|
|
|
|
From the Event Guide archive!
This article refers to an event which took place on, or until, 09 May 2006 Film Reviews U-CARMEN eKHAYELITSHA And then, just as I’m at my most opinionated, along comes ‘U-Carmen,’ a veritable curve ball of a musical (and winner of the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlin Film Festival) that has upended my preconceptions of what the genre ought to be. It is always useful and healthy to have ones perceptions tested, and this is no different. A modern day reading of Bizet’s Carmen (not an opera I am overly familiar with, and keep your cries of ‘philistine’ to yourself), ‘U-Carmen’ relocates the story of a strong-willed woman who falls in love with a guard to the South African townships to delightful effect (‘delightful’ isn’t a word I’m usually comfortable with, but it is, in this instance, so apposite that to not use it would be unforgivable – ‘U-Carmen’ simply is a delightful film). Having never been to South Africa, what I know of it comes second-hand through various media, and it is fair to say that the information is predominantly negative. Director Mark Dornford-May has stated that one of his goals in making this film was to confound our expectations of the place, and he achieves this through a slightly raw-edged, documentary style of shooting which conveys the vibrant, bustling street life to wonderful effect. He has, however, an ace up his sleeve in the formidable presence of Pauline Malefane, who plays Carmen with a brashly confident swagger. A worker in The Gypsy Cigarette Factory, she and her choir of Gypsy Girls interpret the source material’s songs, now sung in their native Xhosa, to disarming effect, indeed I all but defy any viewer not to get swept along by the sheer exuberance of their collective performance. ‘U-Carmen’ is a real discovery, and it is fair to say that it doesn’t really resemble anything else. A fun night at the movies awaits you. – David O Mahony Both David Fincher and Joe Carnahan (whose 2002’s thriller ‘Narc’ Cruise had helped release) backed out of earlier incarnations, the project finally falling to ‘Lost’ creator J.J. Abrams. Cruise had pigged out on Abrams’ earlier hit TV series, ‘Alias’, and felt the 39-year old could bring a fresh perspective to the action hero genre. And so he has, hitting all the right notes – the big action set pieces, the witty one-liners, the hi-tech hardware, the high-kicking babes – but explores too what happens when Mission: Impossible Force pin-up Ethan Hunt goes home. What happens is basically True Lies Revisited, Michelle Monaghan (‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang’) playing the blushing bride-to-be, oblivious to her man’s secret missions, and therefore a prime bargaining tool for cold-blooded black market monster Owen Davian (a brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman). Ving Rhames returns as one of Hunt’s elite team, along with Hawaiian hottie Maggie Q and our own Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and if proceedings sometimes play out like a Milk Tray ad gone completely bonkers, there’s still more than enough thrills and spills here to keep you somewhere in the vicinity of your seat edge. Question is, do Event Guide readers go to movies without subtitles? – Paul Byrne Playing out in real-time, Willis is greying cop Jack Mosley, none too happy with his life, or the way he’s been leading it, when he’s given the task of getting a witness, Eddie Bunker (eccentric rapper Mos Def), to the court on time. Only trouble is, there are quite a few people along the way who would rather he didn’t. Cue oodles of bullets, buddy-buddy bonding and a generous slice of redemption, and, by the end, you’ve got yourself a sweet little potboiler. Shades of ‘Phone Booth’, given the real-time plotting and the Hollywood slickness, but the plot keeps you guessing, as our reluctant hero faces a series of new challenges. Donner and scripter Richard Wenk admirably keep the twists and turns piling up. As for Willis – in desperate need of a hit, which may explain the soon-come ‘Die Hard 4.0’ - who says you can’t teach an old dog some new tricks? – Paul Byrne So, what is there to set this film apart? Why is its cliché-ridden story of Zach, a precocious-yet-put-upon, sexually unsure teenager, and his efforts to forge an identity at variance with the wishes of his conservative parents as successful as it is? Well, it helps immeasurably that the character is played by Marc-Andre Grondin, a talented young actor who plays the part with all of the sensitivity and vigour that the role demands, switching from youthful arrogance to shameful self-loathing at a moments notice. His story (and it is the usual one of gaining hard-won respect from his combative father) begins in the womb, a piece of digital frivolity allowing us access to the in utero Zach (the director’s reliance on such trickery is a disappointment, though understandable when one learns of his history in music videos). He is born on Christmas Day, 1960, the forth son of Gervais and Laurianne Beaulieu. From this point, the story moves in roughly chronological fashion, detailing the boy Zach’s apparent ability to heal the sick, his discovery of glam rock in the early seventies, and his increasing interest in his own sex. It is this later point that causes him, and his tediously conformist father (expertly played by Michel Cote), the most consternation; one instance sees him beating up a boy who has been flirting with him, in another he is sent by Dad for a psychiatric evaluation in a futile attempt to curb his fabulous tendencies. All of this, say the first hour and a half of a two hour plus film, is great fun. The cracks appear during the third act. By now Zach’s substance-abusing brother Raymond, the only member of the clan who is in any way developed, (the others remaining one-note throughout), has become an outright antagonist, a reckless threat to both the family and himself. This is a cliché too far. That he is played as a cut-price Jim Morrison, complete with leather pants and ever-present booze, compounds the issue. This, coupled with Zach’s curve-ball visit to Jerusalem, a sequence that really ought to have ended up on the cutting-room floor, serve to derail the movie as it approaches the finishing line. But this is a venial sin - enough good material has come beforehand to render it forgivable. – David O Mahony The owners of the be-lemming’d utility are Alain and Benedict Getty, newly relocated residents of a spacious modern house – you know the type, Spartan minimalism and gleaming white – who are, as the film begins, preparing a dinner party for his new boss and his wife (employing a device as opaque as a lemming to comment on such a gathering is redolent of Bunuel and his bourgeois-baiting). It is clear from the outset that the guests have been fighting; they are extravagantly late and she, Alice (Charlotte Rampling), openly accuses her husband Richard (Andre Dussollier) of cavorting with prostitutes. The evening descends into near farce as she douses him with wine before leaving. This is a good start; Moll has a firm grasp of the dynamic between the two couples and the uneasy tone is well established. The lemming at this point has been introduced, but its significance isn’t elaborated upon. This soon changes. A day or two later Alice returns to the Getty’s residence (having attempted, with limited success, to seduce Alain at his place of work) to apologize for her behaviour during the dinner. She then kills herself in the guest bedroom, an act of suicide that is, I suppose, linked to the famous mass suicides lemmings inflict upon themselves. This is, to my mind, a deeply tenuous connection, and one which becomes increasingly leaky when the script later informs us that the act is a popular myth, borne out of lemming’s behaviour during population explosions. They don’t kill themselves. So what exactly does Moll want us to take from his furry friend? I mean, it’s not as though this is incidental – the movie is called ‘Lemming,’ Alain has visions of the kitchen being overtaken by swarms of them. Ensnared in a poorly though out metaphor (or analogy, or symbol or whatever), Moll’s otherwise perfectly decent film is starved of oxygen long before the contrived finale. – David O Mahony In this documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig, Daniel Johnston is introduced to us as ‘the best songwriter in the world’. Who? Well, Johnston is a songwriter/artist who came tantalisingly close to success on a number of occasions, only to suffer from schizophrenia and manic depression, and to squander whatever chances he had. And what chances! But we’ll get back to that. Johnston was a hyperactive, hugely creative teenager, destined, if not for greatness, probably for something special. He was a prolific fountain of ideas, from his abstract art, to amusing home-video sketches in which he played his (supposedly) nagging mother. But it was his music that seemed to really capture peoples’ imagination, and indeed, his plaintive songs are often beautiful and achingly personal. They’re also wildly self indulgent at times, but maybe that’s an inevitable part of the package. As in ‘Crumb’ and ‘Capturing the Friedmans’, the filmmakers here have an embarrassment of riches with which to paint their portrait; home videos, amateur video sketches, audio tapes (Johnston often secretly taped phone conversations with friends and family), hundreds of songs, countless drawings and paintings, an MTV appearance, concert footage and access to the man himself and everyone important to him from his family to his long-suffering manager to his would-be lover. This trip with Daniel Johnston is an all access and heartbreaking journey. It’s an undeniably interesting route, though, from middle-class beginnings to quirky art student, to McDonalds employee/celebrated songwriter (at the same time) to mental institution inmate and even more celebrated songwriter (again, at the same time, record execs used to visit him there, contracts in hand.) ‘The Devil and Daniel Johnston’ has a lot to say, and even more to ask. From a public perception point of view, the big one is this: Is genius synonymous with mental illness? Some, including this reviewer, might argue that it’s a romantic ideal that makes the problem more palatable, and one that will sadly be re-enforced by this film. Other troubling questions remain: would Johnston be as lauded if he were not so troubled? To what extent will the recording industry harmfully exploit their artists as long as they make worthwhile music? Is mental illness a commodity? And who will look after Daniel after his parents pass away? ‘The Devil and Daniel Johnston’ gives us a lot to ponder, and some beautiful music. It’s a shame that the film drags in some points and, like its subject, is prone to self-indulgence. But for the most part, it’s a fascinating glimpse, and that I fear is all we can hope for, into a fascinating and tragic life. – Joe Griffin Western actor Howard Spence (Shepard) is washed-up. He’s a hard-drinking womaniser, who sidelined family and friends for a debauched life of tabloid-filling vices. Spence walks off the set of his latest movie and makes his way to his estranged mother’s home (Saint, who is quietly affecting). She informs him that he has a long-lost daughter in a small town in Montana. Spence makes his way to the tumbleweed town, where old flame Doreen (Lange, Shepard’s real-life partner) introduces him to angry musician Earl (Mann), who is also his child. As Spence reflects on his life and tries to atone for past mistakes by connecting with his son, his daughter Sky (Polley) follows him around serenely, all the while clutching the urn holding her late mother’s ashes. ‘Don’t Come Knocking’ is exquisitely shot and has a beautiful soundtrack. There is also no denying the calibre of the performers on screen, especially Polley, who brings the same devastating ethereality to this role, as she did to ‘The Sweet Hereafter’ (1997). There is a limit, however, to how much whimsy and quirkiness you can tolerate from a film. But there are even more fundamental problems than that. Whole segments of this movie fall flat, largely because of the at-times inescapable theatricality of the script, whilst scenes with potential for much-needed humour are let go to waste. Spence remains an unsympathetic protagonist right to the end, leaving the emergent brother-sister storyline as the most poignant part of the story, which is probably only right. In summary: by all means, do come knocking, as this tale sadly aint a-rocking. - Declan Cashin ‘But Wait,’ I hear you cry, ‘are you certain it is a movie you are reviewing? The above brief description calls to mind nothing more so than one of those high-concept video game things beloved of teenage boys (and thirty-year-olds who still live with their mothers) across the land. You know the sort, ‘Resident Raider and his Tomb Evils,’ and so on. A lot of gimcrackery really, basic puzzle solving tarted up as adventure for the imagination deficient.’ Ah, wise reader, your observation does you credit, a penetrating analysis which all but topples this movie’s spurious claims to authenticity. ‘Silent Hill’ did indeed begin life as a first-person, figure-it-out game and, as someone who used to play a lot of this sort of thing, I can attest to its singular creepiness and addictive nature. The game focused on the increasingly unpleasant experiences of a mother as she sought to retrieve her errant daughter from the deserted streets of the town from which it took its name. Many valuable hours were lost trying to further her efforts (and keep her from the clutches of an unsettling, pyramid-headed entity); time which could have could have been more constructively employed writing sonnets or giving alms to the poor. I have, however, no regrets; the tense, grey days and clenched, sweaty nights of that period mark the high watermark of my brief love-affair with the Playstation. ‘Silent Hill,’ with its juddering, faceless nurses and crawling black babies, had a compellingly horrific visual vocabulary which ought to be the envy of contemporary horror movies. That the experience loses something in its transition to the silver screen shouldn’t come as much of a surprise; there have been many adaptations of games and, save perhaps for ‘Clue,’ the campy version of the ‘Cluedo’ board-game, they have all been varying shades of awful. But there are good things here, elements of the game that have survived intact, buried under stratified layers of portentous dialogue and another limp Sean Bean performance. The production design, for one, is suitably grungy, resembling the patina of a Nine Inch Nails album cover. And certain sequences, when cherry-picked from the surrounding mire, are effectively spooky. On balance, however, this fails to justify two hours of your time. – David O Mahony. The plot – for want of a better word – centres on the case of a missing white child in a poor, predominantly black housing project in New Jersey. The detective assigned to that region, Lorenzo Council (Jackson) tries to keep the peace between the disenfranchised locals and the heavy-handed (i.e. racist) police force, although my suspicion is that both groups were heatedly arguing over who was a more simplistic stereotype. Council is suspicious of the missing child’s mother Brenda (Moore), an erratic, presumably mentally unbalanced teacher in the projects, who claims that her vehicle was carjacked by a black assailant with the child still asleep in the backseat. He enlists a missing-child expert (Falco) to help crack the case, whilst Brenda’s hot-headed cop brother Danny (Eldard) ratchets up racial tensions in the projects with his investigation. It’s hard to know where to begin pointing fingers for this disaster, but director Roth has to be indicted for allowing the action of the story to stall almost from the first scene. There’s never a lot of mystery to the central mystery – in fact, most viewers will figured out what’s going on within the first ten minutes. With all the crucial elements of suspense and compassion removed from the main plot, all that’s left is a disingenuous, patronising melting pot subplot, which is handled in a manner that makes ‘Crash’ look positively subtle. Worst of all, however, is the waste of talent involved. A hysterical, outrageously hammy Julianne Moore delivers what is incontrovertibly the worst performance of her impressive career. Consequently, Jackson is forced to over-act alongside her, which together serves to overwhelm the entire movie. Only Falco, so consistently astonishing as Carmela on TV’s ‘The Sopranos’, emerges with any dignity from this rambling, cack-handed mess. - Declan Cashin Starring Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Gregg Henry, Michael Rooker and Don Thompson. Directed by James Gunn. A forgettable, gloop-filled slice of hokum here from the writer of the recent, ill-starred ‘Dawn of The Dead’ remake; ‘Slither’ borrows liberally from other, better gloop-filled slices of hokum in its desperate scramble to achieve tongue-in-cheekness. Although the knotty tangle of charred horror movie corpses it has pillaged from are too numerous to mention, ‘Shivers,’ ‘Tremors’ and ‘Critters’ are immediately discernible amid the ooze. ‘Tremors’ in particular, with its tale of a hick town in Nowheresville America being invaded by giant worms from a galaxy far, far away, is an obvious antecedent given that this film focuses on the grizzly effect a worm-bearing comet has on the inhabitants of a similar one-horse locality. ‘Tremors,’ boasting a witty script and fine comic performances from Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon, worked perfectly well. Without comparable assets, ‘Slither’ falls as flat as the skeleton-deprived parasites that are its main attraction. Given that the film resembles many of America’s 1950s monster movies, which externalized paranoid fears of such things as communism and nuclear power, I was hoping (in vain, as it transpired) for some cheeky comment on the current new world disorder – there is plenty of scope for mind-control gags – but the film really isn’t concerned about anything non-goo related. Nope, the whole mess is tantamount to a show-reel for some (actually quite crap) special effects. – David O Mahony |
|
The entire contents of this website are copyright 2009 InterArt Media Ltd. All rights reserved.