This wispy French-Canadian comedy has an epigraph by Alfred de Musset: "The only truth is love beyond reason." It's mostly about what strange magic attracts members of the same sex and opposite sexes to each other, usually reluctantly and rarely happily. The articulate characters, all well-heeled students in Montreal, discuss it over coffee and across the dinner table. Marie, the heroine, talks about it post-coitally with a succession of boyfriends, and she becomes part of a triangle. The other members of the chaste ménage are her best friend Francis, a somewhat callow gay man (played by the film's talented young writer-director, Xavier Dolan), and the androgynous Nicolas, whom someone calls an Adonis. Together they make up a Jules et Jim trio, but with the narcissistic Nicolas as the obscure object of the others' desire. The style is nouvelle vague but more Godard than Truffaut, and it's likeable enough, though there's far too much slow motion.
Sunday, 29 May 2011
Heartbeats – review
Apocalypse Now – review
The 1970s was Coppola's decade. He was involved in a succession of masterly films, as screenwriter on Patton, producer of American Graffiti, director of the first two Godfather films and The Conversation, and finally, in 1979, as true auteur of Apocalypse Now. They illuminated our times, and we can now see that Apocalypse Now is not merely the greatest film to come out of the Vietnam experience but one of the great works about the madness of our times. He immediately followed the early morning preview screening of Apocalypse Now at Cannes with a press conference which he began by saying: "My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam," and he went on to state that during the shooting "little by little we went insane". How brave and prophetic he was.
Apocalypse NowProduction year: 1979Countries: UK, USA Cert (UK): 18Runtime: 153 minsDirectors: Francis Coppola, Francis Ford CoppolaCast: Dennis Hopper, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Laurence Fishburne, Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Rpobert DuvallMore on this filmCoppola took Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's enigmatic story about the cruelties of colonialism, and turned it into a 20th-century fable about neocolonialism in which the story's eminently sane narrator, Marlow, becomes Captain Willard, the Special Services hitman, as crazy as his assigned quarry, Colonel Kurtz. The difference is that unlike everyone else around him, from the top brass down, Willard knows he's mad. Everything about the Taliban, al-Qaida, the pressures that took us into Afghanistan and Iraq, the assault on Abbottabad and the deadly troubles that lie ahead are to be found here in Willard's journey. It's a work of genius that may falter a little towards the end, though not fatally. This newly released version is more or less the one shown at Cannes and is definitive. The half-hour of material introduced 10 years ago in Apocalypse Now Redux is of no value, it diminishes the film and is to be avoided.
Friday, 27 May 2011
The Hangover Part II – review
We all enjoyed ourselves during that first movie. But now … well, the hangover has begun. And begun so powerfully, so oppressively, that you might almost suspect the success of the original was created specifically to engender this comedown as a piece of conceptual art. Each reminder of the original, each repetition, each desperate, hair-of-the-dog attempt to recapture the party feeling: it's exactly like living through a hungover flashback-memory of what had once seemed so great.
The Hangover Part IIProduction year: 2011Country: USACert (UK): 15Runtime: 102 minsDirectors: Todd PhillipsCast: Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Jamie Chung, Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong, Mike Tyson, Paul Giamatti, Zach GalifianakisMore on this filmIn Hollywood, said William Goldman, nobody knows anything. Who knew The Hangover, from fratpack comedy director Todd Phillips, was going to be such a huge hit? Nobody – perhaps not even the people involved. The story of a Vegas bachelor party that goes horribly wrong looked pretty ropey on paper, and yet it was great. Some thought it was sort of a monkey-typing-Hamlet fluke, but it's actually the sort of fluke that only happens to smart people who keep trying.
The Hangover was funny and the structure was daring. Act one: pre-party – then we jump straight to act three, post-party, and the movie is about the bleary, amnesiac guys trying to piece together act two: what the hell happened? This is not definitively revealed until the sequence of digital photos over the final credits. Brilliant! It showed the spirit of movies like The Usual Suspects or Reservoir Dogs.Bradley Cooper had the chops – he had been a forgettable, almost invisible presence in many movies before this, but he blossomed in H1. There were some cracking comedy turns. Zach Galifianakis was great as the weirdo brother-in-law Alan and Ken Jeong was a real find as the abusive comedy gangster Mr Chow. Everything came together.
Sadly, H2 can't even quite claim the credit of being the first Hangover sequel: the road-movie comedy Due Date, directed by Todd Phillips and starring Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr, attempted to cash in on its success, none too successfully. At least it tried a vaguely different plot. Hangover Part II seeks only to repeat almost every element of the first movie. It's not a sequel, closer to a shot-for-shot remake. This time, the guys go to Thailand for a wedding, in the same shark-jumping way that the Sex and the City girls whooshed off to Abu Dhabi for their profoundly depressing sequel. It feels a bit like a feature-length Christmas special of a well-loved British sitcom.
The original's quirks have now become a formula. The grim daytime shots of Vegas at the beginning are now grim daytime shots of Bangkok; the tiger is now a monkey; there's a different sequence of photos over the final credits. Pretty much everything has its equivalent. Infuriatingly, all the fun has been drained from the movie, simply in repeating almost every trick. The same: but lame, and lame because the same.
Now it's the nerdy dentist Stu (Ed Helms) getting hitched, to a beautiful Thai woman Lauren (Jamie Chung), whose father hates Stu. Slightly insultingly for Justin Barth, his character Doug was the groom-to-be who disappeared in the first movie but he doesn't get a turn at participating in the hi-jinks now.
Stu stays in the story and Barth's nice-but-dull character is sidelined. Stu's goofiness is evidently considered more important to the action, and Phillips perhaps considers that the gang already has a handsome guy in the form of Cooper's Phil. Now it's the bride's sweet younger brother Teddy who tags along on the stag night, disappears, and has to be found at all costs, because he is the apple of his father's eye: he is played by 21-year-old Mason Lee, son of the director Ang Lee. Jeong and Galifianakis seem very subdued and under-par compared to their earlier appearances.
Then there's the question of the big non-PC cameo to match Mike Tyson's bizarre performance in the original. Rumours have been rife. We had heard about Mel Gibson (that idea was abandoned), Liam Neeson (reportedly cut) and even Bill Clinton.
Actually, Paul Giamatti makes an appearance as a bad-tempered tough guy, but this isn't the big cameo – that comes in the form of the celebrity booked to sing at Stu's wedding. You may be hoping for Liza Minnelli. Well, no spoilers, but suffice it to say, this too is a bit of a letdown.
Making The Hangover Part II must have been like going up to a great guitarist who'd just pulled off a brilliant improvised solo, and telling him he had to repeat the performance the next night, note-for-note. The result is self-conscious to say the least.
I have to admit that there are one or two nice lines. When the guys gather outside Alan's bedroom, preparing to invite him along, Jeffrey Tambor, playing Alan's father, tells them to "Go in slowly; let him acclimatise." When Stu defiantly claims: "There's a demon in me!", Alan hits him with a zinging comeback in the bad-taste spirit of the first film. Flashes of fun like this are rare. It's a sobering experience.
Monday, 23 May 2011
Conviction, DVD review
The true story of Massachusetts waiter Kenny Waters can be told, quite simply, in a sentence. He was jailed without parole in 1983 for murder, and served eighteen years while his sister Betty Ann dedicated her life to researching how she could prove him innocent.
Conviction feels like a loyal dramatisation of the tale, which focuses on Betty Anne (Hilary Swank), a single working mum, continuing to fight the battle, despite the forces of America’s legal system, and her family, being against her.
This small-town legal drama is rescued from blandness by the many famous names and faces in the cast, and the character-driven sub-plots that they carry: Minnie Driver plays the bored but smart British law school undergraduate who finds a much-needed project in Betty Anne; Melissa Leo is horribly wasted as a dried out and sour policewoman with a vengeance.
But it is Sam Rockwell’s Kenny, a charismatic but scarred and unpredictable man, capable of changing the way you feel about him from one scene to the next, who carries the film. He is also the only marker of time passing – his face, his eyes, the way he holds his own weight seem to tell the story of his years in prison.
Director Tony Goldwyn, who has directed episodes of popular TV series including Dexter and Law & Order, specialises in drawing out suspense in a crime story and offsetting it with a family saga. He does it well here, managing to resist temptation to spin the tale into a melodrama, even though the story hinges on a potentially spineless theme: sisterly sacrifice.
Wednesday, 27 April 2011
Abel, DVD review
Cert 15, 82 mins, Network Releasing
There's a streak of bravado at the core of Abel. Rather than play it safe in his debut feature film as director, Diego Luna – best known as the actor who played one of the testosterone-teens in Y Tu Mama Tambien – chooses to use not just child actors, but picked-from-the-wilderness amateur child actors.
It's a snort of derision in the face of the adage 'never work with children', and it turns out to be wholly justified. Luna shows himself an eminently capable director in this slim and elegiac film, and he unearths a genuine talent in 10-year-old first-time actor Christopher Ruiz-Esparza.
Ruiz-Esparza plays Abel, a young boy who returns home from a mental health institute to a family without a father figure. For a matter of days Abel surveys the scene with intense muteness. He sees his brother and sister quietly run amok while his mother strains under the economic pressure of bringing up a family.
And then Abel bursts into action. He fixes the toilet, hangs pictures in the hallway, castigates his sister, interrogates her boyfriend, and gets into his mother's bed. In other words, he becomes the patriarch.
Problem is, he also thinks he's the patriarch. Abel believes he's the father of his siblings and the husband of his mother, and any challenge to this new world order immediately sends him into a fit (presumably the type that first put him in the hospital – we are never definitively told).
Madness swarms at the edges of this film, much like the Buñuelian symbol ants pouring from a hole that Luna borrows early on. But the tension between Abel's reality and that of his surroundings is often played for laughs, especially when Abel's father returns to the house and turns out to be far more childish than young Abel, who is actually quite a successful parent.
The joke does wear a little thin – not least for Abel's mother, who has to suffer the inevitable bedroom scene – but there's an intriguing air to Abel and a well-paced finale that prove Luna's direction is mature beyond his years.
The Tourist, DVD review
This confused thriller-romance serves as a reminder that expensive ingredients do not necessarily make for a satisfying dish. Johnny Depp phones in his performance as Frank, a bemused American tourist unwittingly caught up in the schemes of mysterious action-woman Elise (Jolie, floundering as so often when asked to do more than look sexy). In his infamous Golden Globes speech, comedian Ricky Gervais said that in 2010 "it seemed like everything was in 3-D. Except the characters in The Tourist." He was being kind.
After much wistful sighing and preposterous plot twists, it emerges that Elise is a British spy on the trail of a renegade financier. He is wanted by Interpol (led by a wasted Paul Bettany) for robbing the British taxpayer, and also by an unscrupulous gangster (Steven Berkoff) whom he defrauded. As the handsome stars leap around various pieces of lavish scenery, the plot draws towards a conclusion that is at once nonsensical, predictable and unsatisfying. A couple of comic thrills and sumptuous cinematography from Oscar-winner John Seale do not make up for inconsistent tone, an unsatisfactory ending and a remarkable lack of chemistry between the leads.
Friday, 22 April 2011
Junebug, DVD review
Phil Morrison’s Junebug is a film that gradually gets under your skin. After the swift opening – shrewd Chicago art dealer Madeleine falls for perfect Southern beau George and goes to stay with his suburban family – not a great deal happens. But like a Raymond Carver story, the power lies in the detail and deep emotional truth.
Late-30 something Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz, Schindler’s List) specialises in outsider art. When she needs to clinch a deal with an eccentric North Carolina artist, her new husband George (Alessandro Nivola, Goal!) takes her to stay with his family – the Johnstens, who live in the same neighbourhood. A product of privilege and an affected art scene, Madeleine has faith in her own charm. But her touchy-feely banter and habitual "sweethearts" fall flat in George’s Southern Baptist family –despite her excruciatingly sincere attempts to win their approval.
George's brittle mother Peg takes an immediate dislike to her: "She's too pretty. And she's too smart and that's a deadly combination." Taciturn dad Eugene withdraws to his workshop basement where he makes wooden birds. And the inarticulate brother Johnnie (Benjamin McKenzie of The O.C.) grunts with simmering rage whenever his ingratiating sister-in-law approaches him. Beset by bitterness at his golden-boy brother, Johnnie is a kidult who retreats to his den to watch videos of meerkats, rather than confront the difficulties in his own relationship.
His heftily pregnant wife Ashley stands out from the other Johnstens in her warm acceptance of Madeleine (Junebug is the name of her unborn child). Nominated for an Oscar for supporting actress, Amy Adams is enchanting as Ashley, who welcomes her “new sister” with openness and a childlike lack of self-regard. Junebug is also the name of a nocturnal beetle; and like a firefly, Ashley flitters about the urbane art dealer (who she sees as an embodiment of womanhood), playing with her hair, painting her nails her favourite colour -Cinnamon Fizz.
Junebug is about outsiders and the intersection of two dissonant worlds, but it doesn't ram home these themes; they evolve from the wholly convincing characterisations. Brought up in North Carolina, Phil Morrison and scriptwriter Angus MacLachlan are attuned to a Southern pace, but the film never slips into the solemn or patronising. Lingering shots of suburbia catch a quiet rather than a static life and avoid the self-conscious stylisation of Sam Mendes’s infinitely less authentic Revolutionary Road. But what makes this independent film cherishable is its generosity of spirit; we quietly root for all of the characters, including the earnest Madeleine. Accompanying the Johnstens through the everyday, we gradually get under their skins, so that when tragedy besets the family it is surprisingly painful, but not maudlin, coloured, as it is, by Ashley’s precious optimism.
Tuesday, 19 April 2011
Meet the Parents: Little Fockers, review
Meet the Parents, from 2000, had quite a lot going for it. Its central theme - the pitfalls of meeting a fiance's dreadful in-laws - was broadly appealing, and this was lifted by some strong performances. Ben Stiller, as perplexed husband to be Greg Focker, offered just the right mixture of charm and slapstick haplessness, while Robert De Niro as Jack, the ex-CIA agent father of the bride, showed that his comic timing in Analyse This was not just a one-off. The tone was a mix of bad-taste puerility and real warmth, and was surprisingly likeable.
This sort of family comedy - slightly risqué without being even slightly risky - is one Hollywood finds difficult, so it was no surprise that a sequel popped up soon after. No surprise, but still a bit sad. Meet the Fockers, in 2004, in which Stiller's parents were thrown into the mix, offered little new in the way of subject or tone, but did at least introduce Barbara Streisand and Dustin Hoffman as his hippyish, liberal ma and pa, with diverting if not quite hilarious consequences.
This third in the series, however, does not so much scrape the barrel as lick its underside. Greg and wife Pam (Teri Polo), having overcome both sets of awkward parents, are now happily married with five-year old twins. Worn down by the stress of his other daughter Debbie divorcing her husband Bob (Thomas McCarthy), Jack decides that Greg should take the family reins for a while. Focker must sort out the family's finances, build a new house and manage his wayward colleague Andi Garcia (pretty but completely vacant Jessica Alba), while keeping an eye on his children. Moderate disruption ensues, with few laughs. Greg finally proves himself by saving Jack's life when the latter suffers a heart attack. One can't help but wonder if De Niro would have preferred his character - and this increasingly sorry series - to have been allowed to fall quietly off the twig.
The Tiger of Eschnapur & The Indian Tomb: Two Films by Fritz Lang, DVD review
The Tiger of Eschnapur & The Indian Tomb: Two Films by Fritz Lang
PG, Eureka Masters of Cinema, DVD £22.99
One of the cinema’s most marvellous oddities (or two for the price of one), Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das Indische Grabmal (both 1959) are films so luridly intense you think you may just be dreaming them.
I saw them on TV as a teenager, and have never forgotten them: both the exotic world they conjure up – part grand, dazzling sun-soaked Indian locations (palaces, forts, temples, lakes), part astonishing studio fantasy of glittering costumes and interiors, vast underground temples and labyrinthine cave-systems; and Lang’s lush colour evocation of extravagant ceremony and fermenting passions and cruelty – with the aid of jodhpurs, scimitars, crocodiles, lepers, tigers (of course) and, most memorably of all, some astonishingly erotic dancing by Hollywood star Debra Paget as Seetha the temple dancer.
They have much more visionary magic than Spielberg’s comparable but rather flat and nasty Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom – and indeed were very successful on their release. They’ve lost none of their spell.
In the 1920s, Fritz Lang made several films in pairs: Die Spinnen (1919 & 1920), Dr Mabuse: the Gambler (1922), the Niebelungen films, Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924). But when he originally co-wrote these Indian films with his then-wife Thea Von Harbou (later his co-writer on Metropolis), he was considered too junior to direct them, and in 1921 the powerful producer-director Joe May had taken the helm, with the great Conrad Veidt as the insanely jealous Maharajah whose passion for a woman drives the plot. So the 1959 project – nursed into being by a remarkable German producer called Arthur Brauner – is the realisation and vindication of a long-nurtured project, and with its extraordinary atmosphere and visual impact, and ferocious unconcern for psychological nuance in its pursuit of primal, archetypal patterns of emotional significance, it recaptures the panache and melodramatic strangeness of Lang’s silent masterpieces. Which is not to say that it lacks control: the enchantment of Lang’s composition of these garish adventures lies in the sense that underneath the sensational, often gasp-making surface the director of M (1931), The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Scarlet Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1954) has lost none of his sense of seething passions, human perversity, and the grim inexorability of fate.
Doubtless some will find these works uncomfortably ‘Orientalist’ – they’re undeniably filled with the clichés of the romantic India of the 1920s (exotic dancers, sinister priests, sexual passion, torture, dungeons, lepers, gurus, elephants aplenty etc.). But the comic-book blatancy of the genre trappings makes one want to postpone feeling any qualms, and mostly we’re closer here to the delirious India of Powell and Pressburger’s gloriously stylised, studio-shot Black Narcissus (1947) than to the more observed, actual subcontinent of Jean Renoir’s superbly poetic, documentary-feeling, location-shot The River (1950). The trancelike pleasure of the storytelling, in fact, is quite majestic – and these unique films could even be felt to resemble late Shakespearean romance – The Tempest, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale – in their shrugging off of worries about realistic plausibility and Lang’s profound reversion to the roots of creativity.
Friday, 15 April 2011
Your Highness, review
In the trailers Your Highness looked great. After all, it’s usually fun, and maybe even a tiny bit flattering to us, when Americans decide they want to spoof English movies. It’s especially happy-making to see Americans take such delight in adopting hoity-toity English accents as they hoof around pseudo-medieval forests cack-handedly trying to wield their mighty swords.
There’s an intriguing cast – Pineapple Express co-stars James Franco and Danny McBride: the former so cute, the latter so cutting; plus Natalie Portman, hot on the heels of Black Swan, in a larkier, less anguished role than she usually plays. There are enough rude jokes and stoner gags to satisfy the inner Seth Rogen in all of us.
And looking after the whole gleefully tawdry shebang is David Gordon Green, whose early films George Washington and All the Real Girls made him the poster-boy of neo-poetic realism, but whose strange, zig-zagging career ended up with him helming the wildly silly, stupidly funny Pineapple Express. Really, there was no way Your Highness could disappoint.
Wrong! It’s bad. It makes Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights look like a masterpiece. Plodding where it should gallop, crude more than lewd, provoking shrugs rather than thigh-slaps, it should be called Your Lowness.
The plot? Oh, OK then. So there’s this big, leering chump of a prince called Thadeous (McBride) who likes making out with dwarves’ wives and has never performed an act of gallantry in his life. His handsome and obviously homosexual brother Prince Fabious (Franco) is about to get married to Belladonna (Zooey Deschanel), but she is stolen by an evil warlock (Justin Theroux) who wishes, you know, to sire a dragon with her.
The time has come: Thadeous has to man up. Act like aristocracy. Redeem himself. Off he embarks on a big ol’ quest alongside Fabious and valet Courtney (Rasmus Hardiker), who plays Baldrick to his Blackadder. En route they team up with fearsome warrior Isabel (Portman). All that stands in their way is a paedophilic warlord, bare-breasted forest-dwellers acting as honeytraps, monsters galore, and the fact that Thadeous is a dope-smoking scaredy-pants.
What really stands in their way is that McBride, who co-wrote the script and who can be brilliant as a scene-stealer in films such as Tropic Thunder, is so cold and wooden. He delivers half-funny lines so contemptuously that they become zero-funny. He also seems to think that ending every other line with a bit of swearing is hilarious.
Perhaps everyone on set had a good time. Perhaps they were stoned. That would explain why the story is so lazy and full of holes, why key characters like Belladonna go missing for long stretches, why the action sequences are so half-cooked, why Franco appears to have modelled his Fabious on Joey from Friends. Really, how hilarious can a film be when its best comic performance comes from Natalie Portman?
Tron: Legacy, DVD review
Even on the small screen, Tron: Legacy is a dazzling spectacle. The computer world of “The Grid” – somehow dark and bright simultaneously – is beautifully realised with a technical audacity that constantly tests the limits of what’s visually possible.
First-time director Joe Kosinski had been determined to get his hands on the very latest equipment and shot Tron Legacy on cameras more advanced even than those used by James Cameron on his groundbreaking Avatar, released only 12 months earlier.
But, curiously, what spoilt Cameron’s film also spoils Kosinski’s: neither has an engaging narrative.
In the same way that no one came out of Avatar wiping away tears of emotion, so the underwhelming plot of Tron:Legacy never grabs at the heart – even though the potential is there, as the twentysomething hero is reunited with the father he hasn’t seen for decades.
Jeff Bridges reprises his role as Flynn, the computer whiz sucked physically into the digital metropolis of The Grid, with its super-fast lightcycles and gladiatorial bouts fought with what look like neon-glowing Frisbees. Twenty years on, Flynn’s son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) unexpectedly finds himself in The Grid, where he encounters not only his old dad but also an evil – and much younger looking – clone of Flynn.
The visual effects are spectacular, but it’s hard to care what happens to anyone.
Monday, 19 April 2010
The Market | Film review
In his second movie set in Turkey, the British film-maker Ben Hopkins focuses on Mihram, a handsome loser from the country's eastern borders forever devising get-rich-quick schemes, usually connected with smuggled or stolen goods. The movie, set in the mid-90s, artfully observes a society so endemically corrupt that Mihram seems like an honest man. Trying to do well by doing good, he undertakes to help a local doctor by finding black market replacements for some stolen drugs, then tries to make a little for himself on the side. Things go both right and wrong and, as a result, he ends up in the hands of the organised criminals who robbed the doctor in the first place. A satisfying if uncomfortable fable.
Saturday, 17 April 2010
Boogie Woogie: film review and trailer
Boogir Woogie is a failed attempt at the kind of all-star, multi-story ensemble that became a trademark of the late Robert Altman.
Sadly director Duncan Ward is no Altman and this satire on the pretensions of the London art scene is thumpingly obvious and well past its sell-by date.View the Original article
The Ghost Writer: film review and trailer
Notoriety is so firmly associated with Roman Polanski that it should probably be his middle name.
His critics may be surprised to discover that his screen version of the Robert Harris novel The Ghost is an efficient, almost anonymous, old-school political thriller that a weary Alfred Hitchcock might have made in the Sixites.The film is polished and deliberately paced with Polanski's professionalism and a strong cast compensating for a plot that doesn't stand up to close scrutiny.
Ewan McGregor's cynical hack known throughout as The Ghost is hired to salvage the dull memoirs of former British prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan).
His predecessor at the word processor died in mysterious circumstances but the hefty fee is irresistible. His arrival at Lang's retreat on an island off the eastern seaboard of America coincides with an announcement that The Hague may try Lang for war crimes.
View the Original article
City Of Life And Death: film review and trailer
This film is an extraordinary recreation of Hell on Earth.
In December 1937 Japanese troops laid siege to the Chinese capital of Nanjing.Their approach was merciless and shocking in its barbarity. Soldiers and civilians were beheaded, torched, shot or buried alive in mass graves.
Director Chuan Lu's impressive, carefully balanced film places the viewer in the front line of events. The rubble-strewn streets, guerrilla tactics and sniper assaults are as intense as Saving Private Ryan.
The black and white cinematography has all the impact of a Robert Capa photo as we witness a field of bodies stretching as far as the eye can see.
Characters such as Japanese soldier Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi) and Chinese boy Xiaodouzi (Bin Liu) provide a thread of continuity through the chaotic tapestry of the massacre.
There are touching pin pricks of humanity as a soldier covers a child's eyes and translator Mr Tang (Wei Fan) gives his wedding ring to his wife before reporting to the Japanese commanders.
A harrowing, unflinching epic.
VERDICT 4/5
View the Original article
Crying With Laughter: film review and trailer
You might think that his career, ex-wife and self-destructive impulses would provide sufficient plot but apparently not as Joey's old pal Frank (Malcolm Shields) pops up to involve him in his dastardly scheme.
The psycho drama is (unintentionally) much funnier than any of the comedy and none of it is remotely plausible.
VERDICT 2/5
View the Original article
Thursday, 15 April 2010
Film review round-up: Kick Ass, Clash Of The Titans, How To Train Your Dragon, Remember Me
If Quentin Tarantino and Judd Apatow collaborated on a comic-book movie the result might look like Kick-Ass, an audacious, action-packed, darkly comic hoot. Part tribute to and part reinvention of a genre, it combines cartoonish violence with bold, spectacularly tasteless humour and a warm, geeky heart.
Teenage boys the world over have probably just found their new favourite film, while the rest of us can be grateful that the increasingly dour super-hero movie has lightened up.Instead of the brooding introspection of Batman or the po-faced worthiness of Tobey Maguire
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