen, based round a simple concept and some superb performances by a cast made up of some of Britain’s finest actresses.

Filmed around Cadgwith Cove in Cornwall, one of the most beautiful of the many picturesque little fishing villages of that part of the world, the story centres on two elderly sisters – one a spinster, one a widow. If you were looking for a couple of expert actresses to play elderly British sisters, I’d happily make a sizeable bet you couldn’t do much better than two who have been made Dames of the British Empire for their services to the theatre.

Yep, this film revolves around pitch-perfect performances from Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. They are - unsurprisingly for anyone who has seen them together in 1985’s A Room With A View, 1999’s Tea With Mussolini or on the stage together - a perfect partnership. With lead actresses like these it would be hard to go wrong – add the likes of Miriam Margoyles, David Warner and Natascha McElhone in supporting roles, and you have the makings of a truly expert showcase of acting talent.

Dance is astute enough a first-time helmer to allow the acting to dominate. The film is wonderfully understated, allowing the characters to live and breathe like real people as they cope with the unexpected arrival of a strange young man, played by Goodbye Lenin’s Daniel Brühl, washed ashore to shatter the insular nature of their 1930s village.

This could still so easily have become a clichéd morality tale about the dangers of mistrust and the inherent decency of mankind, as so many other small films about the turmoil created by outsiders have done before. It could have been a Wicker Man style human horror story of the bigotry and weirdness of isolated rural communities. It could have been another bland British costume drama.

Instead, Dance has crafted an unexpected gem from the original story by little-known Edwardian writer William J Locke, and produced a wonderfully low-key film which is reminiscent of the very best the British film industry had to offer in the days before it was packed out with low-budget gangster films and soppy romantic comedies.

To say much more about the story would be to spoil the delight of witnessing it unfold – always in unexpected directions, yet at the same time in ways which are utterly true to the characters, and in no way contrived. In turns funny, melancholy and heartwarming, this wonderful little film deserves to be seen, and deserves to be supported by as many cinemagoers as possible. We know Britain can’t compete with Hollywood. What the British film industry evidently can still do is produce charmingly complex yet simple character studies, and some of the best acting you are likely to see. We need more films like this.