Movie & Film Reviews @ The Vast Picture Show

Review: Two Lovers (4/5)

2009-04-18T15:36:00.001+01:00

Two Lovers
(James Gray):
Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow,
Isabella Rossellini, Vinessa Shaw
Running time: 100 minutes (15A)

The jury’s been out on Joaquin Phoenix. It’s as if something has been missing. You sense often an actor who is almost great and who has starred in too few great films. Yet he has a demeanour that seems purpose-built for the cinema. There’s his physical presence: graceful yet strong-boned, that round face framed by high forehead and square jaw. He’s sturdy in a way that seems he had to fortify his own defences. For Phoenix, amidst that dark Puerto Rican smoulder, is a guarded soul. His eyes are green yet shine black, as if he were shielding great pits of despair. His mouth is thin and closed. He talks with marbles in his mouth. Sometimes he talks as if he can’t speak. The words are squeezed out as if he can’t quite shape what it is he is feeling. There’s a bit of Brando in his mumbled mystery; a bit of De Niro in his guard. Till now, he’s been pent-up promise.
Excusing I Walk The Line, most of Phoenix’s best work has been with James Gray (The Yards and We Own The Night). They’ve stuck with each other. Now something special is emerging.
There’s a stunning moment in Two Lovers where Gray puts the camera so close to Phoenix that it trembles. Phoenix’s head is quivering and monstrously silent. It glowers dark like a thundercloud about to strike the ground with electricity.
That moment is typical of Two Lovers. It’s a movie potent with melodrama yet always held in restraint. It opens in Brooklyn, with Leonard (Phoenix) throwing himself off a bridge. And then he decides to get back out of the water. Leonard is depressed and nursing a broken heart. He noodles with photography but mostly just helps out at his parents’ dry-cleaning business. He has moved back home, where his folks fearfully smother him (Isabella Rossellini as his mother proves inspired casting: it’s as if she’s channelling the spirit of her own mother, Ingrid Bergman, and that very quiet, noble suffering.)
Leonard’s parents have set him up with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the forlornly beautiful daughter of a business partner. She sees something she wants to nurture in the guarded Leonard. Meanwhile, outside the apartment, Leonard meets Gwyneth Paltrow but doesn’t have time to run back inside. You wait for her to offer him tips on healthy living. Instead, her Michelle is a cauldron of turmoil. Her blonde smile hides a damaged soul and Paltrow is an unexpected treat: her character doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going.
Leonard strikes up a relationship with Sandra but can’t help being drawn to Michelle. Sandra feels a deep need to mother Leonard. Leonard feels a need to nurture Michelle. But Michelle, who is in love with a married man, is like a mythological Siren. She lures Leonard’s drifting heart onto jagged rocks.
The story is inspired by the Dostoevsky short story ‘White Nights’. (Visconti turned it into White Nights in 1957.) And it’s a wise step for Gray. Freed from crime cliché and the notion of trying to ape Francis Ford Coppola, Two Lovers steers him into very different territory. Indeed, it’s a place much closer in spirit to Sophia Coppola and her film Lost in Translation. Gray has found a voice and a gift for steering intimate exchanges. He zones in here on the push and pull of the heart and deeper unconscious motivations. His characters are literally drowning in emotional currents outside their control.
Phoenix’s performance is measured in the way you get to know someone. At first he’s all physical presence: a nervy guy who walks with a tic in his step. And then you begin to sense his bottled heartache. He draws you into his mind. He becomes a tantalising character, someone strange and delicate who lives on after the film.
The dialogue, co-written by Gray and Ric Menello, revels in verbal foreplay. Not snazzy screwball but something tentative and awkward. It delights in the mystery of unsure early love. Gray shoots a scene on a rooftop, where the wind is a sad howl, and the camera watches Leonard and Michelle from behind a wall, to-ing and fro-ing with each other, as if the moments were being eavesdropped. There is something in the lighting, too, the way most of the story is shot in melancholy twilight, that gives it a feeling of in-between. The city of New York feeds into the mood. It becomes a place that offers both expectation and retreat. The film thrums with the ache of broken heart yet shivers with mystery about what’s to come. I suspect it is a film you could really grow to love.
It seems outrageous (and ludicrously unbelievable) that Phoenix has called closing time on his acting career. There are so few actors around who have the gift to signal what lies unspoken and make it sing on a 30ft screen. In Two Lovers, he shows why the movies now really need him.

The Damned United (3/5); Genova (2/5); Tyson (3/5); Traitor (2/5)

2009-04-18T15:34:00.002+01:00

The Damned United
(Tom Hooper):
Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall,
Colm Meaney
Running time: 97 minutes (15A)

Here’s a football movie with tattered charm, an homage to the days before champagne boys and plutocrats took over. The Damned United, based on David Peace’s novel, is the story of controversial football manager Brian Clough and his 44 days in charge of Leeds in 1974.
Thankfully, there’s little football: instead it focuses on Clough’s hubristic personality – the ‘cocky northeast twat’ who took Derby County from the bottom of the second division to the top of the first; who fell out with his (equally talented) assistant manager Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), and who crashed and burned at the unruly Leeds United.
Michael Sheen is in full impersonation mode as Clough. His head smirks and wobbles like a jack-in-the box; his Middlesbrough accent swings like a valley. Sheen is in danger of becoming the Mike Yarwood of his generation, but he’s always watchable. Colm Meaney is in growling form as Don Revie, the former Leeds United manager. And Peter McDonald’s Johnny Giles doesn’t even slip a smile, so no change on that front.
There are some lovely moments: Clough scrubbing the then second-division Derby’s dressing rooms out of respect for Leeds in an FA Cup tie; and later, pacing the backroom floor, too nervous to even watch a game.

Genova
(Michael Winterbottom):
Colin Firth, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Willa Holland, Perla Haney-Jardine
Running time: 94 minutes (15A)

Roberto Rossellini’s beautiful Journey to Italy is the guiding hand behind Michael Winterbottom’s Genova. It opens with an ominous, superbly-controlled nail-biter: Marianne (Hope Davis) is driving with her two daughters Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) and Kelly (Willa Holland). They banter and then the screen goes blank. A car accident takes Marianne’s life. Their father, university lecturer Joe (Colin Firth), has to pick up the pieces. He moves them to Genoa for a year where old pal Barbara (Catherine Keener) helps them settle in.
Winterbottom creates an easy intimacy. He fills his film with moments of escape and dread. Like Journey to Italy, Winterbottom uses the unfamiliar Italian setting to tease out feelings: Mary’s guilt, Kelly’s resentment amidist Joe’s stoical parenting. Small moments become threatening; Genoa’s dark alleyways psychologically menacing. Winterbottom creates a sense that life goes on, but his ending is a contrived, hammed-up version of Rosselini’s.
And Firth doesn’t feel right: there are not enough layers to his character. He finds it much too easy to get on with his life for my liking.

Tyson
(James Toback):
Mike Tyson
Running time: 90 minutes (IFI Club)

Mike Tyson talks about Mike Tyson. The lisping, soft-voiced giant is painfully honest, a former heavyweight boxing champion who today is a heavy-faced man of 42 with sorrowful eyes and perfect teeth. A troubled character emerges from the reputation of a monster. He narrates a journey from bullied, overweight child to petty crime, to juvenile centres and boxing to the world stage. He had a staggering inferiority complex and used boxing to channel his anger.
Director James Toback lets Tyson do the work and helps out with old footage and some irritating split-screen inserts. Tyson speaks with a sense of new-found self-awareness and amazement about his life. “Who would ever think,” he says, “a poor boy from Brooklyn would have a parade thrown for him in Moscow?” He gets cut up and teary-eyed. He used the pain of untreated gonorrhoea to win his first world champion fight. He was a serial cheater. He discusses his rape conviction, the ear-biting and the hundreds of millions he passed through his hands. He reads from ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (‘Each man kills the thing he loves’), though I wonder if Wilde’s redemptive ‘The Selfish Giant’ would have been better.

Traitor
(Jeffrey Nachmanoff):
Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Said Taghmaoui, Jeff Daniels, Neal McDonough
Running time: 114 minutes (15A)

I was beginning to get nervous that Hollywood would smarten its politics under Obama and stop producing daft al-Qaeda-style terror thrillers. No fear. Jeffrey Nachmanoff, writer of The Day The Earth Wet Its Pants (AKA The Day After Tomorrow) is responsible for this silly affair. It stars Don Cheadle as a seemingly troubled Muslim and Sudanese-American. He’s also a former US Special Forces soldier who joins a terrorist cell in Yemen, blows up an embassy in France and finds an FBI agent in the shape of Guy Pearce (snoozing) on his tail.
Traitor is crisply shot, with handhelds to give it that rough-and-ready sun-kissed feel. But the plot (a plan to blow up 50 buses across the US at the same time) is stapled together and the dialogue written as if to fill the gaps.
Cheadle’s despondent face is always worth watching, but this is beneath him. He does solitary in a Yemeni prison and emerges blinking into the light with a sculpted beard. The movie has ham-fisted liberal intentions and lectures at all available opportunities the value of mutual religious respect.

Review: Il Divo (5/5)

2009-03-21T15:27:00.003Z

Il Divo
(Paolo Sorrentino):
Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto, Piera Degli Esposti, Paolo Graziosi, Giulio Bosetti
Running time: 110 minutes (15A)

The Italian director Paolo Sorrentino has arrived. His new film Il Divo is a pyroclastic surge of brilliance: a political biopic that spills hot all over the screen with a flaming, bravura audacity. It’s a film imbued with such mystery and wonder, you would think Pasolini had returned for a study, perhaps, of the Holy Ghost. Instead, Il Divo’s subject is about something even more mysterious and less tangible – the controversial seven-time Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti. Here’s a politician who would not just slip one over the Holy Spirit, but send Machiavelli sobbing into his goblet.
Andreotti, played here by Toni Servillo, is part Montgomery Burns, part Nosferatu: a hobbled, small man with heavy-lidded eyes and the deceptive hands-clasped demeanour of a saint. The film covers the period from his seventh election as prime minister in 1992 and takes us up to the trial where he fought allegations of Mafia connections. In between, it’s a stew of intrigue, suicides, murders and all manner of political dark arts. Andreotti has his hand in all of it and none of it. In one of the film’s many unexplained, tantalising sequences, the politician sits in a state car while the door handles won’t work. Torrential rain pours down. Police officers struggle to pry the door open, while the prime minister sits inside oblivious. In Il Divo, as in real life, Andreotti is a figure nobody can get at. Unlike the Hollywood biopic, Paolo Sorrentino has made a film about Andreotti’s very unknowableness.
The film’s title comes from an expression used to describe Julius Caesar – Divo Giulio, or divine Julius. And Sorrentino conjures something of the dissolute Roman empire among his modern-day Italian senators. It’s a gilded world of stately buildings and corrupt, balding, grey men. This is the kind of environment that would sink a lesser filmmaker with dead weight. But Sorrentino, who also wrote the screenplay, invests everything with such arresting vitality, playfulness and wit that the picture hums with life. He introduces Andreotti’s inner faction like they were Reservoir Dogs: the camera swoons over their slow-mo swagger while their nicknames such as The Lemon or The Shark slink onto the screen.
Sometimes you wonder if Sorrentino is the bastard child of Martin Scorsese and Federico Fellino. He marries Fellini’s unrestrained exuberance with Scorsese’s flair for gangster poetry and inspirational soundtrack. Certainly, this is the most exciting use of music since last year’s There Will Be Blood. Even the story’s inter-titles cannot sit still – they come at you in blood red from upside down (to accompany a hanging man) or slip out from the backs of buildings. (Sorrentino, meanwhile, is happy to acknowledge his debt to Scorsese with a recurring motif of Andreotti’s fizzing glass of painkillers; it’s a shot borrowed from Taxi Driver.) And yet, Sorrentino’s dynamic restlessness is very much his own.
Before we meet Andreotti, the film fires your adrenalin with a cross-cutting series of assassinations sliced together with an angular guitar track. Men are gunned down and a car falls slowly from the sky with strange poetry. The sequence make you want to dance. Later, you watch a man fall from a tall building all the way down onto the camera. The sequence makes you want to dive for cover.
And then there is a moment that is divine: a long take with a roaming camera that worms its way through a private party at the finance minister’s house. It enters a room, glides past tribal drummers and dancing women, glides into another room, where Andreotti sits like an emperor with his wife, a line of men queuing up to meet him, and a gallery of people standing in a sort of awe. Andreotti leaves swarmed by security, and the camera, still travelling, circles back into the other room, following the back of the finance minister who enters with his hands in the air, dancing. Wow. Everything about this world is contained within this one shot: the power, the secrecy, the decadence, and Andreotti’s almost saintly aloofness. He’s there and yet he’s not there.
Il Divo makes Sorrentino’s previous films look like a dry run. Those movies showed a fascination for men entombed in silence within a world of Mafia vice. Yet both The Consequences of Love (which starred Servillo) and The Family Friend were almost needlessly baroque. Here, form and content lock together in perfect unison. The camera swoops, sweeps and swirls through this ornate universe, soaking up the corridors of power. It travels towards Andreotti restlessly from a hundred different angles. It examines the pores in his face. Yet we come away knowing nothing about him while suspecting everything. It’s a remarkable performance from Toni Servillo. His face is a granite slab; his ears like something that went wrong in pottery class. He builds into his character a limitless fascination, a man whose body language evokes a kind of virtue yet whose inscrutable mind is as cunning as The Prince.
Like its subject, Il Divo is an elusive animal. It creates its own storytelling rules, and is imbued with something most great films have – the quality of strangeness.
A masterpiece.

Review: Duplicity (3.5/5); Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2/5); Lesbain Vampire Killders (1/5)

2009-03-21T15:23:00.003Z

Duplicity
(Tony Gilroy):
Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Tom Wilkinson, Paul Giamatti
Running time: 125 minutes (12A)

Julia Roberts is effervescent, sultry and fabulous in Tony Gilroy’s follow-up to Michael Clayton. With her big wide lips, she looks like she is going to snack on Clive Owen’s grizzled head. Thankfully, his prickly smooth demeanour proves a capable defence. After the corporate-is-evil tone of Michael Clayton, Gilroy’s second film seems positively light-hearted. It filters screwball comedy into espionage thriller into a satire of corporate culture that borders on being glib. Owen and Roberts play former spies and lovers now working for a corporate boss (Paul Giamatti) who wants to bring down his alpha male opposition, a multinational run by Tom Wilkinson. The plot is multilayered to keep you guessing who is spying on who and Roberts and Owen work up genuine heat. Are they deceiving each other? Or is it all play? Indeed, are they being played? The ending, which includes a mind-numbing explanation, keeps spilling like it’s a mess nobody knows how to clean up. Entertaining, though.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop
(Steve Carr):
Kevin James, Jayma Mays, Keir O’Donnell, Peter Gerety, Bobby Cannavale
Running time: 87 minutes (PG)

Comedian Kevin James is shaped like a beach ball. His schtick in Mall Cop is to get laughs from the unexpected slapstick he throws on screen for a man of his weight. He plays Paul Blart, a hypoglycaemic mall cop who takes his job much too seriously. He’s a classic schlub: stuffs his face full of pie due to low self-esteem and has a habit of making a fool of himself. He patrols the mall on a Segway and falls for a pixie-faced girl (Jayma Mays) who runs a hair-extensions store. When the mall is taken hostage by a gang of criminals, he goes from zero to hero and earns a chance to win the girl. James, who starred in I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, is a genial presence – an overweight everyman. He holds our attention for the full 87 minutes. But the script, co-written by James, is barren and barely funny, and the plotting is ramshackle. It follows the recent trend of dove-tailing comedy into ironic ’80s action movie territory with lazy results.

Lesbian Vampire Killers
(Phil Claydon):
James Corden, Mathew Horne,
Paul McGann, Emer Kenny, Lucy
Gaskell
Running time: 88 minutes (16)

If I had a stake, I’d hammer it into the empty heads of the makers of this dire, hammier-than-a-hogfarm C-movie. It’s a sexploitation flick travelling under the mantle of a spoof horror and stars James Corden and Mathew Horne from BBC’s Gavin and Stacey. This hapless duo play a hapless pair who find themselves in a country town overrun by lesbian vampires. They get stuck into killing them with the sort of gusto that wouldn’t take a film academic to work out the male-frustration subtext. It represents the worst of British trash culture: Nuts magazine on screen. I’m sure director Phil Claydon tried his best, but he can’t get beyond a Girls Aloud video: women with fanned hair in hot pants, high heels and fangs. One scene offers us an up-skirt shot before the camera rides up to a pouting mouth that begins to suck a lollipop. Claydon makes ’60s sexploitation mogul Russ Meyer look like an arthouse genius.
The script mangles Shaun of the Dead and Hammer Horror with TV’s The League of Gentlemen and Peep Show without one moment of bite. I can guarantee genuine horror, though – a moment of skin-crawling dread about five minutes into the movie when you’ll realise you should have paid attention to this review.

2009-03-21T15:22:00.001Z

Marley & Me
(David Frankel):
Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston, Eric Dane,
Alan Arkin, Kathleen Turner.
Running time: 110 minutes (PG)

Settling for less is more. That’s the message of Marley & Me, the new comedy-of-sorts and part-time tearjerker starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. Early on, a conversation takes place between two old buddies. There’s Owen Wilson’s John Grogan, a retired stoner-turned-journalist who married Jennifer (Jennifer Aniston), moved to Miami and is taking his first baby steps, in his late 20s, into adulthood. And there’s Sebastian (Eric Dane), a ladykiller who remains resolutely single. John worries about his wife’s ticking biological clock and her plans for the spare bedroom. But Sebastian has the right kind of advice. “Get her a dog,” he says. “You’ve got a kid, you’re a dad – you’re not you anymore. You get a dog, you’re the master.”
Marley & Me spends the rest of the time, in an insipid, mildly comic fashion, turning this advice on its head. John becomes a dad and the film goes to Defcon Four life-lessons alert. Meanwhile, Marley, the neurotic puppy, grows into a 100lb psychotic nightmare. He really is an arsehole. He is the kind of dog ordinary folk would happily, and I say happily, have put down. But John abides.
The film is an adaptation from John Grogan’s bestselling book and is directed with the anodyne hand of David Frankel, the director of The Devil Wears Prada. He gives us a film of two halves. The first is comic caper, where Marley earns his bad credentials. The soundtrack blares Ben Folds’ ‘We’re Rocking the Suburbs’ and John settles into married life. Marley, meanwhile, is eating the suburbs. He seems to possess the ability to chew through steel and concrete. He doesn’t do sit or rollover. He just tears the house apart, rips arms out of sockets and blinds off windows, barks the infant awake and knocks over the toddler.
John takes Marley to Ms Kornblut, an unforgiving dog trainer played by Kathleen Turner. Turner, who spent the 1980s growling at Michael Douglas, has now been reduced to growling at dogs. She no longer looks the svelte siren and has even lost some of that bark. Marley hasn’t a clue who she is. Clearly he has not watched The War of the Roses. We know this by the way he hungrily mounts her leg.
Dog slapstick gets tiring, although sometimes it breaks a smile on your face. Frankel offers us the clichéd image of a dog with his tongue flapping out a car window. Only for Marley then to climb out the window while the car drives down the freeway.
Owen Wilson, who can’t be rushed into anything, spends the film as a perennially chasing blur. He sprinkles the movie with that magnetic laconic charm. His eyes twinkle like he’s in on a joke. His lazy Texan drawl suggests a stoner who has just awoken to find himself starring in a movie. Perhaps that explains why he always seems to be on the back foot. This plays nicely here into a character who is busy catching up with his wife’s expectations.
In many respects, he reminds you of Seth Rogen’s Ben from Knocked Up, although he’s not quite as hopeless or, for that matter, as dramatically interesting. Indeed, Marley & Me plays like the dull younger brother of Knocked Up, and follows Judd Apatow’s template: it charms us with comedy and then, when it knows it has us, steers us into raw, real life.
Even Aniston, who up to this point showed little sign of interior life, begins to stir. The film comes awake. The couple has trouble conceiving. They experience a miscarriage. After child number two, Jennifer gets post-natal depression. John sits in his car in the driveway after work and wonders where it all went wrong.
By the end of it, John, as predicted by Sebastian, is not himself any more. He’s a more spiritual man. This is painfully demonstrated in a scene years later, where John bumps into Sebastian and the best friends no longer have anything to say. John evidently has been brainwashed by his wife, dog and three kids, while big-shot New York Times journalist Sebastian is a walking vacuum. (This scene will have singles ripping out the seats in front of them and smug marrieds beaming I-told-you-so’s.)
Like Knocked Up, Marley & Me wants to take the life lived ordinary and eulogise it. But while Apatow’s film injected a savage humour into the piquancy of real life, David Frankel churns through this material like he was making vanilla ice cream. And it’s lazy – when Marley grows old (by now we’re supposed to love him), Frankel presses the big red button marked ‘tearjerker’. It’s all terribly nice, by which I mean terribly bland. Settling for less is still settling for less.

Review: Bronson (3/5)

2009-03-21T15:21:00.002Z

Bronson
(Nicolas Winding Refn):
Tom Hardy, Hugh Ross, Juliet Oldfield.
Running time: 92 minutes (18)

This biopic from Pusher trilogy director Nicolas Winding Refn is a study of Charles Bronson – not the Hollywood star of Death Wish, but the tabloid star famous for being Britain’s ‘most violent prisoner’. Bronson was sent down in 1974 for armed robbery and has spent virtually every year since in solitary confinement. So in a sense, Refn is working within a vacuum. He makes good with what he’s got but it’s not enough. The film thrives off a primal madness. Tom Hardy’s Bronson is a beefcake brawler and snarling menace. He takes hostages in prison and makes rooftop protests. But most of the time, he just pummels prison guards. The film develops an amusing motif of Bronson stripping naked in readiness for violence, a suggestion his aggression is perverse, almost sexual. Hardy is terrific. He threatens us to engage with him, switching between mock theatrical soliloquy and all-out nutter. The cinematographer is Larry Smith, who shot Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and he brings a Kubrickian sense of space with languorous and immaculate tracking shots. There is one aplomb sequence within an asylum that highlights just how close to sanity Bronson really is. Refn takes his cues from Andrew Dominik’s Chopper and makes another case for a charming sociopath. It’s packed with stylistic violence, but is devoid of dramatic conflict. Bronson seems to drift through time, as unknowable as a cipher.

Review: Hush (2/5)

2009-03-21T15:19:00.003Z

Hush
(Mark Tonderai):
William Ash, Christine Bottomley, Andreas Wisniewski.
Running time: 91 minutes (16)

This low-budget British chiller plays like cat and mouse but in reverse: the mouse here is reluctantly chasing the cat. It opens with a moment of abject horror: we’re stuck in a car in the rain at night with a pair of rowing Mancunians and you realise there is no escape. Up ahead, the back door of an articulated truck momentarily lifts open and Zakes (William Ash) thinks he sees a woman tied up. The couple go to a petrol station where the domestic row spills out. It’s almost a relief, then, when Beth (Christine Bottomley) goes missing and the truck pulls away.
First-time writer/director Mark Tonderai opts for shaky, hand-held, kitchen-sink horror. The actors aren’t up to much and the plot is full of contrivances. It works up an unseen terror and then blows it with some silly, grisly gross-out. But it just about wriggles free, because you keep wondering what Zakes is going to do next. He gives chase, steals a car, gets arrested for murder, escapes and still goes after the demon truck driver. Said demon truck driver wears his hoodie up all the time so he must be anti-social. When out of the truck cab, he walks very, very slowly, as if he were weighing up in his mind the problems of bank securitisation and credit pyramids. This gives our hero time to escape various hairy predicaments.
It’s a good location for horror: the concrete soulless hinterland of Britain’s motorways and rest areas. Meanwhile, Tonderai gives a twist to the old madonna/whore genre expectation: it turns out Beth is cheating on Zakes but he doesn’t find out till much later when he reads a lewd phone text. Will he still do the honourable thing?

Review: Watchmen (1/5)

2009-03-21T15:17:00.001Z

Watchmen
(Zack Snyder):
Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Patrick Wilson
Running time: 161 minutes

A couple of moments into Watchmen, the much-anticipated Zack Snyder adaptation of the revered graphic novel, a US army general turns the hand of a doomsday clock a minute closer to Armageddon. It takes a while to notice, but the clock is slow. Doomsday actually started just a few minutes before and it lasts for exactly 161 minutes – not quite as long as the Book of Revelation would suggest, but long enough.
Snyder, a second-rate director with a third-rate mind, has lovingly recreated Watchmen’s neo-noir surface with a rich, glossy polish. And he has honoured the comic’s complex structure at the complete cost of his film. The graphic novel – set in 1985 in a parallel universe where America has lost its soul – has become a film without soul, as vapid as the world its writer, Alan Moore, was annihilating. It’s as if Daniel Plainview’s straw reached across the room and sucked all Watchmen’s milkshake.
The opening credits are a breeze: a smooth montage through an alternative history of America. We see Andy Warhol painting superheroes instead of Campbell’s soup; Vietnam ending in a US victory; a blue man (AKA Dr Manhattan) being the first person on the moon; while Nixon steers America ever closer to nuclear war with Russia. Poor Nixon can’t get a break. We’ve just seen David Frost twiddle his nose in Frost/Nixon and now he’s being blamed for having forced the Watchmen vigilantes into retirement. When one of them is murdered – the amoral Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) – Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a pathological private eye, sniffs out a scheme where costumed superheroes are being picked off to clear the way for a fiendish mass-murder plot.
Rorschach wears a mask that looks like a dirty dishcloth and growls deep in a voice like he eats Dark Knight DVDs for breakfast. There’s Daniel Dreiberg, or Night Owl II, a techno-geek caped crusader lonely in middle-age and played with blank eyes by Patrick Wilson; there’s Matthew Goode’s Ozymandias, a gymnastic billionaire who turned his hero into a corporate franchise; there’s Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who is technically the only superhero as he has genuine powers – he fizzes blue phosphorescence and can rearrange molecular matter at will after a lab accident in the 1950s. And then there’s Malin Akerman’s Laurie Jupitor, AKA Silk Spectre II, who looks like she’s been poured from a foaming alchemy beaker into a latex lingerie costume.
Akerman, an actress with a number of calamitous comedies under her belt, now sports a cleavered fringe and mahogany hair. She is indeed a beautiful woman, which is a useful distraction, because she can’t act for nuts. She has the cool possession of a small mammal caught unexpectedly in front of oncoming traffic.
But if you remember 300, you’ll know Snyder has never been much good with actors. Or feelings. Or anything remotely human. He just wants sexy carnage. In a flashback, the Comedian is asked about the American dream. “It came true; you’re looking at it,” he says. And the film plays into a loss of faith in American idealism where caped crusaders are amoral, perhaps even evil. We see the Comedian firing a shotgun into a crowd with his tongue hanging out, and Snyder, too, directs with his tongue wobbling. The camera indulges in excessive, grotesque violence that I don’t remember from the novel. The joint of an arm is snapped in two; a child murderer has his head chopped in half. It stinks of misogyny. In a flashback, we watch an attempted rape where moments before, the camera glides over the woman’s lingerie-clad body with slathering tongue. In cinematic terms, it’s as close to saying she was asking for it. A pregnant woman is shot dead. A woman is doused head to toe in blood. The camera looks on with manic glee. Where Alan Moore wrote a superhero book for adults, Snyder delivers a film for 14-year-old boys.
It seems no surprise the film can’t settle on tone. It strives for seriousness and then, in a Vietnam flashback, slips into a silly parody of Apocalypse Now with ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ and helicopters thumping the soundtrack. And what about that cringing sex scene where Night Owl II and Silk Spectre II get it off? It’s a constellation of cheese: a full moon beams into the bedroom while two other full moons shine on the bed; then Leonard Cohen, who would put anyone off their game, erupts into ‘Hallelujah’ when the couple reach their peak.
Snyder wants to observe the multi-layered novel to the point that he entombs his own film. Where the movie needs hurtling forward momentum and snap and swing in the rhythm section, it instead grinds to a halt, turning again and again to lumbering back-story to explain who’s who and how they got there.
To read Watchmen is to relive the Cold War anxieties of its age. It drips doom. Snyder slips in a reference to global warming but the film has no atmosphere, no sense of dread. It’s all surface tension. The grim finale of Moore’s deconstructive novel was an obituary for superheroes. Snyder tweaks his self-destructive film to slip in a suggestion for a superhero sequel. The shame.

Review: Wendy and Lucy (4/5)

2009-03-21T15:16:00.002Z

Wendy and Lucy
(Kelly Reichard):
Michelle Williams
Running time: 80 minutes (15A)

Just 30 seconds into the long tracking shot that opens Wendy and Lucy, your racing brain begins to slow down. It’s a story of companionship set on the margins. With its clanking freight trains, hopeless townscapes and poverty, the story, written by Jon Raymond, evokes Depression-era writing. Wendy (a desperate, brooding and terrific Michelle Williams) is on her way to Alaska when her car breaks down. Her best friend is her dog Lucy. Low on cash, she shoplifts dog food but gets caught. Then Lucy disappears. What follows is a long night of the soul as Wendy stoically fights her mounting despair. Director Kelly Reichard works with hypnotic simplicity. Her intimate behavioural style allows characters to be built and story to be told from mere observation. She evokes a very rich sense of place. Her films catch characters as they slip between the cracks. There is one horrifying scene, in mute blackness, where Wendy sleeps rough and comes very close to danger. The moment moves expertly from one of terror to an awareness of human tragedy. Like Reichard’s wonderful 2006 film Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy is full of simple gestures that shine brightly. It’s very true, honest and compelling.

Reviews: Anvil: The Story of Anvil (4/5); American Teen (3/5)

2009-03-21T15:14:00.002Z

Anvil! The Story of Anvil
(Sacha Gervasi):
Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow, Robb Reiner
Running time: 80 minutes (15A)

This touching documentary is a story of failure – the downward slump of Canadian heavy metal band Anvil. They pioneered thrash metal in the early 1980s, tasted brief fame, but dived soon after into obscurity. The band’s now middle-aged core, singer Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, however, refuse to die. The set-up is real-life Spinal Tap: the denial of reality, the child-man personalities and a redemption of sorts in Japan. Yet you watch Anvil and instead of laughing at them, you feel for them. They’re deluded men who refuse to grow up. But there is something admirable in their tenacity of spirit and the way they refuse to be ordinary. (They are terribly ordinary: ‘Lips’ delivers canteen food for a living.) Gervasi, who wrote Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, lovingly steers the story towards a bittersweet conclusion. The film won the audience award at its European premiere at last year’s Galway Film Fleadh, and another audience award at the Dublin International Film Festival. The sad irony is that it gives Anvil the fame they crave – they are now famous for not being famous.

American Teen
(Amanda Burstein):
Hannah Bailey, Colin Clemens, Mitch Reinholt, Megan Krizmanich
Running time: 100 minutes (15A)

Hollywood high-school movies are stocked with clichés: the bitchy blonde, the jackass jock and the wretched nerd. Amanda Burstein’s documentary American Teen finds their real-life equivalents at a redbelt Indiana high school and digs beneath the stereotypes. Over the course of their final school year, she roams the social maze of adolescence with a certain degree of fly-on-the-wall. It’s full of bitchiness, bullying and backstabbing. The nerd finally gets a girlfriend but she cheats on him on camera. One female student emails a photo of her breasts to a boy, only for it to find its way around school. Amusingly, the kids are self-aware: the nerd knows he’s a nerd to the point of self-fulfilling prophecy. The princess blonde has a laugh about “materialistic girls”. I don’t doubt the film is honest, though its claims as cine verité are at times suspect: One alienated student gets depressed and Burnstein films her staring forlornly into the distance from cinematic locations. The Maysles brothers would have had none of that.

Review: Surveillance (2/5)

2009-03-21T15:12:00.001Z

Surveillance
(Jennifer Lynch):
Julia Ormond, Bill Pullman, Pell James, Ryan Simkins
Running time: 97 minutes (16)

Here’s a film to send your jaw crashing to the floor – a black-humoured, macabre piece of audience bait disguised as a horror-thriller. Surveillance takes Rashomon and plants it in creepy Americana. It becomes Blue Velvet meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Two FBI detectives (Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond) arrive into town to investigate some grisly murders. The local cops are bent and loopy, there’s a drug-addled woman (Pell James) and a small child (Ryan Simkins). All are witnesses to a scene of carnage but none of their stories fit. The director is Jennifer Lynch, daughter of David, and she borrows shamelessly her father’s weird, unsettling style. She is precise with her camera and works up a jaunty yet disturbing tone. She wants to dislocate the viewer and to shock the middle classes. It turns from sadomasochism into total nihilism. You watch a woman, blue in face, being strangled to death while another woman sticks her tongue in her mouth. It wants to be outrageous, to have no moral boundaries whatsoever. It shrinks from harming the child, which, of course, is a good thing. But it just shows that the film is constrained by the same values it wants to mock.

Review: Hunger (5/5)

2009-02-28T12:44:00.002Z

Hunger
(Steve McQueen):
Michael Fassbender, Brian Milligan, Liam McMahon, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham.
Running time: 92 mins (15A)

I can only imagine the frustrated banging of fists of all those lining up to proclaim on Hunger. Here is one of the most supercharged political issues of our time ? the 1981 Maze prison hunger strikes ? and it hits the screen certainly supercharged, but without a hint of politicking. It marks the debut of artist-turned-director Steve McQueen, a Londoner who was a young teenager during Bobby Sands' hunger strike. He takes to the story with fearless abandon, shooting it entirely on his terms. It's a remarkable film ? a work of stunning originality and dazzling cinematic expression. Its sheer visceral thump left me hobbling into the light broken, beaten and scarred. With just one film, McQueen has shown he is a major cinematic artist.
Hunger stars Irish actor Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, but you'll have to wait a while to see him. First we meet Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), prison guard and Maze brutaliser. We watch him bathe a hand with bloody knuckles. Before work, he lowers himself under his car to check for a booby trap. Then he puts the key into the ignition. Your muscles explode with tension. Nothing happens. It just isn't that kind of film. Instead, it erupts with mesmerising detail: crumbs fall like boulders into a napkin; or the hazy, beautiful sequence outside in falling snow where Raymond smokes a cigarette and a single snowdrop melts on a bloody knuckle. McQueen paints a picture of a man about to stress-fracture. He hoovers microscopic details with an insatiable hunger for feeling.
The H-Blocks are a circle of hell. The prisoners, in dirty protest, have taken to interior design using their own excrement. Maggots squirm in piles of dumped food. The prisoners tip buckets of urine under their cell doors, stinking tributaries that trickle into a bay of piss in the corridor. There is a long shot of the man who has to clean it up. And that's one of the things about Hunger: it wants to capture everything ? from the prisoners' conditions to the man whose job it is to mop their mess; or the work involved in hosing their excrement from the walls.
The film surges from tenderness to brutality: new prisoner Davey (Brian Milligan) nurses a fly atop his finger; there's an eyeball, wrought with horror, of a young riot squad officer whose job, in battle gear, is to pummel the prisoners. The men are forced naked under a gauntlet of truncheons, their backs mushrooming into welts. The policeman escapes to sob behind a wall.
The prisoners only get to meet at mass. It is one of the few amusing scenes: a priest declaiming to a room of non-listeners, busy whispering into each other's ears. You can imagine Mel Gibson getting giddy at the sight: all those bruised, battered, long-haired bearded men. It looks like a Jesus Christ convention. But Hunger doesn't saddle the viewer with the kind of Christ-like noble suffering that Gibson dumped on us in The Passion of the Christ. Sands is beaten and shorn like a wild animal. He flails pathetically before going limp in the bath. He is no Christ figure.
But his inner spirit is wild cat. In an exhilarating verbal set-piece, he faces a priest (Liam Cunningham) who has come to talk him out of going on hunger strike. He accuses Sands of being a fool, of wanting to be a martyr. It's like watching tennis, your eyes work back and forth across the heads, a net of blue cigarette smoke curling between them. The spitfire dialogue volleys like trench gunfire. Even the camera sits down in awe. (It's the only time where you feel the presence of co-screenwriter Enda Walsh.) Cunningham's priest is brutal and honest; Sands has a cool but fierce passion. The exchange ends when the camera roams into Cunningham's eye to reveal dismay and defeat.
Fassbender comes into his own in the riveting final act. His body crumples; his skin blisters into sores; ribs poke the air around him. Food is laid beside the bed: scrambled eggs, jam on toast, an apple. Hungry-boy food that Sands, slipping into hallucination, ignores. Dying in the movies never looked so ghastly, so awkward, so disgusting. And McQueen attacks it with corporeal fascination. Fassbender conjures a hollowed body clinging desperately to life, yet he stares out with a thick-headed contradictory defiance. I think it's quite remarkable how he does that.
Hunger won the Camera D'Or at Cannes, and is on the level of another cinematic high-water mark of this year ? The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It is no coincidence that both that film's director, Julian Schnabel, and McQueen day-jobbed before as artists. It has liberated attitudes to making movies. McQueen approaches cinematic form like he never read the rule book, taking narrative grammar and beating it with a truncheon.
The film is ravenous for experience. McQueen wants to know what it feels like when the mind and the body are pushed to the limit. Sands emerges here as neither a martyr nor a terrorist but a human being. The men who mistreat him are brutalised in a different way. You feel for all of them. It defuses bias, sweeps aside politics, until you see the mess for what it is. And that is quite an achievement.

Review: The Class (5/5)

2009-02-28T12:40:00.002Z

The Class
(Laurent Cantet)
François Bégaudeau, Franck Keita, Nassim Amrabt, Esmerelda Ouertani, Laura Baquela
Running time: 128 minutes (12A)

Escapism at the movies has never felt so real. In the triumphant, swooning fantasy, Slumdog Millionaire, you can almost smell the stench among the mountains of Bombay trash which serve as home for Jamal and Salim. Danny Boyle’s camera, always restless and nosing, steels his Dickensian fantasy with the hard edge of poverty. It stirs our sympathy for these kids even more.
American movie-making prides itself on escapism but has for years been gravitating ever closer to real life. Think of last year’s docu-horror Cloverfield, which whooshed us towards the ground in a helicopter crash. Your stomach turned inside out; your body shuddered on impact. In Jonathan Demme’s recent American drama, the Altmanesque Rachel Getting Married, he took us to a wedding and left us to roam around. You knew what it felt like to be there. Realism, it turns out, is the new escapism.
Since the Italian neorealists shook the movies up in the 1940s by using real locations and non-actors, many filmmakers have relied on realism to create intimacy and, with it, to shine light on a greater kind of truth about life. But the mainstream is filching their thunder. Perhaps in response, French directors are pushing those boundaries of neorealism while keeping their eye on narrative force.
In last year’s Couscous, director Abdel Kerchice crafted the kind of film that pokes its nose in during dinner, only to stay and forget the plot was working invisibly around you. And now there’s Laurent Cantet’s nourishing, Palme D’Or-winning film, The Class.
It’s beautifully complex yet beguilingly simple. We spend a year in a tough Parisian classroom and it is so naturalistic, you wonder if you are watching a documentary. You don’t notice there is even a plot until you find your feelings all caught up in it. You could call it extreme-realism.
The Class opens in a café with Mr Marin (Francois Bégaudeau, playing himself from his own semi-autobiographical novel). He slugs an espresso though you suspect whiskey would be more appropriate. He teaches French in a tough Parisian school with a multicultural medley of students. The faces are African, Asian and European. Each day fills up with the din of clashing identities. But Marin – young, balding with a distinctive Gallic nose – takes a progressive approach.
The kids are rowdy and surly. You think, perhaps, he lacks control. Yet he works them in subtle ways. While other teachers prefer discipline, he gives the children room to earn respect. They question everything. He questions their assumptions with Socratic patience, gently leading them to self-awareness and understanding. Unlike the other teachers, he doesn’t want to tame them, even though they kick at student-teacher boundaries.
One slippery and troubled youngster called Souleymane (Franck Keita) makes an inquiry: “People say you like men”. It’s the kind of moment that could destroy a career. Marin smiles. “Why do you ask?” he says. The kid fires back: “Homosexuality isn’t an insult, sir.”
One teacher has a breakdown. To survive, Marin displays the quick thinking of a fire fighter, yet the nurturing instincts of a gardener. But the openness of his approach has its limits too. An incident involving a quarrelsome girl snowballs into a serious problem. At one point, the camera pulls back and we watch Marin swamped by kids in the schoolyard. He has lost control.
The Class is not the kind of film that throws cheap shots. Marin doesn’t inspire his students to stand on their desks reciting Walt Whitman’s ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ It wants instead to understand rather than inspire.
Cantet imbues the film with the gentle inquisitiveness of a parent. His approach allows you to feel like a class inspector; instead of sitting at the back, though, the handheld cameras roam the room, exploring the confused, anxious faces.
Through delicate exchanges, Cantet crafts a warm, stirring snapshot of the future. For underneath the drama is an engorging debate. He is asking explicit questions about secular France and who we are as Europeans within a tidal wave of conflicting identities. In a sense, Marin and his class become a prism of society and its governance. Where do you draw the line between compassion and destructive behaviour if you are a liberal? How can you understand people who are too caught up in their own problems to understand you?
The title of the film in France is Entre les Murs (between the walls) and seems more apt. It has so much in common with Nicholas Philibert’s beloved 2002 documentary Être et Avoir about a year in a provincial school. The Class has a similar texture, with engaging characters and subtle yet profound revelations. It reverberates with real life but it’s entirely a construct. A great achievement.

Review: Doubt (3.5/5); Five Minutes of Heaven (2/5)

2009-02-28T12:39:00.002Z

Doubt
(John Patrick Shanley):
Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams.
Running time: 104 minutes. (15A)

After the plastered-on smile of Mamma Mia! The Movie, Meryl Streep is back to prove she is America’s best screen actress. Of that, no doubt. She cooks up enough electricity here to power Lichtenstein.
As stagey cinema goes, Doubt is engaging. As a parable of how church child abuse was brushed under the rug, it’s riveting. Director John Patrick Shanley (who wrote the play) creates a world of vice-like church control at a school in an Irish-Italian Bronx parish in 1964.
Streep is a grim horror as Sr Aloysius, a pinch-lipped martinet. She keeps a tight rein on the students and a close eye on Fr Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a smiling priest with a touchy-feely attitude. Amy Adams’s Sr James is a gentle naïf. She admires the compassion Fr Flynn shows, especially when he takes the school’s first black student under his wing. When the kid begins acting strangely, however, Sr James wants to give Fr Flynn the benefit of the doubt. Sr Aloysius, intuitively, does not.
The title refers not to religious doubt but to faith in religious institutions. The film plays on your own doubt too: it creates enough room for Fr Flynn to wiggle. It wants you to second-guess yourself. Sr Aloysius draws him into a verbal mousetrap. That scene between Streep and Hoffman is fizzing. She turns her monster into a human being. Shanley’s writing is as solid as a granite church, but he relies too much on the weather to make his film cinematic.

Five Minutes of Heaven
(Oliver Hirschbiegel):
Liam Neeson, James Nesbitt.
Running time: 90 minutes. (15A)

Acclaimed German director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s drama about Northern Ireland arrives here freighted with awards from Sundance. This two-hander, starring Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, and written by Guy Hippert, sets out a worthy, even self-important stall: how can we learn to forgive after the Troubles in Northern Ireland?
But the film’s demonstration of its subject is clunky and stagey. Nesbitt plays Joe. As a Catholic child he watched local protestant Alistair gun down his brother. Now the grown-up Alistair (Neeson) wants reconciliation. The effects on Joe’s family were devastating and Joe naturally fights feelings of revenge – or ‘five minutes of heaven’. The film’s first reel, set in 1970s Lurgan, plays like a heist movie. It’s expertly done: Hirschbiegel uses it to show the tragedy that occurs when explosive ideology is mixed with youthful stupidity. If only he had stopped there. What follows is un-dynamic and visually inert – a series of close-ups with jabbering voice-overs. Close your eyes and it would make a good radio play. Nesbitt is like an itch you can’t scratch. When he’s not hamming it up, he speaks in a manic voice-over that sounds like another TV commercial. Neeson’s natural reticence and melancholy brings the right kind of heft to the film. His story, of how killers too carry their own kind of ghosts, is touching.

Review: The International (3/5); Franklyn (2/5)

2009-02-28T12:38:00.002Z

The International
(Tom Twyker):
Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Brian F O’Byrne.
Running time: 118 minutes. (15A)

Tom Twyker’s debt-ridden thriller offers the noble suggestion that bankers should be shot. I’m sure many will go along with this. The film’s hero, Louis Salinger (Clive Owen), is an Interpol officer who, along with New York district attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts), is on the trail of a faceless rogue bank. It trades in arms deals and assassinations.
Every route the pair takes leads to corrupt indifference from on high. Owen is a very watchable gumshoe. He looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks and is powered by silent fury.
Naomi Watts keeps her talent at low voltage. Twyker keeps the nuts and bolts screwed tight and sets the picture in the cold world of chrome and glass. At times, it’s a nervy watch: it flips from a procedural into paranoid retreat with Euro-nasties played by Armin Mueller-Stahl and Ulrich Thomsen. There is a shoot-out in the Guggenheim that would fit nicely in Heat, while the film is inspired but doesn’t improve on the paranoid thrillers of the early 1970s. It’s an old format for a new fit: while films such as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor were imbued with Nixonian cynicism, The International plugs straight into the crippling banking crisis.

Franklyn
(Gerald McMorrow):
Eva Green, Ryan Phillippe, Sam Riley, Bernard Hill.
Running time: 95 minutes. (16)

The debut film from British director Gerald McMorrow is overweeningly ambitious. It has four separate storylines, three of which are set in a burnished looking modern-day London, the other a noir-ish, ultra-religious sci-fi city straight out of Blade Runner.
The hero of that story is a violent vigilante and athiest Jonathan Preest (Ryan Phillippe). Back in real life, there’s sensitive mope Milo (Sam Riley) who has a broken heart; suicidal artist Emilia (Eva Green) who wants to reconnect with her mother; and Peter (Bernard Hill), a religious man in search of his missing son.
McMorrow’s heart is in the right place: his material speaks about familial alienation and melancholia. And he has ideas, too, about mental illness and vigilantism (borrowed from the Watchmen comic). But he strives too hard at being enigmatic.
The strands of the story don’t have enough ballast, yet are kept separate for as long as possible in the hope of achieving a dramatic pay-off. And the finale, if you can get that far, is pretentious poppycock.

Review: Gran Torino (4/5)

2009-02-28T12:36:00.001Z

Gran Torino
(Clint Eastwood):
Clint Eastwood, Christopher Carley, ...
Running time: 116 minutes.

In human years, Clint Eastwood is a towering 78. But in Hollywood legend, he is as old as mythology. In a staring contest between Clint and a Cyclops, you know who would be picking up the bar tab. Gran Torino is the new film directed by and starring Eastwood and it’s a chrome-looking, all-purpose vehicle. Like the sleek 1972 sports car of the title, it revs up into the fast-moving, nervous territory of the action hero movie. But it’s also happy to drive along at cruise speed, the typical pace of an Eastwood drama.
Ostensibly, it’s the story of Walk Kowalski (Eastwood), a bigoted war veteran who comes to find an unlikely redemption late in life. But it’s also as much about Clint Eastwood, his iconic status, and his advancing years. Gran Torino is also the most unlikely comedy this year. “I’ve been called a lot of things,” Walt growls at one point. “But never funny.” He’s hilarious. He deserves a silver star for single-handedly storming the political correctness brigade. He lobs racial stereotypes like he was back in Korea throwing grenades. And they’re funny because the film shows they are patently empty. The humour and the drama in Gran Torino lies in watching Walt come to care for his nextdoor neighbours, an Asian family he initially despises, to the point that he wants to go out and fight for them.
Eastwood’s Walt is a crinkled curmudgeon. His mouth is sour at the corners. His face has curdled. The skin on his neck is folded like a concertina: when you squeeze him, he growls. At his wife’s burial, he glowers at his grandchildren, and ignores his sons. He’s followed about a baby-faced priest (Christopher Carley), who is determined to wring a confession from him. But Walt gives it to him straight: “I think you're an overeducated 27-year-old virgin who likes to hold the hands of superstitious old ladies and promise them everlasting life.” It’s as if Dirty Harry’s Harry Callahan retired to mid-western Michigan and got old.
Walt flies the American flag on his porch. He fought for his country and worked for Ford all his life. Now, he finds himself patronised by his grow-up children and marooned in his neighbourhood surrounded by immigrants. He catches nextdoor kid Thao (Bee Vang) trying to steal his prized Gran Torino. But he knows it’s not the kid’s fault. He’s being pressurized by a violent gang and Walt emerges as the only guy who will stand up to them.
The middle of picture is a charm. Walt chases a gang with just an old rifle off the lawn of his neighbours. They think he’s a hero. The sarcastic Sue (Ahney Her) and bookish Thao lure the grump from his lair. Soon he’s eating their food at a barbecue (“bring me another beer, dragonlady”) and starts lending Thao his tools. But tensions are simmering in the background. The gang, like an angry wasp, has not gone away.
Eastwood is happy to mine his own iconography. “Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have f**ked with? That's me,” he says. He speaks with the deadly intent of a young man. He pulls a gun but it’s only his finger. Brazenly, he pretends to shoot gangsters with his bare hand. On his front lawn with his rifle pointed in the face of a gangbanger, he tells him: “I'll blow a hole in your face then go inside and sleep like a baby.” The problem with Walt, however, is that while he happy to play the hero, he does not sleep like a baby. His conscience is riddled with anxiety.
In some respects, the film is a perfect marriage of Eastwood’s career: we get the flinty figure of Eastwood the actor, and the keen, generous eye of Eastwood the director. He plays a game with the audience: he teases us with vigilantism, but really he wants to probe the troubled hero, men such as Walt, Harry Callahan or A Fistful of Dollars' The Man with no Name. Why is Walt such an angry bigot?
But there is a poignancy eating at the heart of Gran Torino too. For Walt, just like Eastwood, is an elderly man. He fills up with rage because he wants to do more than he physically can. He puts his fist through the kitchen presses in anger. Eastwood makes palpable the fury and impotence of growing old.
Gran Torino is by no means a perfect film. It’s crafted with Eastwood’s classical restraint and easy tracking shots, but it’s clunky at times with its actors. Still, it’s captivating. Walt hangs on to old ideas of his masculinity, much as we too cling to old ideas about Eastwood. Gran Torino is about letting go. It’s a requiem for retired gunslingers everywhere, a perfect swan song, should he so wish, for Eastwood’s own career.

Review: Confessions of a Shopaholic (2.5/5)

2009-02-28T12:33:00.002Z

Confessions of a Shopaholic
(PJ Hogan):
Isla Fisher, Hugh Dancy, John Goddman, Joan Cusack.
Running time: 112 minutes.

Confessions of a Shopaholic begins life as fashion porn, a great denial of consumer emptiness. It teeters dangerously on high heels. And then, unexpectedly, it trades the stilettos for flat shoes and all round sensibility. It’s the first film I’ve seen that addresses the recession head on. Expect many, many more. Isla Fisher plays Rebecca, a young journalist buried under credit card debt. She hadn’t a clue how to manage money. Amazingly, she lands a job at a financial magazine where she’s a hit: her column, which preaches financial prudence, becomes a hit and the editor (Hugh Dancy) takes a tumble for her. But she’s a spoofer. How long can she keep the game up? Fisher is a winning personality. She has a cheering face and pixie energy. Her character must endure ritual humiliation and she’s up for it. For she’s a good comedian — her face is alive with little signals that tell us her character knows she shouldn’t be getting away with things, which is all the more fun when she does. Dancy is the quintessential Brit-in-America. He could be the child of a gay marriage between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. The surface of the film is garish and director PJ Hogan is happy to steer through dire romcom cliches.

Review: Chew: Part II (3/5); Push (2/5)

2009-02-28T11:53:00.002Z

Che: Part II
(Steven Soderberg):
Benicio del Toro, Benjamin Benitez, Julia Ormond, Armando Riesco, Catalina Sandino,

‘Guerrilla’, or Part two of Steven Soderberg’s biopic of the Cuban revolutionary, takes up with his arrival into Bolivia. The revolutionary fighter explains in a letter to Castro that his work is done and the struggle must continue elsewhere. Che (Benicio del Toro) smuggles himself into Bolivia as a bald, middle-aged man before he retreats to the hills to begin his ill-fated guerrilla campaign. He is betrayed, captured and executed. Part two has a more settled feel than the first. Soderberg’s approach is quiet and unhurried and the film has a stillness that is very absorbing. The director is clearly striving for greatness and yet, I can’t say I’m taken with this project. The two films, taken together, are visually impressive: Soderberg and his cinematographer Peter Andrews have captured in broad and very intimate strokes the sweep of a very turbulent period in history. Yet, they’re austere and cold. Benicio del Toro’s Che is distant and unknowable. The film does not bother to present or probe the dark side of his nature. You come away knowing little about the revolutionary which is a lot to ask for four hours of film watching.

Push
(Paul McGuigan):
Dakota Fanning, Djimon Hounsou, Chris Evans, Camilla Belle, Cliff Curtis.
Running time: 111 minutes. Two stars.

Push is a muddled Matrix-inspired superhero action thriller about a plot to take down The Division, a secret US government agency turning telekinetics into dangerous weapons. It’s set in Hong Kong where telekinetic Nick (Chris Evans) is in hiding and is tracked down by clairvoyant Cassie (Dakota Fanning). The format is very standard: Nick must awaken to his powers within, save his super-powered girlfriend (the sullen, lacklustre Camilla Belle) and take down the agency and a gang of super-powered Hong Kong telekinetics.. Unfortunately, Chris Evans who plays him, hasn’t yet awoken to the fact that he’s supposed to be a movie star. He’s got five o'clock shadow and that all American rugged look. But he has the onscreen presence of a cardboard cutout. Thank goodness for the mercurial presence of young Dakota Fanning, who brings an uncanny intelligence to everything she does. Director Paul McGuigan (Lucky Number Slevin) is keen to amp up the exoticism and mines Hong Kong for all its worth. But he brings no clarity to the plot which fogs up with silliness and over-complication.

Review: Three Monkeys (3/5)

2009-02-28T11:50:00.003Z

Three Monkeys
(Nuri Bilge Ceylan):
Yavuz Bingol, Hatice Aslan, Ahmet Rifat Sungar, Ercan Kesal, Cafer Köse
Running time: 109 minutes

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan makes films like icebergs. They’re pristine, chilly and somewhat formidable. They travel slowly on deep-water currents all of their own. In style and feel, they could have been chipped into shape in the Antarctic. Yet his films speak so clearly about his own country and his own people they’re unmistakably Turkish. You come away from his pictures feeling you have perhaps spent time there, but only in the parts you would never go on holidays.
Three Monkeys follows in the wake of his remarkable 2002 film Distant and the brooding 2006 film Climates. Both of those pictures were superb studies of isolation and crafted with Ceylan’s very distinctive, immaculately composed photography. (He was a photographer before he became a filmmaker.) In those films, the male heroes were so taciturn, to get them to express their feelings would be like asking Sisyphus to roll a boulder all the way to the top of a hill. In Three Monkeys, Ceylan wants to open things out, spread the isolation around. The title and theme come from the three wise monkeys proverb, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Here, there are four characters, a family whose lives are ruined by a scheming, fat-faced politician. But it is only when the film delves deeper, when we really get to spend time with the family, do you wonder how screwed up they were in the first place.
Here, Ceylan has a beef with Turkey and the film plays as a secular call of despair. It’s there in the opening scene, set on a dark, tunneling country road. A car approaches and stops by a body lying in the middle of the road. We can’t see their faces, but they can tell the person is still alive. A woman warns the driver not to get out. Call the police she says. They take the number of a car in the ditch and drive off. After this, everybody is out for themselves in this film. Social responsibility is cast away for a deep-rooted selfishness.
This is never more evident in Servet (Ercan Kesal), a businessman turning politician. He comes skulking out of the shadows when the car passes. He’s responsible for the accident and knows it will destroy his career. So he asks his driver Eyup (Yazuz Bingol) to own up. A year in prison in return for a cash sum. Eyup has one of those faces beloved of Ceylan: bristled and hung heavy with unspoken sadness. He does time and leaves behind his wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan) and his depressed son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) who keeps failing a university exam. Hacer has eyes like dark pools and a face proud with strong bones. But she’s crumbling inside. While Eyup serves time, she is seduced by Servet only for Ismail to walk in on them. He seethes silently but won’t tell his father.
There is a great scene where Hacer goes to Servet to ask for the money. He’s self-absorbed as usual, sweat, like a guilty conscience, trickling down his forehead. Her mobile rings but she can’t find it in her bag. It’s the most annoying ring – a pop song with lyrics that come later to haunt the film. And it fills up the screen with awkwardness. Ceylan did a similar thing in Climates, where, at a pivotal moment when a man wanted to tell his ex-partner how much he had changed, the film interrupted him with a bunch of noisy workmen. It’s a typical Ceylan moment: his still, wide-screen compositions seem so studied, but life keeps interrupting.
The texture of Three Monkeys is lovely. A green hue like dark moss. Blood when it flows is a life-draining brown. Sometimes the picture plays so slowly, moss could be growing on it. But Ceylan is somebody you trust at this speed. Three Monkeys is a film you digest. It repeats in your thoughts after you’ve seen it. Much of it works in silence. Characters think their way through it. But you always know what they are feeling. Ceylan is so in tune with his characters, he can write inner thoughts large on screen. This director takes his cues from the Italian giant Antonioni who painted a world where human connection was impossible. Ceylan’s characters, however, want desperately to speak but don’t know how. So they numb themselves to life. Three Monkeys is not as convincing as Ceylan’s earlier work. It has an austerity that borders on being anti-social, moments when you wonder if he is trying to isolate the viewer too. But it is hard not to be impressed by the potent charge of his imagery or his ability to drill down to unspoken human essentials. He works with clarity of focus that is spiritual, cool and clear.

Review: The Pink Panther 2 (1/5)

2009-02-28T11:48:00.003Z

The Pink Panther 2
(Harald Zwart):
Steve Martin, Jean Reno, Emily Mortimer, Andy Garcia, Alfred Molina, John Cleese, Jeremy Irons, Lily Tomlin
Running time: 92 minutes (PG)

Peter Sellers must be spitting worms. Just as civilization was recovering from Steve Martin’s 2006 Pink Panther remake, along comes The Pink Panther 2, a movie so woeful you wonder if mankind would just be the better for annihilation.
Most of this jewel-heist story is set in Paris. We know this because the film gives us an establishing shot of the Eiffel Tower every three minutes. What we really need is an establishing shot that reminds us we’re supposed to be watching an Inspector Clouseau comedy. Steve Martin is ill-equipped: imagine a quadriplegic monkey on a unicycle. He slimes through the feeble jokes. He can’t do slapstick. (He has to rely on the editor who cuts the jokes physically into shape.) And he has to rely on a body double for larger stunts. Remember Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther or A Shot in the Dark? He used just the personal space around him to create all-consuming anarchy. The director Blake Morrison didn’t have to do a thing but put the camera in front of him. The plot here is not worth speaking of because the movie can’t be bothered with it. After 45 minutes nothing has happened. This is because there are so many star appearances, the film detours to give each one of them a scene. I’ve lost all respect for Lily Tomlin. I never want to see Jeremy Irons or Alfred Molina again. As for Steve Martin, he hasn’t a Clouseau.

Interview: Wood Allen

2009-02-28T11:47:00.001Z

Just who is Woody Allen? Everybody thinks they know him. I’ve never spoken to the man yet I expect to know him like an old friend. When we speak over the phone, it’s 12pm in New York. I’m full of expectation. The line is distant and fuzzy. I wait for him to come at me a mile a minute down the line. But he doesn’t. Allen speaks slowly – gentle, thoughtful. There’s music in his voice. But he sounds tired. Who wouldn’t be? He’s written and directed a film a year for the past 40 years. And, when asked, he’s more than happy to burst the myth that we all think we know Woody Allen.
“There is no Woody Allen figure really in any of my movies, actually,” he says. “They are totally fictional characters that I wrote... But, ahh, I’m nothing like the character in the movies. People always think that I am of course, but they don’t have the faintest idea...”
And I’m willing to go along with that. Even as I listen to him pepper his phrases with those trademark pauses (“ummm” and “you know”) and the non sequiturs that litter his speech. And then, a little while later, he drops in the phrase “existential philosophy” and a smile breaks on my face. And he gets excited when we get to talking about death. If this isn’t the Woody Allen we all know and love, then who could it be?
There lies the problem with Woody Allen. His films are so interwoven with his personal preoccupations, they can be hard to untangle. Whatever approach he has taken for his movies (cut and paste together in any order: slapstick, farce, parody, screwball romance, chamber drama or tragedy) his distinctive voice shines through. The Brooklyn-born auteur has made a career kvetching about his insecurities: love, death and everything in between. He makes us laugh at our own anxiety. (The tagline for Annie Hall was “A nervous romance”.)
Critics would happily split Allen’s career into three stages. There are those early films (his first proper film was Take the Money and Run in 1969) which bustle with beguiling slapstick, cheeky literary references and Allen’s trademark New York Jewish neuroticism. Then Allen hit his stride in 1977 with Annie Hall which won four Oscars. In that middle period, he made one extraordinary film after another. Ask a Woody Allen fan to choose some DVDs to take to a desert island and it would be a difficult choice between films such as Manhattan, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and her Sisters, Radio Days or his final masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors. Those films are glorious: rich and warm, deeply textured with an elasticity his later films lack. They are not just deeply funny still, but improve with age. But things have slowly dived since Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989. Though there have been moments. With each new release there has been talk of a revival though critics have ho-hummed and fans have grumbled.
And now, there’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a hit with US audiences. Though critics have fallen on both sides, surely its success makes Allen sleep better at night?
“Nah, I never think of those things,” he says chuckling. “I’ve been ahh… I’ve had so many box-office failures in my life ahh... so many more than successes, that, ahh, that I’m used to it and I’m always surprised when a film of mine does anything at the box office. I haven’t read a criticism good or bad of a film of mine in 30 years.” Not even a sneak peek? “No, I have no temptation whatsoever,” he says.
And what about the critics who say Woody Allen hasn’t made a great film in 20 years? Surely that has to get under the skin? “It’s a matter of non interest to me,” he says. “Like those sports that I’m not interested in. You know, like, I’m a great basketball and baseball fan. I’m devoted to them. And boxing. Hockey is a sport that I never got interested in and so hockey has no interest for me whatsoever. It’s just completely uninteresting. And I feel the same way about... uhh... things written about my movies. Not just criticism but any, you know, insights, or observations about them. They are all something that I have never been interested in.”
Vicky Cristina Barcelona, he says, came about because Spain put the money up. (The film, shot mainly in Barcelona, makes a small detour to Oviedo, where there is a statue of Allen.)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona tells the story of two chalk-and-cheese American friends (Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johannson) who go to Barcelona for a summer. Both are seduced by the appropriately named Juan (Javier Bardem), a strutting artist with a crazy ex-wife (Penélope Cruz) whose tempestuous lunacy spills all over the place. Both Cruz and Bardem dial the Latin heat to sweltering. Life lessons are learned and then discarded. Nobody knows what they want.
The film is shot both in English and Spanish and I wondered if that posed any problems.
“It was not difficult at all,” Allen says. “There was a script and they obeyed the script, although there were times I asked Javier and Penélope to improvise and they did improvise in Spanish and I didn’t know what they were saying. But I could tell from their body language, their physical actions, that they were doing the right emotions. It worked out pretty well.”
And how much input did Cruz, now Oscar nominated, give for her character? “I felt she created it all,” he says. “You know, she comes from there, she brings that presence. She gets out and does it and she brings it to life. I write down the character but, you know, when you see a character in script form it’s just lifeless words and you give it to 20 different actresses and you’ll get 20 different versions. She was the one that brought all the fire and the passion and the vitality to it.”
The film riffs on a classic Allen theme: the conflict that occurs in relationships when people just don’t know what they want. At 73, has Allen come any closer to knowing anything for sure? His voice brightens. “I’ve achieved no wisdom whatsoever,” he says. “I’ve, you know, after all the years, all the problems remain the same. I haven’t really... I feel these things are all unknowable and unsolvable and they will be the same problems a thousand years from now.”
One of the joys of Allen’s great comedies is the way they take these problems into account. They are buoyed up with a witty, knowing humour, but never lose sight of what is essentially tragic. And yet, Allen has said many times over the years that if he could give up comedy to be a great dramatist, he would. Does he now feel any different?
“Well, I’d love to be able to do, you know, great heavy stuff, you know, just from a pure pleasurable point of view. It’s fun to write a tragedy or a melodrama. I enjoy that. But, ahh, I’ve been able to do comedies over the years, that have been... the strength of them has been that they’ve been basically serious and like Vicky Cristina, kind of sad, the futility of life underneath them. On the other hand, that quality that makes them interesting to a portion of the people keeps another portion of people out of the theatres.”
And who might that be? “Well, there are people who go to the theatre and see a comedy and they want to laugh and be entertained completely. They’re not interested in the sadder side of life or the other dimensions of life. They get that if they go to a drama.
“But if they go to a comedy, they want to see, you know, girls and guys, doors slamming and guys in the wrong beds, and things like that. And they want to laugh. They want to put their troubles away while they laugh.
“My comedies, you know, don’t let them usually do that. They laugh when they’re funny but, you know, they’re always mindful of the sad undercurrent of life and that would be off-putting.
“I do want to make people think and feel a little bit about the poignancy of life and you know I hope that they’re entertained when they do it. I don’t want it to be homework. I don’t want them to feel it’s a course in existential philosophy or a course in interpersonal relations or something. You know, I want them to come in and enjoy themselves. But I don’t want them to just have a mindless experience. I want them to, you know, to get some sense of the underlying tragedy of life.”
Allen has his eye still firmly on the future. His next film, Whatever Works, stars Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David. It sounds like a perfect fit. (“I feel comfortable with him doing my material. He gets it.”) While he plans to return to London to shoot his next film in the summer. (“I like being in London. The weather is cool. The skies are grey.”) Does he ever revisit those earlier movies? “No, no, I never do that. That would depress me. I mean, I’d be sitting there thinking, ‘Oh God, what did I do? I can do that so much better and I shouldn’t have done this and that – it’s so obviously wrong.’ I’d be nothing but critical and there’s nothing I could do about it.”
Woody can’t face his own movies. He famously can’t deal with death. Though after 40 years of talking about it, it’s not for want of trying. Does it get any easier at 73?
“I’ve thought about death every day,” he laughs. “Since I was eight years old. And I haven’t come any closer [to accepting it]. Because there’s never been any room to come closer. And I mean, it’s something that I always think about. It’s the number one factor – one’s mortality is the number one issue of one’s life. So you know it hasn’t increased for me but that doesn’t mean it’s still not enormously prominent.”
So what does he think the public will make of him when Woody Allen finally gets around to dying? “They’ll say, ‘Who are you thinking of? Who....?’”

Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2/5)

2009-02-07T12:22:00.003Z

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
(David Fincher)
Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Elias Koteas, Julia Ormond, Taraji P Henson
Running time: 169 minutes (12A)

What a curious case this Benjamin Button is. The new film from David Fincher tells the story of a boy who is born an old man. He cheats expectations of an early demise to lead a charmed life. He hobbles on bad legs, falls over, but learns to walk properly.
As he ages backwards, he befriends a young girl, grows up, and begins his great life adventures, while all the while he writes letters to the girl he never forgets. He comes home, they meet as adults, part, reunite and fall in love. Life throws him curve balls but he cultivates a can-do attitude where... eeeeerrh... hold on. Haven’t we seen this before? Let’s see: Benjamin Button is written by one Eric Roth and he wrote... Forrest Gump! Box of chocolates anyone? At the cinema, you just never know what you’re gonna get.
Fincher takes F Scott Fitzgerald’s minor story and turns it into a minor film. Despite its epic 169 minutes and its swollen 13 Oscar nominations, Benjamin Button is trapped wind: time will give a polite burp and Button will be forgotten. I’ve no doubt the picture’s surface is a technical achievement but underneath, there’s little but shallow schmaltz: a trite riff on the swiftness of time and some Gumpian wisdom about time management. Life’s short, it says. Gee whizz.
Benjamin is born in New Orleans, 1918. He’s blinded with cataracts, arthritic and shrivelled like dried fruit. His mother dies; his disgusted father dumps the swaddled old man-child at the steps of an old folks’ home where big-hearted black woman Queenie (Taraji P Henson) takes him in. (I tried with a po-face not to think of The Jerk).
These early scenes are full of wonder, for the growing Benjamin is a digital dream: we watch a four-foot tall boy bent with the wretchedness of an 85-year-old’s body and rheumy eyes that belong to Brad Pitt. He transmits something that can’t be faked – a mixture of senility and childish naivety that says lots about the puerility of old age. Those scenes have such charm, you almost forget how the film blunders Fitzgerald’s conceit: where Benjamin was born a full-bodied, cognizant old man, here he is born a child with old-age physical afflictions. As he ages, he does so mentally, but only his body gets younger. Unnaturally, the man-child grows back into a child.
It’s a rare opportunity for Pitt to shed the vanity. And you sense how hard he’s working. But as he gets younger, and his body straightens, he starts to look like himself and that blandness takes over. In his 60s, he’s a sprouting-haired Stephen Pinker who sweeps Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), a bored diplomat’s wife into an affair. In his 50s, he has that silver-fox newsreader look. Though his now grown-up childhood sweetheart Daisy (Cate Blanchett) isn’t attracted to him until he looks like the Pitt we all know. “My god, look at you. You’re perfect,” she purrs. “Sleep with me.” It is, perhaps, the only true emotion in the film, the approximation of star lustre that will draw droves to this trite film.
In the battle between the greatest actress of her generation and the greatest cheekbones of his, Blanchett is untouched. Benjamin and Daisy enjoy blissful middle years, but age is yanking them apart. Eric Roth wants to give reverse aging its own tragedy (as if anybody thought it was a swell idea in the first place). And Benjamin gives up Daisy and their child because he knows he could not be a dad.
Blanchett’s retired dancer moves on screen with lissom grace, but you can’t stop watching her face as it deepens into age, burdened with memory and pain. Benjamin, who might be growing physically younger, should still be advancing mentally. But Pitt plays him as if he is not been touched by life. The trauma of being born old has left him with no obvious pathologies. Life doesn’t dent him with cynicism or melancholy. When his mother dies, he doesn’t grieve. When he gives up his daughter, he goes off backpacking. He’s either a zen master or an idiot. (So much of the charm of Forrest Gump, or that other man-child film Big, lay in Tom Hanks’ ability to reconnect us with a lost innocence. But Pitt’s blank face reminds us only of what we’re not feeling).
When Benjamin’s heart is first broken by Elizabeth, Benjamin doesn’t even have time to hurt. Fincher throws him straight into maritime WWII where bullets zip the nighttime screen like lightning fireflies. Momentarily, you feel a surge in the film pulse, and the beat is in those bullets. Fincher, it seems, doesn’t have time to tease out emotion. He bathes his films in gorgeous light, here the same ochre-and-olive-dipped gloom as his previous film Zodiac. There, the heroes spent the film trying to wrench serial killer obsessions out of the shadows. But here, you wonder what all the moody gloom is for: Benjamin’s world is a place of conventional emotions.
There is a telling sequence where an old man at the old folks home tells Benjamin he was struck in life by lightning seven times. We watch him being smoke-zapped in a comic flashback in the style of hand-cranked early cinema. It’s cute but wedged in. And we see the joke another six times. Fincher flashes his technical savvy like peacock feathers. He struts his way through the film dazzling us with a shallow beauty. But he has never learned how to pull a real emotional lever. His is effect over feeling, false sentiment instead of truth. Bite into Fincher’s chocolates and the centre lies hollow.

Review: Bold 3-D (3/5)

2009-02-07T12:19:00.002Z

Bolt 3-D
(Bryan Howard, Chris Williams):
Voices: John Travolta, Miley Cyrus, Susie Essman, Mark Walton,
Malcolm McDowell
Running time: 103 minutes (G)

The new Pixar cartoon is cute alright, though unconventionally conventional. The out-of-orbit pizzazz of Wall-e has crashed to earth for a recognisable dog-out-of-water road adventure, collared, of course, with Pixar’s knowing meta mash.
Bolt, the star of a TV espionage show, goes missing and just like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show, he must learn that his entire world is a fake. He thinks he’s a real superhero, but superpowers are worked by hidden stunt men. He turns tail when he is shipped by accident to New York but thinks it’s part of the show. Does Penny (Miley Cyrus), his TV-show owner, really love him? Or is she fake too? Bolt has to find her and find his true self. The characters are winsome: Bolt (voiced by John Travolta) makes something cuddly and sympathetic out of a hapless heroism; while scrawny alley cat Mittens (Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Susie Essman) is a sarcastic Bronx yenta. (Tied together, travelling across America, their human ancestors are It Happened One Night’s Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert). The spotlight shines, however, for Rhino (Mark Walton), a hamster with a stoner, fanboy complex. His the incarnation of Jonah Hill’s bozo enthusiasm but much funnier (he gets the belly laughs). If you happen to see Bolt in 3-D, and you happen to be a child, I’m sure it will add an extra layer of fun. For this viewer, 3-D is meddlesome: it’s hard to lose yourself in a movie when characters appear under your nose, a constant reminder of the gimmick that is 3-D.

Review: The Good, The Bad, The Weird

2009-02-07T12:18:00.002Z

The Good, The Bad, The Weird
(Kim Jee-Woon):
Song Kang-ho, Lee Byung-hun, Jung Woo-sung, Yoon Je-moon
Running time: 120 minutes (15A)

For a film so in thrall to Sergio Leone and all things western, surely a more apt title would have been Once Upon A Time In Asia? For Kim Jee-Woon’s oater is set in 1930s Manchuria, and shoots with a double barrel of slick Eastern violence and Korean whack-out humour. The camera swoops and glides like an eagle and comes to rest in a train. It’s not clear who is shooting who in the first 15 minutes (they’re all after a map that leads to buried treasure) but it’s so seductively shot you don’t mind.
Director Kim Jee-Woon (A Tale of Two Sisters) goes at the material with stylish brio. In one split-second shot, a man is blasted into the train wall and bounces back only to be blasted off it again by following bullets. But the fight scenes in open spaces show less control – they’re scrappy and disorientating.
There are good guys, bad guys and weird – the latter, I suppose, is the hero, a typical Korean goofball hero (Song Kang-ho from The Host) who bumbles through wearing a fighter pilot helmet. The cast dress like warlords, cowboys, pop stars and Nazis. It’s zany and feels like it’s in danger of toppling over into post-modern pastiche. But it’s charming. Tarantino would love it.

Review: Punisher: War Zone (1/5)

2009-02-07T12:16:00.001Z

Punisher: War Zone
(Lexi Alexander):
Ray Stevenson, Dominic West, Julie Benz, Doug Hutchinson, Colin Salmon
Running time: 107 minutes (18)

This is the story of a big angry man called Punisher (Ray Stevenson). He used to be a cop but the mafia killed his family. Now he lives in an underground bunker with lots of guns. He likes to point them in the faces of mafia mugs. His aim in life is to catch Jigsaw (The Wire’s Dominic West) who thinks he’s the Joker.
The Punisher started life as a Marvel comics vigilante. He dresses like an SAS man. Heck, he’s a one-man commando unit. He dangles from a chandelier, spins 360 degrees, and guns down an entire room of bad guys. He fixes his broken nose with a pencil. When finished, I took the pencil, put it in my nose and banged my face off the seat in front of me.
Punisher: War Zone is directed by Lexi Alexander, who, incidentally, is a woman. She seems to be angry with men. So many men’s heads are pulped, popped, perforated, powderised and pulverized in the first five minutes, you wonder how she can take the shock factor any further. Alas, she can’t, unless you are new to watching this kind of moronic, demented dreck.