New films reviewed for this year, in reverse order of being seen, are:- Apocalypto; Miss Potter; The Covenent; Stolen; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Jackass 2; Pan's Labyrinth; The Prestige; Havoc; Marie Antoinette; The Last Kiss; Brothers of the Head; The Guardian; Accepted; Stick It; Children of Men; Click; Beerfest; Adrift; Snakes on a Plane; A Scanner Darkly; John Tucker Must Die; Harsh Times; Lady in the Water; Wilderness; The Notorious Bettie Page; Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest; Superman Returns; Elementarteilchen; Banlieue 13; The Lake House; Ultraviolet; Aquamarine; Hard Candy; United 93; The Omen; Wah-Wah; X-Men: The Last Stand; Brick; The Proposition; The Magician; Tristan and Isolde, Cockles and Muscles; Pierrepoint; Manderlay; Boy Eats Girl; Bad Seed; Wild Country and King Kong
Apocalypto represents quite a rare phenomenon in modern movie-making - a simpl story well told. Tightly directed and performed with an intimacy which belies its breakneck pace, it left me wondering where Mel Gibson had been since the days when his Hamlet showed such promise - until, of course, I recalled his confessions about drink. At any rate, it's nice to see him back on form.
Set in the days immediately prior to Cortez's fateful landing on the South American coast, Apocalypto is the story of an ordinary forest-dwelling man whose life is turned upside down when Aztec soldiers raid his village. Carried off for sacrifice, he determines to escape and return to the place where he has hidden his wife and child, but doing so will require ingenuity, fortitude and an astounding measure of luck. The unlikeliness of events is excused by the confidence with which the tale is told and also, to an extent, by our awareness of the historical context. Of course, Gibson screws up a few historical details, as is his wont, but not nearly so badly as he has done on previous occasions. It helps that his actors are all native forest dwellers. The sense of connection between the characters and their environment lends the action a fluency all too rare in this sort of endeavour.
There's nothing particularly new about Apocalypto and it has nothing remarkable to say, but it makes superb use of ts setting and never ceases to provide thrills. Its resourceful characters are much more sympathetic than the usual improbable macho men and whimpering damsels. In the end, its very intensity and single-mindedness provide a brilliant contrast to the overwhelming nature of events in the wider world; at best its hero can hope for a pyrrhic victory, and the bittersweet nature of this gives the film an unexpected depth.
The story of the woman who created Peter Rabbit, Miss Potter has been promoted as a light romance but is in fact a more substantial biopic. Though it doesn't try to analyse its characters in depth it does make an effort to explore their cultural background and its heroine's wider concerns, most notably her attempts to preserve the Lake District countryside from which she drew inspiration.
The problem with Renée Zellweger as an actress is that she has the voice and manner of a spoiled twelve year old child, but in Miss Potter she has finally found a character for whom she can make it work. Though thirty two when we first meet her, Beatrix still behaves very much like a child, cosseted and stifled in an upper middle class household, unable to move on because she refuses to marry and nobody believes her capable of having a career. The film follows her journey into independence, both practically and psychologically, and Zellweger carries the role well enough, her natural tweeness coming across as appropriate eccentricity. Opposite her, Ewan McGregor turns in a performance which is subtler and more subdued than usual, balancing the film very well with just the right amount of charm. It's just a shame to see Emily Watson, more capable than either of them, reduced once again to a supporting role, even if this does provide the story with a extra layer of irony.
Unfortunately, despite the care taken with leading performances, supporting characters in Miss Potter are clumsily handled. Everybody who stands in the heroine's way is presented as cartoonishly ugly and obnoxious, utterly two-dimensional, and this does a lot of damage to an otherwise sympathetic tale. The film has a similar approach to events which it doesn't know how to handle, shifting a lot of the action offscreen, leaving viewers feeling excluded. As a consequencce it becomes hard to get close to emotionally just when that matters most.
Some of the technical work in this film is superb. There's stunning landscape photography which will really make you feel like you're there, and the brilliant editing makes it look much classier than most of its ilk. Early on there are several scenes in which Beatrix's imagined world - the one we know from her books - interacts with the real one. By and large these work well, creating the sense that she's not quite right in the head at the same time as charming the viewer and giving the impression, perhaps, that the film is going to take an altogether more daring direction, but sadly that's not to be. What's left is something which feels vaguely unfinished, as if it never quite made up its mind what it wanted to be.
Caleb, Pogue, Tyler and Reid have always been close. What's more, their families have always been close. Descended from a group of witches who fled English persecution to settle in the small American town of Ipswich, they share a covenant, keeping secret the supernatural abilities which they have inherited. These abilities - which seem to constitute the equivalent of a gamer lying about what number the dice rolled - are harmless enough at first, but threaten to increase dramatically when the owner 'ascends' at the age of 18, with the downside that they age that person prematurely and can also become addictive. As Caleb approaches his 18th birthday, his mother fears that she will lose him as she lost her husband.
We know all this thanks to lengthy pieces of exposition right at the start of the film, with Caleb's mother talking to him as if he's an amnesiac. It's an indication of the way conversation will work throughout. An odd combination of would-be horror movie and 12A certificate, The Covenant is clearly aiming at a Buffy or The Craft kind of crowd, but has nowhere near that level of sophistication.
That said, it comes very close to salvation through utter silliness. It's full of thirty second scenes, crudely cut together, in which nervous actors exchange three-line pieces of dialogue, soap opera style, before we cut to another image of old buildings or trees at night; on many of these occasions it's hard to tell whether the fuzzy imagery is an attempt to create atmosphere or just the result of poor quality film stock. At one point, during the final showdown, our hero's mouth moves for a full minute before any sound comes out - and it's not just out of sync, as nothing extra follows. It's just that bad.
Unfortunately, these moments of unintentional hilarity are insufficient to support the rest of the film, which meanders hopelessly along on a route we've all taken before. It's at its most embarrassing when attempting to be youthful and hip, with cliched scenes of parties, car chases and hanging around in bars, which must make the average teenager squirm. When it tries to scare, it runs the gamut of classic thrills from A to B. Unless you're already a pathological arachnophobe, there's nothing for you here. In an attempt to fulfil the horror movie's other traditional purpose it throws in a couple of gratuious shower scenes, but even these don't really deliver.
The Covenant is summed up by its final fight scene, in which the villain, trying to force our hero to submit, keeps repeating: "Just say the words and it will all be over." "Yes!" cry the audience desperately. "Just say the words, and it will all be over!"
In 1990, two thieves broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in a quiet district of Boston, tied up the security guards, and stole 13 priceless works of art. In doing so, they outraged polite society and created a mystery which fascinates the art world to this day.
Ostensibly about the search for the missing art, Rebecca Dreyfus' fascinating documentary is, like the lost paintings, much cleverer than it appears on the surface. Drawing together the details of the search like a taut little thriller, it introduces us to the various personalities involved, including those already dead for many years.
We meet Harold Smith, the renowned art detective who refused to give up the search despite fifteen years without success and a lifelong struggle with skin cancer; Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With A Pearl Earring, who explains her lifelong obsession with Vermeers; Paul 'Turbocharger' Hendry, the loudmouthed former conman convinced of a conspiracy involving various ex-presidents; and Mrs Gardner herself, the society lady who lost her two year old son and became determined never to lose anything so beautiful again.
In telling their tales, Stolen makes one thing very clear - that all of these people are entranced by the lost paintings and will do practically anything to get them. There is, in the end, very little difference between thieves, detectives and collectors - those who see into the secrets of the paintings are overwhelmed by the desire to possess them.
With such potent subject matter, a delightfully dry sense of humour and a host of further quirky characters on display, Stolen is an intriguing creation which will draw in any sensitive viewer regardless of what that person does or doesn't know about art. Focused on the idea of a painting as an attempt to capture and preserve a moment in time, it is itself a mesmerising portrait, a glimpse of lives since lost. It is also a fine technical achievement, keeping the viewer's attention with constantly shifting yet never intrusive imagery, always coming back to the centrepoint of Vermeer's The Concert. As we study the faces of the people in the portraits, the film examines the face of Mrs Gardner, often deliberately obscured, and that of Smith, painstakingly reconstructed and the subject of much humour on his part. With a soundtrack full of half-heard conversations and sampled telephone messages from members of the public intrigued by the search, this film creates the impression that one is right there in the thick of it, as close to the action as if one were standing in the room beside Vermeer's piano and his impassioned subjects. It is a triumph of documentary film-making, modest in its ambitions yet dazzling in its scope, and it's something you'll want to look at again and again.
Whenever I review a film adapted from a book I strive to treat the two as separate entities, acknowledging that each medium suits slightly different stories and interpretations thereof. In some instances, however, it's harder than in others. Patrick Süsskind's Perfume is widely considered a work of genius, soaring in its themes, beautifully constructed and elegantly written. People have been trying for years to bring it to the big screen; now at last it has arrived, and a great deal about it is worthy of great praise, yet it is so clumsily put together that to admire it requires anybody who has read the book to fall in love with an odour of chrysanthmums after having known the fresh scent of a rose.
Perfume is the story of a boy born in Paris in the latter part of the eighteenth century; a boy with no personal body odour and a genius of a nose. Young Grenouiile at first meanders through life seeking merely to escape the cruelty of his circumstances, but by and large, as he discovers new smells, he becomes obsessed by the notion of possessing them, and his attempt to do so, with the awareness of power which it brings, leads to horrific crimes and still more painful disappointment with the world. Ben Whishaw is superb in this central role, demonstrating his character's complexity and cleverness without ever making the mistake of seeming educated or refined. Unfortunately, the director doesn't seem to realise this, and so he is saddled with a heavy-handed voice-over from John Hurt (utterly miscast) which continually tells the audience how to interpret events. This crushes the ambiguity vital to any gothic tale and utterly sentimentalises what ought to be grim, depriving the story of much of its humour. Similarly out of place, though less directly problematic, are the several instances of sanitisation, probably for the American market. Grenouille's victims are all slightly older than they were in the book (a factor which does matter to the plot); in an orgy scene there are plenty of straight couples and lesbian couples but only two gay male ones, briefly glimsped engaged in studiously tame behaviour; and when a merchant eats lunch with his teenage daughter there is only one glass of wine on the table. Details, yet indicative nonetheless of an attitude quite at odds which the nature of the story which, even for newcomers, fails to convince.
All of this is a shame because in certain other ways Perfume is a real treasure. Brilliantly designed sets and costumes quickly immerse the viewer in Grenouille's world, making a considerable contribution to our understanding of the characters who inhabit it. Dustin Hoffman and Alan Rickman give charming performances in supporting roles and Rachel Hurd-Wood is almost perfect as the imperilled Laura. There are some superb bits of camerawork used to communicate Grenouille's experience of the world of scents, though unfortunately, having begun to express itself this way, the film doesn't have quite enough to go round. What it really needs is a director willing to step further outside the bounds of the familiar - sometimes it looks as if it's trying to emulate Ken Russell or Jocelyn Moorhouse, yet it never quite achieves that edge.
If Perfume still tempts you, I have three pieces of advice. Leave five minutes before the end (once the activities in the square are over). Read the book first (lest it be spoiled for you). And wait for the director's cut. There is a much better film in here just bursting to get out.
Jackass Numer Two, eagerly anticipated by fans, dreaded by others, opens with the show's stars running at breakneck pace along a suburban road. Running with the bulls, of course. This neat reminder that all kinds of other people regularly participate in the kinds of stunts you'll see on display here nicely counteracts the show's 'Don't try this at home, kids' message - the Jackass team may be considered stuntmen now, but they certainly weren't when they started out. They were just a bunch of guys having fun doing stupid and dangerous things, and this is at once the show's strength and its downfall.
The essential problem is that although a lot of these stunts look as if they'd be tremendous fun to try, it's difficult to be entertained by them for an hour and twenty minutes. And Jackass 2 is exactly that. There is no underlying plot, no theme or structure, just three episodes' worth of the usual show stuck end to end. It's hard to stay hyper for that long. The film really needs to be consumed with large amounts of beer, but that would (usually) preclude seeing it in a cinema, and it undoubtedly benefits from the big screen. Watching people launch themselves into the sky strapped to rockets isn't just about observation, it's about the experience.
The other difference which using this format makes is, of course, that it allows the team to be much more obscene and to include scenes of gratuitous nudity and what might in other contexts be deemed sexual torture. A branding scene - branding is specifically prohibited in the UK, regardless of consent, by a law which in its time was controversial - is particularly intriguing. With the government now telling us that it should be illegal for us to possess images of this sort, to protect us from urselves, it's difficult to see how the BBFC got away withot making cuts. Of course, the Jackass boys' main concern is that their victim wriggles whilst the brand is being placed, leaving him with "a cock farm" on his arse. When his horrified mother asks why they did it his friend replies sheepishly "Because it was funny." And it's this naive honesty, this schoolboy charm, which really makes the film appealing.
Jackass 2 is a test of endurance, both for the audience and for the boys themselves. Seeing, in passing, the scars which some of them have acquired during previous stunts is quite disturbing, but they're clearly having a good time. Most of the attempts to squick the audience won't work on more sophisticated viewers - the fishhook scene, for instance, pales in comparison to those in Kim Ki Duk's Seom - but they seem suitably disturbed themselves, and their energy is infectious. There are also great star turns from John Waters and Spike Jonze. And there's a final long gag which, turning the tables on some members of the team, introduces a potent political subtext. The sad thing is, of course, that our changing world is getting less and less sympathetic to this kind of fun. With more and more people getting shot or arrested for what used to be considered student japes, we should respect this film for what it is - swimming against the tide, a celebration of innocence.
An isolated army base during the Spanish civil war. Forested hills filled with the artefacts of a forgotten civilisation. A lonely girl, desperate to protect her pregnant mother, seeking consolation in her books of fairy tales. Spies in the camp, rebels in the hills, brutality everywhere, and perhaps something else, something ancient, unglimpsed by adult eyes.
Such is the setting for Guillermo Del Toro's harrowing and complex Pan's Labyrinth, not the out and out fantasy which viewers might have expected from the trailers but something more borderline, something which explores not only the possibility of other worlds lying beneath our own but also the importance of the imagination. From young Ofelia's perspective, she is contacted by a faun (not the Pan of the title, a rather misleading translation) who tells there that she was a princess in a land beneath the earth and that in order to win back her inheritance she must complete a series of tasks. Elegantly evoked with striking visuals, these are the stuff of classic fairy tales: vivid, messy, delicately off-kilter, and fraught with dangers. However, whether they are real or imagined, they provide Ofelia with a vital means of defending her childhood and her innocence from the ugliness with which she is surrounded.
Despite its strong fantasy element, Pan's Labyrinth is definitely not a film for young children; even older ones may be quite upset by it. Del Toro does not flinch from showing us war and rebellion as they really are, and there are scenes of shocking violence. Unlike previous attempts at this kind of blending, like Labyrinth and The Company of Wolves, Pan's Labyrinth never allows the fantastic viewpoint to dominate, offering an equally strong parallel story. This is supported by a host of powerful performances, most notably from Maribel Verdú as the servant who befriends Ofelia. The charisma of the cast is vital in holding together a tale which interweaves so many different elements, as the film begins with lots of different things happening in different places, apparently unrelated. It takes a while to get going and start making sense, but once it does so it develops the powerful sense of inevitability which is central to developing tension in any good fairy tale.
Where Pan's Labyrinth is sometimes weak is in the development of its fantasy characters. The animatronic faun is just a little too awkward and dry to convince; the fairies get too little room to develop; the monster wich pursues Ofelia is appropriately hideous but too clumsy to be as sinister as it should be. As Ofelia, Ivana Baquero never quite seems comfortable acting opposite these creations, but her performance is otherwise excellent and Del Toro demonstrates a remarkable ability to look at the world he has created from a child's perspective. Ofelia's certainty contrasts tellingly with the hesitation of adult characters to take action when they should, giving her a sense of purpose which remains when everything around her starts to crumble. It is here that the film really excels. It's an odd mixture, and one which many prospective viewers may feel uncertain about, but it's very much worth watching.
In the late nineteenth century, two stage magicians, once friends, battle it out for supremacy. Understandable bitterness over an accidental death turns to increasingly vicious rivalry until one of them finds himself facing the death penalty for killing the other. But all is not as it seems. Thus unfolds a mystery which require you to keep your eyes tightly focued on the screen at all times, your ears alert to evry line. The Prestige is a masterpiece of manipulation which never misses a trick. But there is also, perhaps surprisingly, a potent emotional story at its heart.
Christian Bale's wry, brilliant Borden is a family man whose struggles to make a living lead to his development of a trick which thrills London audiences. Hugh Jackman's obsessive Angier becomes determined to discover it at all costs. The film cleverly balances audience sympathy for the two men most of the way through, despite some truly shocking moments. Though Scarlett Johanssen, as a glamorous assistant, is as wooden as the boards she walks, Rebecca Hall provides stirling support as Borden's wife and David Bowie is delightful as Nikolas Tesla, to who Angier turns for help. Attentive viewers will see the genre twist coming but will nevertheless find themselves taken in unexpected directions.
It's rare to see a film put together with this much intelligence and deep affection for its subject matter. What might have been grim is undercut with laconic humour; what should perhaps be hilarious is studded with reminders of the human cost. Michael Caine's sparing narration clarifies where necessary and the rest is laid out as a puzzle for the audience to solve. Don't miss it.
A modest little film, tightly controlled throughout, Havoc provides the ubiquitous Anne Hathaway with a role she can really get her teeth into and rounds out its cast with some of the best supporting actors in the business. It's a teen film with a difference, much bleaker than most. Whilst this may put off some of those in its natural constituency, others will be delighted to encounter a film this real, a film which deals with the world as it actually is.
Teenagers Allison and Emily have never encountered the real world. Living in a Californian gated community where housing, food, money and expensive toys have always been easy to come by, they dress up like gangstas, listen to the music and try to talk the talk. Though their parents ignore them, their every practical need is catered for, and they're desperately bored. When Allison is caught in an encounter with a genuine gang member in the impoverished east of the nearby city, she is fascinated, eager for more. As she tries to impress and to learn how the other half live, she finds herself getting in deeper than she can handle.
Beautifully shot with innovative camerawork highlighting the isolation of the gated community and the changes which occur as the girls drive east, Havoc is tightly paced and gripping throughout. Freddy Rodriguez makes a compelling foil to Hathaway's wide-eyed but resilient rich girl; Bijou Phillips gives a complex and sensitive performance as best friend Emily, whose relationship with Allison is tested as she struggles with dangers both physical and moral. The film is surprisingly convincing in its portrayal of each distinctly different cultural environment, avoiding the easy conclusion that everyone, given the choice, would prefer the world of the rich. Though it doesn't really have anything new to say and those over the age of twenty five will find few surprises, it's intelligently handled and well worth watching.
Passionate, sensitive and misunderstood or an expensive waste of time - the same controversy which once surrounded the young Queen of France has now attached itself to Sophia Coppola's film. Relying on the viewer's existing familiarity with her story, Coppola has taken a big gamble, addressing a naturally vivid and dramatic subject through the medium of cautious touches and small glances. Hers is a film in which the audience are made to feel like eavesdroppers catching whispered court gossip. It relies entirely on its lead performance for an anchor. Fortunately, Kirsten Dunst is on stunning form. Though not everyone will be willing to play along, those who do will consider this a masterpiece.
Based on the book by noted historian and feminist Lady Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette follows the life of the young Austrian princess from the point at which she leaves her home to marry the Dauphin to the point at which both she and her husband must acknowledge that the revolution has come. Any exploration of events thereafter would be gratuitous, the emotional journey already complete. The focus of the narrative is on its heroine's isolation, her difficulty in adjusting to her strange new circumstances, her despair at her husband's lack of sexual interest (she must produce an heir or risk losing everything), her struggle to deal with her own passions and the impossible distance which exists between her life and that of the common people. Her sex life has been sanitised to an extent, possibly to avoid still pertinent prejudice damaging audience sympathy, but strong visual imagery and Dunst's smouldering performance make it clear that her adulterous activities were more than just casual flings. Even at her most restrained she creates a sense of passion and power scarcely kept under control. As the staid, naif Louis, Jason Schwartzman is the perfect foil, his awkwardness gradually giving way to a deep-seated affection which reveals the complexity of the man behind the sun king's image. When the real Louis was locked in the Basteille, the philosopher Thomas Paine pleaded for his life with the words "kill the King, but spare the man". He could not have had a better advocate than Coppola at his side.
With its genuine Versailles locations and sumptuous costuming, Marie Antoinette is a feast for the eyes. Dunst looks ravishing in the title role. The sets are perfect, brilliantly detailed, with marvellous design work in food, jewellery, fans, wigs and shoes. Omnipresent champagne glasses recall another myth about the wayward queen; her 'Let them eat cake' line is mercifully well handled, acknowledging its falsity if not the reason behind it. The supporting cast are all solid; Steve Coogan may be playing Steve Coogan, as usual, but the role he's been given means it doesn't really matter. But one of the most remarkable things about this film is the delicate political balance it strikes. It's impossible to watch this and not feel distressed by the thought of the young queen's ultimate fate, yet it's equally possible to understand how public resentment was occasioned. Making friends by finding a weaker figure at court to bully, playing games in her quaint little toy village whilst the real peasants starved, Marie Antoinette is not all sweetness and light - at the very least she might be held responsible for her failure to take a real interest in the people for whom she was responsible, or, indeed, in anyone beyond her immediate circle. By failing to make excuses for her in this regard, the film makes her all the more compelling, giving her a certain rawness despite her immaculate appearance. The relationship which Coppola and Dunst built up whilst filming The Virgin Suicides pays off, as they seem to understand each other intimately, the one spaking directly through the other. Maybe it's not quite what audiences expected, but Marie Antoinette is a remarkable film, vast in scope yet unfailing human.
Four young men: one with a devoted girlfriend who's just discovered she's pregnant; one with a wife and young child; one who is struggling to deal with being dumped; and one who is anxious to prolong a lifestyle centered on independence and casual sex. One impending birthday: the thirtieth. Cue crises. We've all seen this movie before. Sometimes, given strong performances and a witty script, it can be entertaining regardless. Unfortunately, The Last Kiss has neither.
It's difficult to know what to say about a film which has so little to say for itself; it's difficult to figure out why anybody thought this film might be a good idea. It's not exactly bad in any particular way, but everything about it is mediocre; every little tangent which looks as if it might take a more interesting direction is quickly smothered. Why does anyone care about these people? Similarly anxious thirtysomethings will be too busy focusing on themselves; younger people won't understand what all the angst is about; older ones won't wish to be reminded. Few people in the real world have such easy lives anyway. As relationships threaten to fall apart, not a single one of these people seems to have to worry about the financial consequences; work is always understanding; friendship is always consistent. Even supporting characters conveniently disappear once the plot has had its way with them. The men are dull and the women are neurotic. When gay people are portrayed this stereotypically there's often an outcry, yet it seems that heterosexuals are expected to sit and take it. Don't be among them. These characters may not know what they want to do with their lives, but I guarantee there are better things you can do with yours than sitting through this film.
As a long time fan of the work of Brian Aldiss, I had eagerly waited to see this film ever since I heard it was in development, and for once I was not disappointed. The story of conjoined twins exploited by the music industry in 'seventies England, Brothers of the Head was one of those little-known novels which nevertheless had considerable cultural influence - as punk developed an obsession with the freakish, Aldiss was asking questions about society's treatment of those with genuine physical differences, questions which have rarely been addressed as intelligently since. In the guise of a documentary, this inspired film adaptation brings those questions right up to date without ever losing sight of the fact that it's telling a human story and a story about rock n' roll.
It's difficult to tell a story about exploitation without being exploitative in turn. Brothers of the Head works around this by using a succession of clever devices including clips from an older documentary, the suggestion that Aldiss' book was a novelisation of true events, and clips from a Ken Russell film adapted from it. Russell is a great sport and seems to delight in sending up his work, complete with gratuitous sex scenes and a ridiculous animatronic third head. The third head which haunted the brothers in the novel has here been replaced by a tumor inside one of their heads, believed to be a foetus-in-foetu (that is, the remnant of a conjoined triplet). Its intermittent influence provides a disturbing element which makes the viewer increasingly concerned for the brothers and those around them even when things appear to be going well; and this, in turn, overshadows more conventional storylines about romance and the boys' stage career.
As the brothers, twins Harry and Luke Treadaway are a revelation, naturalistic and supremely confident, utterly believable both as physically conjoined people and as ordinary boys finding themselves quite by accident in extraordinary circumstances. There is no need for the film to dwell on old issues about identity and individuality as they distinguish themselves with ease, and the brothers would, indeed, be just as riveting to watch without their 'something special'. As their new opportunities draw them in different directions, Tom's brooding creativity contrasts sharply with Barry's ferocious self expression, each endearing in its own way, and it's easy to sympathise with them in their brutal environment. As for their band, The Bang Bang have real stage presence and some genuinely strong songs. Astutely unbalanced sound gives a genuine feel to rehearsals and live recordings, an edge which makes them all the more entertaining. Brothers of the Head has a raw feeling throughout, a sense of urgency and immediacy which, in turn, make it linger in the mind long after the credits have rolled. Despite its odd premise, this is far more than a mere curiosity piece; you'd be an idiot to miss it.
Kevin Costner is a grizzled lifeguard officer traumatised after an accident claims the lives of his workmates. Ashton Kutcher is an ambitious young recruit at the academy to which he is sent to work as a trainer. Immediately rubbing each other up the wrong way, the two become locked in a competitive struggle before gradually learning to respect one another. It's formulaic, but the acting is reasonably good, and there's an above average film in here for those who like this sort of thing. The trouble is that it's forty minutes long and has been padded out with nearly two hours of sentimental bullshit, making the whole so painful to endure that, by comparison, drowning doesn't seem so bad.
Top Gun style, the lifeguard academy is filled with eager youngsters whose attempts to impress one another form the more solid part of the story. The supporting cast are all at least competent, and poor young Kutcher acts his socks off trying to make something of a role nobody will remember. Unfortunately, there's simply no chemistry between him and the woman who makes him question his career commitments. The relationships of the older characters are more convincing but, by virtue of that, unbalance the story. Scenes of action at sea do succeed in being exciting and are intelligently shot so that we get a real sense of the danger and confusion involved without losing track of what's happening to individual characters. Unfortunately the rest of the direction is pedestrian. As with many other examples in its genre, the film tries to build up emotional tension by giving us an insight into a tough training regime, but a number of the tasks which the recruits are given are really not very difficult at all (treading water for an hour in a warm pool is something which any healthy ten year old should be able to manage), and they're further let down by a poor understanding of physics. These scenes are then cobbled together so as to threaten death by montage, apparently in an effort to save time and make room for more ridiculously drawn out scenes toward the end.
If you do go to see this film and enjoy it for the action and the military drama, you would be well advised to leave at least half an hour before the end. Whatever it is that Costner does to editors, they seem to lose all control over his work. Here once again we see his character raised to greater and greater levels of improbable heroism, praised by Kutcher's adoring voiceover until any sympathy we had for either of them is gone. Doubtless Costner expected this would leave audiences in floods of tears; it's more likely to leave them reaching for the sick-bags. What ought to be an action-packed tale of daring sea rescues ends up just being wet.
Pitched squarely at teenagers who are still in the process of deciding what they want to do with the rest of their lives, Accepted is a fast paced, happy-go-lucky comedy which scrapes the bottom of the barrel when it comes to toilet humour yet still somehow manages to charm. Its amiable heroes and starched villains fill out a familiar storyline with gusto. The trouble is, in the movie as in life, that's all they know how to do.
When young Bartleby Gaines finds himself rejected by eight different colleges, life is looking grim. His parents are furious and his cynical kid sister is less than sympathetic. Unless he can get an education, he's told, he'll be a nobody (as if being called 'Bartleby' wasn't bad enough). Then he hits upon an idea - he'll create a fake college acceptance letter, build a fake website, and hide out for a year or two, convincing his family it's all for real. Of course, the scheme soon gets out of hand, and before long he finds himself responsible for several hundred would-be students who have never known anything but rejection, students whose hopes are pinned on an idea which he must strive to make real.
The plot of Accepted is obvious from the outset, but most of the way through that doesn't cause a problem, as there are enough subplots and asides to carry it along quite happily; only towards the end, when things start getting altogether too serious, does it start to drag. The ensemble cast are clearly having a great time and there's some really good development of minor characters, contributing to a delightful final scene. The trouble is that the film's own central idea gradually undermines its cheerful approach. For all their high hopes and moral triumphs, the students of Bartleby's South Harmon Institute of Technology (S.H.I.T.) are, in the words of Leonard Cohen, reaching for the sky just to surrender. Their dream of fighting the system ends when their four years at college are up; they may dream of doing something more with their lives than serving burgers, but at most they're delaying it. This makes the governing body's assertion that the purpose of college is to encourage young people's creativity rather distateful. One can't help but think that they might be better off actually learning something.
If you prefer films which stray from formula enough to teach you something, give this one a miss. In the absence of anything better, however, Accepted can certainly provide an acceptable night's entertainment.
When Haley (Missy Peregrym), out playing on her mountain bike with friends, inadvertently crashes through a plate glass window, her time as a wild child has run out. This time the courts are serious. One option is prison. The other is to accept her father's offer and return to the gymnastics training which she dropped out of two years previously. This might sound like an easy ride, but Hayley knows the sport well enough to understand how punishing it can be; she's also suspicious of her new coach, Burt Vickerman (Jeff Bridges), who has a reputation for leaving his gymnasts with nasty injuries.
The plot of this feelgood teen drama is predictable enough. Haley and her coach initially square off against one another, only gradually coming to see the good in one another, and meanwhile Haley struggles to make friends and to cope with the bitchiness of other gymnasts in the school. Chief among these is Vanessa Lengies' Joanne, who starts out two dimensional but gradually develops a more complex character, a refreshing incident in this sort of film. Her sharp comic timing helps to keep the film afloat through otherwise dull sequences, though some of her lines are stupid enough to jar even with an audience which traditionally relishes stereotypes. Overall, the script is not bad, but it fails to generate sparks when it really should and later sequences are padded with awkward filler dialogue. The film gives the impression of not really being sure where it wants to go.
The problem with sports movies, of course, is that it's difficult to find physically capable stars who can also act. In this regard, Stick It acquits itself better than most, though none of the supporting cast are exactly charismatic. As the film intercuts between its actresses and their stunt doubles, we see bodies metamorphose in peculiar ways. Peregrym makes a convincing lead, and Bridges is dependable as ever in support, but it's difficult to feel very closely involved in their soft focus striving. Fortunately, there are some superb gymnastic sequences to step up the pace. These are beautifully directed, giving the impression that Bendinger really ought to be out there filming sports rather than telling mediocre stories about them.
This is, on the surface of it, a difficult film to review because its plot is so slight, but that doesn't mean it has little to say. The jumble of impressions with which it presents us on our journey through a near-future Britain paints a complex picture of a decaying society which we can still recognise as our own. This is a world where, for over eighteen years, not one baby has been born. Its is a world without hope. In the circumstances there seems little point in working toward a better tomorrow, and most people have apathetically allowed themselves to slide into fascism. Our hero, played with real conviction by the underappreciated Clive Owen, has reached such a low that he's resorted to drinking Bells, but he is galvanised back into action when his terrorist ex-wife asks for his help in undertaking a desperate mission - protecting the first woman in all that time to fall pregnant.
Children of Men is a superb ensemble piece, with inspired performances from the likes of Michael Caine, Julianne Moore, Peter Mullan and newcomer Claire Hope-Ashitey, who gives her young mother a vibrancy and believable teenage unpleasantness which exasperate and endear in equal measure. Chiwetel Ejiofor is riveting as the would-be revolutionary so devoted to his cause that he's lost sight of the reason for it, and all these characters are supported by a script and set design which brings them to life fully formed, giving the story real warmth and bringing its brutality much closer to home. Also close to home are the political issues explored here, from the vicious treatment of asylum seekers to tales of a 'flu pandemic, from the ubiquitous presence of armed police to the economic devastation caused by isolationism. It's rare to see a big budget film take risks like this; as a story, it will date quickly, but as a piece of social commentary it seems likely to remain potent for many years to come.
In developing its near-future vision, Children of Men has kept things simple, with design and architecture only subtly altered from its present form. Though there are obvious advances in technology, such as the newspaper billboards which update electronically, this is all small scale and is woven seamlessly into the background. Much of what the film has to say is also backgrounded. The attitudes of people confronted with the possibility of new life make for a powerful comment on the callousness with which pregnant women and babies are treated in conflict zones today, something which we have learned to overlook. The simple humanity which the film thus dares to evoke is fast becoming the trademark of director Alfonso Cuaron, and it represents a maturity rare in projects of this scale. It is this which ultimately lifts Children of Men above its contemporaries and makes it into something which everyone should see.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who find Adam Sandler unpleasant, and those who find him so unpleasant that they can't stand watching his films. If you're among the latter, nothing will save this movie for you. If you're among the former, you'll be pleased to know that this is one of those occasions in which Sandler makes his natural unpleasantness work for him and, in so doing, raises a familiar story one notch above the competition.
An architect with an unfeasibly sexy wife and two adoring (albeit somewhat saccharine) children, Sandler's Michael is a workaholic frantic to make a success of his career; he's so obnoxious about it that it's hard to see why anyone puts up with him, but things are about to get a lot worse. As the pressure mounts for him to meet tight deadlines, Michael comes into possession of a supernatural device - a universal remote control capable of controlling his universe - which can enable him to turn down the sound on nagging, zip back in time to retrieve information he's forgotten, and fast forward through boring or unpleasant sections of his life on autopilot. Having fun at first, Michael soon finds himself out of control. He should have known better than to accept a free gift from a creepy little man in the backroom Beyond section of superstore Bed, Bath and Beyond. Christopher Walken, channeling Doc Brown and Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka, turns in an inspired performance in one of his most sinister roles yet, whilst Sandler draws on the latent psychosis which he used so well in Punch Drunk Love to illustrate his character's desperation and vulnerability from the start. Michael is not a nice man, but he is a man we can care about if we are willing to face up to the more unpleasant aspects of ourselves.
Click is, ultimately, a sort of updated It's A Wonderful Life, but with a very different atmosphere. It contains a lot of cheap and rather tedious humour, with lazy jokes at the expense of women and transsexuals; fart jokes; and even David Hasselhoff; yet somehow manages to be more than the sum of its parts. For a Saturday night popcorn comedy with a darker edge, you could do a lot worse.
When Jan and Todd's grandfather dies, their loving grandmother requests that they take his ashes to Germany to scatter them during Oktoberfest as part of a family tradition. Tempted by the thought of enjoying a few beers in the festival atmosphere, they eagerly agree, but things don't exactly go to plan. Stumbling upon a Fight Club style secret society devoted to drinking games, they are humiliated by their disdainful German cousins. Family honour is at stake, and they vow to return the following year with a team of their own, to win the Beerfest competition.
A feelgood comedy sports movie which calls on the viewer to support Americans doing something they're notoriously bad at might not sound like the best bet for a night's entertainment, but Beerfest acquits itself surprisingly well. Packed with cheerful slapstick and endless nationality-based humour (which it gets away with by virtue of even-handedness) it features performances of such gentle amiability that it's hard not to like. We're not supposed to take things too seriously - the odd murder is casually swept aside as the story marches on - but there's also plenty of intelligent humour in there too, particularly for those who know the actors' histories, and there's some truly obscene yet subtle use of gay slang which has artfully slipped past the censor. The pacing is well handled especially during the drinking games themselves, though it's hard for the film to sustain an intense party atmosphere throughout. It will doubtless be at its best when shown in the background at a party, as with the Cheech and Chong movies it makes reference to.
If there's one major problem with Beerfest, it's that it doesn't really know its stuff when it comes to drinking, and neither are the actors up to it. As a veteran of drinking contests myself, I was disappointed to see men who are supposed to be among the best in the world routinely taking more than ten seconds to drain their glasses, and the suggestion that there's a great secret about how to drain a glass boot is ridiculous. This is a real shame, as it will let down the film's target audience, who are otherwise well provided for. Non-drinkers will probably also find it funny, though mostly in the same way that they can be amused by watching drunken friends. Beerfest's other weakness is in its two leads, who, whilst affable and sympathetic, don't really have enough charisma to carry it. Fortunately, this is compensated for by the supporting cast, especially Jay Chandrasekhar as a desperate hustler and Cloris Leachman as the lovely old lady with a secret. The film also gets major points for international appeal, understanding just how unpopular Americans can find themselves abroad and explaining this without malice. Ultimately it is, of course, a very silly film, but if you let yourself surrender to its charms you won't regret it in the morning.
When one reveals that one works as a film critic, people always say that it must be a wonderful job. Sometimes it's more of a public service. People like me go to see films like Adrift so that people like you don't have to.
Adrift is the story of a group of six former college friends who meet up to celebrate a birthday aboard a luxury yacht. Some miles out into the ocean, four of them decide to go for a swim. Young mother Amy declines, terrified of water after a traumatic incident in her childhood. In an attempt to cure her fear, loudmouth Zach grabs hold of her and dives overboard with her. As he forgets to let down the ladder before doing so, the six then find themselves stranded in the water, unable to get back aboard. And that's pretty much it. With so many characters, we know from the start that they're not all going to make it, but the ways in which they manage to come to grief are almost as ridiculous as their inability to use the many simple methods available for regaining access to the boat (it would help if they were a little less stupid - letting the heaviest guy climb up something which he's already torn once is really imbecilic, as is throwing things away when they fail to be of use on the first attempt). One of them gives up and swims away, looking for help, much like several of the critics in my press screening. One cannot help but long for them to hurry up and drown and get it over with.
Aiming to fill the ninety odd minutes which will make this (at least look like) a feature film, the scriptwriters have the stranded characters engage in what might have been supposed to be soul-searching discussion, with awkward revelations and macho stand-offs aplenty, yet despite this almost all the characters are underdeveloped. Only Susan May Pratt convinces, as Amy, though Ali Hillis works impressively hard with the fewest lines of all. Cameron Richardson's Michelle is never allowed to be anything more than a dumb blonde, given the impression that even the writers don't care about these people. It's difficult for anyone else to care when they do nothing but whine and pointlessly make their situation worse. If you can't find anything better to do with an hour and a half than watch this film, you might as well go and drown yourself.
Usually when a film has no press screenings and as little advance material as this, there's a good reason for it, so I went along expecting turkeys on a plane. To my surprise, I found myself watching one of the most entertaining movies of the summer. This film has some snakes, and a plane, and Samuel L Jackson, and it makes it pretty clear from the start that it doesn't need anything else.
The plot (if one can call it that) is simple: surfer dude Sean witnesses a murder; the gang boss who committed it tries to have him killed; Samuel L Jackson's Special Agent Neville Flynn escorts him on a plane to L.A., where he's to testify; the gang boss arranges for the plane to be filled with poisonous snakes as a means of assassinarion. "Don't you think I exhausted all other options?" he asks in exasperation, as the security services lament "This is one of those scenarios we didn't prepare for." The audience, of course, have had months to prepare, as excitement about this film has reached fever pitch. From their cheers and laughter throughout and their applause at the end, I'd say it did a pretty good job of giving them what they wanted.
The success of Snakes on a Plane is built on two things. First of all, it realises it has no substance, and everything hinges on its style. From the beautiful, expansive cinematography of the early scenes to the perfectly arranged music, it pulls this off superbly. Its ridiculous but cleverly written dialogue is played absolutely straight. Its confidence is beguiling. Secondly, it's really good at developing its minor characters. Here it benefits from an excellent cast who manage to put across plenty of personality and make themselves seem human without ever letting the comedy falter. They're stereotypes, of course, yet they're engaging enough for us to quickly identify who's who and keep track of their myriad personal stories. This really helps in the confusing scenes when there are snakes everywhere and lots of panicking and running about. It would have been easy to make a mess of these scenes and leave the audience bored, unable to tell what's going on, but the pacing here is good and the film coasts from time to time on the strength of its own ridiculousness. It's clear that the producers were taking note of all the feedback they've received from the public since the ideasd was first aired. Practically every stupid and puerile suggestion for what snakes might do on a plane has been put into practice - but I think we can assume that people with a low tolerance for stupid things won't be going to see this film in the first place. As for the snakes' motivation, well, they've been excited by artificial pheromones so that they're now sex-crazed and looking for a bit of the old ultraviolence. They do things no normal snake would do. Samuel L Jackson does things no normal self-respecting A-list actor would do, but he's clearly having a great time.
Snakes on a Plane is basically a disaster movie, yet it manages to bypass the slow bits which normally weaken such films by being utterly straightforward about its intentions. There is never a dull moment in this film. It does exactly what it says on the tin.
Opening with a nerve-jangling scene of a frantic, schizoid young man desperately trying to cleanse himself amid an infestation of bugs, A Scanner Darkly immediately establishes itself as the most Philip K Dick-like Philip K Dick adaptation so far. Its painstaking rotoscope animation, far from being a cheap gimmick, gives its vision of a drug-saturated near future world just the right edge of delirium and unreliability. This is a film which will work not only for fans of Dick's work but also for anyone who has ever experimented with stimulants or hallucinogens. This seems all the more appropriate because it was such a personal work for the author, and the closing credits retain his personal dedication to all the friends he lost during an equivalent period in his own life: all the people who died.
It's difficult to imagine any fan of Dick's failing to adore this film; but as it retains the genius of his work, so it retains the flaws, and this could be a big problem for some other viewers. Its complex storyline can be difficult to follow at times (deliberately so, considering the experiences of its protagonists). It builds up slowly and sometimes comes across as rather dry, though there's a great deal of humour woven into the dialogue, especially from Robert Downey Jr.'s treacherous but vulnerable Barris. Fortunately, concerns about Keanu Reeves' ability to play the hero, a man whose undercover work has forced him to assume a dual identity which his drug-addled brain can no longer unravel, prove to be misplaced. His slightly stand-offish yet oer-urgent style suits the part perfectly and enables him to create a character who is seriously damaged but no less likeable for it, an everyman with whom the audience can identify, a man desperately trying to hold onto his sanity in an insane world. Beautifully judged dialogue and finely honed performances mean that all of the junkie characters at the film's centre are people it's easy to care about, even whilst they bicker over petty things and screw each other over. In this regard, the film is important as far more than a good piece of science fiction. Too often, films about drugs present addicts as irredeemable monsters and suggest that the reason for trying to interrupt the supply must be the protection of those who haven't tried them yet, the innocents. A Scanner Darkly has no innocents, and it argues fiercely that all of its characters are deserving of redemption. All, perhaps, except those who have created the situation - the hero's personal struggle is paralleled by his unwitting investigation into the conspiracy behind it, and it is in this strand of the plot that events take a really dark turn.
Disorientating but gripping, witty and packed with a powerful emotional punch, A Scanner Darkly is a brilliant piece of film-making. It stands like a tomb for unknown soldiers to remind us of the past and warn us about the future. Though we see as through a glass darkly, this film brings us face to face with the world.
John Tucker - captain of the basketball team - is the most popular guy in school. So popular that he's won the hearts of head cheerleader Heather, animal rights campaigner Beth and student television chief Carrie, and he's managing to date each of them without the others knowing. Of course, this can't go on forever, and when the girls find out their first instinct is to attack each other, prompting a violent and borderline pornographic gym class showdown. But new girl Kate has seen this sort of thing before, having watched her mother go through a series of dead end relationships, and she has one thing to say to them: don't get mad, get even. Kate is thrilled to have the girls' respect, but when she finds herself a part of their vengeful plan she gradually realises that she's out of her depth.
Though full of characters and behaviour which most adult viewers will find insufferable, John Tucker Must Die is essentially a well crafted, intelligently structured film, considerably more complex than it looks on the surface. It's aggressive and sexy enough to appeal to kids like its central characters before undermining many of their assumptions. Over the course of a conventional story it deftly pulls apart the boy versus girl conventions of the genre and questions adolescent assumptions about masculinity and femininity. As John Tucker, Jesse Metcalf gives a surprisingly subtle performance, easily playing the confident sporting hero yet also undeniably human. It is this humanity, and Kate's reaction to it, which gradually expose the problems with the girls' plot to see his heart broken as theirs have been, leading to some unexpected shifts in the way the characters relate to one another.
The biggest problem with John Tucker Must Die is that it still feels obliged to pack in the teen movie clichés and it's not quite clever enough to get away with them all. The party at the end is just too overblown to make sense, and the response of the other girls to Kate's declarations seems entirely out of character. Having built up considerable emotional tension, the film doesn't know how to release it effectively. The conspirators are two dimensional throughout, which works in scenes of fast talking fun but doesn't allow for any satisfactory character development. As Kate, on the other hand, Brittany Snow never seems sufficiently sure of herself to convince as a girl who could attract such attention, even after the coaching the girls give her. Yet minor characters work well throughout, from Kate's anxious mother who simply wants her to be herself to the bemused goths watching the popular girls scream at each other. These outsider elements help to put the teen drama in perspective even for teen viewers.
If what you want is boys, girls, glamour, fashion and giggles, John Tucker Must Die will give you all that and more. If what you want is simply a bit of Saturday night entertainment which won't annoy you too much, you could still do a lot worse than this.
Back on civvy street after serving in Afghanistan, Jim is having a hard time adjusting, but he's determined to make something of his life. He has a longtime girlfriend whom he plans to marry, a good set of employment skills and a driving ambition to work as a police officer. But over the course of a few days in Los Angeles, Jim's life falls to pieces.
Harsh Times is at first a difficult film to get close to, with a meandering narrative and characters whose contempt for other people sometimes extends to themselves - but over the course of this cleverly woven story the viewer is drawn in until it's impossible to let go. Christian Bale's performance as Jim, at times terrifyingly violent but so human and so charismatic that he still attracts devotion from others, is a career best, and he's given ample support from Freddy Rodríguez as his best friend Mike. As Marta, the Mexican peasant who has captured Jim's heart, Tammy Trull is a delight, so vivacious and charming that, despite her limited screentime, it's easy to see why she has had such a powerful effect on him. It's a power of which he is desperately afraid, refusing to be drawn into anyone else's concerns as he struggles to control his own destiny. His reaction to setbacks is to lose himself in drink, drugs, and the aggressive behaviour which is central to his masculine identity. Keenly intelligent and capable, he is able to manage everything except his own emotions, and underlying those is a psychosis which could explode at any moment, endangering the lives of everyone around him.
The world in which Harsh Times is set is a world where violence, crime and the drugs which fuel it are commonplace, yet it's a world which has rules and codes of conduct carefully constructed to protect those who live within it. Jim's willingness to break even these rules is shocking to his friends, yet fascinates them in equal measure. The capable but gauche Mike keeps trying to discover his secret, to work out what it is that he went through in the war which has changed him so dramatically. His journey of discovery gives the film its heart, all the way up to its shocking end.
Few films get away with this kind of intensity; few films speak so convincingly about violence without losing sight of its impact on human lives. Harsh Times is something really special, and should not be missed.
Part fairytale, part New Age redemption drama, part soap opera, Lady in the Water is an odd kettle of fish. When beleaguered janitor Cleveland is saved from drowning by a strange woman with an even stranger story, he is quick to make himself her ally, haunted as he is by a past in which he failed to be there when he was needed. Through his commitment to the enigmatic Story, he may at last find a way to unravel his guilt. But what is Story looking for? What is the creature which is hunting her? And why didn't M. Night Shyamalan finish working these things out before he made the film?
Lady in the Water's problems are painfully apparent from its opening sequence, a cartoon explanation of the (invented) folk tale which underlies it. Didactic and overlong, this initially simple story is expanded throughout the film in a frustratingly haphazard manner whenever the plot (such as it is) threatens to grow too thin. As such, it's realistic enough - but as Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow demonstrated, what works as fireside narration doesn't always work on film. This film may hit the spot perfectly for nine or ten year olds keen to explore the connections between fantasy and daily life (some sequences may be too scary for younger children), but it doesn't do much for an adult audience. After the powerful moral ambiguity of The Village it's disappointing to see Shyamalan retreat into something so awkward and naïve. The willingness of its characters to suspend disbelief is difficult for the audience to believe in and its message that trust is always rewarded seems at odds with its hints at really nasty things lurking in the shadows. What these things are and why they do what they do is never explained. Similary, supporting characters take extreme actions without any apparent motive beyond them seeming like a good idea at the time. A lame attempt to joke about this through a movie critic who complains about characters speaking the plot just makes the unfolding dialogue more painful, and his later references to movie clichés represent a sub-Scream level of parody, as if the script is embarrassed by itself. In this context, the portrayal of a talented and world-shaking writer by Shyamalan himself is not just narcissistic but frankly laughable.
What turns this film around and makes it worth watching despite these problems is its first class development of the characters themselves, with great work put in by all the actors, including Shyamalan, though Bryce Dallas Howard is faintly disappointing as the unearthly heroine or 'narf'. As Cleveland, Paul Giamatti is superb, utterly believable and likeable throughout, an ordinary man who has been out of his depth for a long time. His neighbours manage to be intriguingly weird whilst still making an odd kind of sense as a community. There's Reggie, the bodybuilder experimenting by developing just one side of his physique; Mr. Dury, the crossword addict whose son spends all his time playing with cereal boxes; student Young Soon and her irascible mother; and kindly Mrs. Bell, to whom the narf is just one more sick animal in need of care. Scenes which focus on these characters are rich, absorbing and thoroughly entertaining; there's enough here for an ongoing story. It's just a pity that the film concentrates instead on its much weaker supernatural premise.
M Night Shyamalan is without doubt a great film-maker. Sadly, releasing a film like this at the same time as publicly savaging Disney can only reduce his chances of securing future funding, and one has to wonder now if he will ever succeed in making the great films we've all been waiting for.
After a bullied dorm-mate commits suicide, six residents of a young offenders' institution are taken to a remote island for a character building exercise. They soon discover that the island has been double booked - a female warden is also there with two female prisoners (a purely gratuitous coincidence which has no real bearing on the plot). Unfortunately, as it turns out, this is the least of their troubles. There's also someone else on the island - someone who is hunting them, picking them off one by one, and from whom there seems to be no escape.
Following in the tradition of Dog Soldiers and The Descent, Wilderness has the potential to be a great little film, balancing the nastiness of its young protagonists against the trained viciousness of their foe, but sadly it never lives up to its potential. Most of the acting is very good, and there's some superb banter between the boys early on; it's just a shame that this is sacrificed to a series of horror movie clichės which are ultimately far less interesting. As these develop, naturalistic dialogue is lost in favour of clumsy speeches which the cast are no longer able to deliver with conviction. As a result, though they do undergo some minor character development, it's hard to keep caring about them, especially as the most competent gets the least screen time. This wouldn't be a problem if there was something else to enjoy instead, but the film's approach to horror is entirely by the book, even starting out with the appearance of little woven totems lifted straight from The Blair Witch Project. It's hard to flatter this with the term homage when the film has nothing clever to say about it. Rather, pilfered imagery is scattered around the place almost fetishistically, as if the film hopes to draw on its power. Needless to say, the experiment is a failure.
If what you're looking for in a movie is a collection of chase sequences and some grisly violence, Wilderness does deliver, but there are plenty of films out there which do it better. Here, drawn-out scenes of gore (most notably Sean Pertwee being eaten alive by dogs) are substituted for the inventiveness and humour which often make this sort of horror work so well. Curiously, there are also several death scenes which completely fail to deliver - a boy being stabbed and scarcely even staining his t-shirt; another falling on his back on some rocks and lying there twitching unconvincingly. The film has pretensions to Golding-esque horror when it comes to the boys' interaction, but this doesn't really deliver, since we knew they were nasty pieces of work to begin with. As for the principal plot, not only is it ludicrous, it's introduced with a clumsiness remarkable even within the slasher genre. Characters disappear and reappear with painful predicatbility (there's probably a drinking game in this), and, despite the potential offered by the island environment, everything seems to take place on five small outdoor sets, giving it an oddly theatrical feel.
There are worse films out there than this, but only because they couldn't afford such capable and hard-working actors. When over a third of the critics at a press screening take five minute toilet breaks, unprepared to sit through it all even when they're being paid to, it's clear one is in an entertainment wilderness.
Exploring the life of the enduringly famous pin-up girl and American sex icon, The Notorious Bettie Page strikes a curious balance between prurience, politics and social observation. It opens with a deliciously detailed sleazy New York cityscape, neon signs advertising Kinsey's whiskey, furtive strangers slipping into shops to ogle pin-up magazines. In this environment, repression itself is fetishised, yet the extent of repression in wider society is presented in a way which modern audiences will find shocking, being probably unaware of the extent of such legislative tendencies today. Into this world steps Bettie, bold and resilient and possessed of a kind of innocence which her surroundings never seem to quench. The film's treatment of her is impressively restrained, never sensational, challenging the legend to examine the character of the woman at its heart. In this context, Bettie's religion is never set at odds with her work in the sex industry; her moral progress is as significant a theme as the progress of her career, but there is no weighing up of one set of values against another. By presenting both her convections and her doubts, the film allows a surprising amount of freedom for viewers to make up their own minds.
The problem with this open, distanced approach is that it tells us too little about the passions of the people involved. The film is poorly paced and drags in places whilst failing to fill out important detail in others. The abuse Bettie suffered in her childhood and marriage is only hinted at, and difficulties in her later long-term relationship are examined only briefly, resolution and compromise being glossed over in a way which detracts from the viewer's intimacy with the characters. The result is a film which feels fragmented and dissolute, sometimes insubstantial. Scenes involving Bettie's work have, by contrast, such energy and verve that they unbalance the whole, though they do serve to keep the attention of the viewer - there's always more fun on its way. Many of these scenes are very wittily written, whilst others employ an old-fashioned style of scripting which compliments the old-fashioned visuals (the film is shot partly in black and white, and on varying kinds of film stock) but isn't ultimately very interesting.
As with any biopic, what really matters is the performance of the lead, and here Gretchen Mol excels, conjuring up a remarkable physical resemblance and capturing Bettie's little moves and gestures perfectly. What lets her down is simply that she's too thin (which, in the context of what has made Bettie so enduringly popular, really does matter); the other models likewise conform to modern rather than 'fifties standards of beauty, which makes this film about censorship feel as if it has been the victim of a newer taboo. Fortunately there has been no attempt to tidy up the quality of the carefully recreated photoshoots, which are presented here in all their ridiculous glory and are all the more charming for it. Mol's engaging performance ensures that the film is always watchable and parts of it really are a delight. It's just a shame that it doesn't pack the punch it could have done.
It's not very often that I get to see films which aren't for work (sure, I'm reviewing this one, but less formally, and at my leisure), so I was always going to enjoy this. Although we couldn't get tickets on the opening night, being out of the habit of organising such things, Stuart and I got properly pirated up and exchanged much piratical banter with the staff on our way in. When the film began, it was at once clear that we weren't going to be disappointed. Smarter than its predecessor, Dead Man's Chest is simply but quite cleverly scripted, mingling all sorts of properly researched piratical tales and in-jokes to great effect. It delivers pretty much exactly what the audience are looking for, with the possible exception of those who simply couldn't get enough Johhny Depp - his Captain Jack Sparrow is wisely kept from dominating the story, with other strands allowed to develop and (gasp) two other complex characters now on display. Kiera Knightley gets a lot more to do as Elizabeth, pleasingly unprettified and considerably more interesting, whilst the spurned former Commodore provides a satisfying foil. Orlando Bloom looks like he's having so much fun running around with a sword that he's quite forgotten to act, if indeed he ever knew how, but it doesn't really matter, as there are enough other things going on in his scenes to relieve the boredom. That said, director Jerry Bruckheimer really wussed out on the flogging scene, which must have disappointed some of his fans. I can't imagine that it would be too disturbing for children in the audience who were already coping with a ship full of Deep Ones.
The film is long, it's true, but it's well paced and doesn't feel too long for its story - indeed, it has a story this time. The action feels as if it's leading somewhere, not just taking viewers for a ride. Granted, much of it is lifted from the likes of Monkey Island, but this in itself is quite entertaining. Naomie Harris, playing against type, is amazing as the voodoo lady. There are lots of good action sequences, mostly reworkings of old ideas but very nicely handled. Occasional things do jar - I can't work out why the prisoners in their spherical cages couldn't simply climb out through the holes - but for the most part, it's rollicking good fun. Oh, and stay until the end of the credits - it's one of those.
Nineteen years after his last bigscreen outing, five years after his in-story disappearance, and following a time during which America has experienced tragedies which only someone like him might have averted, Superman returns, falling like a comet from the skies back into the cornfields where he thought he was raised. After a futile search for surviving remnants of the culture from which he came, he wants to get back to what he's good at - rescuing people, posing for the cameras, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, and so forth. So eager is he to return to normal that he almost forgets to show some affection to the foster mother who has patiently waited for him, not knowing if he was alive or dead. And on returning to his job at the Daily Planet, he discovers to his despair that his self centred actions have also cost him the heart of intrepid reporter Lois Lane.
Director Bryan Singer has described this film, somewhat jokingly, as a chick flick, and it does indeed incorporate many of the tropes of that genre, which work well when they're not overplayed. Like several other recent superhero movies, this is concerned as much with character as with action, and particularly with how those endowed with unusual abilities cope with trying to find a place in the wider world. Newcomer Brandon Routh is perfect as the lonely superhero only just coming to terms with his personal weaknesses; he looks the part, but he can also act it, and he does so with a humour which helps to balance out the necessary sentimentality of the tale. Kate Bosworth works well as the resilient Lois, struggling with conflicting emotions but avoiding the temptations of melodrama; and James Marsden is especially good as Richard, the new man in her life, who is trying so hard to be decent and understanding that he persistently robs Superman of any opportunity to hate him. Lois' journalistic success and her responsibilities for her apparently fragile child have changed the dynamic not only of her relationships but also of her work life, making the demands of Frank Langella's still crazy newspaper boss Perry White (brilliantly represented in a 'get to know your Planet' poster with his full Dracula grin) seem all the more ridiculous. White's concern with exploiting Lois' personal connections to get an all important Superman interview emphasise the conflict between public and private life which is at the heart of the hero's struggles, and do so far more effectively that phonebox costume changes and panic over bad guys knowing too much.
The bad guy in this film is classic Superman opponent Lex Luthor, who pictures himself as Prometheus, pilfering the alien technology of Superman's ancestors to bring it to the world. Unfortunately for that world, a few billion people must die for his scheme to be realised, and he will, of course, want his cut. With Superman later portrayed in classic Atlas symbolism, the stage is set for a clash of the Titans. Kevin Spacey plays Luthor with relish and with a certain casual gracelessness which only serves to emphasise his capabilities. He also plays him as a human being, taking the time to look out for his colleagues even if it is his own actions which persistently put them in danger; there is a real sense that this is a team working together, not just a random collection of disposable thugs. Unfortunately, his girlfriend Kitty (Parker Posey), though she gets some great lines and provides effective comic relief, is just a little too cartoonish to convince in this context, and one can't help thinking that Luthor might be less frustrated with his life if he tried spending his time with more intelligent people.
What most people will be looking for in a Superman film is, of course, action, and here the film does well, with some stunning cinematography to set it off. There are chases, explosions and dramatic escapes aplenty. The action sequences are inventive and well planned, with due consideration being given to the laws of physics - Superman may be fast and strong, but he can't compensate for the weaknesses of the objects he interacts with, and when he catches a vehicle he can't protect the people inside from being shaken around. Powerful though he may be, he is still just one man, and the script makes good use of his limits, as of the ways in which his abilities can work against him. The film is well paced and gripping almost all the way through, faltering only towards the end, when it is left with too many emotional issues to resolve and not enough action story to run alongside them. Overall, it is intelligently written, full of delightful jokes and references, and brilliant in its attention to detail. Superman is a tough subject to present effectively, and Singer has done an excellent job.
Michael is a scientist with a gift for mathematics who gives up his job to seek out a formula which could enable the non-sexual reproduction of the human species. Bruno, his half-brother, is mentally ill and on the verge of losing both his job and his family. Both are sons of a wayward and ebullient mother who abandoned them with their grandparents to go off and live in a hippy commune. Now, as their mother lies on her deathbed, both are struggling to make sense of their isolated lives and deal with issues relating to sex and love. Elementarteilchen plays like John Irving in the hands of Todd Solondz. It's highly intelligent, by turns tragic and outrageously funny, and sometimes almost impossible to watch. An adaptation of the cult novel by Michel Houellebecq, it explores its existential themes with a confidence which sometimes verges on vulgarity but which never descends into mere pretension.
Many viewers will find Elementarteilchen hard going, especially in its early stages, and it's a credit to the two leading actors that they manage to make us care about their characters a great deal despite their obvious shortcomings. Michael is quiet and distant from the world, finding it difficult to understand human emotions even whilst he excels in the pursuit of rational knowledge; he genius does not enable him to recognise or reciprocate the interest of women around him. Bruno, at the other extreme, is intensely emotional, reactionary, and seemingly always on the verge of committing violence. The script performs a difficult balancing act as it devotes attention to each in turn, gradually making them more accessible and sympathetic to the viewer. Events unfold in a meandering fashion, very rarely in accordance with the traditional logic of such drama, so that it's never clear what the fate of any particular character will be - the focus is not so much on what might happen to them as on what they might have the opportunity to learn. Nevertheless, this is an actively engaging film, packed full of humorous diversions and colourful minor characters. As Bruno pursues one sexual opportunity after another, there's a great deal of nudity and eroticism, but this too is character-focused and whimsical in its issue. The whole thing is beautifully shot, making excellent use of light to convey mood, and there are times when it seems to be just on the edge of fantasy - fitting, perhaps, in consideration of Michael's ambition and Bruno's fluctuating mental state.
Elementarteilchen will not be to everyone's tastes, ugly as it sometimes is and gently paced, but some viewers will undoubtedly fall in love with it. It's certainly an unusual tale, remarkable as a showcase of talent, and it really does have something to say.
At a time when the politics of wall building is very much in the news, Banlieue 13 presents us with a near-future world where the suburbs of Paris have been walled off to contain the violence brooding within. Growing up in such a suburb, Leï is a man with no grand ambitions - all he wants is to protect his apartment building, to preserve one bright spot whilst everything around him goes to Hell. But after he puts his trust in the wrong people, Leï is compelled to team up with a dedicated cop to hunt down a missing bomb which could claim millions of lives.
With Banlieue 13, writer Luc Besson goes back to his roots, exploring the lives of the Paris poor and outsiders in a world not so very far removed from our own. Though simplistic, his story is passionately told, and the actors convince in the uncomplicated way which is a staple of all good action films. There's certainly plenty of action on display here, with plenty of chases, fights and shoot-outs for your money. Of these, the fights are the most impressive, superbly choreographed and featuring great work from professional stuntman Cyril Raffaelli. Director Morel makes superb use of the complex urban environment so that there are plenty of surprises and the flow of the action is hard to predict. When events go into slow motion, they do so for a reason, to show the detail of what's happening, rather than just because somebody thought it would look pretty. Early on, the chase scenes are compelling in the same way, wide-ranging and inventive, but unfortunately there's only so much one can do with the setting in this regard, so they gradually lose their power. Nevertheless, there's some impressive gymnastics to watch and some suitably ugly accidents to keep one's nerves jangling.
Like much of Besson's early work, Banlieue 13 is heavily stylised, sometimes at the expense of substance - yet the style is just as much a part of its character as the action. Scenes of gang brutality are intercut with beautiful cinematography essential to our understanding of why Leï is so devoted to his home. The pacing is generally good, though it slows down just a little too much towards the end, in time for some clumsy exposition. Fans of the martial arts genre will encounter many more impressive films than this, but as a piece of action it certainly delivers, and it has a spirit which is too often missing from its ilk. It's definitely an entertaining way to spend a Saturday night.
When earnest young doctor Kate moves out of the glass lake house she's been renting, in 2006, she leaves a note for the new tenant. Moving into the same house in 2004, architect Alex discovers the note and, not knowing what else to do, leaves another in the same mailbox by way of reply. So begins a strange correspondence across time which gradually leads to love. But there's a reason why events have unfolded this way, and the two distant lovers must strive to discover it before it's too late.
The Lake Houseis a beautifully shot and pleasingly enigmatic film which strives to bring something new to both the time travel and the romance genres. Unfortunately, it just doesn't have enough story to fill a hundred minutes. It is in the nature of films with this kind of subject matter to become predictable, but in this case certain twists are so glaringly obvious from the start that it's hard to be patient with the characters' struggle to figure them out, and would-be dreamy moments are spoiled by a longing for them to pull themselves together and get on with it. Though there are one or two dodgy plot holes, the scriptwriter has had the good sense not to lay down any rules about how time travel works or to fret over paradoxes, so the viewer is left in the same position as the characters, just figuring it out as they go along. This is fairly well handled, and the story itself is well crafted, but it still really drags. What it needed was a charismatic pair of leads who could really make us care about what happens to them. Sandra Bullock is very good, proving once again that she deserves much better roles than she generally gets. In their scenes together, she even manages to elicit some naturalistic acting from Reeves (reminding one of the chemistry between them in Speed), but on his own Reeves is a disaster. He can't even chat to a colleague on a building site without behaving as if he's trying to declaim Greek tragedy. Two often his performance verges on the unintentionally comic, and at other times it's so soulless that one has to make a conscious effort to overlook it in order to enjoy the film.
For those prepared to put up with its poor pacing, The Lake House would probably make a good date movie, achieving as it does a fair balance between romance and mystery. It does have a tendency to over-intellectualise, trying to make itself look clever with literary and architectural references at the expense of letting us get to know the characters through the acting. The supporting cast are fairly good, though sometimes oddly stilted, suggesting a self-conscious director and too many re-takes. Like many celebrations of passionate love, this story displays a slightly distasteful cruelty to those minor characters unfortunate enough to be in the way, and we're not encouraged to give them any sympathy. It's worth watching for Bullock's performance, but deeply flawed.
"I live in a world you may find hard to understand" says heroine Violet, in the worst bit of voice-over exposition since Blade Runner, at the start of this film. She's quite right - nothing here bears much resemblance to reality; nor is it internally consistent. What it does resemble, rather charmingly, is an early 1980s pop video impression of 2006. In this pseudo-future, the world is no longer "defined by terrorism" but rather by fear of disease (HIV, bird 'flu etc. seem to have slipped the creator's mind). The disease in this case is a variety of vampirism which has set humans against haemovores in a war which the former are about to lose. In desperation, they send their best agent to steal a purported super-weapon which turns out to be a biological agent encased in a young human boy. But Violet, having lost a baby herself (as we are told several times, presumably because it is assumed we wouldn't expect her to care otherwise) takes it upon herself to protect and try to save the boy as everybody else aims to kill or retrieve him. Cue what is essentially one long chase through badly-staged battles and assorted photoshop filters. Why is all this happening? "What do we care?" asks the villain.
Films like Ultraviolet are few and far between. In most cases, when a project starts to go this badly wrong, somebody will step in and stop it, but in this case nobody seems to have noticed. Jovovich apparently loved the script, which was written especially with her in mind - one can only conclude that this is because an actress whose first language was English would have noticed how bad it was more quickly. Not only is it packed full of truly stupid lines, many of its sentences make no sense at all and in several cases it's clear that the writer doesn't understand what the longer words mean (the child is described as "a maternal surrogate", Violet as "a monolith"). The effect of this is to make what might otherwise be a waste of an hour and a half into one of the funniest films this year, not least because it takes itself so seriously. It runs the gamut of thriller clichés, with the gothic graveyard fight and thwarted romantic interlude ("Why do you never let anyone in?") particularly hilarious. During the fight sequences, enemies repeatedly arrange themselves so as to aim past Violet at one another's heads, or simply run towards her and spontaneously die. Attempts to copy Equilibrium's gun-kata are badly mishandled, and supporting actors repeatedly fudge their moves so as to make Violet look good. When he can't work out how to resolve such an encounter, Wimmer merely cuts away and returns later to show his heroine walking away from the bodies. His approach to plot is similar, with numerous sequences both unnecessary and unexplained. The CGI effects often look like they've been drawn on with marker pen. The choreography is terrible. The final duel, with what looks like a vegetable cleaver going up against a breadknife, hides in the dark in the hope that we'll imagine something better.
The most unfortunate thing about this film is that it has been given a 15 certificate when its natural audience would seem to be twelve year old boys with a fondness for computer games. There's really nothing here inappropriate for that age group, the violence being no more vicious than in many pre-watershed TV programmes. Despite its playful credit sequence, Ultraviolet isn't a comic adaptation (one wonders if it hoped it could gain credibility that way), but it imitates a game very well. For other viewers, there's always Jovovich herself in a series of revealing outfits, but it's disappointing to see her not even trying to act, given that she really can be very good. Ultimately, if one approaches it the right way, this film is a great deal of fun, but I would strongly recommend against paying money to see it. At one point the villain observes "a vampire and a dying child - what a pathetic picture." Quite.
Best friends Claire and Hailey are heartbroken at the thought of being separated when Hailey's mother takes her away to Australia. When they discover a mermaid stranded in a pool after a storm, she offers them a wish if they will help her to win the love of local lifeguard Raymond. Though they both have crushes on Raymond themselves, the girls agree to the challenge - but they still have lessons to learn about what's really important in life.
Aquamarine is one of those teen girl pictures which will actually go down best with an audience of younger girls, perhaps around the age of eight or nine. Although it's largely about the business of lusting after boys, with the camera paying almost pornographic attention to Raymond, the focus is on romance rather than sexuality and there's nothing here which most parents will find problematic. Rather than encouraging hopeless fantasies about love, the film ultimately takes a sensible and realistic look at the complicated emotions involved in growing up, but manages to do so without being patronising. The two girls are both very natural and make engaging heroines. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Sara Paxton as the mermaid, who is ditzier that Darryl Hannah in Splash, without any of the charm, and who approaches her fish out of water character by simply not bothering to act. Even high-spirited kids who relate easily to the hectic pace of the girls' adventures will find her giddiness irritating. She drifts through the film striking a series of poses and there's nothing beyond the supporting cast's conviction to persuade us to care about her plight.
In examining issues of responsibility and growing awareness of the wider world, Aquamarine makes good use of its older cast members, but there are some curious omissions. Nasty girl Cecilia, potentially one of the most interesting characters, is entirely demonised despite the fact that adult viewers will quickly identify her as a girl with serious problems of her own. Though Jake McDorman works hard to make him at least personable, Raymond is distinctly two-dimensional, and no challenge is made to the way the girls objectify him. Discussions on the importance of individuality are subsumed by the genre convention of shopping sprees and reliance on teen magazines, though the script does at least give its heroines credit for the vast amounts of knowledge they have absorbed from reading in this specific area. Less credit is due to its approach to action, particularly water safety issues, which are really badly mishandled. It succeeds as a feelgood piece of fluff, and will help to pass the time on summer holidays, but there's little here of any substance and it will soon be forgotten again.
When thirty two year old photographer Jeff meets eager fourteen year old Hayley in a cybercafé, events quickly escalate, apparently beyond the girl's control. Soon they're back at his place, cocktails are being consumed, and Hayley is stripping off for a photoshoot. But Jeff is not the only one with an ulterior motive. Unexpectedly passing out, he awakens to find himself tied to a chair. Hayley is looking for information about a girl who disappeared from the same location, and she's prepared to go to considerable lengths to get it.
Building confidently upon its central twist, Hard Candy is a strong two-hander, stagy by nature but nevertheless making effective use of the cinematic medium. Its similarity to Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden invites unfavourable comparisons, but for the most part it stands up well. The urgent dialogue and the continual motion of the characters grip the viewer's attention even during those parts of the plot whose outcome is a little too easy to predict. Audience sympathy is nicely balanced between the two characters, with the sheer horror of what is happening to Jeff inviting pity even as the case for his defence grows weaker and we learn more unsavoury things about him. If the film has a major weakness, it's that we never get to learn much about Hayley - though it's necessary for her character to remain mysterious, all the emotional weight on her side comes from a set of issues rather than an involving display of emotion. She's just a little bit too confident to really engage, though this is by no means the fault of actress Ellen Page, who turns in a thoroughly convincing performance. The chemistry between the two actors is intense, adding a powerful edge to early scenes of flirtation and later scenes of violence. It's this which really makes the movie work.
Despite subject matter which most viewers will approach with their minds made up, Hard Candy does a fairly good job of exploring the moral issues surrounding vigilante action, losing its way only toward the end with a twee speech which might easily be made by a teenager but which fails to support the moral and emotional weight of what has so far developed. Hayley's red hooded jacket is also a step too far, and cannot help but recall shrewder handing of these issues in last year's The Woodsman. Nevertheless, this is as an extremely accomplished piece of film-making, hard-hitting and intelligent, and deserving of a wide audience.
From the moment the first plane hit the Twin Towers on September the 11th, 2001, it was inevitable that there would be a film about it, yet many people have protested the idea, saying that it's wrong to make entertainment out of such a powerful and still recent tragedy. Paul Greengrass' remarkable United 93 reminds us that films are not just about entertainment. Whilst it grips throughout and provides plenty of thrills, the core of this film is communication. In telling the stories of numerous individuals caught up in the events of that fateful day, it allows us to see what happened in human terms and to recover our sense of perspective.
Opening with the prayers of four young men who know they are going to their deaths, United 93 follows events docu-drama style, the camera wandering around freely as assorted passengers board the plane, air traffic controllers map out routes, etc. There are no passages of exposition here, no convenient discussions in which characters introduce themselves to one another. As in his acclaimed Bloody Sunday, Greengrass makes us an observer at the heart of the action. Though parts of the course of events are naturally guesswork, a huge amount has been taken directly from records and phone calls, and there is nothing which jars with the sense that one is watching something real - in fact, several of the roles are filled by individuals playing themselves, reliving their experiences for the camera. The sense of involvement and immediacy which this creates - the story being told in real time - contributes to a powerful build-up of tension. Knowing how it ends does nothing to decrease the power of this story. Added to this are the stories of further catastrophes which were narrowly avoided as air traffic controllers struggled to cope, and most people will find things here which are new to them.
In shifting his focus away from the Twin Towers themselves and onto the plane which failed to reach its target, Greengrass neatly sidesteps much of the intensity of media debate and finds room to describe events in his own manner. Within the plane itself, tight camerawork maintains a real sense of claustrophobia, though the director's technique is most notable for its realism. This is supported by excellent sound editing which contributes powerfully to the sense of being there. What really makes the film special, though, are the performances built around its skeletal script. Khalid Abdalla, in particular, stands out as the hijacker terrified of the moment when he must make his move, morally troubled and yet determined to carry out his plan. His complex experience is conveyed without any explanatory dialogue. Likewise the terror and gathering resolution of the passengers is shown as much through facial expression and movement as through speech. The only major speeches they make are their last phone calls to loved ones, which are all the more affecting as a result, and a fitting tribute to the deceased. The psychological tension between these opposed but equally desperate groups of people provides an unforgettable experience for the viewer.
United 93 is a harrowing film for all its distance and understatement, but it probably needs to be. Upfront and honest, eschewing sentimentality, it has no heartwarming survivors' agenda but simply endeavours to put across the shock and horror of events as they happened. Some critics have protested that it doesn't seek to address why they happened, yet this seems to miss the point - it was the very randomness of them, so far as most of those involved were concerned, which gave them their power. This is the underlying horror which the world now has to confront, and United 93 provides a means by which to begin to do so.
Taking its premise directly from the Book of Revelation, The Omen tells the story of a couple raising a young boy who is apparently destined to grow up to destroy the world. With the original now widely regarded as a classic, this remake attempts to update the tale and set it in the twenty first century. The difficulty it faces is that the subject matter itself, and the manner of its presentation, are now distinctly old fashioned. In sticking so closely to the style of the original it is likely to appeal only to those people who would be happy to watch an older film anyway, and there's no good reason for them to choose this version in preference. Whilst it it is by no means a bad film, it's hard to see why anybody thought this remake necessary.
Despite a different interpretation of the signs presaging Armageddon (ironically highlighting just how many things have the potential to be interpreted that way) and a few ironic comments on modern American politics, there's little to make this film stand apart from the original; haircut aside, even the child in the central role looks much the same. The imagery which the original made famous seems to have become as indispensable and iconic as the ancient religious imagery on which the film depends. Younger viewers, however, may find the central couple more accessible as characters. Liev Schreiber, in particular, manages to convince as a confused modern man despite the limitations placed on him by the form of the narrative. David Thewlis is reliable as ever as the photojournalist who helps him, and the relationship between the two men is well played, vital as it becomes to the father's motivation. The casing of Mia Farrow as the Satanic nanny ("I have nearly forty years' experience looking after children") is a cute nod to Rosemary's Baby, but she's a little too overtly creepy to make the role work - in this paranoid age it's harder to see why a mother would risk leaving her child with someone she knows so little about. Though messages now arrive by email, nobody seems to be using the internet for research, despite it being an obvious tool. Other technological changes, like mobile phones, are underexplored, and still nobody seems to have noticed that one of the methods of murder used in the film, neat though it is, wouldn't actually work.
Despite these problems, there's plenty about this film that is worth watching. The cinematography is beautiful, with wind and rain-swept landscapes particularly impressive. The music works well without being overwhelming. Early on in the film, it's easy to believe that nothing supernatural is going on, with the three leads providing a solid portrait of day-to-day family life which helps the viewer to understand the father's crisis of conscience later on. Little hints that something disturbing is happening build up well, though the film never really grips the way it should. Too many of its scares are of the bursting-a-paper-bag variety and at one point it descends into a pitiful reliance on prosthetic gore. Nevertheless, it is quite effective in presenting the supernatural to a cynical modern audience. It would be a very impressive piece of work if somebody else hadn't done it better already.
Based on events in first-time director Richard E. Grant's own childhood, Wah-Wah charts the disintegration of a family living in a colonial outpost in Swaziland as the country prepares for independence. Young Ralph is eleven when he witnesses his mother's adultery and his parents' marriage falls apart. After his mother leaves, he goes away to boarding school, returning at the age of fourteen to find his now alcoholic father newly married to Ruby, an American woman he has known for just six weeks. In this isolated world, at the end of an era, Ralph struggles to establish his own identity.
With a sterling cast who know their roles inside out, Grant's inexperience is quite invisible; his confidence in familiar surroundings enables him to recreate in exquisite detail the dying days of empire. The film was shot entirely within Swaziland itself, with the wide open landscape contributing a strong sense of its own character to the finished piece. Deft references to British politics and the media (including a delightful sequence in which Ralph seeks to model himself on Little Alex from A Clockwork Orange) remind us that this is the early 'seventies, whilst the script explores with fascination the contrasts between that era and the pre-war lifestyle of the upper class colonials, particularly with regard to their sexual hypocrisy. Despite this, it never loses its interest in them as human beings. The title of the film comes from Ruby's description of the way they speak, yet their culture is as fondly preserved as that of the younger characters and, indeed, of the Swazis themselves.
As Ralph's broken-hearted father Harry, Gabriel Byrne, always a reliable actor, turns in one of his all-time best performances. Though some of his behaviour is truly monstrous, it's always possible to retain some sympathy for him and to see why his family and friends care about him so much. His scenes of rage are genuinely frightening, but Harry's love for his son always comes across and it's easy to see how he has become what he is. Perhaps equally challenging is Miranda Richardson's role as the wayward mother, which is more difficult for the viewer to relate to, yet retains a degree of humanity. Astute wardrobe choices and clever scripting reveal almost in passing the extent of her frustration at her isolated life. By contrast, Emily Watson's Ruby is right where she wants to be, a character overflowing with positive energy which Watson says made a pleasing change from what she's usually called upon to play. It's easier to like Ruby, but she's no less complex, her depth becoming apparent as she is forced to deal with the realities of her new husband's condition. Meanwhile, as Ralph himself, newcomer Zachary Fox and, later, Nicholas Hoult, are both utterly convincing. They are able to engage and communicate with the audience even during protracted periods of silence. Hoult conveys the boy's tumultuous journey into adulthood with impressive range and a real sense of immediacy.
There are many examples out there of rambling family sagas of this sort which charm from time to time but often leave one wondering what the time is. Wah-Wah is something different. Beautifully paced, it effectively conveys the passing of time without ever breaking down into episodic sketches. Though it deals with quite a weight of human misery, it is entertaining throughout and often quite uproariously funny. As such, it will appeal even to those viewers who wouldn't normally touch this sort of thing. It is, quite simply, a delight from beginning to end, and it comes highly recommended.
Some time after the end of the last film and the loss of Jean Grey, Scott (Cyclops) is still in mourning. When he begins to hear her voice in his head, he feels compelled to return to the place where she died - but is what he finds there the woman he loves, or something else? Meanwhile, the mutant world is thrown into confusion by the discovery of a 'cure' which could enable mutants to become ordinary human beings. Whilst individuals wrestle with a choice which could change their lives forever, Magneto, fearing that mutants will soon be changed against their will, declares war.
This third cinematic instalment in the X-Men saga deals, like the first two, with some pretty big issues - cultural antagonism, the treatment of the mentally ill, and the difficulty in balancing political and personal concerns. Unfortunately, it lacks the fine balance of the earlier films. The first half is all talk, alienating much of the audience; the latter half is all running around shouting and throwing burning cars. Caught up in this, several of the major characters behave in ways which seem inconsistent with what we've come to know of them, and these changes often fail to make sense. What was once a strong character-driven story seems to have surrendered its characters to the demands of the action, and too many complex concerns are resolved by blowing things up. A lot of the scenes seem stilted or rushed. There are very few memorable lines. Ratner's direction lacks the confidence and flair which Bryan Singer brought to the project, and the many changes which the production team went through whilst the film was being made are evident in what seems like a patchwork of good ideas crudely stitched together, still full of holes.
Fans of the comics who have been looking forward to seeing new mutants in this film will not be disappointed. Kelsey Grammer acquits himself surprisingly well as furry blue Secretary of State Beast; Daniel Cudmore makes an impressive, if inexpressive, Colossus; Vinnie Jones hams it up as Juggernaut; there's more for youngsters Shadowcat and Pyro to do, with a long-awaited fight between Pyro and the young Iceman; and we get to see some dramatic action from Angel in a script which deftly works around having to expose us to his famously dull personality. The closer involvement of Marvel has perhaps contributed to action sequences which look as if they've been lifted straight from the pages of the comics. The film is at its strongest in its presentation of one-on-one mutant fights, of which there are quite a number. Less impressive are the big overblown psychokinetic displays, which have a tendency to come off looking like bad album covers. In league with this are a Brotherhood of Mutants whom we can recognise as the bad guys because they wear a lot of black. The moral ambiguity of the story is squandered with a succession of moments of random nastiness from characters robbed of both depth and intelligence. It's a shame to see such a fine cast working with material like this, though they do their best to save it and enjoy many small successes. Anna Paquin is particularly good as Rogue, torn between loyalty to the family she has found and the simple pleasures which might await her if she gives up her mutant powers and identity.
A bad X-Men film is, of course, not necessarily a bad film. As action movies go, this has a lot to recommend it. The return of Jean Grey is elegantly handled, helping to build up a real sense of threat. Once the story gets going, it bounces along at a fierce pace, with plenty to keep the viewer's attention. There's a terrific stunt from Magneto which references classic disaster movies. The special effects are impressive, and the intensity of the story is quickened by an awareness that there's no guarantee everyone will get out alive. If you liked the first two X-Men films, and if you don't allow yourself to hop for too much, you'll probably enjoy this. If you do, remember to stay in your seat until the end of the credits for the final twist.
Setting a film noir in a high school may not sound like the brightest of ideas - one would expect it to put off classic film fans and teenagers alike - yet Brick is something altogether peculiar, more than the sum of its parts, with wide appeal. Part of this is down to the fact that Johnson's script has managed to make the crossover almost perfect. At first it's surreal to hear traditional gumshoe-style dialogue emerging from the mouths of teenagers, but this sense of dislocation lasts only a few minutes, after which the viewer is drawn in by what is being said. Every line in this film is beautifully judged (even if a few of them are inexpertly mumbled) and the characters are drawn with a conviction which exceeds the usual limits of either genre.
The film opens with teenager Brendan (Gordon-Levitt) discovering the dead body of his former girlfriend Emily. Flashing back two days, it examines what remained of their friendship and her last desperate communications with him. Emilie de Ravin is a revelation in this role; though she has very little screentime, she conveys an intensity which resonates throughout the rest of the movie. In just these few minutes, she must make the audience as well as Brendan fall in love with her, and she pulls it off superbly. Nothing else in the film packs this kind of emotional punch, but nothing needs to - what follows is the usual cycle of investigations and revelations, violence and danger. Occasional reminders of the age of the protagonists (such as a gang leader's hangers-on being served drinks by his mum) at times shock the viewer into laughter and at other times add an extra layer of uneasyness to the increasingly dark story. Lukas Haas is excellent as gangster The Pin, combining a real sense of power and threat with childish vulnerability. It is, ultimately, far more horrific to see these characters suffer than to watch the sort of adult gangster films which we have all become inured to.
Every good film noir needs a femme fatale, and Brick has several, most notably the elegant Nora Zehetner as Laura. In a pitch-perfect performance, Zehetner combines ruthlessness and charm with just a faint trace of girlishness which makes her all the more deadly. One is left wondering what will become of these actors as they age and what further such performances they might be capable of. Brick, however, is quite complete in itself, well paced and tightly plotted. Remarkably, it was made on a tiny budget and edited together on a home computer, something which the casual viewer would never guess at. Highly recommended.
After a bloody shoot-out in a brothel, determined lawman Captain Stanley makes career criminal Charlie Burns a proposition: he will spare his terrified younger brother Mikey from the noose if Charlie will hunt down and kill his older brother Arthur, believed to be primarily responsible for a string of vicious attacks on isolated homesteads. Reluctantly, Charlie agrees; but, of course, nothing is ever that simple. Though he has long disliked Arthur's behaviour, Charlie is still bound by family loyalty. Meanwhile, Stanley struggles to maintain his authority over a trigger-happy police force and to protect his innocent wife from the ugliness of the world around her.
The Proposition is a bold departure for Nick Cave, following as it does the trail of destruction resulting from a murder which might easily have been the subject of one of his songs. In examining what happens afterwards and how a simple community tears itself apart, he is taking on a whole new range of psychological issues and, by and large, he handles them very well. However, this is very clearly a first script (that he wrote it in just three weeks shows - it ought to have been much more viciously revised). It suffers from problems with pacing and is unwieldy in its attempts to weave together parallel strands of story as Stanley and Charlie each attempt to bring about justice in their own ways. Superb vignettes (such as Mrs. Stanley's walk through a town full of people who hate her husband and/or have sexual designs on her) showcase a skill which Cave cannot sustain throughout the longer narrative. Intermittent references to his songs will amuse fans but sometimes make the dialogue jar, and his trademark eloquent verbosity sits uncomfortably in the mouths of less sophisticated characters. At times this causes the film to verge on the surreal, which works in its favour, but it's a difficult balancing act.
The greatest strength of The Proposition is its cast, with Ray Winstone especially effective as a man who seems at first unrelentingly brutal yet gradually becomes more human. Sadly, Emily Watson isn't up to her usual standard as his wife, though she's supported by first class costuming and set design which help to convey her desperate isolation. There's a rather peculiar turn from John Hurt which viewers will either love or hate. Richard Wilson is excellent as young Mikey, notably in one of the film's most horrific scenes, conveying real terror and all the hideousness of his plight without ever seeming unduly whiny. This is quite a trick to pull off in a western, and it is superbly handled. The grand sense of doom and destiny is there as it should be, but the characters are refreshingly real.
Many fans of Cave will, of course, be drawn to this film for its soundtrack. There's not actually much new material here from Cave himself, and it's not his strongest work, though it functions well enough. Warren Ellis' score, however, is superb, and is very effective in expressing the vastness and eerieness of the Australian outback. This is complemented by Benoît Delhomme's stunning cinematography. Though it doesn't always work as a story, The Proposition is irresistably beautiful, perfectly counterpointing its necessarily explicit violence. It is certainly an interesting debut, and one hopes to see still better things from Cave in the future.
Film student Max persuades his neighbour Ray to appear in a documentary which can be released only after his death. Ray is a violent criminal and sometime assassin who patiently introduces Max to the rules and practicalities of his lifestyle. Meanwhile, the two men develop an increasingly potent bond. We've seen the basic plot of this film before, in Man Bites Dog, but newcomer Rian does something quite different with it. Despite his professional viciousness, Ray is never portrayed as a psychopath. Rather than getting drawn in to the violence, Max remains a very ordinary guy, and his fondness for Ray is based on human qualities rather than the glamour of the forbidden. There's no poetry here in either script of direction, and this really works in the film's favour. Everything feels very real, very immediate, and all the more affecting for being so mundane. There is no glossy veneer behind which viewers can hide from the violence or from the moral questions it raises.
Made on a shoestring budget, The Magician is superbly edited to make the most of limited footage. The story is such that occasional blurred shots and moments where the viewer is literally left in the dark add to the atmosphere rather than being detrimental. Some viewers, however, will find that the jerky motion of the camera, hand-held almost all the way through, makes them feel seasick. Effective use is made of natural light and background noise, with Melbourne itself adding a great deal of character to the film.
Whilst there is no sense here of violence being glamorous, Scott Rian makes a charming and charismatic lead, connecting with Max and thus with the viewer on a personal level. His sentiments about modern life and about the criminal underworld reveal a pragmatic but easy going man, gradually helping to make his own vulnerability a point of concern, and the story provides an insight into damaged lives which exist in parallel with mainstream society. There are a number of amusing swipes at Tarantino films, though these are never made explicit. Astutely balanced, sharp and often funny, this is the sort of debut which one hopes will herald a great career.
The tale of Tristan and Isolde, which has graced our screens in over a dozen different forms, is one of the world's most celebrated love stories. Set in a time of conflict between prosperous Ireland and the squabbling tribes of what would one day be Britain, it tells of a young soldier washed ashore on an Irish beach and cared for by a beautiful woman who never tells him her true name. Later, as the King of Ireland's daughter, she is married to Tristan's adoptive father and lord, and he finds himself torn between love and loyalty, a situation which his enemies are ready to exploit. Passionate and tragic, this is a story which has echoed down the ages. What is remarkable about this version is that it'll scarcely make you feel anything at all.
The name 'Kevin Reynolds' ought to be warning enough for many viewers - this is a man with Waterworld and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to his credit, if credit is the right word. Echoes of the latter resound here, with the same jarringly Arcadian landscapes, poor handling of actors, and a character uncannily similar to Alan Rickman's dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham. Like his executive producer Tony Scott, Reynolds relies heavily on soft focus and has a tendency to pull away before any given scene has the chance to develop real emotional intensity. This is particularly problematic when it comes to the sex scenes. The story could easily have been told without sex - instead, the demure way it's presented makes it seem so boring that it's hard to see why any of the characters would get emotional about it. After a while, yet another image of Isolde's head and shoulders as she lies on her back becomes a cue for laughter. This is sorely needed to distract viewers from looking at their watches and wondering if they ought to have brought books to read.
With a stronger director, it's possible that these earnest young actors might have achieved something; as it is, there's precious little chemistry between them. Myles works hard with what she's given, but Franco's only attempt at expression is an occasional furrowing of eyebrows. Fortunately, the supporting cast is much better, with Sewell particularly impressive as Lord Marke in the few scenes which are genuinely touching. Mark Strong has fun in his hammy pantomime villain role, and Henry Cavill does well with what is ultimately the most interesting role, that of the nephew who is consistently overlooked. Furthermore, though it struggles with the romance, the action scenes here are passable, a few of them actually exciting. What really saves the film from disaster status, however, is Artur Reinhart's stunning cinematography. Though it draws heavily on the work of John Boorman, it fits the story perfectly well and in places evokes that magical quality which all legends need.
This version of Tristan and Isolde was originally a Ridley Scott project (he remains as an executive producer), and it would have been interesting to see what he could have done with it. The style of the battle scenes is reminiscent of his work in Gladiator, though never quite as tight. Overall, this comes across as a movie which has been compromised to death. It may be big, it may be pretty, but it lacks that essential quality of the epic - a voice of its own.
A surprise hit in its native France, this award winning comedy centres on a family spending their summer holidays in the villa where father Marc spent much of his youth.